Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well,” said the old man.

  Angela was silent. Then she said again that she was sorry, and the old man scratched at the tip of his nose. He stirred a finger in the white hair of his ear. “I figure I’ll go on writing him like before. He’s got a wife and a little boy and I figure that’s why I’m still here, so I can tell him how they’re doing. I know how crazy that sounds.”

  Angela shook her head. “No,” she said.

  He wrote for a while and then he put down the pen and took his writing hand in the other and rubbed at the knuckles. He looked over his shoulder at the rain as though it had been hounding him all his life. He said: “An old aunt of mine told me one time, Simon, if you knew what growin’ old was you wouldn’t be in no rush to get there. I didn’t know what to make of that at the time.”

  She waited. “And now?”

  “How’s that?”

  “What about now?”

  “Now?” He looked at her, somehow keenly for all his eye trouble. “Now I wonder why a man lives so long he doesn’t even know the world he’s in anymore.”

  “Granddad?”

  A woman came up behind him, a little boy in tow. Same woman, same little boy. The woman didn’t seem to believe what she was seeing.

  Angela smiled at the old man. “Thank you for letting me sit with you.”

  The old man touched the tweed cap and got slowly to his feet. The little boy handed him his cane. “The pleasure was mine, young lady.”

  7

  At midmorning Grant helped the old Labrador into the cab, then drove the three miles through the foothills to the cafe for his coffee and eggs and the Denver paper. Other such Saturdays, when he would return to the truck an hour, sometimes two hours later, the dog would be asleep on the bench seat, having been asleep the entire time, but on this morning, when

  he returned after only thirty minutes, the dog lifted her head and watched him glassily, as if puzzled in her dog brain to see him back so soon. He got in and said nothing, and did not scratch her ears, nor turn on the radio, and as he drove back through the hills she cast baleful looks at him until at last without looking he said, “She wasn’t there. So what?”

  By the time he pulled into the long gravel drive he’d not been gone an hour, but it was the hour in which the black car returned.

  Billy.

  He brought the truck to a stop and sat staring at the car across the front pasture. Bright, glossy black and parked at a careless angle next to the old man’s blue Ford at the side of the house. The two bay mares grazed the fence line near the county road, as far from the house and the black car as they could be. The dog sat watching him, quietly panting.

  “Not a thing to do about it,” he said finally, and drove on toward the house. He parked beside the El Camino and stepped out of the truck and the dog spilled out behind him and limped around the corner of the house and disappeared.

  He lit a cigarette.

  Heat rose from the black hood. In the cab a litter of coffee cups and burger bags and crushed Marlboro packs. In the bed nothing but a flat tire and a tire iron, flung there, from the look of them, in a moment of disgust.

  Grant walked around the side of the house and onto the dirt cul-de-sac with its grassy island and the blue spruce at its center, and as he came around the spruce he saw the aluminum ladder leaning against the eaves of the old ranch house, the old man up on the pitched tin roof in a blaze of reflected sunlight, on his knees, clinging one-handed to the brick

  chimney.

  “Shit,” Grant said. He stepped on his cigarette and went to the foot of the ladder. “I see you couldn’t wait for me.”

  Emmet shifted for a look down, his lenses flaring. “—How’s that?”

  “I said I see you couldn’t wait for me.”

  The old man turned back to his work. “Did wait, by God. Waited all morning while this roof got preheated.”

  “I’m coming up now.”

  “Bring some Crisco with you.”

  “Some what?”

  “Crisco. You can’t fry your ass without Crisco.” He frowned under the brim of his straw cowboy hat. You could make him smile with a joke, but when he made one himself he frowned. Beneath his coveralls he wore only a sleeveless undershirt, baring the white knobs of his shoulders to the sun. His red windbreaker lay on the ground below like a fallen helper.

  Grant climbed the ladder and stood watching the old man scour the base of the chimney with a wire brush. “You might’ve got your boy to spot you on the ladder at least,” he said, and Emmet glanced across the sky to the other house, then resumed his work.

