Descent: A Novel

by Tim Johnston

  “Or damnation,” Billy said, and Grant said, “No, that was damnation. You mind if I smoke one of these?”

  Billy told him to help himself, and he did.

  They were silent, smoking. The moon sat in the very corner of the glass as if lodged there. The grandfather clock tocked away.

  “I didn’t understand any of this until my daughter was taken from me,” Grant said. “I never talked to God, not even to ask him to watch over my children. I believed that the terrible things that happened in this world every day could not happen to me, to my family. I suppose every man believes that. Until shown otherwise, he believes no evil can touch the people he protects with his love. Then, one day, another man takes his daughter from him. Simply grabs her and takes her. He has no name and no face, this man, and he vanishes back into the darkness and he takes the man’s daughter there with him. What can he do, this father, in the face of such cruelty, but ask the God he never believed in to bring her back? And if he won’t bring her back, or show him how to find her, then some other deal must be made. Some other terms. I never believed in God like I never really believed in the truly bad man. In his power to touch me.”

  The cigarette ash flared, then dimmed.

  “Now I ask of this God, that if he will not give me my daughter back, at least give me my bad man. At least give me that. I spend my nights dreaming of nothing else. Of getting this man in my hands. I wake up with the taste of his blood in my mouth, only to find I’ve ground some tooth until my gums have bled, or I’ve bitten through my lip.”

  He paused. He drew on his cigarette. He seemed almost to smile.

  “For a time,” he said, “I would see a man and follow him. It could be any man, going about his business. I’d watch and I’d follow, driving sometimes to the man’s very house. I couldn’t help myself. Like the man I sought. Sick to my bones. I believe your brother, Joe, came up with this arrangement down here as a way to keep me away from those men up there in the mountains.”

  They smoked, the clouds from their lungs merging and seething in the space between them. Somewhere in the room was a small constant buzzing, as of some feverish insect.

  “So,” said Grant. “That’s how I’m fixed with God. If he will not give me my daughter back, then he owes me one bad man. And you want to know the hell of it? The hell of it, Billy, is that I don’t give a damn anymore if it’s even the right bad man. I have reached the point where any bad man will do.”

  Billy appeared to study the tip of his cigarette. He tugged at the hair under his lip.

  “And you get to decide that, do you? You get to decide if a man is bad enough to kill or not? That’s thinking kind of highly of yourself, isn’t it?”

  “Deciding won’t have a thing to do with it, Billy.”

  “It won’t.”

  “No.”

  “What will then?”

  Grant looked at his hands. The pale weave of fingers. “God,” he said.

  “God,” said Billy, and Grant nodded.

  “If God put that man on that path to take my little girl, then I expect him to put a man on my path too. I’m demanding it.”

  “And how will you know him, Grant? How will you recognize this bad man God has sent you?”

  “That’s the easy part,” said Grant, and he looked up from his hands and Billy saw his eyes in their sockets like small openings to some blue flame of the skull. “I will know this man because he will be the next man who attempts to hurt anyone I love.”

  Billy stared at him and Grant stared back from the chair and they remained that way in silence for a long time, until finally Grant reached forward and crushed the cigarette in the glass ashtray, and placed his hands on his knees and pushed himself up. He appeared beset by some brute weariness as he bent to collect the shotgun from where it leaned against the chairback.

  “That’s what I got to thinking about over there,” he said. “That’s why I couldn’t sleep.”

  Billy watched the gun in the dark, the moon’s blue scrollwork along the barrels. Grant turned for the door and stopped. Neither of them knew how long the old man had been standing there, but when they saw him they knew he’d been standing there long enough.

  “Sorry to wake you, Em,” Grant said, and eased himself by and descended the stairs, and Emmet watched him go until he reached the landing and turned the corner and was gone.

  He turned to look at his boy in the bed. “What the hell did you do?”

  “Me? Are you blind now too? Didn’t you see your buddy there with a shotgun in my bedroom in the middle of the night?”

  Emmet had not put on a housecoat and under the thin pajamas he appeared to shake.

  “I want you outta this house.”

  “What? What was that?”

  “I said I want you out of this house. I’m all give out, Billy.”

  Billy stared at him, then fell back on his pillow in the moonlight, laughing.

  “You crazy old man,” he said. “You can’t kick me outta my own goddam house.”

  “I ain’t, son. I’m kicking you outta mine.”

  He lay there, his eyes on the ceiling. Then he moved, and Emmet saw something flash in the center of the room like the blink of some ghostly eye, or a spinning moon, an instant before some other thing shattered on the door trim to the left of his head. He stood a moment looking at the wreckage of glass and cigarette butts on the floor, and then he backed away, closing the door behind him.

  47

  Grant had reached the bottom step of the porch when the screen door pushed open and Emmet came backing out, an aluminum travel mug in his gloved hand. He saw Grant and stopped.

  “You’re up early,” he said.

  “So are you.”

  “This ain’t early.” He gripped the railing and came carefully down the steps. He wore his good dark overcoat, dark slacks, black shoes, and the bright red cap pulled down over his ears. Gaining solid ground he looked up and met Grant’s eyes. “How’s that boy?”

