The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (20 page)

“Easy, Reg,” Steve Gluck said.

“Leave her alone,” Jenny snarled.

The chief ranger and the sheriff had no more to say than Anna. Jim Levitt radiated unasked questions.

“I was trying to save you, God damn it!” Regis sputtered—sputtered because he kept pouring water down his throat even while he was trying to talk.

“You’re going to throw up.” Anna’s voice was flat and cold and sounded as if it came from some other place in time.

Like a good actor, Regis vomited on cue.

Behind him, Sheriff Patterson was backing into the mouth of the jar, using the plastic rungs on the slope to ease himself farther into the solution hole.

“Anna didn’t know it was you,” somebody said.

“I frigging told her it was me.” Regis was wiping his mouth on a red rag, the kind car mechanics buy by the bushel. Someone must have brought it from the truck.

“I
fucking
told her it was me,” Anna said. “‘Frigging’ is not a word.” She wondered why she said this, why the cold flat voice came out of her mouth.
Anna, what have you done?
She remembered that.

“Back off,” Jenny snapped at Regis. “Anna’s been through a lot. She was stuck down there a whole lot longer than you were.”

Regis blinked, seeming to consider her words. Anna watched him change: His shoulders relaxed, losing their proximity to his ears; his head rose up and settled on his spine.

“Yeah,” he said. He pinched his nose and squinted past Anna. “Yeah. Okay. It was dark as the inside of a cow, Jesus.” He shook his head and unclenched his hands from around the water bottle. “Sorry,” he said to Anna. She watched his lips form the word. He smiled ruefully. “The damsel in distress isn’t supposed to cold-conk and Mace the white knight.”

“Not Mace,” Anna said. “Buddy.”

Without invitation, Jenny came over and lifted Anna to her feet by the arm, one hand on the bicep, the other cupping her elbow. Lifted, not helped up; Anna was amazed a woman could be so strong. Since Anna didn’t care if she sat, stood, or was laid down on a slab in a butcher shop window, she didn’t fight her housemate.

Jenny put her arm around Anna’s shoulders and, still cupping her elbow, steered her away from the men, back in the direction they had come.

Walking away from a stage where the fourth wall had been summarily shattered and the make-believe world poured out into the real world, Anna began to gather herself together, reeling herself in as if she were a ball of string that had become unwound. At the pace of invalids, she let Jenny lead her over the broken ground. Mindful of tracks, they skirted the flagged area where Kay had fought for her life and lost.

Anna waited while Jenny opened the passenger door of the sheriff ’s truck and dumbly obeyed when she told her to get in. She watched Jenny walk around the hood of the truck and let herself in the driver’s door, lower the sun flap, catch the keys the sheriff had put there, start the engine, and crank the air conditioner to high.

They sat facing front, not talking. An awkward date at the drive-in movies. Anna finished winding up the raveled string. When she could again speak, she said, “Well, that was an unforeseen turn of events,” and was startled when Jenny laughed.

“Poor Regis,” Jenny said when she’d recovered. “Clubbed and skunked and left in a pit.”

“Yeah,” Anna murmured. “The monsters got away, didn’t they?”

“They’ll get them,” Jenny said. To Anna’s ears it sounded as if she spoke without conviction.

“Your monsters got away,” Anna said.

“Not from me, they didn’t.”

There was nothing to say after that until the men reappeared walking five abreast. Their faces set and grim, the sheriff with his cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes.

“The Earps,” Anna said.

“The OK Corral,” Jenny said.

If Anna remembered her film history correctly, that hadn’t ended well for anybody.

Gluck carried the canteen Anna had become so familiar with during her time in the jar. Looped over one shoulder, Levitt carried the two boat ladders. Regis hugged a water bottle much as Anna was prone to do after suffering so much from thirst.

“That canteen the sheriff is carrying was the one with the drugged water in it,” Anna commented with about as much emotion as she might have said, “That’s the T-shirt with the stripes on it.”

Because she felt vulnerable and marginalized sitting in the front seat of the cab as the men approached, Anna reached for the door handle.

“Wait?” Jenny cried, sounding alarmed. “Don’t go out there.”

“Why not?” Anna asked.

“I don’t know,” Jenny admitted. “I just had a weird bad feeling.”

