The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel by Nevada Barr

after, landing lightly on her feet. This far from the washing-machine motion of the main lake the water was calm. Wave action wouldn’t lure her boat back into the channel. Barbarians might.
    “Uhnnn?”
    The bovine grunt alerted her that at least one student body was awake enough to register that an army of one had landed.
    “Whathefuh?” came another lowing sound. “Izza fucking ranger.”
    Taking no notice of these promising signs of intelligent life, Jenny carried on with the task of setting the anchor as deep in the sand as she could manage without a sledgehammer. Rumbles percolated from behind her as she made more work of her anchorage than was needed, giving them time to wake up and pull themselves together. Two bare bottoms and a shriveled male member before lunch had her hoping that they would be not only waking but snatching up wearing apparel and covering the bits of themselves that shouldn’t be allowed to flop about in the breeze.
    When the stirring became ubiquitous, Jenny dusted the sand from her hands. Mentally girding her loins for battle, she turned to face the unwashed masses yearning to be educated. Hands on hips, she took in the mangy lot of them. Many didn’t look to be of drinking age, let alone old enough to be wilderness potty-trained. A few looked properly cowed by, and respectful of, the NPS uniform and gunmetal gray government boat. None seemed overtly hostile. That was a plus. Without the color of law behind her, the only power Jenny had was the power of persuasion.
    As she genially surveyed the group, there was one boy who called attention to himself. In this barely undulating sea of lethargy, a kid in iridescent blue swim trunks and a blue T-shirt with the words SHUCK ME, SUCK ME, EAT ME RAW in white under a picture of an oyster was sitting bolt upright on a nest of towels. His sharp quick movements reminded Jenny of a trapped bird flying into windows or the ceiling, looking for a way out. She’d have been hard-pressed to describe this boy as anything but average: average height, weight, eye and hair color. Though, if such averages ever existed, fast food and immigration had altered them in the United States.
    Suddenly he met her gaze. Fidgeting stopped; like a rabbit hoping the coyote will mistake him for a rock, he froze.
    He was scared, Jenny realized. Drugs were always a good guess—a lid of marijuana? X hidden in his clothes? Heroin, coke? He didn’t look like he’d matriculated from misdemeanor to felony yet. Poor lad couldn’t know she didn’t give a rodent’s posterior about drugs.
    “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” she said in her teaching voice, an impressive mix of Miss Jean Brodie and Kathleen Turner. “My name is Jenny Gorman. Welcome to my favorite place in all of Lake Powell.”
    Red rabbitty eyes blinked blearily at her. The creatures had managed to crawl from the sea onto land but had yet to evolve from dumb beasts to humanoids.
    “Last summer you would not have been able to enjoy this magnificent place. It was closed most of the season because there were three hundred fifty FC colonies—fecal material—per one hundred milliliters of water in the lake. It was too contaminated for our valued visitors to immerse themselves off this beach.”
    Her students began stretching, rummaging through bags, scratching. One girl, the one who’d been naked on the rope-twirling cowpokes, had wrapped a big towel decorated with a fat striped Kliban cat around her and was heading toward the sheet-draped poles.
    “In short,” Jenny continued, smiling graciously on her audience, “our visitors would have been swimming in shit. Bathing in crap. Diving into poop. Wallowing in human manure. It was, in a word, caca.”
    “That’s two words,” a boy hollered. There was general laughter, low-key, as if real hilarity would jar their hangovers.
    “Ah, rapport has been achieved,” Jenny said delightedly. She pointed at the heckler. “You, my astute friend, where does a bear