The Rope ap-17

by Nevada Barr

  How had the adorable little Pigeon fluttered so effortlessly through these defenses? Jenny wondered. Lust? As she watched cigarette smoke curling in the still air, drifting in a cloud across the fingernail of moon, she pondered that. What there was of Anna Pigeon was “cherce,” as Tracy had said of Hepburn. The long red-brown hair was a definite turn-on, as were the high cheekbones and clear hazel eyes. Her ears were small and neat and close to the head. Her nose was a perfectly respectable nose. If she smiled she might dazzle. A girl could do worse for a bedmate than Anna Pigeon. Customarily Jenny’s taste ran to the more lushly upholstered type. Ms. Pigeon’s clavicles stood out like a coat hanger, and her scapula could pass for wings when she stretched her arms back. Jenny always joked, to sleep with a skinny woman would be like sleeping in the knife drawer.

  The joke was on Jenny this time. Fortunately, Ms. Pigeon had flown the coop before Jenny could get cut too bad.

  Anna’s darkness had been part of the appeal, she had to admit. The woman walked in a cloud almost as visible as the dust that hung around Pig-Pen in the cartoons. Jenny was a sucker for stray kittens, wounded mongrels, meth-addicted girlfriends, and down-and-out boys. Anna definitely had the wounded bird syndrome going for her. Another lure was her mystery; she never said word one about the gigantic cross nailed to her skinny back.

  Jenny ground her cigarette out on the side of the porch, tucked the butt into her plastic bag, said good night to Pinky Winky, the pink pygmy rattlesnake that lived between her duplex and the Candors’, and took herself in toward bed. Without Anna to shoulder a share of the work, tomorrow would be a long day in the Fecal Realm. Year eight of her reign as the Fecal Queen.

  Her anointing came her third season when there was a most unfortunate spill of some sixty gallons of collected waste she was hauling in her boat.

  For the most part houseboats had their own privies. Unfortunately a lot of them filled them up, then dumped them in the lake.

  As counterintuitive as it was, Lake Powell, the barren wife of a dam where Gaia never meant a dam to be, needed gray water. Waste put nutrients into the lake, helping an ecosystem that had not had time to evolve. The lake was long and deep, five to six hundred feet in the main channel; she could take a lot of abuse. The problem was the beaches. Any beach where a boat or a Jet Ski could anchor, visitors camped and picnicked and pooped. Some thought they were being ecologically enlightened by cat-holing, but the level of the lake wasn’t static. Boats and wind kept it sloshing like a washing machine. Water came up, uncovered the catty little deposits, and dragged them into the reservoir.

  Warm-blooded animals, including humans, carried fecal coliform bacteria (FC) in their digestive tracts, along with the pathogens that went with it. Off high-use beaches, where the water was shallow and warm, there were often 400 FC “colonies” per 100 milliliters of water. Anything over 200 FC per million was unsafe for swimming.

  Every two weeks for the past seven seasons Jenny had taken water samples from the most popular beaches. Any beach that came up unclean was closed until she had two consecutive samples with an FC below 200. This had worked until visitation reached five million annually. More beaches were closed more often, and visitors howled.

  In two years it would be mandatory that all overnighters carry Porta Potties. During those two years of easing from cat box to Nirvana, Jenny would clean the beaches, and gather water samples for the lab. New this season, and most important, it had become her job to educate the visitors in the niceties of proper pooping protocols so that when the rule was enforced the public outcry would be minimized.

  Because Jenny didn’t have the power to write tickets—or the gun to back it up—she was often teamed with Jim Levitt, a law enforcement seasonal. One wouldn’t think discussing toileting practices could get a girl shot or manhandled, but Lake Powell’s visitors were rich—many were über rich, the kind that can pay ten thousand a week for a houseboat and another three thousand to put gasoline in it. The kind that don’t take kindly to anybody making less than they pay their maids telling them what they can and cannot do on their vacation, in their lake, on their beach, in their world.

  Jenny’s secret to compliance was pretending she was married to Aristotle Onassis and educating the hoi polloi was simply an obligation of noblesse oblige. When that failed it was good to have a large man with a big gun beside her.

  Thinking of guns and bozos, she reminded herself to check the grotto at the tail end of Panther Canyon. A party boat of major übers had camped there, so many college kids per square inch it was a wonder the houseboat was still afloat. Their barge had a bathroom—a bathroom, as in one bathroom. With that quantity of booze, bladders, and bowels, they would most definitely be exhibiting poor litter box habits.

