Descent

by Tim Johnston

  Billy coughed. He felt the wet cling of his shirtback where the blood had soaked it.

  The man watched him. Then he looked down and with his forefinger began writing in the snow. He seemed to be working out some calculus but the figures he made resembled none Billy had ever seen. Working on these equations, the man said: “I suppose you think I had my eye on this girl. This particular girl. That I built up a plan around her.” He glanced at Billy as a professor glances up from his notes, saw that Billy was listening and went on. “People don’t want to give dumb luck any credit for the turns in their lives, good or bad. People want to believe in some plan, or design, when all around them is the evidence that the whole world is nothing but dumb luck. Going back to the first cells in the ocean. Going back to the stars.”

  He glanced up from his ciphers again. “You think I saw this girl and followed her up into those mountains? Hell. I was up there looking for a girl all right, I don’t deny that. But it was another girl altogether. It was this other girl who liked to ride her bike up there with her one-legged boyfriend—had some kind of a gadget leg for riding, this poor bastard. I had my eye on that girl. That was my plan. But then along comes nothing but chance, Billy, nothing but dumb luck to put this other girl in my path.”

  Billy leaned and spat. “I guess it was dumb luck made you hit that boy with your car.”

  “Are you listening? If I’d gone up into those mountains just a few minutes earlier or just a few minutes later, I never would of seen either one of those two. They’d be back in Wisconsin watching the corn grow. Why is that so difficult to understand? You of all people, with that bullet in you, ought to understand.”

  Billy attempted to grin. “I got shot by dumb luck?”

  The man studied him. “Let me ask you something. That bar down there, where we talked earlier. How often do you go there?”

  “What?”

  “How often do you go to that bar we were at today.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Once a week?”

  Billy shook his head.

  “Once a month?”

  “Few times a year,” Billy said, just to stop him.

  “All right, a few times a year,” the man said. “Now ask me how often I go there.”

  Billy stared at him.

  “Go ahead,” said the man.

  Billy spat. “How often you go there?”

  “Never, Billy. Never. I can’t even tell you the name of the place. I never once stepped foot in there until today. Today, for no good reason at all, I decide to pull over and I go into that bar and I sit on that stool and who sits down beside me?”

  Billy said nothing.

  “And now look at you. Lying there with that bullet in you. When you woke up today did you think, hell, I reckon I’ll go down to town and meet the man who knows where that girl is my brother the sheriff never could find and while I’m at it get myself shot?”

  He looked at Billy as if expecting an answer. When he got none he shook his head. He said, “You’re the same as that girl in there, Billy. You are both nothing but demonstrations of how the world really works.”

  “You crazy bitch,” Billy said. “I chose to come up here. She didn’t have no choice. You just took her. What you call dumb luck,” he wheezed, “the world calls fucked-up perversion.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “She did have a choice, Billy. She could of stayed with her brother. She got in my car of her own free will. You can ask her. Go ahead. She’s listening to every word of this. Aren’t you,” he called out.

  Billy looked away. His head felt so heavy.

  The man made a long study of him.

  “Perversion, you say? Thinking the world gives one damn what you do or don’t do, whether you live or don’t live—that’s the greatest perversion there is, Billy.”

  Billy coughed up more blood. He thought he might be about to pass out or die. Likely both. Like this. Just like this. Nothing but a rapist son of a bitch to see him off. “Are you done?” he said.

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause if you’re gonna keep talking . . . I’ll have some of that whiskey.”

  The man produced the fifth of whiskey and unscrewed the cap and offered the bottle. Billy lifted it to his lips and tilted the hot whiskey down his throat. The man took the bottle back and screwed down the cap and chucked the bottle into the snow.

  Billy licked the blood from his bottom lip, from the tuft of hair below it.

  “Tell you one difference, Steve,” he said. “Between you and me.”

  “What’s that.”

  “I ain’t the one keeps pussy on a chain.”

  The man stared at him. Faintly amused. “No?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you don’t like girls.”

  “I like girls.”

  “I know you do, Billy. I bet there’s one somewhere right now wondering where you’re at. Why you’re not with her. Why you haven’t called. Wondering what other girl you might be with.” He looked at the door and shook his head. “That is a long chain, Billy. Going both ways.”

  Billy lay wheezing and the man watched him with a look of false concentration. Like a chess player who has seen the endgame far in advance.

  Billy gathered his breath and said, “Let me ask you something.”

  The man sat waiting.

  “Your old man,” Billy said.

  “What about him?”

  “What was he.”

  “What was he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You mean besides a drunk and a son of a bitch?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nothing. He worked on crews. He wasn’t anything.”

  “He wasn’t,” said Billy, “the Roto-Rooter man.”

  The man watched him, puzzling—and then slowly smiled. “Damn,” he said. “Is that what you think?”

  Billy watched him.

  “It never occurred to me you’d think such a thing. But I can see how you might.” He gave a quiet laugh. “Be damned.” He looked down at the designs in the snow, his calculations, as if finding something new in them.

  “I suppose I could of been,” he said. “I suppose I could of been. And I won’t say that what old Delmar did with that Stillson wrench never left an impression on me. I won’t say that. But I just didn’t have it in me, Billy. Not at that age.”

