Descent (30 page)

“Can you believe that? I saw her one day on the tennis courts in the park. Her and none other. Chasing those balls around with her friends. Ninety pounds and sweet sixteen, Charlotte Sweet. Can you imagine?” He watched Billy’s face. “You can imagine. You have imagined. All men have. Kings and emperors had them like candy—are still having them—while your average Joe—
Billy
!
” he barked and Billy’s eyes slid open.

“Don’t talk to me about chains, Billy. Men are bound by chains their whole lives. That’s the difference between you and me. That’s why you are lying there now with that bullet in you, don’t you see?”

Billy turned and spat and did not look at him again.

“I’ll say one thing for you, Billy, you’ve got sand. I’ll grant you that. But it’s like I told you down at the bar: a man should never be the hero of his own story. So here’s what we’re going to do. Are you listening? We are going to go up to this place I want to show you, this little crack I damn near fell into once. Three, maybe four foot wide and no saying how deep. Only one way to know, really. Sometimes in a real blow it will get drifted over with snow—that’s how it almost got me, day I found it—but it doesn’t ever fill up with snow or anything else and I think you’re gonna like it down there, Billy. You’ll have some company with you. Another hero down there you can swap hero stories with. A couple of young ladies. And you can have this one too, soon enough.”

He stood then and raised the hem of his jacket to button the gun into its holster, and Billy saw the leather sheath at the opposite hip and it was the last thing he saw before the rolling logs parted and the water swam up to carry him down into darkness.

57

When he came back
to the world, or to whatever world this was, he was on his back, staring up into the skirts of the pines. The skirts sweeping by. Or he sweeping by them—each ridge and divot of the earth transmitted to him through the hard slats on which he lay and through the heels of his dragging boots.

At his head his lone bearer towed him along, easily as any horse or mule, his breaths visible in the light that came from the bright clouds beyond the tree tips, and Billy watching these breaths as he rocked and jostled on the slats, having no idea how far he’d traveled or how far he had yet to go. When his mouth filled with blood he lolled his head to one side and let the blood run out.

The man pulled his load another thirty yards and at last stopped, dropping the rope. He took a few moments getting his wind, then got his hands under Billy’s arms and dragged the dead weight of him from the sled. He drew him nearly upright and began to haul him backward up a series of small rises in the earth, black stones like ancient steps and each step striking a sharp note of pain in Billy’s twisted ankle. The man bore him up the stones and when they reached the top he turned him and making a belt of his arms stood him on his bootheels before the pit he’d described and shook him like a doll.

“Wake up, Billy,” he said. “I know you ain’t dead.”

Billy’s head swung from one shoulder to the other. Arms slack at his sides. “Wait,” he said. Hot drool of blood on his lip. Blood running down the chute of his lower spine.

“There you are. Good. I want to show you something.” One arm peeled away and the other tightened, and when the free arm came up again Billy saw the nine-millimeter, the dark empty socket of the grip where the clip had been removed. “Now,” said the man, hefting the gun, “listen”—and he lobbed it into the pit. It fell silently at first into that blackness as though into a great, soft throat. Then the gun struck rock, chimed into rock again, and thereafter rang wall to wall in a long echoing descent, until at last the gun either struck bottom or else dropped soundlessly again through space. There was a faint chasing of rock chips, then silence.

The man’s breath pulsed hot on Billy’s neck. Both arms around him again in that weird embrace, grotesquely half tender, brute and awkward. As he must have held her in the little shack, in the light of the stove. Night upon night and she didn’t fight, she didn’t resist but instead opened her arms to him, her legs, did as he wanted, as he liked, good girl, every which way and again and again and even kissed him because each time was another hour, another day, and she was alive now because of it.

“Are you ready for this?” the man said quietly into his ear.

He shook his head. His hands hung at either side of the man’s hips, his fingertips landing and relanding there, light as moths. Then he felt it.

“Well, courage, Billy. You won’t hardly feel a thing, shape you’re in,” and he puppet-walked him to the mouth of the pit, from which there rose a rich cavernous reek of earth and decay, as if here indeed was the vent to some very deep, very grim storehouse.

“Wait,” Billy said as the man positioned him.

“What for?”

“I ain’t ready.” And he raised his left fist in a punching motion behind his head and felt it slug into solid meat. The man’s arms fell away and Billy pitched forward over the pit. But the pit was not wide and there was strength enough in his legs and he pushed off and was briefly airborne before he slammed chest and gut to the stone ledge on the far side with his legs swimming over the pit. He began to slip—but then his fingers found holds in the rock and he dragged himself clear, rolled to his side, and rolled again onto his back. His heart hammering. Red bombs of light in the trees. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked back at the man.