  There would be many “interpretive moments,” educational opportunities.

  There would be pounds of human waste.

  Lord, but she was going to miss Anna Pigeon.

  This was the first season she’d had a full-time seasonal position under her. Anna Pigeon. Mystery woman, wounded bird, waist-length red hair, rich hazel eyes: Jenny went over the litany of attractions as she brushed her teeth. To it she added the one that had first captured her heart, Anna’s willingness to do hard dirty work without complaining.

  Jenny loved meeting new people, preaching ecological concepts, selling the idea of sustainable wilderness, living out of doors, taking water samples, and sleeping on the beaches. Since the unfortunate incident that had earned her a regal title, she did not love cleaning up human waste. Anna was a gift; she actually preferred shoveling shit to interacting with her fellow men and women.

  Though it was clear boats, water, docks, and about anything else in Glen Canyon was alien to Anna, she was quick to learn and a natural at handling lines. She moved with an economy and efficiency so complete it was as graceful as a dance. On the one occasion the weather came up quick and bad, and the lake was set on pounding them into bags of bone and pureed meat, Anna was daring the goddess of the lake to do her worst.

  Jenny was convinced a quiet camaraderie had been growing up between them. A respect. Admiration. A deep and abiding affection—

  Don’t push it, she thought as she spit in the sink.

  Anna was gone.

  SEVEN

  When Anna again awoke—or came to, depending on how she wanted to think of it—she knew where she was before she opened her eyes. In spite of the fact she’d been drugged, sleep had refreshed her and she was able to think with relative clarity. For a time she lay perfectly still, eyes closed, breathing evenly as if she still slept. Before she committed to another day of life in a pit she wanted to be sure she was alone. Light touched her eyelids gently; the sun was up, but not yet in a position to shine into her prison. The sand beneath her body was cool. That would change before long. Thirst was with her, but not with the same screeching, scratching shriek of need as it had been the night before. That, too, would change before long. She would have to decide whether to die of thirst or drug overdose.

  She felt queasy—again not as bad as on the first morning—the first awakening? Much of that might have been the head wound. Vaguely, she remembered Molly mentioning that concussions made people sick to their stomachs. Minutely, she twitched the shoulder that had been dislocated. Sore, but better, much better. All in all, it felt as if she would be healthy enough to starve to death or be murdered in a day or two.

  It surprised her that she awakened hungry. For the last few months she’d had no appetite and would often forget to eat. Though she was living in New York City within walking distance of the finest restaurants in the world, her weight dropped from a respectable one hundred and eighteen to a boney one hundred and two. Now that she hadn’t so much as a stale corn dog in her future, she was ravenous.

  The train of thought ran fast; no more than a few seconds elapsed between washing up from the sea of sleep to finding herself aground in consciousness. Stopping her mind before it could clatter down another track, she listened, trying to
feel the air around her with invisible antennae. The desert was not silent: A tiny fall of sand whispered; a powerboat buzzed gently, distance muting its roar to a hum that was almost natural; her heart beat, a steady thump in her temples.

  Anna didn’t think there was a monster leaning over her waiting to strike the moment her eyes opened. Surely in stillness as complete as this bottled quietude, she would be able to hear it breathing, feel the fetid air on her neck, smell the foul stench of its mouth.

  Did Jeffrey Dahmer have bad breath? she wondered. Was eating people more unclean than eating cows?

  That thought ended the whole exercise of keeping the eyes closed and not moving. Anna’s eyes popped open as a jolt of fear electrified her. She was on her back staring up at the all-seeing eye at the top of her world, the clear blue of sky beyond the mouth of her bottle. Absurdly, she wondered if this was the view babies had shortly before they were born. No, they’d see a masked man in scrubs peering back at them. At one time that image would have amused her. Lying naked at the bottom of a dry well, it scared her nearly as much as that of Jeffrey Dahmer picking human flesh from his teeth with his fingernail.

  All that kept her from leaping to her feet in terror was the sure knowledge that it would make her arm and head hurt like sons-a-bitches. Carefully, she sat up.

  Things had changed.

  The night before, when the drug took her, she had been leaning against the side of the jar. She had urinated in the sand where she sat. The canteen was tucked under her arm. Now she was in the center of the arena of sand. The canteen was leaning neatly against the sandstone near the patch of sacred datura, night blooms only now beginning to close with the light. Next to it was a paper sack, the neck rolled down tightly to keep whatever was inside trapped. Around her the sand had been raked into concentric circles as if she sat at the center of a vortex.

