by Nevada Barr
In a scattering of male voices, grunting redoubled. Jenny watched with disinterest as her belly and thighs, knees and feet rose out of the black water.
Hands closed on her upper arms, “Gently, gently,” someone was saying. “Very gently. We don’t want to shock her into a worse state. Easy does it. Got her? Okay, on three. One, two, three.” Jenny levitated, flying upward like magic; then strong arms were supporting her and hard light was striping across the rock, illuminating three pairs of feet, one in boat shoes, one bare, one in flip-flops.
“Jim?” Jenny asked.
“It’s Jim. I’m here. Let’s get you warm, okay? Don’t you worry about anything, Jenny. We’re going to warm you right up.”
“Anna.” Jenny tried to look around. Jim’s arms not only supported but imprisoned her.
“Anna’s fine,” Jim said. “That burrito over there is her.” He turned his body so Jenny could see what he was talking about.
Anna Pigeon was wrapped up in silver blankets. Nothing showed but her face. Jenny took comfort in the face. Had Anna been dead, the face would have been covered.
“Let’s get you out of those wet clothes,” Jim said.
“What clothes?” another man asked.
Regis. It was Regis. “Hey,” Jenny whispered.
“Martin, thanks a million. We’re going to need to get the boats out of here…”
“No problem, man. I’m moving the Jet Ski. Let me know how they do, okay?” The flip-flops flip-flopped out of the light.
Strong, warm, flesh-and-blood arms and warm night air restored Jenny sufficiently that she progressed from feeling nothing to shivering violently. Jim sat her down on a rock, unhooked her bra, and slid it off her arms. With a pair of scissors from his orange emergency medical pack he cut off her panties.
“A shame,” said Regis. “Nice outfit, Jenny.” She tried for a smile. Chattering teeth turned it into a grimace. Handling her as if she were made of glass, Jim wrapped her in a silver blanket designed to maximize body heat, then sat her on his lap, his arms around her while Regis lifted Anna and carried her to his speedboat.
“Hot drinks to come,” Jim promised. “Can you walk? I won’t let go of you.”
Jenny found she could walk, after a fashion, and with the support of Jim’s beefy left arm around her waist. Moving slowly, trailing silver like a fairy—or a snail—they got to the bottom of the giant steps, across her boat, still nosed in at the blockage, and into Regis’s red-red cigarette boat rafted off its stern. Jim’s patrol boat was third in line.
Anna, in her cocoon, was lying on the padded bench that spanned the stern of Regis’s boat. Jim settled Jenny next to her. Carefully lifting Anna’s head, he pillowed it on Jenny’s thigh. “Keep each other warm,” he said and, “Gently, gently.”
The trip back to Dangling Rope was a blur. Jenny held Anna, trying her best to protect her from jarring and wind. As Regis slowed at the NO WAKE sign marking the Rope’s docking area, Anna struggled to a sitting position, fighting to free herself from the bundling of the heat blanket. Jenny helped her up but pulled the blanket back around her bare shoulders. “Your skin is still cold to the touch,” she said.
“I’m hot,” Anna said.
“No, you’re not. You just feel hot.”
For a wonder Anna didn’t fight her. Jim Levitt pulled his boat in beside the red speedboat. Between him and Regis, the women were handed to the dock. Anna was buckled into the first ATV, and Regis drove it down the quay. Jim helped Jenny into the passenger side of the second and slid behind the wheel.
The ten feet from the ATVs to the duplex Anna managed on her own two feet, though Regis helped her keep her balance. Anna had progressed from numb to shivering, and both she and Jenny tottered like fragile crones afraid of slipping and falling.
Regis argued they should be taken to the hospital in Wahweap. Jim said no, the long boat ride would do more harm than the hospital would do good. He left the swamp cooler off and opened the door to the porch so warm night air could come into the duplex. Jenny knew she should be helping but couldn’t remember what she was supposed to do, so she held on to Anna as Jim escorted them to her room.
