Descent

by Tim Johnston

  41

  The boy kicked off his boots and fell back onto the little bed and watched as a multitude of near-invisible bodies rose into the space above him. Dense nebulae coalescing into shapely whorls like the formation of stardust into stars and planets and moons. Himself rising bodilessly and traveling through systems of light and color and mass that he alone had ever seen and that were his alone to name. But in the next moment, or what seemed like the next moment, there was a sound, and the alien worlds dispersed as if in fright and he opened his eyes and listened, and after another moment it came again, a kind of cry. A single windy note, short and uncertain. It came at slow intervals and he thought it must be his father in the bedroom across the hall fashioning some new kind of snore in his nose. But then he realized it wasn’t coming from across the hall but from his own room, and he sat up and listened, and then he leaned and looked under the bed, finding only dust and the old floorboards. The sound, louder and nearer, came again while he was bent over looking. After a minute he pulled on his boots and trod quietly down the hall and out onto the porch into the cold dawn.

  He stood on the porch listening, his breath smoking. Then he went down the steps and got down on his good knee to look under the porch. Nothing there but packed dirt and a kind of smooth wallow, roughly lined by the remains of a once-red blanket. He dropped to all fours in the snow and crawled just under the porch to peer into the recesses of the crawl space, and when he was under there, waiting for his eyes to adjust, boots clopped overhead on the floorboards, the storm door hinges croaked, and boots came clopping down the steps.

  “Did we bust a pipe?” His father stood stooped in the light behind him, hands on knees, face upended.

  “No. The dog’s under here.”

  “She’s under there?”

  “I’m looking at her.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Looking at me.”

  “Why doesn’t she come out?”

  “I don’t know.” He called the old Labrador by name and told her to come on out of there. She made her whimpering sound and the boy said, “I think she’s hurt.”

  Grant came up beside him on hands and knees. “Maybe it’s her hips.” He gestured and called to the dog and she scrabbled forward a few inches on her forepaws and stopped and whimpered. Grant watched her. He surveyed the crawl space and the dirt and said with his eyes on the dog, “Think you can crawl back there?”

  They got the dog out from under the house and arranged her gently in the cab of the blue Chevy, and doing so the boy remembered the girl bleeding in the truck, and in his exhaustion he thought that that must have been something he dreamed.

  They climbed in on either side of the dog and Grant drove to the county road and turned west, away from town, and a mile later he parked in front of a white two-story farmhouse, pink in the dawn, and after a moment a stately white-haired woman appeared on the screened porch and called down, “Is that you, Grant Courtland?” and Grant called back, “I’m afraid so, Evelyn.”

  “I see you got your truck back.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Who’s that with you?”

  “He came with the truck.”

  “Don’t say? How are you, Sean?”

  “I’m fine, Mrs. Struthers. How are you?”

  Her head tilted back and she peered down at him from the height of the porch, the height of herself. “Mrs. Struthers is what my students call me. Were you ever my student?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I thought not. In that case call me Evelyn.” She held the door wider and gestured them up. “Come on, come up out of the cold and let me get some coffee in you.”

  When the old man came down, Grant said, “I’m sorry about this, Dale, I know you’re retired but I didn’t know where else to go.”

  “Oh, stuff,” said Evelyn, sweeping in behind her husband and going to the coffee pot. “Neighbors are neighbors.”

  Struthers regarded the back of her head, then turned to Grant and the boy and jerked his thumb at her, as if to say there was nothing more to say nor better way to say it. She turned and fitted a mug of coffee into his waiting hand and so armed he said: “All right then. Let’s see what you got.”

  Grant pulled the truck around and parked before a small red outbuilding, and he and the boy carried the dog inside and settled her onto the stainless-steel table. The boy cupped his hands and blew into them and the old vet said, “I’m sorry about the cold. I don’t hardly heat anything but the house anymore, and hardly that, cost of gas.”

  Cold as it was the air smelled richly of kennel and ammonia and pine.

  The old man set down his coffee and reached into the pocket of his white coat and put something under the dog’s nose and in one chomping instant the offering was gone. He placed his hands on her, playing them slowly through her fur, watching her eyes, frowning, pausing, moving on again and waiting for his hands and the dog’s eyes to tell him something. He slipped one hand underneath her and she gave a yip and swung as if to bite his wrist but only licked at it furiously. He reached into his pocket again and again she took the treat and licked her chops and watched his hand.

  “Way under the house, you say.”

  “About as far as you could get,” Grant said. “Had to send skinny under there to pull her out.”

  The three of them looked at the dog. The dog watched the vet.

  He sipped from his coffee and set it down again. “She’s got at least two cracked ribs under there. One is just about broke but not quite. I’d guess a horse kick right off. But of all the horse-kicked dogs I ever saw I never saw one got itself kicked from underneath like this. I don’t know what kind of horse could pull that off, do you?”

  Grant held the old man’s eyes. Then both turned again to the dog, as if she might put an end to speculation with her testimony. Grant stood in silence and the boy watched him and watching him understood that something had been discussed between the two men that though he’d been right here, was not available to him—as if he’d dozed on his feet, or blacked out.

