Nevada Barr: The Rope

Thank you, Scott Sticha, not only for making the expanse of Lake Powell accessible but for finding the people who helped me so much. Thank you, Steve Luckesen. You were not only my guide but kept me company during the writing process in the character of Steve Gluck. I hope you enjoy Gluck as much as I enjoyed your intelligence and companionship. Thank you, Valerie Reynolds, for easing me through the technicalities of boating and educating the public on water quality issues. Thank you, Julie Smith, for picking me up and dusting me off every time I threw myself down and wailed, “I can’t go on!” Thank you, Nancy Christiansen, for being there when I needed you. Thank you, Mr. Paxton, for being Mr. Paxton.

Regis Candor took a swig of his beer and watched his neighbor, Jenny Gorman. She was sitting on the other picnic table, her feet on the bench, smoking a cigarette as Gilbert and Dennis swaggered into the square of grass and trees fenced in by seasonal housing. Park employee housing at the Rope was set out in two neat quads, two-bedroom duplexes on each of the sides, surrounding squares of defiantly green grass with four locust trees only slightly taller than Regis and not yet as big around as his wrist.

One square was for NPS seasonals, the other for concessions workers, kids that pumped fuel and sucked crap out of the houseboats and made Dangling Dogs at the Dangling Rope Marina snack bar. The duplexes didn’t blend into the red/roan/rust/buff motif of Lake Powell. They were painted the same dead gray as the marina. Regis figured maintenance got a good deal on gray paint.

Gil and Dennis were college boys from Pennsylvania who’d come to Lake Powell to work on their tans and get laid. When they weren’t absorbed in one of those pastimes—or both simultaneously, if Dennis was as much of an “outdoorsman” as he claimed—they did maintenance work.

Regis watched them flop bonelessly down, Gilbert next to Jenny, Dennis at her feet, arms thrown along the table. Both were covered in dust and sweat and, no doubt, wouldn’t shower until Ms. Gorman had every opportunity to be impressed with their machismo.

“Hey, guys,” she said, blowing out a lungful of smoke.

“Hey,” they answered in unison. Heckle and Jeckle, clowns.

Jenny Gorman looked like the Girl Next Door every boy wishes lived next door: dark wavy hair, big hazel eyes, a well-cut mouth, and enormous tits. Jenny was used to being ogled, Regis guessed. In high school she must have had to wave “Hi” at breast level when she met guys. That’s where they would have been looking. Gil and Dennis still were. Regis didn’t think the breasis were implants. Plastic never moved like real flesh and blood.

Gorman didn’t flaunt her body, but he’d seen her flash a little cleavage to get some idiot to fall off his water skis or drive his boat into the dock. Served the fools right, he thought, and took another pull on his Dos Equis.

Evenings at Dangling Rope were Regis’s favorite part of his job. It was as close to being a kid at camp as a grown man could get and not be arrested. His peers—permanent park employees—whined too much about pay, promotion, retirement. Seasonals, no matter what their age, exuded a sense of childlike freedom, as if they were actors in an old movie and any day now they were going to get their big break. Being around seasonals made him feel like a wise old man, though he’d not yet turned thirty.

Thirty was year after next. He pushed that thought away. Forty wasn’t the new thirty, and thirty was the start of forty. Forty was the start of skin sagging, breasts sagging, scrotums sagging, lines and fat and receding hair. Thirty had one upside; at thirty he’d be a rich man. If he fulfilled all the old horror’s requirements.

Butt first, Bethy, his wife of at least two more years, came out of their side of the duplex, a casserole dish in her oven-mitted hands. Hash brown casserole, all cheese and butter and potatoes. Four years of marriage and his wife’s bottom was spreading big-time. To be fair, the weight gain wasn’t entirely her fault, but Regis wasn’t in the mood to be fair.

When they met she was a seasonal interpreter at Rainbow Bridge. She’d been thin and athletic in those days, canyoneering on her days off. Regis had loved watching her cute little behind bobbing ahead of him in the slots, and he’d needed a wife, so he’d followed that taut, flexing little gluteus maximus right to the altar.

Bethy’s charm—other than the tight ass and the convenience—was the gypsy lifestyle she promoted that summer, the sense of a life full of possibilities. The fantasy Bethy. As soon as she had the ring on her finger she changed back to the real Bethy. Two more years, Regis told himself. Two more years and a lot more drugs.

“Hash brown casserole!”Gil ejaculated. Food excited him almost as much as Jenny’s chest.

“Goes right to your hips,” Regis said, glancing at his wife’s rear end as she bent over to set the hot dish on the table. Gil laughed. Gorman shot him an evil look.

Bethy fled back inside. Regis looked at the screen door and considered going in to make sure she was okay. There was no point. What was “okay” for Bethy?

Jenny stubbed out her smoke and tucked the butt into a ziplock bag she’d taken from the pocket of her shorts. Gil Morraine took the opportunity to inch closer. Regis had read Heckle and Jeckle’s personnel files. Ciphers. Dicks for brains and beer for spiritual sustenance.

Both had made a play for Ms. Gorman. Jenny was thirty-three to their twenty-one-going-on-thirteen. Big tits were evidently equalizers on the age issue for these boys. When Jenny blew them off—figuratively, not literally—they’d started a rumor she was gay.

Regis smiled into the neck of his bottle. The fools never did catch on. Jenny was gay, queer as a three-dollar bill. She just didn’t advertise it. The Park Service was seriously homophobic. Regis had discovered her sexual preferences when he’d gone into her duplex to check on a maintenance report and noticed a letter. “Pornographic” didn’t do it justice; it would have won a Penthouse Letter of the Week competition.

The letter had been signed “Cindy.”

Jenny started rolling another cigarette.

“Oooh, roll your own, tough mama,” Dennis said.

“Tougher than you, weenie boy,” Gilbert said good-naturedly. Dennis laughed. Regis guessed there was a private joke regarding “weenie boy.” He had no desire to be let in on it. Neither, apparently, did Jenny.

She grinned past Gil at Regis, winked, licked the paper, and sealed the tobacco in. The lick was longer than it needed to be and ran lovingly the length of the cigarette. Heckle and Jeckle were entranced.

Dennis took the matches from her hand to light the cigarette. After he’d wasted three without getting a flame he could keep alive in the faint breeze off the lake, Jenny took them back. “Nice try, Casanova.” She lit her cigarette.

“I’m off the next two days,” Gil said, his tone suggesting this news would be catnip to any kitten. “Got a couple of new videos. How about you bring the popcorn?”

“I thought you’d get enough of this place. I figured you for town on lieu days.” Smoke trickled out with the words.

“You call Page, Arizona, a town ? Come back to civilization with us and we’ll show you a town .” Dennis waggled his eyebrows as if he’d said something wildly suggestive.

“King of the single entendre,” Regis said. Jenny laughed. Heckle and Jeckle looked at Regis as if noticing him for the first time. They probably were, hidden as he was behind Jenny’s glorious tatas.