Descent (11 page)

19

The edge was not
keen
but the cottonwood logs were dry and they split well, the halves leaping away as the blade sunk into the face of the block, which was the trunk of the cottonwood itself. The boy split each log in half and then split the halves in half, family of four, over and over, pausing only to carry the pieces to the corner of the house and add them to the stack, turning each piece for fit. The house was stucco of some defeated color, with vigas stumps jutting from the face. About it lay a graveyard of trucks and farm equipment and other wreckages
, all of it
wallowing in tall yellow grass. In the shade of the narrow portico at the front of the house sat a muscular brindle dog, tracking the boy’s movements. It seemed to be waiting for an excuse to attack him.

Around noon, with the sun roaring down, he walked to the hand pump near the smaller house, the casita, and struggled with it until at last the water retched up and ran in a cold stream that tasted of stones and iron. He bowed his head under the stream, and then lifted his T-shirt to towel his face. When he dropped it again a girl was sitting in a chair in the shade with the dog. A thin-armed girl in a black bikini top and enormous round sunglasses, her insteps gripping the wooden railing.

The boy lit a cigarette and stood smoking it in the shade of the casita.

Later the man came out with two bottles of beer and a ham sandwich on a plastic plate. He was a large red-faced man in a black T-shirt tight across his gut, his feet stuffed into a kind of sandal. He had a bad back and moved like a man in ankle chains. His name was Tom Carl but the boy didn’t know if Carl was his last name or the second part of his first.

He took the sandwich and one of the beers and said, “I don’t think I can do much with these right now. But thank you.”

Tom Carl looked at the stack of cordwood near the house. “I can see you know how to work. You don’t have to try to impress me.”

The boy looked around for a place to set the sandwich and the beer other than the face of the trunk.

“We came out here to work too,” Tom Carl said, surveying the ruined machinery of his kingdom. “Spend more time together, fix the place up. A family project. Angela lasted five months and high-tailed it back to Phoenix, and now my daughter is counting the days. One day, that dog will go too.”

“Angela,” said the boy.

“Angela. My wife,” said Tom Carl.

“That’s my mother’s name.”

The older man looked at him, and then took a long swallow on his beer.

The boy stood holding the sandwich and the beer.

“Give ’em here,” said Tom Carl, and when his hands were full again he turned and took two steps toward the house and pulled up short. “How long you been sitting there?” he said.

The girl’s painted toenails made a ruby necklace in the sun. She did not look up from the magazine in her lap. She turned a page. “Since the dawn of time,” she said.

THE BOY WAS AT
the corner of the house stacking cordwood when the girl rose from the chair and reached in a stretch for the portico ceiling, showing her dimpled stomach, ladder of ribs, and he thought of Caitlin and her friends in their track shorts and their tight tops—barefoot empresses of summer days, conspiring in voices that made no effort not to be overheard by the male in the house, the plain, meaningless lump of boy who burned at their periphery.

That boy older now than those girls were then. Older than this one before him.

“Come on,” said the girl, and she made a kind of dash past the dog. She bent and slapped her thigh. “Come on,” she urged. She waved a hollow length of bone. “You want this? You want this?” The dog rose to all fours and sluggishly followed. The girl waggled the bone before the dog and said, “Go get it!” and flung the bone into the high blazing grass. The dog took a step toward the thrown bone, swung its head to watch the boy returning to the tree trunk, and then slunk back to the shade and to its dirty square of carpet. The girl stood with her back to him, drenched in the reddening light, young and hip-cocked, preposterous, beautiful.

“CAN I BUM A
smoke?” she said.

She stood to his left, hand to her forehead, shielding the big sunglasses from the sun. White well of armpit giving off faint scent.

“Sorry?”

“A cigarette?”

He saw himself reflected in the dark glasses. He looked at her bare feet, the dusty ruby toenails. He pulled the flattened pack from his pocket and held it to her. She pinched up a cigarette and tucked it under an edge of her bikini top and then offered these same fingers.

“Victoria,” she said.

He wiped his hand on his thigh and took hers, small and warm, and he said his name.

“What’s the matter with your leg, Sean?”

“It was in an accident.”

“A car accident?”

“Yes.”

“Are there scars?”

“You better step back,” he said.

She stood by as he swung the ax down on another log, retrieved one of the halves and set it up. Swung again. He thought about every movement, every pause.

