Day’s light grew stronger. Sunrise, then, not sunset. Anna saw the hasty burial near the wall across from where she sat and remembered how she had tried to hide her purloined finery under the sand so Mr. Monster wouldn’t take it. The belt was entirely exposed and one sandal only partially buried.
She remembered the cries and desperate scrabbling near the mouth of her lair. That memory should have engendered fear. She waited for it, but it didn’t come creeping through her bowels and up her spine.
Freedom from fear. It had been a long time since Anna had been free.
Those long terrible weeks in the New York apartment alone, she’d been afraid to go to sleep, afraid to wake up, afraid to answer the phone, afraid not to. Sitting in a red plastic chair holding Zach’s hand, she’d been scared to stay and terrified to leave. When Zach was truly gone, she was afraid of staying in the apartment they’d shared, afraid of leaving it and losing the last scents and relics of him. She’d been afraid of staying in New York, where every piece of concrete and steel reminded her of him, and afraid to leave the city they’d shared; afraid of forgetting and afraid of remembering.
Then here and this. WHORE on her thigh, thirst, drugs, pain.
Then now; fear gone as if it had been but smoke and a strong wind had blown it clear. It was as if she had been allotted enough fear to last a lifetime and she had squandered it all during three months in New York and three days in a sandstone jar. What remained in the cranial vault where decades of horror had been stored to be meted out as the slings and arrows of life demanded was a strange determination, grim and gray as slate. Determination to do what, Anna wasn’t sure. Survive? Die as annoyingly as possible? Bite the hand that had forgotten to feed her?
Moving sluggishly, she reclaimed her treasures, the belt over her head to serve as a sling, the watch on her wrist, the bra as a token bib around her neck. As she shook the sand from these items and painstakingly put them on, she watched for the tarantula. Not afraid, but not particularly wishing to be surprised by the enormous arachnid.
It had either scuttled into the deadly nightshade patch or burrowed into the sand. She had a vague recollection of watching a PBS special with Zach where tarantulas dragged other bugs into holes in the ground, stung them, and then laid eggs in their comatose bodies so the kiddies could have a fresh snack when they hatched.
Dressed, she sat with her back to the wall and rested. The canteen was beside her. She picked it up and shook it. Not a lot of water was left, a quart or less. Enough to knock her out ten times over and never truly slake her thirst. Unable to stand the feel of her throat closing, the sides of her esophagus adhering to one another, she uncapped it and took a mouthful.
Since Mr. Monster apparently hadn’t bothered to come down to torment her the previous night, maybe he was done with her, playing with her naked inert body and carving a rude word into her flesh the extent of his commitment to the relationship.
As she pondered the possibility that she had been left to die of unnatural causes, she saw the stem of one of the datura plants shift slightly. The tarantula. A black bead appeared a couple of inches above the ground. An eye. Or the tip of a feeler. Anna couldn’t remember if tarantulas had feelers. She worked her way up onto her knees. Her left arm free of the sling, she held the canteen in front of her with both hands like a shield. Spiders could jump. Anna had seen the smallest of them jump several inches. For a being less than a quarter of an inch wide, including legs, that was a prodigious feat. A tarantula the size of the one she’d seen hit the sand the night before could probably jump five feet or more.
“I will squash you like a bug,” she said to the black bead in the weeds and shook the canteen to show she meant it.
The plants quivered again, and a second black bead revealed itself.
Anna raised the canteen over her head.
The grasses moved, and a pointed black snout emerged between the beads. Both black eyes were fixed on her. Anna didn’t move. She’d stopped breathing.
Cautiously, a tiny skunk kit poked its nose from the sere foliage, then dared a paw, then another. It was no bigger than Anna’s hand, coal black with two white stripes originating above its eyes and streaming over the fur of its back to a plume of tail.
The cry in the night that Anna had thought sounded like a small animal must have been just that; the erratic scratching sounds, the paws of coyotes as they attacked and killed the mother skunk. The kit was too small to have been on his own. When the coyotes attacked, this little guy must have fled into the mouth of her jar for safety, then tumbled down. The kit couldn’t weigh more than a pound, and he’d landed on soft sand. The impact must have been minimal. He didn’t appear to be hurt, just frightened of the enormous bipedal beast whose den he found himself in.
No, Anna corrected herself, not frightened, more interested. Had he been frightened, she thought, he was supposed to turn away and point his bottom at her so he could spray. Chances were he’d never seen a person and was more curious than fearful.
“Hey, buddy,” she said softly as she lowered the canteen and laid it gently on the sand. The little animal flinched but didn’t run back behind the datura leaves. Stilling herself, she let her eyes wander, pretending she had little interest in him but sneaking glances. Watching the ball of fluff sniff around, exploring this new place with increasing confidence, she experienced a sensation she hadn’t felt for so long it took her a moment to identify it.
Delight.
She was delighted. That an animal she could fit in a pocket, a wild creature, and a skunk to boot, could bring so much life into the jar that the air seemed brighter, the walls more cozy than forbidding, and her heart no longer too heavy to beat, amazed her.
Soon, she knew, she would worry about how to keep her new friend alive. How much drugged water would be too much and shut down his heart? Should she try to capture him and throw him up the neck of the jar into the real world before he perished from thirst? Or was he too young to survive in the world above without his mama? Like the writers of Old Yeller or The Yearling, had the fates given her this warm little soul only so the monster could take it away in some gruesome fashion?
Soon. Soon she would worry. For now she was content to sit, head resting against the stone, and revel in the tiny perfect creature toddling around on the sand.
Anna was no longer alone.
SIXTEEN
Anna’s false sun moved through her sandstone universe, crawling down one side of the jar, creeping across the bottom, and lapping at the other side. On the surface of the earth the temperature was probably in the nineties; in the perpetual shade of the jar, Anna was not uncomfortable. No longer plagued by fear, and drifting on the low-level effects of sipping drugged water, it occurred to her that Nature wasn’t as harsh as she’d thought when she’d come to Glen Canyon. It was Man’s fighting against it that made it hard.
A woman—even a drugged and broken stage manager—who embraced it could find comforts. Solitude—something she’d dreaded since Zachary had gone—was, in truth, beautiful. Not loneliness, but freedom from people. How could she be lonely while Buddy delicately explored her toes with his snout and one wee paw?
The skunk kit wandered off to find something better than toes with which to play. A strange piece of music filtered through Anna’s memory. Glenn Branca, she thought.
Running Through the World Like an Open Razor.
Human emotion was the razor: slights, sneers, mockery, love, hope, desire. All cut in their own way. Those wounds spawned their own cuts in actions taken, understandings and misunderstandings, then in the remembering.