Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

  Whitford walked over to the girl and began searching the ground. He kicked at the black twist of her underwear and said, “That ain’t it. Ah, there you are.” He bent and pulled the length of stick out from under her leg. He looked it over as if it were some rare specimen of weaponry.

  “Is this what I think it is? Damn.” He put the stick to the girl’s hip and flipped up her skirt. He looked at the boy again, hung there like a pelt in Valentine’s arms.

  “You could’ve had your turn when we were done, bud. You had no call to get violent. Set him to the tailgate there, Clayton.”

  The boy fought but Valentine was too big and too strong and when the boy was pinned against the tailgate Whitford reached around the boy’s waist and began to undo his belt. The boy grabbed at Whitford’s wrists and the stick whipped across his fingers and Valentine squeezed until the boy raised his hands again and held on to the thick noose of arm.

  “Don’t fight,” said Whitford. “And don’t worry, I ain’t no fag. All I’m gonna do is this. Are you listening? You got enough air? All right. All I’m gonna do is, I’m gonna take your little friend here and I’m gonna put him up your asshole, far as he’ll go, all right? How’s that sound, bud?”

  The boy bucked and Valentine brought his weight forward and folded the boy over the tailgate until his face was nearly in the girl’s vomit and he twisted as his jeans and shorts were jerked down to midthigh and the air was cold and the snow was like cold insects alighting on his flesh. There was a long sickly moment of nothing before the stick made its whistling sound and struck him hard. He flinched but made no sound.

  “There,” said Whitford. “Now we both know what that feels like. This next part, well. You’ll just have to let me know. Hold him good, Clayton.”

  The boy clenched himself as if he could make that part of himself shut and vanish altogether by the sheer will to do so. Something touched him on the hip and he flinched and it was the other boy’s fingers there. “Easy now.” Fingers settling gently one at a time and lastly the thumb, finding a purchase that would give him leverage. From the parking lot there came the sound of an engine’s turning—coldly laboring at first but then firing in a deep exuberant roar, sustained and incensed by a series of stompings to the gas pedal, and the fingers on the boy’s flesh were stilled and the arms that held him were like the fixed arms of a statue. The engine revvings brought to his mind the black Ford and the man who drove it. SMITH & WESSON. Stay out of trouble. Yellow light spilled into the alley and searched along the cinder-block wall but in the next moment was eclipsed by the building as the driver made his turn, and then driver and car and light and sound all faded away into the night.

  Fingers reset themselves on the boy’s hip, and Whitford told him quietly that it would all be over before he knew it, and in the long ludicrous moment to follow there came another sound, unexpected, one that halted everything under way in the alley, all movement, all breathing, even their hearts. Only the snow went on as before, mutely falling. It was the crisp steely sound they all understood to be the chambering of a round in a gun.

  “Drop the stick, number twelve,” the man with the gun said.

  The stick hit the ground in a soft clatter.

  “Step away, over there. And you, number ten. Big man. Let him go and step over there with your faggot buddy.”

  Released by Valentine, the boy drank the cold air into his torn throat and pushed up from the tailgate.

  He pulled up his jeans and redid the fly and buckled the belt and turned around.

  “Didn’t I tell you, boss? Cornholers.”

  32

  He has gear for her—snow boots and jacket and gloves and sunglasses, all rising from the footlocker and all in the style of a young and self-conscious boy. Things her brother would like. Yet she knows as she slips into the jacket, into the boots, that they have never been worn by a boy but by a girl more like herself, some predecessor whose traces she can’t see or smell but that are here just the same, like a left-behind shadow. The shadow in these clothes, in the fit of the boots and the jacket and the hat and the gloves is profound, and comforting, and sickening.

