Buzzing sounded in Anna’s ears. Flies. Kay had been unearthed no more than a quarter of an hour and the flies had arrived. A lousy bug could find a person in the bottom of a solution hole inside of fifteen minutes, and a zillion rangers had let Anna rot for a day and a half.
The smell from the body, faint when it was beneath a foot of bone-dry sand, had increased exponentially since it had been dragged into the light of day.
Anna’s arm ached from the tips of her fingers up through her shoulder joint; she was close to exhaustion and had developed a vicious thirst. It didn’t matter. After all of the digging up, she was going to have to rebury the woman. Unsettling as it was, Anna was going to strip her clothes off first. Naked and helpless for however long it had been, Anna craved Kay’s clothes, craved being dressed. Even a bathing suit top seemed like a suit of armor. Cutoff jeans promised a return to normalcy, a deformed twisted normalcy certainly, but Anna was quickly learning to take what she could get. The sandals, with their thick rubber soles and sturdy Velcroed straps, were the very embodiment of hope. If Anna did manage to crawl out of this pustule, she would need shoes to run away. Desert pavement was not as benign as it might sound.
The anklet with the sparkly KAY on it was the first thing she removed from the corpse. Should the murder ever come to light, Kay’s mother and dad might recognize it. The second was the bikini bra. It was a string bikini, two triangles of printed fabric to cover the breasts held up with strings tied behind the neck and down with strings tied behind the back. Kay’s breasts were considerably the larger, and where it had been revealing on the college girl, it would be almost modest on Anna.
She laid it out on the sand before she realized that she couldn’t put it on properly. She didn’t trust her arm not to pop out of its socket if she twisted behind her back to tie the strings. Paralyzing disappointment joined fatigue and raging thirst. Anna groaned long and low, sounding like a dungeon door opening into a B-movie chamber of horrors. Then and there she might have given in and given up had not the flies been landing on her, crawling about with their nasty little fly feet, wading through the sweat and the dust.
Flies were said to be subjects of Satan, the Lord of the Flies, but now Anna thought not. Evil, true evil, in her—and, more scientifically, her psychiatrist sister’s—belief, fed on despair, the kind that suffocates every glimmer of light and life beneath a cold so intense it becomes darkness. Flies, on the other hand, simply pissed one off. They set about pestering Anna back to life, annoying her back into her body and inspiring her to fight back. “God damn it!” she hissed, swatting at the nearest offenders. For all their apparent loathsome sloth, the flies easily dodged her blows. “Okay, okay, I’m burying her, as soon as she’s stripped. For God’s sake, buzz off !”
Anger brought energy, and energy focused her mind. With Kay’s unwitting contributions, Anna’s material estate had been much improved. Despite everything, she experienced a genuine sensation of wealth on becoming the heiress to a pair of old shorts, a bra, and beat-up sandals.
She crawled over to where the corpse lay on its side, rudely booted from its burial trough.
Kay’s low-slung cutoff jeans were held up by a worn man’s belt, leather, with a simple square brass buckle. Anna unbuckled it, slipped the leather from the belt loops, rebuckled it in the last hole, and put it around her neck. That done, she rested her left arm in the sling. Immobilizing the arm brought instant relief.
Deep in her trap, hungry and thirsty and afraid, Anna actually smiled. She was inordinately pleased with her crude sling. In her thirty-odd years she had had her share of triumphs, but at that moment they all paled in comparison to her satisfaction at having thought to use a belt as a sling, having executed that thought, and having found it worked. A tiny shard of her overweening sense of helplessness fell away.
Much as she might have enjoyed simply sitting in smug self-satisfaction, the flies again goaded her to action. The constant pain from her shoulder dulled, Anna’s mind began to work better.
Work had increased her thirst to the level of incipient madness. She allowed herself one swallow from the poisoned canteen, rinsing her mouth and gargling before she swallowed in the hope of maximizing the wet of the water.
Pretending she was refreshed, she set about unsnapping and unzipping the jeans, then working them off the corpse’s hips. As she jerked first one side then the other, lowering them by rude gritty inches, the top of Kay’s panties was exposed. They weren’t cute or sexy, no black lace, no thong, not even the day of the week embroidered on them.
“Oh jeez,” Anna breathed, her eyes filling with sudden tears. “I’m a fucking grave robber. Your last, best ghoulfriend.”
It would have been easier had they bespoken some debauchery, a hint of promiscuity. Anna would have settled for an indicator of vanity. There were none of these. Kay wore plain white Hanes underpants. They weren’t even bikinis, but the next step up on the modesty scale, hipsters. Simple white cotton panties symbolized innocence and purity. Absurd as that was, Anna felt its truth, and it jarred her humanity.
Still crouched over the corpse as if she might devour it, Anna looked away.
Panties—even used panties—were a terrible temptation. A woman wearing panties was braver than a woman with a bare bottom. Panties would protect vulnerable places from the incursion of grit. All in all, panties would be a fine and wonderful addition to her life.
Anna worked the shorts down to the corpse’s knees, then carefully tugged the white cotton Hanes back into place. Kay would meet her maker, if there was such a thing, with at least a semblance of human dignity.
