Then the wrangling began. Anna would not tell them where the solution hole was. She wanted to be there when the bad guy was hauled out. When she refused to be moved from that position by logic, threats, flattery, or wheedling, Glen Canyon Law Enforcement gave in. Had Jenny not already been deeply intoxicated by Ms. Pigeon, Anna’s next words would have stolen her heart.
“I want another woman with me. I want Jenny.”
TWENTY-THREE
The rangers crowded the narrow cabin of Steve Gluck’s boat. “Cabin” was a misnomer; it was more of a roofed windbreak-cum-backrest. Like the front seat of a pickup truck, sans seat and doors. Steve piloted, the chief ranger to his right and Jim Levitt outside hanging onto the metal upright to his left.
Jenny and Anna sat shoulder to shoulder on a hard bench that ran the width of the abbreviated cabin, their backs against its outer shell, their heads a foot or so below the pilot’s windscreen facing the bow. Anna was not sure she liked Jenny so close. Humanity, even a few humans, weighed on her like a summer thunderstorm rolling down the Hudson River toward Manhattan.
Utterly alone in the jar—at least while she was awake and before Buddy had dropped in—she’d craved company. So much so that she’d chatted with her sister, who was not there, and Kay, who was dead. Ensconced on the boat with Jenny and the rangers, she felt crowded, hemmed in.
The din of the engine noise made conversation difficult. She was glad of that. Telling—and not telling—parts of her story over and over again wearied her nearly as much as had living it.
No, she corrected herself. Little was more wearisome than waiting naked and thirsty for a miserable debasing death that never showed up. Her thoughts flashed to Zach, to his role in
Now Anna knew it was meant to be Death—or should have been even if Samuel Beckett didn’t know it.
In the roar of enforced silence, Anna gave herself over to the miracle of wind on her face.
Because of her work, she was familiar with various brands of wind machines and audiotape manufacturers who specialized in wind sounds, from whisper to keening to battering gale. Much thought had been given to creating the illusion of wind, but she’d given none to wind itself.
When she’d escaped the sandstone-bottled air of the jar, and the desert night wind cooled her skin and ruffled the fine hairs around her face, fanning stale air to give life to curtains on windows that looked out to black- painted walls struck her as absurd as pretending an apricot was the sun.
The life she’d spent in the theater with Zach was gone as if it were a dream dreamed by someone else. It left her both too free and too alone. The life that would replace it remained to be seen.
Bullfrog Marina was bigger than Dangling Rope. There was covered docking for several hundred houseboats and yachts that stayed year-round, as well as a fueling station, pumping station, and small grocery store. Many of Glen Canyon’s permanent rangers and their families lived in the tiny town of Bullfrog. They had a system for schooling the children, a medical clinic run by a nurse practitioner, a fire department of sorts, and an airstrip.
The airport was as tiny as the town, serving tiny little planes LaGuardia or Kennedy would use as doorstops or table decorations. It was also the reason the five of them were boating fifty miles from Dangling Rope to Bullfrog. The park owned a Cessna 180 and boasted a park pilot. With such a vast expanse of land and so few roads, flying was the only way to keep tabs on what was happening in the backcountry, to look for lost hikers, fires, floods, game animals, and poachers of deer, elk, reptiles, and artifacts.
Anna had flown on jets of various sizes, but she’d never been in a small plane. The wings looked fragile and stunted, the propeller about the size and effectiveness of a Popsicle stick, the skin of the fuselage and wings no better than the metal used to make beer cans. It looked as if it could be swatted down by any errant gust of wind as easily as Anna could swat a fly.
It did not reassure her when the pilot asked what she weighed.
“I don’t know,” she told him.
“Nothing,” Jenny said.
He put her weight at a hundred ten pounds and told her to get in the rear seat. The chief ranger took the right front seat. Steve Gluck squeezed in beside Anna in the back.
“Hank will come back for Jim and Jenny,” Steve told her. Anna had wondered but wasn’t going to push the issue. She sensed it would take very little for the rangers to decide they could find the solution hole without her now that they had a general direction. They’d already made the transition from treating her like the star of the show to treating her like a walk-on who kept missing her cues.
Once over the shock of committing body and soul to a vehicle that felt no more substantial than a high-end kite, Anna found she loved flying in the small plane. It bore virtually no resemblance to flying on a commercial jetliner. The wings were high, and nothing obstructed the view. The Cessna flew slowly a thousand feet above the earth instead of at the speed of sound and five or six miles in the air. She could see everything: people on boats, water-skiers, Jet Skis throwing plumes. Her delight in the intimacy of peeking down on her fellows quickly gave way to pure awe at the staggering intricacy of Glen Canyon and Lake Powell.
Hundreds of zigzagging fingers of water reaching up jagged creek beds and drainages, snakes of blue curling around shattered rock piled as high as skyscrapers, cutting and poking into the desert, prying away secrets, creating more, hiding and revealing. Anna’s head swam trying to grasp the immensity and complexity of this thing man had done and the foolish belief that he was running the show. Given this bird’s-eye view of the world, she felt how very big it was and how infinitely tiny she was. She was both as indispensable and insignificant as any lizard.
“Aah,” she murmured.
“What?” Steve’s voice in her ear startled her. “Do you see the solution hole?” The four of them were wearing headsets with voice-activated mikes, and her exclamation turned everybody’s attention to her.
“No,” she said.
“That’s Dangling Rope,” came the pilot’s voice. He dropped the left wing a little as if making the airplane point.
Laid out below, neat as any map, was the hopscotch pattern of the dock, the two squares of housing above, the sewage treatment pond above that, then the canyon wall she had scrambled up.
“There’s where I came out.” She pointed for Steve. He leaned across her, his shoulder hard against hers, the faint scent of his aftershave tickling her nose.
“I figured,” Gluck said. “I doubt there’s any other way to walk out of the Rope.”
He stayed too close too long for Anna’s liking. “Breathe on your own side,” she commanded. Before the jar, she might have made room for him, might not have minded. She could have been polite or subtle. Maybe. She could hardly remember who she was back when she had her husband and not the monster as her constant companion.
Steve moved back, apparently unoffended. She didn’t care either way as long as he did as he was told.
“A road!” Anna cried out in dismay. Male chuckles filled the space between her ears.
“Hole-in-the-Rock Road out of Escalante,” Steve told her. “Look at the end there.” He pointed his finger, poking past her nose. “That’ll be the sheriff out of Kane County. Glen Canyon is in two states, several counties and an Indian reservation. You don’t even want to know about jurisdictions. We called Sheriff Patterson last night. He’s a good guy. You’ll like him.”
A car. A road. Anna felt betrayed. What had happened to her should not have happened anywhere near cars and roads. She comforted herself that the road scarcely deserved the name. From the air it looked like nothing more than a dirt track knifing away from the canyon to run parallel to the endless mesa that was Fiftymile Mountain.
The pilot flew beside the road for a while, then made a right-angle turn and another, until the airplane was lined up with the dirt track.
“Solution holes,” Steve said and leaned into her to look out her window. She looked where he pointed. The plateau had great islands of stone bubbling up from it and forming smooth domes and humps polished by the elements until they shone. Pocked into these bubbles were deep, round, smooth-sided holes like the one that had held Anna captive.
