Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

  The boy smoked and the detective watched him.

  “What about your folks?” Luske said.

  “What about them.”

  “Don’t you want to talk to them?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not to me,” said the detective.

  He was returned to the cell. He sat on the hard bunk and stared into space while a man in the adjacent cell who had not been there before snored and muttered. He lay down on the bunk, staring at the pocked and gray concrete ceiling and as he stared he saw in the edges of his vision other men moving restlessly about the cell, and he could smell them and he could hear them, yet when he moved his head to look there was nothing but the concrete and the bars and the buzzing yellow light throwing more bars across the floor.

  36

  The snow swarms about her, thick and white as in a snow globe, a white dust that dazzles the eye and promises a painless fall but that holds for the girl trying to keep on top of it nothing but the terror of the fall and the suffocating struggle of climbing out of it, of getting upright again while the Monkey comes on, sure-footed, step by step.

  Childhood days of snow angels and snowmen were wasted. Days on the lake with Dudley were squandered opportunities—the two of them out on the frozen lake in very old snowshoes, clumsy wooden things with cane-bottom decking and tired leather bindings.

  But these! These are like a sprinter’s trackshoes; they move as she moves, their tails snapping up smartly with her heels. They do not wobble or stray and they are narrow enough that she doesn’t have to hold her legs apart uncomfortably yet broad enough that they keep a good float on the snow, as the Monkey promised they would.

  She’s been watching him, listening to his breathing, and she knows that with a good lead she can outrun him. Outlast him. Not running, exactly, but moving fast enough in her careful striding to keep her lead and even to improve it. This snow is his snow too and he will not want to make a mistake either, will not want to risk a fall, the time and energy to climb out of it, but will count on her panic, on her inexperience and the weakness of her body, all her time of doing nothing in the shack, to bring her down. He was counting on it when he decided to buy the snowshoes and take her out. When he allowed her to go behind the spruce without him.

  And now he would find out if he counted correctly.

  HER BREATHS BURST WHITE before her and when she passes through them she hears No fall, no fall, and each successful footfall is rejoiced and praised, and the landing leg dares the trailing leg to do it even more cleanly, even more impressively, and she does not look back but only listens, the way she listens on the cinder track, and for a long time there’s nothing but the no fall, no fall of her breaths and the quieter cadence of the snowshoes meeting the powder, and she knows that even if he sees her up ahead in the distance, a glimpse of her in her snowy globe, he will be too far away and there are too many trees between them.

  For what?

  For the pistol.

  Sweat has come to her chest, her back, wetting her shirt under the jacket. When the temperature drops and she stops to rest as she knows she must, she’ll be cold. There are stick matches in her pocket, with the headlamp—but no, what you need is darkness, and distance, and stamina, and no fall, no fall, no fall . . .

  She attempts to unzip her jacket on the fly, trying to collect the metal pull in her gloved fingers, glancing down to locate it, and in that distracted instant the snowshoes collide with a sharp clack, her right foot fails to come forward, and she pitches downhill in the onset of a head dive. Yet even as her hands reach out for the snow, her legs react to keep her from it, pushing against the forward crampons so that she leaps altogether from the snow and draws the snowshoes forward in a kind of leapfrog, separating the frames in time to land downslope again with a deep whump. But in landing she pitches too far back and is falling again, backward now, all her weight on the tails of the shoes, arms pinwheeling, momentarily skiing down the slope before the tails begin to sink, and she slows, and her body swings forward and she takes a stumbling step, thighs howling, and is stable once more on the shoes and You did not fall, you did not fall.

  She stands on the snow, sucking the cold into her lungs, her heart pounding. Reflexively she raises her wrist but the training watch is gone. It lies at the bottom of some gorge along with her phone.

  She unzips her jacket and sweeps the cap from her head. Behind her, upslope, nothing but trees, falling snow, her tracks. Enormous repeating tracks unbroken, unmissable. Foxes, and maybe other hunted things, know somehow to backtrack. But she does not understand how the instinct to backtrack can override the instinct to go forward, always forward, to keep as much distance as possible between you and the thing that wants you.

  Water. You need to drink, Courtland. She takes a fast swallow and returns the bottle. Glances upslope once more and then lifts the left snowshoe against the dumb reluctance of her muscles, against a punishing gravity, and then the right, and she is moving again, going down again.

  37

  He awoke to a man’s loud hacking and sat up in the buzzing yellow light. He put his fingers to an itch on his chest and was confused by the buttons on his T-shirt until he looked down and saw the denim jacket.

  He stood before the bowl, then bent over the basin and splashed the cold water on his face and ran it through his hair and scooped it into his mouth and scooped more of it despite its taste of old pennies. When he stood again the man in the adjacent cell was watching him. The man lay on his bunk propped against the concrete wall, his white-stockinged feet crossed at the ankles and his arms crossed over his stomach. He was a skinny dark-skinned man with a skullcap of wiry silver hair. He stared at the boy and said with a graveled throat: “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “What?”