“So, Sean,” she said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Here?”

“Out here.” She glanced about the arid world.

“Making gas money.”

“To get to someplace else.”

“Yes.”

“Someplace in particular?”

“No.”

“So, pretty much you just drive around in that truck.”

“Pretty much.”

She nodded. She watched him. He passed a forearm over his brow. Far above in the sky a threesome of large birds turned a slow wheel. He stood another log on the block.

“What about company?” she said.

“What about it?”

“Don’t you get lonely?”

He brought the ax down on the log and the two halves leapt. He picked up one of the halves and stood looking at it as if the new yellow face of it would tell him something. Then he placed it on the block and split it in two.

“Well,” said the girl. “Everybody needs some company sometime.” And without waiting for his reply she turned and walked back to the house, and knowing she knew he watched, he watched just the same.

Why not her? he thought. Why not this girl instead of Caitlin? The idea of such carelessness, such arbitrary selections in the world, made him almost sick.

By sundown there were only a few logs left and he quartered these and stacked the cordwood. On the horizon a yellow moon rose from the mesas. Tom Carl returned carrying two sweating bottles of beer.

“You hungry now?”

“No, but thirsty.”

They stood in the song of insects. Tom Carl looked at the Chevy and said the boy was a long way from Wisconsin, and the boy said he didn’t live there anymore, and Tom Carl asked where did he live and the boy looked at the moon and said the last place he lived under a regular roof was up in Colorado with his father.

“How long ago was that?”

“February,” he said.

“And you’ve just been driving around since then? Job to job?”

“Yes.”

Tom Carl sipped his beer.

“Is there more of you up there in Colorado, with your father?”

The boy looked at him.

“More of your people. Your family.”

The boy shifted his weight to his bad leg and Tom Carl said, “It’s none of my business. I’m just curious if your dad’s alone up there or not.”

“There’s an old man on the ranch where he’s living.”

Tom Carl raised his drinking arm and slapped at it with his free hand, killing a mosquito.

“How come you left? If you don’t mind me asking.”

The boy was silent a long time. A hard, bitter morning, he remembered, Perseus, the slayer of Cetus, setting in the west, and the old green truck wouldn’t start, so he took the good truck, the blue Chevy. He’d been living with his father in the ranch house for five months and he hadn’t thought, until he was miles away, how it would be when his father woke to find another child gone.

“It just seemed like it was time to go,” he said at last, and took a drink.

Tom Carl put a hand to his back and grimaced. “I thought maybe you had some kind of trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“Trouble.”

The boy met the older man’s eyes. Then he looked into the dusk and said, “No, sir. No trouble. I’m just trying to make gas money.”

Tom Carl showed him the casita and the daybed there and the showerhead over the stone floor. On his way out he stopped and asked the boy if he had a cell phone.

He did but the battery was shot.

His host stood gazing about the little room. “If you need to call someone,” he said, “come on over to the house. I got a cordless you can take outside and that’s about as good as it’s gonna get, privacy-wise.”

He thanked him and Tom Carl tipped his bottle good night and closed the door.

The boy removed his boots and socks and lay back on the narrow bed, his knee pulsing with the old damage and his shoulder answering where the muscle and bone went on chopping, and he lay in this dialogue of pain thinking about his father up in Colorado, his mother in Wisconsin, in the hospital, and Caitlin wherever she was—and he didn’t think he would sleep but he did, and in his sleep he climbed a path in the woods, in the dark, making his way by the progress of the animal he followed, a dog or wolf of such whiteness it raised shadows from the things it passed, the trees and stones. He kept pace with the white dog until the path grew steep and he began to fall behind, and soon he was in total darkness. Clawed at by the limbs of trees, falling to all fours, he scrabbled on until he came to her suddenly on the path. Pale and naked and curled upon herself, and though she was very young he knew it was her. He said her name but she only lay there holding her knees, and when he looked up again he saw the white dog watching him. He moved to pick her up and the dog advanced, and he let go and backed away. The dog came on and he backed away until he could no longer see her, until she’d slipped wholly back into the dark. Then the dog walked to her and by its light he saw her again, saw that she was sitting up, and that she was grown. Covering her breasts with one arm and gesturing to him with the other, beckoning him back,
Come back
. . .