While Jenny sat on the edge of her bed watching, he helped Anna into a long-sleeved flannel shirt, a pair of her soft sweatpants, and socks. A man stripping her, a man manipulating her naked body: Jenny wanted to tell her it was okay, it wasn’t like the jar. Anna kept her eyes on Jenny’s face. “He’s taking the thorn out of my paw,” she said, and Jenny relaxed.
The cuts on Anna’s thigh were drained of color, the cold and blood aging them into scars at least until the blood returned. Jim saw them and looked over at Jenny, brows raised in a question.
She pretended she didn’t notice. Once Jim had settled Anna beneath the covers, sitting, back against the wall, he helped Jenny to put on her flannel pajamas and socks, then tucked her in beside Anna.
It was then Jenny remembered. “Jim, there are dead bodies where we were. Two. That’s why I went in. Men.”
“Men. Two. Dead,” Anna whispered a confirmation.
“You sure they were dead?” Jim asked Jenny, his voice low and pleasant. Gently, gently.
“Dead. Drowned probably, but way dead,” she said.
“I’ll deal with it. You just work on getting warm.”
Regis was standing in the door to the room holding mugs of warm weak tea with sugar. His face twitched at the news of the bodies. Tea slopped onto the floor.
“What’s this about bodies?” he asked in a strangled voice.
“Later,” Jim said warningly and left the room. Jenny heard him calling someone on the radio. A few minutes later he returned with four chemical heat packs and tucked them to either side of her and Anna’s stomachs.
They were finishing their second mugs of tea when a decidedly disgruntled Bethy arrived to insist Regis come home. He looked at his wet-hen spouse with shark eyes, carp eyes, eyes flat and dead.
Jenny shook off the mood that brought those images to mind. Anna was nodding off. Jenny yawned widely. Jim tucked the covers around them as if they were children, turned off the light, and left. Anna, no longer shivering, pressed close. Jenny curled around her back, spooning her with living, healing warmth.
Anna fell asleep first snoring softly, a sound as amiable as the purr of a cat.
For a while Jenny lay awake, just existing in the warmth and the flannel sheets.
As first dates went, this wasn’t the worst she’d had.
THIRTY-SIX
A sound, a shift of the light, or the pressure of another mind awakened Anna. Someone was in the room. When she’d been with Zach she had slept the sleep of the innocent—or the dead. Sirens, subway trains, shrieking couples in the next-door apartment: Nothing woke her. Being able to sleep through anything had been a standing joke. “Was there war?” “Yes, you must have slept through it.” “Thanksgiving Day parade?” “Slept through it.”
In her new incarnation, if a tree fell in the forest, and there was no one there to hear it, it woke her. If God saw every little sparrow that fell, the thump of their tiny bodies on the earth woke her.
Jenny had risen early. Though she’d tried to be quiet, it woke Anna. The shower, the toilet flushing, the screen door opening and closing, woke her. Someone alien was in the room. It woke her.
On her side, covers thrown off, knees pulled up, arms hugging the pillow, Anna lay with her face to the wall, her back to the door. Another thing she would move to the category of things she used to do.
“Who is in here?” she asked without moving. Rolling over in the tangle of tossed covers would expose her soft white underbelly. A foot shifted on the dingy worn carpet. Quick as a cat, Anna sat up, back against the wall, hands up to ward off a blow.
Bethy was standing next to the bed, leaning over slightly as if she’d been interrupted in the act of kissing a child good night. She was dressed for work in NPS uniform shorts and short-sleeved shirt. Fabric pulled across her breasts, and the tailored shirt ga
pped between the buttons. Her face was one no child should see before going to sleep, suffused with blood and anger.
“What do you want?” Anna asked.
“Stay. Away. From. My. Husband.” She made each word separate and distinct, like commands to a bad dog.
“I don’t have designs on Regis,” Anna said truthfully. As alarming as this woman-scorned apparition was, it simply could not compete with the closet full of horrors Anna’d accrued since leaving New York for Page, Arizona. She felt no fear, merely confusion and annoyance.
“Oh. Right. You’re queer now. I forgot.” Bethy’s voice dipped and rose in a parody of high-school-girl sarcasm. “This is Jenny’s room, isn’t it? You’re one of those lesbo dykes like Jenny Gorman. A carpet sweeper.”
