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

hollows. They straggled out of soil so arid and stony they were deformed by the effort. Wretched stunted things, they resembled something T. S. Eliot might have run across after the last ding-dong of doom.
    Behind her, and to both sides, canyons cut into the mesa. Ahead, another escarpment reared up, crowned with ragged serrated trees cutting into a sky so blue it hurt. There were no roads, no houses, no telephone lines, not an animal pen or a fucking creek or a fucking watercooler in sight.
    No water. She wasn’t going to find water. The only water in the world was a million miles back down Jenny Gorman’s sorry excuse for a trail. The last ding-dong of doom ringing in her ears, Anna limped to the nearest excuse for plant life and thumped down cross-legged in the niggardly shade. Her tongue had grown too big for her mouth. It stuck on her teeth and soft palate. Muscles in her legs were cramping. Skin on her face and the back of her neck stung when she touched it. There was no point in going farther, no point in staying where she was, and she doubted like hell she would be able to make it back down.
    Not for the first time, she took the water bottle out of her pack and shook it. Over the months without Zach she’d come to think of the Grim Reaper as a guardian angel, ready to sweep her out of the mortal coils when they cut too deep. Now that He was grinning at her from the dry bottom of a plastic government-issue water bottle, she didn’t like him as much as she’d thought she would.
    She took out the map and unfolded it—something to pass the time while dying. Subway maps and city maps made sense. Streets had names, they intersected; buildings had numbers. Subways had stops. Wilderness maps had crooked lines going nowhere, and nowhere had horrific names like Dry Fork and Turkey Knob, Panther Canyon and Devil’s Garden.
    “There is nothing helpful on this fucking map,” Anna croaked. She balled the map up and threw the wad of paper over her shoulder.
    For a while she sat in defiance, then levered herself to her miserable feet and tottered over to retrieve the litter. Glen Canyon might kill her, but she was damned if it would turn her into a litterbug.
    She was picking her trash out of a stubble of desiccated grass when she heard the scream.
    The pitiful shriek, scratching through the pitiful trees, lifted Anna’s spirits. The cry was too full-throated for a woman dying of thirst. Anna started to run in the direction of the sound. She, the Good Samaritan, would take a thorn out of the screamer’s paw, and the grateful thing would give her water.
    A lot of water.

FIVE
    Running, hoping for water, there memory ended. Between dressed and whole to naked and broken there was nothing but nothing, not even the blank slate. Trying to remember was like trying to see with the tip of her finger.
    Hugging her useless arm to her chest and staring up the gullet that had swallowed her whole, Anna wondered: Had she rescued the maiden? Traded places with the maiden? Had the whole thing been the hallucination of a severely dehydrated woman? Was this rock jug she was at the bottom of another hallucination?
    Reality, so hard won, began to ebb. “Help! Help me!” she screamed.
    Silence slammed down from the buff-and-blue horizon and struck her dumb. Like the silence after prayer, it deafened her; a silence devoid of presence, a wasteland mocking any who dared hope. She didn’t yell again. She didn’t do anything. She didn’t think anything.
    Shade swallowed her. The ellipses of light oozed off of the sand and started crawling up the side of the jar. Where the lozenge of sunlight shone, the stone was burnt orange; behind it the stone was blue; ahead of it, toward the sky where the light was going, the stone was buff, as if the rock that held her prisoner was of living matter, reactive to light and heat.
    July in Arizona, the sun set around seven thirty. The girl’s scream—and Anna’s last memory—must have been around two