Descent

by Tim Johnston

  They’d sat watching the bird.

  Do you believe it? Grant had said.

  Believe what?

  That a person can come back.

  Emmet had set his boot down from his knee. Sipped his beer. Raised the opposite boot to the opposite knee. At last he said he didn’t know if he believed such a thing in any religious kind of way, if that’s what Grant was getting at, but he said his wife had been the one true thing of his life and when he looked out on this land and saw that bird setting atop it that way, well. He blew as if expelling smoke from his lungs. I believe a man is likely to surprise himself with what he believes. Don’t you?

  Now the bird pushed off and beat its wings twice and rode them south along the piney ridge, and the men were quiet and the dog slept, and into the heart of that calm there came a sudden piercing sound—a high, sharp whistling that sliced through the screens and made Emmet duck in his rocker as if struck to the back of the head. They both turned and found the whistler standing in the door, in the screen, lips pursed, looking from man to man. After a moment he turned the latch and brought the shrill notes out onto the porch.

  “Quit now, by God,” Emmet said.

  The whistling ceased midnote and Billy stared at him. “You don’t like that tune?”

  “That wasn’t no tune I know.”

  “That was Hank Williams, Pops. Here, listen.” He stepped between the rockers and turned to face the men. A tall, lean young man in a black leather coat and crisp white shirt. Dark hair stashed behind his ears and a small tuft of beard clinging to the underside of his lower lip. The coat was of a sporty cut and creaked when he moved.

  “No, now, stop,” Emmet said. “You are painin my ears.”

  Billy stopped, one hand paused in the air, a longneck beer bottle swinging in a noose of finger and thumb. He turned to Grant: “All of a sudden he hears like a bat.”

  He sat on the railing and crossed an ankle over his knee in a mirror image of his father and began to jitter a black cowboy boot as if it were something they should all watch. His eyes appeared very blue in the twilight. He set his beer on the rail and got out his cigarettes and shook one up to his lips and began to put the box away but then gestured it at Grant.

  “No, thanks.”

  “You quit?”

  “No, just holding off a bit.”

  “Ah,” said Billy. He dropped his boot down from his knee and straightened out his leg so as to snake two fingers into his jeans and said around the cigarette: “So how’s tricks, Grant? I was wondering if you were still around.”

  “Still around, Billy. How’s tricks with you?”

  “Holding down the old fort over there, are you?”

  “Just till the landlord kicks me out.”

  “Ha,” said Billy. He uncapped a silver Zippo and spun the flintwheel and lit his cigarette and shut the cap again smartly. He blew smoke in the direction of the old ranch house and said, “I hope you like it cold. A man will piss icicles of a winter morning over there. And then what happens the second he moves out? They build themselves this overheated Ramada Inn over here.” He recrossed his leg and jiggled the boot in the air. The lighter moved restlessly in his fingers, silver, then blue-violet, silver again.

  “Don’t you believe it, Grant. He’s had that whole house all to himself whenever he wants. Him and his friends.”

  “Used to,” said Billy.

  Grant sipped his coffee.

  “What is the matter with you, son?” Emmet said.

  “You’re welcome to it, Billy,” Grant said. “I can make other arrangements.”

  “What? Hell, I don’t want in there. I don’t want nothin to do with that place.”

  Emmet shook his head and looked away. Billy drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke thinly.

  “Those are good-looking boots, Billy,” Grant said.

  Billy held his foot still. He aimed the pointed toe at the porch ceiling.

  “I took them off a man down in Denver thought he could play nine-ball. A fool and his boots are soon—hey,” he said, looking beyond Grant, “there you are, girl. Come on over here.”

  The dog lay in the shadows watching him. She looked at Grant.

  “Don’t look at him, come here.” Billy pinched the cigarette in his lips and spanked his thighs and the dog rose slowly and went to him, her head low. “You don’t remember how to come when you’re called?” He took her head in his hands and shook her.

  “Let up on her,” Emmet said.

  “Aw, she loves it. Don’t you, Lo, don’t you, huh? We used to wrastle like goddam alligators.”

  “She’s too old for that now.”

  Billy stood and removed the cigarette from his lips. “Damn it, Pops. Don’t you think I know my own damn dog?”

  Emmet stared at him, then looked away.

  Billy picked up his beer and tipped it back, the sharp knob of his throat working until the bottle was emptied.

  “All right then,” he said. “Can you loan me a few bucks, Pops?”

  “What for?”

  “What for. So I don’t starve. All I got is eight bucks and a check I can’t cash till Monday.”

  “Why didn’t you cash it before you come up here?”

  “Because I didn’t, that’s why. Now can you loan a man a couple of bucks or can’t you?”

  Emmet pulled his billfold from his hip pocket and adjusted his glasses to peer inside. “All I got is a twenty.”

  “That’ll do.” Billy stashed the note in his shirt pocket and looked at the dog again where she’d resettled herself on the floor next to Grant. When he stared at her the dog pinned her ears.

  He began tugging at the patch of hair under his lip.

