Nevada Barr - The Rope

The urge to drink all of the water was almost too powerful to resist. Almost. Anna sipped and chewed. Once, she refilled Buddy’s cap and gave him another chunk of the granola bar. It was his nose, after all, that had found the treasure. This time she picked out the chocolate chips first, then offered it to him. “Chocolate might not be good for little skunks,” she said apologetically. Buddy, had he had any fear of her to begin with, had none now. He took the morsel from her fingers and ate it.

Anna returned the second granola bar to the fanny pack. Fortified with sips and bites, she was settled enough to see what else the pack contained. Sunscreen, SPF 40—so shady was her jar, Anna hadn’t much use for that, but she rubbed it on her face for the moisture. As the heavy cream soaked in, she felt her skin relax and expand to cover her bones. There was a ChapStick that she pounced on greedily, rubbing the oily wax into her cracked lips. The small sack was emptied. Having administered to herself, she replaced the lotion and lip balm inside and zipped it closed.

“I have a plan, Buddy,” she announced to the baby skunk. “It’s only partially baked. So it qualifies as a bona fide adventure.” So saying, she wondered if the miracle of the bars and the water had made her giddy.

The first play she’d ever stage-managed was Hello, Dolly! The boys from Yonkers were off to New York City for an adventure. Barnaby, younger and having had no adventures, was afraid he wouldn’t know when the adventure was happening and thus miss it. Cornelius, his older, wiser companion, promised he’d yell “pudding” when the adventure commenced so Barnaby would know it had begun.

“Pudding, Buddy,” Anna whispered.

Anna drank as much of the drugged water as she dared and slept the rest of the day. Buddy nosed her back into consciousness when the light was nearly gone from the sky and her circle of sand in deep shadow. She shared the last granola bar with him and opened the clean water from Kay’s belt. Anna drank a good portion of what was left and gave Buddy his fill. If her half-baked plan fell flat, she doubted she’d need to ration the clean water. The drugged would be just fine; there would be little point in prolonging sanity.

The influx of fluid into her dehydrated body was nothing short of miraculous. As water seeped into her cells, she felt an opening inside, much as she imagined a flower feels when unfurling its petals. Strength, energy, hope: Those things that made life worthwhile flowed in with the moisture. Grabbing onto these sensations, Anna closed her mind to the possibility of failure.

Buddy watched while she put herself through deep breathing exercises, sit-ups, and rapid walks around the circle of their tiny arena, trying to shake off the effects of the drug.

Having achieved a modest level of alertness, she set about erasing all traces of herself from the bottom of the jar. The belt went into the loops to hold up her shorts. She would need both arms free. The fanny pack she wrapped around her waist, snapping the plastic buckle in place. The scraps of paper from her and the skunk’s repast she shoved into the pockets of her shorts, then clipped the plastic water bottle to the strap of the fanny pack with the carabiner.

If the monster came, he must come down the throat of her jar. The angle dictated that, if he used a rope and didn’t simply crawl down the sides like a blowfly, he would enter her world slightly off center. Beneath the angle where the throat widened into the body of the jar, and the stone overhung the farthest, was the least visible part of the bottom.

As the last of the light was going, she dug out a shallow trough six feet long and two feet wide in the exposed area where she could see the throat and the eye of sky. Sitting in it, legs straight, toes pointing toward where a rope thrown down the jar’s gullet had to land, she buried the canvas-covered canteen next to her right knee and laid the strap along her thigh. That done, she swept sand over her feet and legs. When she was certain nothing of her extremities was visible, she lay down and, grateful that Kay had been so well endowed, arranged one triangle of the bra over her eyes and the other over her nose and mouth. Doing the best she could by feel, she buried her chest, neck, and head, leaving only a slit between the fabric of the bra and the bridge of her nose so she could see out. Moving as little as possible, lest she disturb her sandy shroud, she burrowed her right hand and arm under the sand till she felt the canteen strap and closed her fingers around it.

Buddy had watched her doings with interest and even found the courage to pounce on her foot when she moved it beneath the sand, much as a kitten might. It made Anna wonder if skunks hunted and, if so, what? Even through the sand banked around her head she thought she could hear him nosing around and several times felt him walking across parts of her anatomy.

Then he, too, was still. Night had come. The slit between bra and nose showed only black regardless of whether her eyes were shut or not.

Tonight it would be decided if she were to be, or not to be. A melancholic since Zach’s abandonment, Anna knew the narcotic comfort in contemplating suicide. Molly would be amused that when the choice had been taken from her, and someone else could choose her “not to be,” Death ceased to be a suitor and became the enemy. Sheer contrariness was an excellent motivator.

Anna opened her mind to the sand. For so long she had cursed its incursions into her crevices, its dust in her nose and eyes and ears, its grit between her teeth. Lying as one with it, she embraced the camouflage it afforded and tried to rethink herself as a trapdoor spider, hiding in her own controlled vortex of sand, waiting for her prey to come too near. She pictured the darkness overlaying the sand overlaying her, providing another layer of protection. Almost, she felt herself slipping into the stone surrounding her and wondered if it were the dregs of the drugged water, self-hypnosis, or incipient insanity. Regardless of the cause, for a moment she felt as at home as she did backstage in the dark; she knew where she was and was doing exactly what she should be.

She was waiting for the villain of the piece to enter.

Time passed. Or not. Anna wanted to look at Kay’s Timex but didn’t dare move. Her carapace of sand was fragile. Itches she dared not scratch, thirst she dared not quench, cramping muscles she dared not stretch, chipped away at her sense of being at one with the jar. Thoughts of the kind embrace of the earth shifted to thoughts of hot baths, food, and clean sheets.

Mostly, though, she thought of the monster, willed him to come. It was opening night; the curtain was up, the audience waiting. That he hadn’t come the previous night did not concern her overmuch. Even monsters, she supposed, had obligations they could not get out of. If he didn’t come tonight, though, she would probably die in the bottom of this solution hole. If he didn’t come tonight, maybe he was merely a murderer and not an even lower form of beast. Maybe he simply needed her dead because she’d seen Kay struck down. A plain old murderer would turn his back and walk away, satisfied she was no longer a problem.

She clung to the facts of the drugged water, the sandwiches, the cuts in her thigh. Those had “monster” written all over them. A true monster would come back for her. A monster couldn’t stay away two nights running, not with a captive so very captive and helpless as naked, incapacitated Anna Pigeon.

So she waited and her mind drifted. She did not give in to sleep. Instead she rehearsed: envisioning how her half-baked plan would be enacted, going over every move in her mind, cataloging her props and working out how best they could be used. In the impossible darkness, she toyed with dialogue. As a down-on-her-luck genie in a bottle, she had a right to the role of Scheherazade. Several scenes of charming the monster with words filtered through her mind as she lay in wait. Finally she decided a drugging, carving, murderous monster probably wouldn’t be all that much into oral tradition. Besides, Anna had progressed beyond words. She wanted a pound of flesh.