“A lot of that going around,” Anna said and got out to stand on her own two feet. Regis saw her and waved and smiled.

“Hey, Anna,” he said as he broke the line and moved rapidly toward her.

It took all of Anna’s resolve to keep her face unreadable and resist the need to leap back into the truck and slam and lock the doors.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. For a moment it looked as if he intended to give her a hug. Anna held up one hand, the way the Indians in those same Westerns had done while bizarrely uttering, “How.”

Regis stopped. “I was just so blown away. I forgot how scared you must have been when I climbed down. You went through far worse than anything I did. I’m sorry I took my own fear out on you, that’s all.”

Anna said nothing. Bits of things she might have said skittered around in her skull, but making conversation was too pointless to bother dragging any one of them down to where her tongue could get around it. Lowering her hand was the best she could do. Unnerved, Regis looked over his shoulder at the other men. They had stopped several yards out from the truck and stood in a neat semicircle, a manly tableau against the canvas of the desert.

“You’re lucky she didn’t kill you,” Steve said without a trace of humor. Broken by his words, the tableau came to life again.

“Where’s Kay?” Anna asked Steve. He didn’t answer right away, and Anna was afraid there was no body, the body was gone or had never existed. “Did you find Kay?” she insisted, louder this time.

“We just dug enough to assure ourselves she was there,” Steve said. He hadn’t wanted to speak, Anna realized, because he knew it would be hard for her to hear. She didn’t like him for the kindness. She didn’t like or dislike any of them. She didn’t care because they didn’t care, not in any way it mattered. Not in any way that would ever make anything right.

“Frank’s going to have the county coroner out here. They’ll recover the body and take it back to Escalante. He’s going to work with us to identify her. If we’re lucky she’s been reported missing.”

They didn’t know she was wearing nothing but underpants. Anna hadn’t told that part of the story. It was ugly and it was hers and she would keep it. For now at least.

“We’ll take good care of her,” Sheriff Frank assured her.

“She’s dead, and I didn’t know her,” Anna said, but she remembered how important it had been to her that Kay’s hair be combed from the sand, not yanked, and she remembered sacrificing the tempting panties so Kay could retain a scrap of dignity.

Regis unscrewed the cap of his water bottle as the sheriff and Jim loaded the ladder and canteen into the bed of the pickup.

“I’ll never take water for granted again,” Regis said, offering a tentative smile to Anna. “I nearly thirsted to death.”

“There was a canteen of water,” she said.

“Empty,” the sheriff told her as he dropped it onto the bed of the truck with a clang.

Anna said nothing. It had been over half full when she hit Regis in the head with it, heavy enough to stun. He couldn’t have drunk it all. If he had, he’d be in a stupor. Instead he was hyperactive, the way a person is after a narrow escape. He could have dumped it, or, when it struck him, the cap might have come loose and the water drained out.

Anna saw no value in voicing these thoughts. She saw no value in speaking anymore.

Jenny and Jim were consigned to the bed of the pickup. Anna tried to follow. Steve cut her off and herded her back into the cab the way a good sheepdog would herd a stray lamb back to the fold.

The sheriff slid behind the wheel. Chief Ranger Madden started to climb into the front passenger side.

“Andrew, take the back again, if you wouldn’t mind,” Steve said. “Anna could probably use the air.” Steve Gluck jammed himself in beside Madden and put Regis behind the driver, as far from Anna as he could be in the truck’s cab. Anna didn’t like him for that, either. “Air” was not what she needed. She needed her own planet.

With two people in the truck bed, the sheriff drove toward Hole-in-the-Rock Road more slowly than he had driven out. Regis couldn’t stop talking.

An older man who wouldn’t give his name had hailed him on the dock at Dangling Rope Marina, he told them as the cab jounced and swayed. The old man stank of beer, Regis said, and was none too steady on his feet. The guy told him a bizarre tale about a girl trapped in a solution hole up around Hole-in-the-Rock Road. He said he’d heard some kids bragging about it like they’d caught a bear cub or a cougar and were keeping it a secret from their parents. He wasn’t clear as to how many kids there were, or how tall or short, and was pretty vague about where he had chanced to overhear the boasts.

