Descent (14 page)

“King,” he said. “It’s all right, King. It’s all right, boy.” There was a phone number. He undid the buckle and slipped the collar from the shepherd’s neck and folded it into his jacket pocket and got slowly to his feet while the animal watched him with its skyward eye. It lifted its head again, not aggressively but as if to rise, and he showed his palm and said “Stay,” and Reed Lester watched him turn and walk back to the truck and lay his forearms on the rail of the truckbed.

He went to stand beside him.

“What’re you going to do, boss?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s nothing you can do for that animal.”

Grains of ice ticked in the bed of the truck. A dark station wagon hissed by on the highway, the face of a young girl in the window.

“There’s one thing,” said the boy. He went to the cab and reached into the kitbag and pulled out the Estwing and turned back to the shoulder, back to the dog, and Reed Lester watched him and he saw the dog’s ear prick to the sound of the boy’s step, and as the boy came nearer he saw the dog’s tail strain to lift, and he watched the boy lower himself to his knee again and set his bare hand on the dog’s neck and speak to the dog, telling it something
he couldn’t hear. He saw the boy move his hand to the dog’s ears, rubbing, and then to its brow, and with his hand over the dog’s eyes he saw him cock the hammer high and bring it down once, very hard, very close to his hand.

They lifted the dog and carried it into the ditch and set it down again. The boy looked up and down the highway. Then he returned to the truck and reached behind the seat for the red mechanic’s rag his father kept there, and he carried the rag back through the ditch and tied it to the uppermost fence wire. He stood looking down on the dog as the sleet fell and he looked at the sky and he shuddered. He went once more to the truck and reached again behind the seat and returned to the ditch and unfolded the blue tarpaulin and spread it over the dog and tucked its edges under him. The tarp had been his shelter, his plastic roof on nights under the stars when the dew came down. He stood back and the sleet pocked loudly at the plastic, as if angered by it. He returned his hammer to the kitbag and the two of them got back in the truck and he turned off the flashers and started up the Chevy. The wipers leapt back to their noisy work. He checked his mirror and pulled back onto the highway and in silence he lit a cigarette and in silence they drove on.

26

T
here is a beam of light, shaped by an eye-sized hole in the battened window over the cot, a light with no purpose other than to push a burning coin of itself over the seams of the floorboards—irregular demarcations of an illogical timepiece.
Th
e beam is pink in the dawn and turns yellow-white on its sweep as the sun moves westward over the earth—as the earth spins eastward away from the sun—progressing from one corner of the room where a locked chest sits, to the opposite corner, the beam going ruddy, and then pink again, and then dying altogether at the lion’s foot of the stove, as if dispirited, as if defeated daily by the black iron thing.

Some days the beam never arrives at all and it’s as if the sun, and time with it, has stopped. Other days the beam flickers and withers midfloor, signaling the arrival of a storm front. And when it dies all at once, as if by a switch, she pins herself against the wall side of her cot and waits for the beam to come back and for the peeping eye that stopped it to move on again.

Currently the beam is midfloor. She could reach out and place her hand in it and feel it pool in her palm, a warm autumnal yellow, a weightless continuum to the outside world, free to come and go.

She doesn’t move, not in the least. Her heart down-beating from a race it believed it was in, a dream-race against nothing but her own shadow.

You should get up. You should get up. You should not lie here like this.

Th
e coin of light rests in the center of her vision, severed in two by a crack in the timber.
Th
e longer she fails to get up the more it’s as if her real self has continued on in the dream, leaving behind this heavy, dark-minded thing, this shell. Why get up? Why move? Hopelessness falls like the shadow of a great bird; black thoughts rise like water.
Th
en, suddenly, without deciding to do so, she sits. Is sitting up. A pair of hands in her lap. Hers. She can make the fingers move like so. My fingers. My legs. Mine.

27

They rode the storm
eastward
and by the time they reached the outskirts of Omaha it was dark and the ice had grown thick at the edges of the windshield where the wipers and heat fought it back, and when the Chevy’s tires strayed from the tracks in the whitened road, rails of slush crushed beneath them with a wet, explosive sound.

