The Rope ap-17

by Nevada Barr

  In her pack were most of a liter of water, a map, and a pamphlet identifying area plants. She took out the map. Maybe the black broken lines were trails. None of them came anywhere near Dangling Rope. The pamphlet was even less help. “The Glen Canyon National Recreation Area has highly diverse vegetation typical of the Colorado Plateau.”

  Humanity’s dam and the universe’s sun allowed very little to survive. On the flat spots a scanty grass, like the last hurrah on a balding man’s pate, grew, but it was so brittle and colorless as to be nearly transparent.

  “Hah!”

  Anna remembered saying “hah.” She repeated it now to break the awful silence of her open-air tomb. The pathetic little gust of noise only made it worse.

  Breathe in two three.

  Hold two three.

  Out on a count of five.

  Briefly, she’d considered packing a sandwich, but she wasn’t hungry and figured she would be back long before lunch. Stuffing the papers in the pack’s zipper pocket, she headed past the housing area toward the cliff and the thin pale line that disappeared into the scree.

  By the time she passed the maintenance barn, with the generators that powered the development, and the sewage treatment area behind it—a total of maybe a hundred yards—she was wishing she’d bought a pair of shorts the last time she was in Page. The straight-legged black jeans and T-shirt, so good in the cool dark of backstage, were hot and constricting in the back of beyond. Black, prevalent in New York because it didn’t show every sooty smudge, showcased the beige smudges of what Anna supposed was good clean dirt.

  Three hours later she was out of water, sunburned, and three-quarters of the way up the canyon’s side. Stopped on a level spot, hands on knees, she gasped for breath. Heat lay like molten lava on the back of her neck and arms. The muscles in her thighs were quaking, and her thin black Reeboks felt as if they were on fire. Not sea level, not flat, not paved, not Manhattan: not a place she could walk a hundred miles.

  Slumping to her knees, she stared back the way she had come. Staff housing was tiny with distance, heat making the gray-on-gray shimmer as if the houses were slipping from this dimension into another and, if she watched long enough, would disappear altogether. The trail looked much steeper going down. Climbing, using hands and feet, it hadn’t seemed so precipitous. As shaky as her legs were, she doubted she would make it down—unless she just gave in to gravity and rolled most of the way.

  Going down would take too long, and she was too thirsty. After thirty-odd years of drinking various beverages, Anna had assumed she knew what thirst was. She hadn’t had a clue. Thirst was not a desire for a beverage; thirst was a screaming need that drowned out all other calls from the body, an obsessive, desperate craving that narrowed vision and channeled the mind to a single topic: finding water.

  Old movies, black-and-white, where men were good or bad and never lived with shades of gray, swam through her mind: dying of thirst on deserts with burros or camels or Arabian horses, shaking the canteen, a sip left, sharing it with a buddy. Until this moment she hadn’t known what heroism she’d missed in those viewings.

  Since Zach was gone and Molly only drank Scotch neat, there was not a buddy dear enough to her heart with whom she’d share her last sip.

  She looked up toward the ridge that had appeared so close from the housing area. The black scruff of foliage was made up of actual honest-to-God trees. At this height, they even looked a little green around the edges. Green had to mean water. Didn’t green always mean water? If she could make it the rest of the way, she could find a spring or creek or whatever watered the trees. Failing that, she could get to a road or a house or farm or sheep shed or whatever passed for civilization and beg water from them. If she was extra nice and said pretty please, maybe they’d give her a ride down to a marina where she could catch a passing boat with a ranger in it.

  If she could get up from her knees, she could make it the rest of the way, she amended as she struggled to arrange burning feet under aching gluteus maximus so she could perform the amazing, showstopping trick of rising from the goddamn rocky red dirt.

  The ridge retreated over the next pile of rock, then around the next jagged cut of sandstone. Then it appeared to be just over the next polished haunch of land. Another waterless hour passed before she reached the lip of the canyon. Steep gave way to flat without preamble, and she stood, the canyon at her heels, her hands dangling apelike near her knees from the last bit of the ascent.

