Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

  “Damn, Sheriff,” he whispered. “Damn.”

  Kinney lowered to a squat and removed his hat, and the deputy did the same, the shotgun bridged across his knees. They watched to see if anyone would pass before the door or window or come to shut it against the cold, but no one did.

  The deputy whispered, “Sheriff, look up ahead here,” and he pointed to where the two sets of tracks abruptly diverged. The men rose and went stooped-backed up the trail and dropped once more to their haunches to study the tracks.

  The deputy drew a gloved forefinger under his nose. “What should we do, Sheriff?”

  Overhead, the white points of the pines sawed through the stars and sent a fine brilliant dust sifting down.

  “I don’t like it,” said Kinney, “but I guess we’ll have to split up.” He leaned and spat dryly. “You go on ahead with those tracks and I’ll take these here. Set that radio to beep mode. If you see anything, beep me twice and wait for me to come, and I’ll do the same.”

  They restored their hats to their heads, squared them, and stood. “Don’t use your torch if you can help it, and stay sharp, Donny.”

  “Okay, Sheriff.”

  He watched his deputy out of sight, then turned and stepped into the woods as his brother had done when he spotted the same remote light two, perhaps three hours earlier.

  THE MOON FOLLOWED HIM, sidling through the treetops and attaching to him a disturbed version of his own shape, a liquid shadow that moved with perfect stealth while he himself blundered along behind. He kept an eye on Billy’s tracks and an eye on the light ahead, and he made himself stop every twenty paces and count to ten, just listening. He heard a twig fracture thinly in the distance, in the direction his deputy had gone, and nothing more. He considered whether he’d made the right decision splitting up. Made the right decision not calling Summit County to meet them

  up here.

  Meet us for what, for Jesus’ sake?

  He had stopped to listen at a place where Billy had tripped over a tree that lay hidden under the snow. “Up here in goddam cowboy boots,” he said, and continued on.

  He followed the tracks where they dodged through the pines, and when he glanced ahead once more to the lighted rectangle, now unmistakably a doorway, something passed darkly and soundlessly before it, like a tree felled in the middle ground but with no sound of its landing. He stood still and the tree came swinging back to darken the doorway again, and he saw then that it was no tree but some figure careening through the woods.

  He stepped behind the branches of a young pine and watched the figure come on, antic and wayward, wildly lame in one leg. Bereft of all ballast or compass yet moving doggedly on some course, and it was the same course, he saw, that he himself was on and that was stamped in the snow by his brother’s boots.

  He peeled off his gloves and stashed them in his pocket and unholstered his sidearm and found his stance behind the small pine, digging his boots into the snow. He raised the Maglite and rested it on a branch at eye level where the sight line was clean, training both gun and unlit flashlight on the place twenty feet ahead where he knew the figure would come into view.

  Through the intervening boughs he made out the hobbling shape and he saw the blue-black gleam of leather in the moonlight, and although he believed he recognized the jacket he saw nothing else in those palsied movements or in the blanched face under the watch cap resembling his brother. He thumbed off the safety of the gun and released the air slowly from

  his lungs.

  The sound of erratic footfalls arrived in advance of the figure, and Kinney watched the white breaths erupting before the white face, and in time he heard the breaths too, hearing not only the exertions behind them but also the ragged bursts of speech within them—a breathy convulsive incantation as fierce as it was unintelligible.

  At last the figure came lurching into his line of fire and he threw his light on it and a gloved left hand swung up reflexively and there was no weapon in it, nor in the right, which remained down and fisted and close to the right thigh.

  “Not another step,” said Kinney, and the figure stopped. The splayed, outstretched hand wavered in the torch beam, its shadow covering the face like a huge smothering glove. He saw that it was not his brother but some impostor in his brother’s clothes and a poor one at that: swamped in the leather jacket, blue jeans lapsed into accordion folds from the ankles up. Or rather from one ankle up, for on the opposite leg the pant leg was bunched above a cowboy boot, where a strap had been fed through the pullstraps of the boot, the impostor holding the resulting loop in his gloved fist like the bridlereins to his own right foot.

  “I want to see both your hands in the air right now,” Kinney said, and after a moment the unsteady figure let go the strap and fell at once to both knees and then to all fours with a high, awful whimper. Black hair spilled from the shoulders and hung trembling in the sheriff’s torchlight.

  “Look up,” said Kinney. Such shoulders as there were under the jacket shook visibly. Droplets fell amid the lank hair, dazzled in the light, and were consumed in the snow.

  “Come on now,” said the sheriff more gently. “Look at me.” He lowered his beam and when the light was off of it, the fallen head lifted and showed him the face under the cap and for a moment he believed he was seeing the face of his own daughter—haunted and drained and ravaged by illness.

  “My Lord God,” he said. He came from behind the tree holstering the gun and knelt beside her and looked into her wild wet eyes. “Sweetheart,” he said, “what’s your name?”

  62

  They had been silent a long time, smoking in the moonlight, when Grant said: “I thought about trying to stay on here. I talked to Sheriff Joe about it. I thought I might cover the mortgage for a while. But it would mean selling the house back home. It would mean going back there and putting everything in storage. Or selling it.”

