Nevada Barr - The Rope

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.”

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 Hudson 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.