The Last Descent

by Jeff Soloway

  A couple stepped to the podium in tandem to deliver a poem too terrible to be written by anyone but them. I wanted to chop the microphone cord with an ax. Everyone was getting Jewel wrong. All we were hearing was a litany of Magic Moments with her—heavy on stargazing, campfire building, and late-night introspecting, but not omitting some of Jewel’s more inspiring urban escapades, which usually involved outfoxing cops, guards, train conductors, or media-company accountants. Several people had anecdotes of receiving transformative professional encouragement from her, usually in the midst of some kind of transit, in an airport or on a bus—when Jewel had time to kill. I tried to memorize highlights from the least platitudinous of these speeches for my story, but the words seemed to ding off my ears like bugs off a windshield. These people all assumed that Jewel would want us to dwell on the glories of her life, not her death. They were wrong. Her death was the most glorious thing about her. Because of it, her name and her most captivating photos had made all the Arizona and New York metro newspapers and USA Today, not to mention every activist blog, website, and Twitter account in North America. For three days running, she’d even been discussed for multiple minutes on the national morning chat-news programs. The Grand Chalet was defunct. The Greenbaums were fugitives, wanted for arranging the murder of Freddie Bridgewater.

  Jewel and Freddie had been vindicated. Before they came back up the trail to find me and Victoria, Doby and her rangers had used my instructions to track down the lying water meter, which was impaled in the dry dirt near a long-dead spring, miles from any water source—and still issuing phenomenal water-flow readings. The next day, Doby, as resolute in truth telling as in truth hunting, had gone public with the revelation of the scheme to hide the depletion of the park’s natural water supply. She even produced the names of the park employees who had signed off on the water meter’s installation, thus entangling the Park Service in the Grand Chalet’s conspiracy. Jewel’s death now bore a political meaning. She would have wanted her memorial service to serve a political cause, to spark outrage and organization, campaign and charitable contributions, career changes.

  But instead of calls to action we were given hymns of praise. Even those would have been bearable if Jewel could have heard them too. If only death had granted her a few hours’ furlough, so she could stand invisibly at the back of the tent. She had not been especially vain, but she’d been proud. She would have liked the speeches. I should try to like them too. In Jewel’s absence, the eulogists were only trying to comfort one another.

  I stood on my toes and shifted my head over the restless, heat-flogged crowd to try to get a glance at Dolly Rider, Jewel’s mother. There she was, facing the crowd in the podium-side folding-chair of honor, approving of every reminiscence and accepting every word of praise as Jewel’s surrogate. Jewel had been her only child. Jewel’s father was dead. Her second marriage had provided Dolly with money but was also long over. Today the hundreds of mourners gave her a vast extended family. Tomorrow a few of them, nieces and nephews, maybe a cousin, would still be around the house. In a week she’d be alone. I planned to talk to her. I had to try to give her something more than everybody else. I had to evoke her living daughter, not the trickster princess of these eulogies. But what could I say?

  The master of ceremonies, not Jewel’s best friend but her most theatrical, finally commandeered the podium and invited all remaining eulogists to stand down and add their speeches to the guestbook. The few indignant huffs were drowned out by the crowd’s general sigh of relief.

  Magda and I made for the receiving line. By the time we identified its end point, it had stretched outside the tent. I didn’t mind. I needed time to compose my condolences. It seemed stupid to depend on on-the-spot inspiration, which had let down some of the eulogists as badly as overpreparation had let down the others.

  I had met Dolly Rider several times with Jewel. She was thin, vigorous, and chatty. She had a weird and, to me, exciting habit of waving her hand before her chest as she spoke, as if to drive her words more quickly on. This tic, and much more about her, drove Jewel crazy, but Jewel was always able to suppress her grousing until her mother was gone. Since Jewel hated to suppress anything, I assumed she loved her mother deeply.

