The Rope ap-17 Read online

  TWENTY-TWO

  Anna’s courage awed Jenny. The little Pigeon had snatched power from a psycho-rapist or psycho-rapists. Regardless of what she said, Jenny believed she was raped. The way her small, competent hands hovered protectively over her thighs, the way she kept plucking the khaki trouser leg away from her skin, her aversion to the three hulking males, suggested Anna’s story had missing chapters. Anna’s violation enraged Jenny. Anna’s escape and trapping the rapist elated her.

  Jenny was rapidly forgiving herself for falling into obsession over the woman from New York City. Who wouldn’t? Gay or straight, anyone with a soul would have to be enamored of her. Even as Jenny laughed at herself, it amazed her that Andrew, Steve, and Jim weren’t stumbling over each other to pay homage.

  Buddy nestled in her arm, Anna was telling the law enforcement rangers about coming on a woman and three men of college age, of how one of the men was taking out his dick while another held the woman and the third watched.

  The picture she painted jolted Jenny back to her sophomore year. At twenty she already knew her sexual orientation was firmly in the direction of the female of the species. She had known it since she could remember. As a tyke she’d loved dolls and girls and believed without reservation that boys had cooties. In middle school, when the other girls were proclaiming undying love for their favorite Beatle, Jenny was lusting after Linda Ronstadt. As a teen she’d had posters of Jane Fonda as Barbarella on the wall of her room. In college she’d taken her first lover, Adafaire Mason. Obsession with this first, long-imagined and magnificently forbidden, fruit overwhelmed everything else in her life.

  Memories of her sexual assault were blessedly confused. As she’d confessed to Anna, she’d been drinking. She wasn’t drunk, but close. She remembered the scrape of blunt fingernails and the sickening slip of nylon over her skin as her panties were dragged off. On bad days she could still feel the suffocation. A boy straddled her, his butt on the back of her head holding her down, mashing her nose and mouth into her own vomit. On really bad days she could feel the pounding as the rapists took turns. Alone, in a crowd of dead-eyed girls, and boys cringing with feral need, it had seemed to go on for eons. Looking back, she knew it had only been minutes. Two of the three rapists came in a thrust or two. The third Jenny didn’t feel inside her at all, but the pounding of his pelvic bones was the most violent.

  Much later she realized he had probably come before he entered her and was putting on a show to cover his embarrassment at having prematurely ejaculated.

  The memory that was clear as crystal and sharp as a razor was her cheek on the splintering planks, craning her neck, looking for Adafaire, finding her, tall and blond and confident, standing at the edge of the circle that had formed around the table. Jenny had screamed her name. Adafaire had a beer in her hand. As their eyes locked, she raised the bottle to her lips and took a drink. Then she turned her back and walked into the darkness beneath the trees.

  Jenny came to know the major players, five “good boys,” white, from upper-middle-class families. One was on the swim team, two others on the varsity wrestling team, the last hangers-on, soaking up what reflected glory they could. They were the ones who held her down on the rough planks, one sitting on her head, his knees on her upper arms, the other at her legs pulling them apart like a child breaking the wishbone of a chicken. Jenny knew this because she had researched them, dug for their secrets, watched and followed them.

  Even before she’d been left to crawl off amid the splinters and spilled beer to put herself together as best she could, she knew she would not report the rape. There would be no justice for her—but, she had promised herself, there would be revenge.

  The greatest revenge was saved for Adafaire. Cowardice and betrayal were sins greater even than the bestiality of the boys or the malice—or worse, pity—in the faces of the girls who had watched and done nothing.

  Bony little Ms. Anna Pigeon was not a coward. For the first time in the decade since her sophomore year in college, Jenny thought she might again give into obsession, let it take her from lust maybe all the way to love.

  Love and marriage. Jenny pushing a baby carriage, she mocked herself, her mind abruptly returning to the present.

  Anna was speaking of Kay, the woman buried in the bottom of the solution hole. The Kays of the world hadn’t the luxury of life and breath; for them there would be no satisfying dish served cold, only the cold of the grave.

