by Tim Johnston
“More of your people. Your family.”
The boy shifted his weight to his bad leg and Tom Carl said, “It’s none of my business. I’m just curious if your dad’s alone up there or not.”
“There’s an old man on the ranch where he’s living.”
Tom Carl raised his drinking arm and slapped at it with his free hand, killing a mosquito.
“How come you left? If you don’t mind me asking.”
The boy was silent a long time. A hard, bitter morning, he remembered, Perseus, the slayer of Cetus, setting in the west, and the old green truck wouldn’t start, so he took the good truck, the blue Chevy. He’d been living with his father in the ranch house for five months and he hadn’t thought, until he was miles away, how it would be when his father woke to find another child gone.
“It just seemed like it was time to go,” he said at last, and took a drink.
Tom Carl put a hand to his back and grimaced. “I thought maybe you had some kind of trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“Trouble.”
The boy met the older man’s eyes. Then he looked into the dusk and said, “No, sir. No trouble. I’m just trying to make gas money.”
Tom Carl showed him the casita and the daybed there and the showerhead over the stone floor. On his way out he stopped and asked the boy if he had a cell phone.
He did but the battery was shot.
His host stood gazing about the little room. “If you need to call someone,” he said, “come on over to the house. I got a cordless you can take outside and that’s about as good as it’s gonna get, privacy-wise.”
He thanked him and Tom Carl tipped his bottle good night and closed the door.
The boy removed his boots and socks and lay back on the narrow bed, his knee pulsing with the old damage and his shoulder answering where the muscle and bone went on chopping, and he lay in this dialogue of pain thinking about his father up in Colorado, his mother in Wisconsin, in the hospital, and Caitlin wherever she was—and he didn’t think he would sleep but he did, and in his sleep he climbed a path in the woods, in the dark, making his way by the progress of the animal he followed, a dog or wolf of such whiteness it raised shadows from the things it passed, the trees and stones. He kept pace with the white dog until the path grew steep and he began to fall behind, and soon he was in total darkness. Clawed at by the limbs of trees, falling to all fours, he scrabbled on until he came to her suddenly on the path. Pale and naked and curled upon herself, and though she was very young he knew it was her. He said her name but she only lay there holding her knees, and when he looked up again he saw the white dog watching him. He moved to pick her up and the dog advanced, and he let go and backed away. The dog came on and he backed away until he could no longer see her, until she’d slipped wholly back into the dark. Then the dog walked to her and by its light he saw her again, saw that she was sitting up, and that she was grown. Covering her breasts with one arm and gesturing to him with the other, beckoning him back, Come back . . .
20
There was one morning she could never forget, Angela said. Bright, battering morning when she’d awoken in her own bed after so long away, her own room—the first morning back from Colorado and it had not been a dream, she hadn’t thought so even for an instant—and the moment she was awake she knew Grant was gone. Knew he’d not even come up to bed but had slept a few hours on the living room floor and left in the dark or at first light, so as to spare her this departure, this separation—let her wake to it in her own time and on her own terms. It was like before, when he’d left them, her, for some other woman, some other bed, she said. Only now she was not sorry; every moment he was here with her was a moment he was not in Colorado, searching, and those were hard, hateful moments.
Grant picked up his coffee and sipped. He sat across from her at the kitchen table in the middle of the afternoon, the middle of September. Sean was in school; Grace’s kids were in school, Grace and Ted at their jobs. The house was like a house where everyone has been murdered: breakfast dishes in the sink, a boy’s plastic truck on the counter, the terrible wall clock ticking and ticking. Grant had come back at Grace’s request, to see Angela, to see his son, whose leg was now healed, or as healed as it would ever be. She wouldn’t say it outright but Grant knew that what his sister-in-law wanted was for him to see how things had become in her small and crowded house.
Caitlin had been gone for a year and two months.
That morning, that first morning back, Angela had come down the stairs in her robe. Sean was on the sofa under the bedding, books and homework and other things from his room spread out over the coffee table. The wheelchair within reach. He looked asleep, and Angela passed quietly into the kitchen and found Grant’s note by the coffeepot—I didn’t want to wake you, etcetera. She was standing at the kitchen window staring out when Sean rolled in. She looked at him and smiled. How are you feeling?
Did Dad leave?
He didn’t want to wake you. He said he’d call from the road.
Sean looked around the kitchen as if it he’d never seen it before. He was getting used to seeing everything from a lower vantage. As if he’d grown small again. Angela turned and looked out the window at the stark cold day. No cars, no one on the sidewalks, everyone shut up inside recovering from their Thanksgivings. They themselves had gone to a restaurant where they’d picked in silence at hot turkey sandwiches. The restaurant so quiet they clearly heard the young waiter in the kitchen ask, Christ, who died?
Mom? said Sean.
Hmm? She turned back to him. Yes?
He elevated his leg just a little and lowered it again. Nothing, he said. I think I’ll have some cereal.
Oh, I’m sorry, I should have asked. Do you want some eggs?
No.
Do you want an English muffin?
No, just some cereal.
