Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

  Without unhooking his thumb from the backpack strap the young man opened his hand and said Hola, and the boy nodded and said Hola back.

  “Somebody was serious when they set those nuts,” said the young man.

  “And all Chevy gave me was this little toy wrench.”

  The young man sniffed and looked down the road ahead as if he would walk on. Then he made a survey of the tire iron and the tire and said: “Looks to me like a question of leverage.”

  “You don’t happen to have a two-foot length of pipe in that pack, do you?”

  “You tried stepping on it?”

  “It slipped off and tore up the nut.”

  The young man nodded. “Well.” He studied the tire. “I’ve got an idea, if you’re about done with that club.”

  The boy seated the iron once more as instructed and held it with both hands while the young man came around next to him and got a grip on the truck and stepped up on the bar with one wet sneaker, then the other, and stood a moment getting his balance, and then began lightly springing so that the boy could feel the bar flexing in his hands, could sense in it a quality of steel that would only give so much before it sheared, and he was ready to tell the young man to stop when the bar shuddered in his hands and the nut gave an eerie cry and the young man rode the bar like a mechanized lift down to the blacktop and stepped off.

  “There’s one,” he said.

  “There’s one,” said the boy.

  The rain continued but with a lesser violence and the little iron held, and soon the boy was setting the lugs on the spare while the young man stood turning the flat tire, blackening his wet hands until he stopped and said, “There she is,” and the boy looked. A nickel-colored nailhead flush to the tread.

  “I worked some construction down in Texas,” he said. “But that was weeks ago.”

  “They do that sometimes. They plug the hole for a while and then they don’t. My uncle Mickey’s a contractor and I’ve seen him about fire a man for letting a nail lie in the dirt.” He lightly fingered the nailhead. “This one’s got a flat side on it. Like a nail-gun nail.”

  The boy considered that, then stood up, his knee cracking and popping, and he restowed the tire iron and the jack behind the seat while the young man hefted the tire into the bed of the truck and swiped his hands one against the other. “I’ll be seeing you,” the young man said, and when the boy turned he was already walking down the highway.

  He called to him and the young man turned around and stopped.

  “I’m going that way if you want a ride.”

  “Thanks, I don’t mind walking.”

  “Well,” he said. “I’d like to return the favor.”

  “That’s not why I did it.”

  The boy squinted into the sky as if to locate the sun in all that sodden gray. “I’ve seen better walking weather,” he said.

  “Me too. But I’m already soaked and I don’t want to foul up that truck.”

  “It’s just a truck, and I’m soaked too.”

  He rebuckled the kitbag and piled his duffel and his sleeping bag between the seats and the young man swung his large pack into the truck bed and swung himself into the cab. The boy put the truck in gear and pulled back onto the highway, unsheltering a perfect dry rectangle of shoulder as the Chevy drove away into the haze.

  THE YOUNG MAN REMOVED his wet cap and set it like a bowl in his lap and said his name was Reed Lester, and the boy gave his full name in return and they said nothing more for a while but only listened to the clicking wipers and the wet sizzle of the tires. The air in the cab was dense with the smell of unwashed bodies and damp, unclean clothing.

  “How long you been walking?” the boy said.

  “I left Lincoln two days ago.”

  “And you walked all that way?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “Noplace special. How about you?”

  “Same place.”

  Reed Lester looked about the cab. “This is a nice truck, isn’t it.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “It looks about brand new.”

  “It was brand new, four years ago.”

  The young man laughed and the boy looked over, surprised. As much by the sound of laughter in the truck as the idea that he had caused it.

  “Mind if I smoke?” he said, and Reed Lester said, “Hell no, it’s your truck.”

  “You want one?”

  “No, thanks.”

  He pushed in the lighter and returned his hand to the wheel.

  “That uncle of yours ever see a nail-gun nail in a tire?” he said.

  Reed Lester watched the road. “Those nails don’t usually lie around in singles.”