The man stood as before on the opposite side of the pit. He’d raised his gloved left hand to the left side of his neck, exploring with his fingers the haft and hilt of the bowie knife embedded there, as if it were some newly discovered lesion or chancre under his collar. No part of the blade was visible. Without lowering his left hand from his neck, he fumbled with his right at the holster. The button snap popped and Billy watched as he pulled out the pistol, aimed it, cocked it, and dropped the hammer on the empty chamber.

The man’s lips parted in a terrible grin. Blood like ink in the seams of his teeth. He attempted to step away from the hole but his knees failed him and he dropped hard onto them. He worked his jaw as if to speak but no sound came out that Billy could hear. They watched each other across the pit. Then the man, his hand now firmly on the knife grip, keeled to his left and fell to the stones like a man already dead and lay there unmoving.

Billy let his own throbbing head fall to the stone. He breathed with his one good lung. Overhead a bright tide of clouds ebbed thinly over the pines, black starry rents in its surface like night ships steaming counter to the current. He rolled his head and looked at the man on the far side of the pit and then he shut his eyes, just for a minute—
Just give me one minute here, son, and then we’ll get the man’s keys and go on back to her.

He closed his eyes and dreamed of the pit, of beings from below, the deeply entombed climbing one over the other like crabs toward the moonlight, issuing from the pit’s mouth to consider the two men lying there, poking and sniffing and deciding at last,
Th
is one, him,
and with their claw-hands dragging him back down with them, and he awoke jerking, choking, pressed to the flat rock as a man to the side of a cliff, his heart pounding. He sat up and spat out the blood. He thought he hadn’t been out long but it had been long enough for the moon to burn off the clouds and center itself directly over him, a round and burning sun of the night. He rolled his head to look at the man and the man was gone. Nothing but an empty shelf of rock where he’d fallen. As if the dream had been no dream and only wrong in one of its particulars.

“Get up, damn you,” he said. “I know you. Ain’t dead.”

He got up on his knees, from there to his feet, a long tottering moment, the pines in sickly carousel all around him—and then
Slowly, slowly, son, down the old stone steps.

58

They sat in the
heated cab
studying the woods before them, their headlights boring a vague passageway under the boughs.

“You think those are Billy’s tracks, Sheriff?”

“I don’t know. They might be.”

They looked again at the GPS screen, which seemed to place them in a dark void at the edge of the world. The device told them the time was 9:32 p.m.
Their speed was zero.

“How far you reckon he could get in that car, Sheriff?”

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out.”

“You want me to get Summit County on the radio, tell them we’re up here?”

“No, let’s see what’s up ahead here a ways first.”

The deputy shifted into the low range of four-wheel drive and they drove into the woods and followed the primitive road as it wound through the trees and grew more steeply pitched, more wildly switchbacked, the foreshortened way brilliant in their headlights until at last they rounded a bend and saw the El Camino. There was time and slope enough for the cruiser to stop short of the car, and the deputy skillfully worked the gas to keep them from backsliding more than a few feet, until at last they achieved a kind of stasis on the slope.

The El Camino sat aslant the road, anchored to a tree by its tailgate.

They sat watching it for a moment.

“He sure drove that car, didn’t he, Sheriff.”

“He sure did.”

“You want me to throw the lights?”

“No, there ain’t nobody in it.”

“How can you tell?”

“Well, I see that snow built up on a cold hood, and I see a car that ain’t even tried to get itself unstuck, and lastly I see them footprints going away from the car and on up the road.”

The deputy drew himself to the wheel, as if he’d lacked the proper vantage to see such things. He sat back again and shook his head. “I don’t know, Sheriff. I got a funny feeling.”

“All right,” said Kinney after a moment. “Cover me with the shotgun if it’ll make you feel less funny.”

The deputy put the cruiser in park and eased his foot from the brake, and the cruiser held. They got out and the deputy took his position in the wing of the door while the sheriff approached the El Camino. Kinney put his light into the cab and called back that nobody was home and the deputy raised his shotgun to port. Kinney tried the door and then walked around and tried the driver’s door. It opened and the dome light came on and he stooped to look in. He picked up Billy’s phone and checked for the messages he himself had left but none had arrived. The two phones were now less than a foot apart and not a word could pass between them.

“That his phone?” said the deputy.

“Yep.”

“Why do you reckon he left it?”

“Why do you?” Kinney was reading the sent messages.

The deputy grew pensive. “For one, it wouldn’t do him any good up here. For two, I reckon he wanted us to find it.”

Kinney pocketed the phone. “That’s how it looks to me.”

He shut the door and returned to the cruiser and handed the deputy a magazine and asked him to get on the horn and call it in, and he’d begun to walk back to the El Camino when he stopped and turned back. The deputy was staring at the magazine.

“You want me to call in this magazine, Sheriff?”

“Look again, Deputy.”

He looked.

“There on the fanny,” said Kinney.

“Oh,” said the deputy. “Got it.”