  When he opens the door and stands aside she thinks she’s prepared but she isn’t. The whole white world crashing into her eyes, the cold, incredible brightness of it. She puts on the sunglasses and sees this world as the girl before her saw it: the mountain pines rising in their entirety toward the white sky, boughs heavy with snow. The piney air so intensely white and clean and cold it’s as if she’s never breathed before, never smelled before. She is so dazzled she almost doesn’t look back, but then she does. It isn’t a cabin but a shack. Hardly that. A low wooden storehouse half buried in the snow. Smoke like white birds fleeing the pipe. A stripe of red catches her eye and it takes her a moment to understand what it is, which is the painted runner of a sled. Long wooden child’s sled parked along the wall. It’s how he moves logs from the woods, provisions from the jeep-thing. Other loads.

  It’s going to feel strange when we get in the deep snow, he’s saying, down in his monkey-squat at her feet, setting her bindings. It’s like learning to walk all over again, he says. But there’s no way to learn but to do it. Just remember to keep your legs apart, and try not to drag the tails, you might snag on something under the—

  She sets off ahead of him across the small clearing, downslope, and when she falls, the arm she puts out to stop herself sinks and sinks, as if into fog. She comes to rest in her own impression, her face turned from the snow. She half rolls and tries to push herself up with the other arm and finds the same deep nothing below her. She understands she needs to get the snowshoes under her again before she can stand, but the gymnastics of that—the rolling, the grunting, the immodest exertions on her back—is a performance he won’t see, not out here.

  He walks to her on the snow and helps her up. You stepped on one shoe with the other. Legs apart, remember?

  She brushes snow from her legs, her hips, and sets off again, and makes it to the trees.

  Better, he says, better. But let’s go this way. And he turns from the downward slope and leads her up instead. Up the mountain and into a woods of spruce

  and fir and utter stillness. Her breathing is coarse and her quad muscles throb and he stops to check with her and she goes stomping by.

  Don’t push yourself, he says. You can get sick at this altitude, and she says, I’m fine, and stomps on.

  They make slow headway against the slope and against the gravity of her body that wants only to go down. She searches for a change in the trees, for the suggestion under the snow of an order imposed by the path of a creek bed, or a road. She looks up compulsively for cables, listens for the sound of anything at all: traffic, chainsaw, helicopter. She remembers the blue road markers from that day in July and looks down expecting to see them like tiny heads trying to keep themselves above the snow.

  How you doing? he says behind her, and she flinches at the sound of him. She takes two more steps and falls.

  You’re getting tired, he says, appearing above her. Blocking the falling snow, her view of the trees. When you get tired you get lazy, and you can’t be lazy in snowshoes.

  Where are we? she says.

  What do you mean?

  I mean where are we? Are we far from where you—from where my brother and I were? She hasn’t mentioned the boy since the beginning, since those first days.

  He looks down on her. Nothing at all in his eyes behind the yellow lenses.

  Why?

  Why what?

  Why do you ask.

  Because I want to know.

  Why?

  Because I do. Wouldn’t you?

  No. What difference would it make?

  It might make you feel less lost.

  Or more. Where you are is where you are, not where you’re not.

  She stares at him. But I don’t know where I am.

  Yes you do. You’re with me, right here.

  He watches her, then looks away. You want
to go back? Is that it? You want to spend Christmas day indoors? Aren’t we having a good time out here? Isn’t it beautiful?

  The pitch grows steeper and the woods grow thicker, obliging them to weave around the trees in a series of switchbacks that make the climb easier but longer. And where the slope turns gentler, fewer trees confront the way, as if that were the design, until at last they reach a wide expanse of snow where the trees grow sparsely and are no taller than herself. Unless these are the tips of the trees and she is crossing a deep lake of snow.

  Ahead, the trees vanish altogether, and then so does the mountain—abruptly, entirely, like the edge of the world. Nothing beyond but the gray sky and the snow swarming out of it as though here is the place where snow begins, where it’s made. She goes on toward the edge but he calls out Stop, and she stops and looks back.

  He stands between a pair of small fir trees; they give him the illusion of great stature. We don’t want to go beyond this point here, he says.