  The lighter popped and the boy touched the coil to the cigarette and pulled the smoke into his lungs and cracked the window and exhaled into the cold draft.

  Reed Lester adjusted his glasses. “You think somebody put it there for you?”

  The boy watched the road. “Down in Texas I met a man at a gas station and he hired me on the spot. Said he was way behind on this house outside Austin. The next day I jumped in with these Mexican boys been there for months and I don’t think they knew what to make of me. White boy out of nowhere in his nice blue Chevy.”

  Reed Lester shook his head. “They don’t know what to make of you and it’s your own damn country.”

  The boy smoked.

  “Then what happened?”

  “Nothing. I worked for two weeks and moved on.”

  “With a nail-gun nail in your tire.”

  The boy said nothing. Watching the road. Then he said: “Those Mexican boys worked harder than anyone I ever saw. They were making good money and I never saw them eat anything but beans and tortillas. They were sending every dime back down to their families.”

  “Well,” said his passenger. “There you have it.”

  “Have what.”

  “The whole problem with those people. Crying about discrimination and deportation and all the while they’re throwing U.S. currency over the border and it’s never coming back, not ever. Uncle Mickey won’t hire them anymore, not even when they’ve got papers. Says there’s plenty of Americans around who can swing a hammer.”

  The boy stared ahead with nothing to say. He put some air on the fogged windshield.

  “Some people want to call that racism,” Reed Lester volunteered. “But if Americans don’t get the jobs, then they don’t get the capital to build houses, and if they don’t build houses, then Uncle Mickey can’t give jobs to ten other guys. It’s not racism, it’s Economics 101.”

  The boy drew on his cigarette. He tapped the ash in the draft. “I never said it was racism.”

  “I know you didn’t, boss,” said Reed Lester. He picked up his wet cap and sat weighing it in his hand.

  “Hell,” he said. “My girlfriend back at school was Cuban. Pure Cuban. All her family crossing over on a boat hardly more than a raft. Daddy and granddaddy and all her aunts and uncles. Her mother eighteen and pregnant with her. They hit a storm in sight of Miami. They could see the lights one second and then they couldn’t. When the Coast Guard got there it was just girls in the water—her mother and her mother’s sisters. All the men, Mia’s daddy, her granddad, all her uncles, all drowned.” He scratched at his jaw. “They didn’t send them back because what would become of four teenage girls in Cuba with no family and one of them already pregnant?”

  “Why did all the men drown?”

  The young man looked up, as if roused from a daydream. “What?”

  “Why’d the men all drown.”

  “Because there was only enough life jackets for the girls.”

  The rain was turning sleety, dashing like insects on the glass and collecting in slushy berms at the outer reaches of the wipers. Along the road the mile markers flared green in the truck’s daylights. Ten miles on, sixty miles outside of Omaha, something appeared in the road ahead and the boy lifted his foot from the gas and bega
n tapping the brake.

  “What is that?” said Reed Lester. “Is that a coyote?”

  “No, it’s too big.”

  The wipers flicked and they watched the animal grow larger in the gloom. It was a dog. A German shepherd on its side, half on the road and half off. It lay with its long spine to them and one dark ear aimed at the sky, the tail limp and rain-flattened on the shoulder. The boy pulled over and brought the Chevy to a stop a few yards short of the dog and killed the engine and the lights.

  “What are you going to do?” said Reed Lester.

  “Go look, I guess.”

  “At what? That dog is dead.”

  The boy reached and unbuckled the kitbag at his passenger’s feet and brought out his gloves and then switched on his flashers and pulled the key from the ignition and stepped out into the driving sleet.

  Reed Lester stepped from the truck with his cap on and stood with his hands deep in the pockets of his jacket. The boy tugged on his gloves and walked over to the dog and Reed Lester followed.

  The dog did not appear to have been there long. Its thick coat was not saturated but stirred yet in the wind at the haunches and at the hackles. Over the road lay a sleety film and a fine white pebbling unbroken but for the black stripes where tires had passed. In both directions the tracks ran straight as far as the eye could see. There was no sign that any car had swerved or braked or pulled over on the shoulder.