  “Sleeping it off.”

  “How bad?”

  “Not as bad as it looks. Two good shiners and a somewhat enlarged nose.”

  “Broke?”

  “What?”

  “The nose.”

  “No. Just the wrist. They put a cast on that.”

  “I want you to give me that hospital bill, Grant.”

  Grant waved this away. “It was just a scrap, Em.”

  Emmet cocked an ear at him. “How’s that?”

  “It was just a scrap.”

  “If my dog gets loosed and kills a man’s chickens, is that man gonna come to me and say, don’t you bother, Emmet, it was just a scrap?”

  “Not the most flattering analogy, Em.”

  The old man cocked an ear at him again and Grant shook his head. He looked to the corner of the house where the tail end of the El Camino jutted. Emmet sniffed and looked at the sky.

  “Why don’t you let me drive you, Em?”

  “They ain’t took my license from me yet.”

  “I know it. I feel like a drive myself.”

  “What about the boy?”

  “He’s fine,” Grant said. “He’s sleeping.”

  WITHIN THE BORDER OF ponderosa pines were a few decorative birch trees, bare and white amid the stones. Grant got out to walk but there was no place in the cemetery from which he could not see the old man clearly, and he watched him trek through the snow until he reached a rose-colored stone of modest size and began to clear the snow from its crown, whisking left and then right, the way she must have once brushed snow or dander from his shoulders. When the stone was clean he pulled the cap from his head and rested upon the stone, his back to the graveyard, his fine white hair bristling.

  Grant swept the snow from a bench and sat on the cold slats. The bench was aligned for a view to the north where on a clear day the mountains must be visible, rising above the hills, but this morning there was only the low thick clouds like a gray canopy over the world. In the corner of his eye he saw the ol
d man at the stone. The white head nodding, cocking as if to listen, nodding again. Sipping his coffee. After a while the old man stood and turned and touched the stone once more and began walking toward Grant. Grant brushed more snow from the bench, and Emmet sat down beside him.

  “Her folks are buried over in that corner there, where that birch is. She wanted to be closer, but them plots was bought up long ago.”

  “It’s a nice spot she’s got,” Grant said.

  “I bought the two plots for us and two more for the boys if they want them. If they don’t, they can sell them at a good profit.” He paused. “Twenty-five years ago that was, and I never once saw myself sitting here.”

  Despite the cold and the snow there was the damp, moldering smell of the graves, or Grant imagined there was, and he took out his cigarettes unthinkingly, and then returned them to his pocket.

  “Go ahead and smoke.”

  “I can wait.”

  “It ain’t gonna kill me.”

  “That’s not what I hear.”

  “That wasn’t the smokes, that was the goddam chemo.”

  Grant brought out the cigarettes again and got one lit and blew the smoke well away, Emmet watching him closely. Emmet sniffed at the air. He sipped his coffee. Then he reached two gloved fingers casually toward Grant.

  “What?” said Grant.

  “Give a man a puff.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Come on now.”

  “No.”

  “One goddam puff, God damn it. Night I had.”

  Grant looked into his eyes and handed over the cigarette.

  Emmet sipped at the filter, held the smoke briefly in his lungs, and exhaled it slowly from pursed lips. He handed the cigarette back, grinned, and pitched forward on the bench coughing with such violence that Grant reached over and took hold of his arm.

  “Em,” he said. He tossed the cigarette and began to pat the old man on the back, unprepared for the slightness of him under the coat, the racking thin basket of ribs and spine. “You need water,” he said, and Emmet shook his head and raised the travel mug, or attempted to—black gouts of coffee leaping from the sip hole before Grant reached to stabilize it, guiding it to the gray, contorted face. Emmet sipped, swallowed, sipped again. Grant let go of the mug and sat back again.

  “Lord,” Emmet gasped, wiping at his chin. “Holy mother,” he said.

  When the old man was quiet again, and a long moment beyond that, Grant leaned forward and said, “Want to say I’m sorry, Em. About last night. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  Emmet reached up and reseated the red cap, tugging it forward and down, as a man facing a gale might.

  “I told him it was time for him to go,” he said.

  “When?”

  “Last night, after you left.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Don’t matter what he said.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Em.”

  “Don’t be.” He looked over at the rose stone. “Alice,” he said, and stopped. He shifted on the bench. “She’d tell you the same thing.”

  Grant rubbed at his fingers, at the two knuckles that were now the tips, nailless and printless and bone hard under the skin; yet still sometimes when he reached for a coffee cup or to scratch his jaw, he would experience again as if for the first time the bewildering moment when fingers that had been there, indisputably, suddenly were not. The loss that was more than physical.

  Emmet said: “I know I never said it, and I guess I should of. But that’s your home as long as you want it, Grant. You and Sean both.”

  “I appreciate that, Emmet. I can’t even tell you.”

  “But you’re leaving just the same. Ain’t you.”

  Grant said nothing.

  “And just where are you gonna go?” the old man nearly demanded.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Back to Wisconsin?”

  “I don’t know.” Grant stared at his hands. “I haven’t taken very good care of that boy. If he got in his head to just leave again . . .”

