The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (17 page)

The puppy curled around Anna’s breastbone whimpered in its sleep. Anna wanted to speak, to commend Jenny’s courage or offer a word of support in return. Not sympathy. With absolute certainty, she knew sympathy was wrong. Unable to sort out language for the situation, she sat mute, her coffee cup to her lips to hide their trembling.

“Aren’t you going to ask me if that’s why I became a lesbian?” Jenny asked with a trace of bitterness.

“No,” Anna said. “The other girls didn’t try to stop it. They were as culpable as anybody.”

“They were afraid,” Jenny said. It sounded as if she had said that more than once over the years.

“Not all of them.” Anna sipped her coffee. It had cooled. Coffee was the only substance she knew of that could quickly cool to significantly below room temperature.

“No,” Jenny said. “Not all of them.”

“And they were supposed to be
us,
not
them
.”

Jenny thought Anna had been raped. That’s why she bared her own shame, so Anna’s burden might be lessened by sharing. Anna wanted to insist she wasn’t raped and not because, as far as she knew, she hadn’t been.

Shared her own shame.

It was not Jenny’s shame, Anna knew that. Had the monster of the jar raped her, it would not have been her shame. Even so, like Jenny, she would have had to carry it because neither monsters nor society—nor the legal system—would carry it for them. Anna wanted to separate herself from her housemate, from the girl who had been gang-raped, the girl who was not like her, not like lucky Anna, not like the unraped girls.

Anna pictured how these cowardly emotions would look onstage, how an actor might move her face or eyes, how she would shape her shoulders and spine to embody them for the audience. The image wasn’t pretty.

Anna owed Jenny Gorman. She steeled herself to give what she could. Beginning her story, she creaked like the Tin Man croaking for oil. “I was knocked out and tossed into a solution hole. I don’t know if I was raped or not,” she said. “My clothes were taken. I woke up naked. The clothes I came back in I found on the corpse of a girl buried in the sand. It was one of those weird
Silence of the Lambs
things,” she echoed Jenny’s opening statement. The women exchanged wry smiles. Some humor was so black it had to be funny or tragic.

“I hiked out of here. Up there,” she turned and pointed toward the escarpment, though, from the picnic table, neither of them could see it. “You said there was a trail.” She didn’t try to keep the accusation out of her voice, and, as expected, it won her a smile. The part about running out of water embarrassed her. Anna resisted the temptation to leave it out, to make herself seem more clever. When she told the story to the Bullfrog district ranger and the chief ranger, it would not be included in the recitation.

Anna told Jenny everything: how afraid she was, how hard it was to choose between drugged water and no water, about the sandwiches and digging a cat hole and finding it full of fine brown hair, about pulling Kay’s clothes off and wearing them, about how important the watch was, how it anchored her in time as she was anchored in place. Then she told Jenny the other thing she would not tell the men coming on the boat, how WHORE had been carved deep in her thigh, how afraid she was that it would scar and every day she would see it there.

When she finished, they sat quietly for a while; then Jenny carefully scooped the sleeping Buddy out from the nest of her crossed legs. “Make a lap,” she said to Anna. Anna obediently pressed her thighs together. The khaki of the borrowed trousers dragged over the healing wounds.

Gently, as if she were setting down a soap bubble, Jenny laid Buddy in the new-made lap. “Wait for me,” Jenny said. She disappeared into the duplex and returned a few minutes later with a small glass bottle in hand. “Vitamin E oil,” she said as she handed the bottle to Anna. “It’s supposed to be good for diminishing scars.”

Without further comment on Anna’s story, she sat again and began rolling a cigarette.

“Do you want Buddy back?” Anna asked. It was the only way she could think of to say thank you.

“Secondhand smoke isn’t good for skunk kits.”

A week before, Anna might have retorted that it wasn’t good for anyone. Now the halcyon days when secondhand smoke seemed a viable threat seemed decades behind her.

Jenny ran her tongue along the edge of the paper and rolled the cigarette between her fingers.

“It looks like the snake that swallowed the elephant,” Anna said.

“I can’t seem to get the knack of it,” Jenny admitted as she lit the bigger end and inhaled.

“I can teach you if you like.” Anna surprised herself by the offer.

