Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

The path followed the mountain’s edge with only a thin median of pines separating the climbers from the gorge and the open sky. The going was steep, yet for every step there appeared a stone or a thick knee of root made bone smooth by time and weather and the treads of hikers, and the men ascended these crude steps single file, the sheriff in the lead and the deputies bringing up the rear, giving Grant and the boy the look and the feeling of two men on their way to some high alpine arraignment. Through the trees and not fifty feet off in the blue sky, two brown eagles rode the updrafts wing tip to wing tip, without effort or urgency, absolutely soundless, their hunter’s eyes searching.

  Above the climbers, on a level stretch of trail, two more men in uniform stood waiting, peering out through the trees into the sky. They saw the eagles bank suddenly, pinions riffling, and dive down into the gorge like Messerschmitts.

  “Oh, they saw something,” said one of the men. “They saw dinner,” said the other, but when they heard the climbers they said no more and waited for them to come over the rise of the trail: sheriff, father, son and deputies, all winded and all ready for the level strip of trail, crowded though it was with the seven of them clustered there. The two waiting men were the Boulder County sheriff and one of his deputies. Introductions were made and the Boulder sheriff, whose name was Price, tipped back his hat and said that this was where the hiker had spotted her. She was hard to see, said Price, you had to step through the branches, right up to the edge, and look straight down.

  “What made the hiker do that?” said Kinney.

  “I asked him the same thing, Sheriff.”

  “What’d he say?”

  Price glanced at Grant, the boy, and then at the ground.

  “Said he was relieving himself.”

  Within the trees there was only one place where a man could stand like that and Kinney stepped into it and looked down. After a moment he stepped back and stood with his hands on his belt, not quite yielding the spot to Grant. He seemed to be in argument with himself. Then he moved back to the trail and let Grant pass.

  Grant stepped between the branches and all of his vision and all of his heart spilled over the bluff and fell to the rocky outcrop some forty feet below, a dun-colored shelf piled with tumbled scree and sun-bleached wood and rimmed around by stunted, clinging pines. South-facing, there was no snow or even any trace of thaw on the shelf, and at first he saw nothing but a gray and dry twist of fallen tree on which someone, or the wind, had hung faded rags of cloth. Then he saw the sweep of black hair, the back of her head, and his mind corrected the image and he was tottering in space. One of his legs back-stepped of its own accord and his arm came into a strong grip and he turned to see who held him and it was his son.

  He looked into Sean’s eyes and the boy looked back with his matching eyes.

  “I don’t know,” Grant said. “I can’t tell.”

  He stepped back and the boy took his place at the edge of the bluff. Leaned out and looked down.

  “I’m sorry, Grant,” said Kinney. He glanced at Price and his deputy. “I shouldn’t have brought you up here. I thought you’d be able to see. Why don’t you go on back down and—” He stopped. The other sheriff and the deputies were staring.

  “Be damned,” said Price, and the others turned to see the boy going over. He’d taken hold of a branch at the edge of the bluff and swung his leg out over the lip and was climbing down.

  “Sean,” said Kinney, “don’t do that.”

  “Sheriff, he can’t do that,” said one of the deputies. “That’s a crime scene.”

  “I said don’t do that, son.” Kinney came forward to take hold of the boy and Grant put out his hand.

  “It’s all right, Joe.”

  “Hell it is. He’s got a broke hand and a bum leg. I wouldn’t let a healthy man climb down there.”

  “It’s all right,” Grant said.

  “It ain’t all right, Grant. Son,” said the sheriff to the top of the boy’s head, “I want you back up here. That’s an order.”

  The boy went on. Backing steadily down the face of the bluff by way of tree root and rock and fissure. He knew that under the cast the bones would hold and that it was the cast itself that opposed him, and his progress was slow; finding a foothold with his good leg, reaching down and finding a handhold with his good hand, lowering himself to the next foothold and This is your plan, then, to make him watch you fall to your death? and with every movement sending small rockslides of talus chattering down to the ledge below. When he was perhaps twenty feet from where she lay, he looked over his shoulder and saw only the green void behind him and he turned back and said aloud, “Don’t do that. Do not do that.” A few feet farther down, his bad leg slipped and for a moment he scouted the place where he would land below on the ledge, but his boot, scrabbling at the rock face, found purchase and he continued on.

