by Nevada Barr
Smiling, Anna remembered a crew member asking Zach to pick up the other end of a massive oak refectory table that needed moving. Zach had been unable to so much as disturb the wood. Sweeping a gracious bow to the other man, he had said, “Alas, all I have to offer is my civility.”
A day spent fetching tools and carrying buckets and the case containing Jenny’s water-sampling paraphernalia had worn Anna out, while Jenny remained unfazed. The ill-fated trek up to the plateau had exhausted her to the point that her muscles were quivering and she could scarcely breathe. Unearthing Kay had been a Herculean task. Carrying a fifteen-ounce skunk up a twenty-foot ladder taxed her strength. The hours she’d been lost, looking for the trail back down to Dangling Rope, she had almost given up because she was so weak and tired.
Had she been stronger, maybe the boys would not have caught her. Maybe she could have fought them off long enough to get away.
Anna resolved to eat more and get strong. Everybody died. Cars killed, microbes, viruses, cancers, plaque, bullets, knives, gravity: Death came in one form or another in the end. Death would come for Anna, she knew that. She swore when it came it would find her strong.
Never again would she go down without a fight.
THIRTY-ONE
Jenny was in excellent form. She charmed the adults, entertained the children, and left their camp feeling she had enlisted four more people in her campaign to free Lake Powell’s beaches from the rising tide of toxic waste.
As the campers headed toward their Jet Skis for an evening ride, she turned and went back toward her own campsite. Her feet felt light, her heart soared, and she laughed out loud. She was young, living in the most amazing place on earth, doing important work for reasonable remuneration, and she was in love.
The exhilarating alignment of the heavens was sufficiently rare that she recognized her moment of joy, thus making the joy that much more potent. That her darling little pigeon was probably woefully heterosexual, and their union might never be consummated, didn’t dampen her enthusiasm by any noteworthy amount.
“Statistically insignificant,” she called to her beloved, not caring that she got nothing but mild confusion in return. Infrequently—but nonetheless deliciously—loving pure and chaste from afar was a grand thing.
Then, too, sometimes a girl got lucky.
Flopping down on the sand next to Anna, she asked, “Is there any more wine?”
Anna handed her the red fuel bottle. This wasn’t Jenny’s cheap vin ordinaire but a twenty-seven-dollar bottle of Chateau Ste. Michelle Merlot that had been reserved for a special occasion. Two more bottles of her usual waited on the boat as backup. Not to inebriate for the purpose of seduction—such acts were beneath an enchantress of Jenny’s stature—but to ensure a mellow evening.
At the moment Jenny felt anything but mellow. Had there been tall buildings, she would have leaped them, dragons, she would have slain them, if it would have enhanced the pleasure of her new mistress.
“You look like the cat that ate the canary,” Anna said.
Would that it were a pigeon, Jenny thought wickedly and smiled. “I feel positively grand,” she said. “We’ve hours of light left. Where can I take you? What can I show you? Your wish, my command.”
“You can show me who shoved me into the jar,” Anna said flatly.
With that jab of reality, Jenny’s elation deflated somewhat. “Ugly thoughts for such a beautiful evening,” she said gently.
“I know. Sorry,” Anna apologized. “My solution hole isn’t all that far from here, is it? Not as the frog hops?”
Anna must have been looking at maps. A week ago Jenny would have bet she neither knew nor cared about the geography of the lake and its environs.
“The end of Hole-in-the-Rock Road is maybe a quarter of a mile from the head of this canyon,” Jenny told her. In saying the words she realized not only was that true but— “Those college kids,” she said suddenly, sitting up straight. “They didn’t have to come up from the Rope or down Hole-in-the-Rock from Escalante. They could have climbed out of Panther.”
Now Ms. Pigeon was interested. She looked out over the skinny lick of water that fronted the grotto. “Sheer cliffs,” Anna said. “What? Sixty, eighty feet up to the plateau? They would have had to be bitten by a radioactive spider to pull that off.”
“Come with me,” Jenny said, delighted she had found a gift for her new friend. “Be prepared to strip to your underwear—or skin, if you prefer the classics.”