  A black wave rose up before Billy’s vision and rolled on.

  The man looked off toward the woods. “Charlotte Sweet,” he said. “That was my first.”

  He glanced at Billy with an odd little smile.

  “Can you believe that? I saw her one day on the tennis courts in the park. Her and none other. Chasing those balls around with her friends. Ninety pounds and sweet sixteen, Charlotte Sweet. Can you imagine?” He watched Billy’s face. “You can imagine. You have imagined. All men have. Kings and emperors had them like candy—are still having them—while your average Joe—Billy!” he barked and Billy’s eyes slid open.

  “Don’t talk to me about chains, Billy. Men are bound by chains their whole lives. That’s the difference between you and me. That’s why you are lying there now with that bullet in you, don’t you see?”

  Billy turned and spat and did not look at him again.

  “I’ll say one thing for you, Billy, you’ve got sand. I’ll grant you that. But it’s like I told you down at the bar: a man should never be the hero of his own story. So here’s what we’re going to do. Are you listening? We are going to go up to this place I want to show you, this little crack I damn near fell into once. Three, maybe four foot wide and no saying how deep. Only one way to know, really. Sometimes in a real blow it will get drifted over with snow—that’s how it almost got me, day I found it—but it doesn’t ever fill up with snow or anything else and I think you’re gonna like it down there, Billy. You’ll have some company with you. Another hero down there you can swap hero stories with. A couple of young ladies. And you can have this one too, soon enough.”

  He stood then and
raised the hem of his jacket to button the gun into its holster, and Billy saw the leather sheath at the opposite hip and it was the last thing he saw before the rolling logs parted and the water swam up to carry him down into darkness.

  57

  When he came back to the world, or to whatever world this was, he was on his back, staring up into the skirts of the pines. The skirts sweeping by. Or he sweeping by them—each ridge and divot of the earth transmitted to him through the hard slats on which he lay and through the heels of his dragging boots.

  At his head his lone bearer towed him along, easily as any horse or mule, his breaths visible in the light that came from the bright clouds beyond the tree tips, and Billy watching these breaths as he rocked and jostled on the slats, having no idea how far he’d traveled or how far he had yet to go. When his mouth filled with blood he lolled his head to one side and let the blood run out.

  The man pulled his load another thirty yards and at last stopped, dropping the rope. He took a few moments getting his wind, then got his hands under Billy’s arms and dragged the dead weight of him from the sled. He drew him nearly upright and began to haul him backward up a series of small rises in the earth, black stones like ancient steps and each step striking a sharp note of pain in Billy’s twisted ankle. The man bore him up the stones and when they reached the top he turned him and making a belt of his arms stood him on his bootheels before the pit he’d described and shook him like a doll.

  “Wake up, Billy,” he said. “I know you ain’t dead.”

  Billy’s head swung from one shoulder to the other. Arms slack at his sides. “Wait,” he said. Hot drool of blood on his lip. Blood running down the chute of his lower spine.

  “There you are. Good. I want to show you something.” One arm peeled away and the other tightened, and when the free arm came up again Billy saw the nine-millimeter, the dark empty socket of the grip where the clip had been removed. “Now,” said the man, hefting the gun, “listen”—and he lobbed it into the pit. It fell silently at first into that blackness as though into a great, soft throat. Then the gun struck rock, chimed into rock again, and thereafter rang wall to wall in a long echoing descent, until at last the gun either struck bottom or else dropped soundlessly again through space. There was a faint chasing of rock chips, then silence.

  The man’s breath pulsed hot on Billy’s neck. Both arms around him again in that weird embrace, grotesquely half tender, brute and awkward. As he must have held her in the little shack, in the light of the stove. Night upon night and she didn’t fight, she didn’t resist but instead opened her arms to him, her legs, did as he wanted, as he liked, good girl, every which way and again and again and even kissed him because each time was another hour, another day, and she was alive now because of it.

  “Are you ready for this?” the man said quietly into his ear.

  He shook his head. His hands hung at either side of the man’s hips, his fingertips landing and relanding there, light as moths. Then he felt it.

  “Well, courage, Billy. You won’t hardly feel a thing, shape you’re in,” and he puppet-walked him to the mouth of the pit, from which there rose a rich cavernous reek of earth and decay, as if here indeed was the vent to some very deep, very grim storehouse.

  “Wait,” Billy said as the man positioned him.

  “What for?”

  “I ain’t ready.” And he raised his left fist in a punching motion behind his head and felt it slug into solid meat. The man’s arms fell away and Billy pitched forward over the pit. But the pit was not wide and there was strength enough in his legs and he pushed off and was briefly airborne before he slammed chest and gut to the stone ledge on the far side with his legs swimming over the pit. He began to slip—but then his fingers found holds in the rock and he dragged himself clear, rolled to his side, and rolled again onto his back. His heart hammering. Red bombs of light in the trees. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked back at the man.