  “Can you do anything?” Grant said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “For the ribs.”

  “There’s not a whole lot I can do for cracked ribs but wrap them up. And she’s old.”

  “Right,” said Grant. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning she’ll be a long time healing, if at all. And she’ll be in pain.”

  Grant nodded. “Is there something for that? For the pain?”

  “Sure, sure,” said the vet. “But.”

  Grant and the boy and the dog waited. Struthers took his clean-shaven jaw in his hand and worked it over. “I’m not sure she ought to be going back there, Grant, is the thing,” he said.

  “No,” Grant said.

  “I mean it ain’t my business . . .”

  “No, I think you’re right.”

  “And I can’t keep her here.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to, Dale.”

  “I’m just not set up for it anymore. And Evie can’t have an animal in the house for her allergies, never could, all these years. The Lord said no children and then he said no pets either, all you get woman is this old man comes in end of the day smelling of horse and dog and everything else.”

  “Seems to me she’s had plenty of kids, Dale,” said Grant. “Hundreds of them.”

  Struthers didn’t seem to hear this, but then he looked up from under his silver eyebrows and said, “Thirteen hundred and twelve.”

  Grant watched him.

  “She’s got ever last grade book going back to her very first class, year we were married. Takes them out time to time. Goes through them one by one, like picture albums.”

  “NOW WHAT,” SAID THE boy.

  “Now we go see a friend.”

  They were in the truck again, driving back toward town. The dog in her trussings nested between them, blinking drowsily as the painkiller found its way into her blood. The sun climbing the pines, washing the snowy boug
hs in a restless glitter. They came around a turn and Grant brought the Chevy to a stop behind a school bus. Flushed little faces in the rear window, too listless at that hour even to stick out their tongues.

  The boy got a cigarette to his lips and depressed the lighter knob.

  “Give me one of those,” Grant said. “I’m out.”

  The lighter popped and they took turns with it.

  “Are you gonna tell me what’s going on?” said the boy.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Grant shook his head. “Can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

  “Well, what do you think then?”

  “What do I think?” Grant flicked his ash. A young girl and a younger boy came out of a small clapboard house and made their way to the bus. The bus door folded open and the little boy stood stomping some last-second imperative into the snow until the girl nudged him and he hauled himself aboard and she climbed up after him. The door rattled shut and the stop sign clapped to and the bus rumbled on, towing the Chevy behind at a distance.

  Grant said: “I’m wondering if Billy didn’t do that to her.”

  “Billy.”

  “Emmet’s son. That’s his car at the house. The El Camino.”

  The boy looked at the dog. He watched the rear of the bus.

  “Why would he do that?”

  Grant drew on his cigarette. “I’m not saying he did.”

  They were silent. The little faces at the back of the bus watched them. The boy took a last drag on his cigarette and crushed it in the tray.

  “Yes you are.”

  They followed the bus through town and for another mile beyond that before Grant turned into the woods down a narrow drive where the snow lay brilliant and trackless between the pines, a small one-story house at the end of the drive, cornflower blue with darker blue shutters and a bloodred door. Grant made a space for the Chevy on what might have been the lawn so as not to block either of the Subaru wagons parked before the house, and when he opened his door the dog forgot about her injury and tried to stand and he placed his hand on her skull and said, “You stay here. Both of you.”

  He shut the door and the dog began to wheeze in distress for what she couldn’t see, and the boy spoke to her. “He’s walking up to the house. He’s knocking on the door. Someone’s at the window. The door opens. It’s a woman. Dark curly hair. It’s the woman from the diner, that waitress, I forget her name. She looks out and waves . . . I wave back. He steps inside and the door closes. Maria is her name. Maria Valente.”

  The red door opened again and Grant returned to the Chevy and got the dog halfway into his arms and the boy came around to collect the remaining half, and when they were free of the truck Grant said to put her down but hold her up, and the dog looked around in confusion until he told her to do her business, at which signal and without the appearance of another thought she lowered her haunches and released a long hissing stream into the snow.

  They carried her into the house and placed her on the bed of blankets Maria had prepared on the tiled entrance, and Maria squatted to stroke her head. Then she stood again and all three looked down at the dog. They were still standing there when the girl arrived from somewhere in the house, sock-footed and carrying a large backpack in one hand and a cell phone in the other. With the barest of glances at the two men she dropped the pack and sat on her heels before the bandaged dog and began to pet her.

  “What happened to her?”

  The dog sniffed at the girl’s bare knee. Licked it.

  “We’re not sure,” Grant said. “She might’ve got herself kicked.”

  “By what?” She looked up—she looked from Grant to the boy, and back. She seemed about to say something else but didn’t say it. She turned to the dog again, stroking her ears.

  “Poor Lola,” said the girl, “poor Lo.”

  The boy looked at his father, then at the girl again. “You know this dog?”

  She glanced up, her brow furrowed, as though there must be something wrong with him. “Of course I know her.”