Anna was growing more annoyed but no less confused.
“A carpet sweeper?” she asked. Then it came to her. In her desire to wound, Bethy thought she’d pulled out all the stops. “Carpet muncher,” Anna said. Bethy’s mouth formed a little o. Giggles bubbled through Anna’s lips, then full-blown laughter, the kind that brings tears and skips along the slippery slopes of hysteria. Hilarity was not soothing to her caller, and the more upset Bethy grew, the more Anna’s control slipped away.
When Bethy’s face began to look like a tomato about to burst, Anna laughed so hard her stomach hurt. Sitting up straight was more than she could manage. Literally doubled over with laughter, she fell off of the bed. This was funnier still. Fear that she could not stop laughing, not ever, that she would die laughing, finally sobered her. Gasping and hiccuping, she pulled herself up and leaned her back against Jenny’s bed.
Bethy was gone.
“What in the hell was that about?” Anna whispered. The habit of talking to herself aloud had been born of isolation and fear while in the jar. In the real world it was a habit she was going to have to break. People would think she was insane. Worse, people might hear what she was thinking when she preferred to keep her thoughts to herself.
* * *
Having showered and washed her hair, Anna returned to her own room. This was where she would sleep tonight. Without hypothermia demanding body heat, she would sleep alone as she had every night since Zach died.
Wrapped in a towel, on the edge of the bed, she sat and stared at the open bottom drawer of her dresser. She missed Buddy. Zach was gone. Molly was two thousand miles away. Anna guessed she was like a lot of people in the world, just one baby skunk away from lonely.
For a cowardly moment she wondered if Jenny would let her sleep with her a few more nights. It was reassuring to hear another person breathing when one woke up in the creepy hours between midnight and 4:00 A.M.
Would Bethy’s accusations hurt Jenny? Were there still people in the world whose best friend wasn’t gay? Not in the theater. Homophobia might live on in the hinterlands. Anna infinitely preferred to be thought gay than to be known a coward. Compromising Jenny Gorman to save herself a few bad nights would be the act of a craven.
Given Bethy’s preposterous rage—and Anna’s less than soothing reaction—she was undoubtedly broadcasting to anyone who would listen that her neighbors were carpet sweepers.
Carpet sweepers. Giggles started to rise in a frothy tide. Anna quashed them. The line between mentally stable and not had been worn too thin to take chances. Of course, with Bethy “outing” them, there was no point in worrying whether hiding out in Jenny’s room a few more nights would damage their reputations.
She examined the wounds on her thigh. The cuts had been deep, and those first days she’d had no way of cleaning them. It was pure luck—or the sterility of the desert air—that they hadn’t gotten infected.
The night she staggered back to Dangling Rope in Kay’s cutoffs, Jenny had cleaned the cuts and used butterfly bandages to pull the edges closed. They looked to be healing okay. The scabs were mostly off, and, though the wounds were still dark red, there was no proud flesh. She’d been using Jenny’s vitamin E oil. Maybe it was helping, maybe not. There was no way to tell, lacking anything with which to compare the progress. WHORE was still clear and angry. One day it would fade to thin white lines. If Anna were fortunate, there might even come a time it could be seen only with her mind and not her eyes. Until then—or until she grew a skin as thick as that of an armadillo—she would eschew bikinis.
Dressing herself in her green uniform shorts—summer weight and feeling like there was not a single natural fiber in their makeup—and the gray NPS shirt, Anna replayed her wake-up call.
Bethy thought she was after her husband. Twice Regis had rescued Anna; was that what set Bethy off? After Regis saved her from the jar, Anna occasionally felt he was either looking after her or watching her, depending on her mood. It wouldn’t be unusual if he was concerned for her well-being. Saving someone’s life could up one’s interest in that individual. The Chinese went so far as to say it made one responsible for the life saved.
Regis was Johnny-on-the-spot at her interviews with law enforcement. Boredom? Wanting to get out of the office? Gathering information he could barter for stardom at the next cocktail party? Or whatever passed for a cocktail party in Rangerland. A potluck, probably.
