Descent (15 page)

The man gestured at the trucks in the lot. “I’m guessing that one there. That Chevy.”

“Sorry?” said the boy.

“I’m saying that’s your Chevy there, the blue one.”

The boy stared blankly at the truck. He could see the man watching him in the corner of his eye. “What makes you say that?”

“Well. From the look on your face when you stepped out here I took you for a man who has not had the pleasure of this particular smoker’s lounge before. And I see them Wisconsin plates. And I see what looks like a fair amount of gear in the cab there, like a man on the road.”

The boy drew on his cigarette. “Which one’s yours?” He was scanning the lot for an off-duty cruiser, or a detective’s car.

“Black Ford over there with the topper,” said the man.

The boy looked. In the rear window of the topper was an American flag decal and on the bumper below was a sticker with the words
SMITH &
WESSON
and nothing more.

“I guess you could sleep in there if you wanted to,” said the boy.

“You could, it weren’t packed so tight a mouse can’t lick his nuts.”

They smoked and looked out on the foreshortened night. The patter of the sleet on the roofs and hoods of the trucks. The boy’s head felt clearer for the cold air.

“Coming here I found a dog by the side of the road,” he said. “A German shepherd. Had a collar and tags.” He shifted his weight and didn’t look at the man.

“Dead?”

“No.”

“Somebody hit him?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you do?”

“There wasn’t anything to do.”

“So what’d you do?”

“I finished him. Then I set him under a tarp by the fence. There’s a phone number on the tags.”

The man looked at the boy and looked out at the storm. “My daddy shot a dog once. Old Jim-Jim.” He smoked and shook his head. “I can still hear that rifleshot like it was yesterday.”

Out on the frontage road a police cruiser crept slowly by, the dash-lit face of the officer turning to take them in, filing their images away.

“Whoever hit that shepherd didn’t even slow down,” said the boy.

“Does that surprise you?”

The boy studied his cigarette. “Maybe they didn’t know they hit it.”

The man looked at him. “You always think so well of people?”

“No, not always.”

The man took a last pull and held the butt before him as if it were some strange new thing. “Used to be a man could chase a good meal with a good smoke and never get up from his table. You remember that?” He tossed the butt into a pothole brimming with slush and pushed off from the brick and touched the bill of his cap. “You take it easy now.”

“You too.”

“Stay out of trouble.”

28

T
here’s the jeep-thing, of course—somewhere. Stowed in a cave of scrub woods with more scrub piled on top to cover it. She knows when he’s used it by the smell of gas on him and the smell of the places he’s been, a hamburger joint, a barbershop, a bar.
Th
e smells inside these walls are finite and the ones he brings back from the outer world must be sniffed and identified, like guests confronted by the family dog. She sniffs for the smell of the motel where she stayed with her family.
Th
e restaurant where they ate, the Black Something. She sniffs for the smell of her mother’s perfume.

Once a month he fetches groceries and she knows it’s once a month by the dates on the magazines he brings,
National Geographic, Field & Stream,
and this is how she knows roughly how long she’s been here too. No newspapers. Nothing to tell of herself or of the search, nothing to tell of her brother—how long he lay there and who found him and how they got him down the mountain and how his leg
is and You never should’ve left him, never should’ve done that, lying there so scared and his leg all wrong, and the man said he saw on the news when he went down that the boy was fine so stop asking him—and sometimes he brings a bright new shirt from the boys’ department because he won’t shop in ladies’, nor buy tampons or liners, such things were already here, stacked and stacked on a shelf above the toilet.
Th
e sight of them telling her everything that first day, everything.

People see him when he goes in the jeep-thing, when he goes down to wherever he goes.
Th
ey must. He moves among them like anyone would. Completes transactions. Trades pleasantries. He wore a ring that first day but not since and there is no woman down there, she knows this as any woman would. Does anyone give him a thought?
Th
ink him strange?

Th
e yellow coin of light has slipped over the ninth gap in the floorboards and she pushes herself up from the cot and shuffles into the bathroom following the blue beam of the hiker’s headlamp that precedes her like eyesight itself.

