Nevada Barr - The Rope

Jenny ground her cigarette out on the side of the porch, tucked the butt into her plastic bag, said good night to Pinky Winky, the pink pygmy rattlesnake that lived between her duplex and the Candors’, and took herself in toward bed. Without Anna to shoulder a share of the work, tomorrow would be a long day in the Fecal Realm. Year eight of her reign as the Fecal Queen.

Her anointing came her third season when there was a most unfortunate spill of some sixty gallons of collected waste she was hauling in her boat.

For the most part houseboats had their own privies. Unfortunately a lot of them filled them up, then dumped them in the lake.

As counterintuitive as it was, Lake Powell, the barren wife of a dam where Gaia never meant a dam to be, needed gray water. Waste put nutrients into the lake, helping an ecosystem that had not had time to evolve. The lake was long and deep, five to six hundred feet in the main channel; she could take a lot of abuse. The problem was the beaches. Any beach where a boat or a Jet Ski could anchor, visitors camped and picnicked and pooped. Some thought they were being ecologically enlightened by cat-holing, but the level of the lake wasn’t static. Boats and wind kept it sloshing like a washing machine. Water came up, uncovered the catty little deposits, and dragged them into the reservoir.

Warm-blooded animals, including humans, carried fecal coliform bacteria (FC) in their digestive tracts, along with the pathogens that went with it. Off high-use beaches, where the water was shallow and warm, there were often 400 FC “colonies” per 100 milliliters of water. Anything over 200 FC per million was unsafe for swimming.

Every two weeks for the past seven seasons Jenny had taken water samples from the most popular beaches. Any beach that came up unclean was closed until she had two consecutive samples with an FC below 200. This had worked until visitation reached five million annually. More beaches were closed more often, and visitors howled.

In two years it would be mandatory that all overnighters carry Porta Potties. During those two years of easing from cat box to Nirvana, Jenny would clean the beaches, and gather water samples for the lab. New this season, and most important, it had become her job to educate the visitors in the niceties of proper pooping protocols so that when the rule was enforced the public outcry would be minimized.

Because Jenny didn’t have the power to write tickets—or the gun to back it up—she was often teamed with Jim Levitt, a law enforcement seasonal. One wouldn’t think discussing toileting practices could get a girl shot or manhandled, but Lake Powell’s visitors were rich—many were über rich, the kind that can pay ten thousand a week for a houseboat and another three thousand to put gasoline in it. The kind that don’t take kindly to anybody making less than they pay their maids telling them what they can and cannot do on their vacation, in their lake, on their beach, in their world.

Jenny’s secret to compliance was pretending she was married to Aristotle Onassis and educating the hoi polloi was simply an obligation of noblesse oblige. When that failed it was good to have a large man with a big gun beside her.

Thinking of guns and bozos, she reminded herself to check the grotto at the tail end of Panther Canyon. A party boat of major übers had camped there, so many college kids per square inch it was a wonder the houseboat was still afloat. Their barge had a bathroom— a bathroom, as in one bathroom. With that quantity of booze, bladders, and bowels, they would most definitely be exhibiting poor litter box habits.

There would be many “interpretive moments,” educational opportunities.

There would be pounds of human waste.

Lord, but she was going to miss Anna Pigeon.

This was the first season she’d had a full-time seasonal position under her. Anna Pigeon. Mystery woman, wounded bird, waist-length red hair, rich hazel eyes: Jenny went over the litany of attractions as she brushed her teeth. To it she added the one that had first captured her heart, Anna’s willingness to do hard dirty work without complaining.

Jenny loved meeting new people, preaching ecological concepts, selling the idea of sustainable wilderness, living out of doors, taking water samples, and sleeping on the beaches. Since the unfortunate incident that had earned her a regal title, she did not love cleaning up human waste. Anna was a gift; she actually preferred shoveling shit to interacting with her fellow men and women.

Though it was clear boats, water, docks, and about anything else in Glen Canyon was alien to Anna, she was quick to learn and a natural at handling lines. She moved with an economy and efficiency so complete it was as graceful as a dance. On the one occasion the weather came up quick and bad, and the lake was set on pounding them into bags of bone and pureed meat, Anna was daring the goddess of the lake to do her worst.

Jenny was convinced a quiet camaraderie had been growing up between them. A respect. Admiration. A deep and abiding affection—

Don’t push it, she thought as she spit in the sink.

Anna was gone.

When Anna again awoke—or came to, depending on how she wanted to think of it—she knew where she was before she opened her eyes. In spite of the fact she’d been drugged, sleep had refreshed her and she was able to think with relative clarity. For a time she lay perfectly still, eyes closed, breathing evenly as if she still slept. Before she committed to another day of life in a pit she wanted to be sure she was alone. Light touched her eyelids gently; the sun was up, but not yet in a position to shine into her prison. The sand beneath her body was cool. That would change before long. Thirst was with her, but not with the same screeching, scratching shriek of need as it had been the night before. That, too, would change before long. She would have to decide whether to die of thirst or drug overdose.

She felt queasy—again not as bad as on the first morning—the first awakening? Much of that might have been the head wound. Vaguely, she remembered Molly mentioning that concussions made people sick to their stomachs. Minutely, she twitched the shoulder that had been dislocated. Sore, but better, much better. All in all, it felt as if she would be healthy enough to starve to death or be murdered in a day or two.

It surprised her that she awakened hungry. For the last few months she’d had no appetite and would often forget to eat. Though she was living in New York City within walking distance of the finest restaurants in the world, her weight dropped from a respectable one hundred and eighteen to a boney one hundred and two. Now that she hadn’t so much as a stale corn dog in her future, she was ravenous.

The train of thought ran fast; no more than a few seconds elapsed between washing up from the sea of sleep to finding herself aground in consciousness. Stopping her mind before it could clatter down another track, she listened, trying to feel the air around her with invisible antennae. The desert was not silent: A tiny fall of sand whispered; a powerboat buzzed gently, distance muting its roar to a hum that was almost natural; her heart beat, a steady thump in her temples.

Anna didn’t think there was a monster leaning over her waiting to strike the moment her eyes opened. Surely in stillness as complete as this bottled quietude, she would be able to hear it breathing, feel the fetid air on her neck, smell the foul stench of its mouth.

Did Jeffrey Dahmer have bad breath? she wondered. Was eating people more unclean than eating cows?

That thought ended the whole exercise of keeping the eyes closed and not moving. Anna’s eyes popped open as a jolt of fear electrified her. She was on her back staring up at the all-seeing eye at the top of her world, the clear blue of sky beyond the mouth of her bottle. Absurdly, she wondered if this was the view babies had shortly before they were born. No, they’d see a masked man in scrubs peering back at them. At one time that image would have amused her. Lying naked at the bottom of a dry well, it scared her nearly as much as that of Jeffrey Dahmer picking human flesh from his teeth with his fingernail.