Watching how stiffly Anna got to her feet, Jenny felt a pang of remorse. The poor little thing had seemed determined to do the work of ten men regardless of the fact her shoulder hadn’t fully healed and she should have been on bed rest after the trauma she’d suffered.
“We don’t have to go,” Jenny said earnestly. “I was just going to show you the slot canyon that forms the end of Panther. It’s been there since Zeus was in knee pants. It will still be there tomorrow. You should rest. Let me fix you some dinner.”
“No,” Anna replied, evidently determined to push herself until she dropped in her tracks. “I want to see it. I like the idea they could have come up from here. It makes more sense than the road or the trail. Show me how.”
Jenny looked at her for a second, watching her gather her little strength around her great heart, and silently mocked herself for describing it as such. Despite the mockery she was so proud of Anna tears stung her eyes.
“I am so very completely and totally an idiot,” she said softly.
Anna had ducked into the tent to get her boating shoes. If she heard Jenny’s brief autobiography she gave no sign.
Beyond the grotto, the long skinny finger of lake snaking its way along the bottom of Panther Canyon narrowed precipitously. The gunwales of Jenny’s boat were scarcely a foot from the eighty-foot-high cliffs forming the sides of the slot canyon. Running at idle, she nosed the boat forward until both sides of the Almar’s bow touched the sandstone, then scraped, then the boat stuck like a cork in a bottle. Having shut down the engines, Jenny joined Anna where she knelt on the bow looking, to Jenny’s eye, like one of Arthur Rackham’s fairies.
Three feet from where the bow was wedged, giant stone steps, with an almost man-made symmetry, rose thirty feet above the lake level. Like a calving glacier, great rectangles of rock had sheared from the sides of the slot and fallen in a neat pile, completely blocking the canyon. To either side of the giant’s staircase another sixty feet of cliff cut upward before the earth gave way to the ribbon of sky. With the sun gone from them, and the sky turning pearl, the rock appeared dove gray and soft as velvet. The water ran dark, a blue that is only the blink of an eye from black.
“Pretty amazing, huh?” she asked when Anna didn’t speak.
Anna was shaking her head. The end of her long braid twitched across the back of Jenny’s hand. She stifled the urge to catch it as she might a cat’s tail.
“It’s too steep. It’s too high. Nobody could get out.” Anna’s voice, usually an alto, smooth as warm honey, had risen an octave and was all sharps and flats. Her eyes were too wide. Around the dark hazel irises Jenny could see white.
As a gift to her beloved, Jenny had effectively put the poor thing back into the jar. “Oh, honey,” she cried. “I am so sorry. I should have known. I’m such a blockhead. Come on. Let’s go back to camp, forget we ever came here.”
Anna didn’t move. She was shaking her head again.
“No,” she said, her voice still unnaturally high. “I can stay. I will stay. This is just a crack full of water. It won’t slam shut.”
Anna’s last word finished on a high note. Not quite a question, but clearly a plea for reassurance.
“The walls will not slam shut,” Jenny said firmly and waited as Anna breathed slowly in through her nose and out through her mouth. Meditation, Jenny knew from her years of shrinkage. Three breaths and Anna said, “Tell me how they could have gotten to the plateau from here.”
“Not here,” Jenny said. “Past this p
ile of sandstone.”
“What happens past the rocks?”
“The slot starts to get seriously narrow.”
Anna groaned. “You’re kidding?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Jenny said. Then, because she couldn’t help it, she added, “It’s really beautiful.”
“In a strangled creepy kind of way?” Anna asked. She was using humor to cover her fear. Jenny admired that and laughed to reward her courage.
“Coming here wasn’t that great an idea. Let’s go back and finish off the wine. Besides, wait till you see what I brought for supper.” She laid her hand on Anna’s arm. The gesture had been meant to reassure but it had sent a jolt of pure lust right up the center of Jenny. Pure and chaste from afar, she reminded herself.
Staring at the immense steps rising out of the lake, Anna hadn’t noticed Jenny’s brief internal battle between good and evil.