Bathroom. Please. It is like some prairie outhouse with a dry, house-style porcelain bowl. She pulls the thin door and fits the little hook into the eyelet, takes down a box from the shelf and drops one tampon unwrapped into the water bucket where it swells and floats like a small drowned thing. Four more in this box. Twenty more in each of the four remaining boxes. Was this her schedule, her tenure here? Behind the toilet, low in one corner in the dark old wood, is a patch of a lighter shade. Once, she got down on hands and knees and looked closely. Felt with fingertips. Faint small scarrings in the wood. Hatch marks. Months and months of calendaring, incompletely sanded away. It sickened her and taught her: Don’t count. Don’t mark. Don’t believe in a foreseeable end with its nothing to do but wait, and wait.

She sits and pees with a hollow pattering sound into the dry bowl, lifts the tampon from the bucket by the tail and drops it into the bowl and with a tilt of the water bucket sloshes everything down to wherever it goes when it goes down, obeying laws of gravity and geography.
Th
e Great Divide deciding even this.

In the dull small mirror screwed to the wall is a pale miner, halogen moon in the center of her forehead.
Th
e pajamas lie on the floor and she stands as if risen out of them, all her flesh crawling in the cold. She soaks the washcloth in the remaining bucket water, soaps it and washes herself while the girl in her head takes up her story again midsentence . . . but there was one thing I had to tell myself every morning when I woke up in that place . . . the voice not hers but the voice of an older, tougher girl, speaking as though to a gymnasium of girls, all their faces composed while their bodies imagine and their hearts beat with strange excitement, and she is one of them, knee to knee with her friends. Listen, is the girl’s message, this could happen to you.

She takes up the sour gray towel and dries herself quickly and begins to dress.

What did I have to tell myself?

Th
ere is only you.
Th
ere is only you.

IN THE OUTER ROOM
she throws her arms one way and then the other, limbering her spine. Rolls her head on her neck and bends at the hips to grab her toes. So bent she clasps her arms around her knees and hugs herself into a compact human fold, breathes in, her upside-down heart thudding evenly, breathes out. She touches the thick band at her ankle, the hard iron within the leather liner, no more strange to her now than her own foot. She releases her legs and gathers up the chain in her fists and stands, leaning until all her weight is opposed to the remaining length of chain, and she begins to walk, clockwise, like a mule turning a mill wheel.

Th
e steel plate, about the size of an index card, makes its minute adjustments under the four bolt heads, revealing hairlines of raw wood as she half circles the compass and then returns.
Th
e movement of the steel plate is good, but her focus is the ringbolt itself, the small half hoop of steel welded to the plate, its gritty underbelly of red-brown where she has nurtured corrosion on a diet of water, sweat, orange juice, urine, and Coke. (Rust particles are harder than steel, sweetie, her father told her once, by way of comfort when a swing chain dropped her on her fanny; abrasive wear is inevitable.) With her every straining pass the connecting link traverses the arc of the ringbolt, and back again, transmitting a grinding kinking code up through the links to her hands.
Th
e turnings have become grainier, noisier, and she stops every six passes just to listen—for whistling. For footfalls.

Th
e coin of light is on the last floorboard before the lion’s foot and she releases the chain for the day. Kneels down facing east and tests the ringbolt with the tender backs of her fingers. Hot. She wets a fingertip and blots up tiny particles like spilled salt. Presses fingertip to lips and tongues up the taste, the peculiar rusty tang she loves now, so like the taste of blood. Good work. And off in the woods she hears the whistling and she stands and brushes off her knees. Good girl. And the whistling is coming and she goes to the cot and lies back and picks up the magazine and opens it and stares at the picture of an Egyptian mummy.
Th
e magazine is trembling, her fingers trembling from her labor, the jumpy kinking and twanging of the chain still alive in her hands like crazy heartbeats. Good work. Good girl.

