Nevada Barr - The Rope

Having her eyes open was not reassuring. From the unsightly alien lump on her shoulder, she could see her arm hanging like dead meat. The tips of her fingers were white, and her hand was numb. The skin was pale and old-looking with papery fine wrinkles. Pain, spread over every square inch, was the only sign of life in the appendage.

In the movies the hero would grasp the hand, give the arm a yank, and, presto, good as new. Tentatively, with the hand of her living arm, she tugged on the cool white fingers. Pain threatened to make her throw up again. She quit, laid her head back against the warm rock. Bone was squashing a blood vessel. That was why her arm and hand were dying. How long before the tissue was so damaged there was no reclaiming it? Gangrene, blood poisoning, necrosis, a litany of ailments of which she was all but ignorant. The classics had been wasting her time. If she’d stage-managed for General Hospital or M*A*S*H she’d know these things.

No sense worrying about the arm. Thirst would probably kill her first.

Breathe in two three.

Hold two three.

Jenny, Jenny Gorman, called the Fecal Queen because she cleaned human waste from the beaches, Anna’s boss, Jenny, said there was a trail out of Dangling Rope to the plateau—or mesa or butte or whatever the flat places above the ditch places were called. Anna remembered that.

She remembered shading her eyes and staring up at the sand-colored rock. Never had she seen so much dirt in one place: tan dirt, red dirt, pink dirt, yellow dirt, black dirt. Dirt and rocks. Carved stone heaved up, smooth as polished granite in some places, shattered into avalanches in others, broken rocks flowing down from higher ground, rocks liquid as lava and lumpy as dough. A psychedelic Mt. Rushmore morphing into the Pyramids of Giza, giving way to the craters of the moon, and all of it glazed with white-hot sunlight.

At the skyline, crinkled trees or shrubs showed black rather than green, not exactly poster plants for Mother Nature. One of the few signs of life Anna had seen at Glen Canyon was the fish. Every day, around the dock, the big bums gobbled scraps boaters tossed at them. They were about as glamorous as rats begging for picnic leavings in Central Park. Bum fish, houseboats loaded with party animals, and a little pink rattlesnake were the sum total of her wildlife experience. This wasn’t Bambi and Thumper’s kind of neighborhood.

Hand shading her eyes, she’d searched for Jenny’s path. To the right of a rubble of rock flowing down a side canyon was a sheer cliff veiled in a skein of black lace—desert varnish, Anna had been told. Even the black gave off a hot shine.

A hat.

Anna remembered Jenny told her to wear a hat. She’d offered to lend her one that looked as if the Yankees had used it for third base for a couple of seasons. Nobody wore hats. Anna hadn’t seen a hat in years. The first one she put on that wasn’t purely to keep her ears from freezing was the flat-brimmed ranger’s hat. Like everybody else, she resembled a hairless, malnourished Smokey Bear when she wore it.

These memories trickled through the toxic sludge in her brain. Like dreams they drifted with color and emotion. Like dreams, they ran together without logic. Rehashing a hike up a pile of rocks wasn’t getting her any closer to what mattered. With her good hand, she rubbed the grit from her eyes and tried to fast-forward to the stone pit, the naked, the befogged. Wispy trails of the cliff, the past, the path threatened to dissipate. Anna let go of the effort.

Breathing in: one, two, three.

Hold, two, three.

Exhale on a five count.

Wisps coalesced into memory.

Hatless, Anna was squinting. If she tilted her head to the side she could almost make out a line paler and more contiguous than the rest. It didn’t look like a path so much as a scratch on a rock. She could get most of the way up to it via the apron of broken stone. At the top of the pile was the wee scratch that might be Jenny’s path, might zigzag up a crack to the ridge. It didn’t look far. Anna had walked the length and breadth of Manhattan more times than she could count, hundreds of miles clocked on concrete. The climb looked to be less than a mile. Five crosstown blocks. Piece of cake.

In her pack were most of a liter of water, a map, and a pamphlet identifying area plants. She took out the map. Maybe the black broken lines were trails. None of them came anywhere near Dangling Rope. The pamphlet was even less help. “The Glen Canyon National Recreation Area has highly diverse vegetation typical of the Colorado Plateau.”

Humanity’s dam and the universe’s sun allowed very little to survive. On the flat spots a scanty grass, like the last hurrah on a balding man’s pate, grew, but it was so brittle and colorless as to be nearly transparent.

“Hah!”

Anna remembered saying “hah.” She repeated it now to break the awful silence of her open-air tomb. The pathetic little gust of noise only made it worse.

Breathe in two three.

Hold two three.

Out on a count of five.

Briefly, she’d considered packing a sandwich, but she wasn’t hungry and figured she would be back long before lunch. Stuffing the papers in the pack’s zipper pocket, she headed past the housing area toward the cliff and the thin pale line that disappeared into the scree.

By the time she passed the maintenance barn, with the generators that powered the development, and the sewage treatment area behind it—a total of maybe a hundred yards—she was wishing she’d bought a pair of shorts the last time she was in Page. The straight-legged black jeans and T-shirt, so good in the cool dark of backstage, were hot and constricting in the back of beyond. Black, prevalent in New York because it didn’t show every sooty smudge, showcased the beige smudges of what Anna supposed was good clean dirt.

Three hours later she was out of water, sunburned, and three-quarters of the way up the canyon’s side. Stopped on a level spot, hands on knees, she gasped for breath. Heat lay like molten lava on the back of her neck and arms. The muscles in her thighs were quaking, and her thin black Reeboks felt as if they were on fire. Not sea level, not flat, not paved, not Manhattan: not a place she could walk a hundred miles.

Slumping to her knees, she stared back the way she had come. Staff housing was tiny with distance, heat making the gray-on-gray shimmer as if the houses were slipping from this dimension into another and, if she watched long enough, would disappear altogether. The trail looked much steeper going down. Climbing, using hands and feet, it hadn’t seemed so precipitous. As shaky as her legs were, she doubted she would make it down—unless she just gave in to gravity and rolled most of the way.

Going down would take too long, and she was too thirsty. After thirty-odd years of drinking various beverages, Anna had assumed she knew what thirst was. She hadn’t had a clue. Thirst was not a desire for a beverage; thirst was a screaming need that drowned out all other calls from the body, an obsessive, desperate craving that narrowed vision and channeled the mind to a single topic: finding water.

Old movies, black-and-white, where men were good or bad and never lived with shades of gray, swam through her mind: dying of thirst on deserts with burros or camels or Arabian horses, shaking the canteen, a sip left, sharing it with a buddy. Until this moment she hadn’t known what heroism she’d missed in those viewings.

Since Zach was gone and Molly only drank Scotch neat, there was not a buddy dear enough to her heart with whom she’d share her last sip.

She looked up toward the ridge that had appeared so close from the housing area. The black scruff of foliage was made up of actual honest-to-God trees. At this height, they even looked a little green around the edges. Green had to mean water. Didn’t green always mean water? If she could make it the rest of the way, she could find a spring or creek or whatever watered the trees. Failing that, she could get to a road or a house or farm or sheep shed or whatever passed for civilization and beg water from them. If she was extra nice and said pretty please, maybe they’d give her a ride down to a marina where she could catch a passing boat with a ranger in it.