  “Well, Grant,” he said. “It’s good to see you again, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “Why would I mind?”

  “Why would you mind?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would you—?” He looked from Grant to Emmet, and back. “Because seeing you here means that that brother of mine still hasn’t found that daughter of yours, that’s why.”

  Grant looked at the young man. Held his blue eyes. The first he’d known of Billy Kinney was in the mountains, in those early days when they lived in the motel—the sheriff stopping by one day to say he’d be gone for the day, driving down to Albuquerque. Angela staring at the sheriff with eyes that held only one concern, one question, always: What did he know? It’s nothing, said the sheriff, I gotta go get my little brother out of jail, be back as quick as I can. It had stunned them—the first time since they’d known him that the sheriff had not seemed to be entirely theirs, devoted exclusively to their needs. They could not object, they could not blame the sheriff, but neither could they bear it, this abandonment, because within it was the message that, in time, the investigation, the manpower, the reporters, the world, would all move on.

  “God damn it, Billy,” Emmet said, leaning forward in his rocker, clutching the armrest with one hand. “What in the hell is the matter with you?”

  “What? Nothing’s the matter with me. What’s the matter with you? I’m just trying to be friendly here.”

  “Why don’t you go be friendly somewheres else?”

  “Jesus Christ, I didn’t mean nothin. He knows that. Don’t you, Grant.”

  Grant sipped his coffee. “We’ll see you later, Billy.”

  Billy looked from one to the other and shook his head. He flicked his cigarette into the dirt and went nimbly down the steps. A moment later the El Camino roared and a red stain of taillights spread over the dirt at the corner of the house. The tailgate came briefly into view and then lunged forward, throwing up red fans of dirt. They heard the car progressing down the drive, heard it idling at the county road, revving throatily, but there was no squealing of tires, and after a few seconds the sound of it faded away altogether.

  Across the way, over the doors of the machine shed, the automated farm light had come on, lighting up a scrim of grit in the air they could taste.
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  “I gotta say I’m sorry for that, Grant.”

  “No you don’t, Em. I got a boy too. He’s just young.”

  “He ain’t that young. And I’m too old. I was already old when we had him. I wonder if that’s why.” Emmet stared into his coffee. Grant stared out at the night. A bat dove blackly into the light to snatch a moth and wheeled away again. Soundless as a thought.

  “I’ll say one more thing,” said the old man. “Though I know a man ain’t supposed to say such things aloud. But if it come down to just one of these boys coming home, yours or mine? I’d of voted for yours.”

  10

  The truck, a long-bed blue Chevy, moved down the interstate under a low moon and the fading vault of stars. No crew cab, three years old, in good shape. No bumper stickers or decals. No gun rack. It held cruise control steady at 77 mph, two miles over, all its bulbs alight and nothing out of the ordinary but the out-of-state plate. The driver was heading north and if there was another passenger or any kind of luggage or possessions in the cab with him, these were stowed out of sight. Ten miles from the upcoming town on a steep grade, the Chevy swung into the left lane to pass a flatbed hauling a tremendous black stone, a monument of some kind, and then it swung back into the right lane again, and the silver SUV that had been following did the same and bloomed with flashing lights, red and blue, red and blue, strobing soundlessly in the dark predawn.

  The officer sat back there running the plates. In the truck, the boy squinted at the headlights in the rearview and pushed the mirror out of true.

  Out over the desert the moon had struck a black edge of sky, the flat of a mesa, and sat flat-sided itself in a field of stars. Tossed, unknown stars; a strange heaven. With his head half out the window he looked and looked, disbelieving, almost dizzy, until at last there was Pegasus, and from there the others: Cepheus, Cassiopeia, and Andromeda, the king’s daughter, chained to her rock. Naked, forsaken, watching the sea. He was not a great student but he had learned the stars. The idea that they’d been there, in their places, long before their names, long before the first eyes saw them.

  The officer, walking up, put his light on the boy’s face, and then into the passenger’s seat, lighting up a red roll of sleeping bag and a green duffel, the duffel incompletely zipped on a gray nest of tubesocks. Below the duffel on the floorboards sat a canvas carpenter’s bag with leather grips and a brass buckle fastened across the mouth. It looked full and heavy.

  The officer lowered his light and stood in the frame of the window, half lit like a moon in the beams of the cruiser. Under the hatbrim he was black-eyed and smooth-faced and he wore a black shiv of mustache. His jacket bore the insignia of the sheriff’s department but he was too young to be sheriff. He asked for the boy’s license and registration. He put his light on one document and then the other and then flicked it to the boy’s face again, throwing white pain into his eyes.

  “This your license, sir?” In his voice was that lilt of another land, another people, older than anything.

  “Yes.”

  “This says you’re seventeen.”

  The boy waited.

  “That correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long you been sucking on those cancer sticks?”

  The boy glanced at the cigarette between his knuckles. “Sorry?”

  “You the oldest seventeen I ever saw.”

  The boy waited. “How come you pulled me over?”

  “Failure to signal when you passed that flatbed. Who is Grant Courtland?”