A few minutes later the deputy told him the number had come back a New Mexico plate registered to one Reginald Smites who, like the plate itself, was long expired.

Kinney was skimming his torchbeam along the surface of the snow to reveal what was left of the other set of tire tracks continuing up the road.

“Looks like he got out and followed on foot, Sheriff.”

“That’s how it looks to me.”

“Think we can move this car?”

“He didn’t leave the keys.”

“We could tow it out of the way.”

“We could try but I don’t want to spend the time. Go grab a torch, Donny, and lock up and let’s go.”

“You want me to bring the shotguns?”

“I guess one ought to be plenty.”

The moment the deputy extinguished the headlights the woods grew deep in every direction. Tree articulating from tree and the steep expanse of mountain unveiled in the blue flood of moonlight. They saw where Billy had twice fallen and they saw his adjustment and they followed these strange impressions up the road with the flashlights off and no sound anywhere but their own footfalls and the faint hiss of wind in the boughs. When the sheriff’s two-way squawked he grabbed it and thumbed it into silence and the deputy did the same to his.

59

The wood split
and
there was the sudden edge of blade, the dull gleam of silver in the black face of the door. She did not believe it. A thing from the outside world had broken into hers. She stared at it, heart-stopped, waiting to see what it would do next. The sight of it awakened in her thin legs the memory of a day long ago on snowshoes—afloat on the deep snow, thighs full of blood, lungs stretched and burning and each step another step downslope, away from the shack, away from the cot, from the bathroom, from the chain. She watched the blade in the door and it didn’t move, and then she heard the pop of the gun, and she dropped to her knees, and the voice she heard next was the Monkey’s.

She backed away, dragging the chain with her to her place on the cot and to the sour old sleeping bag, which for a moment she had let herself believe would never again touch her skin. She drew up her legs and cowled the bag about her and watched the dim edge of blade in the door, dully lit by the glow from the stove where her next-to-last log withered on its bed of coals.

After a while he and Billy were quiet. Then he told her through the door that he would be right back, and there were a few more sounds, and she heard the sled runners cutting through the snow and away into the trees, and there was no more sound from out there and she didn’t move. She watched the edge of the blade in the door, staring so intently that it burned into her retinas—and it became in this uncanny way more than the edge of the ax but the edge of the outer world itself, as the thin blade of the crescent moon suggests the whole round moon, and she remembered a book she’d once loved about a circular being who was missing a piece of itself, like a slice of pie, and went rolling around the world singing,
Oh, I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece, I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece.
The smell of the book’s paper and the smell of sawdust on her father’s shirt in whose arms she rested like a small circular being herself. The deep man-tremor of his voice down in his chest passing into her back and into her chest, and his heartbeat too, like a separate voice speaking in a register so low that only her own heart could hear it, and she knew by this memory, by her willingness to allow it to bloom inside her, that she would not see him again. Or her mother or her brother.

So she sat thinking of each of them, all she could remember of them, while another part of her listened for the return of his footfall, the dragging of the riderless sled, the sound of the key fitting into the padlock. He’d told Billy he did not believe the sheriff was coming but he would not take the chance. It was time. And he would do what he should’ve done long ago and then he would come down from the mountain and never return to this place and he would never be found and she would never be found, nor her sisters before her nor the two men who had tried to help her. Her family would never know and she knew now that that was the worst thing of all, to never know, and she hoped that if there was no God or no heaven that at least she might be allowed to make herself known to them one last time, to tell them everything she’d not told them when she’d had the chance, and she began to tell them now, hastily, in a fevered whisper, for once more she heard the footsteps beyond the door, distant, then steadily louder, slogging heavily in the crusted snow. She did not hear the sled runners and she did not hear the jangle of keys as he reached the door, but instead the door shuddered and she saw the ax blade pulled from its place in the breached wood, and then there was no sound other than her whispers as she closed her eyes and spoke to her parents and to Dudley. These would be the faces she saw, not his, the faces of Dad, Mom, and Sean. She tried to see what he must look like now, her little brother. He would be the age she’d been back then. Taller, leaner, more like their father. No longer a boy but a young man. Lastly she imagined herself, not as she was now but as she had been. She put her own remembered face into this portrait and in this way they were reunited, complete once more, a fully round thing.

In the next moment the wall behind her shook and her eyes leapt open and the edge of the ax was in the door again, more of it than before, rocking in the splintered wood. It withdrew again and she heard the wheezing effort of his backswing and the ax came crashing once more through the wood, the entire axhead now, wrenching in the ragged seam like the head of a panicked animal. Freeing itself, crashing through again. She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand. Had he lost his keys?

The axhead fell again and pieces of wood flew across the room, and the axhead was jerked from the door and did not return. There was hole enough now she could see the white of the snow in the trees beyond, luminous in the moonlight. Then the hole was blacked out and she knew he’d blocked it with his head. She held her breath. White fingers sprouted in the black hole and gripped the wood. The door shook. The fingers withdrew.