  “What?” said the man.

  The boy held his gaze, the glassy, red-stained eyes.

  “I said,” said the man, “is there something I can help you with.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then why are you eyeballing me?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Hell you wasn’t, motherfucker.”

  The boy went to stand by the bars of the door, as if doing so would compel the door to open and release him. You saw it in the movies and on TV but none of that gave you any idea of what it was like to be caged, to be kept against your will and against reason and against the truth for even one hour of your life.

  The man in the other cell got to his feet and stepped to the bars separating the two cells and stood watching the boy, his wrists draped over the crossbar, his hands hung into the boy’s space.

  “Hey,” he said.

  The boy turned and the man showed his teeth, large and white, as if smiling. “I was just messin with you.”

  “Ah,” said the boy.

  “Just taking your temperature, my man.”

  The boy nodded and looked away.

  “Hey,” said the man.

  The boy looked back at him.

  “Name’s Jonas.” He held his hand out for shaking. Held it there.

  The boy stepped over and took it. Cold and thin and raspy as the hand of an old woman. He said his name and stepped away again.

  “What they got you in here for, Sean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” The man watched him. Then he said: “What do they think you did, Sean?” and the boy said without turning, “They think I raped a girl.”

  The man gave a low, portentous whistle. “White?” he said.

  The boy looked over.

  “White pussy or dark?” The man laughed and said, “What am I saying? Pussy ain’t got but one color, ain’t that right, Sean?” He laughed until he dislodged something from his throat and turned and spat in the direction of the stool in his cell.

  “Hey, Sean. Sean,” he said. “I can see you ain’t no rapist, my man, shit. I’m just messin with you.”

&
nbsp; The boy stared out into the corridor.

  “You talk to your lawyer man, Sean? Or lady? Half the time it’s a lady nowadays.”

  “No.”

  “What’s this? You ain’t talked to no lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Nothing to talk about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean there’s nothing to talk about.”

  “ ’Cause you didn’t do nothin.”

  The boy was silent.

  The man peered at the boy’s profile and said, “How old are you, Sean?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “No you ain’t.”

  The boy said nothing. The lights buzzed.

  “Eighteen. God damn, I got a daughter oldern you.” He hung his head. Then he raised it and said: “Boy, do you even know what kind of trouble you’re in?”

  “I got an idea.”

  “It must be a pretty poor idea or else you wouldn’t be here chatting with me, you’d be talking to your motherfucking lawyer.”

  He turned away as if he’d finished with the boy. He walked to his bunk and stood staring down at it. Then he came back to the bars, his hands back into the boy’s cell.

  “Where your folks at?” he said. “They know you’re in here? They know the shit you’re in?”

  “No.”

  “You ain’t called them?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not their problem.”

  “Not their problem.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You they son?”

  “What?”

  “Are you their son?”

  “Yes.”

  “Blood son? Born to them some eighteen years ago? Born to them and to no others?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then motherfucker you are nothing but their problem. And you are always gonna be and I’ll tell you something else, Sean. The judge and the jury might set you loose in the world again but set you loose to what? Loose to what? You understand what I’m saying?”

  The boy turned and looked into the man’s bloodshot eyes.

  “Boy, look at you. You a young man, but you already on a road that don’t go but one way.” His hands rolled in space and he drew the air into his flared nostrils in the manner of a man gathering in the aroma of some exquisite dish.

  “Mm-hmm,” he said, “I can smell it. I can smell it on you like shit on a dog’s ass.”

  Luske was waiting in the same room, at his chair, hands on the file. He now wore his jacket and he had shaved and the room smelled of shaving cream and coffee. When the boy was seated and they were alone, Luske pushed one of the two large coffees across the table, the smell of it rich and darkly delicious. A smell of the normal, the free world. Luske rooted in his jacket pocket and reached across and unfisted onto the table a pile of packets and cream containers.

  “I didn’t know how you take it so I grabbed everything.”

  “I usually take it with a cigarette.”

  “I told you there’s no smoking in this building,” he said, then slid the boy’s cigarettes and lighter across the table.

  The boy thanked him and got one lit.

  Luske watched him.

  “Do you know what day this is, Sean?”

  The boy thought and said, “Sunday?”

  “No. This is your lucky day.”

  “It is?”

  “You better believe it. We picked up the owner of that Ford truck, this boy named Valentine, and he fell to pieces like a china doll. I never saw a boy that size cry so hard. Did he cry like that when you hit him with that stick?”

  “No, sir. He didn’t say a word.”

  “Well, he’s got plenty to say now.”

  “I don’t suppose he said I wasn’t any part of what they did to that girl.”

  “No, he didn’t. He rubbed his big red ear and said you just wanted to get you some of that free pussy.” The detective lifted his coffee and sipped it and set it down again.

  “He’s lying,” said the boy, and Luske said, “Maybe. But who’s to say?”