  There was movement and they both turned to see a pair of cardinals, males both, sitting bright red in the ribs of a birch. Beyond the birch was the rose headstone, the only one not snowcapped. Grant had seen the chiseled words but not read them. They named the woman whose remains lay there, ALICE MARGARET KINNEY, with her dates, and they named the man who sat beside him on the bench, EMMET THOMAS KINNEY, for whom there were no dates, for whom the stone carver waited, and below these were the words MAN AND WIFE and nothing more. The face of his own wife came to him then, Angela Mary Courtland, and a time of graves he could not imagine.

  He turned back and Emmet was watching him.

  “What?” Grant said.

  The old man looked away and shook his head. “Leaving’s hard,” he said. “But it ain’t the hardest thing. Is it.”

  48

  The boy walked the mares to the front pasture, released them, and walked back to the barn, passing the El Camino coming and going; his blood on the windshield was long gone and there was no other sign of that day but the caved-in door where Billy had kicked it.

  Some cowboy, Dudley. Some Marlboro man.

  In the barn he picked up the rake and began to muck the stalls. A black farm cat gathered herself and flew up to one of the saddles and sat there, tracking the flights of swallows in the dusty heights.

  Two Saturdays gone by and now a third and he knew she wouldn’t come and he knew he would have to go to her, but what would he say if he did? And what did it matter anyway?

  Then why don’t you stop thinking about it?

  About it?

  Her.

  He was hindered by the cast but not as hindered as he had been, and before long he removed his jacket and continued working in his T-shirt, and this was how his father found him, planted in a dry blizzard of dust and straw, bending and forking and pitching the soiled straw into the wheelbarrow.

  “Sean,” he said, and without stopping the boy said, “What.”

  Then he stopped and turned and saw his father standing in the bay door.

  It was the first day of April, a bright day with the smell of spring in it. She’d been gone for two years and eight months.

  The deputy met them at the interstate and they followed his silver SUV down toward Denver, and they exited where he exited and followed him up again, climbing the pass toward Estes Park and Boulder. Spring had come indisputably to this county and the tires hissed as they struck the dark bands of thaw that lay across the road. The high bends of blacktop as they took them ignited in waves of granular light, starfields of quartz and mica, and they saw in memory the black dazzle of the cinder track in the spring—the brilliance of the white lines on the oily black, her long-striding legs scissoring between the lines as she neatly snipped one girl, and another, and then another

  from the picture. The gleam and heat and sun-smell of her after. The other girls, their parents, stepping into their circle of happiness, circle of pride, congratulating and stepping away again.

  There was no other sound in the cab but the rushing wind at their windows, and watching these new trees in this new county, the deep gorges and the far piney walls, they remembered the first time they’d climbed such a road and it could have been the same road, same mountain, a family from the plains who’d never seen such country before. And if the country was no longer strange to them, it was still strange in that it had never again astounded them, nor awed nor excited them again, but only reminded them every day and almost from hour to hour what it had taken from them and what it had made of them. The deputy’s signal winked and his taillights flared and he veered from the blacktop onto a sudden unpaved road, a narrow passage where such sunlight as reached their windshields, their faces, was green and trembling and heatless. The deputy’s SUV and the Chevy after it yawing and pitching in the graveled wallows until the road summitted and fed them down into a bowl of cleared land where four other cars sat waiting. Two of these were offic
ial SUVs like the one they followed and two were the meaningless parked cars of hikers.

  Sheriff Kinney and his other young deputy stepped from the silver cruiser and moved toward Grant and the boy who were coming to meet the lawmen in the middle ground. Gravel and needles and deadfall crushing under their boots. The sheriff stopped and his deputies stopped and stood behind him, their young faces grave. He reached to shake Grant’s hand as he always did and then put his hands on his belt and regarded the boy.

  “What happened to you?”

  The boy looked at the cast on his wrist, as if he’d not been aware of it. He’d worn it for three weeks now and it showed the dirt of that time and could not be cleaned. He said he’d fallen off a horse.

  “The hell you say. One of ours?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why wasn’t I told?”

  “It wasn’t the horse’s fault,” said the boy.

  “Don’t make no difference.” The sheriff studied him. He adjusted his hat and looked at Grant, and he remembered why he was there.

  “You sure you all want to do this?” he said, and Grant looked up from the gravel.

  “What else can we do?”

  “You can wait down below.”

  “Up here or down there, we have to look,” he said. “Don’t we, Joe.”

  “That’s why I called you,” said the sheriff. “Though I shouldn’t of. I should of done it by the book and called you later. But it’s likely to be hours yet before we even get this”—he hesitated—“recovery under way.”

  “I’m grateful you called, Joe.”

  The way he figured it, said the sheriff, the perp had driven her up here

  to the trailhead and parked. Then he either took her life here and carried her up the trail or else forced her to walk up there with him and then did it.

  Took her life.

  The boy stood remembering another shaded hollow in the woods. A cold bench and white crooked headstones. A tarnished metal plaque that promised forty days and all of it attended by the white statue with her maimed blessing and all of it so long ago.

  What do you think will happen this time?

  Nothing. Let’s go.