Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

  They found two stools at the bar and sat in the electric glow of tiki torches and ordered two beers from the bartender, a large yellow-haired man in a Hawaiian shirt who, in a practiced glance, saw two men weary from the road and the weather, and turned to draw their beers. Placing the pints before them he said, “You gents going to eat here or wait for a table?”

  Lester looked to the boy and the boy shrugged and Lester said they’d eat there if the bartender didn’t mind.

  “I don’t mind if you don’t mind.”

  “Why would we mind?”

  “I know I’m pretty, but most dudes come in here would rather be served by Barb or Patti.”

  They rotated on their stools and took in the waitresses, one blonde, one redheaded, both in Hawaiian shirts and both older than either of them by ten years or more.

  “We’ll keep an eye out for a table,” said Lester, and the man made an approving face and took a pencil from behind his ear. “So,” he said. “What do you want on those burgers?”

  THEY DRANK THEIR BEERS and watched without comment the college wrestling match under way on a TV above the bar, two muscular near-naked men twining like pythons, until the channel switched unaccountably to a basketball game. In the backbar mirror the boy saw himself and Lester sitting side by side and it seemed an odd, implausible thing to see. When the bartender brought their burgers, fat and tottering on nests of fries, they both set into them gratefully, though the boy was not hungry.

  The bartender indicated their glasses but only Reed Lester was ready for another.

  “I don’t much follow college sports,” he said to the boy around a mouthful of beef. “You?”

  “Not much.”

  “What do they call them in Wisconsin, is it Buckeyes?”

  “Badgers,” he said. The word flaring red on the white field of memory—her running shorts on the mountain, in the woods.

  “Know what they call them here?”

  He didn’t, and Reed Lester leaned and said cagily: “Cornhuskers. You believe that? Who can say that word without thinking cornholers?”

  They finished the burgers and worked the fries. The bartender came to check on their glasses and rapped a knuckle on the bar. “Nothing personal against you gents, but there’s a booth opening up over there if you want it.”

  They looked and Lester said, “What do you say?”

  The boy glanced out the near window. The sleet was still coming down hard. Endless needles shooting through the red haze of the neon beer sign.

  “I don’t mind sitting a while, but I won’t drink any more.”

  “You sit and I’ll drink.”

  They carried their glasses to the booth and the redhead, Patti, took their order and went away.

  “How old you think she is?” said Lester.

  “I don’t know. Thirty.”

  “I think more like thirty-five. Still, she might be about as good as it’s gonna get in the old Paradise tonight.” As he said it the front door swung open and two young women blew in hunched and clutching each other and gathering control of their skating bootheels and laughing. “Holy fuck my hair,” one said, and they laughed again and cast their made-up eyes around the room.

  Reed Lester raised an eyebrow at the boy.

  The girls spied the two empty stools at the bar and hurried over and seated themselves with considerable tugging on short skirts and shifting of bottoms and tossing of hair.

  “Bombed,” the boy said.

  “They might not mind being bombed in a booth,” said Lester. He looked at the girls and his grin died away. “Shit.”

  Two men had come across the floor to bookend the girls. Or not men but large boys in red and white football jerseys, baseball caps set backward on their skulls. Each bent toward the near girl, stiff-arming the bar in reverse images of capture. The name on the bigger boy’s jersey was Valentine. At a table across the room two other boys also sat watching, and after a minute the girls turned to look at the table, and then leaned and consulted into each other’s hair, and then they laughed and rose together from their stools and with more skirt tugging preceded the boys across the room. The smaller of the jerseyed boys snatched two chairs from an adjacent table without asking and all sat down and introductions began.

  “Cornholers,” Reed Lester said.

  The waitress returned to set their drinks before them and moved on again. The boy didn’t want to be there, but he wanted to be sober and so he drank his Coke while Lester drank his Jack and Coke.

  “I used to watch such geniuses as these watching Mia at the bars,” said Lester.