  We were getting closer. Some aunt was keeping the line moving. Dolly (short for Dolores? a name that fit her only today) was flushed with heat and emotion, so that the spots of rouge on her cheeks were duller than the surrounding skin. She clutched the arm of a niece, who, though slim as everyone in the family, was straight and stalwart with youth. As the line passed, Dolly’s eyes drifted from face to face but sometimes seemed to slip in the gaps and drop to the ground, until the niece pressed her arm, which somehow lifted her gaze and reactivated her smile.

  I kept just ahead of Magda. She liked Jewel’s mother, but I knew it would be hard for her to speak in the middle of this scrum. I would speak first, leaving room for Magda to add to my speech if she chose, or launch her own, or just second my words with her smile.

  Almost there. I had so far thought of nothing to say. How could I penetrate the woman’s bewilderment and devastation? My praise for her daughter would have to be earthbound, oblique, funny. Maybe I could drop in a little joke about Jewel’s relentless style of arguing, leading to a more solemn tribute to her ability (unusual in the politically committed) to appreciate counterarguments. Jewel had always left herself room to retreat and even to reverse herself. On the other hand, maybe Jewel had never let her mother win an argument. Perhaps instead I should recall, with the exasperated affection a mother would understand, Jewel’s well-earned self-confidence. But hadn’t that got her killed? Or maybe her love of self-searching. What was it that had made Jewel so memorable?

  It was our turn. Dolly Rider looked up at me and smiled vaguely.

  “I’m Jacob,” I said.

  “I remember.” The smile firmed up, but the words felt like an admonition. I opened my mouth and was unable to speak.

  Magda rescued me. “Jacob’s got a contract to write about Jewel for Outside. Can you believe it? He’s not done yet, but he showed me some of it. It’s brilliant. You knew how brave she was. Now everyone will.”

  “I can’t wait to read it,” Dolly Rider said, and pressed my hand between her fingers, which were warm and moist from so many other hands.

  Now was my time to speak.

  “I miss her already,” I began. I took a deep breath. Then I burst into tears, feeling as helpless as a baby and at the same time foolish, as no baby has ever felt.

  Jewel’s mother immediately drew me into her arms. I tried to apologize and found I was unable to speak. I buried my face in her shoulder.

  I hadn’t expected that at all. My emotions had staggered me before but never so completely kicked out the legs from under my brain. But as I walked away, red-faced, wet-eyed, thanking her as I went, I didn’t regret my collapse. The vigor I remembered in her had returned to her body as she consoled me. Her smile, as she broke away from me, had been bright with sympathy for me and pride in her resilience. She needed people to console every day of her life. I felt better not just for having provided her with the opportunity but also for having seen this trace of Jewel in her.

  Suddenly I knew what my story needed—a successor to Jewel, a survivor. Grant was right about one thing. Nobody loves a political tragedy, however noble the cause behind it. After a disaster, people need the consolation of a redeeming triumph, led by new champions taking up the work of the old. Jewel’s story had not one but two surviving heroes. I just had to find them.

  —

  Meat and Kevin had disappeared. According to Doby, who was also trying to track them, their car had been found in a dirt parking lot beside the barely used town playground. Its windows were smashed and the glove compartment torn open, but the radio was untouched. Doby was afraid that the Greenbaums, before they fled, had sent one of their men after them, someone more competent than Miguel and Grayson. He could have waylaid the car, forced them to pull over, gra
bbed the two brothers, and sunk the bodies in Lake Mead. Greenbaum’s men were known in Las Vegas for such maneuvers. No blood or any other trace of a struggle was found within the car, but Meat, I knew, would have followed orders, with Kevin’s life under threat.

  Their prefab in Camper Village had also been broken into. None of Meat’s activist acquaintances had heard from him. Doby had assigned rangers to check local dumpsters for bodies.