They came into more lanes and more traffic. A semi plowed by casting a filthy wave over the windshield, and through the wash of it they saw a pair of taillights ahead but in a strange place and at a strange tilt. A little farther on they saw the tire tracks cross suddenly before them, twining in helices before trailing away into the median, and then they saw the black SUV down there and the blue glow of the phone inside and the man’s lips moving calmly as if he were only continuing the conversation he’d been having before he spun off the highway.

“All that rig and there you sit in the median,” said Reed Lester.

“We could be next,” said the boy.

“I doubt that.”

“Four-wheel drive isn’t any good on ice and I haven’t got any weight in the back.”

“You want me to get on back there, boss?”

The boy looked over. “Would you mind?”

“Hell, no. Just pull over a second.”

“I thought you might just go on out your window.”

“I could. But if I fall, then where will you be?”

The boy watched the road. The red starbursts of taillights. The bleary lit signs of gas stations and motels drifting by.

“Maybe we ought to just pull over someplace and see what happens with this,” said his passenger.

“You said you were just going to the other side of town.”

“I am but it’s a big damn town and this traffic’s gonna get a whole lot worse, and I’m in no hurry. Are you?”

The boy stared out at the storm. “You know any place to go?”

They left the highway and drove along a business strip of car lots and liquor stores and many dark, derelict buildings. In the midst of it sat a small restaurant of boxcar shape with neon beer signs burning in its windows and a radiant sign in the shape of a palm tree declaring its name which was the Paradise Lounge.

“You like burgers?” Reed Lester asked.

“Sometimes.”

“This will be one of those times.”

Lester directed him to park in back and he did so, bringing the Chevy to rest in the cratered gravel lot among another dozen cars and trucks. They transferred the wet backpack from the truckbed to the cab and the boy locked the truck and followed Lester toward a red metallic door.

Inside was a noisome crowd which somehow gave the impression of having arrived out of the inclement night hours before, and all together. Faces turned to take stock of them and turned away again with no show of impression good or bad. The air smelled of seared beef and perfume and alcohol. Islandy music piping down from the ceiling and everywhere on the walls large, richly colored images of white sands and turquoise waters and brown-backed girls.

They found two stools at the bar and sat in the electric glow of tiki torches and ordered two beers from the bartender, a large yellow-haired man in a Hawaiian shirt who, in a practiced glance, saw two men weary from the road and the weather, and turned to draw their beers. Placing the pints before them he said, “You gents going to eat here or wait for a table?”

Lester looked to the boy and the boy shrugged and Lester said they’d eat there if the bartender didn’t mind.

“I don’t mind if you don’t mind.”

“Why would we mind?”

“I know I’m pretty, but most dudes come in here would rather be served by Barb or Patti.”

They rotated on their stools and took in the waitresses, one blonde, one redheaded, both in Hawaiian shirts and both older than either of them by ten years or more.

“We’ll keep an eye out for a table,” said Lester, and the man made an approving face and took a pencil from behind his ear. “So,” he said. “What do you want on those burgers?”

THEY DRANK THEIR BEERS
and watched without comment the college wrestling match under way on a TV above the bar, two muscular near-naked men twining like pythons, until the channel switched unaccountably to a basketball game. In the backbar mirror the boy saw himself and Lester sitting side by side and it seemed an odd, implausible thing to see. When the bartender brought their burgers, fat and tottering on nests of fries, they both set into them gratefully, though the boy was not hungry.

The bartender indicated their glasses but only Reed Lester was ready for another.

“I don’t much follow college sports,” he said to the boy around a mouthful of beef. “You?”

“Not much.”

“What do they call them in Wisconsin, is it Buckeyes?”

“Badgers,” he said. The word flaring red on the white field of memory—her running shorts on the mountain, in the woods.

“Know what they call them here?”

He didn’t, and Reed Lester leaned and said cagily: “Cornhuskers. You believe that? Who can say that word without thinking cornholers?”