  As Anna detailed finding the body, Jim, fresh out of the six-week seasonal law enforcement training program in Santa Rosa, California, who’d practically had his tongue hanging out in anticipation of a grand adventure, lost his boyish glow. Jenny loved Jim Levitt like a warmhearted little brother or a very intelligent big-footed hound, despite the fact he was one of what the interpreters often referred to as “danger rangers,” LE guys who were hooked on red lights and sirens, arrests and accidents and rescues. He’d graduated at the top of his class in whitewater rescue, self-defense, marksmanship, arrest techniques, search and seizure, pain compliance, and other macho things Jenny was fairly sure he couldn’t spell.

  He was an ideal lieutenant for her queenly rounds, dealing with the occasional harsh words and veiled threats, but this was Jim’s first dead person.

  The Bullfrog district ranger just looked older and sadder. Jenny had known Steve Gluck for years. He’d been a sheriff or trooper somewhere in Nevada before he’d joined the National Park Service. A lot of people in his position grew hard and slick so the day-to-day tragedies would slide off. A lot more drank to dull the sharp edges of memory and disappointment. Not Steve. Steve quietly carried every single lost sheep and broken body on his shoulders. The weight bowed his back so much he moved stiffly, like a much older man.

  Andrew was clicking through scenarios so fast Jenny could almost see the shutter effect behind his heavy-lidded eyes: Accidents were bad, murder was really bad, deaths from NPS employee negligence were the worst, press was bad; bad press, no funding. That was disastrous.

  Jenny smiled at the variables she invented. Perhaps one day, when she grew up, she should leave the nomadic life of a seasonal and become a park politician.

  As the dust was settling from little Ms. Pigeon’s announcement of finding the dead girl, she again sent the boys reeling with the news that not only had she escaped, she had left the bad guy caught in the trap he had laid for her.

  Jenny was flat-out loving this.

  After a moment’s stunned silence Andrew Madden said, “We’d better get up there and get him out. Before you know it he’ll be sticking his hands in Uncle Sam’s deep pockets, suing the park for wrongful imprisonment.”

  “Can he do that?” Anna demanded with a fierceness that warmed Jenny’s bones.

  “Anybody can sue anybody for anything anytime—and they do,” Andrew Madden said with a bitterness that suggested he’d been ground slow and fine by the wheels of justice at some point in his career.

  Then the wrangling began. Anna would not tell them where the solution hole was. She wanted to be there when the bad guy was hauled out. When she refused to be moved from that position by logic, threats, flattery, or wheedling, Glen Canyon Law Enforcement gave in. Had Jenny not already been deeply intoxicated by Ms. Pigeon, Anna’s next words would have stolen her heart.

  “I want another woman with me. I want Jenny.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  The rangers crowded the narrow cabin of Steve Gluck’s boat. “Cabin” was a misnomer; it was more of a roofed windbreak-cum-backrest. Like the front seat of a pickup truck, sans seat and doors. Steve piloted, the chief ranger to his right and Jim Levitt outside hanging onto the metal upright to his left.

  Jenny and Anna sat shoulder to shoulder on a hard bench that ran the width of the abbreviated cabin, their backs against its outer shell, their heads a foot or so below the pilot’s windscreen facing the bow. Anna was not sure she liked Jenny so close. Humanity, even a few humans, weighed on her like a summer thunderstorm rolling down the Hud
son River toward Manhattan.

  Utterly alone in the jar—at least while she was awake and before Buddy had dropped in—she’d craved company. So much so that she’d chatted with her sister, who was not there, and Kay, who was dead. Ensconced on the boat with Jenny and the rangers, she felt crowded, hemmed in.

  The din of the engine noise made conversation difficult. She was glad of that. Telling—and not telling—parts of her story over and over again wearied her nearly as much as had living it.

  No, she corrected herself. Little was more wearisome than waiting naked and thirsty for a miserable debasing death that never showed up. Her thoughts flashed to Zach, to his role in Waiting for Godot. Certain scholars were of the opinion that Godot was meant to be God.

  Now Anna knew it was meant to be Death—or should have been even if Samuel Beckett didn’t know it.

  In the roar of enforced silence, Anna gave herself over to the miracle of wind on her face.