  The man stood as before on the opposite side of the pit. He’d raised his gloved left hand to the left side of his neck, exploring with his fingers the haft and hilt of the bowie knife embedded there, as if it were some newly discovered lesion or chancre under his collar. No part of the blade was visible. Without lowering his left hand from his neck, he fumbled with his right at the holster. The button snap popped and Billy watched as he pulled out the pistol, aimed it, cocked it, and dropped the hammer on the empty chamber.

  The man’s lips parted in a terrible grin. Blood like ink in the seams of his teeth. He attempted to step away from the hole but his knees failed him and he dropped hard onto them. He worked his jaw as if to speak but no sound came out that Billy could hear. They watched each other across the pit. Then the man, his hand now firmly on the knife grip, keeled to his left and fell to the stones like a man already dead and lay there unmoving.

  Billy let his own throbbing head fall to the stone. He breathed with his one good lung. Overhead a bright tide of clouds ebbed thinly over the pines, black starry rents in its surface like night ships steaming counter to the current. He rolled his head and looked at the man on the far side of the pit and then he shut his eyes, just for a minute—Just give me one minute here, son, and then we’ll get the man’s keys and go on back to her.

  He closed his eyes and dreamed of the pit, of beings from below, the deeply entombed climbing one over the other like crabs toward the moonlight, issuing from the pit’s mouth to consider the two men lying there, poking and sniffing and deciding at last, This one, him, and with their claw-hands dragging him back down with them, and he awoke jerking, choking, pressed to the flat rock as a man to the side of a cliff, his heart pounding. He sat up and spat out the blood. He thought he hadn’t been out long but it had been long enough for the moon to burn off the clouds and center itself directly over him, a round and burning sun of the night. He rolled his head to look at the man and the man was gone. Nothing but an empty shelf of rock where he’d fallen. As if the dream had been no dream and only wrong in one of its particulars.

  “Get up, damn you,” he said. “I know you. Ain’t dead.”

  He got up on his knees, from there to his feet, a long tottering moment, the pines in sickly carousel all around him—and then Slowly, slowly, son, down the old stone steps.

  58

  They sat in the heated cab studying the woods before them, their headlights boring a vague passageway under the boughs.

  “You think those are Billy’s tracks, Sheriff?”

  “I don’t know. They might be.”

  They looked again at the GPS screen, which seemed to place them in a dark void at the edge of the world. The device told them the time was 9:32 p.m.

  Their speed was zero.

  “How far you reckon he could get in that car, Sheriff?”

  “I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.”

  “You want me to get Summit County on the radio, tell them we’re up here?”

  “No, let’s see what’s up ahead here a ways first.”

  The deputy shifted into the low range of four-wheel drive and they drove into the woods and followed the primitive road as it wound through the trees and grew more steeply pitched, more wildly switchbacked, the foreshortened way brilliant in their headlights until at last they rounded a bend and saw the El Camino. There was time and slope enough for the cruiser to stop short of the car, and the deputy skillfully worked the gas to keep them from backsliding more than a few feet, until at last they achieved a kind of stasis on the slope.

  The El Camino sat aslant the road, anchored to a tree by its tailgate.

  They sat watching it for a moment.

  “He sure drove that car, didn’t he, Sheriff.”

  “He sure did.”

  “You want me to throw the lights?”

  “No, there ain’t nobody in it.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Well, I see that snow built up on a cold hood, and I see a car that ain’t even tried to get itself unstuck, and lastly I see
them footprints going away from the car and on up the road.”

  The deputy drew himself to the wheel, as if he’d lacked the proper vantage to see such things. He sat back again and shook his head. “I don’t know, Sheriff. I got a funny feeling.”

  “All right,” said Kinney after a moment. “Cover me with the shotgun if it’ll make you feel less funny.”

  The deputy put the cruiser in park and eased his foot from the brake, and the cruiser held. They got out and the deputy took his position in the wing of the door while the sheriff approached the El Camino. Kinney put his light into the cab and called back that nobody was home and the deputy raised his shotgun to port. Kinney tried the door and then walked around and tried the driver’s door. It opened and the dome light came on and he stooped to look in. He picked up Billy’s phone and checked for the messages he himself had left but none had arrived. The two phones were now less than a foot apart and not a word could pass between them.

  “That his phone?” said the deputy.

  “Yep.”

  “Why do you reckon he left it?”

  “Why do you?” Kinney was reading the sent messages.

  The deputy grew pensive. “For one, it wouldn’t do him any good up here. For two, I reckon he wanted us to find it.”

  Kinney pocketed the phone. “That’s how it looks to me.”

  He shut the door and returned to the cruiser and handed the deputy a magazine and asked him to get on the horn and call it in, and he’d begun to walk back to the El Camino when he stopped and turned back. The deputy was staring at the magazine.

  “You want me to call in this magazine, Sheriff?”

  “Look again, Deputy.”

  He looked.

  “There on the fanny,” said Kinney.

  “Oh,” said the deputy. “Got it.”

  A few minutes later the deputy told him the number had come back a New Mexico plate registered to one Reginald Smites who, like the plate itself, was long expired.

  Kinney was skimming his torchbeam along the surface of the snow to reveal what was left of the other set of tire tracks continuing up the road.

  “Looks like he got out and followed on foot, Sheriff.”