“You used to smoke?”

“No,” Anna said as a memory flooded back of a life that had happened long, long ago and far away in a different galaxy. Laughing over red wine, Andrew Lloyd Webber in the tape player, tobacco scattered over an old wooden table the size of a school desk in a kitchen so small the door could only be closed when both chairs were pushed in, and one could clear the dirty dishes from table to sink without getting up, running lines for a production of
Our Town
set in the Old West, Zach deciding to roll his smokes in keeping with the cowboy motif. Anna’d learned. Zach hadn’t, and, since the show never opened due to financial disasters, it didn’t much matter.

The growl of one of the ATVs used to carry supplies up the hill from the dock dragged her back into the still of the morning on Lake Powell.

“The guy is still in the hole?” Jenny asked. The admiration in her voice made Anna feel better than she had since she’d embarked on the telling and, so, the remembering of her days in the jar.

“I hope so,” she said.

The ATV carried Chief Ranger Andrew Madden and Steve Gluck, Bullfrog Marina’s district ranger. Steve was also acting district ranger for the Rope until funding came through to pay for another GS-11 permanent position.

Close behind them, Jim Levitt arrived in a second ATV.

“Jim is supposed to patrol with me today,” Jenny said, “but there is no way in hell he would miss out on this.”

Chief Ranger Madden was tall and lean and quiet. He wore the flat hat well and sported a lush mustache just starting to go gray. Had he not been black and spoken with a distinct Boston accent, Anna thought he would have given Tom Selleck a run for his money at the Marlboro Man auditions. There weren’t a lot of black guys high up in the park service. Anna would have to tread carefully around Andrew Madden. He hadn’t gotten as far as he had by being stupid—or nice. Steve Gluck Anna had met on several occasions, but she had never spoken more than a few words to him.

While the chief ranger leaned against the side of the duplex near the door, Gluck asked Jenny if she wouldn’t mind making a fresh pot of coffee for “a broken-down old ranger.” Gluck was nowhere near as pretty as Andrew Madden. He wasn’t more than an inch or two taller than Jenny, five foot nine at best. Too many long sedentary winters had given him a sizable gut that rode hard and high above his belt. A life out of doors had weathered him. Anna, who was good at guessing people’s ages, bet he was close to sixty.

Still and all, she doubted that he was a “broken-down old ranger,” though she suspected he used the line with some frequency. Unoffended, Jenny went to fetch coffee. Steve Gluck turned a tired smile on Anna.

“Jim here says you’ve had quite an adventure.”

He waited with his sleepy smile while Anna decided what she was going to tell him. All three law enforcement rangers bided in polite silence. A scholar of silences from years backstage, Anna could tell in a heartbeat whether an actor paused or forgot his line, whether an audience was asleep or in awe, whether the silence was active and tense or dead air, momentary confusion or smug prescience.

The three ranger silences radiating at her were as distinct as the men themselves. Levitt, young and fit and stony-faced, leaked the joyous excitement of a puppy ready to be taken on the best walk ever. Andrew Madden’s silence was hungry and calculating. He needed information so he could start the political spin in his direction should Anna pony up anything in need of spinning. The Bullfrog district ranger—the only one of the three confident enough to allow the vulnerability of facial expression—was just a man waiting to get the details on one more hard dirty job he needed to do in a long line of hard dirty jobs he’d plowed through during his career.

Anna told her story again.

As she talked, her voice low and even, her sentences with beginnings, middles, and ends, her plotline sensical, her timeline as logical as a person drugged to the gills, in pain, and dehydrated could make it, she could tell she was not showing enough trauma to satisfy her audience. Not that she suspected for an instant any of them wished her ill. They wore varying degrees of the same look her sister the psychiatrist wore when she thought Anna was hiding some metaphorical boil that would heal better if lanced.

The lack of emotion surprised Anna as well. Trained in an era where a person couldn’t cross Rockefeller Center without stepping on half a dozen psychotherapists, she worried she was bottling up, repressing, in denial, or one of the great many bad labels good old-fashioned stoicism had had heaped upon it.