  “I am.”

  Luske seemed to be waiting for him to say more. When he didn’t, the detective said: “He did give us names, however. And this morning I gave the girl a photo array to look at and she picked them out, all four of them. And she’ll testify.”

  The boy drew on his cigarette and exhaled the smoke.

  “I guess my picture was in there too.”

  Luske nodded. “She didn’t look twice at it.”

  “And I guess that doesn’t count for much since she was passed out.”

  “No. But other things do.”

  “What other things?”

  “The waitress’s account. The fact that you were pulled over within sight of the hospital. That dead dog we found where you said it was. Although there was no blue tarp.”

  “The wind might’ve got it.”

  “Or somebody took it.”

  The boy tipped his ash and watched the flakes fall to the floor. “What about the gun?”

  “Sold by a dealer outside Lincoln. Purchased by Reed Lester five days before you picked him up.”

  “And what about him?”

  “Lester? Still at large.”

  The boy observed the tip of his cigarette. As if reading some message in the thin scroll of smoke.

  “So now what?” he said.

  “So now I’m compelled to release you, Sean. Your father’s waiting at the front desk.”

  Some heavy thing like an ax swung in his chest. He stared at the detective.

  “We called him about the truck, Sean.”

  “How much does he know?”

  “I don’t know. I just know he’s here.”

  The boy said nothing. He stared at his cup of coffee.

  “I’m compelled to let you go, Sean, but I’m not happy about it.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I got a feeling about you, despite what it looks like you did for that girl. Maybe because of it. Maybe because of the way you did it. The fact that you didn’t call the police and you didn’t look for any help whatsoever but you just walked back there and whipped those two boys with the handle of a shit plunger. The fact that you had Reed Lester in your truck for whatever reason. There’s something in the eyes of people who are capable of certain things, and I see it in yours.”

  The boy did not look away.

  “I’d never do what they did,” he said.

  “I didn’t say you would. But there’s plenty more a man can do that will end just as bad. He might not go looking for it, and he won’t think he wants it, but he won’t do enough to avoid it either and it will find him. It will find him, Sean, sooner or later.”

  38

  Some unknown hours later, unknown distance, she becomes aware of a change in her stride, in the nature of the effort it takes to keep moving forward, and in the sound of that effort.

  She stops and looks around at the valley she’s come into. A mountainous small amphitheater. The angle of the trees confirming what her body has been telling her, that she is no longer going down but is crossing snow that has massed evenly on level ground. Without the feeling of down in her legs, a stone of fear rolls from its place behind her heart. All she knows, all she counts on, is down. Without down, and without a thing in the sky to go by, with no horizon to lock onto, she might walk and walk until she arrived suddenly in the cold night at her own tracks.

  To either side of the valley the banks of the mountainsides rise into the gray. Whatever lies ahead at the far end of the valley lies behind the veil of falling snow and the dusk, and there’s no way to know but to go there. It seems very far away and I wanted to stop, says the girl in her head, the girl in the gymnasium, I wanted to dig into the snow like an animal, bury myself, listen to him pass over me in the dark. Sleep. Wait for the spring. But I didn’t. I knew if I stopped, I died. I asked
my legs to keep moving and somehow they did.

  She goes down the center of the valley in the failing light and there is more valley here, though narrower, the wings of mountain drawing steadily closer, moving toward a fusion she can’t see. She notices the shifting, scuttling snakes of powder at her feet and then notices the tailwind that drives them. It whips up and gains strength the nearer she comes to what she expects to be the convergence of the two mountainsides—the hard inevitable slamming that will crush out any passable trail and leave nothing but a steep rocky crotch, a dead end. It will almost be a relief.

  The wind plays a cold note in the boughs of the trees, in the needles; the sound of absolute aloneness. She moves forward and the mountains move together and she is under the trees again, their laden arms dragging against her, the snow spinning up from the ground and littering the back side of her lenses with a distorting rash of crystals. She removes the glasses and stows them and works her way through the dark underworlds of the boughs, the wind rocking her on the snowshoes one way, and then the other, and finally forward, only forward, like the current of a river. It pushes her onward through a pair of low boughs crossed like swords, and stepping through these with her arms raised to protect her face she almost does not see, and nearly goes over, the edge of a sudden drop in the mountain.

  Down.

  She stands looking down the straight and treeless chute of what she knows is the bed of a stream, a dry wash like the one they went up that day in July. Not the same one; she knows she’s a long way from that place. But this one brings her closer to that one. Or closer to some conjoining artery by which she can spill once more into life, into family. The wind howls in the gap behind her, the hysterical snow rushes past, and within that funneled gale she hears the droning of a motor. A large and laboring motor such as a semi in low gear, dragging its load up the mountain. A man sitting warm in the cab, country music in the speakers, his solitary headlights boring into the storm. The image is so stark in her mind that she can imagine nothing at the bottom of the dry wash but the paved and plowed road itself.