Regis said he figured the guy imagined it, or half heard something in a drunken stupor and, when he sobered up somewhat, thought it was real and reported it to the first person in uniform he’d laid his bleary eyes on.

This had transpired around seven thirty or eight o’clock the evening before Anna attacked him, Regis said. Though he figured the guy was crazy, Regis had checked to see if anyone had gone missing. No one had but Anna. Since Anna’d packed up her things, he never thought it could be her, so he let it go.

Then, in the middle of the night, he woke up worrying about it. What if a woman were trapped, suffering in some way, crying for help? He couldn’t stand it, he said, and got up and dressed and started up the unmaintained trail that scrambled and clawed up the escarpment behind the housing area, the only way he knew to get from the Rope to the area the drunk had mentioned.

He’d wandered around until nearly dawn and was about to give it up when he heard a woman crying. He’d found the hole where the weeping came from. Beside it, half hidden under the overhang of a rock, were the boat ladders.

All this poured out with no encouragement but the occasional grunt from law enforcement. As the sheriff turned the ignition off, the truck parked neatly parallel to the dirt track as if meter maids were watching, Regis finished his story.

Anna had not been weeping the night he came to the solution hole. She had been lying under the sand, waiting, like a trapdoor spider.

Anna said nothing.

TWENTY-SIX

There were two phones in Dangling Rope, one in the ranger station on the dock and the other in the small convenience store run by the park concessionaire. Since the Rope didn’t have its own district ranger, as the senior NPS employee, Jenny had the key to the ranger station. Jim thought he should keep it because he was law enforcement.

When he grumbled about it Jenny had said sweetly, “Then next time
you
give Steve the blow job.”

Anna had thought it funny. Gil, Dennis, Regis—the males—were not laughing. They were thinking maybe it was true. Jenny winked at Anna and rolled her eyes.

That was Anna’s third or fourth day at the Rope. Cocooned in her grief, she hadn’t put herself out to get to know her fellows, not even Jenny. That wink and eye roll surprised her. Jenny had seen her. Being unseen was one of Anna’s skills. During rehearsals, stage managers were visible. During the running of the show, they were not. Anna dressed in black, as did the crew, so if the audience accidentally caught a glimpse of her it would make little impression. She cultivated a soft low voice so backstage noise wouldn’t compete with the show onstage. She wore soft-soled shoes and moved quietly. She did not bump into things or set curtains moving as she passed through. She could see well in the dark.

Before she lost Zach, Anna used this learned invisibility only professionally. Jenny’s wink let her know she had been trying to disappear during the light of day and it hadn’t worked, at least not on Jenny.

That had been less than three weeks before. The jar had turned time on its end, and it seemed a story from when Anna was much younger.

As soon as the dock settled down for the evening, Anna got the ranger station key from Jenny and went down the hill to the lake. She needed her psychiatrist. More than that, she needed her sister. Molly had been so present during her days in the jar that, as she inserted the key and let herself into the cramped office, she reminded herself Molly had been present only in her mind. Her tale would be a shock to her.

Molly would go into one of her icy rages, the kind where her mind glittered like crystal and her eyes could slay at a glance. Anna needed that, too, needed someone to be furious for her, rage against the withering impotence of knowing life was very, very unfair, and there was not one goddamned thing you could do about it.

Having locked the door behind her, she slipped into the padded swivel chair in front of the desk, a narrow built-in behind a half-wall that kept visitors from wandering into the working portion of the office.

There was both an overhead light and a desk lamp. Anna left them dark. Not only did she feel at home without light, she didn’t want visitors trotting down to borrow a cup of sugar.

Finally alone, the last rays of the day making the dust motes sparkle and dance in the dim office, Anna realized how tired she was. After Regis had been rescued from the solution hole, Steve ordered her to the Bullfrog clinic. The nurse practitioner—a competent woman named Beatrice—wanted her to go to the hospital in Wahweap or, failing that, stay overnight in Bullfrog for observation. Anna refused, arguing her injuries were old news. If the bang on the head and dislocation of her shoulder were going to kill her, she’d already be dead.

Never again would she allow herself to be trapped and observed by strangers as she slept. After signing release forms, Beatrice let her go. The woman was so affronted by her refusal to see sense she’d actually said, “If you have problems with the concussion, let it be on your head.”