They finished the burgers and worked the fries. The bartender came to check on their glasses and rapped a knuckle on the bar. “Nothing personal against you gents, but there’s a booth opening up over there if you want it.”

They looked and Lester said, “What do you say?”

The boy glanced out the near window. The sleet was still coming down hard. Endless needles shooting through the red haze of the neon beer sign.

“I don’t mind sitting a while, but I won’t drink any more.”

“You sit and I’ll drink.”

They carried their glasses to the booth and the redhead, Patti, took their order and went away.

“How old you think she is?” said Lester.

“I don’t know. Thirty.”

“I think more like thirty-five. Still, she might be about as good as it’s gonna get in the old Paradise tonight.” As he said it the front door swung open and two young women blew in hunched and clutching each other and gathering control of their skating bootheels and laughing. “Holy fuck my hair,” one said, and they laughed again and cast their made-up eyes around the room.

Reed Lester raised an eyebrow at the boy.

The girls spied the two empty stools at the bar and hurried over and seated themselves with considerable tugging on short skirts and shifting of bottoms and tossing of hair.

“Bombed,” the boy said.

“They might not mind being bombed in a booth,” said Lester. He looked at the girls and his grin died away. “Shit.”

Two men had come across the floor to bookend the girls. Or not men but large boys in red and white football jerseys, baseball caps set backward on their skulls. Each bent toward the near girl, stiff-arming the bar in reverse images of capture. The name on the bigger boy’s jersey was Valentine. At a table across the room two other boys also sat watching, and after a minute the girls turned to look at the table, and then leaned and consulted into each other’s hair, and then they laughed and rose together from their stools and with more skirt tugging preceded the boys across the room. The smaller of the jerseyed boys snatched two chairs from an adjacent table without asking and all sat down and introductions began.

“Cornholers,” Reed Lester said.

The waitress returned to set their drinks before them and moved on again. The boy didn’t want to be there, but he wanted to be sober and so he drank his Coke while Lester drank his Jack and Coke.

“I used to watch such geniuses as these watching Mia at the bars,” said Lester.

The boy looked at him.

“My girlfriend—the Cuban? I’d see them huddling up and calling the play. Sure enough, some cornholing genius would come on over and start talking her up, like I wasn’t even there. She’d look at me like she didn’t know what the hell was going on, like what was she supposed to do, she’d just been sitting there. And she
had
just been sitting there, is the thing, boss. That’s all she ever did and still they came.” He swallowed half his drink and sat pondering the remains. “Well,” he said. “That’s all she did whenever I was around. But I wasn’t always around. And then, after a while, neither was she.”

“Where was she?”

“Where was she? Where was she, you ask? I asked myself the same thing. I began to get a little dark in my mind, boss, I confess it. I went by her building. I went over there just to see if I could catch her coming or going. I wanted to see her face, I wanted her to look me in the eye, that was all.” A cheerless smile crept into his lips. “Well,” he said. “You can guess where this is going. I’m standing there across the street one night and this black Caddy pulls up and sits there idling for five minutes, twenty minutes, I don’t know, until finally the dome light comes on and out she pops, smiling back at the man in the car, wiggling her fingers at him. Mia. My Mia. Jesus.”

He hunched over his drink, raised it to his lips and drank and then returned it to its wet ring on the table.

The boy wanted a cigarette. He looked in vain for a clock.

Lester watched him from under his eyebrows. “The thing is, I knew that car, boss. And I knew the old bald head that lit up when the dome light came on. It was the writer. The famous writer the college had rented for the year.”

The boy waited for the name of the writer, but Lester only lifted his glass again and swallowed and winced.

“About two nights after that first night, I see that black Caddy parked outside a certain bar, this certain local craphole where the old professors go to run their hands up the skirts of their students in the back booths. So in I walk and there they are. Having the conversation of their lives. Just about knocking their goddam heads over the table and him with his old claw on her wrist and the next thing I know I’m walking on back there. I’m walking back there and they both look up and at the sight of me Mia’s smile falls away, just falls away.”

