Descent (31 page)

60

She’d never used one
before but the shape of the handle and the weight of the head told her how it must be done and she took her stance over the chain, raised the ax as high as the ceiling would allow and with all her strength brought it down. Sparks leapt and the axhead twisted and the handle convulsed from her hands like something alive. The effort left her panting and dizzy and furious with her body. She bent and gathered the chain in her hands and found no sign of the blow and only a scrape of raw steel in one tarnished link, the link itself unharmed, and she understood at once a combination of truths: the chain was too strong, the ax too dull, her body too weak. In the air was an acrid, ferric smell, like the smoke of sparklers that burns in the nose on the Fourth of July.

She took up the ax again and this time aligned herself over the bolt plate in the floor, over the half hoop that was conjoined with the final link of the chain, that perversely enduring union that had defied her every effort to break it. She raised the ax and brought it down and the axhead did not twist but merely rang out a flat note and bounced back into the air, having struck the face of the plate an inch from the hasp.

Dizzily she raised the ax again and brought it down again and the blade glanced off the hasp but she held on. She knelt to feel the hasp and the link but they remained bound to each other as ever. She turned the ax and drew her thumb along the nicked and blunted edge. Despair rose in her and she fought it down. She looked at the door, the thick wreckage of it, and she looked at the floor around the bolt plate. Having swung the ax she now understood what it had taken to break through the door, and what it would take to do the same to the floor, and she knew she could never do it.

Cold air spun about the room. Snow continued to drift in and collect at Billy’s leg, a climbing dune. She knelt there watching it, shivering.

What are you doing?
said the girl—the strong one, the one she thought had abandoned her.

“I’m thinking.”

I hope you’re thinking how you’d better stoke this fire and get in that sleeping bag.

“Fuck that sleeping bag.”

The girl said nothing.

Caitlin held the ax, listening. Then she said: “Do you think he’s coming?”

Who?

“Either one.”

The girl was a long time answering and Caitlin knew what she would say.

I think what I’ve always thought.
Th
ere’s no one coming.
Th
ere’s only us.

Crystals swam in the air and landed cool on her face. Billy’s keys where she’d left them on the floor glinted blue in the light. Follow his tracks, that’s all. Get to the car. That’s all. She remembered snowshoes, the deep powder and her pounding heart, the Monkey in pursuit and
no fall, no fall . . .
He had bagged it all up, snowshoes and boots and jacket and gloves, took it away without a word. Bad girl.

She held the ax. Her heart clocking away the seconds, the minutes. Now that she’d let the faces of her family into her mind she could not get them out. Faces of the life before. And they were down there still, he said, still looking. Still looking and what will they find?

She listened for the girl—listened for anything. But there was nothing. Wind. The snow whispering along the floorboards.

She got to her feet and opened the stove gate and with the last length of firewood prodded the length that preceded it, now nothing more than a smoldering black bone of itself which at first touch fell into glowing red cubes. Flames arose and she placed the new wood carefully atop them and closed the gate incompletely so that the air would draw and the wood would burn more quickly and intensely. She set the bucket of water next to the stove and the ax next to that, and then she went to the cot and picked up a flannel boy’s shirt, once red now gone almost to black, and she put this on and buttoned it to her throat. Lastly she got down on her hands and knees and reached far under the cot until she felt what she was looking for and dragged them out. They were dusty and gray and shrunken, like creatures who’d crawled under there long ago and died together side by side. She took one in each hand and clopped them sole to sole and the sound and the feel of this nearly made her sob. She clopped them and the red dust of the trail and the gray dust of the years fell from them like snow.

There were no cans of food or snack bars or child’s boxes of juice or anything at all on the larder shelves and she dippered her hand into the bucket and drank three cold handfuls of water.

She looked at the man named Billy on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and she took him by the ankles.

61

The way became more
trail
than road and before long they reached the place where the tire tracks dove down into the brush and one set of bootprints became two and they raised their Maglites and probed the gully with the beams, but the light struck the thick latticework of brush and went no farther. They switched off the torches and stood in silence, in moonlight.

“Want me to go on down there, Sheriff?”

“I guess not, Donny. We’ve got two men afoot now and we’d best see where they’ve gone to. Though by the looks of these tracks I’d say they’ve already got there.”

