Descent

by Tim Johnston

  “Where we going, Steve?”

  Fourteen miles beyond the exit, just short of the great tunnel that delivered travelers all at once to the far side of the Rockies—to entirely new weather systems, to the long, slow descent to the western deserts and the coast and the ocean—the Bronco’s signal light began to blink, its brake lights flared and it took the exit for US Highway 6 and the Loveland Pass. It crossed under the interstate and picked up speed again on the winding two-laner and Billy let himself fall farther behind, as there would now be no place for the Bronco to go but up to the top of the pass and down again on the other side.

  He took a switchback turn at its posted speed, the car slewing mildly, and when the road straightened again he checked his phone for a signal and found that he had one—a very scant one—and he entered a short text message and sent it.

  The road wound high into the mountains, into heavier snowfall and finally into a gusting chaos of snow like the white rioting heart of the storm itself, before cresting and beginning its steep descent into the valley on the other side. Down and down and the snowfall growing lighter again at the lower altitude and the mountain switchbacks cutting once, twice, and

  a third time across the Snake River before settling into an easier alliance with the river at the floor of the valley, both road and river turning according to the same geography, the same logic.

  He kept the radio off, wanting to hear nothing but the engine and the regular sweep of the wipers. The liquor had left him all at once, leaving him edgy and wishing for a cup of coffee. He asked himself if he knew what he was doing, and answered that he knew exactly what he was doing, he was taking a drive, that was all.

  There were no exits or even turnoffs for many miles. Then the posted speed limit fell, and another sign announced their arrival at a resort village, and the speed limit fell again and his heart lifted at other signs of organized humanity: the high shedroofs of the lodges, the Christmassy lights in the restaurants and shops, the cheering reds and greens of traffic lights. But there was little traffic so late in the season and when the Bronco caught the village’s outermost red light Billy knew he would have to pull up behind it or else draw more attention to himself. He was fifty, perhaps forty, feet away—the shape of the driver’s head visible through the rear window—when red turned to green, and signaling, the Bronco turned left.

  “Go on through and double back,” he told himself; but he was afraid of losing him in the grid of streets, and at the last moment he signaled and turned through the yellow and followed.

  The Bronco immediately turned left again, heading east along the rim of a large and nearly empty parking lot. Then it turned right onto a county road, which took them all at once out of the village and into the long mountainous valley to the east, and as there was no other traffic coming or going Billy let the gap between the cars grow once more. With his free hand he collected his phone and punched up and sent another text.

  The road turned south and the speed limit fell and Billy rounded a bend to see that the Bronco had come to a stop at a T in the road. The intersection had come up suddenly and there was no hiding, and if the man checked his mirrors there’d be no missing the El Camino behind him. Likewise when the man went one way or the other there’d be no missing that the El Camino had done the same, and so he hoped the Bronco would turn right, where a sign indicated the town of Montezuma lay, instead of left, where there seemed little incentive or encouragement for any single vehicle to go, let alone two.

  The Bronco sat idling at the T as if awaiting a break in traffic, but there was no traffic. The El Camino idling behind it. The snow drifting down.

  “Go left, you son of a bitch, I dare you.”

  The Bronco signaled left and turned, and Billy took his place at the T, signaled, and followed.

  HE CAME TO ANOTHER intersection a few miles on but the Bronco had not taken it, and he followed the tracks deeper into the range. The Bronco ignored two more turns and the road began to climb in increasingly steep cutbacks, as if here were yet another pass that would take them inevitably to another summit and another vortex of snow. But the snowfall remained light and the El Camino continued to find traction. His luck was holding, and he climbed another few miles toward the white ghostly peaks before his luck ran out.

  It ran out all at once, without warning, when the Bronco’s taillights disappeared, as though the car had gone off the road. Yet when he arrived at the place where the taillights had vanished he found no tracks careening from the road—found no road at all but only the sudden crunch and ping of loose gravel under him, and the road, such as it was, diving into the evergreens ahead.

  He pumped the brakes and brought the El Camino to a halt and sat looking into the trees. The mountains that lay above and beyond the trees were obscured by the trees themselves and by the fog of snowfall. He rolled down his window and looked out into the white emptiness of the gorge, the air thin and cold and pungent with the smell of snow and pine. He picked up his phone and sent a final text, then sat looking at the road ahead. Or what had been the road and which, but for the tracks, might have been just a minor clearing at the end of the road where the makers of roads, going back to men in wagons, had abruptly and inexplicably stopped.

  He tugged at the hairs below his lip. He thought of the set of tire chains back at the barn hung on their barn spike with the horse tack. He sat a few moments longer, sensing the rising dusk in the bowl of the gorge, in the shades of the pinewood. Then he said, “All right, son, let’s see it,” and he lifted his foot from the brake and drove on.

  52

  The road tunneled in wide swings through the woods and was not too steep, the snow not too deep, and he made good progress with the Bronco’s tracks before him. The road looped back upon itself, and on the far side of every loop he expected to see no more road and the Bronco parked before some ordinary mountain homestead, the man, Steve, stepping out of the car to the ordinary jubilation of dog and wife and children, and nothing for Billy to do but laugh and drive away. But around every turn there was more road, more trees, another turn, and no Bronco, and no house and no wife.

