Descent (28 page)

52

The road tunneled
in
wide swings through the woods and was not too steep, the snow not too deep, and he made good progress with the Bronco’s tracks before him. The road looped back upon itself, and on the far side of every loop he expected to see no more road and the Bronco parked before some ordinary mountain homestead, the man, Steve, stepping out of the car to the ordinary jubilation of dog and wife and children, and nothing for Billy to do but laugh and drive away. But around every turn there was more road, more trees, another turn, and no Bronco, and no house and no wife.

The road narrowed as it climbed. Trees and scrub trees crowding in, low-hanging boughs lapping at the windows. If a man were to stop he could not turn around but would have to back all the way down and good luck with that, pardner. He drove on and the road grew steeper, a fact he could not see or feel but knew by the increasing slippage of his tires. He shifted on the fly into his lowest gear and pressed on more slowly, all his senses wired to the messages of the climb, and still the tires spun, the tail swinging drunkenly toward tree trunks, righting, yawing again the opposite way, and he understood with a rising fury that she would not make it and that he’d known she wouldn’t. He made one more bend, tires spraying a wet slag over the undercarriage, and with his fingers light on the wheel he worked her with all his skill but the rubber spun and the motor raced and there was nothing to do but stop and hope the car held. It didn’t. Brake, no brake, it would go back the way it came. He hooked an elbow over the seat and attempted to take the curve one-handed but he overshot it and the bed of the El Camino slammed into the sudden, ungiving trunk of a pine and went no farther.

He killed the engine. He lit a cigarette and sat watching the snow mutely finding the windshield. Falling heavier now. The Bronco’s tracks were filling.

He pulled the keys from the ignition and pocketed them and buttoned the leather jacket and collected the rawhide gloves from the glovebox, and then he reached under his seat and hunted down the bottle and took a swig. He reached again under the seat, groping deeper, “Come here you motherfucker,” the blow to the tree having sent it to the very back of the cab, and at last he felt it and tugged it free. He peeled away the black watch cap and put it on his head and checked to see that the gun, a nine-millimeter he’d bought off a man in Nevada, was loaded, the safety on, then he dropped the gun into his right pocket. He picked up his phone from the seat and put that in his pocket too but then took it out again and left it on the passenger’s seat, centering it on the cover of a magazine. Finally he pulled on his gloves and got out.

He took a few steps up the road and turned to look back. His car rested nearly abeam to the road so that any vehicle coming up or going down could not pass. He stood thinking about that, then dropped his cigarette into the Bronco’s track and continued on.

The treadless cowboy boots he’d won at billiards sent him to his hands and knees, and sent him there again before he adopted a wider, splay-footed stance, digging the inside edges of the soles into the snow. By the time he reached the next bend, no more than thirty yards from the car, his legs were burning and his lungs felt pierced through by the thin air. He stopped, hands to knees, unable to curse for his wheezing and his wheezing the only sound made by any living thing on the mountain.

Before him the road looked less a road than some wide chute carved out by falling rocks or by water or both, and still the Bronco’s tracks went on, and finally so did he, staggering on until he reached the next bend where he rested again. When he came to the bend after that and there was still no sign of the Bronco other than its fading tracks, he fell once more into his wheezing stance of rest and fought with all his heart the desire to drop to his knees, to his back, in the snow.

The day was now all but gone, the sun fallen behind some distant peak. He judged that within a few minutes there’d be no light at all but the light of the snow itself where it lay on the trail.

He glanced back down the mountain at the tracks of the Bronco and his own thin herringbone footprints between. He removed a glove with his teeth and found his cigarettes and the Zippo.

“You got to the end of this to decide,” he said, and when he finished the cigarette he dropped it in the snow and went on, and he’d not gone very far before the tracks of the Bronco turned abruptly from the trail, plunging down into a deeper, scrappier woods.

He stood at the top of this gully looking down, his heart thudding in his neck. He studied the trees for possible handholds and felt for the nine-
millimeter in his pocket, making sure it was secure, and then he reached out for the first tree and stopped. There was a bootprint in the snow. Nearly as fresh as his own but not his own, the floor of this print waffled with good tread. It led to its left-footed counterpart, and he saw that the tracks had come up out of the gully and continued up the trail. He looked ahead and saw nothing in the snowfall but the white, snaking trail and the dark pattern of prints along its back.

He looked down the gully once more where the Bronco was stashed, and he looked back up the mountain.

“All right, asshole,” he said, addressing himself. “It’s a fair fight now.”

