Descent (13 page)

24

She was running well, her stride long and light, her feet rolling loose through their landings, her lungs working hard but not too hard and her heart like a liquid clock in her chest. And while part of her mind roamed through her body this way—observing, evaluating, adjusting—the greater and forward part processed the messages of the run as she received them through her narrowed senses: the sound of soles on packed cinder and the sound of many lungs; the smell of dew in the April grass and the good petroleum stink of the sun-heated track; the blurred cheering faces of a Saturday morning beyond the blade of vision that was the length of lane before her, the next few meters of track, her own shadow there, black and soundless and one step ahead, always one step ahead, goading her on until it was just the two of them, far ahead of the others who had nothing left to run for now but just to finish—second, third, what did it matter?

And she was gaining; she was hard on this shadow’s heels as they banked into the final turn, ready to open her stride and take the race away, just take it, without mercy or apology, like taking a boyfriend—Whoosh, mine now, not yours! She ran without fear or effort, a strong, leggy girl of eighteen, an undefeated girl, with nothing before her but more races and more life and the never-ending love of her family, and hers for them, a family who waited beyond the finish line to collect her once again, to claim her in pride and love and take her off for breakfast. She ran and it was like a dream of running under the spring sun, and the day was so beautiful and her heart was so full that she hardly noticed the shadow when it returned, darkening the cinder ahead as if she’d rounded another bend, though she hadn’t. Her heart pounding, legs pounding, giving everything, everything, and it wasn’t enough, the shadow held its lead, it stretched, and she watched in dismay as it—parted. Severed itself foot by foot from her own feet and fled down the track untethered, uncatchable, gone.

And from that, to a scene that should be the dream but isn’t—this dark, rough space of raw plank walls and low plank ceiling, dark floor of thick timber where small life comes and goes through the gaps. A room of such squareness and sameness it might roll like a toy block and do just as well, wall as ceiling, ceiling as floor, and she blinks heavily, the light and colors of the race leaving her, sunlight leaving her, wind and speed leaving her, the heat and smell and heartbeats of the other girls—all gone, and the only arms that wait to claim her are the arms that took her, without apology or mercy, just took her, from the mountain.

Part II

25

A
few miles outside
of a small town on the eastern half of Nebraska, some two hundred miles yet from the river border, the boy switched on his hazards and pulled over on the pitched shoulder, stepped out, and went around to the passenger’s side and found the rear tire nearly flat. He had gassed up in the small town and now he looked back that way.

“Forgot to check your tires, Dudley.”

He pulled his jacket from the cab and put it on and got a cigarette lit and stood looking out over the land. In the wires of the near fencing, tumbleweeds trembled like living things, and beyond the fence the land combed away in a vast litter of bleached and severed cornstalks. Late February, he thought. Maybe March. To the west a darker scrim of gray sky swept the ground, rain or snow, coming along, its smell already there, and looking out over the whole shelterless world he wondered what you would do or where you would go if you were out there on foot with nothing but the clothes you wore, alone in that emptiness when the storm came. It was what he always wondered, plains or mountains or desert.

He was now eighteen. She would be twenty-one.

He dropped his cigarette and stepped on it and considered the truck, its stance on the pitched shoulder, and seeing no way to improve it he set the parking brake and freed the jack and the tire iron from their clamps behind the seat and got to work. He set the tire iron on a lug and bore down on it, and bore down on it harder, but to no effect. Some weeks back at a small station near the Mexican border he’d had the tires rotated by a man who had reset the lugs with his pneumatic driver and charged him ten dollars.

He reseated the iron and taking hold of the Chevy’s bed rail he stepped onto the thin bar and eased down his weight, until the iron twisted off and rang on the shoulder. He crouched and found three edges of the lug smoothed over with small thin forelocks of steel.

Nice, Dudley. What’s your next trick?

As my father liked to say,
his father would say, enacting some sly mechanical solution,
even a monkey knows the value of a stick.

The first drops of rain began drumming the bed of the truck. A single drop burst coldly on the back of his neck, and then the rest of it came hissing over the road behind him and he braced as if for a blow and it was on him, drilling his head and shaping out the truck in a violent riddling and blackening the road as it went.

He leaned into the cab and unlatched the buckle on the kitbag and as he did so he looked through the fogged rear window and saw a figure coming toward him in the rain, alone and as gray as the rain itself. He swiped the glass with his hand and watched the figure come on, his progress casual, thumbs hooked under the straps of his backpack, stains of rain-soak along the shoulders of his jacket.

“What in the hell,” the boy said.