  The boy thought of the house in Wisconsin, his bedroom above the garage, all his childhood things, bed and books and fighter planes hung on fishing line. The ribbons on Caitlin’s wall like a bird wing, her trophies and posters and the stuffed ape he’d given her one Christmas and that sat on her bed still. Everything untouched in the cold dark and not a sound anywhere. He lowered his head and blew into his cupped hands and said into them, “What about Mom?”

  “What about her?”

  “Is she planning on staying with Aunt Grace forever?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you getting divorced?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “No. We haven’t talked about anything but one thing in a long time.”

  The boy thought of the waitress, Maria, and of Carmen.

  Grant reached for the ashtray on the porch rail and stubbed out his cigarette.

  The boy said, “You think she still believes in God?”

  Grant nodded. “Yes.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  The boy looked at him and looked away.

  “I don’t know,” Grant said.

  “Do you think it would’ve changed things?”

  “Would what have changed things?”

  “Believing. Before.”

  Grant stared at him, at his profile in the moonlight.

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Sometimes.”

  They were quiet. Across the clearing from out of the shadow of the house slipped the shape of a cat, sinuous and black on the snow, stalking something. She was nearly to the blue spruce when she stopped, one forefoot stilled in midstep, and her eyes ignited in her face like tiny headlamps, green-gold and molten. For a moment the world was still. Then the boy scraped his boot on the step and those lights blacked out and the cat turned and slunk back into shadow. They watched to see if she would reappear but she didn’t.

  “That house back there is the only thing left,” said the boy.

  Grant got another cigarette in his lips an
d offered the pack to his son but he shook his head. Grant lit his cigarette and exhaled a blue, ghostly cloud.

  “I don’t know what else to do,” he said. “Do you?” He looked at the boy. Blond whiskers silvering in the moonlight. He still saw the young boy he’d been not long ago, but he knew that he alone saw it, that it was the image a father carries, burned into the eyes by way of the heart.

  The boy shook his head and said that he had wished for something terrible. Terrible.

  “When?” Grant said. “Just now?” He was thinking of the falling star.

  “No. When we went to see that girl.”

  Grant looked at him. “What did you wish for?”

  “I wished it was her. I wished it was Caitlin.”

  Grant looked away.

  “I wanted it to be her so we could take her home.”

  Grant shook his head. “I shouldn’t have let you go down there.”

  “You couldn’t have stopped me.”

  Grant sat shaking his head. “I’ve had this conversation a thousand times,” he said. He stared into the sky. “I never should have let you go up into those mountains, I say.”

  The boy was quiet. The moon sat in the eye of its ring.

  “You couldn’t have stopped me, she says. Maybe not, I say.” He stared into the heavens, his eyes burning with its lights. “But I should have tried.”

  63

  Kinney told the girl who he was and that he’d followed his brother, Billy, up there. She was still on her hands and knees, and he scanned the snow for blood.

  “How bad are you hurt, Caitlin?”

  She gave a sob and faltered and he caught her by the upper arm. More bone than arm under the leather. He knew by this how light she would be.

  “All right, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re gonna be all right now. We’re getting you down off this mountain.” He found his radio and pushed the button twice and waited. He pushed twice again and as he waited he heard someone coming through the woods, moving smartly but cautiously. He doused the torch and drew the gun again and leveled it over the hunched girl, who grew silent and rigid.

  “Who all’s up here, Caitlin?” he said under his breath. “Is he up here, the man who took you?”

  “I don’t know. I think so.”

  “What about Billy? Where’s Billy, Caitlin?”

  Before she could answer, a man appeared in silhouette and Kinney saw the shape of the man’s hat and he lowered the gun and blinked the torch twice to guide him. He told her it was all right, it was just his deputy, and she began to breathe again.

  The deputy came through the trees at a lope and he stopped beside them and set the shotgun across his knees and leaned upon the shotgun gasping like a man at the end of a hard race. He was as pale as the girl and when he met the sheriff’s eyes the sheriff saw he was badly shaken.

  The deputy looked at the girl on her hands and knees in the snow. He looked at the one big cowboy boot she wore and the loop of belt making its dark smile in the snow. He looked at the running shoe on her other foot. He seemed not to have the breath or words to speak.

  “What did you find, Donny?”

  The deputy lowered himself to his knees beside the girl, as if to pray, or beg. The girl watched him with her wet eyes.

  “Did you find him?” she whispered.

  “Find who?”

  “The man,” she said.

  “All I found was Billy,” he said.

  Her eyes searched his. Then her head dropped again heavily, black hair spilling to the snow.

  Kinney looked from the girl to his deputy. “Tell me, Deputy.”

  “Sheriff, I think we need to get this girl to a hospital.”

  “I know it. Tell me what you saw up there.”

  “Sheriff, I don’t know if I can.”

  “By God, Donny.”

  The deputy shook his head dismally. He reached to touch the girl’s shoulder but stopped himself. “Miss?” he said. “Can we take a look?”

  She did not answer or move. Then, in silence, she pivoted onto one hip and shifted around to sit in the snow with her arms stiff behind her and her legs stretched out, and thus arranged she raised the single boot into the air before the deputy, as if proffering it. As if in some weird invitation of undress.

