Nevada Barr - The Rope

The dam and the lake did everything a good piece of art should: provoked, evoked, inspired, incensed, amazed. Lake Powell made visitors question their relationship to the earth. Was it a toy to be played with, broken, and cast off? Was it a tool to be used as Man saw fit? Could it be destroyed? Could it be remade?

Desert formations rearing defiantly out of the water were so staggeringly out of place as to appear man-made or out of context, the way a stuffed grizzly bear in a glass case in a bank foyer is out of context. Anna could easily picture how the formations would look backstage, the supporting two-by-fours, and the unpainted backs of the papier-mâché rocks.

When she was six and Molly twelve, their mother had gone to Southern California to visit her only sister. While there, Uncle Clarence had taken the children to Disneyland. They’d gone on a ride that was in a mine cart through Old West gold country. To Anna’s child-eyes the landscape seemed far more authentic than that of Lake Powell.

Even the recreation area’s names had a theme park feel: Rainbow Bridge, Twilight Canyon, Anteater Arch, Pollywog Bench. The juxtaposition of this lighthearted romp of imagination with the stark and beautiful reality of the drowned river canyons moved Anna the way the finest offerings of the theater once had.

One of the many differences between this grand play of Nature against Man and the plays she stage-managed was that, in this world, she was not running the show. She enjoyed watching a drama unfold never knowing if she would be part of the story or not. Should she be given a part, she did not enjoy never knowing if she was to be the windshield or the bug, but then no one in New York knew that either. One day you were the front end of the Yellow Cab. The next you were the jaywalker.

Steve Gluck was on Bullfrog’s dock waiting for them. Arms crossed over his chest, he leaned against the side of the convenience store in a scrap of shade.

“Nice job docking that pig-nosed little boat,” he said to Anna. The compliment delighted her. The slight to Jenny’s boat did not.

“Meeting us in person. To what do we owe this honor?” Jenny asked.

“Needed to air myself off,” Steve said. He fell in step as they walked up from the docks toward the employee housing area and the town of Bullfrog.

“Where’s your vehicle?” Jenny asked. “Why walk when you can ride?”

Steve patted his gut. “Need the exercise.” Then, “We got company. Andrew flew out this noon. The assistant superintendent is with him and, believe it or not, a state senator.”

“That’s what drove you down here; the BS got too deep,” Jenny said.

An audience. Anna didn’t like that and had to fight a wave of shame for what she’d suffered. Circumstances made her into a spectacle to be gawked at. Rock star, Bethy Candor had said. Bethy was an idiot. This was a small, cringing, nasty little fame. A physical sensation of shrinking crept through her, as if she could make herself smaller, more of a child. Small children were supposed to be protected from the ugly truths.

Disgusted by her cowardice, Anna stacked her bones one on top of the other until she stood tall. Pulling back her shoulders, she shook the tension out of her hands. Anthony Heald did that every night before he went onstage. She’d watched it from her perch as assistant stage manager during the Off-Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie.

Thinking of actors, she thought of Sir John Gielgud. Once upon a time she told him to pick up his cues. Facing NPS and state bureaucrats couldn’t be nearly as intimidating as facing a legend with a knighthood.

Bullfrog’s clinic was a small white prefab building with a flat roof. Inside, it was spare but well appointed. There was a room for overnight patients and a small operating room—for sewing up gashes and cutting out fishhooks, Steve said. Anna hadn’t thought they did much open heart surgery in Bullfrog but was impressed nonetheless. The last room before a locked closet that Steve told them was the pharmacy was the examining room. The door was closed. From behind it came a low murmur of voices.

“Holy smoke,” Steve muttered. “They’re all still in there. We’re probably going to have four more cases of hypothermia to deal with.”

He pulled open the door and a blast of frigid air rolled out to meet them. “No morgue,” Steve said. “Just AC.”

The district ranger stepped back to allow the women to precede him.

“SRO,” Anna commented sourly. When Jenny looked a question, she added, “Standing room only.”

There were two hospital beds in the room, each with a sheet-covered occupant. Beatrice, the nurse practitioner, stood by the head of the bed nearer the window, hands folded over her stomach as if her intestines might spill out if she let them.

The assistant superintendent, who put Anna in mind of a jolly Boy Scout on steroids, loomed large and green and gray at the head of the nearer bed. Grinning amiably down the shrouded length he said, “Hey, Jenny,” and, “You must be Anna Pigeon.”

He didn’t remember her from his brief visit to her orientation.

“Yes,” Anna admitted.

“This is State Senator Billy Wilson.”

The senator, a lean handsome man with a whiff of Iago about him, and dressed down for the event in gray linen trousers and a pale pink Izod shirt, stepped out from the wall, hand extended, canvassing for votes over the dead.

Anna nodded politely but pretended not to notice the outstretched hand. Nothing in his behavior offended her; she just didn’t want to touch the man.

“Let me see the corpses,” she said.

“Are you sure you are okay with this?” Nurse Beatrice asked solicitously. The presence of important men evidently improved her bedside manner.

“If it’s not, be it on my head,” Anna returned, remembering the phrase from when she’d refused to let the nurse ship her off to Page because she’d had a concussion. To her surprise Beatrice laughed.

“I guess it’s not just your head that’s hard as a rock,” the nurse said good-naturedly. Reaching across the lump on the bed, she delicately pinched the top edge of the sheet between her thumbs and forefingers. Before she unveiled the dead man’s face she looked at Jenny. “Steve, Jenny doesn’t need to see this, does she?”

“No. You want to wait outside, Jenny? Beats freezing to death.”

Jenny shook her head, her eyes on Anna’s face. Anna appreciated the support.

“Okay,” the nurse said and peeled back the sheet. A puffy, white, but surprisingly unaltered face was exposed. Fine, curling dark brown hair framed eyebrows that darted toward the aquiline nose like seabirds going into a wave. The eyes were closed.

“I recognize him as one of the bodies we found in the slot canyon,” Anna said. “I don’t recognize him from the assault up on the plateau. Could I see his back?” She stepped closer and leaned in. Her braid fell against the sheet. She snatched it back and tucked it through her belt where it wouldn’t get tainted.

None of the men stepped in to help Beatrice roll the corpse. Anna doubted she would have welcomed the assistance. Expertly, she rearranged the body without ever endangering the dignity of the dead man, if the dead had dignity, then tipped it up onto its side.

On the back of the right shoulder was a tattoo of a sea turtle about six inches long from head to tail and five inches wide.

“I recognize the tattoo from the attack,” Anna said. “The shape and placement of it anyway. I was right. It was a turtle.”

“Tortoise,” Jenny corrected her automatically. “Sorry. Hazard of the profession.”

“Show me the other guy,” Anna said.

While Beatrice redraped the tattooed corpse, Steve stepped up and efficiently folded the sheet back from the face of the second body.