The Rope ap-17

by Nevada Barr

  A newness highlighted the people she watched and the landscape she traveled through. There were times Jenny glittered as much as the wind-scattered lake surface. Even Bethy was growing on her. The woman’s butchery of the English language grated on ears trained to the Bard, but Bethy had mettle. Beneath her vague babbling exterior was a vein of something strong. Anna’d seen flashes of it when she’d pushed her maximum weight up from the bench into Anna’s waiting hands and, once, when Regis had made a deprecatory remark that managed to simultaneously flatter Anna and disparage his wife.

  It seemed to both Anna and Jenny that the more Bethy slimmed down and firmed up, the more cutting Regis’s remarks became. Sly and cutting, the kind that are tricky to confront, but felt all the more sharply for being served with that spice of helplessness. It was almost as if he hated seeing his wife becoming what she thought he wanted.

  Disturbingly, Regis became Anna’s cheerleader in the fitness game, remarking—always politely and never with an underlying leer that either Anna or Jenny could detect—on how much stronger she looked, how much faster she ran. It was annoying to the point Anna avoided him when she could. If he had the itch to be a personal trainer, he should scratch it with his wife. Even Gil and Dennis, as obtuse as they seemed to be, noticed how Bethy hungered for Regis’s approval. They would flirt with her a little after a rebuff, their inherent good natures wanting to bolster her up.

  The night Regis offered to teach Anna canyoneering, Anna thought Bethy was going to burst into tears. Instead she’d stood up for herself for the first time in Anna’s acquaintance with her.

  “I taught you,” she’d snapped at Regis. “If Anna wants to learn, she’d be better off coming to me.” The half-hangdog, half-hoping look she’d shot Anna was painful to see.

  “I’d like that,” Anna replied firmly. Regis didn’t let the matter drop with any grace. His demeanor turned so cold Anna half expected icicles to form on the eaves of the duplexes. Shortly thereafter, he left the picnic benches for their apartment and didn’t return.

  Since then, Bethy had taken Anna on two tiny canyoneering adventures in an old Zodiac she brought out from Page.

  In the slot canyons, Anna suffered mentally. The sense that the walls were closing in and trapping her never entirely went away. Physically, she did herself proud, enjoying the playground-jungle-gym way she worked her body. Moving like a child awakened the spirit of a child in her as she bent and twisted, crawled and wriggled.

  On their first adventure, Jenny was with them; on the second, Jim. The third time it was just Bethy and Anna. The canyon Bethy chose was off Rock Creek Bay, half an hour’s ride in the Zodiac from the Rope. The afternoon was still and hot, and after a day of trying to talk a string of uniquely unpleasant individuals into being better stewards of the land, Anna was glad to lounge in the bow of the puffy little boat and watch the unfailingly awesome grandeur of Glen Canyon fold into the secret jewels of the smaller side canyons.

  “This is an easy one,” Bethy said as she expertly herded the fat little craft up a snaking waterway, dyed deep turquoise by the shadows. “A walk in the park,” she said and laughed.

  Anna laughed with her. Bethy’s sense of humor was woefully undeveloped, and Anna felt duty bound to reward even the smallest glimmer of it. After years around actors, Anna had come to believe that people in general were witty and entertaining. That this was not so had been dawning on her over the past months. In general, people were plodding creatures. Occasionally, she missed the brighter-colored social butterflies, but only occasionally. Lack of repartee was conducive to honesty and solitude. Both of which she was coming to crave.

  Bethy beached the Zodiac on a spill of sand on a flat stone outcropping no wider than the boat was long. Anna climbed out of the bow and, line in hand, walked the few feet to the only anchorage, a dead tree wedged tightly between a rock and a hard place.

  The sand apron that formed their landing area had been washed down from a slot canyon, a mere crack in the sandstone cliffs, carved and smoothed by the runoff from a million years of rain on the plateau and Fiftymile Mountain. A gold-and-gray pathway beckoned them into the heart of the rock. Straighter and shallower than many slot canyons Anna had seen in previous weeks, it was not dark and did not fill her with the mix of excitement and foreboding she’d grown accustomed to.