  The deputy handed the shotgun to the sheriff.

  “What are you doing, Deputy?”

  The deputy took the boot in his hands and began, gently, to pull. It came off more easily than Kinney would’ve predicted and when it slipped free he did not understand what he was seeing. At the end of her white thin leg there was no foot. There was the heel—and nothing else. A stunning illusion. As if the rest of the foot were still inside the boot. The deputy tilted the boot and the blood ran from it like oil and Kinney looked again and saw the black sooty wound and he smelled the seared meat smell of it.

  “My God,” he said.

  The deputy tilted the boot farther and something heavy slipped along the shaft from bootheel to mouth and landed in a dark clot on the snow.

  “What is that?”

  “I think it’s his socks, Sheriff. Billy’s socks.”

  Kinney looked at him.

  “He got shot, Joe. He didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”

  Kinney frowned. He adjusted his hat. Then he handed the shotgun back to the deputy and slipped an arm under the girl’s knees and the other around her back and rose to his feet lifting her easily.

  “Don’t,” she said. “I can walk.”

  “I know you can, sweetheart, but this will be faster.”

  “Let me help, Sheriff.”

  “No, she don’t weigh nothin. Grab that belt there and get it on her leg.” The deputy did so. “Higher,” said the sheriff. “Just below the knee. Pull it tight. Tuck in the end. Are you in pain, sweetheart?” he said, and even as she shook her head he said, “Jesus, what a question.” To the deputy he said: “Now watch our backs with that shotgun, Donny. Anything else moves in these woods you go ahead and shoot the sonofabitch.”

  The girl hooked one arm around his neck and with her face to his chest he turned and they headed down the mountain, moving slower than they might have, not for the weight of her but for the care he took not to jostle her or allow her to come into contact with any branch or bough or to himself slip on the steep trail. She was not bleeding badly and he didn’t believe she’d lost much blood, and if she’d not gone into shock by now he didn’t believe she would and his sole desire in the world was to deliver her gently and safely to the cruiser.

  The girl for her part rode in his arms like a child to whom sleep has come no matter what, no matter where, though it wasn’t sleep she surrendered to but something more absolute, more exquisite, which was abandonment. Abandonment of thought and of fear and of responsibility and of strength. She surrendered to abandonment and in her surrender she felt the downhill pull of gravity and she believed that the man who carried her was in fact a man-shaped sled or toboggan and she its only passenger. Sailing down the mountain slope with the song of speed in her ears, beat of his heart against her ribs, whole unto herself but also belonging to the snow and the wind and the moon and the mountain. Altogether more effortless and fleet than she’d ever been in any footrace and putting nothing but distance and more distance between herself and the life up there, which was no life but only the momentary interruption of life, and every second on this man-sled delivering her farther and farther from shack, chain, sleeping bag, Monkey. Down and down the great slope, the sweetest ride, joy of speed, down and down and unstoppably down.

  64

  They came around a final bend and found the El Camino broadside to the road as before and the cruiser beyond it downslope. Both the sheriff and his deputy were breathing harshly. The full moon hung above them on its high sweep, and on the deputy’s wrist a small round face lit from within told them it was just midnight. The deputy unlocked the cruiser and opened the rear door and went to the other side to help the sheriff arrange the girl along the bench seat, h
er body so meager in the folds of clothes. He saw something protruding from one of the jacket pockets and after a moment understood that it was a shoe. The other running shoe.

  “How’s that, Caitlin?” said Kinney. “Can you ride like that?”

  She nodded, gazing around the interior as if it were the cockpit of a spaceship. Kinney told the deputy to start up the cruiser and get the heat going, then he had him radio Summit County for ambulances and officers. When that was done the deputy came around again and stood behind the sheriff who was still tending to the girl.

  “You want the emergency kit, Sheriff?”

  Kinney looked more closely at the wound in the dome light. The blackened curled lip of skin with its bright scarlet fissures. “No, I’d rather spend the time driving toward the EMTs. And anyway I don’t believe we can do much better than what’s been done.” He reached for the belt below her knee and noticed for the first time the silver oval of buckle, the snakehead with its ruby eyes, and for a moment it froze him, as the face of a true viper would. Billy had put it on that morning, or whenever he’d gotten up. Mindlessly fastening the buckle and getting on with his day. Then Kinney thought of the girl’s father, Grant, and the boy Sean, down on the ranch. Going about their day, their night, with no idea, just no idea. He uncinched the belt and watched for the blood to seep from the wound and cinched it again.

  What in the hell, he thought. Just what in God’s own hell.

  “Sheriff,” she said as he was withdrawing from the cruiser. She’d removed Billy’s glove. She held out her bare fist. He reached in and cupped his hand and the keys dropped into his palm.

  “He gave them to me,” she said.

  “Okay. You lie still now. We’re gonna get you to the hospital before you can say boo.” He moved to shut the door and again she said, “Sheriff.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry. What I did to him.”

  He didn’t understand. “Hush, now,” he said. “Don’t talk.”

  “Sheriff?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have a phone?”