  The boy looked at him.

  “My girlfriend—the Cuban? I’d see them huddling up and calling the play. Sure enough, some cornholing genius would come on over and start talking her up, like I wasn’t even there. She’d look at me like she didn’t know what the hell was going on, like what was she supposed to do, she’d just been sitting there. And she had just been sitting there, is the thing, boss. That’s all she ever did and still they came.” He swallowed half his drink and sat pondering the remains. “Well,” he said. “That’s all she did whenever I was around. But I wasn’t always around. And then, after a while, neither was she.”

  “Where was she?”

  “Where was she? Where was she, you ask? I asked myself the same thing. I began to get a little dark in my mind, boss, I confess it. I went by her building. I went over there just to see if I could catch her coming or going. I wanted to see her face, I wanted her to look me in the eye, that was all.” A cheerless smile crept into his lips. “Well,” he said. “You can guess where this is going. I’m standing there across the street one night and this black Caddy pulls up and sits there idling for five minutes, twenty minutes, I don’t know, until finally the dome light comes on and out she pops, smiling back at the man in the car, wiggling her fingers at him. Mia. My Mia. Jesus.”

  He hunched over his drink, raised it to his lips and drank and then returned it to its wet ring on the table.

  The boy wanted a cigarette. He looked in vain for a clock.

  Lester watched him from under his eyebrows. “The thing is, I knew that car, boss. And I knew the old bald head that lit up when the dome light came on. It was the writer. The famous writer the college had rented for the year.”

  The boy waited for the name of the writer, but Lester only lifted his glass again and swallowed and winced.

  “About two nights after that first night, I see that black Caddy parked outside a certain bar, this certain local craphole where the old professors go to run their hands up the skirts of their students in the back booths. So in I walk and there they are. Having the conversation of their lives. Just about knocking their goddam heads over the table and him with his old claw on her wrist and the next thing I know I’m walking on back there. I’m walking back there and they both look up and at the sight of me Mia’s smile falls away, just falls away.”

  He stared into some remote place, some sector of vision beyond the boy’s right shoulder, turning his glass slowly in his hands.

  “I stand at the booth and the great writer looks at me. With his bald head and his goatee. He looks at Mia, and he looks at me again and he says: ‘The jealous boyfriend, I presume?’ And I look at him and I say, ‘It’s an honor to meet you, sir, I’m a great admirer of your work,’ and he nods and says, ‘That’s very kind,’ and I say, ‘How do you like fucking my girlfriend?’ ”

  Lester lifted his drink, sipped at it, set it down.

  “Mia says something but I don’t hear it. It’s just me and the writer now, and we’re just staring at each other. ‘Young man,’ he says finally, very quiet. Very serene. And I remember every word, boss. ‘Young man,’ he says, ‘I can only assume by such a comment that you have made the assumption, based perhaps on my age, perhaps on my demeanor, perhaps on God knows what, that I will not stand up from this booth and knock you on your insolent ass. That is a poor assumption. On the other hand, it is absolutely true that I would prefer to stay seated
as I am. Why don’t you sit down and allow me to buy you a drink?’ To which I replied: ‘I read one of your books once, you old cocksucker, and I would sooner have another one force-fed up my ass than have to read it.’

  “Well,” said Lester. “The great writer turned to Mia and excused himself, as if he was going to the head, and he got out of the booth and turned and took this funny, old-school jab at my gut, but he caught me on the wrist and I heard some of his bones go and before he got his hand up I came around with the left and sat him back down in the booth with the blood pouring from his nose, just gushing from it, all over his nice shirt and his sport coat and all over Mia’s hands when she came around and tried to sop it up with cocktail napkins. Jesus, she looked like a nurse trying to stop a gut wound with those little goddam napkins.”

  He lifted his glass for the watery dregs.

  The boy looked away, his eyes drawn to the electric tiki torches at the bar. An erratic simulated guttering that, when watched, was not erratic at all but cyclical and predictable.

