“Maybe the park should replace the sand with clumping litter,” Anna suggested.
Jenny laughed. “I’ll mention that to the superintendent next time he asks a GS-5 seasonal for her opinion.”
The tent was orange and dome shaped and sat lightly on the sand like half a melon on a plate. Human waste or not, Anna would leave the tent to Jenny. The space inside was too small and the color too much like sandstone at sunset for Anna to allow herself to be enclosed within. The day had been ninety-two and cloudless. The night would be warm. The tent was for privacy and to keep out the bugs and the sand.
“I’m going to go introduce myself to the neighbors and see if I can’t strike up an elucidating conversation about poop,” Jenny said as she tossed the stuff sack containing her sleeping bag into the tent.
“The little kids ought to love that,” Anna said. The wine was good. She stretched out her legs and felt the muscles begin to relax.
“Kids are great audiences for poop talks,” Jenny said. “These are a little young. Boys eight to twelve are the best. Want to come?”
“I’ll pass.” It was after six, suppertime for campers. Anna had yet to let go of the schedule she’d kept for so many years; lunch around three, supper at midnight after the curtain came down.
Though the sun still shone on much of the lake, it had long since set in the narrow tongue of Panther Canyon. Twilight would last several more hours. Anna leaned back into one of the “chairs” Jenny had brought up from the boat. They were clever things, two thin pads with a fabric hinge between that could be locked into an L shape by snapping straps that extended from the four corners. Camping had changed from the heavy canvas and cots Anna remembered from when she was very small.
She watched Jenny cross the sand to the visitors’ camp. Jenny was wide hipped with long strong legs. Muscles in her calves bunched as she stepped over the uneven ground. Her shoulders were square and her arms brown from working in the sun, biceps well defined. Jenny moved with the ease and grace of a warrior who had vanquished the invaders and returned to tend the land.
Physical strength had never been high on Anna’s priority list. Her work had demanded the ability to organize and focus. A stage manager’s greatest asset was the gift of paying attention at all times and to all things so none of the thousands of threads that must be woven together to create the director’s vision was lost, late, or broken.
Zachary, her husband, tall as he was, was not a strong man. He was willowy, slender, and supple, with long fingers that could speak as eloquently as most men’s tongues.
Smiling, Anna remembered a crew member asking Zach to pick up the other end of a massive oak refectory table that needed moving. Zach had been unable to so much as disturb the wood. Sweeping a gracious bow to the other man, he had said, “Alas, all I have to offer is my civility.”
A day spent fetching tools and carrying buckets and the case containing Jenny’s water-sampling paraphernalia had worn Anna out, while Jenny remained unfazed. The ill-fated trek up to the plateau had exhausted her to the point that her muscles were quivering and she could scarcely breathe. Unearthing Kay had been a Herculean task. Carrying a fifteen-ounce skunk up a twenty-foot ladder taxed her strength. The hours she’d been lost, looking for the trail back down to Dangling Rope, she had almost given up because she was so weak and tired.
Had she been stronger, maybe the boys would not have caught her. Maybe she could have fought them off long enough to get away.
Anna resolved to eat more and get strong. Everybody died. Cars killed, microbes, viruses, cancers, plaque, bullets, knives, gravity: Death came in one form or another in the end. Death would come for Anna, she knew that. She swore when it came it would find her strong.
Never again would she go down without a fight.
THIRTY-ONE
Jenny was in excellent form. She charmed the adults, entertained the children, and left their camp feeling she had enlisted four more people in her campaign to free Lake Powell’s beaches from the rising tide of toxic waste.
As the campers headed toward their Jet Skis for an evening ride, she turned and went back toward her own campsite. Her feet felt light, her heart soared, and she laughed out loud. She was young, living in the most amazing place on earth, doing important work for reasonable remuneration, and she was in love.
The exhilarating alignment of the heavens was sufficiently rare that she recognized her moment of joy, thus making the joy that much more potent. That her darling little pigeon was probably woefully heterosexual, and their union might never be consummated, didn’t dampen her enthusiasm by any noteworthy amount.
“Statistically insignificant,” she called to her beloved, not caring that she got nothing but mild confusion in return. Infrequently—but nonetheless deliciously—loving pure and chaste from afar was a grand thing.
Then, too, sometimes a girl got lucky.
Flopping down on the sand next to Anna, she asked, “Is there any more wine?”
Anna handed her the red fuel bottle. This wasn’t Jenny’s cheap
At the moment Jenny felt anything but mellow. Had there been tall buildings, she would have leaped them, dragons, she would have slain them, if it would have enhanced the pleasure of her new mistress.
“You look like the cat that ate the canary,” Anna said.
Would that it were a pigeon, Jenny thought wickedly and smiled. “I feel positively grand,” she said. “We’ve hours of light left. Where can I take you? What can I show you? Your wish, my command.”
“You can show me who shoved me into the jar,” Anna said flatly.
With that jab of reality, Jenny’s elation deflated somewhat. “Ugly thoughts for such a beautiful evening,” she said gently.
“I know. Sorry,” Anna apologized. “My solution hole isn’t all that far from here, is it? Not as the frog hops?”
Anna must have been looking at maps. A week ago Jenny would have bet she neither knew nor cared about the geography of the lake and its environs.
“The end of Hole-in-the-Rock Road is maybe a quarter of a mile from the head of this canyon,” Jenny told her. In saying the words she realized not only was that true but— “Those college kids,” she said suddenly, sitting up straight. “They didn’t have to come up from the Rope or down Hole-in-the-Rock from Escalante. They could have climbed out of Panther.”
Now Ms. Pigeon was interested. She looked out over the skinny lick of water that fronted the grotto. “Sheer cliffs,” Anna said. “What? Sixty, eighty feet up to the plateau? They would have had to be bitten by a radioactive spider to pull that off.”
“Come with me,” Jenny said, delighted she had found a gift for her new friend. “Be prepared to strip to your underwear—or skin, if you prefer the classics.”
Watching how stiffly Anna got to her feet, Jenny felt a pang of remorse. The poor little thing had seemed determined to do the work of ten men regardless of the fact her shoulder hadn’t fully healed and she should have been on bed rest after the trauma she’d suffered.
“We don’t have to go,” Jenny said earnestly. “I was just going to show you the slot canyon that forms the end of Panther. It’s been there since Zeus was in knee pants. It will still be there tomorrow. You should rest. Let me fix you some dinner.”
“No,” Anna replied, evidently determined to push herself until she dropped in her tracks. “I want to see it. I like the idea they could have come up from here. It makes more sense than the road or the trail. Show me how.”
Jenny looked at her for a second, watching her gather her little strength around her great heart, and silently mocked herself for describing it as such. Despite the mockery she was so proud of Anna tears stung her eyes.