HE KNEW BY THE
clarity of the tread that the man’s lead on him was not great, and he tried to stare not at the snow but into the darker woods ahead so that his eyes would be rightly adjusted to see the man before the man saw him. But he never saw the man. He’d climbed another fifty steep yards of mountain when he saw to his right, or thought he saw, a wink of light deep in the woods, so faint that had he come by this spot only a few minutes sooner, a few shades earlier in the gradients of dusk, he would not have seen it at all.

The man he tracked had seen the light or not seen it or didn’t care. His tracks had gone on, stamping their regular seal on the trail until both trail and tracks curved around a low rampart of boulders and passed out of sight.

Billy stared into the woods where he thought he’d seen the light. He began to believe he’d not seen it at all, that it had been some trick of the high altitude, of the mixed fuels of exhaustion and adrenaline. Then he saw it again, far back through the trees, dully orange and faintly guttering like a candle orphaned in the woods, and on nothing more than the lurching of his heart at the sight of it, he abandoned the trail and began to make his way through the pines and the snow toward this light.

53

Sheriff Kinney considered the
papers before him sorted in their various stacks. He picked one up and read a few lines. It was a letter from his father’s sister, his aunt, from a time when people wrote letters. It seemed all about the weather and he set it down again. He swiveled in the chair and looked out the window at the shallow field of snowfall and the white world beyond.

“Out in this in that goddam car of yours,” he said.

“You ask me something, Sheriff?” his deputy said from the outer office.

“What? No. Talking to myself.”

The deputy appeared in the doorway holding the coffeepot. “You want any more of this or should I toss it?”

“Go ahead and toss it and go on home before this gets worse.”

The deputy looked out the window. “What do I care about a little snow, Sheriff?”

“Well, why don’t you go on out and make a snowman then?”

The deputy stood with the coffeepot.

Kinney looked up at him. “I’m sorry, Donny.” He gestured vaguely at the papers before him.

“That’s all right, Sheriff. Your dad sure kept track of things, didn’t he.”

“He sure did.”

“You look like a bookkeeper there, or a lawyer.”

“I feel like both.” He randomly lifted a paper and it was the deed to a cemetery plot for himself. “A man never knows how many pieces of paper he collects in his life because there’s never any cause to look at them all together until he’s dead. And then it’s somebody else and not him who gets the job of looking at them, and it is a hopeless task, Deputy. Hopeless and thankless. Every man knows this and yet every man still saves up all his goddam papers. Now why is that?”

“I guess a man can’t help himself, Sheriff. I guess it’s his nature.”

He stared at the deputy. “I reckon,” he said. “Now go on home, Donny.”

“Want me to wash that mug?”

“Thanks, Donny.”

He leaned back in the swivel chair and set his bootheels on the edge of the desk and he looked at the picture of his daughter there on the desk. Josephine on that good roan pony, Laddy, the reins so easy in her hands. Sixteen on that day and she’d taken the blue ribbon by five entire seconds.

A junior now at the university in Boulder studying journalism. A good way to see the world, she said. As if the world were something her father and mother couldn’t imagine. She had not known the girl they found up there on the mountain trail, Kelly Ann Baird. But people at the school remembered when she’d gone missing. A pretty white college girl just vanishing. It was always news.

He wanted to call Josephine every day but he didn’t. She wouldn’t have it. The closer he wanted to keep her, the farther away she wanted to go. That’s what being a father was.

He stared at the papers and thought of the ranch and his life there as a boy, the only child for many years until Billy came along. Now he’d done the math and there was no way to keep the ranch without selling his house up here and moving back down there and nobody wanted to move back down there, least of all his wife. He’d sell the ranch, and Billy would get some money and move on, maybe for good. Grant and his son would move on too, you couldn’t worry about that. Grant was a smart man who’d once run his own construction company, a good man, now a man who’d suffered the most unthinkable thing. You could help but you couldn’t help him, not really.

His phone sounded the tone that told him he had a text message. He picked it up and it was Billy again. That made three. He read the message and set the phone down again and stared at it, and while he was staring at it the phone sounded its note once again, and he picked it up and read the message. But whereas the others had been the names of highways and passes and county roads, here was a single word that by itself made no sense to him:
blanket.
He scrolled to see if he’d missed something. He waited for the rest of the message, but it never came. He looked again out the window at the snow. He looked at his daughter on the horse.

When his boots hit the floor his deputy called out to see if he was all right.