  “He come in a little after you left and went straight to his room. Walked right by me like a ghost.” The back of the old man’s neck was a dark leather chamois, red in its seams. Thick smile of scar running under the jaw where part of the throat had been removed, the scar a bright crimson in the sun. Grant thought to say something more about Emmet’s son but then remembered his own son, gone one morning without good-bye, without even a note. Half a year ago now. More. Taking Grant’s blue Chevy for good measure. Could’ve called the cops. Still could.

  “You think that’s clean enough for fresh jack?” Emmet leaned away from the chimney and Grant looked for the place to grab him if he slipped.

  “I think that’ll do.” A five-gallon bucket hung from the top of the ladder and inside was a bristle brush, a small spade trowel, and two fresh tubes of roofing cement. When Emmet was finished with the bristle brush, he took the caulking gun from Grant and began to squeeze the black cement into the deep crack where the flashing had split and pulled away from the brick.

  “She’s thirsty up here,” said Emmet.

  “Is she?”

  “Like a tick on a tumbleweed.” He emptied both tubes and took the little spade trowel and began to work the cement like black icing. After a while he wiped his brow with his forearm and said: “How’s that look to you, contractor man?”

  “Like I did it myself. Better.”

  “Like hell. You’d of tore out half this roof and put new flashing on.”

  “This will do for now.”

  “That’s all I’m asking. The next man after me can do it his way.”

  Back on the ground Grant stowed the ladder and they went up on the porch for the shade and looked out at the sky as if to watch for the storm that would now come along and test their work. But the sky was clear and the old man’s joints told him there’d be no rain today nor any day soon. The dog lay under the porch in the dark with her chin on her paws, listening.

  “Come up to the house for lunch,” Emmet said. “I got coldcuts, and we could fry us some bacon, and not that goddam fake bacon neither.”

  Emmet’s house sat stark and handsome in the sun. From the outside it appeared to be a large two-story log cabin cut from the very pines that marched down the hills to surround the ranch’s meadows and pastures, when in fact it had arrived in sections on the back of an eighteen-wheeler ten years before, and the men who brought it had put it together in two days and the walls inside were as smooth and white as any art gallery’s. Emmet had done it for Alice, his wife, but she got to enjoy the house for less than a year before she died, all of a sudden in the night, from a clot in her brain. Guess what you can count on, said the old man: nothing.

  Grant put his weight on a sprung board in the porch floor and said he had half of a leftover steak he’d better eat. “Split it with you, if you like.”

  “Don’t feel like steak today. Don’t feel like coldcuts neither but I gotta eat something so I can take my goddam pill. Which reminds me.” He peered at his wrist and began to rub at a smear of black. “I put a few of my prescriptions in there, in your cupboard. Behind your Cheerios. They’re ones I don’t take too often but they cost a damn fortune. If you wanna put them someplace else that’s fine by me, I’ll just ask you when I need them.”

  “All right.”

  The old man took one step down and stopped and looked off.
He stroked craftily at his throat and said: “You see that waitress this morning at the cafe?”

  “Which waitress?” Grant said.

  “Which waitress, he says.” He took the remaining two steps to the dirt and bent for his red jacket and spanked the dirt from it and fed his arms into the sleeves. He sunk a hand in one pocket and said, “The hell? Oh, that,” and he stepped back to the stairs and reached a fist up to Grant. “You might as well take these too. For the time being.” Grant put out his hand and Emmet spilled the shotgun shells into his palm like candies. The old man zipped his jacket up to his jaw and tugged his hatbrim down and began to make his way across the clearing, hunch-shouldered and small-looking, as if the storm had come after all.

  8

  The bus rolled to its hissing stop and the door swept open and Angela climbed up into a smell she loved. You couldn’t define it but it was a smell all buses had and it was the smell of childhood. The school bus, yes, but her father had been a driver for the city and he would tip his cap when they came aboard, Good afternoon, ladies, and they would drop their quarters coolly—Good afternoon—and go down the swaying aisle in their summer shifts, their sunglasses, bikini strings playing at their napes, and they would sit where they could watch him, the way he turned the great wheel like a ship captain, swinging their hearts through space when he took the corners, the cordial way he had with every kind of person who stepped on board—and then coming to their stop and tipping his cap again, and these two girls, these identical sun-browned girls kissing him on the cheek, one, two, and skipping down the steps into the sunlight and not turning but feeling the following eyes, the men especially, as the bus rolled on.