  I called the few people I knew in the area. Magda, who was always professionally sociable, helped me with phone numbers. Claudia picked up—job seekers usually do. She had heard that Meat had fled to California but couldn’t remember who had told her. A lot of tales had been flying around the Grand Chalet in its last days. The free-for-all had started as soon as I left. Food stores were raided, even the snack machines. All the balls went missing from the bowling alley. One of their passenger vans had turned up on a roadside near the Phoenix airport. The security people were the first to abandon their jobs.

  Marlene failed to answer several calls and texts, presumably on the advice of Grayson’s lawyer.

  Next I tried the northern Arizona environmentalist community. Everyone I contacted responded. Activists, in general, like nothing better than being cold-called by journalists. Many of them had known, or at least tussled with, Freddie, and a number of his antagonists were reevaluating their opinion of him. Since the Grand Chalet’s implosion, video of Freddie’s “Blood in the Canyon” stunt was as ubiquitous online as images of Jewel’s face, which it often accompanied in articles. It was good politics to have been Freddie’s friend. But no one claimed to have seen his brothers.

  I even wrote to Jeannette, hoping that Google might be beta-testing special new people-tracking resources. If so, the project was too top secret for her to know of or reveal. She did mention that Brian Blackpool had, at her suggestion, checked into rehab. That he was taking her advice implied that they were more intimate than I would have guessed or recommended, but Jeannette liked her projects. In that way, she reminded me of Jewel.

  Claudia’s rumor was my best hope. I remembered that Meat had mentioned Santa Cruz as a possible refuge from Tusayan’s dreariness. California made sense for him. It was a traditional hotbed of radical enviro-activism and ground zero for the most punishing drought in decades—the perfect combination for someone with Meat’s activist experience. It also offered a target-rich environment of Big Agro water hogs, plus more pay-the-rent day jobs than Arizona. (Not to mention redwoods and bears.) I googled with a new geographic focus and still found no hint of the brothers. The problem with people like Meat—wanderers, apartment sharers, government mistrusters, service workers, scrupulous avoiders of LinkedIn and Facebook—is that they escape even the Internet’s notice.

  I might have given up the search if Victoria hadn’t texted me. She said she had news about the Bridgewaters. She wanted to meet me at McSwiggan’s.

  —

  I hadn’t seen her since that day in the Grand Canyon. Doby had left two rangers behind to sort out Grant’s removal and ordered the third to take Victoria back up the trail. Doby herself escorted me back. On the way, I emptied myself of the whole truth, including Victoria’s long toss of my unpermitted gun. Doby went silent for two switchbacks straight. The wind had died, the shadows were growing, the temperature dropping. I could hear nothing but my own heavy breaths. Finally, she declared that Grant might have accidentally discharged his gun and stumbled off the trail. She would listen to Victoria’s story back in her office but expected she would say the same thing.

  “Will you arrest her?” I asked.

  “Depends on what she tells us.”

  I stopped, and not just to rest knees, thighs, and lungs. Victoria would never confess. She would go unpunished. The only evidence against her was my testimony, which would be easy enough to undermine in court. If I had recorded our conversation on the trail, there might have been a case. It was just as well I hadn’t. Grant’s punishment was enough justice for me. Beyond that, all I wanted was never to see Victoria again.

  But as soon as I read her text, I changed my mind.

  Jewel’s death was continually changing me. Writing about it meant that I was always thinking about her. There was so much to consider. All the statements I’d gathered from friends, colleagues, and even her own interview subjects; all the facts of her life I uncovered; every personal memory I dredged up for inspection—every piece of information had to be classified, pondered, judged. Every word she’d ever said to me could contain some truth that would help clarify the meaning of her story. I thought about Jewel as often as I had once thought about Victoria. My contract with a prestige magazine (mid-high four figures!) had rendered Jewel’s death the opportunity of my lifetime—an unpleasant notion, but undeniable. The assignment gave me a purpose. But it also forced me to compare my life to hers, and my potential to what hers would have been.

