civilizations were drowned. Derelict machinery, trailer houses, sheep pens, watering troughs, windmills, broken- down vehicles, propane tanks, rubber tires—any junk that was not cost-effective to haul away was fed to the rising water.
The living danced, drank, partied, and water-skied over the dead.
As it should be, Regis thought. The pure joy of being one of the living caught him by surprise as it sometimes did when he was flying. Delicately he probed the phenomenon. Like a majority of the human race, he was accustomed to living in a psychic brownout: Barely There, walking dim pathways, hearing muted voices. The difference was, he was aware of the muffling. Others seemed contented with somnambulism. Whether he envied or scorned them depended on his mood.
Today, on this murderous playground of a lake, he was suddenly totally and completely alive. His veins and arteries hummed like high-voltage wires, electrifying every part of him. Maybe it was the speed of the boat cutting clean and fast through dark water. Speed sometimes affected him like a drug. No. This was new. This was speed and fear combined, a kind of wild, teetering high that pulled him from the shadows.
A single day of this high-octane life was worth years of reviewing seasonal applications, sitting through endless meetings, eating hash brown casseroles, and watching Bethy’s bottom spread. A single day of this made going back wretched to consider. It wasn’t that Regis had never felt good before. He’d thought he’d been happy enough, often enough. In early lust for Bethy he’d had his moments. Climbing with her up canyon walls so sheer even sunlight couldn’t stay on them, he’d felt totally awake.
Risk. It came to him and he felt God’s own fool. It hadn’t been the young, and then nubile, Bethy who’d turned his life from black-and-white to living color those few months. It was risk, the risk of falling, being killed, of her falling, being killed or crippled. Risk and the promise of wealth; that was the combination that had him down on one knee, diamond solitaire in hand.
“Holy smoke.” The wind snatched the words away from his lips as they formed. Falling in love. Bethy was necessary, but it was the thrill of the fall he was in love with.
For the first time, he got why people chose to be firefighters, track down lions, arrest felons—type A’s. Cops, rangers, sheriffs were always telling people to stand back, let the professionals handle it, call for help. They’d done a fabulous job of convincing the sheepish public that taking matters into their own hands would just make those matters worse.
They didn’t care about the sheep; they wanted to keep the fun for themselves. Risk, that was what made the blood sing high and fine. Two hours ago he’d been afraid of the risk he’d taken calling in sick. Regis bleated, then smiled. When had the wool been pulled over his eyes? When had he donned sheep’s clothing?
Cutting a sharp right into the mouth of Dangling Rope, head back, hair wild in the wind, he realized he was laughing.
“Slow down!” somebody yelled as he waked the marina, slamming boats into their bumpers. Regis waved. He wasn’t going to slow down. He might not ever slow down again.
Unerringly, he speared the cigarette boat into the mooring slot nearest the marina store. The slot was reserved for NPS boats. Risk. Having leaped to the dock, he whipped his lines over the cleats. Mad dogs and Englishmen: In the noonday sun he jogged up the incline from the dock toward the gray duplexes hugging the square of green like elephants guarding an oasis. He’d resented spending the summer out here rather than in their house in Page. No more. Life was edgier at the Rope. People were more open. Gory memories of Kippa dulled. Sun blessed his bare head; the air was cut to fit his lungs. The desert was limned with gold and red, every dry blade of grass, every stone as clear-cut as a new diamond.
Sweat ran down his spine. Glen Canyon in July was so hot even Superman would sweat through his tights. Regis smiled at the thought and broke into a run for the last fifteen yards. Heart attack, heatstroke: risk.
Jenny would scream like a banshee when she found out he’d gotten her a new roommate and he was a person of the male persuasion. Jenny insisted her preference for women was not sexism but sanitation, citing the fact that women seldom, if ever, pissed on the floor and that, given her job, she should at least be allowed to eat in an environment free of human waste.