“I don’t see how anybody could possibly climb out of here without those things climbers nail into the walls and the ropes and pulleys or whatever they use,” Anna said.
Focus had taken the glaze from Anna’s eyes and the edge from her voice. Seeing her somewhat recovered, Jenny said, “Come on. I’ll show you.” The bow of the snub-nosed boat was sufficiently wedged—and this far from the washing-machine action of the main body of the lake, it wasn’t going anywhere. Still, Jenny jumped the yard of water between the boat and the sandstone stair and secured the bow line around a big friendly rock. Little was more embarrassing for a boat ranger than to lose her boat. Fortunately Jenny was an exceptionally strong swimmer. Both times she’d let her boat escape she’d been able to reclaim it without hopping pathetically around on shore begging kindly visitors to take their boat out and retrieve it for her.
“We’re set,” she said. “Feel free to disembark.”
Anna leaped gracefully onto the natural step. “Lay on, Macduff,” she said.
Jenny started up the pile of stones, thirty feet an easy scramble, Anna was mastering the climb, but she was sweating and breathing hard. Jenny reminded herself to quit showing off and take it easier on her companion. Women as fragile as her darling didn’t belong between a rock and a hard place.
“You okay with this?” she asked solicitously. “I’m a tough old thing. I’m used to it.”
“I’m getting used to it,” Anna said grimly.
When Anna reached the summit, Jenny gestured toward the sculpted slot canyon beyond and said, “Tada! Beautiful in a strangled creepy kind of way.”
“My gosh,” Anna breathed, and Jenny was gratified. They stood ten yards above an ever-narrowing waterway that had been cut off from the larger part of Panther Canyon by the rock fall. At the base of the obstruction the waterway was twelve feet wide, an almost square pool surrounded by sheer cliffs rising perpendicularly sixty or eighty feet.
“It’s like a quarry,” Anna said. “Like the granite quarries near where I grew up, but in miniature. Molly used to dive in them. Seventy feet. Not me. Too scared.”
It looked not only like a quarry but like a square sandstone jar with water in the bottom. Short staccato sentences: Jenny guessed Anna was afraid longer ones would betray her fear. She opened her mouth to again offer to go back to camp, but knew she was doing it because she felt guilty. Anna would leave when she needed to. At present, she seemed to need to stay and endure.
“A quarry with a tail.” Jenny pointed to the far end of the rectangular pool where a crack opened in the cliffs and the water slipped into a dark and twisting channel. “Runoff carved that slot down from the plateau. Of course, there wasn’t a lake here for most of the millions of years of cutting. That’s what makes the slot canyons here unique. The lake inhabits them. Look how sinuous the walls are. Nowhere near straight up and down. Eons on eons of water carved that S shape into the plateau on its way down from Fiftymile Mountain to the Colorado River. I love the way the wall on your left curves away, like it’s shying from the other’s touch, then, up higher, see how it sways back till it almost meets the opposite wall? Now close as lovers, now falling back. They always look to me like they’re in the middle of a sensuous dance to music timed to a millennium beat,” Jenny finished. “When you’re in the slot you can’t see the sky because of the curves in the cliffs above you.”
“It reminds me of ribbon candy. The kind we used to get at Christmas,” Anna said, sounding determinedly cheerful.
Jenny added her own nonthreatening image, hoping it would help. “Or taffy the way they’d pull it at the county fair, the colors stretching and twisting all through it.” It also resembled the elongated cousin to the canted neck of Anna’s jar. “That’s it,” Jenny said. “The goddess’s own sculpture. Had enough?”
In answer, Anna started down the three giant steps to where the rock sheared off in an eight-foot drop to the water. “Does the slot eventually lead up to the plateau?” Anna asked. “Run uphill getting shallower and shallower and then there you are?”
“Nope.” Jenny joined her on the edge of the drop. “The slot stays between sixty and a hundred feet deep and, for the most part, no more than a few feet wide. Often less than that. It runs back into the sandstone another two hundred yards or so, then ends in a chimney that goes vertically up to the plateau. Or almost all the way up. The last fifteen feet or so you need a rope to traverse. It’s too wide to shimmy up and too smooth to free-climb.”