  While Anna tied off the line, Bethy unloaded the gear. “This one’s not a technical thing. We’re not going to need ropes and stuff. I’m not even going to wear a helmet,” she said as she sorted through the plastic laundry basket that served as her gear chest. “You want one?”

  Anna knew she should—safety first and all that—but it was hot and she hated wearing the things. “I guess not.”

  “We won’t need ropes either, but I’m going to carry this one. Just in case.”

  “Just in case what?” Anna asked, resisting the impulse to offer to carry the coiled line with a carabiner affixed to either end. Once she had eschewed the helmet, the idea of scrambling totally unencumbered took precedence over good manners.

  Bethy looked nonplussed. “I don’t know. Just in case, I guess, you know, we need to tie something to something or something.”

  “Be prepared,” Anna said and raised her hand in the three-fingered Boy Scout salute.

  Bethy wrinkled up her nose and forehead like a little kid trying too hard to think. Finally she gave it up. “You’re so weird,” she said. “Is everybody in New York as weird as you?”

  “In New York the people are as gods,” Anna said as she followed Bethy down the yellow sand road. “Spider-Man: a New Yorker. Batman, the same. Gotham was just an alias. King Kong immigrated to New York. In New York I am considered to be the most banal of beings.” There was a quality about Bethy Candor that allowed Anna the peculiar freedom of chatter, or, when feeling wildly audacious, of babble. Only with Zach had she given herself permission to free-associate. With her husband, it was their shared joy of whimsy, wordplay, and language that lowered the inhibitions and opened the mental floodgates.

  With Bethy, Anna suspected it was because, cruel as it was to think—let alone put into words—it was rather like talking to the family cocker spaniel. Not being understood, how could one be judged in any meaningful way? Once in a while Bethy surprised her by responding intelligently, but not often enough that Anna worried about it.

  Anna paid as little attention to, and understood as little of, Bethy’s monologues as Bethy did hers. Friendships had been built on less camaraderie than that, Anna supposed.

  The canyon, half again as wide as Anna’s shoulders, had a flat sandy bottom and the lazy curves of a snake’s trail. Sunset wasn’t for a couple of hours, but it had long since finished its brief visit to the bottom of the forty-foot slot. The air was cooler between the walls, and a pleasant breeze blew down-canyon, as it often did at this time of day. Light was clear but didn’t have the glare it did on the water. For the first time in a closed-in space Anna felt relaxed. She must tell Jenny. Jenny was the kind of girlfriend Anna hadn’t had since she was in grade school and spent most of her free time with Sylvia Gonzales; the kind of girlfriend for whom one saved up successes and failures along with foolish remarks and astute observations, like treasures to carry back and share. Jenny would be pleased Anna had entered this benign bit of Mother Earth with fearlessness.

  Jenny. Anna had accepted her with ease, as if such friendships came along every day or sprang fully formed like Venus from the sea. She supposed it was shared trauma. Emotions became accessible in times of stress or high drama. One of the dangers of the theater was that actors could so easily fall in love with one another in the same way people thrown together on a great adventure often did. When the final curtain came down, it was anybody’s guess as to whether the romance would survive the daunting ordinariness of day-to-day life.

  The canyon narrowed but didn’t squeeze, and there was no water in which to fall and die of cold. Happily, Anna scrambled along in Bethy’s wake as she climbed upward through cr
evices and rock chimneys that reminded Anna of the children’s board game Chutes and Ladders.

  Bethy chattered breathily as she climbed. “I can’t wait until Regis turns thirty. It’s not even two whole years and then we’re going to go to Europe and see stuff. He promised me. And I’m going to get all new clothes and we’ll cruise. Have you ever been on a cruise? I haven’t, but I’m probably supposed to have a baby pretty soon and cruises are supposed to be, you know, all romantic and everything…”

  Anna’s ears pricked up at this. Whether Bethy was telling the truth or spinning a fantasy, Anna couldn’t guess. Either way it was a bit of gossip to share with her housemate. The wicked glee at such a human foible was untarnished by guilt. Needing to catch her breath, Anna stopped for a moment, her butt on a slanting four-inch shelf, feet and hands on the two sides of the triangular chimney they clambered up. Gossip, unless aimed or honed sharp like a weapon, was natural to human beings. It showed interest in one’s fellows, interest in the well-being of the tribe. Gossip was a way to learn taboos, pass on warnings, share the burden of being human among many so the onus of bearing it alone would fall on no one person. At least that’s what Molly always said, and who would know better than she?

