Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

  The first she hears of him is his voice.

  Hello? he calls, freezing her.

  She drops the chain. Her heart slamming.

  It comes again: Hello? Someone in there?

  It’s not him. It’s some other man. Close, and not close. Well back from the door. Keeping his distance, according to some law of mountain etiquette. Or fear at what he heard, her wild thrashing.

  Her throat constricts, her jaw opens, and a voice she does not know calls out, Hello? Is someone out there?

  Hello, the man calls. I saw the smoke. I thought it might be a fire.

  She takes a step toward the door and her right leg halts painfully in midstride and she looks back in confusion at the length of chain on the floor. The leather-wrapped cuff at her ankle, the big padlock with the word Master at its base. Her own naked foot, filthy and alien.

  She turns back to the door. Are you the police?

  He doesn’t answer. Then: Who are you? And she knows he is just a man. Not the police. No gun. No dogs. No walkie-talkie. No helicopter on its way. No father no mother no brother.

  Who are you? he says again. Are you all right?

  She puts a hand to her throat and feels the words in her fingers as they come up, as she says her own name for the first time in so long. Her family is looking for her, she says. The police are looking for her. A man has been keeping her here, please help.

  The snow crunches and the man is approaching.

  All right, he says, all right. Take it easy. Did you say Caitlin? Close now. On the other side of the door. She hears the padlock shift. Hears him tug on it. Caitlin? he says.

  Yes?

  Where is he?

  I don’t know. He left me.

  How long ago?

  She shakes her head. Two days? She swallows down her climbing heart. Please help me. She can hear him breathing hard in the thin air. There’s an ax somewhere, she says. Do you see it?

  He takes a step back from the door. No.

  It’s out there, she says. She can see it so clearly. I hear him chopping all the time.

  The man takes a few steps away, then comes back.

  Is there another way in? A window? he says, and she says, On the other side, but it’s locked too, and his footsteps move away from the door and grow faint as he makes his way around the shack.

  She drags the chain across the floor and steps onto the cot and puts her eye to the small burning hole in the window board, stopping the coin of light.

  Incredibly, he is already there—exactly there. Dark shape of him in the white nimbus of vision. Dead-centered like a figure posed in a lens not yet focused. There he stands before her, and yet the sound of his footsteps reach her through the wall to her left. He is standing still and he is walking around the shack, both. She blinks in the tearful light and the figure in the peephole clarifies, taking its true form, and a blade comes into her chest to halve her heart like an apple.

  The footsteps progress around the corner and grow louder, nearer, and then they halt, short of the window, short of what she can see of the world, and she hears the man say Jesus. He makes a sound like a kind of laugh. Where’d you come from, buddy?

  Same place as you, I reckon. The Monkey smiles and his face begins to turn toward the window and she drops like loose bones to the cot.

  I saw the smoke, the Monkey says. Thought there was a fire.

  So did I, says the man. But there’s somebody in there. He takes two steps and stops. There’s a girl inside.

  Slumped against the wall, knees hauled to her chest, she hears them as though they stand in a tunnel, voices tubing along the stone walls toward the opening.

  I know, I heard, the Monkey says. Heard her say a man’s been keeping her up here.

  These words roll and die in the tunnel.

  You wouldn’t be that man, would you? says the Monkey.

  Hell no, says the man. And nothing else.

  They are silent, the world silent, until a crack detonates in the roof timbers, relaying in the wall where her shoulder touches it and jolting down through her.

  Pretty funny the two of us arriving at the same time, says the Monkey, and the man says, I saw the smoke.

  You said that. The Monkey sniffs. You don’t look like a ranger.

  I’m not.

  You’re not?

  No.

  What are you then?

  What am I? Hell, I’m just a hiker.

  A hiker. The Monkey shifts somehow in his jacket. You’re a ways off the trail, aren’t you?

  Like I said, I saw the smoke.

  The Monkey shifts again. You saw that?

  I smelled it first.

  Ah.