He came away from the cab with the big twenty-ounce Estwing, and he got down on his knees again and seated the iron on a lug and held it there with his left hand and cocked the hammer back and brought it down squarely on the bar but with no result other than a wild, electric jolt in the bones of his left hand. He raised the hammer and brought it down again, and another time, and once more before he looked up into the pelting rain and into the face of the young man who had come up behind him on the shoulder and stopped there, rain dripping from the bill of his cap, regarding the boy through round unreflecting lenses. To the boy in that instant the young man seemed older than he by several good years; but to the young man the same was true of the boy before him on the shoulder with the big one-piece hammer.

Without unhooking his thumb from the backpack strap the young man opened his hand and said Hola, and the boy nodded and said Hola back.

“Somebody was serious when they set those nuts,” said the young man.

“And all Chevy gave me was this little toy wrench.”

The young man sniffed and looked down the road ahead as if he would walk on. Then he made a survey of the tire iron and the tire and said: “Looks to me like a question of leverage.”

“You don’t happen to have a two-foot length of pipe in that pack, do you?”

“You tried stepping on it?”

“It slipped off and tore up the nut.”

The young man nodded. “Well.” He studied the tire. “I’ve got an idea, if you’re about done with that club.”

The boy seated the iron once more as instructed and held it with both hands while the young man came around next to him and got a grip on the truck and stepped up on the bar with one wet sneaker, then the other, and stood a moment getting his balance, and then began lightly springing so that the boy could feel the bar flexing in his hands, could sense in it a quality of steel that would only give so much before it sheared, and he was ready to tell the young man to stop when the bar shuddered in his hands and the nut gave an eerie cry and the young man rode the bar like a mechanized lift down to the blacktop and stepped off.

“There’s one,” he said.

“There’s one,” said the boy.

The rain continued but with a lesser violence and the little iron held, and soon the boy was setting the lugs on the spare while the young man stood turning the flat tire, blackening his wet hands until he stopped and said, “There she is,” and the boy looked. A nickel-colored nailhead flush to the tread.

“I worked some construction down in Texas,” he said. “But that was weeks ago.”

“They do that sometimes. They plug the hole for a while and then they don’t. My uncle Mickey’s a contractor and I’ve seen him about fire a man for letting a nail lie in the dirt.” He lightly fingered the nailhead. “This one’s got a flat side on it. Like a nail-gun nail.”

The boy considered that, then stood up, his knee cracking and popping, and he restowed the tire iron and the jack behind the seat while the young man hefted the tire into the bed of the truck and swiped his hands one against the other. “I’ll be seeing you,” the young man said, and when the boy turned he was already walking down the highway.

He called to him and the young man turned around and stopped.

“I’m going that way if you want a ride.”

“Thanks, I don’t mind walking.”

“Well,” he said. “I’d like to return the favor.”

“That’s not why I did it.”

The boy squinted into the sky as if to locate the sun in all that sodden gray. “I’ve seen better walking weather,” he said.

“Me too. But I’m already soaked and I don’t want to foul up that truck.”

“It’s just a truck, and I’m soaked too.”

He rebuckled the kitbag and piled his duffel and his sleeping bag between the seats and the young man swung his large pack into the truck bed and swung himself into the cab. The boy put the truck in gear and pulled back onto the highway, unsheltering a perfect dry rectangle of shoulder as the Chevy drove away into the haze.

THE YOUNG MAN REMOVED
his wet cap and set it like a bowl in his lap and said his name was Reed Lester, and the boy gave his full name in return and they said nothing more for a while but only listened to the clicking wipers and the wet sizzle of the tires. The air in the cab was dense with the smell of unwashed bodies and damp, unclean clothing.

“How long you been walking?” the boy said.

“I left Lincoln two days ago.”

“And you walked all that way?”

“Mostly.”

“Where you headed?”

“Noplace special. How about you?”

“Same place.”

Reed Lester looked about the cab. “This is a nice truck, isn’t it.”

“It’s all right.”

“It looks about brand new.”

“It was brand new, four years ago.”

The young man laughed and the boy looked over, surprised. As much by the sound of laughter in the truck as the idea that he had caused it.

“Mind if I smoke?” he said, and Reed Lester said, “Hell no, it’s your truck.”

“You want one?”

“No, thanks.”

He pushed in the lighter and returned his hand to the wheel.

“That uncle of yours ever see a nail-gun nail in a tire?” he said.

Reed Lester watched the road. “Those nails don’t usually lie around in singles.”

The lighter popped and the boy touched the coil to the cigarette and pulled the smoke into his lungs and cracked the window and exhaled into the cold draft.

Reed Lester adjusted his glasses. “You think somebody put it there for you?”

The boy watched the road. “Down in Texas I met a man at a gas station and he hired me on the spot. Said he was way behind on this house outside Austin. The next day I jumped in with these Mexican boys been there for months and I don’t think they knew what to make of me. White boy out of nowhere in his nice blue Chevy.”

Reed Lester shook his head. “They don’t know what to make of you and it’s your own damn country.”

The boy smoked.

“Then what happened?”