Bethy must have seen this as romantic interest. Anna was older than she was, older than Regis by a few years, but Anna was thin and Bethy was not. Sometimes that was enough.
Anna threaded the cordovan-colored belt through the belt loops of her shorts and buckled the brass buckle. There was such a thing as too thin, and she was it. Two Dangling Dogs with chips for lunch, she told herself.
Grabbing her ball cap, the traditional NPS Stetson being impractical on a boat, she shoved thoughts of Bethy’s morning speech from her mind. A life observing great drama, both on- and offstage, had taught her that there was no way out of an imagined love triangle. If it was a comedy, all was revealed in act three; if a tragedy, everybody died in act four. Trying to talk to Bethy or Regis would only prolong the action.
Anna had consumed a minimum of six hundred calories in hot dogs and chips, and was nearly to the bottom of her sixteen-ounce Pepsi, when Jenny finally made it back to the marina to collect her.
She rejoiced at the sight of the woman and the boat. Though a night’s rest hadn’t cleared out the fatigue of a long day’s work followed by treading water in the cold, Anna was anxious to be put to work, the harder the better.
THIRTY-SEVEN
For the next three days Anna worked and ate and slept. Along with Jenny, she cleaned two beaches. A grand haul of sixty-two pounds of human waste gathered and sealed into five-gallon cans. Under Jenny’s tutelage, she learned to pilot the twenty-eight-foot Almar cuddy and to anchor in the water and to land. The second day Jim rode with them. Anna was impressed with how he dealt with those who, in Jenny’s vernacular, “failed to see the light.”
Inexperienced as he was, Jim was a natural when it came to handling difficult people. Though her interactions with him as an EMT had been pleasant enough, given his youth and macho good looks, Anna had expected a hard-line swagger.
Apparently for Jim, law enforcement was as much about education as enforcement. Park rangers—if Jim Levitt was any indication—were a lot more lenient when it came to “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” If the ignorance was sincere, often it earned the miscreant a second chance.
On occasion, Anna helped by sensing who was sincere and who was not. Anyone who sat through thousands of auditions got to where she could spot a bad actor before he opened his mouth. Anna could often tell if they lacked sincerity within seconds of the lie’s commencement.
There was an old theater joke, attributed to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx, that said sincerity was the single most important thing for an actor, because once you can fake that you’ve got it made.
Both nights she and Jenny camped on beaches. Their first camp was on a willow-fringed white sand beach in Warm Creek Bay. A piece of land, round as a coin and smaller than a Lower East Side block—less than an acre, according to Jenny—sn
uggled into a crescent of high sandstone cliffs that were slightly undercut, forming a natural shelter. A cave, not natural, but made by native peoples long before Columbus talked Isabella out of her jewels, burrowed twenty feet into the stone at the northernmost point of the arc.
A favorite place of the Anasazi, the beach was rich with potsherds, scraps of dusty history that fascinated Anna. Warm Creek Bay’s beach, also favored by modern humans, had subsequently been turned into an open-air latrine. Willows screened a wealth of toilet paper blooms. The small cave was as full as a week-old cat box, and the walls sported as much graffiti as a subway car on the 7 train to Queens.
While Jenny and Anna separated the ancient garbage from the modern, leaving the former and canning the latter, Jenny fumed and sparked. Anna was more baffled than anything. Poop, she could understand. Options were limited and people unprepared. What she couldn’t understand was the graffiti vandals had painted and scraped into the stone. In the city it made a twisted kind of sense. People who had nothing in their lives wanting to be seen, to leave a mark. Kilroy was here. Teenagers, who’d never known beauty, unaware they were destroying it, or enraged because they didn’t understand it. Kids who were never heard expressing themselves the only way they knew how. Gangbangers marking territory by spraying like tomcats leaving their sign.
In a playground for the wealthy, people destroying the beauty they’d come to enjoy mystified her. During orientation they’d stressed the parks-and-recreation ethic of preserving the natural and historical area to be enjoyed by future generations. On man-made surfaces graffiti could be painted over. Not so in a park. Paint had to be removed from rock. Scraping it off left scars that would not heal for many hundreds of years.
