Descent

by Tim Johnston

  It’s steeper than she expects and her instinct is to lean back, but when she does so the tails of the snowshoes slip and ski. She shifts her weight to the forward crampons but feels she will pitch headlong over the snowshoes. Finally she turns herself crosswise to the slope and continues her descent in a series of deliberated steps, like a newly walking child on a staircase.

  It takes her five minutes, it takes her five hours. All she knows when she reaches the bottom of the dry wash is that she’s reached the bottom and there is no road. Here the stream when it runs spills into a broad wallow in the mountain where it either pools or else drains away in multiple smaller streams, none large enough to carve a recognizable path through the trees. No road. No truck. No wind here. No sound again but her own ragged wheezing, in which she hears some desperate note and says, Stop that, God damn you.

  And there comes an answer—a whooping cry from the woods. From far upslope. The far-traveling call of some great bird, announcing its greatness to the mountain, and it splits her open, this sound, and takes her heart in its claw.

  She turns to look back up the dry wash and there’s nothing but the white rising chute and the dark conical shapes that are its borders. Then, arriving out of the heights, there appears a dark falling thing on the snow. Black as night and gliding down. An immense bat of the woods. A black angel on skis.

  She takes two wild steps away and on the third the snowshoe doesn’t rise and she falls heavy and facedown into the snow. She kicks but the snowshoe won’t move, it’s snagged on something, gut-hooked like a fish. She tries to get her other foot up and around but can’t drag it through the weight of the snow, the weight of herself. Worse than that: she sends the signals to the leg and nothing happens, no response from the muscles. She begins to dog-paddle in the snow, trying to get herself turned over. Though she can’t see it she knows there’s a tree nearby—the sensation of needles raking her face as she fell, the piney smell of them is still with her. If she can get a hand on a lower branch she can pull herself out.

  She shoves at the empty snow, and twists, and manages to turn herself enough to see, over the edge of the depression, the last of his descent. Arms out and legs spread in flying rapture, riding the tails of his snowshoes. When he hits the level snow at the bottom, his crampons bite and he pitches forward, aloft, and lands in a sure-footed concussion of powder two feet from where she lies. In the darkness above her his teeth are brilliant.

  He squats down and puts a hand on her snowshoe and all her flesh trembles. She stares up into the steeples of the trees, the falling snow, with weird absorption. The flakes in their slow, distinct tumblings—the brightness and clarity of each one of them. They fall without care or intent, will go on falling no matter what. Her mind knows this, and disbelieves it, and is sick with it.

  You’re snagged on something under the snow, he says, breathing hard. Didn’t I warn you? He wrestles the snowshoe free and gives her foot a kind of rough toss. He looks down on her. This curious thing in the snow.

  You know what? I don’t believe you never snowshoed before. Nobody moves that good their first time. Damn. I about gave up. I puked up eggs and bacon three hours ago.

  Christmas Day, she remembers then. In two months she would be twenty.

  He shrugs off his pack and brings out his water bottle. Look at this—frozen solid! Doesn’t take long. He scoops a gloveful of snow and pushes it into his mouth. Works it around. Swallows. He glances about the dark woods.

  You’ve really done it now, haven’t you? We’re way the heck out here now. No tent. Too far and too dark and too cold to walk back tonight. There isn’t anything we can do but get under the snow and try to keep each other from freezing to death.

  He stares at her and she looks beyond him. The black-and-white patterns of the trees. The careless ghostly flakes. You got any ideas how we do that? he says, and she shakes her head.

  I do. Now give me your hand and let’s get you on your feet. I want to see what all you got in your pockets.

  No, she says.

  What’s that?

  No.

  Don’t tell me no, kiddo. He grabs her by the jacket and lifts her into a twisted, half-sitting position and holds her there—and then lets go, and she falls onto her side again. He stands and reaches down and takes her jacket in both fists and hauls the dead weight of her up and onto her back, where she sinks once more into the snow. He stands over her, bright clouds like fury erupting from his lungs.

  I could use a little cooperation here, he says, and a small voice in the dark says: Please. I just want to go home.

  What did you say?

  Please, says the voice.

  He looks into the black sky and fills his lungs and wails. There’s no other word for it. The sound tears away into the night and stops the small hearts of whatever small things hear it.

  He walks straddle-legged over her and drops to his knees, his weight landing squarely on her hips and sinking her more deeply into the snow. He takes glovetips in his teeth and pulls one glove off and tugs off the other and seizes the zipper-pull at her throat and jerks it down, opening her chest to the cold.

  Kiddo, he says. Don’t you understand you are home?

  His hands are up inside her jacket. They find the water bottle and slip it into his own jacket, then they pull up her flannel shirt and push the dingy sports bra roughly from her breasts. Steam lifts palely from her pale skin, rising and moving off like some banished layer of herself. He is talking but she isn’t hearing him, she is deep in the snow and within the snow is the gymnasium, and Allison Chow is on her left and Colby Wilson is on her right, and they are sitting in the wooden bleachers listening to the girl who’s come to speak to them, to tell them this story, and their eyes are wide as they listen, and their hearts are beating. But although they know that what the girl is saying is something that could happen to them, it hasn’t, not yet. It has happened to her, to this girl standing before them. To her, not them. And for that they love her, as fiercely as they love each other.

