Descent (10 page)

17

In the bleary daybreak
the boy passed a gas station just beyond the off ramp and drove into the little town the deputy had told him to stay out of. He took Main Street at the posted speed, parked among the spaces, and fed two of his dimes, and a third, into the meter.

The cafe door opened with a disturbance of small bells and he stood a moment in the warm, ancient reek: ages of coffee, ages of bacon. The quiet tink tink of knives on chinaware. A girl said, “Anywhere’s fine,” and he went to the row of stools at the counter. She came around and poured him a coffee and handed him a menu. She had the black hair and round face of a native people, although native to what he didn’t know. He ordered an English muffin.

“That’s all you want?”

“With butter and jam, please.”

She looked at him more closely. He seemed all bone and muscle under his denim jacket, and with that limp she’d first thought rodeo, but the boots were wrong and he wore no hat. He looked as though he’d slept on a rock. She imagined touching his yellow hair, dirty as it looked.

She played the thickness of her ponytail through her fist and held his eyes. “Douglas back there pours a humongous flapjack, and it only costs a dollar more than an English muffin.”

The boy glanced at some men behind him, their jaws working at their meals.

“No, thanks,” he said, and with a sigh, with an air of having done all she could do, the waitress left him. A minute later a toaster popped and she placed the muffin before him and stepped away to the cash register.

“How was breakfast, Gabe?”

“I reckon I’ll live.” The man winked a leathery lid at the boy and slipped a twenty from his wallet. The drawer rang open with a rich slosh of coins.

MORE DINERS CAME IN
and the waitress carried loaded plates along her forearms. On one trip a plate appeared before the boy, the great flapjack steaming. When she returned to the counter it hadn’t moved. She inched a small china bowl toward him.

“Real maple syrup,” she said.

The boy popped the last of the muffin into his mouth. “Thank you. But I won’t eat it.”

She made a birdlike motion with her head. “Why not?” Behind her in the pass-through a man appeared. Large man stooping to look. Toothpick in his lips. One dark eye looking at the boy and the other wandering off into the world.

“I ate that muffin and that’ll do me,” the boy said.

She looked at the man in the pass-through until, muttering to himself, he went away, and then she turned back to the boy and collected the plate and turned again to upend the flapjack into a bin, and with each turn of her head her ponytail swung like a girl on the move, like a girl in a race, that thick and fitful, that alive.

He left the diner and walked along the sidewalk until he came to a Laundromat. He cupped his hands to the glass and then stepped inside. He thought he was alone but he wasn’t—a dwarfish round woman turned and blinked small black eyes at him and then turned back to monitor the portal of a dryer, her head cocked as if listening for some false note in the thumping heartbeat of it. The air was humid and sharp with the ammonia stink of piss. He went to the back by the soap-dispensing machine and stacked his quarters on top of the pay phone and pulled the slip of paper from his wallet and stood looking at it. He’d stopped calling her cell phone months ago because of the way she answered, and because of the way she sounded when it was not the call she wanted.

He got a cigarette to his lips and dropped two quarters in the slot and dialed the number and a voice told him to deposit more money and he did so and then lit his cigarette and waited.

“You can’t smoke in here.”

It was the woman, the dwarf monitress, torn from her vigil.

He nodded and showed her the receiver at his ear.

“This here’s a nonsmoking facility,” she said. “Says so right there.”

The ringing in his ear ended and he turned from the little woman as a voice said thinly, electronically, over the miles, “Hello?
Hello . . . ?
”

“Hello, Aunt Grace?” he said. “It’s Sean.”

“Sean?” she said. “I can barely hear you. Where are you? Are you still in California?”

“I’m in New Mexico now.”

“New Mexico! What’s—Jordan, please stop poking him with that, now he asked you to stop, so stop.” There was a pause, a clatter of silverware, a young girl’s despairing voice. Covering the mouthpiece with her hand or her breast, his aunt said, “Right, young lady, just keep that up till I get angry, okay?”

The boy drew on his cigarette and sudden pain lanced into his knee, deep between the bones. White hot and twisting. He shifted his weight to that leg to force the blade back out.

His aunt said into the phone, “Ugh. I’m sorry. Are you there, hello—?”

“I’m here.”

“New Mexico!” she said again. “What’s in New Mexico?”

“I’ve got some work,” he said.

“You should come home, Sean. You can do that kind of work here,
can’t you?”

He knew that if there were news from Colorado his aunt would have
said so.

“Is Mom around?” he said, and for a long moment it seemed the connection had failed. At last his aunt said: “Sean, haven’t you talked to your dad?”

He said nothing. Then he said, “Why?” and his aunt said, “Seanie, your mom’s back in the hospital.”