  They are silent. Water drips from the roof and rings in its wells.

  What about you? the hiker says.

  What about me?

  What brings you up here?

  I’m a volunteer ranger.

  A volunteer ranger. What’s that mean?

  It means I’ve got a cabin down the mountain I don’t want burning up.

  The hiker says nothing. Then he says, Hadn’t we better see about getting her out of there? She might be hurt. Are you hurt in there? he calls.

  Run, damn you, she whispers. Get away. Get down the mountain.

  She sounded fit enough a second ago, says the hiker. There’s a padlock on the door, but she said there’s an ax out here somewhere.

  I heard that. Is that it over there?

  Where?

  Behind you. Under that tree. Where that wood is.

  The hiker changes his footing in the snow, is still, and then moves quickly in the direction he came. Okay, he calls. It’s an ax. I found the ax, he calls to her. There’s another man out here. He’s a volunteer ranger. We’re gonna come around and knock the padlock off the door, Caitlin.

  He is walking again and she tracks his footfalls, and the Monkey’s, as they circle the shack, and soon the hiker arrives once more at the front door.

  Don’t, she breathes. Don’t, don’t . . .

  Don’t do it like that, says the Monkey. Use the poll.

  The what?

  The blunt end.

  Why?

  Cause you’ll ruin the edge.

  Who gives a damn if I ruin the edge?

  There is silence. Then the hiker says Wait and through the door comes a sound she knows, a sharp festive pop, like a single firecracker. Hardly loud enough to startle a bird yet sudden and sharp enough to cleave open a mountain and send it shearing down itself. Immediately the door shudders in its jamb, as if he has decided to throw his weight at it, but feebly, and then in defeat has slid slowly down to the snow.

  I do, says the Monkey.

  She hears him click open the pistol. Eject the casing. Snap the pistol shut again. Something scuffs at the outside of the door, down low, near the floor. Like an old dog scratching to be let in. There is a second pop and the scuffing stops.

  SHE IS ON THE cot as before, unmoved, legs drawn up in the same tight ball of herself, when she hears him returning. His footsteps, the sled runners, moving more easily through the snow. She remembers the high snowy ledge, the tumbling emptiness beyond, but he has not been gone long enough for that, has stashed the body someplace nearby. As he unlocks the padlock the timbers crack overhead and her legs spasm, kicking as they do in dreams of running, and her mind plays her a scene in which the last thing she sees and feels in life is the cold, blued face of the only other human being in all this time who knew where she was, who heard her voice. A stranger with whom she will now lie through however many years, centuries, nothing to do but hold each other until they’re found, rags of cloth and mummy’s flesh inseparable, histories inseparable, locked in each other’s bones. More in love by the look of them than any man and wife of the living world.

  43

  They rose together for coffee and cold cereal and they worked through the mornings at chores, together and separate, and then they sat with Emmet for lunch, the boy quietly chewing and Emmet telling his
stories as before and never asking the boy where he’d gone or what he’d done in all that time away, and Emmet’s son Billy passing through these scenes like a character in a play, commenting in merry disdain and moving on, never stopping, always on his way to more promising scenes, more promising company.

  At the waitress’s house they watched from the door stoop as the dog stepped gingerly through the snow, finding the places that suited her, the two of them standing in a draft of warmth and scent from inside the little house until the door was shut again and locked. Later they rang the bell over the cafe door and Maria smiled to see them.

  Saturday found Sean up with the dawn to shower and shave, to brew the coffee and carry a cup of it out onto the porch. Cold silence and no movement in the treetops along the ridgelines and not a trace of cloud in the sky. Second week of March and no change anywhere, no sign of winter’s end. Across the way sat the El Camino, black and gleaming.

  The mares nickered and blew at his approach and he stepped to the stall with an apple rolling in his palm.

  He was leading the mare named Belle from her stall when the old man arrived at the bay door with his cup of coffee, dragging the red cap from his head as if entering a church.