  Five or six feet above the ledge his strength gave out, or he allowed it to give out, and he pushed off and fell clear of the wall and landed good leg first and the leg skidded out from under him in the tailings and he came down violently on his back in a cloud of dust beside her.

  High above him through the haze of dust was his father’s face.

  “You hurt?” he called down.

  “I’m all right,” the boy answered. Up there, one of the men said something about evidence and the other sheriff, Price, said, “I know, Deputy.”

  The boy coughed and got to his knees and turned to her. Under the veil of what was once a plaid flannel shirt her back was wrapped in a colorless leather, the leather so tight it showed every rib and every vertebra. Where her waist had been was a pebbled stretched material like the webbing of a duck’s foot. One arm lay under her and the other lay tangled in the roots of the clinging small pines, more root now than arm. There was no smell but the dry smell of the pines and the dusty, chalky smell of the scree.

  He reached and gathered a handful of black hair and it was like the hair of any living person except that when he moved it, it shed twigs and pine needles and small moltings as if it were some derelict nest and he thought maybe it was. He lifted the hair aside and leaned to see her face. What had been her face. The drawn gray mask of it in profile. The empty slit of eyelid deep in its bowl. Cheekbone like an elbow. Fallen nose. The toothy ghoulish half smile.

  “Sean?” called his father.

  He looked at this face, this maybe-sister. Maybe-daughter. He looked along the wasted length of her and saw nothing he recognized. The clothes were like none he’d seen on her before. The remains of the shoes were not the remains of running shoes but of some kind of hiking boot. He looked again at her clothes. A fallen threadbare flap of backside pocket trembled in a breeze. Something glinted dully in the talus where it had piled up against her, and he grubbed there with his forefinger and brought forth a key and pulled on the key and following it out of the pebbles was a short length of chain and at the end of that, popping loose with a tug, swung a small gray clump. He stilled the swinging clump and held it close to his face and blew on it and a dingy white fur stirred in his breath.

  There was something else in the debris below the pocket. He dug again and unearthed a thin plastic wallet folder. He prized a finger into the folder and it fell apart and the cards spilled out. Two faded credit cards and an ID. At one corner of the ID the lamination had curled away and the paper inside had been soaked and dried many times over, yet the picture and much of the printing had survived. Her name was Kelly Ann Baird. She had been a student at the University of Colorado. He could not read the date of her birth.

  He sat back in the rubble with his bad leg out and studied the ID. Pretty girl. Pretty smile. Her image unchanged all these seasons while the source of that image inches away grew old and unrecognizable, a lonesome desiccated remainder of herself, of family and of love and pride and delight and hope. He looked out over the valley. A bird flared at eye level and screamed at him and flapped away. Perhaps it lived here on this ledge, high sepulchral roost, watching over her. Keeping he
r company until her people could find her and claim her and carry her back down the mountain, as if in victory.

  “Sean,” his father called. “Sean.”

  He turned and looked up and waved the ID. He called up what he’d found and from where he sat on the ledge he felt the heart swing back into his father like a stone pendulum, flesh once more and filling with blood again and going on with its work.

  One of the deputies had gone back down the trail for the towrope, and while he waited the boy sat beside the girl, facing where she faced. Trying to see what she’d been seeing all this time.

  49

  The boy went to bed and Grant lay down on the sofa and remained there in the fitful light of the TV, watching the webbing up in the vigas, the dusty swags pulsing with color. Voices from the TV reached him in strange incantation, voices undertowed into dream and his dreams playing on before his open eyes, all of it vivid and repeating until at last the hours delivered the new day, its gray light in the windows, and still in this fevered state he sat up, hunched and exhausted. On the screen a woman stood at a rostrum in a purple robe, small black ball of microphone near her mouth. She spread her arms wide and he raised the remote and the screen went black.

