That’s what had changed.
Rape was what hadn’t changed.
Women were in the military and they were raped by their fellow soldiers. Girls were in college and they were raped by their fellow students. Rape crisis centers had sprung up and rape counselors. Yet it was still ignored in the most essential way: people in power didn’t want to touch it lest they get their hands dirty.
This was true in the armed forces, corporate America, universities. And in the National Park Service. A friend of Anna’s had been raped; she’d been working seasonally as a fire technician. She’d been struck down and raped by an NPS employee, a permanent, someone close to the Assistant Superintendent. Anna and the woman’s parents convinced her to report it.
The rape was never turned over to law enforcement. Higher-ups in the park talked to the victim, offered to set up “mediations” between her and her rapist that they might learn to work and play well together. The rapist was not fired. The crime was treated as a spat between roommates rather than as a felony assault. NPS employees raping seasonals wouldn’t be good PR.
And maybe she was lying. Maybe she was exaggerating. Maybe she had it coming.
That was the unsaid, the way otherwise-decent men and women could refuse to help and still think themselves good people.
“Arthritis.”
Still limp as a rag doll, Robin was staring at Anna. “Arthritis,” she said in an eerie monotone a thread above a whisper.
Anna’d been cracking her knuckles and clenching her jaw.
“Thanks.” She shook out her hands and let them hang loosely between her knees. Bone and muscle ached. “Drink some coffee.”
Anna helped with holding the cup and raising it to Robin’s lips. “Not bad,” she said when only a tablespoon or two slopped on the ruined sweater.
“My mom made this,” Robin said.
The sweater was a classic pattern, deep chocolate with a band of white reindeer marching single file across the chest and the back. “It’s beautiful,” Anna said. It had been, before the wine stained the reindeer the creepy color of cheap stage blood.
Robin bent at the waist to take off her knee-high mukluks and fell over sideways on the bed. Anna made no move to help her till the young woman asked for assistance. Having set her back up in her Raggedy Ann pose, Anna unlaced the soft boots and worked them off.
“There.” Robin pointed at her sock-clad feet.
“What?” Anna didn’t see any damage. The socks weren’t wet and the skin beneath radiated body heat.
“Mom knitted my socks for my feet. They fit better than any other socks.”
“Wow,” was all Anna could say. “Beats baking cookies all to hell.”
“All to hell.”
Anna helped her to another sip of coffee, then took a drink herself. The long day was beginning to wear on her.
A tap at the door was followed by the pilot’s grizzled face. “More coffee?”
“Food?” Anna asked.
“Coming up.” The door snicked shut.
Another tap quickly followed. “Robin?”
Bob.
“Go away.”
Jonah brought them each a bowl of beef-and-pasta casserole and more coffee. The food fortified Anna, and the few bites she could be induced to take seemed to help Robin some. Finally she asked Anna to help her remove the wine-soaked sweater.
As the fire was banked and others went to bed, the bunkhouse stilled and cooled. At ten, the lights went out; Jonah had shut down the generator for the night. Had Anna been sure Robin was loaded on booze, and only booze, she would have let her sleep it off and been grateful to do so. As it was, she lit a candle and propped herself next to the biotech where she could nudge her awake for at least another hour or two till her system wasn’t so depressed.
To keep them both from falling asleep, Anna began asking questions. In the next ninety minutes, she learned that Jonah was seventy-three years old, Ridley’s wife was probably a bona fide genius, Gavin, Robin’s sweetheart, loved Proust and classical guitar and the early works of Andrew Wyeth, had wonderful hands and thought Isle Royale was America’s last chance at saving Eden, that Adam had been married but his wife had committed suicide, slit her wrists and bled to death in the bath while he fixed the sink in the dressing room not ten feet away, and that Rolf Peterson had great legs.
By eleven-thirty, the candle was burned to a stub, and Robin was waxing fairly coherent. Anna watched her get undressed and slip into her sleeping bag. Her clothes didn’t look as if they’d been messed with and there was no bruising visible on arms, back or thighs. Reassured, Anna blew out the candle.
Before she crawled into her own sleeping bag, she turned the lock on the bedroom door. Without the heat from the stove, the room would be cold, but at least she would know no one was watching them as they slept.
24
Anna had hoped to plummet deep into the land of Morpheus as her roommate had done. Sitting, talking by candlelight, it had been all she could do to keep from falling asleep midword. Now her legs twitched and her mind raced and she couldn’t get comfortable.
To stop the racketing thoughts, she focused into the night, hoping its deep quiet would creep into her soul. The bunkhouse groaned and popped in a satisfied manner as it cooled. Robin snored softly, something she never did sober.
Now that Katherine slept in a black plastic shroud on the floor in the carpenter’s shop, the room across the hall was empty. Anna could move in. It would be a simple matter of dragging her sleeping bag and pillow fifteen feet to another single bed and another bare mattress, but her usual need for aloneness had given way to the comfort of safety in numbers. Even if that number was two, one of whom was semicomatose.
Jonah or Adam might take the room. Adam, probably. When he was in the bunkhouse and not on the couch, he shared a room with Bob. Anna couldn’t figure out that relationship. Adam seemed to want to be Bob Menechinn’s friend one moment and showed nothing but contempt for him the next.
Bob, as the axman from Homeland Security, wasn’t in much of a position to make friends. Anna doubted if he fared much better when he was elsewhere, then wondered what it was about him that set her teeth on edge. When a person – or a situation – brought out a strong sense of unease, she’d learned to pay attention to it. A thousand “tells” were broadcast every minute: a tic, a wince, a smell, a shadow, a draft, a flick of the hand, a door ajar. The human senses experienced them all. The human brain registered them. The human monkey mind, clamoring with the shouting littles of life, was lucky if it recognized one or two. The message from the gestalt trickled down in intuition, gut feelings, geese walking on one’s grave, déjà vu. There was a reason or reasons she didn’t trust Bob. She just didn’t know what they were yet.
A shivering ululation cut into her thoughts, reminding her that she had been seeking to quiet their flames, not fan them. A wolf’s howl embraced rare magic; sound transforming into pure emotion, the kind that exists beneath the level of language. Train whistles had it. They touched a chord in the human breast that echoed a longing for things unknown. For Anna, the sound of a cat purring or the tiny thunder of their paws racing over hardwood floors had the power to cause instant, unthinking delight, but that might not apply to everyone.
Train whistles and wolves howling seemed to be universal in their ability to pass through the paltry defenses of civilization to the more fundamental primitive heart of people. Anna loved the sound, loved the pleasurable shivers it sent up her spine. At least until she remembered the wog, the pack coming through the housing area, the attack on Katherine.
Giving up on the idea of sleep, she slid from her sleeping bag and into Levi’s and a sweatshirt. It occurred to her as she completed this abbreviated toilette that, should an unfortunate incident befall her, she would be found without underwear, clean or otherwise. She’d be careful not to get hit by a truck.