Nevada Barr - The Rope

Regis stared at her coldly. Jenny didn’t apologize. Among themselves, field rangers had a tacit understanding that headquarters brass should not venture out of their cubicles and interfere with the real work of the park. Jenny would never waltz into the personnel office and rearrange Regis’s desk. On an irrational level, she expected the same courtesy.

He combed the beach with his eyes, ignoring or, worse, not noticing her ill humor. “That’s him, I think. Bastard.” With that, he strode across the sand, a man on a mission. Jenny watched him beeline through the groggy campers toward a boy on the upper part of the beach where the cliff of sand bisected the grotto floor, separating those who could still scramble up a soft embankment before they passed out from those who collapsed where they stood, drink in hand.

The “bastard” Regis stalked toward was the antsy kid with the pimples in the oyster shirt. He was drinking from a water bottle when he noticed Regis bearing down on him. His body jerked, seeming to spasm from head to heel. Water spilled over his chin. Then Regis was upon him, hands held in his standard conversational gesture: right hand slightly above shoulder height, index finger pointing heavenward, left cupped near his belt buckle, fingers curved as if holding a tiny world in his palm. It was eerily reminiscent of a whole lot of statues of Jesus Jenny’d seen in the cathedrals of Europe. She hoped the gesture was unconscious. It would be too weird if he’d practiced it in a dusty old mirror in a dank church basement when he was little.

Reading the poor boy the riot act, Jenny guessed, but she hadn’t a clue why.

A girl rose from her blanket and headed toward the sheet-draped poles the woman in the Kliban-cat towel had visited. Heaving a sigh, Jenny went to intercept her. The area marked off with upended bottles and furnished with a privacy screen had to be a dedicated privy area. The partiers would undoubtedly be offended that sequestering their fecal deposits was not considered the height of ecological awareness.

Jenny had taken down the sheet and was nudging stragglers toward the houseboat in hopes of forging another interpretive moment from the wreckage. Regis, evidently finished with Joe Average, crossed her path on his way back to his boat. The cigarette boat had acquired a fan club of admiring boys. Fleetingly, Jenny thought of relocating her movable classroom to the beach.

“What was that all about?” she asked as Regis passed her.

He stopped and turned. “What was what about?” he asked blankly.

“Storming the beach, invoking the ‘bastard,’ cornering the boy in the blue T-shirt: What was that about?”

“I had a bit of a run-in with him and his pals when they were refueling at Dangling Rope. He says he doesn’t know where his buddies are.”

“Why are you trying to track them down?”

Regis ignored the question.

“What was the run-in about?” she tried when it was clear he wasn’t going to volunteer any information.

“It’s not something you should have to deal with,” he said.

“I deal with shit all day every day,” she countered, beginning to go from annoyed to seriously annoyed.

“I’ll talk to the chief ranger today. In the meantime, stay as far away from that punk as you can get.” Regis started walking.

“What did he do?” Jenny insisted.

Regis raised a hand in dismissal. “I’ll get law enforcement on it,” he said and strode purposefully toward the throbbing red phallic symbol he loved to ram through the waters of the lake.

Isn’t that just the prick calling the bastard rude, Jenny thought and returned to herding hungover visitors in the general direction of the boat, where she might get a hearing. As reigning Fecal Queen, she feared this battle had been lost the moment Regis inserted himself into the equation. But for a horse’s ass the battle was lost, she thought. Even butchered, the wisdom of the bard was ageless.

The kid Regis had called “bastard” was on the foredeck laughing and trying to snap another guy’s butt with his towel—a hopeless task given that the towel was the size of a volleyball court. Gone were the furtiveness and the twitchy fear. Whatever Regis had hunted him down to impart hadn’t cowed him, but had relieved him to the point of goofiness.

The kid caught her studying him. This time he grinned and waved as if she were his dear old auntie come to see him win the three-legged race.

“Stay away from him,” Regis had said.

“Law enforcement will deal with it,” Regis had said.

The kid struck Jenny as about as scary as a St. Bernard puppy. Still, she decided to do as the personnel officer suggested. Some St. Bernard puppies grew up to be Cujo.

That image in mind, she abandoned the idea of a two-way conversation with her soggy-brained pupils and decided to teach by example. Walking to her boat to gather bucket, rake, shovel, gloves, tongs, and plastic bags, she missed Anna Pigeon dearly. There was, literally and most graphically, a shitload of work to be done.

Buzzing sounded in Anna’s ears. Flies. Kay had been unearthed no more than a quarter of an hour and the flies had arrived. A lousy bug could find a person in the bottom of a solution hole inside of fifteen minutes, and a zillion rangers had let Anna rot for a day and a half.

The smell from the body, faint when it was beneath a foot of bone-dry sand, had increased exponentially since it had been dragged into the light of day.

Anna’s arm ached from the tips of her fingers up through her shoulder joint; she was close to exhaustion and had developed a vicious thirst. It didn’t matter. After all of the digging up, she was going to have to rebury the woman. Unsettling as it was, Anna was going to strip her clothes off first. Naked and helpless for however long it had been, Anna craved Kay’s clothes, craved being dressed. Even a bathing suit top seemed like a suit of armor. Cutoff jeans promised a return to normalcy, a deformed twisted normalcy certainly, but Anna was quickly learning to take what she could get. The sandals, with their thick rubber soles and sturdy Velcroed straps, were the very embodiment of hope. If Anna did manage to crawl out of this pustule, she would need shoes to run away. Desert pavement was not as benign as it might sound.

The anklet with the sparkly KAY on it was the first thing she removed from the corpse. Should the murder ever come to light, Kay’s mother and dad might recognize it. The second was the bikini bra. It was a string bikini, two triangles of printed fabric to cover the breasts held up with strings tied behind the neck and down with strings tied behind the back. Kay’s breasts were considerably the larger, and where it had been revealing on the college girl, it would be almost modest on Anna.

She laid it out on the sand before she realized that she couldn’t put it on properly. She didn’t trust her arm not to pop out of its socket if she twisted behind her back to tie the strings. Paralyzing disappointment joined fatigue and raging thirst. Anna groaned long and low, sounding like a dungeon door opening into a B-movie chamber of horrors. Then and there she might have given in and given up had not the flies been landing on her, crawling about with their nasty little fly feet, wading through the sweat and the dust.

Flies were said to be subjects of Satan, the Lord of the Flies, but now Anna thought not. Evil, true evil, in her—and, more scientifically, her psychiatrist sister’s—belief, fed on despair, the kind that suffocates every glimmer of light and life beneath a cold so intense it becomes darkness. Flies, on the other hand, simply pissed one off. They set about pestering Anna back to life, annoying her back into her body and inspiring her to fight back. “God damn it!” she hissed, swatting at the nearest offenders. For all their apparent loathsome sloth, the flies easily dodged her blows. “Okay, okay, I’m burying her, as soon as she’s stripped. For God’s sake, buzz off !”