  Why not?

  I’ll show you. Come back here.

  She returns, and he draws off his glove in his teeth and reaches under his jacket and there’s the sound of a metallic snap and he’s holding the pistol.

  It is the black, hard center of the white world. The only thing to look at or care about. Dizzily she sees her body here, left behind in the lake of snow to freeze and thaw with the seasons. Or maybe never to thaw but to lie in its last, fallen state for centuries, the story of her death preserved with her body, and she will ask him to please please not take the gear off, at least, the boots and the jacket and the gloves, to please at least do that much.

  He raises the pistol and fires into the gray void. The sound is unexpectedly small, like a summer firecracker, yet it carries unexpectedly, caroming and returning to them from invisible reaches. In the instant after, she thinks there must be something out there he can see but she can’t, and she peers with aching eyes for the man, mountain climber, lawman, to come stumbling from the fog, hands to his guts, face twisted in pain and amazement.

  Instead there’s a second, greater crack, like the gunshot amplified, and in the foreground a ragged blue seam appears in the snow like a vein shot full of dye. The vein widens, turns a deep glacial blue and then fills with white as the entire length of ridge shrugs and slips away down into the gray, pulling her eyes and her heart and the pit of her stomach down after it, down into the sky. The ridge falls and crashes and pounds against the side of the mountain. It takes a long time and sounds all the while as if it’s no farther away than when it began. Then it stops, or seems to stop, and there’s nothing more to hear but the distant replay of thunder in the far, unseeable gorges.

  They stand in the aftersilence. He ejects the shell from the cylinder and it falls hissing into the snow. He fetches up another bullet and slips it into the cylinder and snaps the gun back together again and returns it to the holster under his jacket and there’s the sound of the metal button snap and he puts his glove back on.

  One bullet at a time. She never knew it but she understands it at once: if she ever got her hands on the gun she could only shoot him once, and he likes his chances of that shot missing or merely wounding him in some nonlethal way.

  It’s safe now, he says, and they advance together, the space between them widening as they near the edge, like an understanding. She looks out into the tumbling snow and feels the pull of the gorge, the unknowable drop, the thinness of the space between doing and not doing—between a step of the mind and a step of the body, the unreal moment when it’s done and there’s no undoing it and there’s only your rolling heart and the roar of the blurring world.

  Careful, he says, and reaches for her, and she steps alertly back. The wind can carry you off like a leaf, he says.

  They stand staring into space.

  On a clear day you see as the hawk sees, he says. You see as God sees.

  He looks at her. To observe the effect of such words.

  She swipes at her dripping nose.

  Ready to go? she says, and he steps toward her, and she steps away, back from the edge.

  What are you doing? he says.

  Nothing. I’m afraid of the edge.

  Don’t be afraid, he says. As he’d said that other day, long ago.

  She takes another step and stops and he comes up to her, aligning his snowshoes carefully with hers. He takes her upper arms in his hands: I don’t want you to be afraid, Caitlin.

  I’m not. Not now.

  Good.

  He stands staring at her. He shakes his head.

  What, she says.

  Nothing. He squeezes her arms. You’re just so beautiful, out here in the light. In the world. Did you know that?

  She takes his wrists in her hands, smiles, and he comes a little closer, his fingers clenching and relaxing. Clenching, relaxing. He comes only so close and will come no farther.

  After a moment, looking into the yellow lenses, she comes the rest of the way to his lips.

  33

  Freed from Valentine’s embrace, the boy put his hand to his throat and looked at the gun at the end of Reed Lester’s straight and level arm. The slender chasing of light along the chromium barrel.

  “I wasn’t really gonna do it,” the boy named Whitford said.

  “Shut up,” said Lester.

  “I just wanted him to think I was.”

  “Say one more thing, cornholer. I dare you.” He looked back to the boy. “What the hell are you doing?”