  Stinging brought her attention back to her body. Her thigh burned. Blood covered the skin, running down and clotting in her pubic hair. Sand stuck between her legs where the blood had pooled and dried.

  “Nooooo,” she wailed. The monster had come as she slept and raped her bloody. “No!” she screamed as on elbows and heels she tried to escape the red stain. Movement sent more burning from her thigh to her brain. She began to cry. Tears blurred her vision and ran down the side of her nose.

  The bleeding, stopped overnight, began again, seeping from the top of her thigh to run in narrow red rivulets down the crease between her leg and her abdomen. Anna sat still. Gathering her courage, she leaned forward to study the bloodied area. Neither the ooze nor the pain emanated from her vagina, but from the flesh near panty-line, had she had panties to boast of. Scooting backward, she moved to where the canteen rested neatly beside the deadly garden. Having unscrewed the cap, she poured a small stream of water onto the wound. The water ran red; then, slowly, cuts began to show, straight, careful lines incised into a strip of skin about two inches wide: W H O R E.

  The monster had come and cut his word into her.

  She jerked back as if she could escape the message, but it was carved on her flesh. Ignoring the sudden roar of pain in her shoulder and head, she began scooping up sand, burying the horror that had been made of her.

  “No!” she said aloud at the same moment Molly said, “Stop it, Anna.” Opening her hand, she let the sand trickle out between her fingers, watching it rejoin a million other grains that had been worn from the stone over the last millennium, blown and settled in this trap.

  He—the monster—had not made a horror of her. He had made a thing of her, an object, a joke, a notepad, a scrap to scribble on, then throw into the trash. He had made her nothing but his butt, a billboard, garbage.

  Trembling took her so hard her teeth rattled and her breath came in short shallow gusts. Folding her legs, she began to rock and moan. The moans turned to anguished sobs, and her lips formed a hard open square as ragged screams were forced through. Far away, in the back of her mind, she could hear Molly shouting something, but the words couldn’t penetrate the thick walls of degradation built around her in the night, walls as solid and imprisoning as the stone jar this damaged bit of trash had been dropped into. She rocked and screamed until she didn’t even have the will to do that anymore.

  Then she was just sitting cross-legged on the sand staring at the desiccated-looking nightshade garden, the canteen of poisoned water, and the paper bag.

  Three doors and behind each the tiger. There was no lady for such as Anna. She knew the datura could kill her, but she didn’t know if she was supposed to eat it or inject it or smoke it or what. The paper bag held an unknown. The easiest seemed to be the canteen. If she drank all of it, maybe it would be enough.

  She waited for her sister to order her to “stay alive.”

  From a long ways away she could hear her. “So. Fine,” her sister called, barely audible in the distance. “A bit of monster garbage. Poor you. The monster wins.”

  That rather pissed Anna off.

  No. That really, really pissed Anna off.

  “I will fucking show you,” she muttered and thought she heard her sister’s fading voice saying, “That’s my girl.” Fury swept away most of the self-pity. It burned out with the heat and rapidity of a car fire, leaving fatigue, helplessness, and confusion in its wake. How would she fucking show anybody? A hundred and two pounds of naked city girl with a sore shoulder and a broken pate, what could she do? Unless, when the monster showed up with his number twelve X-Acto knife—or whatever it was he’d used to carve his judgment—he was a malnourished pygmy with rickets, she wasn’t likely to overpower him even if she wasn’t drugged out of her mind.

  Maybe she’d get lucky, like the girl kept in the stone pit in the basement in Silence of the Lambs, and the bastard would have a yappy little dog she could hold hostage. From what she’d seen, Lake Powell wasn’t a hotbed of yappy little dogs, more the big sorts that can clear a coffee table with one swish of a mighty tail.

  Blinking back the last residue of tears with the thought that she needed all her hydration, she looked around her sandbox. Not even any rocks for bashing in the heads of predators. Self-pity was creeping back when the cat saved her. She remembered Sophie, a five-pound cat she had when she moved to New York after college. Sophie was so sweet until someone tried to make her do something she did not wish to do. Then she became a five-pound buzz saw, all fangs and claws and moving at the speed of sound.

  Sophie. Gilda Johanson. Gilda was attacked two floors down in the apartment building where Anna and Zach lived. She was in her sixties, had emphysema and high blood pressure. She snarled and snapped at everybody. A burglar had come in and decided to rape Gilda while he was there. Relating how she had driven the man off was one of the few times Anna had heard Gilda laugh—or rather chortle.

  “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 nourish
ing.

  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.