  The road narrowed as it climbed. Trees and scrub trees crowding in, low-hanging boughs lapping at the windows. If a man were to stop he could not turn around but would have to back all the way down and good luck with that, pardner. He drove on and the road grew steeper, a fact he could not see or feel but knew by the increasing slippage of his tires. He shifted on the fly into his lowest gear and pressed on more slowly, all his senses wired to the messages of the climb, and still the tires spun, the tail swinging drunkenly toward tree trunks, righting, yawing again the opposite way, and he understood with a rising fury that she would not make it and that he’d known she wouldn’t. He made one more bend, tires spraying a wet slag over the undercarriage, and with his fingers light on the wheel he worked her with all his skill but the rubber spun and the motor raced and there was nothing to do but stop and hope the car held. It didn’t. Brake, no brake, it would go back the way it came. He hooked an elbow over the seat and attempted to take the curve one-handed but he overshot it and the bed of the El Camino slammed into the sudden, ungiving trunk of a pine and went no farther.

  He killed the engine. He lit a cigarette and sat watching the snow mutely finding the windshield. Falling heavier now. The Bronco’s tracks were filling.

  He pulled the keys from the ignition and pocketed them and buttoned the leather jacket and collected the rawhide gloves from the glovebox, and then he reached under his seat and hunted down the bottle and took a swig. He reached again under the seat, groping deeper, “Come here you motherfucker,” the blow to the tree having sent it to the very back of the cab, and at last he felt it and tugged it free. He peeled away the black watch cap and put it on his head and checked to see that the gun, a nine-millimeter he’d bought off a man in Nevada, was loaded, the safety on, then he dropped the gun into his right pocket. He picked up his phone from the seat and put that in his pocket too but then to
ok it out again and left it on the passenger’s seat, centering it on the cover of a magazine. Finally he pulled on his gloves and got out.

  He took a few steps up the road and turned to look back. His car rested nearly abeam to the road so that any vehicle coming up or going down could not pass. He stood thinking about that, then dropped his cigarette into the Bronco’s track and continued on.

  The treadless cowboy boots he’d won at billiards sent him to his hands and knees, and sent him there again before he adopted a wider, splay-footed stance, digging the inside edges of the soles into the snow. By the time he reached the next bend, no more than thirty yards from the car, his legs were burning and his lungs felt pierced through by the thin air. He stopped, hands to knees, unable to curse for his wheezing and his wheezing the only sound made by any living thing on the mountain.

  Before him the road looked less a road than some wide chute carved out by falling rocks or by water or both, and still the Bronco’s tracks went on, and finally so did he, staggering on until he reached the next bend where he rested again. When he came to the bend after that and there was still no sign of the Bronco other than its fading tracks, he fell once more into his wheezing stance of rest and fought with all his heart the desire to drop to his knees, to his back, in the snow.

  The day was now all but gone, the sun fallen behind some distant peak. He judged that within a few minutes there’d be no light at all but the light of the snow itself where it lay on the trail.

  He glanced back down the mountain at the tracks of the Bronco and his own thin herringbone footprints between. He removed a glove with his teeth and found his cigarettes and the Zippo.

  “You got to the end of this to decide,” he said, and when he finished the cigarette he dropped it in the snow and went on, and he’d not gone very far before the tracks of the Bronco turned abruptly from the trail, plunging down into a deeper, scrappier woods.

  He stood at the top of this gully looking down, his heart thudding in his neck. He studied the trees for possible handholds and felt for the nine-

  millimeter in his pocket, making sure it was secure, and then he reached out for the first tree and stopped. There was a bootprint in the snow. Nearly as fresh as his own but not his own, the floor of this print waffled with good tread. It led to its left-footed counterpart, and he saw that the tracks had come up out of the gully and continued up the trail. He looked ahead and saw nothing in the snowfall but the white, snaking trail and the dark pattern of prints along its back.

  He looked down the gully once more where the Bronco was stashed, and he looked back up the mountain.

  “All right, asshole,” he said, addressing himself. “It’s a fair fight now.”

  HE KNEW BY THE clarity of the tread that the man’s lead on him was not great, and he tried to stare not at the snow but into the darker woods ahead so that his eyes would be rightly adjusted to see the man before the man saw him. But he never saw the man. He’d climbed another fifty steep yards of mountain when he saw to his right, or thought he saw, a wink of light deep in the woods, so faint that had he come by this spot only a few minutes sooner, a few shades earlier in the gradients of dusk, he would not have seen it at all.

  The man he tracked had seen the light or not seen it or didn’t care. His tracks had gone on, stamping their regular seal on the trail until both trail and tracks curved around a low rampart of boulders and passed out of sight.

  Billy stared into the woods where he thought he’d seen the light. He began to believe he’d not seen it at all, that it had been some trick of the high altitude, of the mixed fuels of exhaustion and adrenaline. Then he saw it again, far back through the trees, dully orange and faintly guttering like a candle orphaned in the woods, and on nothing more than the lurching of his heart at the sight of it, he abandoned the trail and began to make his way through the pines and the snow toward this light.

