The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel (6 page)

“I don’t has many things. This
stomme bastaard
he want to take what I got. Then he pull out to
zijn smerige kleine
penis and wave it around,” she said when she met Anna and Zach on the landing as they were carting their laundry upstairs.

“Did you knock some manners into him?” Zach asked.

“What I got to knock with?” she demanded indignantly. “I start to piss and do bowels and I spit and act crazy and throw the piss and bowels at him and scream and the piece of
de hond braakt
, he can’t get out my house fast enough.”

Cat and gross defenses, Anna had those. Though they were ridiculous—maybe because they were ridiculous—she was comforted by remembering them. Her sense of helplessness eased a little. Not trusting her recently dislocated shoulder to take any weight, she struggled up and walked on her knees to the canteen, the paper sack, and the deadly nightshade. Plopping down beside them, she picked up the canteen first. It was full, topped off during the night. She unrolled the crimped neck of the paper bag. Two squares wrapped in waxed paper. To her, the two squares wrapped in waxed paper and stowed in a sack spoke of food. To the monster, it might mean anything, tarantulas in an odd box, rat guts on toast. Who knew what monsters thought was nourishing.

Along with the paper-wrapped squares were two cups of the kind of pudding that comes in little six-packs. No spoon, no napkins. Laying one of the packages on her thigh so it covered
WHORE
, she carefully folded back the corners of the waxed paper.

It looked to be a regular sandwich, the kind eaten by schoolchildren all over America, peanut butter and jelly oozing out from two slices of bread with the crusts cut carefully off. Molly used to make Anna PB&Js to take to school in her lunch box. The box was black and had Zorro on it sticking his sword into a fat guy in military blue. Anna’d thought it was really keen until she was thirteen and found out both the box and “keen” were suddenly not at all groovy.

Waxed paper, that was odd. Nobody used waxed paper anymore. Only monsters who trimmed the crust away and served massive doses of sugar to their captives to fatten them up for slaughter.

Molly never cut off the crusts. She said they were the best part. Anna wished she had the crusts to this sandwich. Harder to put weird shit in the crusts. Meticulously peeling the top slice of bread back, she looked for anything suspicious, her mind clicking through images from
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
. No eyeball, no obvious expectoration, dead cockroaches, or rat feces.

Closing the sandwich, her eyes, and her mind, Anna took a bite. Hunger roared, taste buds sang, saliva ran, stomach quivered with anticipation. For that instant Anna was transported from terror and agony to a glorious hedonistic plane. In short, it was the finest bite of food she had ever experienced.

Gourmet gave over to gobbler. She devoured the rest in three bites and was eyeing the second wax-paper-wrapped square in the bottom of the sack. Was it also a sandwich? The monster was into mind games. Maybe the one on top had been the bait and this second was the switch, the one with the razor blades in it.

She took a pudding instead. It had at least been factory sealed. Running her fingers over the smooth plastic tub and the foil top, she felt for pinpricks. In college, one of her roommates enamored with Psych 101, had used a hypodermic to inject blue food coloring into an unopened milk carton to see if anybody would drink blue milk. Nobody would.

No pinpricks; nothing had been injected into the pudding.

Anna pulled off the foil top. Chocolate. Again saliva flowed from some mysterious moisture source the rest of her body didn’t have access to. She licked the underside of the foil, then squeezed the little plastic cup, gushing the pudding into her mouth and over her tongue, and went again to the place where all was good and even better this time because all was chocolate. The last remnants she scraped out with her index finger and sucked into her mouth.

The monster hadn’t left her a spoon. Probably afraid she’d tap him to death with it if she got a chance. Which she would. Anna’d never been much on hate, but she hated this guy. Mentally ill or not, she hated him so much that to think of him filled her with an intense anger she could feel to the tip of her braid. Surely this kind of hate would cause one of them to spontaneously combust. Probably her.

Taking deep slow breaths, she blew some of the toxic emotions out of her body and brain. A semblance of calm restored, she folded the lunch sack closed. At the moment she didn’t want to know what was in the other package. Supper maybe, should she live that long. The canteen beckoned, and she knew she would have to drink sooner or later. Later was better.