Kay repaid the kindness. As Anna rolled her body onto its hip to make the final adjustment, the outflung arm, half buried during the frenzied excavation, flipped over and exposed itself.
Kay was wearing a watch, a cheap digital Timex, the kind that can be bought at Walmart for less than twenty dollars. It was working just fine. “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” Anna said. “Hey, Molly,” she called up the spout of her bottle, “it’s Wednesday, July twelfth, three twenty-six P.M.”
With teeth and fingertips, Anna released the watch from Kay’s person and buckled the stiff plastic band around her own wrist. Arm bent at the elbow in the standard pose of the time reader, she marveled at the confidence this small machine gave her. She wasn’t anywhere or anywhen, lost in a timeless limbo of days and drugs; she was right here on Wednesday at 3:27 P.M. Time mattered, every precious passing minute of it mattered. When all was said and done, time was all anybody really had. X amount of time between cradle and grave. The theft of it was the theft of life; the gift of it, more precious than anything on earth.
Watching the number in the last tiny digital readout window morph from seven to eight, Anna wondered how much time she had left. Allowing herself another swallow of water, she waited to see if she could feel the drug touching her insides. Maybe. Maybe when Monster Man topped it off the previous night he’d forgotten to add more of the knockout drug. Maybe it wasn’t as potent as it had been. Maybe it would be safe to drink more of it. Maybe she was just trying to rationalize drinking more. Anna felt as if she could drain the whole of Lake Powell in a couple of gulps and still be thirsty.
Whatever the drug was, it made her groggy. The night before she’d lost control of her bladder and then passed out. Rufies, the date rape drug? Possible. Her memory was compromised, that was for sure. Chloral hydrate? Downers? Sleeping pills? Anna’s money, had she had any, would have been on the date rape drug. Not that it mattered. She must drink or die.
She didn’t know how long the drugged water had kept her unconscious. Tomorrow, with the fabulous watch, she would know. Then she could imagine all the things that might have been done to her while she was out. More fun to be had with her brain. Unless she didn’t have a tomorrow in her future.
How much time did she have?
How should she spend it?
If you were going to die tomorrow—or tonight—what would you do? That question was a fairly standard party icebreaker. Anna had never had an answer for it. Everything and nothing. Now that she was faced with it, without a drink in her hand and a belief she had all the time in the world, she knew what she wanted most right at this minute. She wanted to get dressed.
Awkwardly, but with significantly less discomfort than she’d suffered before she’d fashioned her sling, Anna finished getting Kay’s shorts off, dragged up her own legs, and snapped around her middle. The cutoffs were too big. Without the leather belt they hung dangerously low on her narrow hips. Still inspired by success, she laid the bra on the sand and tied the strings in square knots, then eased the loops over her head.
The bikini top hung more like a bib than a bathing suit. Anna didn’t care. She had clothes on, just like a real person. It would have been nicer if they hadn’t been encrusted with sand and skinned off a dead woman, but being grateful for what she had was getting easier every minute.
The next hour was spent reinterring the corpse. Anna wanted it buried deep enough that the flies and the stink would leave her jar. Every fifteen minutes—Anna knew the time because, in an ecstasy of knowledge, she checked the watch every few minutes—she allowed herself a careful mouthful of water. These dribs and drabs did nothing to quiet the grate of thirst, but she was afraid to take in any more.
At 4:49 P.M. on Wednesday, July 12, 1995, the reburial of the murdered woman known as Kay was successfully completed. The flies left as they had arrived, first a scout or two, then the lot of them. The small part of the day when a globule of sunlight made it down into the bottom of the jar had come and was nearly gone. The golden lozenge was high on the curving wall, below where the neck crooked.
Anna watched it move incrementally up, striking beautiful tones of color from the striated layers. In New York, in the theater, she’d given the natural world little thought beyond the rats in the subway, the fall colors on the trees in Central Park, and the fresh flowers in the corner grocery stores.
The mean streets, she thought idly, feeling the drug in her, strong, but not yet strong enough to take her away. Streets could be mean, cities romantic or dangerous, deadly or ugly. That which people made with their hands absorbed human emotions, radiated them back.
Nature, she realized, was indifferent.
Anna thought of Shakespeare and Johnson, Edna and Emily, Jane and Anne, Ibsen and Albee, Simon and Molière, writers and poets whose winds raged, seas grew sullen, and a thousand other emotions rode in on the tides of their imaginations.
The truth was, humans needed the forces of nature to be invested with emotion because they could not bear the fact that there was something that did not give a flying fuck about them. Anna found this idea comforting. Indifference was clean and honest. Having been begrimed by that which was human, she felt safety in that which was not.
The last sliver of light slipped away, the final beam disappearing over the lip like the tail of a lizard. Anna’s thoughts tumbled down into the shadows where her body remained.
Night was coming and, with it, Monster Man with his thigh-carving equipment.
She decided she would take the chance and eat the other sandwich he’d left. If, indeed, the second waxed-paper package was a sandwich and not the fingers of children or dog turds. Keeping up her strength was important.
She would eat, then drink what she had to, but she swore to herself that she would do whatever it took to stay awake.