  Because of her work, she was familiar with various brands of wind machines and audiotape manufacturers who specialized in wind sounds, from whisper to keening to battering gale. Much thought had been given to creating the illusion of wind, but she’d given none to wind itself.

  When she’d escaped the sandstone-bottled air of the jar, and the desert night wind cooled her skin and ruffled the fine hairs around her face, fanning stale air to give life to curtains on windows that looked out to black-painted walls struck her as absurd as pretending an apricot was the sun.

  The life she’d spent in the theater with Zach was gone as if it were a dream dreamed by someone else. It left her both too free and too alone. The life that would replace it remained to be seen.

  Bullfrog Marina was bigger than Dangling Rope. There was covered docking for several hundred houseboats and yachts that stayed year-round, as well as a fueling station, pumping station, and small grocery store. Many of Glen Canyon’s permanent rangers and their families lived in the tiny town of Bullfrog. They had a system for schooling the children, a medical clinic run by a nurse practitioner, a fire department of sorts, and an airstrip.

  The airport was as tiny as the town, serving tiny little planes LaGuardia or Kennedy would use as doorstops or table decorations. It was also the reason the five of them were boating fifty miles from Dangling Rope to Bullfrog. The park owned a Cessna 180 and boasted a park pilot. With such a vast expanse of land and so few roads, flying was the only way to keep tabs on what was happening in the backcountry, to look for lost hikers, fires, floods, game animals, and poachers of deer, elk, reptiles, and artifacts.

  Anna had flown on jets of various sizes, but she’d never been in a small plane. The wings looked fragile and stunted, the propeller about the size and effectiveness of a Popsicle stick, the skin of the fuselage and wings no better than the metal used to make beer cans. It looked as if it could be swatted down by any errant gust of wind as easily as Anna could swat a fly.

  It did not reassure her when the pilot asked what she weighed.

  “I don’t know,” she told him.

  “Nothing,” Jenny said.

  He put her weight at a hundred ten pounds and told her to get in the rear seat. The chief ranger took the right front seat. Steve Gluck squeezed in beside Anna in the back.

  “Hank will come back for Jim and Jenny,” Steve told her. Anna had wondered but wasn’t going to push the issue. She sensed it would take very little for the rangers to decide they could find the solution hole without her now that they had a general direction. They’d already made the transition from treating her like the star of the show to treating her like a walk-on who kept missing her cues.

  Once over the shock of committing body and soul to a vehicle that felt no more substantial than a high-end kite, Anna found she loved flying in the small plane. It bore virtually no resemblance to flying on a commercial jetliner. The wings were high, and nothing obstructed the view. The Cessna flew slowly a thousand feet above the earth instead of at the speed of sound and five or six miles in the air. She could see everything: people on boats, water-skiers, Jet Skis throwing plumes. Her delight in the intimacy of peeking down on her fellows quickly gave way to pure awe at the staggering intricacy of Glen Canyon and Lake Powell.

  Hundreds of zigzagging fingers of water reaching up jagged creek beds and drainages, snakes of blue curling around shattered rock piled as high as skyscrapers, cutting and poking into the desert, prying away secrets, creating more, hiding and revealing. Anna’s head swam trying to grasp the immensity and complexity of this thing man had done and the foolish belief that he was running the show. Given this bird’s-eye view of the world, she felt how very big it was and how infinitely tiny she was. She was both as indispensable and insignificant as any lizard.

  “Aah,” she murmured.

  “What?” Steve’s voice in her ear startled her. “Do you see the solution hole?” The four of them were wearing headsets with voice-activated mikes, and her exclamation turned everybody’s attention to her.

  “No,” she said.

  “That’s Dangling Rope,” came the pilot’s voice. He dropped the left wing a little as if making the airplane point.

  Laid out below, neat as any map, was the hopscotch pattern of the dock, the two squares of housing above, the sewage treatment pond above that, then the canyon wall she had scrambled up.

  “There’s where I came out.” She pointed for Steve. He leaned across her, his shoulder hard against hers, the faint scent of his aftershave tickling her nose.

  “I figured,” Gluck said. “I doubt there’s any other way to walk out of the Rope.”