Food had revived her to an extent that surprised her. A sense of optimism came with a full stomach and a shot of sucrose. The downside was now she had to go to the bathroom.

In New York she’d lived in many one-bedroom and studio apartments, some not as spacious as the bottom of her jar. Living small had taught her the necessity of living neat. The thought of fouling where she would be eating, maybe, and sleeping, druggily, was abhorrent, but life apparently was going to go on at least for a while.

Getting awkwardly to her feet, she chose to put her privy to one side of the datura garden. In the old days Chinese farmers used night soil to fertilize their fields. The scraggly plants couldn’t be getting much in the way of nutrients from the sand. Hoping the datura would be grateful for her donation, she carefully dug a hole a foot or so deep.

The business of living attended to, she began scooping sand in to cover it up in good cat fashion. Her fingers tangled in a web in the dirt, and hope flickered: Hemp to weave a rope? Old fishing nets to macramé into a ladder? Even if she could have done those things, there was no way to get it hooked to the outside world.

A bit of line with which to garrote a monster?

That was a cheering thought. She tightened her fingers and dragged out the nest of fibers she’d pawed up.

Brown and fine. It looked like human hair. Anna shook her hand free in sudden panic and fell back onto her hind end. The jarring loosed fire-bolts of pain in both arm and head. She almost welcomed them. They made it hard to think.

Nothing much looked like human hair but human hair.

“Help! Help me!” Anna screamed.

EIGHT

Regis was sitting in the bedroom of Jenny’s duplex, the one that Anna Pigeon had used for such a short time. It wasn’t his lieu day—like a lot of HQ employees, he had Saturdays and Sundays off just like normal people. He had called in sick. The parks frowned on permanents calling in sick or going on vacation at the height of the season, but he’d done it anyway. Seasonals never called in sick. At least he’d never heard of one doing it. They just didn’t.

Was it possible they never got sick? he wondered.

He never got sick. There wasn’t a day in his childhood he could remember staying home sick. He wasn’t sick now. He was—agitated. It wasn’t unpleasant. In fact, he liked a change from the neutral nothing he felt most days. A life lived in ecru, he thought wryly. Ecru. That was his mother’s favorite color. Half his genes were from a woman whose favorite color wasn’t a color at all. “Everything goes with ecru,” she liked to say.

She would have approved of the employee housing color scheme at the Rope: outsides gray with no adornment, insides varying shades of ecru. Possibly the original decorators—buyers was probably the more accurate term—who’d chosen the carpets and furnishings had dared a splash of color, but over the years time and use had sucked it out. Dust and the neglect of serial renters had done the rest.

The room Anna Pigeon slept in was no different: a double bed, stripped now, a dresser and bed stand of the processed woodlike substance that looks battered and old a week after it’s brought home from the store and limps on in that shabby state for the next hundred years. Opposite the bed were a shallow closet with sliding doors, the wood warping slightly, and a single window, blinds down, three of the bottom slats broken.

Anna Pigeon’s things had been taken, but Regis wanted to sit in the room where she’d stayed without people butting in and asking him what he was doing or why he was there. He was in personnel; as far as he was concerned he had a right to be anywhere he wanted. And, in the park, nobody bothered to lock their houses, especially not at Dangling Rope, Bullfrog, Hite, or Halls Crossing. They were too remote by road to attract thieves, and people who came by boat were too rich to covet the trash that could be bought on a government salary.

Regis sat on the bed and listened to his pulse racing in his ears. The emptiness of the shabby space was more than just the lack of a tenant. Too many people who cared too little about the room filled it with ghosts. Not the ectoplasmic phantoms fools pretended to see when they wanted to feel special. Real ghosts, the kind that don’t exist, the kind that are made up of dead air, the kind you see in the eyes of an animal when the vet puts it to sleep. The kind that are Not There.

Growing up he hadn’t been allowed pets. The first time he’d seen the Not There of death was the previous winter when Kippa died. Kippa was their six-month-old French bulldog. A golden bowling ball of love. Regis smiled, remembering. The image shifted into another, the wide grin red with blood, blood where his ears had flopped, screams that came out through his mashed nose. Regis had been holding him like a baby, looking deep into his brown eyes, when all of a sudden there was no dog, just dog meat, carrion. There, then Not There.

