Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

  What did I have to tell myself?

  There is only you. There is only you.

  IN THE OUTER ROOM she throws her arms one way and then the other, limbering her spine. Rolls her head on her neck and bends at the hips to grab her toes. So bent she clasps her arms around her knees and hugs herself into a compact human fold, breathes in, her upside-down heart thudding evenly, breathes out. She touches the thick band at her ankle, the hard iron within the leather liner, no more strange to her now than her own foot. She releases her legs and gathers up the chain in her fists and stands, leaning until all her weight is opposed to the remaining length of chain, and she begins to walk, clockwise, like a mule turning a mill wheel.

  The steel plate, about the size of an index card, makes its minute adjustments under the four bolt heads, revealing hairlines of raw wood as she half circles the compass and then returns. The movement of the steel plate is good, but her focus is the ringbolt itself, the small half hoop of steel welded to the plate, its gritty underbelly of red-brown where she has nurtured corrosion on a diet of water, sweat, orange juice, urine, and Coke. (Rust particles are harder than steel, sweetie, her father told her once, by way of comfort when a swing chain dropped her on her fanny; abrasive wear is inevitable.) With her every straining pass the connecting link traverses the arc of the ringbolt, and back again, transmitting a grinding kinking code up through the links to her hands. The turnings have become grainier, noisier, and she stops every six passes just to listen—for whistling. For footfalls.

  The coin of light is on the last floorboard before the lion’s foot and she releases the chain for the day. Kneels down facing east and tests the ringbolt with the tender backs of her fingers. Hot. She wets a fingertip and blots up tiny particles like spilled salt. Presses fingertip to lips and tongues up the taste, the peculiar rusty tang she loves now, so like the taste of blood. Good work. And off in the woods she hears the whistling and she stands and brushes off her knees. Good girl. And the whistling is coming and she goes to the cot and lies back and picks up the magazine and opens it and stares at the picture of an Egyptian mummy. The magazine is trembling, her fingers trembling from her labor, the jumpy kinking and twanging of the chain still alive in her hands like crazy heartbeats. Good work. Good girl.

  29

  Reed Lester sat toying his glass around on its base, wheeling the naked cubes around and around. He had a new red hue to his face like the faces of the people who sat near the windows where the red beer lights burned. The waitress brought him a fresh drink and asked the boy if he was ready for another and he told her he’d take a glass of water and she went to see about the group of young people in the corner who had taken to ordering shots—downing them in some kind of game, slamming the glasses hard on the table and cheering. People at the tables next to them had paid their tabs and left. One of the boys in jerseys had his arm around one of the girls. Another boy leaned to say something into the ear of the other girl and she shoved at him and said, “Get your dog breath offa me. Jesus!”

  Outside the window the sleet was turning to snow.

  “Know what I’m thinking, boss?”

  “No.”

  “I’m thinking you should come with me to Uncle Mickey’s. He’ll hire us both like that.” His finger snap was soundless. He leaned back in his seat and regarded the boy with whiskey eyes. His eyelids slid down and were a long time opening again, and then only in reaction to the commotion from the table of young people. A chair scuffed the floor and a clump of keys were dropped and retrieved. “Ah, sit down, Courtney,” said one of the boys, “c’mon.”

  “Abby,” said the standing girl, “I’m serious.” The girl Abby said something and the standing girl said, “I’m serious, I’ll take the car. You’ll be stuck here.”

  Reed Lester watched them without expression.

  “She won’t be stuck,” said one of the boys.

  “Abby,” the girl said. “Abby.”

  The girl Courtney crossed the floor alone, fierce and unstable on her bootheels, and pushed out through the front door. In a moment a pair of headlights flared, thickening the snowfall, and swung around and were replaced by the red eyes of her taillights and these went bobbling over the pitted lot and arced onto the frontage road and vanished.

  “Stupid,” said Lester. “Stupid, stupid.”

  “I think it’s time to hit the road,” said the boy, and Lester gave an extravagant wave.