  The boy came up slowly, watching the dog’s ribs, the black pointed ear. Nothing moving but the sleet and the windblown fur. He came closer, bent at the waist, and came closer yet and suddenly the dog lifted its head in a lunging motion and the boy dodged back, and Reed Lester’s feet went out from under him and he sat down on the shoulder saying “Holy shit,” then scrambled up and moved off.

  The dog returned its head to the pavement and the boy stood there, stunned and chilled. The shepherd had tried to bite him but it had no lower jaw. There was the muzzle, the upper canines, and that was all. The tongue and lower jaw had been shorn off and flung away somewhere. Or else they rested in the bumper of a car on its way to Iowa.

  He removed his gloves and came forward again and knelt to his good knee, and this time when the dog’s head snapped up he set his bare hands on its body, one at the ribs and the other at the neck, and he worked his fingers into the fur and he told the dog Shh and met its wide desperate eye. The head went down again and he listened to the high whimpering in its bloodied nostrils and he said Shh and moved his hand to the dog’s skull and rubbed the great ears. Everywhere he looked he saw damage. Bleeding rents in the fur, disfigured bones under the hide. The dog had known that sudden astounding flight, that long ride in the air and the return to earth with its snapping sound of breakage. The only unbroken part seemed to be the neck, and pressing his fingers into the fur there he felt the collar. He dug deeper and raised a length of blackened leather. He rotated the collar until the tags came jingling into view.

  “King,” he said. “It’s all right, King. It’s all right, boy.” There was a phone number. He undid the buckle and slipped the collar from the shepherd’s neck and folded it into his jacket pocket and got slowly to his feet while the animal watched him with its skyward eye. It lifted its head again, not aggressively but as if to rise, and he showed his palm and said “Stay,” and Reed Lester watched him turn and walk back to the truck and lay his forearms on the rail of the truckbed.

  He went to stand beside him.

  “What’re you going to do, boss?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s nothing you can do for that animal.”

  Grains of ice ticked in the bed of the truck. A dark station wagon hissed by on the highway, the face of a young girl in the window.

  “There’s one thing,” said the boy. He went to the cab and reached into the kitbag and pulled out the Estwing and turned back to the shoulder, back to the dog, and Reed Lester watched him and he saw the dog’s ear prick to the sound of the boy’s step, and as the boy came nearer he saw the dog’s tail strain to lift, and he watched the boy lower himself to his knee again and set his bare hand on the dog’s neck and speak to the dog, telling it something

  he couldn’t hear. He saw the boy move his hand to the dog’s ears, rubbing, and then to its brow, and with his hand over the dog’s eyes he saw him cock the hammer high and bring it down once, very hard, very close to his hand.

  They lifted the dog and carried it into the ditch and set it down again. The boy looked up and down the highway. Then he returned to the truck and reached behind the seat for the red mechanic’s rag his father kept there, and he carried the rag back through the ditch and tied it to the uppermost fence wire. He stood looking down on the dog as the sleet fell and he looked at the sky and he shuddered. He went once more to the truck and reached again behind the seat and returned to the ditch and unfolded the blue tarpaulin and spread it over the dog and tucked its edges under him. The tarp had been his shelter, his plastic roof on nights under the stars when the dew came down. He stood back and the sleet pocked loudly at the plastic, as if angered by it. He returned his hammer to the kitbag and the two of them got back in the truck and he turned off the flashers and started up the Chevy. The wipers leapt back to their noisy work. He checked his mirror and pulled back onto the highway and in silence he lit a cigarette and in silence they drove on.