  Summers of secrecy and love and something else. Of hearts aching for something they could feel just beyond them, around the next wide-swinging turn surely, or the next.

  An old woman sat directly behind the driver with a kind of mesh duffel in her lap and after a while a tiny head poked out of the duffel with enormous bat’s ears and round, wet eyes to look about, licking its muzzle with the smallest tongue. At the very back of the bus were three slumping teens, two boys and one girl, skinny black jeans everywhere, oblivious to all but their phones.

  Angela watched her town go by. The shopping center. The university. The church where she was married. The soccer field that had been a drive-in theater in its last days when they were sixteen and dating, do you remember that?

  Those Meyers twins everybody thought we must go out with?

  Identically ridiculous.

  Identically boring.

  Identically bonered.

  Oh my God!

  The bus stopped and the old woman with the tiny dog stood and went carefully down the steps. Angela watched her open up a yellow umbrella on the sidewalk, taking care to keep the dog dry. No one else got on. The door swung shut again and the driver signaled and suddenly Angela was on her feet. “Wait! Wait, please,” she called to him, “we need to get off.”

  The teenagers, the driver—everyone—watching her make her way, just her, down the aisle.

  THE OLD WOMAN TOOK the path that led to the old section of the cemetery, her umbrella climbing a far hill like a cartoon sun amid the dripping trees, the wet ancient stones, and Angela took the path to the newer section, with its smaller trees and its modern stone benches. She’d not been here for so long, but somehow she was calm; the markers and the grass plots and what lay beneath them did not frighten her. Perhaps it was the rain, the absence of sunshine, of birds singing. Perhaps it was the pills.

  Her father was here, awaiting her mother, who lived on, half oblivious, in the nursing home. Faith was here too. And next to Faith’s plot was an island of empty grass, the turf undisturbed, unstoned. Back then there’d been plenty of empty plots, but Angela had known. She’d known. Her parents could not imagine the girls separated; they could not imagine Angela a grown woman with a husband, children of her own. You could not imagine burying your children—putting their bodies into the earth while you went on living, growing older—until you had buried one. This was what the second plot had told her.

  Do you remember how freaked out you were? Like you were expected to

  go too?

  It wasn’t that. I thought I should go. It wasn’t fair for you to go alone.

  Fair to whom?

  She swept the water from the bench as best she could and sat down and

  at once felt the dampness in her skirt, the deep chill of the stone. She breathed in the sodden air and blew a faint mist. The rain beat dully at her umbrella. The blood was moving thickly in her veins, dividing, seeking its separate ways.

  The bench was cold and hard and the air was cold and there was the smell of leaves and earth and rain, and the umbrella spread over her like a dark canopy, and she sat very still in that sheltering space until the bench became the same stone bench where Caitlin had sat—looking at these gravestones, this pale and cold Virgin with her missing fingers like Grant’s and the brass plaque at her feet, Right Reverend . . . Mercifully Grants, in the Lord, Forty Days of Grace.

  Did she pray before the shrine, her daughter? She would ask Sean—did

  Caitlin pray? Did you?

  What would it mean if they didn’t? What would it mean if they did?

  There was a sound, a small rustling, and she saw at her feet a black beetle scrabbling over the yellow aspen leaves. It carried another beetle in its jaws, this second beetle smaller, weightless, inert with death, or perhaps the paralyzing bite.

  Pray with me now, Angela.

  Somehow she was alone in the woods. Grant, the sheriff, the rangers, the dog handlers, the volunteers—all had fanned out and moved on. Nobody noticed she was not with them. She picked up the walkie-talkie and looked at it: something was wrong with it, the battery was dead.

  Pray now? she said. Before this shrine?