The living are There. Ghosts are the Not There, the blank, the dead, the ecru.

That his mind had come full circle to his mother’s favorite color startled Regis out of his self-induced trance.

He’d never seen a human being die. He’d been there when his mother passed, but she was so doped up on morphine it had been a seamless transition. Anyway, her eyes were closed. He imagined it would be the same, though. The person would be There, then simply Not There. The eyes might not be the windows to the soul, but when life left, that was where the falling shutters could be seen.

Anna Pigeon’s room felt like that, like the Not There had taken up residence. Regis had wanted to feel the room, and it felt like nothing. Standing, he looked around at the tawdry space. He wouldn’t come back. Sooner or later another seasonal There would move in and give it the illusion of life for a few months. Nothing would be different.

Agitation was still making his insides quiver. Being still was impossible. He probably should have gone in to work just to be moving, be distracted by the nonsense of the day-to-day world of the Barely There. Leaving Anna’s room, he walked down the hall to the room where Jenny stayed. Jenny Gorman had been an interpretive ranger at the park for nearly a decade, coming back every summer. As he’d anticipated, her room looked and felt as if someone were there. Jenny showed up every season with a huge old hard-sided Samsonite suitcase that she joked was her life in a box.

Regis had never been in her room before, but he expected this was her box-life unfolded. A coverlet with a cabbage rose print, and matching shams, was on the bed; sheets, folded neatly over the bedspread, were printed with sheep in complementary colors. On the bureau a dresser scarf in pale yellows hid the scarred surface. There were two small framed pictures of children—nieces, Regis guessed. Beside them sat an old-fashioned silver-backed brush-and-comb set. He picked up the brush and examined it. Long curling brown hairs were caught in the bristles.

It wasn’t just for show, Jenny used it. That made it real. Regis ran the tips of his fingers over the ornate silver casting. Fine things, quality, endurance, he craved those. His boat and his ancient but perfect Super Cub, made life livable. He looked forward to when he could surround himself with tangible proofs human life wasn’t all shoddy construction and tedious noise.

An oval mirror, cheap but decorative, was hung over the dresser, one she had bought in Page probably. It didn’t look worth enough to haul from wherever she spent her winters. Regis could find out if he wanted. Personnel was where the skeletons of background checks, pay grades, and reviews were buried. Until Anna Pigeon disappeared, Jenny had never interested him enough to bother.

Today Jenny was going up Panther Canyon to check on a party boat full of college kids. Levitt was in court, so she’d be working without law enforcement backup. Regis didn’t like it. That might have been part of why he felt shaken, agitated. The party boat had some bad people on it; he knew that for a fact. Dangerously bad people.

Holding the brush, he looked at his reflection in the glass. Bethy told him he was handsome. When he looked at himself, all he saw was that he was There. Replacing the brush precisely where it had been before he disturbed it, he realized calling in sick had been a mistake. Getting caught in the lie was going to count against him, but he had to go out to Panther Canyon and make sure Jenny didn’t stir up a hornet’s nest.

NINE

Mad as Lady Macbeth, Anna scrubbed her hands together lest any of the long and human hairs buried in the sand should cling to them. Retreating to the far side of the jar, she felt her panic worsening. There was nowhere to be, nowhere to run but in circles like a crazed hamster. Slumping down, she leaned back against the sandstone, hands held before her, too unclean to touch any other part of her body, and stared at the mess of delicate brown strands near her cat hole. “My life is a Stephen King novel,” she whispered. “Everything gets worse. And worse. And worse. When it finally can’t get any worse, everybody dies.”

Everybody dies.

Had she been thrown into a charnel pit?

The monster might have been using this hole for years. Dropping his human garbage into it, playing his games with drugs and cutting and chocolate pudding; watching his victims, sans clothes, sans dignity, sans freedom until, finally, he got tired of them or broke them.

Sans life.

How many women were buried in her sandbox? Into her mind’s eye came rotting arms, skeletal fingers, reaching up through the dirt to drag her down.