  “You thinking about riding?” he said, and the boy said that he was. He hitched the mare to the post and went back for the other while Emmet scooped oats into the galvanized pails fixed to either side of the post. When both mares were hitched and feeding, the boy returned to the stalls and began raking the soiled straw into a heap.

  Emmet stood patting the near mare’s neck. With his eyes on the horse, he said: “You look a might fussed up for such work.”

  The boy took up the pitchfork and said, “No more fussed than usual.”

  Emmet patted the mare’s neck. “You might have yourself some company, you’re not careful.”

  “I might?”

  “Might.” He sipped his coffee. “Since you been gone there’s a gal been coming over Saturdays and helping with the horses.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “She don’t come every Saturday, of course. Sometimes she gets busy with other stuff. Fact is, I’m surprised she comes a’tall, lately.” He coughed and turned his face and spat, and toed a little mound of dirt over the spot. “She keeps on coming when she feels like coming, though. Calls me up when she don’t.”

  The boy pitched the last of the straw into the wheelbarrow and rolled it out into the sunlight and came back in and took up the curry brush and began brushing the mare named Nellie.

  “She ain’t called today,” Emmet said. “The gal. Why I said that about you maybe having some company.”

  The boy said he’d figured as much.

  “Did you figure you might save that curry work till after, when they’ll need it?”

  The boy said he had nothing better to do and went on brushing.

  Emmet stood watching him. Then he said, “That leg pain you much?”

  “What leg?”

  “What leg he says.” He sipped at his coffee. He scratched at the scar on his throat. “I ever tell you about my old granddad who had that same hitch in his step?”

  “No, sir. How’d he get it?”

  “Asked him that very thing, one time. Asked him, ‘Granddad, how came you to have that hitch in your step?’ and he looked down on me with a look to make the clocks run backwards and said, ‘Boy, I’m gonna tell you this just this one time ’cause I know you don’t know no better, but you’d best learn that a whelp never asks a growed man any such questions.’ Then he told me how he’d had three brothers, each one hardly older than the next and him the youngest. Well, the Great War come along and off went the eldest named John Junior, eighteen years of age and not over there two weeks before he got blowed in half. A month later the second brother named James snuck off in the night and never made it to the continent but got torpedoed by a U-boat in the North Sea. Two weeks went by before the third brother named Thomas slipped over there and was never seen nor heard from again.”

  Emmet paused for a sip of his coffee.

  “ ‘Well,’ said Granddad,” said Emmet. “ ‘There I am in the bed one cold night, fifteen and the bed all to myself for the first time in my life, and I’d just got to sleep when I woke up screamin. Felt like my foot had been dipped in molten steel, and me lying there a twistin and a cryin, and when I could finally see through the pain what do you think I saw? I saw my daddy standin over me holding the handhatchet my mother used to chop the kindling with. I looked to see did he chop my foot off, but he hadn’t, he’d just given it a whack with the blunt end, breaking every little bone they was. So I asked him, What’d you do that for, Daddy? And do you know what he said? Said, ’Cause your momma tolt me to.’ ”

  Emmet lifted his coffee halfway to his lips and stopped. The boy had stopped brushing, the brush held still on the mare’s shoulder.

  “You think I’m making this up?”

  The boy resumed brushing. “You might be telling stories.”

  “True stories. Years later, at Granddad’s funeral, I kissed my granny’s cheek and said, ‘Granny, he sure will be happy to see his brothers again, won’t he?’ And she blinked at me and said, ‘Brothers? What are you talkin about?’ And I said, ‘His three brothers what all died in the war, which is how he come to have that hitch in his step on account of his momma telling his daddy to bust his foot with the handhatchet.’ Well. Granny stared at me and then started laughing. Laughing, at her husband’s funeral. ‘Boy,’ she said, ‘your granddad never had no brothers a’tall. He come by that limp thirteen years old when he kicked a mule and broke his foot.’ ”

  Emmet lifted his coffee and sipped noisily, and when he lowered the mug he was frowning happily.

