Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

  Billy shook his head. “A man gets out of bed in the morning and he has no idea. Just no idea.” He looked up at the high teeth of the pines, the darkening lane of sky.

  The boy sat coddling his arm. Before him at Billy’s waist was a silver oval with two ruby eyes and a red enamel fork of tongue. It was the bejeweled belt of the pugilist, and staring from its polished surface was his own bloodied, distorted face in miniature.

  Looking good, Dudley.

  Billy took out his phone and held it loosely in his palm, as if it were a stone he might sling.

  “Fuck it,” he said finally, slipping the phone back into his pocket. He bent to grab the boy by the jacket but the boy pushed his hands away and climbed to his feet on his own. They walked to the passenger’s side and Billy opened the door and waited for the boy to get in.

  “Keep your head back.” He found him a mechanic’s rag already red to press to his face and he shut the door and walked around and swung in behind the wheel. He got a cigarette in his lips and tapped up another and looked at the boy with the rag pressed to his face and put the pack away. He lit the cigarette and looked at the boy again. Then he leaned to grope under the seat and he found the bottle by feel and brought it up and unscrewed the cap and held it out.

  “Here,” he said, and the boy lifted the rag to look. It was a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, half gone. He took the bottle and tipped it up and the whiskey splashed cold into his mouth washing away the copper taste of blood and running down his throat in a cold burn. He handed the bottle back, shuddering, his eyes weeping and a great hot snake uncoiling in his gut.

  Billy checked the bottle for blood and tilted down a deep swallow and restashed the bottle under the seat and turned the key. Electric guitar burst forth and he snapped it off. He sat a long moment looking at his windshield, shaking his head. At last he flipped the wiper lever and they both watched as the blood spread across the glass, smearing away the world in bright arcs of gore.

  45

  As Grant stepped out of the truck, the red door opened and the old dog hobbled out to greet him, her wrappings gray in the dusk. He walked up to the stoop and halted. Maria stood in the partial opening, one hand on the door and one on the jamb, as if the matter of his admittance were still in question.

  “I’m late,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  She made him stand a moment longer, the canvas tool bag in his grip like an overnight bag, and then smiled and swung open the door. “Don’t be,” she said. “We’re not on any kind of schedule here.”

  He pawed at the welcome mat with his boots and stepped in, passing near her and into the scent of her, a brief miscellany of perfume and cooking

  and wine.

  “Do you want to give me your coat?”

  He glanced down at the old canvas jacket and brushed at it.

  “The only other jacket I have makes me feel like I’m going to my own funeral.”

  “I love this jacket. But you’ll get hot if you keep it on.”

  “Maybe I’d better see about that door first. Unless dinner is ready.”

  “There’s time. But Grant, honestly, I’ll feed you either way, you have

  my word.”

  “And I gave you mine.”

  She led him to the back of the house, through the kitchen—the smells of seared garlic and bubbling meat sauce and baking bread bringing his stomach alive—and into the small utility room.

  “Can I get you something to drink? Glass of wine?”

  Behind her the dog plopped with a grunt to the kitchen floor to watch him.

  “Damn,” Grant said. “I forgot the wine.”

  She shook her head and pressed two fingers to her breastbone: “Italian, remember? If the sheriff saw my stash, he’d arrest me. I’ll pour you a glass.”

  “I’d better not. Not yet. I’ve got some sharp tools here.”

  He unbolted the back door and lifted on the knob and jerked the door open, rattling the old pane of glass.

  “Can I help?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She stood watching him.

  “I wouldn’t mind the company, though,” he said. “Unless you’re needed in the kitchen.”

  She gave a kind of glance over her shoulder. “I think they’ve got it under control. I’ll just grab my glass.”

  The door sagged from its hinges and he shut it again and studied the gaps. Then he collected hammer and screwdriver from the bag and tapped the hinge pins from their thick paint encasements and lifted the door free and set it edgewise on the floor. The cold dusk poured into the house.

  “I’ll try to be quick,” he said.

  “No, take your time.”

  He began backing out the old slot-head screws, and while he worked he told her why he was late: it was because he’d caught Emmet up on a ladder chipping at gutter ice with a screwdriver, and he’d spent about an hour talking the old man down, and then he’d gone up and finished the job, and then spent more time getting the old man inside and making sure he was in for the evening.

  He looked up from his work, and Maria looked up—she’d been watching him, his hands—and she smiled. “He’s lucky you came along,” she said.

  “He was doing all right.”

  “I mean in general.”

  “So do I.”

  “If breaking your leg is your idea of doing all right.”

  “It’s not that he doesn’t like help. He just can’t stand the idea of needing it.”

  “He doesn’t like getting old.”

  “He’s funny that way.” Grant unrolled the chisel bib atop the dryer and selected one and began shaping out the new mortises in the door edge and in the jamb, tapping gently and exactly with the Estwing hammer.

  Maria sipped her wine. “I think he’s gotten younger, actually, since you’ve been around. You and Sean. There’s a light in his eye that wasn’t there before.”

  “That’s the light of pure evil.”