  “Let’s do it. But gimme one minute here. My head is rollin like a BB in a teacup. I need water. One glass and I’ll be shipshape.” His head went back again and his eyes closed. The boy looked for the waitress. She was behind the bar staring into a computer screen. He sat looking at Lester for a while, then got up and walked down the hall to the men’s room.

  “Leave him, Dudley,” he said to the cracked plaster over the urinal. To the large curving phallus carefully penned there. “Bring his goddam bag in

  and go.”

  Outside in the hall a group was passing. Someone of size thudded into the bathroom door. A man whooped and the restaurant’s back door groaned open and after the group had passed through it groaned shut again and he could hear them faintly in the parking lot laughing. An engine revved to life, car doors slammed, and the sound of the engine faded away.

  He washed his hands and crushed a paper towel and stepped into the hallway and went to the metal door and stepped outside again and looked for the man who’d given him a light before, but the man wasn’t there, no one was. He lit his cigarette and leaned against the wall. The sleet had gone completely to snow and there was a good white inch on the ground, on the Chevy, on the black Ford with the topper, on everything but the rectangles in the gravel where cars and trucks had recently sat, and these were quickly filling in. His eye fell on the freshest of the rectangles and stayed there. Then he looked to the side of the building where he himself had driven around to park. He looked back to the rectangle. The tire tracks leading away from it did not run that way but banked in the opposite direction, disappearing into a narrow gap between the Paradise Lounge and the cinder-block building next door. The boy leaned on the bricks and smoked and watched. In a moment, at the corner where the tire tracks disappeared, came a cloud of white breath. Only one.

  He looked at the blue Chevy under its coat of snow and he thought of his kitbag inside the cab and he thought of the Estwing inside the kitbag and he remembered the weight of it and the sound of it landing and he drew hard on his cigarette. He looked at the corner again, then stepped on his cigarette and went back inside.

  He took a few steps toward the dining room, then turned around and went back into the men’s room and stepped into the stall where the stool was. Next to it in the stinking corner stood a cheap plumber’s helper. Crusted black rubber and a grimy wooden handle.

  The value of a stick, he thought.

  He trapped the rubber cup against the floor with his boot and unscrewed the stick and took it into the light and looked at it. Beyond the stick he saw the stick again and himself holding it in the square of glass over the basin, his face sallow and shadowed by the ceiling fixture, darkness in the wells under his brow.

  What are you up to, Dudley?

  30

  She knows the world of the sleeping bag. The satiny inside that goes from cold to warm, the head hole string-drawn down to the size of a child’s fist, the humid, breathing lung of it, of one’s own self. Such pleasures long gone.

  Kiddo, comes his voice, down through the hole. Comes again: Kiddo, and she stirs so he won’t put his hand on the bag—on her shoulder, her hip. She follows her own fingers, arms, head out into the cold morning, blinking. Bacon spitting in a skillet. The air smoky and pungent. His back is to her. He came in late, she remembers, and went straight to his cot, trying not to wake her.

  She down-zips to the smaller opening at her feet where the chain feeds in, swings her legs over the edge of the cot and plants her bare feet into the slippers. She wears flannel pajamas but in the morning a girl ne
eds to get out of bed without being watched, and he keeps his eyes down as he kneels at her feet and unlocks the cuff.

  DO YOU KNOW WHAT today is? Handing her the plastic plate. A child’s juice box for her other hand. He has stopped offering coffee, knows she doesn’t like it. She sits on the cot and he pulls up his camping chair. Fresh cordwood is stacked near the stove in a tidy pyramid. The ax and the saw are outside somewhere. The pistol is on his hip.

  She picks up the plastic fork and looks at the yellow clot of eggs, Eat it, Courtland, and forks up a bite and says, Monday.

  No—

  Thursday. Sunday.

  No, not the day of the week, kiddo. Bigger than that. Think bigger.

  She chews the egg and with her fingers breaks off a chip of bacon and slips it into her mouth and chews on that and shrugs.

  What is the biggest day of the year? he says. The day everybody looks forward to most?