  The boy brushed along the mare’s back in slow, mechanical strokes. “That reminds me of this dog I found one time by the side of the road,” he said.

  “Dead dog?” guessed the old man gamely.

  “No, still alive. Big German shepherd. Whoever hit him had driven off. His lower jaw was missing.”

  Emmet said nothing. He watched the boy.

  “Lifted his head and looked right at me, this dog. He couldn’t bite if he wanted to, but I don’t think he wanted to. Somebody had run him over and left him there like that, but he let a stranger walk right up and touch him.”

  “He knew you didn’t mean him no harm.”

  “I killed him with a hammer.”

  Emmet looked at the boy. The boy went on brushing.

  “You did him a mercy, that’s all. You did what any decent man would do.”

  The boy went on brushing.

  Emmet combed his fingers into the mare’s dark mane. He was quiet. Then he said: “I bought these two animals for two reasons. One was so Alice and me could ride them, time to time, and the other was to give my boy Billy something to do with himself. But after Belle here throwed him and busted his arm he wouldn’t have a thing to do with either one of them. They was already tame as lambs when I bought them and when I asked him what he did to make her throw him he looked at me and said, ‘Nothing. She’s just a crazy mean bitch of a animal.’ ”

  The old man coughed and sipped from his coffee.

  “Alice and me. We didn’t do nothing different for that boy we didn’t do for his brother before him. We did a good deal more for him, truth be told. But it was just one heartbreak after another, year after year. That poor gal. You think the heart gets harder but for a mother it never does. It just breaks and breaks and breaks once more.”

  The boy glanced at Emmet and went on brushing. “Not for a father?”

  “For a father too. But a father don’t know it so well. A father keeps busy in his body. A father don’t stop. Then one day his wife of forty-five years is gone and then he knows. Then he knows. He gets up one day and he’s got too much love. Just too much love. What’s he supposed to do with it? Where’s it supposed to go?”

  The boy held the brush on the mare’s croup. The old man stared into his coffee
mug, then glanced up, abruptly, as if surprised to find he was not alone with the horses. “You was gone a long time,” he said plainly. And the boy resumed brushing.

  “I shouldn’t have done it how I did it,” he said. “I know that much.”

  “Something tells you it’s time to go and you go. In that respect a young man ain’t so different from a old one.”

  The boy brushed down the mare’s hindquarters and moved to the other mare, Emmet beside him. The mares puffing and smacking at the empty pails.

  “Well,” said Emmet. “I won’t chew your ear no more.”

  “You weren’t.”

  “Well,” he said. He moved as if to go but then stopped, and the boy turned to see the blue-green Subaru wagon come around the corner of the house, swing around the big spruce and stop short of the bay door. They watched the girl step from the car and come across the snow in her cowboy boots and her cowboy hat. She raised up to peck Emmet on the jaw and the mares turned their heads from the pails and flared their nostrils at the changed air and snorted.

  Under the wicker weave of her hatbrim her dark eyes shone.

  “They think I have carrots,” Carmen said, and Emmet said, “They know you do,” and she said, “I know. But that’s for later.” She stepped between the mares and raised a hand to each and they pushed their muzzles into her bare palms and snuffled and blew, and for a moment with the two horse heads balanced in the cups of her hands she seemed to be weighing them one against the other, like some figure of equine justice come to decide their case.

  44

  From where he stood at the western-facing window, Grant saw the horses splash abreast into the winter wheat, blackbirds flushing before them, parallel seams chasing behind. The girl sat her horse erect and easy, her

  ponytail in a matching swing with the mare’s, while his son clung to his horse with his knees, his arms and shoulders all out of compliance with the gait. He watched to see if they would turn to look back but neither did, and he watched them come out of the pasture and he watched their shapes grow fitful and watery in some distorting effect of distance and light before they vanished altogether into the tree line, boy and girl lost to sight, and he turned from the window and looked about in confusion at the empty and