He stared into some remote place, some sector of vision beyond the boy’s right shoulder, turning his glass slowly in his hands.

“I stand at the booth and the great writer looks at me. With his bald head and his goatee. He looks at Mia, and he looks at me again and he says: ‘The jealous boyfriend, I presume?’ And I look at him and I say, ‘It’s an honor to meet you, sir, I’m a great admirer of your work,’ and he nods and says, ‘That’s very kind,’ and I say, ‘How do you like fucking my girlfriend?’ ”

Lester lifted his drink, sipped at it, set it down.

“Mia says something but I don’t hear it. It’s just me and the writer now, and we’re just staring at each other. ‘Young man,’ he says finally, very quiet. Very serene. And I remember every word, boss. ‘Young man,’ he says, ‘I can only assume by such a comment that you have made the assumption, based perhaps on my age, perhaps on my demeanor, perhaps on God knows what, that I will not stand up from this booth and knock you on your insolent ass. That is a poor assumption. On the other hand, it is absolutely true that I would prefer to stay seated as I am. Why don’t you sit down and allow me to buy you a drink?’ To which I replied: ‘I read one of your books once, you old cocksucker, and I would sooner have another one force-fed up my ass than have to read it.’

“Well,” said Lester. “The great writer turned to Mia and excused himself, as if he was going to the head, and he got out of the booth and turned and took this funny, old-school jab at my gut, but he caught me on the wrist and I heard some of his bones go and before he got his hand up I came around with the left and sat him back down in the booth with the blood pouring from his nose, just gushing from it, all over his nice shirt and his sport coat and all over Mia’s hands when she came around and tried to sop it up with cocktail napkins. Jesus, she looked like a nurse trying to stop a gut wound with those little goddam napkins.”

He lifted his glass for the watery dregs.

The boy looked away, his eyes drawn to the electric tiki torches at the bar. An erratic simulated guttering that, when watched, was not erratic at all but cyclical and predictable.

“So then what,” he said, turning back.

“Then what what.”

“What happened?”

Lester regarded him dully. “I’m sitting here with you, aren’t I?” He tipped his empty glass and crushed some ice in his backteeth. “I got hauled up before the dean, and do you know what he says? Says I can get the hell offa his campus by five p.m. or go directly to jail, my choice. I told him I didn’t take the first swing and he says that’s not what the great writer says, and I said that that bar was full of witnesses and he says that’s not what a single one of them says. I said there’s one who didn’t say that and the dean says which one is that and I say Mia, the girl who was sitting there through the whole thing. And he shook his head at me, the dean, and said, son, there was no girl sitting there.”

The boy got up to have a smoke. He walked past the bathrooms and he saw the pay phone he hadn’t seen coming in, and he thought about the time of night and he thought about the last time he’d called—a few days after she’d gotten out of the hospital, and although she was upbeat, although she said she was happy to hear his voice, all he could hear in hers was that place: the hall walkers, the mutterers, the TV gazers, the weeping, the forgotten, the broken.

He stepped through the metal door and into the cold and sleeting night.

A man stood smoking under the yellow light, his back to the wall, one leg cocked and the heel of his cowboy boot set to the bricks. The sleet blew over the scant eve and fell at an angle to a place just a few inches in front of the toe of his other boot. He touched the bill of his cap and said, “It ain’t much but it’s dry.”

The boy put up his collar and got a cigarette in his lips and the man produced a lighter and lit him.

“Pretty night,” said the man. His face was deeply lined, the stubble on his jaw half gone to silver, his eyes in shadow under the cap bill. “You all got far to go?”

“Not too far.”

“That’s good. I believe this will turn to snow, and snow on top of ice, that’s about as fun as it gets.”

The boy nodded. He smoked. “You going far?”

“Not as far as I come. But it’s those last miles, ain’t it? Especially when you got something worth getting to.” He turned and caught the boy’s eye and the boy half smiled and looked away.