  She looks at him. Then she turns and looks at the little fir tree at the foot of his cot. The necklaces of red berries and popcorn she’d sat there stringing while Johnny Mathis sang from the small speaker. Stabbing her fingers with the needle to keep her mind there, with her, in this place and not back in some candle-scented memory of home.

  A large red box sits under the skirt of the tree. Oh, she says.

  Oh ho ho, he says.

  After they eat he gets Johnny Mathis going again and sits in his chair with his coffee, watching the snowfall in the small square of window. He tells her he likes it like this, Christmas morning: simple, quiet. When he was a kid you couldn’t get his old man out of bed before noon and still he’d be drunk. Look at all these goddam presents, he’d say. Jesus H. Christmas. Why didn’t somebody tell me we were rich?

  He swings his chair and opens the iron gate and jabs his stick into the fire, setting off a brittle collapse. The stove is serious business. Deadly serious. If she doesn’t do it right while he’s away, if she gets careless . . . can she imagine a more terrible way to die than fire?

  Um . . . to die by fire while chained like a dog?

  He tosses in a length of wood and maneuvers it with the stick. One Christmas, he says, all I wanted was a Swiss Army knife. The big one with a hundred uses. A real survival knife. Didn’t ask for anything else. Dad worked for the forest service and he wasn’t home much but when he was he made sure his boys weren’t becoming a couple of pansies in his absence. If we cried when he whipped us he’d keep going till we stopped. I wanted the knife because I thought it was the last thing a pansy would want.

  He stares into the fire. The new log hissing and whistling.

  Did you get it? she says.

  He looks up. What?

  The knife.

  No. He told me: I know you wanted that knife, boy, but what kind of father would I be giving a knife to a boy still wets the bed, what kind of message would that be? He had me confused with Bobby, of course, my little brother, but you couldn’t tell him that. Nor remind him that it was him, not Bobby, passing out and pissing himself on our couch.

  His hand moves to his hip, where he hangs the big hunting knife, but finds nothing and moves back. He shuts the gate and swings back to her. The knife, in its sheath, waits in the locked footlocker by his cot. Or under his pillow.

  He sips his coffee. She looks at the length of chain where it lies on the floor. She is free of it and yet her hands ache for it.

  Two years later, he says, just a few months after Bobby hung himself with a power cord, he—Dad—was up in Oregon when a load of logs rolled off a rig and crushed him where he stood. He raises his coffee but doesn’t drink. Thirty-man crew coming and going all day and it’s my old man walking by when those logs decide to go. Some might see the hand of God in that.

  She waits. Then says, Do you?

  Do I? He laughs. When you have seen your little brother swinging from

  a rusty pipe in the basement you pretty much know all you need to know

  about God.

  A tear runs down her cheek, surprising her. It’s the day. Her family. His voice. It’s Johnny Mathis singing to these walls, these cots, which in a glance betray every raw, unbelievable thing they’ve witnessed.

  She wipes away the tear and he says, Hey, I’m sorry. What am I thinking? Who needs to hear that crap? It’s Christmas! The coffee cup rises and his head hinges back for the last of it—single hard convulsion of the throat knuckle under the skin—and when he looks at her again his eyes are bright with atonement.

  I’ve got something to cheer you up.

  He fetches the red box and places it on her lap, surprisingly light for its size, and her heart dives at the thought of the dress inside, before she remembers he wouldn’t do that, that he’s too careful.

  I didn’t get you anything, she says.

  He waves this off.

  I couldn’t get away, she says.

  He gestures impatiently at the gift.

  She peels back the wings of paper and takes in the image on the box. For just a moment something opens in her chest, like excitement, like happiness, before she understands the cruelty of it.

  She lifts the lid and crushes back tissue paper and her heart sets up a thick beating.

  Is this some kind of joke?

  Expensive joke, he says, taking one of the snowshoes from the tissue. I thought you might like to get out for a while. Have you ever used them before?