  “My father.”

  “This his truck?”

  “Yes.”

  “He know you got it, way out here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean what do I mean? Does your Wisconsin daddy know you are driving his truck in New Mexico.”

  “He knows I’ve got it.”

  “But he don’t know where you’re at?”

  “No.”

  The deputy watched him. “What did you do back there?”

  “Back where?”

  “Wisconsin.”

  “Nothing,” said the boy.

  “You did something.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Yes you did. You left.”

  The boy kept looking at the deputy. No sound but the cruiser’s idling engine. After a minute the deputy leaned a little closer and lifted his face in a peculiar way. As if to take the boy’s scent.

  “Where you coming from, bro?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s twice you asked me that. I mean where you been at, before you come through here?”

  “I was in California for a while.”

  “California.”

  “Yes.”

  “What for?”

  “Sorry?”

  “What were you in California for.”

  “To see the ocean.”

  The deputy stared at him. “These are some poor answers, bro.”

  The boy waited.

  “You steal this truck from your daddy?”

  “Was it reported stolen?”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “No, sir. I borrowed it.”

  “You borrowed it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The deputy squared himself and glanced up the highway to where the truck’s shadow on the road reached long and thin for the dark beyond. His torchbeam slashed mildly up and down as if he were testing the flashlight’s weight in his hand. He told the boy to step out of the borrowed truck and go stand behind it in the lights of the cruiser.

  Dawn was coming, a creeping shade of violet in the east. The boy smoked his cigarette and dropped the butt and mashed it under his boot toe. The air smelled dryly of sage and juniper and rocks and dirt but it was a cold smell, and even without the cigarette his breath smoked white. September, he thought, early September. The seasons might be changing but they were not his seasons and he didn’t know the signs. He shuddered and tried to shake the pain out from under his kneecap. He’d slept a while at the rest stop, the sleeping bag as pillow, but then the cold and pain had got to work on him and he’d driven on.

  The deputy’s black eyes appeared in the rear window of the cab, above the passenger’s seat, and were gone again. Between the highway and a far mesa ranged a field of pale grass with the dark heads of chaparral rising out of it like the humps of sea monsters. Standing there not thirty yards away was an antelope, or pronghorn. Sharp corkscrew antlers, one obsidian eye fixed on the boy. The boy stared back, his own eyes aching, and he thought of the Chinese man leaning down, widely unlidding one eye between finger and thumb and sinking his needle light into the helpless ball, smell of rubber fingers, Hello, Sean, I’m Dr. Lee. White lights beyond the Chinese man’s needle light flooding in and then the sudden bomb of leg pain that sent all lights streaking like comets across his vision—and within the streaking lights was the car or the jeep-thing that had come out of the trees and locked its tires in the dirt, the yellow lenses of the man behind the wheel and the look on his face which was no look at all just his yellow eyes as the jeep-thing slid. And then the boy must have slept again because he woke himself talking. Answering questions when he became aware that he was answering questions. No feeling at all in his leg, as if they’d cut it off. His mother and father off to one side and another man looking down on him, big man in a sheriff’s jacket. Holding a sheriff’s hat in his hand, big serious face trying to look friendly.

  Good, Sean. You’re doing just fine. Now, I need you to do something for me. It’s real important. I need you not to tell anybody else who ain’t a lawman what you just told me. Do you understand? Anybody else asks, you just tell them you don’t remember a thing. Nothin about no sunglasses, nothin about no blanket, none of that. Do you understand?

  Everybody staring. Mother father Chinese man sheriff.

  Can you do that for me, son?

  “Step on back here,” said the deputy.

  The boy came up and glanced in the
window. Socks and T-shirts strewn over the unrolled sleeping bag and down on the floorboards, the canvas bag on its side with the gear tumbled out. The glove box gaping, all its junk stuffed back in as if to gag it. Don’t say it, Dudley. Don’t say a word.

  The deputy said, “What’s wrong with your leg?”

  “Is that it, then?”

  “You borrow those tools from your daddy too, in that grip?”

  “Some. Some are mine.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “My daddy come in the house one day to take a shit and when he comes back out to the garage his table saw is gone. Somebody borrowed it.”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  The deputy turned his face and spat.

  “Tell you what, bro. You don’t look to me like nothin but dumb white trouble, and I don’t want none of that anywhere near my town or on this highway even. You copy?”

  The boy gazed over the truck into the east where the dawn was coming. The stars and their kings and their creatures all swept away in the tide of light.

  Little brother, the man with the yellow eyes called him.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, “I do copy. But I need gas. I was planning on stopping for gas.”

  The deputy raised his beam like a great sword. “There’s a Shell station fifteen miles up the road, exit 151,” he said. “They got all kinds of gas there.”

  11

  February. The days dull and leaden and cold. Sitting at the dining room table head bowed to his homework when she came down the stairs and hushed by in slippers and housecoat stirring the air with her sleep-smell on her way to the kitchen. Watching her pour water from the filtered pitcher and stand at the sink holding the glass to her chest, staring out.