There followed another blow of the ax and this time the axhead did not stop but continued on its downward arc as the plank of the door split all the way to the floor and the entire door shook in its frame. For a moment all was still. Then the door banged violently once, and a second time, and at last swept open in an explosion of light and snow and shards of wood spinning through the air, followed by the man himself, crashing into the room like someone stepping through a rotted floor. He fell to his hands and knees and remained that way, gasping, the ax pinned to the floor under his right hand. He’d fallen in with the moonlight, and the longer he remained in this all-fours position the more he appeared to be captive to the box of light in which he crouched. When he looked up at last his face was ghastly in that light. Ghastly in any light. What may have been the very last of his blood ran in a black syrup from his mouth. Something rattled deep inside him, as though every breath passed through a wet cloth.

She shrugged off the sleeping bag and Billy watched as she separated from the heap of bedding like bones from hide, so skinny, so pale in her thin rags. Dark hair snarled about her face, her filthy bare feet. The dragging chain and the padlock rocking at her ankle like some grotesque idea of jewelry. They each looked into the other’s eyes and saw there the pitiful thing they had become.

She put a hand on his shoulder. The first touch of another human not him in so long. Kept her hand there, fighting the desire to wrench the ax away—
Mine,
g
ive it to me.

“Billy,” she said. “Where is he?”

He spat blood and wheezed, then pushed himself to his knees and sat back on his heels. He knuckled the blood from his lips and looked about him. “My God,” he said.

“Billy,” she began again, but then his balance gave out and he toppled backward, landing heavily against the doorjamb. His legs unfolded before him one at a time, and now the only part of him she could easily reach was his boots. She put her hand on the ax and slid it closer to her.

He was blinking at her sleepily. The smell of him, like the moonlight and the cold, had invaded the room. He was the smell of cigarettes and car exhaust, of pine trees and snow and mud. Of unwashed hair and vomit and alcohol. He smelled of sweat and flesh and of cowhide and of something metallic and primal that she thought must be his blood. He smelled of the world.

“Billy,” she said again. “Where is he?”

“S’who?” he said.

“The man. The man who shot you.”

His raised his hand in a vague gesture. “Stabbed.”

“You stabbed him?”

He nodded.

“Is he dead? Billy, is he dead?”

He sighed. He closed his eyes. “I don’t know.” His lips were blue; his teeth had begun to chatter.

She looked beyond him, into the moonlight, at the trees and the mountain. She could not see high enough to see the moon but she knew it was up there, bright and whole.

The room was growing cold but she didn’t feel it. She was burning up. Her heart was punching at her wasted ribs.

“Billy,” she said. She grabbed his boot and shook it. “Billy.”

He opened his eyes. Glassy, drowsing eyes struggling to focus.

“Billy, you said the sheriff was coming. Is that true? Is he coming?” He winced, and she realized it was his ankle and eased her grip on it.

He wagged his head. “Don’t know,” he said. “My phone.”

“Yes?” she said, “yes? You have a phone? Where? Where’s your phone, Billy?” She reached out toward him.

“Not here,” he said. “Down. In the car.”

She stared at him, disbelieving. “Why would you leave it there?”

“You go,” he said. “My car.” He shuddered. His gloved hand lifted from the floor and stabbed at his jacket pocket and at last found its way in. She heard the sound of keys and he brought out his fist and held it out to her. She could just reach it. Her hand touched his bloody glove and she had the keys.

“My tracks,” he said. “Down the mountain. Understand?”

She nodded. She clutched the keys. They were not the set of keys she wanted and he seemed to know it. Such sadness in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said, shuddering. “Can’t chop. Anymore.”

“It’s okay. You rest. I’ll get you some water.” She’d begun to stand but he raised a hand to stop her. He wanted to speak again.

“Do you know,” he said, “what timezit?”

She turned and looked instinctively for the coin of light on the floor but it wasn’t there.

“Ten,” she said. “Maybe ten thirty.”

He nodded.

“Your people,” he said.

She looked at him. She held absolutely still.

“Your people,” he said again. “Down there still,” he said. “Still looking.”

She bowed her head. She placed her hand on his boot again. Her thin small shoulders shaking. After a moment she wiped her face and looked up again and said she would get him some water.

She dragged the chain into the bathroom and collected the quarter-full bucket, the last of her water, and returned to the outer room, and stopped short, and set the bucket down, for she could see from there that he was dead.

Outside, the wind blew in the pines. A flurry of snow seethed over the floor and settled alongside his leg. She looked behind her at the dark stove, the last small chunk of firewood next to it. Then she looked beyond him, out into what she could see of the world in the corridor of door and moonlight.

“Come on if you’re coming,” she said, and stood holding the ax.