Okay. Stepping to the cupboards, pulling down the boxes. We’re going to have to put stuff down where you can reach it, aren’t we. She set a place for him and moved the chairs away and she arranged all the cereal boxes and the milk and she watched him get himself parked before the bowl.
Aren’t you going to eat? he said.
Not right now. I’m going to go up and shower. Will you be all right?
I think I can take it from here.
She touched his shoulder and walked back through the living room and she understood, she told Grant, how everything had shifted in the house, like pieces in a puzzle: the boy’s room empty and the living room now a bedroom, her own bed half empty, another bedroom empty beyond all comprehension or belief. She climbed the stairs. Then, at the top, she heard Sean say something, but she didn’t stop, and she didn’t look back.
Grant waited. Angela lifted her mug and sipped and returned it soundlessly to the table.
That’s it? he said.
That’s it. Yes.
Grant looked toward the stairs.
Christ, that clock, he said. He turned to look out the window. Finally he turned back. Angie, you were in shock.
She thought about that. Do people remember being in shock? I remember the moment vividly. He called out to me and I pretended not to hear him.
Grant stared into his coffee. He shook his head. You can’t blame yourself, Angie. I know that’s your instinct as a parent, as a mother, but you can’t.
He heard the hollowness of these words in the ticking stillness of the borrowed kitchen.
She waited for him to look up. It’s worse than that, she said.
What is it? God? You blame God?
I wish I did.
He moved as if to reach for her hands and her hands withdrew to the edge of the table.
He watched her, studying her, and she saw the instant when he understood, and she knew that he had thought it himself, that it wasn’t just her.
But, Angie, my God, he said quietly. He was just a boy. And he was hurt. What could he have done?
I don’t know, I don’t know. Her eyes were dry. Dar
k. Grant didn’t know them. But he just lay there, she said. He just lay there while she got into that man’s car and I can’t help it, Grant, when I look at him all I can think is, why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you stop her?
21
The boy awoke with a start, disoriented, lying in a narrow bed in a small room. It was the sound of animals that woke him, a high ungodly yipping nearby, and the distant baying of hounds. His heart pumping and his T-shirt soaked, staring in utter confusion at these ceiling poles, these blank walls.
He smelled the smoke and then he saw the ember arcing and lastly he saw the girl, sitting not far from the bed on the only other piece of furniture in the room, which was a rickety wooden chair. She sat with one bare knee drawn up to her chest, one thin arm roped around the knee.
“Christ,” he said, getting onto his elbows. “What is that?”
“What’s what.”
“That sound.”
“Coyotes. Fucking coyotes. Or, perhaps, coyotes fucking.”
He looked away from her, listening to them. She was watching him.
“What time is it?” he said.
“Three a.m. I couldn’t sleep with all of this.” She drew on the cigarette and exhaled. The chair creaked. “Do you want me to go?”
He stared at her, the milky shapes of her arms, her legs. She seemed to be wearing almost nothing.
He shook his head to clear it but it would not clear.
“Is that a no?” she said.
After a moment, he said, “—What?”
The girl watched him. If he moved just a little, toward the wall, she would take the space next to him, the way his little dog used to. The warm little body against his stomach.
She peered at him in the poor light. “Are you all right? You don’t look
so hot.”
The animal sounds abruptly stopped, and the girl cocked her head, listening. Then she lowered her leg and leaned toward him. “Who’s Caitlin?”
“What?”
“You said Caitlin in your sleep. Is that your girlfriend?”
Before he could answer, the door swung open and they turned to see it fill with the shape of Tom Carl.
The ember flew like a firefly to the stone floor.
“Hello, Thomas,” said the girl.
Tom Carl stood there. The brindle dog panting just beyond his legs. With surprising grace he stepped forward and took the girl by the arm and hoisted her to her feet and pushed her toward the door.
“Having a conversation here, Thomas!”
“Conversation over. Go into the house. Now.”
She stood at the threshold rubbing her arm. They glared at each other, their kinship undoubtable, until at last she sighed and turned and strode away, her white legs scissoring at the dark. Tom Carl turned to the boy.
“Did you touch her?” His tone was not accusatory, nor hostile; no question in it as to what the boy had wanted to do—and no judgment about that either. There was only the wish to know if he had done it.
“No, sir.”
Tom Carl shook his head. He ran a hand through his hair. “I gave you work. I gave you a bed to sleep in. She’s fifteen, did you know that?”
The boy sat up and reached for his socks. His boots. “Nothing happened.”
Tom Carl watched him work his feet into the socks. He sniffed the air, looked about him, and stepped forward and brought his sandal down on the cigarette. He left without another word, and the dog, putting a last look on the boy, swung its square head and followed.
Outside, the moon was high and a weird spectrum of light lay over
everything—the trucks and the ruins of trucks, the looming mesas and the juniper and piñon that grew from their walls. All of it saturate, phantasmal.