Barry Mack—aptly named “Mackerel” by his co-workers in honor of his body odor—the toilet scrubber, would be out to the Rope as soon as the paperwork to up-jump him from a GS-3 maintenance man to a GS-5 interpretive ranger was finished. Risk. Regis would definitely be on hand when Jenny was introduced to Barry and his grime- encrusted fingernails.
Panting, he let himself in through Jenny’s battered screen door. He paused and looked back into a glare the honey locusts were too small to filter out. No one was watching him. Again he laughed. Risk bred paranoia. Who cared if anybody saw him entering Jenny’s duplex? He was here on business, here to check the room the Mackerel was assigned. The room Anna Pigeon had occupied.
Bed stripped, closet doors partly open, window blind at a drunken angle in one window, air-conditioning unit in the other: The room was as he’d last seen it. Footsteps noiseless on the drab carpet, he crossed the room and turned on the swamp cooler. The fan thumped and clanked as if it were cutting carrots instead of air but, after a minute, blew cold.
He switched it off and stepped back into the hallway. The door to Jenny’s room was closed, leaving the hall in semidarkness. What light there was leaked from the bathroom at the end of the hall. Feeling for the ghosts, Regis stood in silence and stillness. The Not There were not there for him in his present heightened state. He didn’t miss their nonexistent emanations. No self-respecting ghost should be forced to haunt the likes of Barry the Mackerel.
Regis was turning to leave when the dim light from the bath caught his attention. On the bath mat in front of the sink cabinet somebody—Jenny, who else?—had arranged two lines of irregularly shaped objects. Backlit, they looked like men in a futuristic game of chess. Jenny Gorman was an interesting woman. Her sexual preferences never made her any more or less interesting to Regis. Playing peculiar games on the bathroom floor was another matter entirely.
Moving quietly out of habit, Regis closed the distance between Barry Mack’s new room and whatever Jenny had set to guard her bathroom sink. At the door, he flipped the light switch. Along the ratty edge of a faded pink terry-cloth mat, Jenny had lined up two rows of feminine detritus, tampons, birth control pills, the usual stuff women keep in the bathroom. “Riddle me a riddle: Why did the lesbian line up her girl things?” he asked the ether as he squatted on his heels.
“To convince herself she is a girl.”
That wouldn’t fly. Jenny was all girl all the time, so much so she’d fallen in love with her own gender.
Hairbrush, Xanax … Jenny didn’t strike Regis as the Xanax type. She loved the classics: nicotine and alcohol. Anna Pigeon, tranquilizers fit her.
“Damn it,” Regis hissed and snatched open the door of the cupboard. Like items lined the top shelf. The shelf near floor level was bare. When Anna Pigeon’s things were packed, these were forgotten.
Regis stood and switched the light off. People left things behind in the units all the time. Every fall, after the seasonal nomads moved on, maintenance collected the forgotten or abandoned bits and bites of them and tossed them in the trash.
These must have felt different than the usual leftovers to Jenny. Why else would she line them up as neat as soldiers on parade? Evidently, to her, these meaningless items had meaning. “When the Pigeon flies the coop, why does Jenny arrange her toiletries in two lines?” Regis muttered.
Playtex tampons, Secret deodorant—regular scent—Xanax, birth control pills in a flat round dispenser.
What they had in common was that these weren’t things women could take or leave, these were things women needed. It was unlikely they would be forgotten or purposely left behind.
If they were not purposely left behind, it suggested Anna Pigeon did not leave on purpose either. She’d been planning to come back, shower, put on deodorant, maybe change a tampon, take a birth control pill and a Xanax and go to bed.
Fear welled up, curdling the exhilaration of risk. The downside of being fully alive was that even that which was bad was felt more keenly. Fear clenched Regis’s stomach. Sweat broke out at his hairline.
What had Jenny Gorman done?
More to the point, what was she doing now?
He walked down the hall and let himself out into the sunlight. In three steps he crossed the barren ground between her porch and his own. Ignoring the heat and the glare, he collapsed into one of Bethy’s pink-and-green