20

T
here was one morning she could never forget, Angela said. Bright, battering morning when she’d awoken in her own bed after so long away, her own room—the first morning back from Colorado and it had not been a dream, she hadn’t thought so even for an instant—and the moment she was awake she knew Grant was gone. Knew he’d not even come up to bed but had slept a few hours on the living room floor and left in the dark or at first light, so as to spare her this departure, this separation—let her wake to it in her own time and on her own terms. It was like before, when he’d left them, her, for some other woman, some other bed, she said. Only now she was not sorry; every moment he was here with her was a moment he was not in Colorado, searching, and those were hard, hateful moments.

Grant picked up his coffee and sipped. He sat across from her at the kitchen table in the middle of the afternoon, the middle of September. Sean was in school; Grace’s kids were in school, Grace and Ted at their jobs.
Th
e house was like a house where everyone has been murdered: breakfast dishes in the sink, a boy’s plastic truck on the counter, the terrible wall clock ticking and ticking. Grant had come back at Grace’s request, to see Angela, to see his son, whose leg was now healed, or as healed as it would ever be. She wouldn’t say it outright but Grant knew that what his sister-in-law wanted was for him to see how things had become in her small and crowded house.

Caitlin had been gone for a year and two months.

Th
at morning, that first morning back, Angela had come down the stairs in her robe. Sean was on the sofa under the bedding, books and homework and other things from his room spread out over the coffee table.
Th
e wheelchair within reach. He looked asleep, and Angela passed quietly into the kitchen and found Grant’s note by the coffeepot
—I didn’t want to wake you,
etcetera.
She was standing at the kitchen window staring out when Sean rolled in. She looked at him and smiled. How are you feeling?

Did Dad leave?

He didn’t want to wake you. He said he’d call from the road.

Sean looked around the kitchen as if it he’d never seen it before. He was getting used to seeing everything from a lower vantage. As if he’d grown small again. Angela turned and looked out the window at the stark cold day. No cars, no one on the sidewalks, everyone shut up inside recovering from their
Th
anksgivings.
Th
ey themselves had gone to a restaurant where they’d picked in silence at hot turkey sandwiches.
Th
e restaurant so quiet they clearly heard the young waiter in the kitchen ask, Christ, who died?

Mom? said Sean.

Hmm? She turned back to him. Yes?

He elevated his leg just a little and lowered it again. Nothing, he said. I think I’ll have some cereal.

Oh, I’m sorry, I should have asked. Do you want some eggs?

No.

Do you want an English muffin?

No, just some cereal.

Okay. Stepping to the cupboards, pulling down the boxes. We’re going to have to put stuff down where you can reach it, aren’t we. She set a place for him and moved the chairs away and she arranged all the cereal boxes and the milk and she watched him get himself parked before the bowl.

Aren’t you going to eat? he said.

Not right now. I’m going to go up and shower. Will you be all right?

I think I can take it from here.

She touched his shoulder and walked back through the living room and she understood, she told Grant, how everything had shifted in the house, like pieces in a puzzle: the boy’s room empty and the living room now a bedroom, her own bed half empty, another bedroom empty beyond all comprehension or belief. She climbed the stairs.
Th
en, at the top, she heard Sean say something, but she didn’t stop, and she didn’t look back.

Grant waited. Angela lifted her mug and sipped and returned it soundlessly to the table.

Th
at’s it? he said.

Th
at’s it. Yes.

Grant looked toward the stairs.

Christ, that clock, he said. He turned to look out the window. Finally he turned back. Angie, you were in shock.

She thought about that. Do people remember being in shock? I remember the moment vividly. He called out to me and I pretended not to hear him.

Grant stared into his coffee. He shook his head. You can’t blame yourself, Angie. I know that’s your instinct as a parent, as a mother, but you can’t.

He heard the hollowness of these words in the ticking stillness of the borrowed kitchen.

She waited for him to look up. It’s worse than that, she said.

What is it? God? You blame God?

I wish I did.

He moved as if to reach for her hands and her hands withdrew to the edge of the table.

He watched her, studying her, and she saw the instant when he understood, and she knew that he had thought it himself, that it wasn’t just her.

But, Angie, my God, he said quietly. He was just a boy. And he was hurt. What could he have done?

I don’t know, I don’t know. Her eyes were dry. Dark. Grant didn’t know them. But he just lay there, she said. He just lay there while she got into that man’s car and I can’t help it, Grant, when I look at him all I can think is, why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you stop her?