  Part III

  39

  When Sean appeared suddenly from the back of the station, emerging without escort through a steel door, his hair in oily disarray and a blond whiskering on his jaw—an older boy by far looking out from his blue eyes—Grant stood and rubbed his own jaw in an effort to keep the surging of his heart from reaching his own face. He put his hands in his pockets to keep them from reaching out and taking the boy into his arms.

  Sean came to him, and they stood looking at each other.

  “You didn’t have to come.”

  “Do you think I could not have come?”

  Sean sat on the hard bench and reached into the plastic bag he was carrying. After a moment Grant sat down too and watched his son feed the laces back into his boots, his belt back into the loops of his jeans.

  They were driven to the impound lot in the backseat of a cruiser, retracing the route the boy had taken to the station the night before, down the same frontage road where the Paradise Lounge still sat, squat and ugly and meaningless in the gray cold morning. Though the snow had stopped only hours before, already a layer of grit seemed to have settled over everything. The officer dropped them at the lot another mile down the road and wished them a good one and then drove off with his radio squawking.

  They reclaimed the key and crossed the lot toward the blue Chevy Grant had not set eyes on, like the boy, in more than a year.

  “I changed the oil every three thousand,” the boy said. “Rotated the tires.”

  Grant stripped a garish orange decal from the windshield and then reached into the truckbed and put his hand on the damaged tire. Finding the silver head of the nail with his thumb, he stood a moment touching it, as if he might divine from it all that had happened because of it.

  Behind him, the boy looked at the flat and wanted only to sleep and to sleep.

  They drove to a motel near the highway and Grant checked them into a single room with two large beds. He thought Sean would want to
shower, he suggested as much, but instead the boy sat on the nearest bed, pulled off his boots, fell into the pillows, and was asleep. Grant drew the curtains and peeled the duvet from the other bed and settled it over his son, then sat down on the mattress across from the boy. He sat in the dimmed room studying the shape of the boy under the blanket. Eighteen now, he was. The age she had been.

  After a while he wrote a note and placed it close to Sean, then retrieved it and went out the door to stand on the narrow concrete balcony. He seemed very far away from the mountains and the ranch and the people he had come to know: Emmet and his sons, Maria and her daughter. Farther yet from Wisconsin and Angela and the house where they’d raised their children; his onetime life.

  He inhaled the cold air with its highway tang of diesel, and lit a cigarette. He looked west into the wind until his vision blurred, and then he turned to the east, to the city’s low industrial horizon under the low pewter sky. Semi after semi droning down the highway toward the sky.

  WHEN HE RETURNED, THE sun was low in the west behind the clouds and the room was nearly dark. The duvet had been thrown aside, and at the sight of the empty bed his heart dropped for a disbelieving instant before he saw that the bathroom door was shut, before he saw the seam of light at the floor and heard the exhaust fan groaning away on the other side.

  He set down the grocery bag and opened the curtains and stood looking out at the highway in the gray dusk until the bathroom door opened and his son switched off the fan and stepped out. He wore a blue T-shirt and the same weary pair of jeans. The room filled with the scents of soap and shaving cream.

  “I didn’t think you’d wake up till tomorrow,” Grant said.

  The boy looked at him but saw only his dark shape before the window. He picked up his duffel and set it on the bed. “I don’t like motel rooms,” he said, fitting his things back into the duffel.

  “I gather that from the inside of that truck. Have you been sleeping in there this whole time?”

  “No. I slept out sometimes. Sometimes people put me up.”

  “If you’d asked, I would’ve sent you money. Or a credit card.”

  The boy zipped up his duffel, then stood and raked his damp bangs back with his fingers.

  “I bought some orange juice,” Grant said. “Cokes. A couple of sandwiches.”

  The boy got into his jacket. “Can we just go?”

  The Chevy was still warm and Grant fit the key in the ignition but did not turn it, and they both got a cigarette lit and sat with the windows half down, saying nothing, until the boy said without looking: “You want me to drive?”

  “No, I’ll drive.”

  The boy flicked his ash. “You were gone a while.”

  Grant looked over but the boy would not meet his glance.

  “I was looking for a place to get that tire fixed,” he said. “But it’s Sunday. Everything’s closed.” He took hold of the key, then let it go again.

  “Sean.”

  “What.”

  “Talk to me. We have to talk.”

  “What about?”

  “Sean.”

  The boy inhaled, blew sharply at the window. “What am I supposed to say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t either.”

  They both looked to the west, where the dropping sun flared suddenly between the clouds and the horizon like the eye of a great bird cracking open, round and blazing.

  “I only tried to help her.”

  “I know you did, Sean.”

  “How?”

  “How what?”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know you. Because you’re my son.”

  “Those aren’t the same thing.”

  “They are to me.”

  The boy sat without moving. Grant crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. After a while Sean did the same.

  “So now what?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you going back to the airport, or what?”

