Descent (16 page)

30

She knows the world of the sleeping bag.
Th
e satiny inside that goes from cold to warm, the head hole string-drawn down to the size of a child’s fist, the humid, breathing lung of it, of one’s own self. Such pleasures long gone.

Kiddo, comes his voice, down through the hole. Comes again: Kiddo, and she stirs so he won’t put his hand on the bag—on her shoulder, her hip. She follows her own fingers, arms, head out into the cold morning, blinking. Bacon spitting in a skillet.
Th
e air smoky and pungent. His back is to her. He came in late, she remembers, and went straight to his cot, trying not to wake her.

She down-zips to the smaller opening at her feet where the chain feeds in, swings her legs over the edge of the cot and plants her bare feet into the slippers. She wears flannel pajamas but in the morning a girl needs to get out of bed without being watched, and he keeps his eyes down as he kneels at her feet and unlocks the cuff.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT
today is? Handing her the plastic plate. A child’s juice box for her other hand. He has stopped offering coffee, knows she doesn’t like it. She sits on the cot and he pulls up his camping chair. Fresh cordwood is stacked near the stove in a tidy pyramid.
Th
e ax and the saw are outside somewhere.
Th
e pistol is on his hip.

She picks up the plastic fork and looks at the yellow clot of eggs, Eat it, Courtland, and forks up a bite and says, Monday.

No—

Th
ursday. Sunday.

No, not the day of the week, kiddo. Bigger than that.
Th
ink bigger.

She chews the egg and with her fingers breaks off a chip of bacon and slips it into her mouth and chews on that and shrugs.

What is the biggest day of the year? he says.
Th
e day everybody looks forward to most?

She looks at him.
Th
en she turns and looks at the little fir tree at the foot of his cot.
Th
e necklaces of red berries and popcorn she’d sat there stringing while Johnny Mathis sang from the small speaker. Stabbing her fingers with the needle to keep her mind there, with her, in this place and not back in some candle-scented memory of home.

A large red box sits under the skirt of the tree. Oh, she says.

Oh ho ho, he says.

After they eat he gets Johnny Mathis going again and sits in his chair with his coffee, watching the snowfall in the small square of window. He tells her he likes it like this, Christmas morning: simple, quiet. When he was a kid you couldn’t get his old man out of bed before noon and still he’d be drunk. Look at all these goddam presents, he’d say. Jesus H. Christmas. Why didn’t somebody tell me we were rich?

He swings his chair and opens the iron gate and jabs his stick into the fire, setting off a brittle collapse.
Th
e stove is serious business. Deadly serious. If she doesn’t do it right while he’s away, if she gets careless . . . can she imagine a more terrible way to die than fire?

Um . . . to die by fire while chained like a dog?

He tosses in a length of wood and maneuvers it with the stick. One Christmas, he says, all I wanted was a Swiss Army knife.
Th
e big one with a hundred uses. A real survival knife. Didn’t ask for anything else. Dad worked for the forest service and he wasn’t home much but when he was he made sure his boys weren’t becoming a couple of pansies in his absence. If we cried when he whipped us he’d keep going till we stopped. I wanted the knife because I thought it was the last thing a pansy would want.

He stares into the fire.
Th
e new log hissing and whistling.

Did you get it? she says.

He looks up. What?

Th
e knife.

No. He told me: I know you wanted that knife, boy, but what kind of father would I be giving a knife to a boy still wets the bed, what kind of message would that be? He had me confused with Bobby, of course, my little brother, but you couldn’t tell him that. Nor remind him that it was him, not Bobby, passing out and pissing himself on our couch.

His hand moves to his hip, where he hangs the big hunting knife, but finds nothing and moves back. He shuts the gate and swings back to her.
Th
e knife, in its sheath, waits in the locked footlocker by his cot. Or under his pillow.

He sips his coffee. She looks at the length of chain where it lies on the floor. She is free of it and yet her hands ache for it.

Two years later, he says, just a few months after Bobby hung himself with a power cord, he—Dad—was up in Oregon when a load of logs rolled off a rig and crushed him where he stood. He raises his coffee but doesn’t drink.
Th
irty-man crew coming and going all day and it’s my old man walking by when those logs decide to go. Some might see the hand of God in that.

