tangle of arms and heads were visible through the glass patio doors on the rear deck. Most of the fallen were on the beach. A naked couple lay curled back to back on an old square sleeping bag. A faded motif of cowboys spinning lariats telegraphed the loss of innocence. A boy in a Broncos T-shirt and tennis shoes without socks was spread- eagled on a red-and-white-checked tablecloth, shorts missing, shortcomings visible.
Amid the carnage was a platoon of dead soldiers: beer bottles, wine bottles, and whiskey bottles. Paper cups, bits of cellophane, chip bags, cigarette butts, and other festive effluvia had been strewn across the sand like confetti. A plastic Gatorade bottle, an inch of creepy orange liquid inside, bobbed in the water near the shore.
At the far end of the grotto, near the wall, was an area devoid of bodies or blankets. Wine bottles, shoved neck down several feet apart, marked off a space about twenty feet long and half that wide. Two poles were jabbed upright into the sand with a bedsheet draped over them.
Jenny beached her boat a dozen yards from the barge and got out her anchor. Having heaved anchor and line over the bow, she jumped after, landing lightly on her feet. This far from the washing-machine motion of the main lake the water was calm. Wave action wouldn’t lure her boat back into the channel. Barbarians might.
“Uhnnn?”
The bovine grunt alerted her that at least one student body was awake enough to register that an army of one had landed.
“Whathefuh?” came another lowing sound. “Izza fucking ranger.”
Taking no notice of these promising signs of intelligent life, Jenny carried on with the task of setting the anchor as deep in the sand as she could manage without a sledgehammer. Rumbles percolated from behind her as she made more work of her anchorage than was needed, giving them time to wake up and pull themselves together. Two bare bottoms and a shriveled male member before lunch had her hoping that they would be not only waking but snatching up wearing apparel and covering the bits of themselves that shouldn’t be allowed to flop about in the breeze.
When the stirring became ubiquitous, Jenny dusted the sand from her hands. Mentally girding her loins for battle, she turned to face the unwashed masses yearning to be educated. Hands on hips, she took in the mangy lot of them. Many didn’t look to be of drinking age, let alone old enough to be wilderness potty-trained. A few looked properly cowed by, and respectful of, the NPS uniform and gunmetal gray government boat. None seemed overtly hostile. That was a plus. Without the color of law behind her, the only power Jenny had was the power of persuasion.
As she genially surveyed the group, there was one boy who called attention to himself. In this barely undulating sea of lethargy, a kid in iridescent blue swim trunks and a blue T-shirt with the words SHUCK ME, SUCK ME, EAT ME RAW in white under a picture of an oyster was sitting bolt upright on a nest of towels. His sharp quick movements reminded Jenny of a trapped bird flying into windows or the ceiling, looking for a way out. She’d have been hard-pressed to describe this boy as anything but average: average height, weight, eye and hair color. Though, if such averages ever existed, fast food and immigration had altered them in the United States.
Suddenly he met her gaze. Fidgeting stopped; like a rabbit hoping the coyote will mistake him for a rock, he froze.
He was scared, Jenny realized. Drugs were always a good guess—a lid of marijuana? X hidden in his clothes? Heroin, coke? He didn’t look like he’d matriculated from misdemeanor to felony yet. Poor lad couldn’t know she didn’t give a rodent’s posterior about drugs.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” she said in her teaching voice, an impressive mix of Miss Jean Brodie and Kathleen Turner. “My name is Jenny Gorman. Welcome to my favorite place in all of Lake Powell.”
Red rabbitty eyes blinked blearily at her. The creatures had managed to crawl from the sea onto land but had yet to evolve from dumb beasts to humanoids.
“Last summer you would not have been able to enjoy this magnificent place. It was closed most of the season because there were three hundred fifty FC colonies—fecal material—per one hundred milliliters of water in the lake. It was too contaminated for our valued visitors to immerse themselves off this beach.”
