The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel Read Online Free Page A

beaches, Anna’s boss, Jenny, said there was a trail out of Dangling Rope to the plateau—or mesa or butte or whatever the flat places above the ditch places were called. Anna remembered that.
    She remembered shading her eyes and staring up at the sand-colored rock. Never had she seen so much dirt in one place: tan dirt, red dirt, pink dirt, yellow dirt, black dirt. Dirt and rocks. Carved stone heaved up, smooth as polished granite in some places, shattered into avalanches in others, broken rocks flowing down from higher ground, rocks liquid as lava and lumpy as dough. A psychedelic Mt. Rushmore morphing into the Pyramids of Giza, giving way to the craters of the moon, and all of it glazed with white-hot sunlight.
    At the skyline, crinkled trees or shrubs showed black rather than green, not exactly poster plants for Mother Nature. One of the few signs of life Anna had seen at Glen Canyon was the fish. Every day, around the dock, the big bums gobbled scraps boaters tossed at them. They were about as glamorous as rats begging for picnic leavings in Central Park. Bum fish, houseboats loaded with party animals, and a little pink rattlesnake were the sum total of her wildlife experience. This wasn’t Bambi and Thumper’s kind of neighborhood.
    Hand shading her eyes, she’d searched for Jenny’s path. To the right of a rubble of rock flowing down a side canyon was a sheer cliff veiled in a skein of black lace—desert varnish, Anna had been told. Even the black gave off a hot shine.
    A hat.
    Anna remembered Jenny told her to wear a hat. She’d offered to lend her one that looked as if the Yankees had used it for third base for a couple of seasons. Nobody wore hats. Anna hadn’t seen a hat in years. The first one she put on that wasn’t purely to keep her ears from freezing was the flat-brimmed ranger’s hat. Like everybody else, she resembled a hairless, malnourished Smokey Bear when she wore it.
    These memories trickled through the toxic sludge in her brain. Like dreams they drifted with color and emotion. Like dreams, they ran together without logic. Rehashing a hike up a pile of rocks wasn’t getting her any closer to what mattered. With her good hand, she rubbed the grit from her eyes and tried to fast-forward to the stone pit, the naked, the befogged. Wispy trails of the cliff, the past, the path threatened to dissipate. Anna let go of the effort.
    Breathing in: one, two, three.
    Hold, two, three.
    Exhale on a five count.
    Wisps coalesced into memory.
    Hatless, Anna was squinting. If she tilted her head to the side she could almost make out a line paler and more contiguous than the rest. It didn’t look like a path so much as a scratch on a rock. She could get most of the way up to it via the apron of broken stone. At the top of the pile was the wee scratch that might be Jenny’s path, might zigzag up a crack to the ridge. It didn’t look far. Anna had walked the length and breadth of Manhattan more times than she could count, hundreds of miles clocked on concrete. The climb looked to be less than a mile. Five crosstown blocks. Piece of cake.
    In her pack were most of a liter of water, a map, and a pamphlet identifying area plants. She took out the map. Maybe the black broken lines were trails. None of them came anywhere near Dangling Rope. The pamphlet was even less help. “The Glen Canyon National Recreation Area has highly diverse vegetation typical of the Colorado Plateau.”
    Humanity’s dam and the universe’s sun allowed very little to survive. On the flat spots a scanty grass, like the last hurrah on a balding man’s pate, grew, but it was so brittle and colorless as to be nearly transparent.
    “Hah!”
    Anna remembered saying “hah.” She repeated it now to break the awful silence of her open-air tomb. The pathetic little gust of noise only made it worse.
    Breathe in two three.
    Hold two three.
    Out on a count of five.
    Briefly, she’d considered packing a sandwich, but she wasn’t hungry and