She waits.
Th
en says, Do you?

Do I? He laughs. When you have seen your little brother swinging from
a rusty pipe in the basement you pretty much know all you need to know
about God.

A tear runs down her cheek, surprising her. It’s the day. Her family. His voice. It’s Johnny Mathis singing to these walls, these cots, which in a glance betray every raw, unbelievable thing they’ve witnessed.

She wipes away the tear and he says, Hey, I’m sorry. What am I thinking? Who needs to hear that crap? It’s Christmas!
Th
e coffee cup rises and his head hinges back for the last of it—single hard convulsion of the throat knuckle under the skin—and when he looks at her again his eyes are bright with atonement.

I’ve got something to cheer you up.

He fetches the red box and places it on her lap, surprisingly light for its size, and her heart dives at the thought of the dress inside, before she remembers he wouldn’t do that, that he’s too careful.

I didn’t get you anything, she says.

He waves this off.

I couldn’t get away, she says.

He gestures impatiently at the gift.

She peels back the wings of paper and takes in the image on the box. For just a moment something opens in her chest, like excitement, like happiness, before she understands the cruelty of it.

She lifts the lid and crushes back tissue paper and her heart sets up a thick beating.

Is this some kind of joke?

Expensive joke, he says, taking one of the snowshoes from the tissue. I thought you might like to get out for a while. Have you ever used them before?

31

He stepped out through
the metal door again, out into the cold and snow, and he moved unhurriedly along the wall, toward the corner where he’d seen the white plume of breath, where he now saw another. He began to mutter, and he made his footfall heavy and he fumbled with his fly as he gained the corner, and when he saw the white jersey there in the shadows he took a clumsy step away and said, “Oh, sorry.”

“Take off, jack,” said the boy in the jersey.

“Apologies, boss,” said the boy. “Just came to empty the tank.”

“Empty it someplace else, jack. Piss yourself and fuck off.” It was the big one, Valentine. His jersey brilliant white in the unlit alley. Number 10 in deep red on a white field.

He looked beyond Valentine into the alley and the larger boy stepped forward to block his view.

“What part of fuck off don’t you understand?” His breath sour and alcoholic in his face. The boy back-stepped the way he’d come and stopped, looking at Valentine. Valentine took another step and the boy back-stepped again. In this manner they both came around the corner, and when Valentine was all the way around it the boy moved no farther. He let the wooden handle drop from the sleeve of his jacket, catching it at its threaded end, the threads like a grip. In the snowlight he saw flecks of black in Valentine’s glassy blue eyes and he brought the stick up in a whistling arc that caught the larger boy across his ear. Valentine clapped a hand to his head and slipped to his knees and then forward onto his free hand, his face contorted in a soundless wail.

The boy stepped around him into the alley, moving toward the other jersey he could see there in the deeper dark, white like a signal, like a flag. On the jersey was the name Whitford and this boy Whitford stood at the rear of the truck in a sure stance, his jeans and underwear spanning from knee to knee and his white buttocks clenched and working. The other two boys from the table leaned over the truckbed rail, their hands down in the dark of the bed like ranch hands at some act of animal husbandry. When they looked up, the boy saw in their eyes that he was not himself—was not the boy he knew himself to be but some dark contour of man, shaped out of the light and snow behind him, ageless and faceless and moving certainly toward them.

One of the boys said, “Shit,” and the thrusting Whitford looked up, looked over his shoulder, and without pausing in his work said, “Who the fuck are you?” He didn’t see but heard the stick as it came whistling out of the dark and struck him just below the jersey, laterally across the buttocks, as if to recleave them yet again crosswise. He howled and spun away from another strike and received it instead to the face. He raised his hands and went staggering until the shackles of his jeans tripped him and sent him flat-handed to the snow. “Motherfucker,” he said, crawling away. “Motherfucker.”

The boy raised the stick again and the two boys leaning into the truckbed let go their holds and fled down the alley and the facedown girl began to slip from the tailgate, and he placed a hand in the small of her back to stop her. Her hair lay over her face like black webbing and there was the smell of vomit and he could see where it had melted the snow and pooled in the bed of the truck.