29

Reed Lester sat toying
his glass
around on its base, wheeling the naked cubes around and around. He had a new red hue to his face like the faces of the people who sat near the windows where the red beer lights burned. The waitress brought him a fresh drink and asked the boy if he was ready for another and he told her he’d take a glass of water and she went to see about the group of young people in the corner who had taken to ordering shots—downing them in some kind of game, slamming the glasses hard on the table and cheering. People at the tables next to them had paid their tabs and left. One of the boys in jerseys had his arm around one of the girls. Another boy leaned to say something into the ear of the other girl and she shoved at him and said, “Get your dog breath offa me. Jesus!”

Outside the window the sleet was turning to snow.

“Know what I’m thinking, boss?”

“No.”

“I’m thinking you should come with me to Uncle Mickey’s. He’ll hire us both like that.” His finger snap was soundless. He leaned back in his seat and regarded the boy with whiskey eyes. His eyelids slid down and were a long time opening again, and then only in reaction to the commotion from the table of young people. A chair scuffed the floor and a clump of keys were dropped and retrieved. “Ah, sit down, Courtney,” said one of the boys, “c’mon.”

“Abby,” said the standing girl, “I’m serious.” The girl Abby said something and the standing girl said, “I’m serious, I’ll take the car. You’ll be stuck here.”

Reed Lester watched them without expression.

“She won’t be stuck,” said one of the boys.

“Abby,” the girl said. “Abby.”

The girl Courtney crossed the floor alone, fierce and unstable on her bootheels, and pushed out through the front door. In a moment a pair of headlights flared, thickening the snowfall, and swung around and were replaced by the red eyes of her taillights and these went bobbling over the pitted lot and arced onto the frontage road and vanished.

“Stupid,” said Lester. “Stupid, stupid.”

“I think it’s time to hit the road,” said the boy, and Lester gave an extravagant wave.

“Let’s do it. But gimme one minute here. My head is rollin like a BB in a teacup. I need water. One glass and I’ll be shipshape.” His head went back again and his eyes closed. The boy looked for the waitress. She was behind the bar staring into a computer screen. He sat looking at Lester for a while, then got up and walked down the hall to the men’s room.

“Leave him, Dudley,” he said to the cracked plaster over the urinal. To the large curving phallus carefully penned there. “Bring his goddam bag in
and go.”

Outside in the hall a group was passing. Someone of size thudded into the bathroom door. A man whooped and the restaurant’s back door groaned open and after the group had passed through it groaned shut again and he could hear them faintly in the parking lot laughing. An engine revved to life, car doors slammed, and the sound of the engine faded away.

He washed his hands and crushed a paper towel and stepped into the hallway and went to the metal door and stepped outside again and looked for the man who’d given him a light before, but the man wasn’t there, no one was. He lit his cigarette and leaned against the wall. The sleet had gone completely to snow and there was a good white inch on the ground, on the Chevy, on the black Ford with the topper, on everything but the rectangles in the gravel where cars and trucks had recently sat, and these were quickly filling in. His eye fell on the freshest of the rectangles and stayed there. Then he looked to the side of the building where he himself had driven around to park. He looked back to the rectangle. The tire tracks leading away from it did not run that way but banked in the opposite direction, disappearing into a narrow gap between the Paradise Lounge and the cinder-block building next door. The boy leaned on the bricks and smoked and watched. In a moment, at the corner where the tire tracks disappeared, came a cloud of white breath. Only one.

He looked at the blue Chevy under its coat of snow and he thought of his kitbag inside the cab and he thought of the Estwing inside the kitbag and he remembered the weight of it and the sound of it landing and he drew hard on his cigarette. He looked at the corner again, then stepped on his cigarette and went back inside.

He took a few steps toward the dining room, then turned around and went back into the men’s room and stepped into the stall where the stool was. Next to it in the stinking corner stood a cheap plumber’s helper. Crusted black rubber and a grimy wooden handle.

The value of a stick, he thought.

He trapped the rubber cup against the floor with his boot and unscrewed the stick and took it into the light and looked at it. Beyond the stick he saw the stick again and himself holding it in the square of glass over the basin, his face sallow and shadowed by the ceiling fixture, darkness in the wells under his brow.

What are you up to, Dudley?