  “Rock!” Bethy shouted.

  Anna pressed her head back against the chimney wall and covered her face with her forearm. A stone the size of a softball grazed her right knee as it fell between her legs to clatter down the chute beneath her.

  “You okay?” Bethy called.

  “Yeah,” Anna said.

  “Sorry about that. My fault. I shoulda poked it before I stepped on it,” Bethy said.

  Looking up, Anna could see the other woman about twenty feet above her looking down through her wide-set feet, head and fanny in alignment with the forced perspective.

  “No harm done,” Anna said and then checked her knee, locked to keep the pressure that wedged her in the chimney. Her trousers hadn’t torn, and no blood was seeping through. That was all she would know until she tried to bend it. Settling her other limbs and digits more firmly, she put her foot on a nice little outcropping. The joint was in good working order.

  “Almost there,” Bethy called. “Don’t be such a slowpoke.” She vanished from Anna’s line of sight. Anna followed. Feet, hands, knees, back, and brain occupied with the business of ascent, she moved quickly. When she reached the point where she’d last seen Bethy, a vertical crack, two feet wide, with a lovely smooth rock bottom led off to the right. Anna levered herself into it and stood upright. After the chimney, the going was as easy as a stroll down a sidewalk in Central Park. Within less than a minute the crack ended. Anna stepped from the sandstone’s embrace onto a natural balcony the size of the stage’s apron in a small theater. Tumbled rock and blown sand created enough earth that a few hardy plants had taken root and were surviving, if just barely. Bethy was sitting on a rectangular boulder, sides so straight and size so perfect it would be easy to believe it was man-made.

  “Cool, huh?” Bethy said, as Anna took in the vista.

  The balcony was sixty or more feet above a finger of the lake, as close to an aerie as anything without wings was likely to get.

  “This is amazing,” Anna said and laughed because, in this place, language failed her. The depth and beauty of evening’s muted palette on a canvas too immense for man’s imagining was enough to strike a poet dumb and a painter blind.

  “Cool, huh?” Bethy repeated.

  “Exceedingly cool,” Anna replied. Crossing to the stone, she sat down next to Bethy and let her soul drink in the intricacy of the view. The climb had taken less than an hour, and, though in the morning there would be new aches in heretofore unchallenged muscles, for the moment she felt pleasantly tired and inexplicably moved by this gift Bethy Candor had given her.

  She doubted they were the first white women ever to set foot in this tiny Eden, a suspicion borne out by the dull round of a beer bottle cap pocking the dirt at the base of a small but dedicated cactus. Yet it was new and fresh for Anna, and she was grateful for having been led there.

  “Thanks, Bethy,” she said earnestly. “This is a real treat.” She turned to smile at her companion just as Bethy Candor lunged for her.

  FORTY-THREE

  Regis was in a foul mood. Jenny was half sorry she’d bummed a ride with him back from her shopping trip in Wahweap. For the first time in years shopping was a pleasure. Commuting to town once a week to hit the grocery store for peanut butter and booze, and the Walmart for paper and plastic items that had become necessities for a modern household, was usually a tedious waste of a perfectly good lieu day.

  Shopping for treats to share with Anna filled Jenny’s head with delicious plots and plans for camp suppers and lunch picnics. Now that Anna had taken on the task of turning herself into Superwoman, she was a most appreciative audience for Jenny’s culinary surprises.

  “Bethy’s sure looking good,” Jenny said, thoughts of Anna reminding her of Regis’s wife.

  Regis grunted. Rather than enjoying the lush bucket seats, he was standing behind the wheel of his sexy red boat as if by so doing he could urge greater speed from it. Lounging in the left-hand seat, Jenny had to admit he was visually compelling: good jaw, good chin and nose, hair wild in the wind, dark and wavy. Such a good-looking man, yet he’d always struck her as a nonevent, a bit of a cipher. Not that she didn’t like him, he just didn’t seem vital enough to waste much attention on. This season that had changed. Somebody or something had turned the lights on in his haunted house.