He dropped the stick and set his hands in her armpits and considered how best to proceed, and as he was doing this he heard the heavy steps and he braced for the blow, and it landed with such force it slammed him down over the girl’s body. An arm collared his neck and lifted him and he let go the girl to grope at the arm and the girl began to slide again, slipping limp and heavy over the tailgate. She spilled over and her chin struck the tailgate’s lip and her head rocked back and she toppled doll-like down, her head landing last and bouncing once dully on the snowed-over ground.

The boy was lifted from his feet and he could feel the skin of Valentine’s face against his own, the jaw working as he told him quietly, “I got you, jack, I got you.” The boy bucked and horse-kicked and punched blindly at Valentine’s head but the arm only grew harder and tighter until he could no longer breathe but could feel the other boy’s breath in his ear saying, “Quit that now, it ain’t helping you any.”

“Turn him this way, Clayton.”

The boy was swung and before him stood Whitford, head down, patiently attending to his fly, his beltbuckle. When he was finished he reset his backward cap and regarded the boy. He touched his fingers to his own cheekbone, gently probing, and inspected his fingertips. He looked to the fallen girl, and back to the boy.

“Give him some air, Clayton. He looks about to pass out and he don’t wanna do that.”

Whitford walked over to the girl and began searching the ground. He kicked at the black twist of her underwear and said, “That ain’t it. Ah, there you are.” He bent and pulled the length of stick out from under her leg. He looked it over as if it were some rare specimen of weaponry.

“Is this what I think it is? Damn.” He put the stick to the girl’s hip and flipped up her skirt. He looked at the boy again, hung there like a pelt in Valentine’s arms.

“You could’ve had your turn when we were done, bud. You had no call to get violent. Set him to the tailgate there, Clayton.”

The boy fought but Valentine was too big and too strong and when the boy was pinned against the tailgate Whitford reached around the boy’s waist and began to undo his belt. The boy grabbed at Whitford’s wrists and the stick whipped across his fingers and Valentine squeezed until the boy raised his hands again and held on to the thick noose of arm.

“Don’t fight,” said Whitford. “And don’t worry, I ain’t no fag. All I’m gonna do is this. Are you listening? You got enough air? All right. All I’m gonna do is, I’m gonna take your little friend here and I’m gonna put him up your asshole, far as he’ll go, all right? How’s that sound, bud?”

The boy bucked and Valentine brought his weight forward and folded the boy over the tailgate until his face was nearly in the girl’s vomit and he twisted as his jeans and shorts were jerked down to midthigh and the air was cold and the snow was like cold insects alighting on his flesh. There was a long sickly moment of nothing before the stick made its whistling sound and struck him hard. He flinched but made no sound.

“There,” said Whitford. “Now we both know what that feels like. This next part, well. You’ll just have to let me know. Hold him good, Clayton.”

The boy clenched himself as if he could make that part of himself shut and vanish altogether by the sheer will to do so. Something touched him on the hip and he flinched and it was the other boy’s fingers there. “Easy now.” Fingers settling gently one at a time and lastly the thumb, finding a purchase that would give him leverage. From the parking lot there came the sound of an engine’s turning—coldly laboring at first but then firing in a deep exuberant roar, sustained and incensed by a series of stompings to the gas pedal, and the fingers on the boy’s flesh were stilled and the arms that held him were like the fixed arms of a statue. The engine revvings brought to his mind the black Ford and the man who drove it.
SMITH & WESSON
.
Stay out of trouble.
Yellow light spilled into the alley and searched along the cinder-block wall but in the next moment was eclipsed by the building as the driver made his turn, and then driver and car and light and sound all faded away into the night.

Fingers reset themselves on the boy’s hip, and Whitford told him quietly that it would all be over before he knew it, and in the long ludicrous moment to follow there came another sound, unexpected, one that halted everything under way in the alley, all movement, all breathing, even their hearts. Only the snow went on as before, mutely falling. It was the crisp steely sound they all understood to be the chambering of a round in a gun.

“Drop the stick, number twelve,” the man with the gun said.

The stick hit the ground in a soft clatter.

“Step away, over there. And you, number ten. Big man. Let him go and step over there with your faggot buddy.”

Released by Valentine, the boy drank the cold air into his torn throat and pushed up from the tailgate.

He pulled up his jeans and redid the fly and buckled the belt and turned around.

“Didn’t I tell you, boss? Cornholers.”