  Was Jewel’s death changing Victoria too? She now had to reckon with her total moral collapse—which many of us suffer but few are forced to face so pitilessly—along with the destruction of almost every comforting element of her daily life: her partner, her economic security, her routine. All she had left was her teaching job. She would need a purpose, like I had. What could it be? Perhaps, to start, she intended to make amends.

  At McSwiggan’s, Glyn pretended not to know us. Our last time here, Grant had stayed behind at the bar while Victoria worked her con on me in Prospect Park. Knowing Grant, he had probably drenched Glyn with praise for his wife. Perhaps she was now disgusted with Victoria and me. The combination of funky tattoos and traditional morals is not unknown in Brooklyn.

  Victoria had already gotten herself a vodka and cranberry, probably so there would be no question of one of us buying drinks for the other.

  “Marlene told me you’re looking for Meat,” she said.

  “I just hope he’s alive.”

  “He’s fine. His brother too.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I talked to him. I have his cell number. I’ll give it to you—but first you have to answer a question.”

  This didn’t sound like making amends. “Why should I make a deal with you? Don’t you owe me?”

  “It’s not a question of whether I owe you. It’s a question of whether I’ll pay.” She took a long pull at her drink until it was nothing but pinkish cubes of ice.

  Her coldness didn’t fool me. Her cheeks were shadowed, her eyes sunken and blinking, her fingertips trembling around her glass.

  “What’s your question?”

  The gentleness of my tone seemed to unsettle her. “Look. This is the last time I’ll ever bother you. I have no right to ask a favor. I get that. But I have to anyway. So. Our last night together. In the hotel. Remember?”

  “Of course.”

  She looked not at me but down into her drink. The ice hadn’t even had time to melt since her last attack. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

  “Go on.”

  “Were you really in love with me, like you said, or were you just trying to get the truth out of me? I’m pretty sure it meant something to you. But what I can’t figure out is what it meant. Was it just—what do they call it—a hustle? I could never use my body to lie like that. But you’re different. You’ve lived more. Maybe you could. So did you? Either way, it’s fine. I deserved it. I just want to know.”

  She kept staring into her drink, not daring to meet my eyes. I almost laughed. That she would suspect me, after all her tricks…But of course I had always had my own secret suspicions and misgivings, my own private purposes. Maybe she thought everyone’s inner fears were as dire as hers, everyone’s fantasy schemes as savage. Her very ruthlessness was a kind of naïveté.

  “You can’t imagine what I went through that day,” she said. “I got back from a trip with the writers and learned that Freddie Bridgewater’s body had been found. Then you wrote me you were hiking the Hermit Trail, and I heard Grayson and Miguel were going after you. Some other security
goon had been asking where Meat lived and what kind of car he was driving. I thought you were going to die like Freddie. I shouldn’t have called Doby, but I decided I had to change, I had to be better. And then that evening you came back and everything was going to work out. They’d blame Freddie for Jewel’s death, or Miguel, it didn’t matter. We were all going to live, all three of us, you, me, and Grant. I asked you up to my room. You agreed. It wasn’t what I expected, it was better. And then you had to go talk to Grant and it all went to hell, just like that. So tell me. What were you really doing up in my room?”

  Her thin face and nervous fingers had drained me of any remaining desire for revenge. I no longer wanted to hurt her. But the truth was too humiliating.

  “I’ll tell you,” I said. “But not now.”

  “When?”

  “Come to me in ten years,” I said. “Not before then. Teach your classes, help your students after hours, pay your debt—”

  “To you?”

  “To Jewel.”

  She frowned into her drink.

  “To Jewel,” I repeated. “If the question still matters to you after ten years, find me and I’ll tell you the truth.”

  “Why do I have to wait?”

  “I want to see what you make of your second chance. That’s the question that matters to me.”

  “I wish it did to me.”

  She sighed and passed me one of Grant’s old business cards with a cellphone number written on the back and the initials MB.

  “Where’d you get it?” I asked.

  “I always had it. Grand Chalet security database. Sorry.”