Nevada Barr - The Rope

Anna must have been looking at maps. A week ago Jenny would have bet she neither knew nor cared about the geography of the lake and its environs.

“The end of Hole-in-the-Rock Road is maybe a quarter of a mile from the head of this canyon,” Jenny told her. In saying the words she realized not only was that true but— “Those college kids,” she said suddenly, sitting up straight. “They didn’t have to come up from the Rope or down Hole-in-the-Rock from Escalante. They could have climbed out of Panther.”

Now Ms. Pigeon was interested. She looked out over the skinny lick of water that fronted the grotto. “Sheer cliffs,” Anna said. “What? Sixty, eighty feet up to the plateau? They would have had to be bitten by a radioactive spider to pull that off.”

“Come with me,” Jenny said, delighted she had found a gift for her new friend. “Be prepared to strip to your underwear—or skin, if you prefer the classics.”

Watching how stiffly Anna got to her feet, Jenny felt a pang of remorse. The poor little thing had seemed determined to do the work of ten men regardless of the fact her shoulder hadn’t fully healed and she should have been on bed rest after the trauma she’d suffered.

“We don’t have to go,” Jenny said earnestly. “I was just going to show you the slot canyon that forms the end of Panther. It’s been there since Zeus was in knee pants. It will still be there tomorrow. You should rest. Let me fix you some dinner.”

“No,” Anna replied, evidently determined to push herself until she dropped in her tracks. “I want to see it. I like the idea they could have come up from here. It makes more sense than the road or the trail. Show me how.”

Jenny looked at her for a second, watching her gather her little strength around her great heart, and silently mocked herself for describing it as such. Despite the mockery she was so proud of Anna tears stung her eyes.

“I am so very completely and totally an idiot,” she said softly.

Anna had ducked into the tent to get her boating shoes. If she heard Jenny’s brief autobiography she gave no sign.

Beyond the grotto, the long skinny finger of lake snaking its way along the bottom of Panther Canyon narrowed precipitously. The gunwales of Jenny’s boat were scarcely a foot from the eighty-foot-high cliffs forming the sides of the slot canyon. Running at idle, she nosed the boat forward until both sides of the Almar’s bow touched the sandstone, then scraped, then the boat stuck like a cork in a bottle. Having shut down the engines, Jenny joined Anna where she knelt on the bow looking, to Jenny’s eye, like one of Arthur Rackham’s fairies.

Three feet from where the bow was wedged, giant stone steps, with an almost man-made symmetry, rose thirty feet above the lake level. Like a calving glacier, great rectangles of rock had sheared from the sides of the slot and fallen in a neat pile, completely blocking the canyon. To either side of the giant’s staircase another sixty feet of cliff cut upward before the earth gave way to the ribbon of sky. With the sun gone from them, and the sky turning pearl, the rock appeared dove gray and soft as velvet. The water ran dark, a blue that is only the blink of an eye from black.

“Pretty amazing, huh?” she asked when Anna didn’t speak.

Anna was shaking her head. The end of her long braid twitched across the back of Jenny’s hand. She stifled the urge to catch it as she might a cat’s tail.

“It’s too steep. It’s too high. Nobody could get out.” Anna’s voice, usually an alto, smooth as warm honey, had risen an octave and was all sharps and flats. Her eyes were too wide. Around the dark hazel irises Jenny could see white.

As a gift to her beloved, Jenny had effectively put the poor thing back into the jar. “Oh, honey,” she cried. “I am so sorry. I should have known. I’m such a blockhead. Come on. Let’s go back to camp, forget we ever came here.”

Anna didn’t move. She was shaking her head again.

“No,” she said, her voice still unnaturally high. “I can stay. I will stay. This is just a crack full of water. It won’t slam shut.”

Anna’s last word finished on a high note. Not quite a question, but clearly a plea for reassurance.

“The walls will not slam shut,” Jenny said firmly and waited as Anna breathed slowly in through her nose and out through her mouth. Meditation, Jenny knew from her years of shrinkage. Three breaths and Anna said, “Tell me how they could have gotten to the plateau from here.”

“Not here,” Jenny said. “Past this pile of sandstone.”

“What happens past the rocks?”

“The slot starts to get seriously narrow.”

Anna groaned. “You’re kidding?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Jenny said. Then, because she couldn’t help it, she added, “It’s really beautiful.”

“In a strangled creepy kind of way?” Anna asked. She was using humor to cover her fear. Jenny admired that and laughed to reward her courage.

“Coming here wasn’t that great an idea. Let’s go back and finish off the wine. Besides, wait till you see what I brought for supper.” She laid her hand on Anna’s arm. The gesture had been meant to reassure but it had sent a jolt of pure lust right up the center of Jenny. Pure and chaste from afar , she reminded herself.

Staring at the immense steps rising out of the lake, Anna hadn’t noticed Jenny’s brief internal battle between good and evil.

“I don’t see how anybody could possibly climb out of here without those things climbers nail into the walls and the ropes and pulleys or whatever they use,” Anna said.

Focus had taken the glaze from Anna’s eyes and the edge from her voice. Seeing her somewhat recovered, Jenny said, “Come on. I’ll show you.” The bow of the snub-nosed boat was sufficiently wedged—and this far from the washing-machine action of the main body of the lake, it wasn’t going anywhere. Still, Jenny jumped the yard of water between the boat and the sandstone stair and secured the bow line around a big friendly rock. Little was more embarrassing for a boat ranger than to lose her boat. Fortunately Jenny was an exceptionally strong swimmer. Both times she’d let her boat escape she’d been able to reclaim it without hopping pathetically around on shore begging kindly visitors to take their boat out and retrieve it for her.

“We’re set,” she said. “Feel free to disembark.”

Anna leaped gracefully onto the natural step. “Lay on, Macduff,” she said.

Jenny started up the pile of stones, thirty feet an easy scramble, Anna was mastering the climb, but she was sweating and breathing hard. Jenny reminded herself to quit showing off and take it easier on her companion. Women as fragile as her darling didn’t belong between a rock and a hard place.

“You okay with this?” she asked solicitously. “I’m a tough old thing. I’m used to it.”

“I’m getting used to it,” Anna said grimly.

When Anna reached the summit, Jenny gestured toward the sculpted slot canyon beyond and said, “Tada! Beautiful in a strangled creepy kind of way.”

“My gosh,” Anna breathed, and Jenny was gratified. They stood ten yards above an ever-narrowing waterway that had been cut off from the larger part of Panther Canyon by the rock fall. At the base of the obstruction the waterway was twelve feet wide, an almost square pool surrounded by sheer cliffs rising perpendicularly sixty or eighty feet.

“It’s like a quarry,” Anna said. “Like the granite quarries near where I grew up, but in miniature. Molly used to dive in them. Seventy feet. Not me. Too scared.”

It looked not only like a quarry but like a square sandstone jar with water in the bottom. Short staccato sentences: Jenny guessed Anna was afraid longer ones would betray her fear. She opened her mouth to again offer to go back to camp, but knew she was doing it because she felt guilty. Anna would leave when she needed to. At present, she seemed to need to stay and endure.