  He stayed too close too long for Anna’s liking. “Breathe on your own side,” she commanded. Before the jar, she might have made room for him, might not have minded. She could have been polite or subtle. Maybe. She could hardly remember who she was back when she had her husband and not the monster as her constant companion.

  Steve moved back, apparently unoffended. She didn’t care either way as long as he did as he was told.

  “A road!” Anna cried out in dismay. Male chuckles filled the space between her ears.

  “Hole-in-the-Rock Road out of Escalante,” Steve told her. “Look at the end there.” He pointed his finger, poking past her nose. “That’ll be the sheriff out of Kane County. Glen Canyon is in two states, several counties and an Indian reservation. You don’t even want to know about jurisdictions. We called Sheriff Patterson last night. He’s a good guy. You’ll like him.”

  A car. A road. Anna felt betrayed. What had happened to her should not have happened anywhere near cars and roads. She comforted herself that the road scarcely deserved the name. From the air it looked like nothing more than a dirt track knifing away from the canyon to run parallel to the endless mesa that was Fiftymile Mountain.

  The pilot flew beside the road for a while, then made a right-angle turn and another, until the airplane was lined up with the dirt track.

  “Solution holes,” Steve said and leaned into her to look out her window. She looked where he pointed. The plateau had great islands of stone bubbling up from it and forming smooth domes and humps polished by the elements until they shone. Pocked into these bubbles were deep, round, smooth-sided holes like the one that had held Anna captive.

  “That’s the biggest,” Steve said, indicating a neat circular mouth over a white sand bottom. The hole was so big a good-sized oak tree had grown up inside of it, and so deep the crown of the tree would never reach ground level.

  The pilot did something that made the plane slide sickeningly sideways, and Anna realized they were going to land the rickety little airplane on the dirt road, a road strewn with rocks and other unforgiving substances. At what seemed the last minute, the airplane stabilized and the wheels met the earth with surprising smoothness.

  “Sorry about that,” Hank said. “Bad crosswind.”

  They taxied to where the truck Steve had pointed out was parked. Literally, the end of the road. Beyond was canyon. An angular man in a cowboy hat unfold
ed from the cab as they deplaned. Frank Patterson, sheriff of Kane County.

  Anna did like the sheriff, if for no other reason than he looked like Buddy Ebsen, and she was a big fan.

  After introductions were dispensed with, the men talked among themselves, a soft rumble in Anna’s ears. Sheriff Patterson took a pack of Marlboro Lights out of the pocket of his short-sleeved uniform shirt and lit one with a wooden match he struck on the sole of his cowboy boot. Chief Ranger Madden bummed a cigarette with the desperate relief of a man who had quit smoking and had been doing well until this. He struck the match on the side of the box. Two broke, the third one lit. His hands were shaking.

  The wait while the pilot fetched Jenny and Jim was hard on Anna. She knew they waited for Jim with his muscle and the arsenal he carried on his belt. Andrew Madden didn’t look like he’d carried a gun in years. The sheriff was old—older than Steve—pushing seventy at a guess. Anna suspected all three were too canny to walk into anything that could turn out to be a fair fight. More firepower was undoubtedly wise; still, her monster was calling, and she needed to go to him, look on his face. With each passing minute her need to lay eyes on him grew more intense and more terrifying.

  As did the thought that she would not be able to find him. Every rock and bulge in the landscape looked familiar and at the same time alien.

  When she stumbled onto Kay and her attackers, Anna was exhausted and perishing of thirst—or so she believed until she was, indeed, perishing of thirst. She hadn’t noticed scenery or noted landmarks. When she’d been taken to the jar, either she was already unconscious or quickly became so by striking her head on the way down. She had no memories between turning to run and waking up in the bottom of the hole. She hadn’t a clue whether all three boys had stripped her and thrown her down along with Kay’s body, or only two, or just one. She didn’t know how many followed to bury Kay. She didn’t know if all the men returned to leave her drugged water and snacks, or if only one returned without his pals to continue the game. It was possible all three took turns visiting, and the last had drawn the unlucky night and gotten his monstrous self caught.