  Rescuing her and Anna from drowning had been positively heroic. Even when they’d been wearing the tights and cape and rescuing him from the jar, he’d been more engaged than she’d ever seen him. Sniping at his wife, once done in an offhand desultory manner, was now done with a keen edge and an eye to her weak points. Regis Candor’s wattage had definitely been amped up. The anger he radiated as he pushed the cigarette boat to its limit was almost as tangible as the late afternoon sun on her skin.

  Was it possible the someone who lit all her candles this season was the same one who turned on the lights for Regis? Jenny pondered that for a moment. Love of—or lust for—Anna Pigeon was not an area where she could be objective. Her heart insisted that, of course, every sighted intelligent creature on the planet must be head over heels for the little redhead. Intellectually, she knew that was nonsense. The rose-colored glasses had been given to her alone. Like Joseph Smith’s God-given golden spectacles, her glasses for translating the tablets of Anna Pigeon were not shared by the hoi polloi.

  But Regis? It was possible. Clearly he admired Anna. From admiration it was but a small step to the desire for acquisition.

  Jenny waited for jealousy to raise its little green head. It didn’t. It was Regis’s wife Jenny was jealous of: jealous of the time she spent with Anna on their shared lieu days, jealous of the mornings and evenings she stole for runs and working out on weights, jealous of the places she showed Anna and the knowledge of canyoneering she gave away, jealous of the temptations of the Zodiac and borrowed gear.

  “Why are you staring at me?” Regis demanded.

  Caught out, Jenny said the first thing that came to mind. “Didn’t you and Bethy used to stay in town on your days off?”

  “We did. Why?” Her conversation distracted him from whatever was ruining his day. The white left his knuckles as he loosened his grip on the wheel.

  “You seem to be more at the Rope this summer.”

  Regis’s eyes darted to her face, to the windscreen, and back to her face. Not the double take of a comedian; the frightened look of a rabbit that can’t decide which way to run.

  “Not complaining, mind you. I appreciate the ride and the company.” The last wasn’t entirely true. Jenny felt it was best to work and play well with others whenever possible.

  Regis returned his gaze to the bow cutting through the waves, the boat’s steady pounding against the rough water echoing in the slight spring of his knees.

  “W
e are spending more weekends at the Rope, I guess,” he said in an oddly confessional tone. “Used to be we’d go in every week to spend time with Kippa.”

  Kippa, Jenny knew, was a French bulldog, a caramel-colored bowling ball eight parts energy and two parts unadulterated joy. Meeting Kippa was akin to wrestling with a manic dwarf Santa.

  “She a year old now?” Jenny asked to be saying something.

  “Died this winter,” he said and smiled at her, more a baring of teeth than a show of camaraderie. Jenny didn’t know whether he hid deep emotion or a heart of obsidian.

  Either was too much to delve into. She let the conversation drop. Judging by the set of his mouth, she doubted Regis wanted to pursue the subject any more than she did.

  Lost in their own thoughts, Jenny’s mostly pleasant, Regis’s, she guessed, not so much so, they rode with nothing but the whine of the engine for company until they rounded Gooseneck Point, a long knuckly finger of land poking into the main body of the lake.

  “Isn’t it wonderful that Bethy and Anna are becoming best friends?” Regis asked, looking at her from the corner of his eye, a slight curl to his lips, virtually a smirk.

  This was not an innocent question. That unmistakable fishhook-in-the-sternum bite and pull let Jenny know it was on a par with asking Barbie if it wasn’t wonderful that Ken was all over Skipper.

  “They sure are getting in shape,” Jenny said carefully, more or less the same remark she’d made an hour earlier that had elicited nothing but a grunt.

  “You and I are gym widows. They seem totally engrossed in life without us.” He shot her a smile that she didn’t like one bit. Regis was fishing. For what? Secrets of the lesbian sisterhood? Regis had figured out her sexual orientation years ago, Jenny knew that. Straight men who also happened to be idiots thought woman-on-woman was the bee’s knees. As if the lesbian couple was going to spot them lurking in the hall and yell, “Come on in, the sex is fine!” According to Jenny’s totally unscientific research, that had happened exactly never. Besides, Regis wasn’t an idiot and he’d never come across as lascivious.