  Yes.

  Is this Lourdes? Cures and miracles? Our Lady of the Missing Fingers.

  Please, Angela.

  The bland white face like a china doll in the dusk. The clipped, bloodless fingers. Stump-Fingered Lady of Our Missing, keeping watch over the old stones. Crooked old markers of once living Americans, frontiersmen and their kin, drawn west by such scenes and dreams as their minds could conceive. There was that documentary they’d watched about the Donner party: women, children, whole families, freezing and starving in the mountains, eating each other. Some party, said Sean, twelve years old. Caitlin said she would have done what they did: she would’ve eaten to stay alive. Grant—Grant was not there.

  The sun was down. The air gone autumn cold, October cold. Her breaths pluming and dispersing like a series of ghosts.

  Do you remember when he came back that time, that summer, with his hand in bandages?

  Yes, of course.

  How he got down on his knees at my feet? How he begged for my forgiveness? The promises he made?

  Yes.

  No more drinking, no more women. He wasn’t asking for forty days, he was asking for a life. A whole new life. And I gave it to him. I forgave, and I took him back, and I believed God would grace us the more for our fight, for our resilience. And now here we are. And you ask me to pray before this rock?

  You did before. After that day on the lake. You didn’t stop praying then.

  You didn’t leave me. You never left me!

  Neither has she, Angie. Neither has Caitlin. You’ll see. But you have to fight. For her, and for God, but most of all for yourself.

  What if I can’t? What if I’m broken, like these fingers?

  Oh, honey, said Faith, and said no more, for there were lights in the woods—swinging, wayward lights, like headlights knocked loose. Voices out there, calling.

  Angie! Angela!

  Her heart leaping wildly—Caitlin! What is it, she cried, what is it?

  They were upon her, they came crashing over the fallen leaves in the dark, putting their hands on her. Grant’s face, inscrutable behind the beam of light—Angie, Christ . . . we thought we’d
lost you.

  9

  On certain hot days after the work was done Emmet would step onto his porch across the way with a beer and sit in one of the wooden rockers and stare out at the land. In time Grant would come over and they’d sit and talk about what the weather was bringing and what must be mowed or painted or planted or mended the next day, watching the dusk slide down. Emmet would tell Grant to smoke and Grant would say he’d get around to it but then wouldn’t because of the old man’s throat, and in silence they’d watch the stars swim up over the hills. The bats and swallows in their soundless, extravagant dances.

  At this day’s end in early September Grant filled his mug and stepped outside and went down the steps, the dog rising stiffly from her place under the porch to follow. The black El Camino sat as before, as it had sat all day.

  “I see you had the same idea,” Emmet said, raising his coffee.

  “Seemed like a night for something warm.”

  “Fall’s coming. Set down, partner.”

  Grant lowered into the other rocker that had been meant for Alice

  Kinney and for the remaining days of the old couple’s lives. The dog sniffed up a spot farther back on the porch, turned twice, and dropped with a huff to the boards.

  Emmet had napped and shaved and there was pink in his face above the red windbreaker and he’d dragged a comb dipped in scented oil through his white hair.

  “That patch looks good from here,” said Grant.

  “How’s that?”

  “I say that chimney patch looks good from here.”

  In the west a large bird sat atop the ridge on the point of a lodgepole pine that had long ago shed its branches and pointed like a needle at the sky. This same bird found this same perch at the same hour every day, as if to maximize its own effect before the sunset, resting in silhouette until prey or some other bird impulse set it moving again. By its regularity it had become an unspoken fact of the ranch, like the hills themselves—although once, early on, Grant had commented on the bird, and the old man had grown silent and still. Then he told Grant that his wife liked to say that if she must come back to this earth and not to heaven she hoped God would let her come back as such a bird—hawk or eagle or falcon. And if she did come back as one of these, said Emmet, she hoped she would have no memory of ever having lived as a human woman. She wanted to look down from the air and know the things a bird should know and nothing of what men thought or did, but just to watch them as a bird would, from up high, no more curious and no less wary than any other creature.