  The air outside chilled his sweat, his clammy, clinging shirt. Porch floorboards popped under his weight and he felt the burning cold of them through his socks. He inhaled too deeply and the air came retching back up and he stood gripping the post, convulsed less by the hacking than by the effort to stop it—until the cigarette was lit and he drew the calming smoke into his lungs.

  Before him, across the clearing, the house was taking shape in the dawn. No movement and no sound anywhere but the first tentative notes of the birds.

  He crushed the cigarette in the ashtray on the railing and went back inside and got into a dry shirt, and then he returned to the kitchen and set the coffee to brewing and stood at the window looking at the old man’s house, the light already changed. He poured coffee into a mug and left the mug sitting there. Across the way the windows were dark, upstairs and down. The rockers on the porch stilled and empty.

  He looked at his watch, then drew his fingertips slowly over his jaw, as if he were deciding whether or not to shave. He stood that way for a long time. Then he pulled on his boots and got into his jacket and stepped once more into the cold morning. Down the cold popping steps and the pops returning to him in echo off the face of the old man’s house.

  He wasn’t in the kitchen and there was no sound of the TV in the living room but Grant looked there anyway. No sound in the house at all but the tocking of the grandfather clock, and after he’d checked every place a man could be downstairs, he climbed the stairs heavily and he knocked and stood a moment with his hand on the knob, then opened the old man’s door and looked in and there was no need to say his name but he said it just the same.

  “Em,” he said.

  Silent and still in the big bed where he’d slept with his wife so many years. Silent and still and gray and so small in the big bed and all the heat gone out of the bed and out the body, and all the history and all the love gone out of it too.

  Part IV

  50

  Billy Kinney lay against the headboard with the bunched pillow under his neck, watching the smoke in the middle space above him. It was so quiet he could hear the burning of the tobacco each time he inhaled. He lay very still, listening, and after a while he realized it was the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs: sometime in the night it had wound down and ceased its ancient tock tock tock. He had seen the waxen and painted face, had heard the old pastor’s entreaties to God, the platitudes of the

  condolent—but it was this, finally, the abandonment of habit, of sound, of time itself, that made it true and real.

  Downstairs next to a half pot of coffee was a hundred-dollar bill and a message. This money is from me, not the estate. I’ll be back in a few days with the auction people.

  “Good morning to you too, brother,” he said, his voice strange to himself.

  No more sheriff now so no more neighbors bearing casseroles and pies. No more hard heels rapping the porch at dawn and the sheriff thanking them for the food and for the sympathies and seeing them off with no further awkwardness, for they’d come early and wished to leave early, before the other one came down, and wasn’t it just remarkable they asked each other as they drove away how two boys from such two good souls could grow up such entirely different kinds of boys? One of the mysteries of the Lord, they allowed, and always would be, but today our prayers are with them both.

  He uncapped his lighter and held it to a corner of the note and watched the flames climb, the paper twisting and blackening until the ink purpled and rose again in a phantom script, the flame going at his fingers before he dropped it into the sink. He lit a cigarette and thought of Denise Gatskill in her black funeral dress. Hair done up and showing her neck. She had come by the house but he’d sent her away. Now he had money and he ought to take her down to the city, to a bar where they served the red wine she liked.

  He stood before the window. Nothing moving out in the gray midday world. Not a bird in the sky and nothing stirring over at the old ranch house either. The blue Chevy gone and those two likely gone off with the sheriff for some brunch or to the diner on their own. Monday, Monday. He began to whistle but abruptly stopped and looked quickly over his shoulder—at what? Nothing. The empty kitchen. The view into the empty living room. Dark blank face of the TV. Nothing.

  He grabbed his jacket from the chairback and frisked it for phone and wallet and keys and slapped up the hundred-dollar bill, and then he went out onto the porch and past the wooden rockers and down the steps and across the yellow and crusted and spongy turf. Rich stink of earth in the air, pungency of rootbeds and tunneling worms. Grass and hay and horseshit.