  26

  There is a beam of light, shaped by an eye-sized hole in the battened window over the cot, a light with no purpose other than to push a burning coin of itself over the seams of the floorboards—irregular demarcations of an illogical timepiece. The beam is pink in the dawn and turns yellow-white on its sweep as the sun moves westward over the earth—as the earth spins eastward away from the sun—progressing from one corner of the room where a locked chest sits, to the opposite corner, the beam going ruddy, and then pink again, and then dying altogether at the lion’s foot of the stove, as if dispirited, as if defeated daily by the black iron thing.

  Some days the beam never arrives at all and it’s as if the sun, and time with it, has stopped. Other days the beam flickers and withers midfloor, signaling the arrival of a storm front. And when it dies all at once, as if by a switch, she pins herself against the wall side of her cot and waits for the beam to come back and for the peeping eye that stopped it to move on again.

  Currently the beam is midfloor. She could reach out and place her hand in it and feel it pool in her palm, a warm autumnal yellow, a weightless continuum to the outside world, free to come and go.

  She doesn’t move, not in the least. Her heart down-beating from a race it believed it was in, a dream-race against nothing but her own shadow.

  You should get up. You should get up. You should not lie here like this.

  The coin of light rests in the center of her vision, severed in two by a crack in the timber. The longer she fails to get up the more it’s as if her real self has continued on in the dream, leaving behind this heavy, dark-minded thing, this shell. Why get up? Why move? Hopelessness falls like the shadow of a great bird; black thoughts rise like water. Then, suddenly, without deciding to do so, she sits. Is sitting up. A pair of hands in her lap. Hers. She can make the fingers move like so. My fingers. My legs. Mine.

  27

  They rode the storm eastward and by the time they reached the outskirts of Omaha it was dark and the ice had grown thick at the edges of the windshield where the wipers and heat fought it back, and when the Chevy’s tires strayed from the tracks in the whitened road, rails of slush crushed beneath them with a wet, explosive sound.

  They came into more lanes and more traffic. A semi plowed by casting a filthy wave over the windshield, and through the wash of it they saw a pair of taillights ahead but in a strange place and at a strange tilt. A little farther on they saw the tire tracks cross suddenly before them, twining in helices before trailing away into the median, and then they saw the black SUV down there and the blue glow of the phone inside and the man’s lips moving calmly as if he
were only continuing the conversation he’d been having before he spun off the highway.

  “All that rig and there you sit in the median,” said Reed Lester.

  “We could be next,” said the boy.

  “I doubt that.”

  “Four-wheel drive isn’t any good on ice and I haven’t got any weight in the back.”

  “You want me to get on back there, boss?”

  The boy looked over. “Would you mind?”

  “Hell, no. Just pull over a second.”

  “I thought you might just go on out your window.”

  “I could. But if I fall, then where will you be?”

  The boy watched the road. The red starbursts of taillights. The bleary lit signs of gas stations and motels drifting by.

  “Maybe we ought to just pull over someplace and see what happens with this,” said his passenger.

  “You said you were just going to the other side of town.”

  “I am but it’s a big damn town and this traffic’s gonna get a whole lot worse, and I’m in no hurry. Are you?”

  The boy stared out at the storm. “You know any place to go?”

  They left the highway and drove along a business strip of car lots and liquor stores and many dark, derelict buildings. In the midst of it sat a small restaurant of boxcar shape with neon beer signs burning in its windows and a radiant sign in the shape of a palm tree declaring its name which was the Paradise Lounge.

  “You like burgers?” Reed Lester asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “This will be one of those times.”

  Lester directed him to park in back and he did so, bringing the Chevy to rest in the cratered gravel lot among another dozen cars and trucks. They transferred the wet backpack from the truckbed to the cab and the boy locked the truck and followed Lester toward a red metallic door.

  Inside was a noisome crowd which somehow gave the impression of having arrived out of the inclement night hours before, and all together. Faces turned to take stock of them and turned away again with no show of impression good or bad. The air smelled of seared beef and perfume and alcohol. Islandy music piping down from the ceiling and everywhere on the walls large, richly colored images of white sands and turquoise waters and brown-backed girls.