  “So then what,” he said, turning back.

  “Then what what.”

  “What happened?”

  Lester regarded him dully. “I’m sitting here with you, aren’t I?” He tipped his empty glass and crushed some ice in his backteeth. “I got hauled up before the dean, and do you know what he says? Says I can get the hell offa his campus by five p.m. or go directly to jail, my choice. I told him I didn’t take the first swing and he says that’s not what the great writer says, and I said that that bar was full of witnesses and he says that’s not what a single one of them says. I said there’s one who didn’t say that and the dean says which one is that and I say Mia, the girl who was sitting there through the whole thing. And he shook his head at me, the dean, and said, son, there was no girl sitting there.”

  The boy got up to have a smoke. He walked past the bathrooms and he saw the pay phone he hadn’t seen coming in, and he thought about the time of night and he thought about the last time he’d called—a few days after she’d gotten out of the hospital, and although she was upbeat, although she said she was happy to hear his voice, all he could hear in hers was that place: the hall walkers, the mutterers, the TV gazers, the weeping, the forgotten, the broken.

  He stepped through the metal door and into the cold and sleeting night.

  A man stood smoking under the yellow light, his back to the wall, one leg cocked and the heel of his cowboy boot set to the bricks. The sleet blew over the scant eve and fell at an angle to a place just a few inches in front of the toe of his other boot. He touched the bill of his cap and said, “It ain’t much but it’s dry.”

  The boy put up his collar and got a cigarette in his lips and the man produced a lighter and lit him.

  “Pretty night,” said the man. His face was deeply lined, the stubble on his jaw half gone to silver, his eyes in shadow under the cap bill. “You all got far to go?”

  “Not too far.”

  “That’s good. I believe this will turn to snow, and snow on top of ice, that’s about as fun as it gets.”

  The boy nodded. He smoked. “You going far?”

  “Not as far as I come. But it’s those last miles, ain’t it? Especially when you got something worth getting to.” He turned and caught the boy’s eye and the boy half smiled and looked away.

  The man gestured at the trucks in the lot. “I’m guessing that one there. That Chevy.”

  “Sorry?” said the boy.

  “I’m saying that’s your Chevy there, the blue one.”

  The boy stared blankly at the truck. He could see the man watching him in the corner of his eye. “What makes you say that?”

  “Well. From the look on your face when you stepped out here I took you for a man who has not had the pleasure of this particular smoker’s lounge before. And I see them Wisconsin plates. And I see what looks like a fair amount of gear in the cab there, like a man on the road.”

  The boy drew on his cigarette. “Which one’s yours?” He was scanning the lot for an off-duty cruiser, or a detective’s car.

  “Black Ford over there with the topper,” said the man.

  The boy looked. In the rear window of the topper was an American flag decal and on the bumper below was a sticker with the words SMITH &

  WESSON and nothing more.

  “I guess you could sleep in there if you wanted to,” said the boy.

  “You could, it weren’t packed so tight a mouse can’t lick his nuts.”

  They smoked and looked out on the foreshortened night. The patter of the sleet on the roofs and hoods of the trucks. The boy’s head felt clearer for the cold air.

  “Coming here I found a dog by the side of the road,” he said. “A German shepherd. Had a collar and tags.” He shifted his weight and didn’t look at the man.

  “Dead?”

  “No.”

  “Somebody hit him?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “There wasn’t anything to do.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “I finished him. Then I set him under a tarp by the fence. There’s a phone number on the tags.”

  The man looked at the boy and looked out at the storm. “My daddy shot a dog once. Old Jim-Jim.” He smoked and shook his head. “I can still hear that rifleshot like it was yesterday.”

  Out on the frontage road a police cruiser crept slowly by, the dash-lit face of the officer turning to take them in, filing their images away.

  “Whoever hit that shepherd didn’t even slow down,” said the boy.