“Nothing. I worked for two weeks and moved on.”

“With a nail-gun nail in your tire.”

The boy said nothing. Watching the road. Then he said: “Those Mexican boys worked harder than anyone I ever saw. They were making good money and I never saw them eat anything but beans and tortillas. They were sending every dime back down to their families.”

“Well,” said his passenger. “There you have it.”

“Have what.”

“The whole problem with those people. Crying about discrimination and deportation and all the while they’re throwing U.S. currency over the border and it’s never coming back, not ever. Uncle Mickey won’t hire them anymore, not even when they’ve got papers. Says there’s plenty of Americans around who can swing a hammer.”

The boy stared ahead with nothing to say. He put some air on the fogged windshield.

“Some people want to call that racism,” Reed Lester volunteered. “But if Americans don’t get the jobs, then they don’t get the capital to build houses, and if they don’t build houses, then Uncle Mickey can’t give jobs to ten other guys. It’s not racism, it’s Economics 101.”

The boy drew on his cigarette. He tapped the ash in the draft. “I never said it was racism.”

“I know you didn’t, boss,” said Reed Lester. He picked up his wet cap and sat weighing it in his hand.

“Hell,” he said. “My girlfriend back at school was Cuban. Pure Cuban. All her family crossing over on a boat hardly more than a raft. Daddy and granddaddy and all her aunts and uncles. Her mother eighteen and pregnant with her. They hit a storm in sight of Miami. They could see the lights one second and then they couldn’t. When the Coast Guard got there it was just girls in the water—her mother and her mother’s sisters. All the men, Mia’s daddy, her granddad, all her uncles, all drowned.” He scratched at his jaw. “They didn’t send them back because what would become of four teenage girls in Cuba with no family and one of them already pregnant?”

“Why did all the men drown?”

The young man looked up, as if roused from a daydream. “What?”

“Why’d the men all drown.”

“Because there was only enough life jackets for the girls.”

The rain was turning sleety, dashing like insects on the glass and collecting in slushy berms at the outer reaches of the wipers. Along the road the mile markers flared green in the truck’s daylights. Ten miles on, sixty miles outside of Omaha, something appeared in the road ahead and the boy lifted his foot from the gas and began tapping the brake.

“What is that?” said Reed Lester. “Is that a coyote?”

“No, it’s too big.”

The wipers flicked and they watched the animal grow larger in the gloom. It was a dog. A German shepherd on its side, half on the road and half off. It lay with its long spine to them and one dark ear aimed at the sky, the tail limp and rain-flattened on the shoulder. The boy pulled over and brought the Chevy to a stop a few yards short of the dog and killed the engine and the lights.

“What are you going to do?” said Reed Lester.

“Go look, I guess.”

“At what? That dog is dead.”

The boy reached and unbuckled the kitbag at his passenger’s feet and brought out his gloves and then switched on his flashers and pulled the key from the ignition and stepped out into the driving sleet.

Reed Lester stepped from the truck with his cap on and stood with his hands deep in the pockets of his jacket. The boy tugged on his gloves and walked over to the dog and Reed Lester followed.

The dog did not appear to have been there long. Its thick coat was not saturated but stirred yet in the wind at the haunches and at the hackles. Over the road lay a sleety film and a fine white pebbling unbroken but for the black stripes where tires had passed. In both directions the tracks ran straight as far as the eye could see. There was no sign that any car had swerved or braked or pulled over on the shoulder.

The boy came up slowly, watching the dog’s ribs, the black pointed ear. Nothing moving but the sleet and the windblown fur. He came closer, bent at the waist, and came closer yet and suddenly the dog lifted its head in a lunging motion and the boy dodged back, and Reed Lester’s feet went out from under him and he sat down on the shoulder saying “Holy shit,” then scrambled up and moved off.

The dog returned its head to the pavement and the boy stood there, stunned and chilled. The shepherd had tried to bite him but it had no lower jaw. There was the muzzle, the upper canines, and that was all. The tongue and lower jaw had been shorn off and flung away somewhere. Or else they rested in the bumper of a car on its way to Iowa.

He removed his gloves and came forward again and knelt to his good knee, and this time when the dog’s head snapped up he set his bare hands on its body, one at the ribs and the other at the neck, and he worked his fingers into the fur and he told the dog Shh and met its wide desperate eye. The head went down again and he listened to the high whimpering in its bloodied nostrils and he said Shh and moved his hand to the dog’s skull and rubbed the great ears. Everywhere he looked he saw damage. Bleeding rents in the fur, disfigured bones under the hide. The dog had known that sudden astounding flight, that long ride in the air and the return to earth with its snapping sound of breakage. The only unbroken part seemed to be the neck, and pressing his fingers into the fur there he felt the collar. He dug deeper and raised a length of blackened leather. He rotated the collar until the tags came jingling into view.