“Can you swim to the end?”
“No. The water’s still there, but sometimes the walls of the canyon are only six or eight inches apart. Great place to wedge a foot.”
“There must be a beautiful waterfall back there when it rains.”
“I suppose you could enjoy it for a minute or two before it killed you,” Jenny said. “Everything washes down. Traversing the last fifty yards of the slot is an obstacle course the Navy SEALs would appreciate, but it’s definitely doable. Canyoneers do it a couple times during a season.
“Kay and the men who attacked you could have gotten up to the plateau. They would have come out north of Hole-in-the-Rock Road, about a quarter of a mile from where Frank Patterson parked his truck.” Jenny was enjoying herself. She loved being able to tell Anna of wonders, introduce her to stunning mysterious slots. Stop it, she chided herself without rancor. Obsession was a bad thing. Feeling sixteen with clear skin and no curfew was delicious.
Jenny sat down on the edge of the drop, feet over the water below, and made herself comfortable. “Have you ever heard of canyoneering?” she asked.
Anna eased down beside her, groaning softly. When she noticed the sympathetic look on Jenny’s face, she stopped abruptly and finished her move without showing fatigue or pain. What a woman.
“I haven’t,” Anna said. “I have lived only in the canyons of steel. New York’s skinniest alleys are six-lane highways compared to this. This isn’t a canyon, it’s a crevice, a crack.”
“Cracks are growing in popularity. When I started here nobody much paid attention to anything too narrow to drive a Jet Ski up. The whole Escalante region is full of winding, wandering, narrow canyons. More and more we have people come for the purpose of climbing them. Sandstone is too soft for any true technical climbing, but get a good crack, not too wide, and you can sort of wriggle and worm your way to the top. Of course, if it widens out you’re screwed, and if it gets very, very skinny at the bottom, and you fall, you can get wedged.”
“Like this one does?” Anna asked.
“Pretty much.”
“Sounds like a nightmare,” Anna said.
“Actually, it’s satisfying. You use your whole body like you did when you played as a kid. Grown-up amusements don’t allow for crawling and wriggling, getting good and muddy, and tearing the knees of your pants.”
“True,” Anna said. “Why doesn’t the water fill up behind this dam?”
“Only the top forty feet or so is solid. Below it’s boulders and rubble. The water can flow through.”
“Ah.”
For a minute they sat sho
ulder to shoulder, feet dangling like children, and soaked in the utter silence of the canyon. Not even the sound of water lapping against stone disturbed it. Lest they forget they were in a recreation area, the thin roar of an approaching engine made its way up from the direction of the grotto.
“Campers returning on their Jet Skis,” Jenny said.
“How would Kay and those guys get a rope to the top if they were climbing up from here?” Anna asked.
“You’re a single-minded wench, aren’t you,” Jenny teased.
“How could they?” Anna asked.
“Lookie there.” Jenny pointed at a frayed old climbing rope anchored around a boulder on the right side of the step where they sat. The rope snaked over the edge and down the sheer rock face into the dark water below.
“Canyoneering types don’t use fancy new climbing gear for this grubby sport. Often, if they’ve found a way, or gotten somebody to drop a rope so they can make the impossible spots, they’ll leave it behind for the next guy. This rope’s been here a couple of years. If somebody left a rope down that last fifteen or so feet from the plateau you could make it out.”
“Is there a rope?” Anna asked.
“There was the last time I was there,” Jenny said, “but that was a couple of seasons ago. It’s possible it’s still there. If it is…”
“The murderers could have climbed out,” Anna finished. “How far down the slot can we wade before it turns into an obstacle course?” she asked.
“Not wade, dear heart. The water here is over thirty feet deep.”
Anna drew her feet up and tucked her heels next to her butt, her arms wrapped around her knees.
Jenny laughed. Knowing a vast lake was hundreds of feet deep was entirely different from looking on a body of water scarcely more than a few yards wide and knowing that beneath were fathoms of water. It brought on the sense of perching on the edge of an abyss, a pit so bottomless as to create its own mysteries. After years on the lake, Jenny could still feel the pull.