  “Does that surprise you?”

  The boy studied his cigarette. “Maybe they didn’t know they hit it.”

  The man looked at him. “You always think so well of people?”

  “No, not always.”

  The man took a last pull and held the butt before him as if it were some strange new thing. “Used to be a man could chase a good meal with a good smoke and never get up from his table. You remember that?” He tossed the butt into a pothole brimming with slush and pushed off from the brick and touched the bill of his cap. “You take it easy now.”

  “You too.”

  “Stay out of trouble.”

  28

  There’s the jeep-thing, of course—somewhere. Stowed in a cave of scrub woods with more scrub piled on top to cover it. She knows when he’s used it by the smell of gas on him and the smell of the places he’s been, a hamburger joint, a barbershop, a bar. The smells inside these walls are finite and the ones he brings back from the outer world must be sniffed and identified, like guests confronted by the family dog. She sniffs for the smell of the motel where she stayed with her family. The restaurant where they ate, the Black Something. She sniffs for the smell of her mother’s perfume.

  Once a month he fetches groceries and she knows it’s once a month by the dates on the magazines he brings, National Geographic, Field & Stream, and this is how she knows roughly how long she’s been here too. No newspapers. Nothing to tell of herself or of the search, nothing to tell of her brother—how long he lay there and who found him and how they got him down the mountain and how his leg

  is and You never should’ve left him, never should’ve done that, lying there so scared and his leg all wrong, and the man said he saw on the news when he went down that the boy was fine so stop asking him—and sometimes he brings a bright new shirt from the boys’ department because he won’t shop in ladies’, nor buy tampons or liners, such things were already here, stacked and stacked on a shelf above the toilet. The sight of them telling her everything that first day, everything.

  People see him when he goes in the jeep-thing, when he goes down to wherever he goes. They must. He moves among them like anyone would. Completes transactions. Trades pleasantries. He wore a ring that first day but not since and there is no woman down there, she knows this as any woman would. Does anyone give him a thought? Think him strange?

  The yellow coin of light has slipped over the nint
h gap in the floorboards and she pushes herself up from the cot and shuffles into the bathroom following the blue beam of the hiker’s headlamp that precedes her like eyesight itself.

  Bathroom. Please. It is like some prairie outhouse with a dry, house-style porcelain bowl. She pulls the thin door and fits the little hook into the eyelet, takes down a box from the shelf and drops one tampon unwrapped into the water bucket where it swells and floats like a small drowned thing. Four more in this box. Twenty more in each of the four remaining boxes. Was this her schedule, her tenure here? Behind the toilet, low in one corner in the dark old wood, is a patch of a lighter shade. Once, she got down on hands and knees and looked closely. Felt with fingertips. Faint small scarrings in the wood. Hatch marks. Months and months of calendaring, incompletely sanded away. It sickened her and taught her: Don’t count. Don’t mark. Don’t believe in a foreseeable end with its nothing to do but wait, and wait.

  She sits and pees with a hollow pattering sound into the dry bowl, lifts the tampon from the bucket by the tail and drops it into the bowl and with a tilt of the water bucket sloshes everything down to wherever it goes when it goes down, obeying laws of gravity and geography. The Great Divide deciding even this.

  In the dull small mirror screwed to the wall is a pale miner, halogen moon in the center of her forehead. The pajamas lie on the floor and she stands as if risen out of them, all her flesh crawling in the cold. She soaks the washcloth in the remaining bucket water, soaps it and washes herself while the girl in her head takes up her story again midsentence . . . but there was one thing I had to tell myself every morning when I woke up in that place . . . the voice not hers but the voice of an older, tougher girl, speaking as though to a gymnasium of girls, all their faces composed while their bodies imagine and their hearts beat with strange excitement, and she is one of them, knee to knee with her friends. Listen, is the girl’s message, this could happen to you.

  She takes up the sour gray towel and dries herself quickly and begins to dress.