  Up close the trees weren’t much greener than they’d looked from below. They didn’t have the decency to form into a proper forest with shady lanes and mossy hollows. They straggled out of soil so arid and stony they were deformed by the effort. Wretched stunted things, they resembled something T. S. Eliot might have run across after the last ding-dong of doom.

  Behind her, and to both sides, canyons cut into the mesa. Ahead, another escarpment reared up, crowned with ragged serrated trees cutting into a sky so blue it hurt. There were no roads, no houses, no telephone lines, not an animal pen or a fucking creek or a fucking watercooler in sight.

  No water. She wasn’t going to find water. The only water in the world was a million miles back down Jenny Gorman’s sorry excuse for a trail. The last ding-dong of doom ringing in her ears, Anna limped to the nearest excuse for plant life and thumped down cross-legged in the niggardly shade. Her tongue had grown too big for her mouth. It stuck on her teeth and soft palate. Muscles in her legs were cramping. Skin on her face and the back of her neck stung when she touched it. There was no point in going farther, no point in staying where she was, and she doubted like hell she would be able to make it back down.

  Not for the first time, she took the water bottle out of her pack and shook it. Over the months without Zach she’d come to think of the Grim Reaper as a guardian angel, ready to sweep her out of the mortal coils when they cut too deep. Now that He was grinning at her from the dry bottom of a plastic government-issue water bottle, she didn’t like him as much as she’d thought she would.

  She took out the map and unfolded it—something to pass the time while dying. Subway maps and city maps made sense. Streets had names, they intersected; buildings had numbers. Subways had stops. Wilderness maps had crooked lines going nowhere, and nowhere had horrific names like Dry Fork and Turkey Knob, Panther Canyon and Devil’s Garden.

  “There is nothing helpful on this fucking map,” Anna croaked. She balled the map up and threw the wad of paper over her shoulder.

  For a while she sat in defiance, then levered herself to her miserable feet and tottered over to retrieve the litter. Glen Canyon might kill her, but she was damned if it would turn her into a litterbug.

  She was picking her trash out of a stubble of desiccated grass when she heard the scream.

  The pitiful shriek, scratching through the pitiful trees, lifted Anna’s spirits. The cry was too full-throated for a woman dying of thirst. Anna started to run in the direction of the sound. She, the Good Samaritan, would take a thorn out of the screamer’s paw, and the grateful thing would give her water.

  A lot of water.

  FIVE

  Running, hoping for water, there memory ended. Between dressed and whole to naked and broken there was nothing but nothing, not even the blank slate. Trying to remember was like trying to see with the tip of her finger.

  Hugging her useless arm to her chest and staring up the gullet that had swallowed her whole, Anna wondered: Had she rescued the maiden? Traded places with the maiden? Had the whole thing been the hallucination of a severely dehydrated woman? Was this rock jug she was at the bottom of another hallucination?

  Reality, so hard won, began to ebb. “Help! Help me!” she screamed.

  Silence slammed down from the buff-and-blue horizon and struck her dumb. Like the silence after prayer, it deafened her; a silence devoid of presence, a wasteland mocking any who dared hope. She didn’t yell again. She didn’t do anything. She didn’t think anything.

  Shade swallowed her.
The ellipses of light oozed off of the sand and started crawling up the side of the jar. Where the lozenge of sunlight shone, the stone was burnt orange; behind it the stone was blue; ahead of it, toward the sky where the light was going, the stone was buff, as if the rock that held her prisoner was of living matter, reactive to light and heat.

  July in Arizona, the sun set around seven thirty. The girl’s scream—and Anna’s last memory—must have been around two o’clock. She glanced at her wrist. Her watch was gone. Either she’d been in the bottle five or six hours or a night and a day. Instinct—or body clock—suggested the latter. Fear prickled in her belly. Thirty hours as a prisoner.

  Prisoner. The word stuck crosswise in her brain, striking ice crystals from bone. Someone or something had taken her and imprisoned her, stolen her clothes, her watch, her ID, stolen who she was, and hid the leftovers in a pit like garbage.