  31

  He stepped out through the metal door again, out into the cold and snow, and he moved unhurriedly along the wall, toward the corner where he’d seen the white plume of breath, where he now saw another. He began to mutter, and he made his footfall heavy and he fumbled with his fly as he gained the corner, and when he saw the white jersey there in the shadows he took a clumsy step away and said, “Oh, sorry.”

  “Take off, jack,” said the boy in the jersey.

  “Apologies, boss,” said the boy. “Just came to empty the tank.”

  “Empty it someplace else, jack. Piss yourself and fuck off.” It was the big one, Valentine. His jersey brilliant white in the unlit alley. Number 10 in deep red on a white field.

  He looked beyond Valentine into the alley and the larger boy stepped forward to block his view.

  “What part of fuck off don’t you understand?” His breath sour and alcoholic in his face. The boy back-stepped the way he’d come and stopped, looking at Valentine. Valentine took another step and the boy back-stepped again. In this manner they both came around the corner, and when Valentine was all the way around it the boy moved no farther. He let the wooden handle drop from the sleeve of his jacket, catching it at its threaded end, the threads like a grip. In the snowlight he saw flecks of black in Valentine’s glassy blue eyes and he brought the stick up in a whistling arc that caught the larger boy across his ear. Valentine clapped a hand to his head and slipped to his knees and then forward onto his free hand, his face contorted in a soundless wail.

  The boy stepped around him into the alley, moving toward the other jersey he could see there in the deeper dark, white like a signal, like a flag. On the jersey was the name Whitford and this boy Whitford stood at the rear of the truck in a sure stance, his jeans and underwear spanning from knee to knee and his white buttocks clenched and working. The other two boys from the table leaned over the truckbed rail, their hands down in the dark of the bed like ranch hands at some act of animal husbandry. When they looked up, the boy saw in their eyes that he was not himself—was not the boy he knew himself to be but some dark contour of man, shaped out of the light and snow behind him, ageless and faceless and moving certainly toward them.

  One of the boys said, “Shit,” and the thrusting Whitford looked up, looked over his shoulder, and without pausing in his work said, “Who the fuck are you?” He didn’t see but heard the stick as it came whistling out of the dark and struck him just below the jersey, laterally across the buttocks, as if to recleave them yet again crosswise. He howled and spun away from another strike and received it instead to the face. He raise
d his hands and went staggering until the shackles of his jeans tripped him and sent him flat-handed to the snow. “Motherfucker,” he said, crawling away. “Motherfucker.”

  The boy raised the stick again and the two boys leaning into the truckbed let go their holds and fled down the alley and the facedown girl began to slip from the tailgate, and he placed a hand in the small of her back to stop her. Her hair lay over her face like black webbing and there was the smell of vomit and he could see where it had melted the snow and pooled in the bed of the truck.

  He dropped the stick and set his hands in her armpits and considered how best to proceed, and as he was doing this he heard the heavy steps and he braced for the blow, and it landed with such force it slammed him down over the girl’s body. An arm collared his neck and lifted him and he let go the girl to grope at the arm and the girl began to slide again, slipping limp and heavy over the tailgate. She spilled over and her chin struck the tailgate’s lip and her head rocked back and she toppled doll-like down, her head landing last and bouncing once dully on the snowed-over ground.

  The boy was lifted from his feet and he could feel the skin of Valentine’s face against his own, the jaw working as he told him quietly, “I got you, jack, I got you.” The boy bucked and horse-kicked and punched blindly at Valentine’s head but the arm only grew harder and tighter until he could no longer breathe but could feel the other boy’s breath in his ear saying, “Quit that now, it ain’t helping you any.”

  “Turn him this way, Clayton.”

  The boy was swung and before him stood Whitford, head down, patiently attending to his fly, his beltbuckle. When he was finished he reset his backward cap and regarded the boy. He touched his fingers to his own cheekbone, gently probing, and inspected his fingertips. He looked to the fallen girl, and back to the boy.

  “Give him some air, Clayton. He looks about to pass out and he don’t wanna do that.”