  He drove by the cafe and he saw the blue Chevy there and drove on. He drove by the Gatskill house and he drove by his old high school up on the yellow and snow-scabbed hill, and everything he saw was old and tired and pitiful. It was as though he’d gone away for many years and had not seen the process that changed things but only the change itself, all at once, which was the same as seeing your own life gone by. Then he reached the interstate, and with the speakers pumping through him he gunned the El Camino and headed down toward Denver.

  HE LEFT THE CLOUDS and the dregs of snow and descended into the full green outbreak of spring. There were good cheap places on the east side of the city but there was a place he liked on the west side with a billiards table and where you could still smoke and where if you got too lit you didn’t have to drive all the way back through town, through all that traffic and highway patrol. He also hoped to see an old boy he knew there, although this old boy wouldn’t show until much later if he showed at all.

  It was just one o’clock in the afternoon when he pushed through the back door into the near-empty barroom; the room itself was hardly more than a passageway, dominated by the old Brunswick with its three good lion’s feet and a fourth blocky stump of blackened oak, its stained and burn-holed felt.

  Behind the bar was Louis, the old man with the tremendous hands. Louis didn’t care for a song during the day and if someone got one going he’d limp over and unplug the machine and after that the billiards cracked more smartly, voices sailed, a girl’s laugh turned the heads of the daytime drunks.

  Billy took a seat at the bar, leaving an empty stool between himself and two men who’d been talking quietly when he came in and who now stopped to watch him in the backbar mirror as he settled himself, as if he were a strange new development that might or might not be suffered.

  Louis came and Billy asked for a seven-and-seven and the old man set to mixing it. In the mirror, beyond the image of himself, was the bright reflected square of the bar’s only window, and within that bright square were the shapes of a man and a woman. The man leaning close to tell her things no one else could hear in the hushed and daylit bar.

  Louis centered the seven-and-
seven on a bar coaster and Billy palmed the hundred-dollar bill down and the old man held the bill to the light, made change, and placed the smaller bills exactly where the hundred had been. Billy pushed two singles back and folded the remaining cash into his shirt pocket and raised his drink to Louis, who nodded, and he drank.

  “Can a man still smoke in here, boss?” he said, and Louis said, “He can if these boys don’t mind,” and the two men turned to look at Billy—the far one older than the near one, who might’ve been a little older than Billy.

  “Smoke ’em if you got ’em,” said the older man, and Billy looked to the younger, nearer man, this man staring at him for a moment from under the bill of his cap, then shrugging and facing forward again.

  Billy said Much obliged and got one going. Louis placed the ashtray on the bar.

  He drank. He smoked. The two men resumed their conversation, the older man monologuing low and steady, speaking about his wife, or his ex-wife, telling the younger man in the cap all the things he and the ex-wife had done in their marriage, good and bad. Billy ordered another drink and the man spoke about the things he would like to do to his ex-wife now, now that he was no longer blinded by love, and he said many graphic things he’d be sorry he said, Billy thought, if the woman ever turned up dead. If she wasn’t dead already. He stirred his drink and drew the little double-barreled swizzle between his lips and sipped at the fizzing glass brim.

  “It’s like a man just goes along for years,” the man said, “and he thinks he’s living his life, he thinks he’s a normal Joe living his life with a normal woman, but he ain’t, he ain’t, and one day he sits up in bed and he sees his life for what it really is. Sees his wife for what she really is. You know what I’m talking about, Steve?”

  The younger man nodded.

  “Right, Steve?”

  “Right,” said the younger man, Steve.

  The man lifted his beer, swallowed, set it down again. “Same thing as when I was in the service, Steve, which, as I said, I ain’t at liberty to talk about. Five years of high-level shit and then, one day, boom, there I am, staring at myself in a mirror, covered in blood and no idea how or why. Same motherfucking day different motherfucking story.”