  “She goes over there some Saturdays,” Maria explained. “To help with those horses.”

  They were all silent but the girl, who went on soothing the dog with her hands and her voice.

  Grant said he’d come by later with food for the dog and to take her out, and Maria handed him the key and he slipped it into his pocket. He said he’d find someone who could take the dog in for a longer time but she told him not to worry about that, that they would see how this went, and the girl said with finality, “We’ll take care of her.”

  Maria went to the kitchen to find a water bowl, and the girl stood and with a tug at her skirt turned and put her dark eyes on the boy. “I’m Carmen.”

  “I know.” He said his name and the girl said, “I know. I just didn’t think you knew mine.”

  “You were in my history class,” he said.

  “Briefly,” she said. “A brief history.”

  At their feet the dog showed her old fangs in a great yawn.

  The girl checked her phone, then turned and opened a closet door and withdrew a red woolen jacket and got into it. She dipped her white-socked feet into suede boots of a plush, primitive style, and bent once more to rub the dog’s ears. She hoisted the pack from the floor and called, “I’m outta here, Mom,” and Maria called back, “Okay, tesoro. Be careful on the snow, I love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  She gave Grant and the boy her smile, and then she stepped around the dog and opened the red door and for a bright instant as the morning sun found her she blazed in a red pirouette and was gone.

  WHEN HE AWOKE AGAIN the room was sun-swamped and hot and he lay staring at the large yellow blister directly overhead. Empty smooth eggshell of plaster shaped by a leakage long since moved on to some other course or else hunted down and stopped at its source. He listened for the sound again, the dog or the ghost of the dog restored to her foxhole beneath the floorboards. But when the sound came again it came distinctly through the pine door. Through the two pine doors shut to each other across the narrow hall.

  He got up and opened one door, waited, and carefully opened the other.

  This room on the western side would not see daylight until the afternoon and his father lay on the bed in the chill gloom, facing him. The blanket drawn over his ribs but his shoulder and arm exposed, bare and white, the arm hooked over a pillow as a child holds a stuffed animal. As a man holds a wife. When he spoke he seemed to be speaking to the boy, his voice as plain and clear as if he were asking the time. But his eyes, or the eye that was visible, was shut. The face slack.

  “What?” said the boy.

  “Where is she,” said the sleeping man.

  “Where’s who?” He took a step forward and the cold floor cracked and he stood still.

  “Where is she,” said his father, and he looked more closely. The curvature of eyelid trembling and rolling with the restless ball it held.

  He drew the blanket up over the bare shoulder.

  “She’s fine,” he said. “She’s safe.”

  He got into his jeans and T-shirt and stepped onto the porch barefooted and stood where there was no snow and lit the cigarette and sucked in the smoke and leaned against the post and blew the smoke out. Almost at once, across the way, an answering white cloud sallied from the porch of the house. He brought his cigarette to his lips and squinted. The old man would sit there in his rocker in the mornings with his hands clamped around a smoking mug. But the old man did not have brown hair hooked behind his ears and he did not leave the house T-shirted and barefooted even on the warmest of days and he did not smoke.

  The two smokers regarded each other across the way. They took another drag each, exhaled, and as the smoke tattered away in the cold the young man on the far porch raised his cigarette in a mannered way—princely, pontifical—

  and lowered it again.

  The boy raised his in answer.

  4
2

  Spring comes, even there. Or perhaps false spring.

  Snowmelt dripping from the shedroof and ringing faintly on the floors of tiny wells in the snow, frail airholes to the earth. Note upon hollow note. The shingled roof, bared to the sun, flexes and cracks like something coming awake. When she puts her nose to the peephole in the wood over the window, she can smell the heated sap of the pines beyond the glass and she aches with the feeling of spring after the long Wisconsin winter. The cinder track rising through the snow like a hot, primordial ring. She listens for the sound of water running, of snowmelt finding its way in thin cascadings, meeting, gaining mass and speed, churning for the far valleys, for the great rivers to the sea. But which sea?

  He is staying away longer. Days, sometimes. The food runs out. The wood runs out. She hoards her water. In the dull little mirror is the shape of her skull. No one is there.

  SHE KEEPS AT HER work, her diminished body pitched against the length of chain, milling halfway around and then back again, listening to what the links are telling her. On the surface of the steel plate, spanning the two thick welds of the ringbolt, lays a tiny field of dull glitter, winking and changing visibly every few passes with the addition of some new and sizable granule of steel or rust. The largest of them fall at the moment when the mated crooks of the bottom link and the ringbolt grind and fight and give way in a sudden twangy jump that makes her heart jump too with the momentary loss of resistance and the feeling, as on that long ago swing set, that the link has broken and she is about to go sailing, free, into space. Again and again, that deception.

  After one such twang so profound she must take a hop for balance, she stands in dismay when she finds the chain still taut, still unbroken at the ringbolt. Something breaks within her then and she begins to haul wildly at the chain, and it’s her own noise, she understands later, the torrent of curses upon the tormented chain, that causes her to miss the sound of footsteps outside in the crusted snow.