He saw a dim phantom of himself in the face of the soap-dispensing machine.

“When?”

“Two weeks ago. She took too many pills.”

“She tried to kill herself.”

“No, she didn’t, Seanie, it was an accident. She was just taking too many of those damn pills.”

“Do the doctors think it was an accident?”

“The doctors are . . . cautious. They want to watch her for a while, that’s all.”

Behind him a harsh alarm sounded and the little woman opened the dryer and began hauling laundry hand over hand into a wire basket on wheels. Next to the soap-dispensing machine was a corkboard thick with fliers and ads: trucks and farm equipment for sale, offers of trash hauling and babysitting. Reflexively he looked for his sister’s face among them.

“Sean—?” said his aunt, and he drew soundlessly on his cigarette. Tapped ash to the dirty floor.

“Is she okay?”

“Yes. I mean, what’s okay?”

They were silent.

“She’s safe,” said his aunt finally. “She’s resting.”

They hung up and he spread the remaining quarters in his palm, tallied them, and dropped two more into the phone. He punched in a number from the corkboard and watched the little round woman backing herself through the glass door, her body rocking with the weight of two swollen garbage bags at the ends of her arms. “You ain’t got the right to smoke in here,” she said, pinning him with her black eyes. “You ain’t got the right to give other people your cancer.”

18

Grant left the sheriff
and drove back over the divide and down again to meet the climbing dusk. He exited the freeway while still high above the city and took the county road back into the foothills, to the old mining town that lived on though the copper was long gone.

Inside the Whistlestop on his way to the back a man reached out to grab him. “Where’s the fire, mister?” It was Dale Struthers, the old veterinarian who owned the ranch down the road from Emmet’s. He and the wife, Evelyn, smiling up warmly. They told Grant to join them and he glanced at his watch and said he couldn’t, he only had time for one cold one and then he had to go see what kind of trouble Emmet had got up to.

“We were going to stop by on the way here, see if we could feed that old bird,” Struthers said. “But then we saw Billy’s car there and, well . . .”

“We didn’t want to intrude,” Evelyn said.

“He been back long?” said Struthers.

“A few days,” Grant said, and the old man said, “That right?” and put his silverware in order as if for surgery. His wife patted Grant’s arm to free him.

He continued back to the bar and sat down, nodding to Jack Portman and to the man Jack was serving whom he did not know. He got out his cigarettes and then remembered and put them away again. Jack drew him a pint of beer and poured a shooter. Grant tossed back the shooter, chased it, nodded for another. He sat watching the bar and the restaurant beyond in the backbar mirror. He used the mirror to study the man a few stools down. The man’s face was ordinary and revealed nothing of his character.

Maria Valente came into view in the glass, stopping before a booth of high school kids to take their order. For a moment, before she returned to the kitchen, Maria seemed to look in Grant’s direction, but her face was obscured by a large silver cataract in the old glass.

He thought about ordering another shot and another beer. He rubbed his thumb over the blunt ends of his two fingers and looked in the glass again for the man with the ordinary face. The man was gone. Grant ordered another shot and another beer.

“IS THIS SEAT TAKEN?”

Maria was there, at his left, her dark eyes finding his in the mirror. She got onto the stool and set the plate of food between them. “I got the big steak and extra fries,” she said. “Here’s some silverware.”

“No, that’s your dinner.”

“Are you kidding? Look at the size of this thing. It should’ve come with a deed.” In her voice, the way she formed her words, were long-ago scenes of a little girl in Italy. Grant knew he tended to watch her mouth.

“Are you off?” he said, and she shook her head.

“Debbie-Lynn called in sick. Otherwise known as a hot date. How about you?”

“How about me?”

“Big plans tonight?”

“Sure.” Grant took up a French fry. “Me and Emmet are throwing a party out to the ranch. Gonna be a hootenanny. You should come by.”

“Really. A welcome-home party for Billy?”

He looked at her and she said, “He was in earlier. With that Gatskill girl who likes to French-kiss in public.” She watched him in the mirror, then picked up her knife and began sawing into the meat. After a few minutes he joined her.

They had just finished the steak when Maria’s daughter appeared at her side, planting her elbows on the bar and levering herself forward for a look at the bloody plate. “That is revolting. Did you even cook it?”

“Carmen,
tesoro
—you remember Mr. Courtland?”

“Yes. Good evening, Mr. Courtland.”

“Good evening, Carmen.”

The girl had her mother’s dark eyes and dark curly hair but her skin was darker than Maria’s. That was all Grant knew about the father.

“Anyway,” the girl said, snapping down a credit card. “Here’s this.”

“Did you have them check the transmission fluid?”