Kinney gathered the two-way from the desk, his sheriff’s hat and jacket from the coat tree, and stepped into the outer office. Donny stood in his jacket and gloves near the front door.

“What’s going on, Sheriff?”

“I see you got your snow boots on.”

“I saw it was snowing.”

“Did you already tell Linda you were coming home?”

“Just sent her a text.”

“All right. You can call her from the road.”

“Where we going, Sheriff?”

“Loveland Pass.”

“Loveland Pass?” The deputy glanced through the panes of glass at the tumbling storm.

“I thought you didn’t care about no snow, Deputy.”

“I don’t, Sheriff. But that’s Summit County.”

“Is that a fact?”

The deputy tugged at his gloves. He adjusted his hat.

Kinney looked at him. “I just gotta check something out, Donny, and I need your help.”

“Hell, Sheriff. You don’t have to ask for it.”

54

It was altogether nightfall
under the pines, and while this helped him to track the orange light it also rigged his path with deadfall he didn’t see until he’d snagged his boot and pitched headlong into branches that raked at his face like the hands of ghouls. One twisted ankle pulsed in its boot and he struggled to hold his direction. It was necessary to detour around the boughs of the pines and each time he did so he lost the light, then stopped, then moved again laterally through the trees until he reached a place where the light and his eye aligned once more and he could move forward again. Then, abruptly, he smelled woodsmoke, and he said in the silence of the trees,
Jesus, Jesus.

He made progress but the light seemed to grow no brighter or nearer, as though it were borne through the woods ahead as a lure is dragged through water. He pursued it, moving through the woods tree by tree, until he came around the broad skirt of a blue spruce and stopped.

Before him in the smallest of clearings sat an unlikely structure, so squat and spare, so colorless and rough-hewn and artless, that if not for the weak pulse of light in the seams of the door he never would have seen it. And but for the light never would have believed it to be anything but some crude and temporary shelter that rightly should have rotted back into the mountain a century before.

There were no windows that he could see, and even the pale vine of woodsmoke rising from the roof pipe, hardly distinguishable from the snowfall into which it climbed, seemed a sign of abandonment and disuse.

He stood almost within the spruce, pulling the air into his lungs as quietly as he could. He looked for signs of the man he’d been tracking and saw none. No footprints before the door of the shack and no visible trail or footpath in any direction. There was the hunkered little structure and there were the trees all around it and there was the vast, snowbound mountain. He watched the seam in the door to see if anyone would pass between it and the source of light within but no one did. He looked all around him through the trees, alert to any sound. He reached into his pocket and brought out the nine-millimeter and, muffling the sounds with his gloved hands, chambered a round and thumbed off the safety. He removed his right-hand glove and stowed it in the opposite pocket with the whiskey bottle, restowed the gun carefully, and stepped away from the spruce.

Crusted snow lay under the new powder and his boot steps announced him to the woods but there was no help for that and he moved ahead unhurriedly, favoring the bad ankle, until he reached the cabin. He raised his fist to knock on the door and it was then he saw the lock, a large outdoor Master, the fat boltshackle passed through an equally fat staple of a heavy-gauge hasp, which was itself fastened to door and jamb not with screws but lags, or perhaps through bolts. In the moment he took to consider such hardware he understood from its gleam and the smell of oil that it had been used recently and would be used again soon. Then he struck the door a few knocks with his bare knuckle and called out Hello as casually and quietly as he could.

He lowered his hand and found the gun grip inside his pocket. Held his breath, listening. The ticking of the snow on his shoulders, the faint pop of firewood on the other side of the door. He glanced around the clearing and it seemed even smaller now that he was at its center, the woods that shaped it more immense and dark. He let go of the gun and raised his hand again but then held it still. There was a sound from the other side of the door, as of a chain, as of chain links unspooling over a wooden floor, like a hound hauling itself to its feet, some old mountain breed chained up against doing damage or breaking free in its master’s absence. And then the hound spoke. It spoke in the voice of a girl and it said, thinly, “Hello? Is someone there?”

Billy swallowed.

“Who’s in there?” he said.

The chain dragged again and came to rest.

“Who’s out there?” said the girl. Nearer to the door but still some distance from it.

“What’s your name?” he said, and waited, his heart pumping. He asked again, and she said: “A man is keeping me here. Please help me.”

He took hold of the gun again. “Is the man in there?”

“No. He’s gone. Please help me.”

“I’m trying, darlin. Just tell me your name. Please.”

She was silent. The chain was still.

Then she said her name. So quietly that Billy wondered if it had been his mind that said it.