  Or, like leftovers: to be eaten later.

  Again Anna started to cry for help. Fear of the answering silence cemented the sound in her lungs.

  Soon, somebody—or something—would come. Monsters are a lazy bunch. They don’t take all the trouble to catch a thing and put it in a bottle if they don’t want it for some reason. They’d want to talk to it or poke it with sticks or make it sing or dance or fuck it. They would do experiments on it at the very least and torture it at the very worst.

  Unless they just wanted to watch.

  Suddenly Anna could feel hidden eyes leering from behind the rim of her hole, eyes that watched her vomit and scream like a fox in a trap. Watched her naked.

  Scanning where cliff met sky, she studied every shadow, rock, and crack.

  Nothing.

  No one.

  The sense of being watched didn’t leave her.

  Her arm was throbbing, a pulse of all-encompassing pain. The ends of her fingers were numb and turning blue. She eased herself down until she was flat on her back, her bloodless dying limb supported by the sand. Draping her uninjured arm over her breasts to cover her nakedness, she studied the high eye-shaped rim of her world. The sun would come back or the monster would come back or insanity would come back or she would die of thirst. The last option seemed the least nasty.

  “You have one job,” Molly said, as she had so many times over the past few months. “Staying alive.”

  “Damn it!” Anna grumbled. “Why do you have to make things so hard?”

  With her sister’s admonition tolling in her head, Anna realized how desperately she wanted a drink of water. The maiden whose paw she’d intended to de-thorn for a drink must not have come through. Lying in a stupor for—hours? a day?—the lining of her nose had dried to parchment. In place of her tongue was a splintery wooden clapper. Thirsting to death lost its place of honor as the least nasty possibility.

  Along one curving edge of her prison jar, green plants with wilted white flowers grew. Datura, deadly nightshade; Anna knew that from the pamphlet she’d had in her pack. They needed water to grow. She could dig, then drink from the seep. The optimistic thought was stillborn; desert weeds needed drops, not buckets. If a plant needed serious water to live it would take root in Oregon or Louisiana, not on Mars or the Colorado Plateau.

  Galvanized by attention, Anna’s thirst became its own entity, a clawed evil, tearing at her throat and shredding her thoughts until she could think of no worse death than death by thirst.

  Deadly nightshade.

  Did one get the “deadly” if one ate it? It was good to have options. Rising to her feet was too labor intensive, so, shutting out Molly’s “staying alive,” she held her worthless arm across her belly and knee-walked toward the plants. Chewing on the leaves or the blossoms might produce some moisture or it might kill her. Either way, she figured she was ahead.

  Reaching for the juiciest-looking leaf, she noticed a deeper shadow, round and dark, like the back of a turtle—or a land mine—to one side of the scrap of living green. It was half hidden in the sand. Approaching the object with the suspicion of a cat in a new country, she shuffled toward it, each small movement driving knives into her skull and shoulder. Tentatively, she nudged it with her knee. It didn’t explode.

  It was an old metal canteen, the brown-and-blue fabric cover faded to grays. Folding herself down, she tugged it free of the sand by its army green strap. It was heavy, nearly full. Thirst made unbearable by this promise of water, Anna jammed it between her thighs and awkwardly unscrewed the cap with her right hand. A bit slopped out, and she groaned at the waste and the luxury. Carefully curling it against her chest, lest it be too heavy to hold one-handed, she bent her head, locked her mouth around its metal lips, and drank deeply.

  For a moment she felt good, almost giddy with relief. She drank a second time, then screwed the metal cap back on tightly. Her captor had left water for her. That meant he didn’t want her to die.

  Didn’t want her to die yet.

  If he wanted her alive, that meant he’d be coming back.

  Daylight was nearly gone. Night was when predators hunted; at least the cats in New York hunted at night, as did the thugs for the most part. Would her predator make his appearance soon? Hours by herself to look forward to, with only her mind to play with and rocks to keep her company. She was beginning to understand why solitary confinement was such an effective punishment. She wanted her abductor to come even as she feared it. At least, after he came, she would know how frightened to be.