  She laughed. “The devil himself.”

  “I’m serious. Not an innocent word comes out of that mouth.”

  “What does he say?”

  He dry-fit the hinge and picked up the chisel again and began teasing up fine curls of wood.

  “He’s got a thing or two to say about this here,” he said. Not looking up.

  “This here?” She would not help him. “What do you mean by this here?”

  He brushed a curl to the floor and reset the chisel. “My coming over here. Over to the cafe.”

  “Does he now.”

  “Not outright. Never outright. He’s too sly for that.”

  “I see.” She watched him. “Does it bother you?”

  “Does what?”

  “Him being so sly.”

  “Nope.” He replaced the hinge and tapped it with the butt of the chisel and it sat dead flush to the wood. “Sean might, though. If the old man goes down that path.”

  “What path?”

  He rigged his cordless with a bit and predrilled for the new screws. “Oh, he was very sly today about Sean and Carmen.”

  “Sean and Carmen?”

  “My son and your—”

  “Yes, thank you. What about them?”

  “It seems those two mares went out for a walk today with those two kids on their backs.”

  She lifted her glass and said into the bowl of it, “Does that bother you?”

  “Does what?” Grant changed bits and looked at her. “Why should it bother me?”

  When the screws were set he lifted the door upright and walked it to the jamb. The hinge barrels slipped together and he slid the upper pin into place and then the lower, and lastly he tapped the pins down and swung the door to with a neat and solid click. He tested it again, and as there was no binding he threw the deadbolt and put the tools away and took up the broom and began to sweep.

  “Let me do that at least,” she said, but he shook his head. Cleanup was part of the job, he said, and sometimes the best part, although not this time. She asked him what was
the best part this time and he smiled and said he didn’t know yet, but so far it was the smell of that food while he worked. Then he reconsidered and said no, it was talking to her while he worked, and she smiled, but it wasn’t the way she usually smiled.

  “Listen,” she said after a minute. “I want to say something.”

  He held the broom.

  She’d not eaten anything but two Greek olives and she could feel the wine in her tongue and she could hear it in her words but she went on anyway. “Listen,” she said. “I know this isn’t exactly happy-couple land here. You know? I don’t know what it is but I know it’s not that. And I know that’s not why you’re here. In Colorado. You and Sean. And I just want you to know that I know it. Everybody knows it.”

  “Everybody?”

  She sipped her wine.

  “What do they know?” Grant said.

  “They know that you—” She met his eyes, and held them, and smiled, and shrugged. “They know that you aren’t here for us.”

  Grant looked down on the meager pile of paint and wood chips at his feet, then turned to look out the old pane of glass in the door, but the night had come down and there was nothing to see in the glass but his own skewed face and the shape of the woman behind him.

  “I don’t believe she’s gone,” he said without turning. “Did you know that?”

  Maria nodded—then said, “Yes.”

  “How did you know?”

  She watched him. “Because you’re her father.”

  He nodded to the images in the glass.

  “Without evidence,” he said, “without definitive proof, a father would never give up believing, would he.”

  “No.”

  “Long after everyone else has given up and gone home and gotten on with their lives, he would keep on believing because, without evidence, you could never kill his belief.”

  “No, you couldn’t.”

  He nodded again and said nothing for a long time. She watched his back, his shoulders.

  “But it’s not belief,” he said. “It’s not belief. Whatever belief is, whatever it once was, it’s been destroyed by something else. It’s been kicked all to hell by something else.”

  She watched him. She held the glass of wine in both hands.

  “Belief never stood a chance against disbelief,” he said.

  After a moment she said, “Disbelief?”

  “Disbelief in the world,” he said. “The way it is. The way it works. Its god.”

  She waited for him to go on.

  He said: “I stay because I disbelieve. I disbelieve. I don’t hope. I don’t pray. I disbelieve. I disbelieve and I reject and I renounce, and there’s nothing more to say about me.”

  He turned and his face was perfectly composed, his look detached and calm. Then he saw her and she saw the change in his eyes, in his face, as if he’d stepped out of one kind of light into another.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. You’re a good person. A good woman.”

  She stared at him, and then she looked about the utility room—at this and that, at nothing. She wiped at her cheek and sniffed, and then smiled. “All I wanted was to cook you a decent meal, for God’s sake, and you lay this on me.”

  He held her eyes. He could think of no reply.

  He took a step toward her, but just then the dog labored to its feet and clicked off across the kitchen floor, and they heard the front door slam and a moment later Carmen appeared in the kitchen, the dog at her heels, and she came to the threshold of the utility room and stood taking in the strange scene: her mother wet-eyed, holding a glass of wine, and Grant Courtland in his canvas jacket behind her, holding the broom.

  46

  The young man in his bed did not hear the click of the lamp, or feel the light on his eyes under their lids, but went on sleeping as before, openmouthed and dreaming of God knew what. He slept on his side, facing lampward, hair spilled across his eyes, curled upon himself with one loose fist exposed above the hem of the blanket near his chin. The air smelled of ash and sour breath and the rank humid interiors of leather boots. And he would’ve gone on sleeping but for a noise in the room, a true noise heard and felt, like a blow to the headboard, which jerked him blinking into the light—“What?”—raising his head and squinting at the lamp, squinting into the room.