Her students began stretching, rummaging through bags, scratching. One girl, the one who’d been naked on the rope-twirling cowpokes, had wrapped a big towel decorated with a fat striped Kliban cat around her and was heading toward the sheet-draped poles.
“In short,” Jenny continued, smiling graciously on her audience, “our visitors would have been swimming in shit. Bathing in crap. Diving into poop. Wallowing in human manure. It was, in a word, caca.”
“That’s two words,” a boy hollered. There was general laughter, low-key, as if real hilarity would jar their hangovers.
“Ah, rapport has been achieved,” Jenny said delightedly. She pointed at the heckler. “You, my astute friend, where does a bear shit in the woods?” Jenny was not overfond of the scatological, but she’d found that a good way to bridge the age gap with males was the use of third-grade toilet humor. Girls ceased finding farts and belches humorous before they went to high school. Boys found them hilarious all the way through senile dementia.
“Anywhere he wants.” The kid shouted the punch line to the old joke.
“Correct again,” Jenny said, looking appropriately impressed. “Now, tell me, do you see any forest around here?” Lifting both hands, she made a sweeping gesture toward the bare bones of Lake Powell’s shoreline.
As she opened her mouth to get into the meat of the lesson, the whine of a high-powered engine burned through the still morning air. She turned to see who had the gall to speed in a blind canyon so narrow two boats couldn’t pass without fighting each other’s wake.
A wave crashed into the outside of the final curve and splintered into wavelets that came begging across the channel to throw themselves at her feet. They were followed by a sleek red cigarette boat Jenny could have identified in a fleet of speedboats.
Regis owned it, and no one but Regis piloted it. Regis was in personnel, an hour away in Page. He’d come to Panther Canyon at breakneck speed. Fear sent cold prickles over Jenny’s scalp. One of her sisters had died or been badly injured. No one but her sisters was close enough to merit personal attention from personnel.
Jenna was the youngest but also the most reckless. Car crash?
Jessie was pregnant with her second son. Ectopic pregnancy? Eclampsia?
Jean was a pharmacist in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Surely nothing bad could happen to a pharmacist in Ann Arbor.
Jodie was married to a moron that the other sisters suspected abused her.
Jenny would beat the son-of-a-bitch to death with a tire iron.
Regis beached his precious boat gently, then leaped gracefully to dry ground. Jenny had frozen her face and body lest the barbarians see weakness. Regis was walking in her direction. She couldn’t unfreeze to say, “Hello.”
He wasn’t smiling.
“Good morning,” he said with a curt nod at Jenny’s erstwhile students. He turned his back to the now scattering class. “Are you okay, Jenny?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” she managed. “Am I?”
Regis took her words as either a joke or a brush-off. Aping her arms-akimbo stance, he turned and surveyed the milling kids. “They give you any trouble?”
“No.” Jenny waited for Regis to drop the bomb.
“I talked to a few of them the other day. They’re an ugly bunch.”
They weren’t an ugly bunch—or no uglier than any bunch of campers who hadn’t been housebroken. They were just younger and running in a pack. Tense, Jenny waited. And waited. Regis had no bomb to drop, she realized. Fear for her family leached away. Anger at Regis flowed in where it had been.
“Thanks for disrupting my class,” she said acidly. The teaching moment was gone. She’d be lucky if she could get even a handful to pay attention at this point. “What are you doing out here, anyway? Don’t you have important papers to push?” she asked irritably.
Regis stared at her coldly. Jenny didn’t apologize. Among themselves, field rangers had a tacit understanding that headquarters brass should not venture out of their cubicles and interfere with the real work of the park. Jenny would never waltz into the personnel office and rearrange Regis’s desk. On an irrational level, she expected the same courtesy.
He combed the beach with his eyes, ignoring or, worse, not noticing her ill humor. “That’s him, I think. Bastard.” With that, he strode across the sand, a man on a mission. Jenny watched him beeline through the groggy