  The sky turned from blue to gray to black so absolute the circular walls of her jar seemed to glow in contrast. Stars, bright enough Anna mistook the first for an airplane, pierced the inky eye high above. Clear and sharp, they seemed no more than a hundred feet from the sand and, paradoxically, incomprehensibly far from earth.

  Cool air poured into the hole, welcome at first, then chilling. Silence settled like concrete as she strained to hear the approach of a car engine or a footstep, the stealthy scratch of boots on rock.

  Lethargy claimed her. Stars became supernovas, then blurred. Her bladder emptied, yet she hadn’t the energy to move to clean sand. Fragments of thought bloomed, and in the blooms were serpents of color. Her shoulder no longer hurt, and the pain in her head hid behind a curtain of thick felt. Legs and arms were leaden, too heavy to move.

  The water in the canteen was drugged.

  When the monster came she would be unconscious, helpless, as she must have been when he’d taken her clothes and pack and wristwatch. She’d been drugged then, too; she should have known it from the hangover, the amnesia, the way her mind wouldn’t work, drugged and stripped naked and hurt, smashed on the head, her arm dragged from its socket. Had she fought back?

  Pushed by terror, the torpor receded a few inches. It was only a short reprieve. A night blacker than the one above was coming to claim her. She roused herself enough to scream. The breathy uhhn didn’t get more than a foot from her lips.

  She cried, then stopped. Yelled weakly, then quit.

  Inner darkness pooled with that outside her skin. Soon she would drown in it.

  “What the hell.” Her words were slurred and her head heavy with stupidity as she fought to her knees. No light, she found her way by touch. Using her good hand, she laid the knuckles of her useless arm’s hand on the sand palm up. “Gravity sucks,” she mumbled as her body swayed, threatening to topple her. Inch by inch she eased her left knee sideways until it was in the middle of the palm.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” she whispered and, with what strength she had left, jerked upward. An agony of pain cut through the drug haze as she heard bones grind and snap and settle. Clutching her arm to her, she fell back moaning. After a minute agony dispersed, leaving behind soreness and a wild itching as blood moved through her veins into her fingers. Either she’d resocketed the bone or the drug was masking the consequences of the attempt. Chemical darkness clogged her eyes. Like a puppy, she curled up. She wanted to pray but wouldn’t let herself.

  The Bastard didn’t exist and didn’t deserve to hear from her anytime soon.
r />   SIX

  Long after the Candors and Heckle and Jeckle, as Regis dubbed them, had gone to bed, Jenny sat on her porch and smoked. Her erstwhile roommate had been an odd duck, but Jenny had taken to her right off. That was not the usual for the Gorman girls. She and her sisters had to get used to people by degrees, ever wary for signs that they were untrustworthy or cruel or snitched food or lovers. A legacy from their parents.

  Jenny didn’t often think of her folks. It wasn’t that she hated them. Mom and Dad Gorman weren’t evil; they’d never yelled or raised a hand to any of their five daughters. They weren’t drunks or pedophiles. They were wilting flower children, embracing tune in, turn on, and drop out with the younger generation. They made promises they didn’t remember to keep, left bills unpaid, forgot to pick up the children at school, spent birthday money Gramma and Grampa gave their daughters on things for themselves, always with the promise that they’d “pay it back with interest.”

  Then, when Jenny was twelve, Jodie eleven, Jessie fourteen, Jean six, and Jenna two and a half, Mummy and Daddy got in the car to go see Terms of Endearment and didn’t come home for three years. Two weeks before Jenny’s fifteenth birthday they’d waltzed into Gramma’s kitchen streaming beads and skirts and hair and were hurt to find out nobody much gave a damn. Baby Jenna didn’t remember them, and even Jean was a little vague. Jenny and her other sisters remembered too well to believe in them anymore. They remembered too well to believe in anyone who was not yet tested and proven to be reliable.