When she began relating how she had found long brown hair as she dug a cat hole in the sand, she realized she was doing none of those things. She had not merely survived but won. Winning, and the fact that, unlike for Jenny, there had been no witnesses cheering and swilling beer as they watched her humiliation, allowed her a shred of dignity. Physical violation was the tool men traditionally used to debase women. In wars and feuds men debased women for the sole purpose of humiliating the men to whom they belonged, reducing the women to nothing more than vessels to carry man’s hatred for man.

Maybe that was why Anna left out the detail that she had been cut with the casual mockery of a boy carving his initials in his desktop.

She also did not tell them where the solution hole was, insisting she’d have to take them there herself. Had she done otherwise, she knew, as female, victim, and non-law-enforcement personnel, she wouldn’t be allowed to accompany those who went to make the arrest. Anna was determined to see what her monster looked like by the light of day, how he looked beaten, in handcuffs, outnumbered, outsmarted, outgunned. She needed the monster, grown to enormous proportions in her mind, cut down to size.

TWENTY-TWO

Anna’s courage awed Jenny. The little Pigeon had snatched power from a psycho-rapist or psycho-rapists. Regardless of what she said, Jenny believed she was raped. The way her small, competent hands hovered protectively over her thighs, the way she kept plucking the khaki trouser leg away from her skin, her aversion to the three hulking males, suggested Anna’s story had missing chapters. Anna’s violation enraged Jenny. Anna’s escape and trapping the rapist elated her.

Jenny was rapidly forgiving herself for falling into obsession over the woman from New York City. Who wouldn’t? Gay or straight, anyone with a soul would have to be enamored of her. Even as Jenny laughed at herself, it amazed her that Andrew, Steve, and Jim weren’t stumbling over each other to pay homage.

Buddy nestled in her arm, Anna was telling the law enforcement rangers about coming on a woman and three men of college age, of how one of the men was taking out his dick while another held the woman and the third watched.

The picture she painted jolted Jenny back to her sophomore year. At twenty she already knew her sexual orientation was firmly in the direction of the female of the species. She had known it since she could remember. As a tyke she’d loved dolls and girls and believed without reservation that boys had cooties. In middle school, when the other girls were proclaiming undying love for their favorite Beatle, Jenny was lusting after Linda Ronstadt. As a teen she’d had posters of Jane Fonda as Barbarella on the wall of her room. In college she’d taken her first lover, Adafaire Mason. Obsession with this first, long-imagined and magnificently forbidden, fruit overwhelmed everything else in her life.

Memories of her sexual assault were blessedly confused. As she’d confessed to Anna, she’d been drinking. She wasn’t drunk, but close. She remembered the scrape of blunt fingernails and the sickening slip of nylon over her skin as her panties were dragged off. On bad days she could still feel the suffocation. A boy straddled her, his butt on the back of her head holding her down, mashing her nose and mouth into her own vomit. On really bad days she could feel the pounding as the rapists took turns. Alone, in a crowd of dead-eyed girls, and boys cringing with feral need, it had seemed to go on for eons. Looking back, she knew it had only been minutes. Two of the three rapists came in a thrust or two. The third Jenny didn’t feel inside her at all, but the pounding of his pelvic bones was the most violent.

Much later she realized he had probably come before he entered her and was putting on a show to cover his embarrassment at having prematurely ejaculated.

The memory that was clear as crystal and sharp as a razor was her cheek on the splintering planks, craning her neck, looking for Adafaire, finding her, tall and blond and confident, standing at the edge of the circle that had formed around the table. Jenny had screamed her name. Adafaire had a beer in her hand. As their eyes locked, she raised the bottle to her lips and took a drink. Then she turned her back and walked into the darkness beneath the trees.

Jenny came to know the major players, five “good boys,” white, from upper-middle-class families. One was on the swim team, two others on the varsity wrestling team, the last hangers-on, soaking up what reflected glory they could. They were the ones who held her down on the rough planks, one sitting on her head, his knees on her upper arms, the other at her legs pulling them apart like a child breaking the wishbone of a chicken. Jenny knew this because she had researched them, dug for their secrets, watched and followed them.

Even before she’d been left to crawl off amid the splinters and spilled beer to put herself together as best she could, she knew she would not report the rape. There would be no justice for her—but, she had promised herself, there would be revenge.