“I don’t suppose they bothered to wonder why I would choose a big flat rocky chunk of nowhere for a rendezvous with boys ten years my junior, or why any woman would agree to meet me there.”
“Kay and or the boys might have driven out to Hole-in-the-Rock Road from Escalante. The quickest way for you would be up that trail. They’re hoping to get an ID on Kay’s body. That should clear up a lot of things—where she was from, why she was here, what vehicles she owned.”
“If she drove out from Escalante, where was her car?” Anna asked.
“Maybe the rapist boys drove it away. Or maybe you hid it.” Jenny said.
“This is a pretty pickle,” Anna said.
Jenny laughed.
“Would you roll me a cigarette?” Anna asked suddenly.
“You don’t smoke,” Jenny said, oddly appalled by the request.
“I didn’t think I did,” Anna said, “but it’s beginning to look like there’s nothing I won’t stoop to.”
Jenny was stung. Because Anna was under a lot of stress, and because Jenny was enamored of her, she let it pass, but she didn’t roll the cigarette.
“Somebody murdered Pinky,” she said suddenly, having no idea why the thought popped into her head or out of her mouth.
“The little rattlesnake?” Anna asked.
“I found him under Regis and Bethy’s porch. His body had been laid out in a line. A nail—big, maybe six-penny or ten-penny—was driven through each end of his snaky body and into the dirt.”
“Somebody crucified a snake,” Anna said flatly. “There is something I wouldn’t stoop to after all.”
“He was under Regis’s porch,” Jenny said.
“Regis found me in the solution hole.”
“If what you told me is true, he lied about hearing you crying.”
“What I said is true.” Anna’s voice was flat and cold.
Jenny shuddered inwardly. “Sorry,” she said. Other than food and clothes the greatest gift she could give Anna was faith, utter and complete belief in her every word: If Anna said she saw pixies or skin walkers or flying saucers Jenny must believe.
“I know you’re telling the truth,” Jenny said.
“No you don’t,” Anna said. “Even I’m not sure what my truth is.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
The pygmy rattlesnake was on Regis’s mind. On his desk were background checks he needed to review and file. At present there were few job openings. Seasonals were in place. A full-time district ranger for Dangling Rope was the only job pending. Given that the federal bureaucracy ground slower than the wheels of justice, he didn’t feel any urgency.
By choice Regis had never been hunting or fishing. Madison, Wisconsin, was not exactly Mecca for members of the NRA; still, hunting was seen as a noble tradition and bass fishing almost a devotional pastime. There had been plenty of invitations. None had tempted him, not even for the “bonding experience” with other males, or proving of himself in some outdated blood ritual.
Even as a kid he couldn’t imagine a more miserable pastime than freezing in the snow, sputtering in the rain, or baking in the sun to acquire something that could be bought at Kroger’s already gutted, butchered, filleted, and wrapped.
Some things did need killing. Pinky Winky the snake had to be killed. What was Jenny’s deal with naming the thing? It was a wild animal. Less than a wild animal, it was a venomous snake. Having a poisonous reptile under the porch wasn’t cute, it was stupid. Snow White—the Disney animated version—had warped the minds of an entire generation of women. They thought the creatures of the forest would frolic on their skirts, dance with them. Forest creatures were more apt to spit and bite, in Regis’s experience.
He did like the way snakes moved, water snakes through water, land snakes across land. No legs, no arms, not so much as a fin or a finger, yet they moved rapidly and with grace. The pygmy rattlesnake was a little thick and short for true gracefulness, but it moved well enough. Yet he killed it. Its death was such a nonevent. No more than wadding up a piece of paper and tossing it into the trash.
His mother and grandfather didn’t value life, not this life anyway. They were devout, not just in church on Sunday, but Saturday night. As an only child and an only grandchild, Regis had gotten the full attention of their God. Not a particularly nice deity. He would never have dared say so, that was blasphemy. His grandfather’s God, as manifest by his grandfather, was all about control. The old man had money, scads of it, and doled it out to his daughter-in-law and grandson only when he deemed them worthy in the eyes of the all-seeing.
There were the Rules. Abortion was murder. At eleven or twelve, he remembered a night foray to a liberal church and putting tiny white crosses all over the lawn to protest the fact they had a doctor as a member who worked with Family Planning. Regis told that story once to the horror of his college girlfriend and her roommate, but, in truth, it had been a hoot. They had even blacked their faces commando style. Black ops. He’d loved it.
When his dad died at forty of a massive coronary, family and friends stood in a half circle around the casket at the viewing. His mother in her ecru suit, his father laid out in gray pinstripe. He was so lifelike. Everybody said so. At least he was more lifelike than his mother, until she broke down and wept.
Regis didn’t cry. Old Mrs. Burman, the pastor’s wife, nearly smothered him in a great fat hug, crooning, “Let it out, let it out, there’s no shame in crying for your poppa.” Regis never did “let it out.” For years he kept thinking that one day, boom, the dam would break and all that repressed emotion would flood the world. In his early twenties it dawned on him that wasn’t going to happen. There was no repressed emotion. He’d liked his dad, but it just wasn’t that big a deal. He was alive, then he was dead. So what?
He should have felt something.
He should have felt something—even just a glimmer of something—when he killed the damn snake. When his and Bethy’s dog, Kippa, was killed he’d felt plenty. In a way it was good just to feel. He wished he could blow off the afternoon, take the Cub up and catch thermals or—and this would get him fired in a heartbeat—fly through Rainbow Arch.
Putting his heels on the edge of the open bottom drawer of his metal desk, he tilted back in his chair and stared out the window. Headquarters was surrounded by a narrow belt of greenery. In keeping with the park ethic, mostly indigenous plants had been used. Mostly: Whoever designed it could not resist a few nice patches of grass, real, suburban, green, watered grass.
The juxtaposition of this lush chlorophyll belt against hills that looked as bleached as bone left too long in the sun suited his mood. Rampant life smacked up against near death. He wished he dared leave the office and find that risk that had given him such a lovely illusion of life that day on the boat, the kid in the grotto. He had that rush when he dropped that ladder down the solution hole.
The rest of that incident was a bit of a buzz kill.
The midnight black ops up the cliff behind the Rope, the desert at night, everyone asleep in their beds, little red-haired Anna Pigeon in the hole—that part he would gladly do over again. He’d felt alive that night. After she’d knocked him down with the canteen, the flashlight beam chasing her, the way it cut across her bare legs, her cutoffs low and loose on her hips threatening to slide off.
The image of the writhing flailing rattlesnake recurred behind his eyes. Sunlight through the cracks in the porch floor, strobing as it thrashed. Fighting for life, both Anna and the snake were preternaturally vivid, as if they had walked and slithered through a black-and-white world in black-and-gray skins, then suddenly, suddenly were in full color, finally completely alive.