“I checked it myself. It’s fine.”

“Who showed you how to do that?”

“This hitchhiker dude I picked up.”

“Oh, that’s funny. Isn’t she funny, Mr. Courtland?”

There was a sound, a playful chirrup, and the girl glanced at her phone. She kissed her mother on the cheek and dismounted from the bar. “Gotta go, Jenna’s waiting.”

“You two be good,” Maria said.

“You too.”

“And not one second past midnight, I mean it.”

The girl strode back through the restaurant and the high school kids watched her go. One of the boys bugged out his eyes and Grant’s heart filled with violence. He saw himself crossing over and lifting the boy out of the booth by his throat.

“So she got the car,” he said.

Maria looked to the ceiling in wonder. “When she drove it off the lot, just her, sitting behind that wheel, I thought, This can’t be happening, look at her, look how young!”

She turned to him and touched his forearm. “Oh God, I’m sorry—”

Grant shook his head.
Hush.
He patted her small hand.

When she got off work at ten o’clock she found him where she’d left him, hunched over his drinks. There was a kind of scene outside in the yellow lamplight when he would not surrender his keys, but finally he dropped them into his pocket and got into her Subaru. Maria was not expecting anything. There had been plenty of time for something to happen and it hadn’t, and she was fine with that.

Grant sat with his hands capping his knees, his eyes fixed on the road unspooling in the lights. Maria punched on the radio, listened a moment to some country song, and punched it off.

“She’s a beautiful girl,” he said.

“Who is?”

“Your girl. Carmen.”

“Thank you.”

“And smart. Smart. I bet she’s ready to drive that car right off to college.”

Maria looked over at him. He pawed at the chest pocket of his jacket and then stopped and put his hand back on his knee. “You can smoke if you want to,” she said. “Seriously. I think I’ve even got one of those lighter things . . .”

“Right here,” he said, thumbing in the knob. He got a cigarette to his lips and gapped the window. The lighter popped and he guided the coil with care. He blew the smoke through the opening, and then held the ember as near to the wind as he could without destroying it. The wedding band on his finger glowed a dull green-gold in the light from the dash.

“Well,” Maria said. “What about Sean?”

“What about him?”

“Is he getting ready for college?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Doesn’t that—” she said. “Don’t you want to?”

He nosed the cigarette slowly to the wind, absorbed, until the embers flared and flew off like bright little hatchlings.

She said: “I’m sorry, I’m overstepping.”

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m taking advantage of the circumstances.”

“Which circumstances?”

She glanced at him, then looked back to the road. Slowing for a blind curve, her beams swept a stand of aspens—white skins flashing for a lurid instant and dodging back into darkness.

After a silence Grant said, “Ask me something I can answer,” and she nodded and said, “All right. All right, I’ve always been curious: what happened to those fingers?”

“Which fingers?”

She gave him a look, and he opened his hand before the windshield.

“Was it a work accident?” she said. “Like a saw or something?”

“No. Well, there was a saw, but it wasn’t a work accident. It was a drinking accident.”

“Oh.”

“I used to be a drinker.”

“Oh.”

“The turnoff’s coming up.”

“I know. But thanks.”

When they reached the ranch he had her circle around the big spruce and park in front of the old ranch house. He struggled with the seat belt until she leaned over to get it. The black spill of her hair, the up-close smell of it.

“Maybe I should come in and make you some coffee,” she said. “Do you have coffee in there?”

The Labrador met them on the porch and Maria put her knuckles to the dog’s nose and tousled the soft ears. Grant held open the door and flicked on the light and saw at once the drab utility, the male disregard. Whiff of laundry he’d let pile up because he didn’t like the sound of the machines, that humming and thumping, that false lulling.

“Make yourself at home,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“Over to check with Emmet. Come on, you,” he said to the dog.

From the window over the sink she watched man and dog cross the clearing in the blue light. Grant walked upright and steady in a way that made her heart shift. She had tried to imagine it—what happened to him happening to her, her daughter—but she could not, not even for a second. Bad things happened to good people. God had his plan, always. But how did that help this man? His family? That girl? She began looking for the coffee.

Grant stopped short of Emmet’s porch and stood before the living room window. Through the glass he could hear the argument between two TV crime solvers. Electric auroras of blue and green played over the walls and over the old man’s white-socked feet on the footrest. The remote stood upright in his spotty hand but his eyes were shut and his stubbled jaw had fallen. Grant thought of his children, his own children—of carrying them to their beds when they were small. The limp human weight of them, the young scent of their skins, the murmurs as he lay them down. Angela waiting downstairs with a glass of wine, bare feet up under her on the sofa. He stood outside the old man’s window remembering that this had happened, that it was true.