  He was down on his knee working his arms under the girl’s shoulders and under her knees. He hefted her to himself and his leg trembled as he stood but it held. The girl’s head lolled and her upturned chin began to bleed and he shifted her so her face rested against his chest. “She’s hurt,” he said hoarsely.

  “I think we’d be smart just to vacate, boss, and most ricky-tick.”

  “We’re taking her.”

  Lester opened his mouth again but what came out in an unmatched voice were the words Oh my God and he and the two boys at gunpoint turned to see what the boy had already seen, which was the redheaded waitress standing at the mouth of the alley in the light. “What are you doing with

  that girl?”

  “Hospital,” said the boy.

  “What did you do to her?” said the waitress.

  “He didn’t do a damn thing,” said Lester. “Go back inside.” The boy limped forward with the girl. He reached the waitress and said again, “Hospital.”

  She opened her mouth and shook her head.

  “Where’s the goddam hospital?”

  She turned around. She ran a hand through her hair and got her bearings. She pointed south with her cigarette. “Down the strip, about four miles. You’ll pass under the highway and you’ll see the sign. Sisters of Mercy. But let me call an ambulance, okay? Just bring her inside.”

  He limped away from her into the parking lot and after a moment the waitress turned and ran back toward the door.

  WHEN REED LESTER REACHED the Chevy his pack was on the ground in the snow and the boy was folding the girl’s legs into the cab from the passenger’s side. Lester picked up his pack and tossed it in the truckbed with the boy’s gear and went around to the driver’s side and helped him arrange her in the middle of the cab. “I’ll drive, boss.”

  The boy settled the girl’s head back on the seatback and gave a tug to her short skirt and shut the door and walked around to the driver’s side and stood staring at Lester.

  “You’re right, you drive,” said Lester, and he hustled around and reopened the passenger’s door and pushed in next to the girl and slammed the door. The boy started up the Chevy and hit the wipers and they creaked but didn’t budge.

  “Got a scraper, boss?”

  The boy put a hand to his throat. “Under your seat.”

  Lester found the scraper and jumped out and left his door open while he went to work on the windshield. The red door of the Paradise Lounge opened and the waitress and the big blond bartender stood
watching them. The bartender began to cross the lot and Lester faced him and said, “It’s all good, boss,” and the bartender abruptly stopped as if reaching the end of a tether.

  “The police are coming,” he said. “I think you boys had best leave that girl here.”

  “So do I,” said Lester. “But it ain’t my show.” He reached into his jacket pocket and the bartender took a step back. Lester underhanded the wad of keys through the air and the bartender caught them in his fist and looked at them.

  “What’re these?”

  “Keys.”

  “No shit.”

  “They go to that truck parked in the alley.”

  He climbed back into the Chevy and the boy put the truck in gear and drove out of the lot. He turned onto the frontage road and got the Chevy up to speed in the snow.

  Reed Lester looked at the boy, then at the girl. Her split bleeding chin and the wet dark ribbon tracing her bared neck, the small pool of blood in the pit of her throat and the dark ribbon running on, down over breastbone, down under a bridge of sweater and into shadow. As the cab warmed there was the smell of her perfume. Of alcohol and bile.

  “I won’t ever tell,” he said.

  “Tell what?” said the boy.

  “About back there.”

  The boy watched the road. He reached for his cigarettes but the fire in his throat stopped him.

  “Where’s that gun?” he said.

  “Put away. Why?”

  He looked over and Lester looked up from what he’d been staring at, which was the girl’s bare upper thighs, the hiked hem of skirt. They held each other’s gaze. The wipers made their noise. The boy turned back to the road.

  “Loaded?” he said.

  “What?”

  “The gun.”

  “Not much good otherwise, boss.”

  “You had it all along.”

  “You never know what you might run into on the road.”

  “Like a dog.”

  “Sorry?”

  The boy stared ahead. “You just stood there and watched me. With that hammer.”

  Lester watched the boy’s profile for a long moment.