  “I don’t know. Where are you going?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Where were you going?” Grant said. “Were you going home?”

  “What home?”

  “Wisconsin.”

  The boy was silent.

  Grant said: “She’s home from the hospital, did you know that? She’s back at Grace’s.”

  “I know. I talked to her.”

  “When?”

  “Just after she got out.”

  “It wasn’t prison, Sean. She was there voluntarily.”

  “I know.”

  “She’s doing much better. She’s talking about teaching again.”

  The boy nodded. “That’s good.”

  Grant drew his fingertips along the dash, looked at them, rubbed the red dust with his thumb. “Do you want to go there now? We could put you on a plane. Or—” He didn’t finish.

  “Or what?”

  “Or we could drive there together. If you wanted to.”

  The boy glanced at him, and turned back to the sun. A tepid orange disk sitting exactly on the edge of the world as if it could go no further. It didn’t seem possible that the whole western half of the country lay before it and not beyond it. The mountains, the deserts. The wide plate of the sea, all waiting for their own sundowns.

  Without turning he said, “We can’t do that.”

  “Can’t do what?”

  “We can’t leave her there.”

  Grant said nothing. In his chest were two hearts, two thudding fists. One of these hearts beat with the memories of his daughter, and the other beat with the sight of his son before him. Each the more furiously in the presence of the other.

  He put the Chevy in gear and pulled out of the lot. He found the on ramp and accelerated up it and merged into the westbound traffic, into the lanes of cars and trucks and semis all racing toward the horizon as if they meant to catch it, as if they might go flying over it as if over a rise in the road, thereby forcing the sun back up into the sky, again and again, keeping it indefinitely aloft, the day indefinitely alive.

  40

  They drove the long midwestern state again, end to end, exactly as they’d driven it that July long ago when there had been four of them and everything, even Nebraska, had been worth looking at, and then had driven it again when Grant and the boy returned in the two trucks. Now it was just the two of them once more, in the single truck, and they drove at night and there was nothing to see but the same length of highway, the same median, and the same bleak radius of snow-blown nothing that came along with them and around them like a moving island they could not escape. Just outside of North Platte Grant stopped for gas and to use the restroom, and when he came back out Sean was still asleep, slumped against the door, against the roll of sleeping bag.

  Later the boy sat up and squinted into the oncoming lights and asked where they were, and Grant said they were just inside Colorado, and did he want to stop for dinner? Sean said Okay and they took the next exit, but when the waitress came to the counter in the overlit diner he set aside the menu and ordered only coffee.

  “That’s all?” said the waitress.

  “Yes, please.”

  “How about a little plate of hot beef sandwich? Folks drive from all over for the hot beef sandwich. I’ve got this old couple drives all the way from Sterling for it. Though I guess I would too if I lived in Sterling. And was old,” she slyly added.

  Grant told her that they themselves had driven from Omaha and the waitress cried, “Omaha!” as if announcing some appalling discovery on the floor. “What on earth were you doing in Omaha?”

  The boy looked to the window, which held only the reflection of the diner: himself and his father sitting there.

  Grant handed the waitress the menu and said they’d just been passing through on their way to the hot beef sandwich.

  When she was gone he said, “I thought you were hungry.”

  “I never said I was hungry.”

  “
I asked if you wanted to eat and you said yes.”

  “You asked if I wanted to stop for dinner. I figured you were hungry so I said okay.”

  “When was the last time you ate?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “What do you mean why?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  He stared at his son, his thin face, and for a moment he could have been just some young man in the diner, just off the road like himself.

  The waitress returned and filled their coffee mugs and went away again.

  “When I was fat everybody tried to starve me. Now they want to shove food in me I don’t even want.”

  “You were never fat,” Grant said, and the boy looked at him. “You just had some vertical compensating to do.”

  They got back on the highway and the boy drove while Grant slept. The night was clear and there was little traffic and he tracked a three-quarter moon as it overtook him on the left, cold and steady. In time this same moon pulled from the black foreground a luminous row of teeth, and he watched in bleary confusion before he understood what he was seeing, which was the first snowy reef of peaks, yet hours away, baring itself to the plains.

  Grant raised his head to see the mountains rising in the night, and they both found their cigarettes and sat waiting for the knob in the dash to pop. They gapped their windows and smoked while the cold night spooled in and whistled around them like a mad spirit. The boy thought of the jail cell, the hard cold stink of that place, and he saw the man from the adjacent cell like a projection on the windshield: his bloodshot eyes, his disembodied hands hung in space. I can see you ain’t no rapist, my man.

  He blew smoke and tapped his ash in the gap.

  “Do you think we’ll ever feel normal again?” he said.

  “I don’t know. What’s normal?”

  “I don’t know,” said the boy, watching the road, the mountains. “Not this.”

  A few miles on, Grant put out his cigarette and powered up his window and the boy did the same and the whistling stopped and the cab grew warm again. Don’t forget about the airport, Grant said, and the boy said he didn’t forget, and two miles later they took the exit for it, and they found the green Chevy in the sea of cars, and after that they drove the two trucks in tandem toward the lighted city.