The boy drew on his cigarette and looked to the north, to the place in the sky where he thought the mountains of Colorado must be, the white backbone of the Rockies, and there was nothing there, only the black, star-blown heavens on and on. A falling star put a scratch across Cancer and was consumed again, and with that signal the coyotes resumed their crying, their yelping and keening, very close.
He walked around the casita, but when he reached the opposite side he was sure the animals must be on the side he’d just left. He went back around and experienced the same certainty. There were things in the world that would not be explained. Entities were birthed from moonlight or from their own uncanny wills to be, to howl and to run and to mate and to hunt.
Andromeda on her rock watches the sea for the thing it hides, the black scales and the black mindless eyes, the hungry smile. Not far away, in mountains to the north, in the highest ranges, she knew these beings well. She fought and wounded and escaped them but more came on to snatch at her and carry her back, and Don’t go, she was about to say in the dream, Don’t leave me, and she fought and she ran, and the moon looked down from its bed of stars and did nothing.
22
Don’t do it, don’t you do it, don’t you get into that car, but she did, and he told her to buckle up and she did that too and they picked up speed, rocking along over the dirt road, his hand on the upright stick shift as upon some elegant cane, until he would suddenly throw it with slamming violence, as if this were the only way it would work.
They abandoned the dirt road in a hard right on the blacktop and she twisted around but there was nothing to fix in her mind but the red cloud of dust and the featureless world of trees and You just left him there, with nothing but the animals. Busted up and all alone and just a boy and you left him there.
She tried to read the odometer but couldn’t—and then remembered her watch.
What’s that? said the man. What are you doing there?
Setting the mileage, she said. She saw her heart rate and took a slow, deep breath.
You don’t need to do that, the man said. You just tell them take Fox Tail Road offa County Road 153. Sheriff’ll know exactly where to go.
She checked her phone.
Down the blacktop they went, banking left, right, the rubber sending out faint cries, the wind lashing the unravelings of her ponytail across her face. The pines stood back and blurred like bicycle spokes.
If he slows down you could jump, you could jump out and go into the woods and go back up to him. Or down.
She wanted the ground, the forces of the earth against her, each tree as she passed it singular and essential, like girls on the track. She would know what to do. Primally agile in flight, the pattern of the woods opening up to her, she would see path upon path and all of them going down.
Down to where? It might take hours. You could get lost, and what would happen to him then?
So, the man called, as if over a greater noise. What were you all doing up there, anyway?
She might have asked him the same thing. She checked the phone.
I say what were you all doing up there, anyway?
Running.
Running?
Yes.
Running from what?
She was watching the phone. What?
I said running from what?
From nothing. Just running. For training.
Oh. He braked into a sharp turn, downshifted, hit the gas again. Training for what?
For running, she said.
That’s good, he said. That’s funny. You got a good head on your shoulders, don’t you.
Will you just please shut the fuck up? said the good head but not aloud.
The road intersected another unpaved, unmarked road and he took it, plunging them down through the trees until they landed abruptly on another blacktop, or the same blacktop, and he took that road and she lost all hope of being the one to lead the way back. But the sheriff would know. The sheriff would know. How could you just leave him?
What’s your name, anyway? the man yelled.
What’s yours? she said automatically. Like a child.
He grinned and said something but she didn’t hear it, she’d turned back to her phone. It had changed—the tiny ar
ray of icons had changed. She thumbed the keypad, and waited, and her heart leapt as the radiant pulses of dialing graphed across the screen.
So what’s yours? said the man.
She pressed the phone to her ear.
It was late morning. They’d be up by now and showered. Sitting in the cafe next to the motel drinking coffee and reading the local paper and trying not to look too often out the window—trying not to even though they’d chosen the table, without discussing it, for the view that would include, any second now, the paired familiar shapes of daughter and son, exactly as their minds saw them, demanded them, moving carelessly up the strange street. Maybe, waking up in the strange rooms, even in separate strange rooms, but waking up without kids in the strange rooms in the strange mountain light and the air that made the heart work, maybe they’d felt closer to each other. Maybe they’d laughed. Touched. Maybe their hearts were beating with a new old love over their coffees when the phone rang.
She was smiling, she was crying, already hearing his voice: Hello? Caitlin? Where are you, sweetheart? And then she did hear his voice, deep and steady and familiar in her ear, and though it was only his voice mail she began to sob.
Daddy, she said, before the first blow landed.
23
At the end of sleep there was music, low and thumpy and harassing him back into the world. Grant lay on the sofa with his knees drawn up, her lap replaced by a coarse little cushion she’d somehow slipped under his head. He sat up, boots to the floor, and passed his hand roughly over his face. The music was outside, the deep bass pulsing over earth and floorboards. He looked around the darkened room. What had he done? He’d kissed her, there on the dusty sofa. He’d put his hand on her breast and she’d put her hand over his. But when he began on the buttons she stopped him. Rubbed his shortened fingers in hers like coins. She didn’t want to be a drinking accident, she said. He’d put his head on her lap then and she’d traced slow circles on his temples with her fingers. She’d turned off the light when she left.
But no, here she was—the shape of her, at the kitchen window, framed in the blue light beyond.