Long after the Candors and Heckle and Jeckle, as Regis dubbed them, had gone to bed, Jenny sat on her porch and smoked. Her erstwhile roommate had been an odd duck, but Jenny had taken to her right off. That was not the usual for the Gorman girls. She and her sisters had to get used to people by degrees, ever wary for signs that they were untrustworthy or cruel or snitched food or lovers. A legacy from their parents.
Jenny didn’t often think of her folks. It wasn’t that she hated them. Mom and Dad Gorman weren’t evil; they’d never yelled or raised a hand to any of their five daughters. They weren’t drunks or pedophiles. They were wilting flower children, embracing tune in, turn on, and drop out with the younger generation. They made promises they didn’t remember to keep, left bills unpaid, forgot to pick up the children at school, spent birthday money Gramma and Grampa gave their daughters on things for themselves, always with the promise that they’d “pay it back with interest.”
Then, when Jenny was twelve, Jodie eleven, Jessie fourteen, Jean six, and Jenna two and a half, Mummy and Daddy got in the car to go see Terms of Endearment and didn’t come home for three years. Two weeks before Jenny’s fifteenth birthday they’d waltzed into Gramma’s kitchen streaming beads and skirts and hair and were hurt to find out nobody much gave a damn. Baby Jenna didn’t remember them, and even Jean was a little vague. Jenny and her other sisters remembered too well to believe in them anymore. They remembered too well to believe in anyone who was not yet tested and proven to be reliable.
How had the adorable little Pigeon fluttered so effortlessly through these defenses? Jenny wondered. Lust? As she watched cigarette smoke curling in the still air, drifting in a cloud across the fingernail of moon, she pondered that. What there was of Anna Pigeon was “cherce,” as Tracy had said of Hepburn. The long red-brown hair was a definite turn-on, as were the high cheekbones and clear hazel eyes. Her ears were small and neat and close to the head. Her nose was a perfectly respectable nose. If she smiled she might dazzle. A girl could do worse for a bedmate than Anna Pigeon. Customarily Jenny’s taste ran to the more lushly upholstered type. Ms. Pigeon’s clavicles stood out like a coat hanger, and her scapula could pass for wings when she stretched her arms back. Jenny always joked, to sleep with a skinny woman would be like sleeping in the knife drawer.
The joke was on Jenny this time. Fortunately, Ms. Pigeon had flown the coop before Jenny could get cut too bad.
Anna’s darkness had been part of the appeal, she had to admit. The woman walked in a cloud almost as visible as the dust that hung around Pig-Pen in the cartoons. Jenny was a sucker for stray kittens, wounded mongrels, meth-addicted girlfriends, and down-and-out boys. Anna definitely had the wounded bird syndrome going for her. Another lure was her mystery; she never said word one about the gigantic cross nailed to her skinny back.
Jenny ground her cigarette out on the side of the porch, tucked the butt into her plastic bag, said good night to Pinky Winky, the pink pygmy rattlesnake that lived between her duplex and the Candors’, and took herself in toward bed. Without Anna to shoulder a share of the work, tomorrow would be a long day in the Fecal Realm. Year eight of her reign as the Fecal Queen.
Her anointing came her third season when there was a most unfortunate spill of some sixty gallons of collected waste she was hauling in her boat.
For the most part houseboats had their own privies. Unfortunately a lot of them filled them up, then dumped them in the lake.
As counterintuitive as it was, Lake Powell, the barren wife of a dam where Gaia never meant a dam to be, needed gray water. Waste put nutrients into the lake, helping an ecosystem that had not had time to evolve. The lake was long and deep, five to six hundred feet in the main channel; she could take a lot of abuse. The problem was the beaches. Any beach where a boat or a Jet Ski could anchor, visitors camped and picnicked and pooped. Some thought they were being ecologically enlightened by cat-holing, but the level of the lake wasn’t static. Boats and wind kept it sloshing like a washing machine. Water came up, uncovered the catty little deposits, and dragged them into the reservoir.
Warm-blooded animals, including humans, carried fecal coliform bacteria (FC) in their digestive tracts, along with the pathogens that went with it. Off high-use beaches, where the water was shallow and warm, there were often 400 FC “colonies” per 100 milliliters of water. Anything over 200 FC per million was unsafe for swimming.
Every two weeks for the past seven seasons Jenny had taken water samples from the most popular beaches. Any beach that came up unclean was closed until she had two consecutive samples with an FC below 200. This had worked until visitation reached five million annually. More beaches were closed more often, and visitors howled.
In two years it would be mandatory that all overnighters carry Porta Potties. During those two years of easing from cat box to Nirvana, Jenny would clean the beaches, and gather water samples for the lab. New this season, and most important, it had become her job to educate the visitors in the niceties of proper pooping protocols so that when the rule was enforced the public outcry would be minimized.
Because Jenny didn’t have the power to write tickets—or the gun to back it up—she was often teamed with Jim Levitt, a law enforcement seasonal. One wouldn’t think discussing toileting practices could get a girl shot or manhandled, but Lake Powell’s visitors were rich—many were über rich, the kind that can pay ten thousand a week for a houseboat and another three thousand to put gasoline in it. The kind that don’t take kindly to anybody making less than they pay their maids telling them what they can and cannot do on their vacation, in their lake, on their beach, in their world.
Jenny’s secret to compliance was pretending she was married to Aristotle Onassis and educating the hoi polloi was simply an obligation of noblesse oblige. When that failed it was good to have a large man with a big gun beside her.
Thinking of guns and bozos, she reminded herself to check the grotto at the tail end of Panther Canyon. A party boat of major übers had camped there, so many college kids per square inch it was a wonder the houseboat was still afloat. Their barge had a bathroom—a bathroom, as in one bathroom. With that quantity of booze, bladders, and bowels, they would most definitely be exhibiting poor litter box habits.
There would be many “interpretive moments,” educational opportunities.
There would be pounds of human waste.
Lord, but she was going to miss Anna Pigeon.
This was the first season she’d had a full-time seasonal position under her. Anna Pigeon. Mystery woman, wounded bird, waist-length red hair, rich hazel eyes: Jenny went over the litany of attractions as she brushed her teeth. To it she added the one that had first captured her heart, Anna’s willingness to do hard dirty work without complaining.
Jenny loved meeting new people, preaching ecological concepts, selling the idea of sustainable wilderness, living out of doors, taking water samples, and sleeping on the beaches. Since the unfortunate incident that had earned her a regal title, she did not love cleaning up human waste. Anna was a gift; she actually preferred shoveling shit to interacting with her fellow men and women.
Though it was clear boats, water, docks, and about anything else in Glen Canyon was alien to Anna, she was quick to learn and a natural at handling lines. She moved with an economy and efficiency so complete it was as graceful as a dance. On the one occasion the weather came up quick and bad, and the lake was set on pounding them into bags of bone and pureed meat, Anna was daring the goddess of the lake to do her worst.
Jenny was convinced a quiet camaraderie had been growing up between them. A respect. Admiration. A deep and abiding affection—
Don’t push it, she thought as she spit in the sink.
Anna was gone.