  53

  Sheriff Kinney considered the papers before him sorted in their various stacks. He picked one up and read a few lines. It was a letter from his father’s sister, his aunt, from a time when people wrote letters. It seemed all about the weather and he set it down again. He swiveled in the chair and looked out the window at the shallow field of snowfall and the white world beyond.

  “Out in this in that goddam car of yours,” he said.

  “You ask me something, Sheriff?” his deputy said from the outer office.

  “What? No. Talking to myself.”

  The deputy appeared in the doorway holding the coffeepot. “You want any more of this or should I toss it?”

  “Go ahead and toss it and go on home before this gets worse.”

  The deputy looked out the window. “What do I care about a little snow, Sheriff?”

  “Well, why don’t you go on out and make a snowman then?”

  The deputy stood with the coffeepot.

  Kinney looked up at him. “I’m sorry, Donny.” He gestured vaguely at the papers before him.

  “That’s all right, Sheriff. Your dad sure kept track of things, didn’t he.”

  “He sure did.”

  “You look like a bookkeeper there, or a lawyer.”

  “I feel like both.” He randomly lifted a paper and it was the deed to a cemetery plot for himself. “A man never knows how many pieces of paper he collects in his life because there’s never any cause to look at them all together until he’s dead. And then it’s somebody else and not him who gets the job of looking at them, and it is a hopeless task, Deputy. Hopeless and thankless. Every man knows this and yet every man still saves up all his goddam papers. Now why is that?”

  “I guess a man can’t help himself, Sheriff. I guess it’s his nature.”

  He stared at the deputy. “I reckon,” he said. “Now go on home, Donny.”

  “Want me to wash that mug?”

  “Thanks, Donny.”

  He leaned back in the swivel chair and set his bootheels on the edge of the desk and he looked at the picture of his daughter there on the desk. Josephine on that good roan pony, Laddy, the reins so easy in her hands. Sixteen on that day and she’d taken the blue ribbon by five entire seconds.

  A junior now at the university in Boulder studying journalism. A good way to see the world, she said. As if the world were something her father and mother couldn’t imagine. She had not known the girl they found up there on the mountain trail, Kelly Ann Baird. But people at the school remembered when she’d gone missing. A pretty white college girl just vanishing. It was always news.

  He wanted to call Josephine every day but he didn’t. She wouldn’t have it. The closer he wanted to keep her, the farther away she wanted to go. That’s what being a father was.

  He stared at the papers and thought of the ranch and his life there as a boy, the only child for many years until Billy came along. Now he’d done the math and there was no way to keep the ranch without selling his house up here and moving back down there and nobody wanted to move back down there, least of all his wife. He’d sell the ranch, and Billy would get some money and move on, maybe for good. Grant and his son would move on too, you couldn’t worry about that. Grant was a smart man who’d once run his own construction company, a good man, now a man who’d suffered the most unthinkable thing. You could help but you couldn’t help him, not really.

  His phone sounded the tone that told him he had a text message. He picked it up and it was Billy again. That made three. He read the message and set the phone down again and stared at it, and while he was staring at it the phone sounded its note once again, and he picked it up and read the message. But whereas the others had been the names of highways and passes and county roads, here was a single word that by itself made no sense to him: blanket. He scrolled to see if he’d missed something. He waited for the rest of the message, but it never came. He looked again out the window at the snow. He looked at his daughter on the horse.

  When his boots hit the floor his deputy called out to see if he was all right.

  Kinney gathere
d the two-way from the desk, his sheriff’s hat and jacket from the coat tree, and stepped into the outer office. Donny stood in his jacket and gloves near the front door.

  “What’s going on, Sheriff?”

  “I see you got your snow boots on.”

  “I saw it was snowing.”

  “Did you already tell Linda you were coming home?”

  “Just sent her a text.”

  “All right. You can call her from the road.”

  “Where we going, Sheriff?”

  “Loveland Pass.”

  “Loveland Pass?” The deputy glanced through the panes of glass at the tumbling storm.

  “I thought you didn’t care about no snow, Deputy.”

  “I don’t, Sheriff. But that’s Summit County.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  The deputy tugged at his gloves. He adjusted his hat.

  Kinney looked at him. “I just gotta check something out, Donny, and I need your help.”

  “Hell, Sheriff. You don’t have to ask for it.”

  54

  It was altogether nightfall under the pines, and while this helped him to track the orange light it also rigged his path with deadfall he didn’t see until he’d snagged his boot and pitched headlong into branches that raked at his face like the hands of ghouls. One twisted ankle pulsed in its boot and he struggled to hold his direction. It was necessary to detour around the boughs of the pines and each time he did so he lost the light, then stopped, then moved again laterally through the trees until he reached a place where the light and his eye aligned once more and he could move forward again. Then, abruptly, he smelled woodsmoke, and he said in the silence of the trees, Jesus, Jesus.

  He made progress but the light seemed to grow no brighter or nearer, as though it were borne through the woods ahead as a lure is dragged through water. He pursued it, moving through the woods tree by tree, until he came around the broad skirt of a blue spruce and stopped.