  A figure sat there in the weak light, having pulled the little chair bedside to sit upright and formally, as a doctor would, or a priest.

  “What the hell you doing, Pops?” he said thickly, and the figure leaned forward, elbows to knees, hands clasped, and the face clarified and Billy beheld him groggily. Beyond him the door stood open.

  The alarm clock showed 3:35.

  Billy uncurled and stretched himself, yawning. He smacked his lips and said, “How long you been sitting there?”

  Grant looked at him closely. The greasy, fallen hair, the hooded eyes, that mouth.

  “Not long.”

  “That’s good to hear.” Billy drew himself up and rested his head against the headboard, the pillow mounded under his neck. This new position, the angle of his neck, gave him the look of a man who was helpless to make himself more comfortable.

  He regarded his visitor and said, “What’s on your mind, Grant?”

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “You couldn’t sleep.”

  “I was lying over there, trying to sleep, but I couldn’t. So I got up and came over here. I thought maybe I could talk it out of me.”

  Billy looked at him. He sniffed the air for alcohol and smelled none.

  Grant sat studying his own fingers.

  “You couldn’t find anybody else to talk it out with?” Billy said. “That old man across the hall don’t even sleep. You could talk to him till the cows come home.”

  “It doesn’t concern him.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “No.”

  “It concerns me?”

  “Yes.”

  Billy grinned and wagged a finger and said, “I bet it concerns that boy of yours too. Am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why don’t you talk to him?”

  “I did talk to him, earlier. But they sedated him at the hospital and he’s sleeping.”

  “They sedated him at the hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why’d they do that?”

  “That’s what they do for a broken wrist.”

  “He broke his wrist?”

  Grant stared at him. Billy stared back from his strange position. “And you think I had something to do with it,” Billy said.

  “I do.”

  “Because that’s what he told you.”

  “No. He told me the horse threw him.”

  “Yeah, they do that.”

  “The girl had a different story.”

  “What girl was that?”

  Grant reached up and scratched his jaw. Billy watched his hand until it came down again.

  “You know what girl,” Grant said. He could hear the younger man’s breathing and Billy could hear his.

  “And now here you are,” Billy said. “Come into a man’s room while he’s still in bed. Well, do what you gotta do, Grant. But before you begin I think you ought to know something that maybe nobody else has mentioned.”

  “What’s that.”

  “It was a fair fight. A fair fight. And if your boy got his wrist broke it was only because he didn’t know when to quit. He’s no fighter, sorry to say, but he’s got no fear either.”

  “A fair fight,” said Grant. “What does a shit like you know about a fair fight?”

  Billy’s eyes had been glazed, then faintly lit as he warmed to the conversation. Now they turned hard and bright.

  “I’m sorry junior can’t handle himself better in a scrap,” Billy said. “But I’m done talking to you.” He reached and clicked out the light and then rolled away and slugged the pillow. “Shut that door on your way out.”

/>   Grant sat as before, like a man at vigil, his eyes adjusting to the dark. A moon had come into the west-facing window, white as the eye of a blind man. Light enough to see by. There was the tock tock of the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs.

  “How are you fixed with God, Billy?” he said, but Billy did not stir—until finally he exhaled with a sound of exhaustion and said, “Worse than a woman,” and he rolled again to face Grant. Faint moonlight in his eyes. “What do you want from me? An apology?”

  “Want you to answer my question.”

  Billy stared at him. He shook his head and propped himself again on the headboard and grabbed his cigarettes and lighter from where they lay by the lamp. He struck the flint wheel and his face lit up garishly with the flame, then darkened again.

  “How am I fixed with God? Was that the question?” The eye of the cigarette flared and dimmed. The exhaled smoke rolled overhead in a blue squall.

  “I’m not fixed with him one way or another, Grant. We mostly leave each other alone. Does that answer your question?”

  Grant nodded, frowning.

  “I used to be the same,” he said. “It was a challenge for my wife, who was raised Catholic.” He opened his hands and observed the two white pools that were his palms. Then he told Billy the story he’d told the boy: of the two sixteen-year-old girls, Angela and Faith, twins, and their baby sister on the dock. Told him of the splash and the dive and the mouth-to-mouth while Faith didn’t come up, and she didn’t come up.

  Billy tapped ash into a glass ashtray. “Your wife lost her Faith,” he said, and Grant said, “Yes, but it brought her closer to God. Now she understood him better. Understood that he saw to all things in the world, the beautiful and the ugly. The joyful and the heinous. There was nothing he didn’t touch. No beautiful summer day on the lake without him nor dead twin sister on that same day. He was whimsical and violent and hard but this was better, much better, than a godless world that was whimsical and violent and hard. Because you could not talk to the world. You could not pray to it or love it or damn it to hell. With the world there could be no discussion, and with no discussion there could be no terms, and with no terms there could be no grace.”