The deputy sniffled and looked back down the way they’d come, and up to where they were going. “What do you suppose made him do a thing like this anyway, Sheriff?”

“I quit even asking that question a long time ago, Donny.”

They went on.

The two sets of tracks progressed in tandem up the narrowing trail, one set landing wide of the other as if out of some compulsion, or superstition. As if one man were loathe to place his foot where the other’s had been.

“There ain’t no mistaking which is which, is there, Sheriff.”

“Let’s go quiet, Deputy.”

They came around a bend and, seeing only more trail, more tracks, stopped to get their wind. Kinney wanted a cigarette but put that out of his mind.

They’d turned to go on when a sound reached them, traveling in echo from up the mountain. A dull flat chock, as of an ax blow to solid wood. They stilled themselves and listened. Less than a minute later the sound came again and after that there was no more sound like it nor any sound at all. The deputy looked at the sheriff and the sheriff nodded, and they went on.

The trail grew more difficult and Kinney yielded the lead to his deputy so that he himself might concentrate on the surrounding woods, listening for any single thing which was not of the woods. They’d not climbed another fifty yards before he reached and put a hand on the deputy’s shoulder and they halted.

The deputy looked where the sheriff pointed and he saw the small flare of color deep in the monochrome woods, simmering and orange and
geometrical—a doorway. And seeing it he immediately smelled woodsmoke, as if one could not exist without the other.

“Damn, Sheriff,” he whispered. “Damn.”

Kinney lowered to a squat and removed his hat, and the deputy did the same, the shotgun bridged across his knees. They watched to see if anyone would pass before the door or window or come to shut it against the cold, but no one did.

The deputy whispered, “Sheriff, look up ahead here,” and he pointed to where the two sets of tracks abruptly diverged. The men rose and went stooped-backed up the trail and dropped once more to their haunches to study the tracks.

The deputy drew a gloved forefinger under his nose. “What should we do, Sheriff?”

Overhead, the white points of the pines sawed through the stars and sent a fine brilliant dust sifting down.

“I don’t like it,” said Kinney, “but I guess we’ll have to split up.” He leaned and spat dryly. “You go on ahead with those tracks and I’ll take these here. Set that radio to beep mode. If you see anything, beep me twice and wait for me to come, and I’ll do the same.”

They restored their hats to their heads, squared them, and stood. “Don’t use your torch if you can help it, and stay sharp, Donny.”

“Okay, Sheriff.”

He watched his deputy out of sight, then turned and stepped into the woods as his brother had done when he spotted the same remote light two, perhaps three hours earlier.

THE MOON FOLLOWED HIM,
sidling through the treetops and attaching to him a disturbed version of his own shape, a liquid shadow that moved with perfect stealth while he himself blundered along behind. He kept an eye on Billy’s tracks and an eye on the light ahead, and he made himself stop every twenty paces and count to ten, just listening. He heard a twig fracture thinly in the distance, in the direction his deputy had gone, and nothing more. He considered whether he’d made the right decision splitting up. Made the right decision not calling Summit County to meet them
up here.

Meet us for what, for Jesus’ sake?

He had stopped to listen at a place where Billy had tripped over a tree that lay hidden under the snow. “Up here in goddam cowboy boots,” he said, and continued on.

He followed the tracks where they dodged through the pines, and when he glanced ahead once more to the lighted rectangle, now unmistakably a doorway, something passed darkly and soundlessly before it, like a tree felled in the middle ground but with no sound of its landing. He stood still and the tree came swinging back to darken the doorway again, and he saw then that it was no tree but some figure careening through the woods.

He stepped behind the branches of a young pine and watched the figure come on, antic and wayward, wildly lame in one leg. Bereft of all ballast or compass yet moving doggedly on some course, and it was the same course, he saw, that he himself was on and that was stamped in the snow by his brother’s boots.

He peeled off his gloves and stashed them in his pocket and unholstered his sidearm and found his stance behind the small pine, digging his boots into the snow. He raised the Maglite and rested it on a branch at eye level where the sight line was clean, training both gun and unlit flashlight on the place twenty feet ahead where he knew the figure would come into view.

Through the intervening boughs he made out the hobbling shape and he saw the blue-black gleam of leather in the moonlight, and although he believed he recognized the jacket he saw nothing else in those palsied movements or in the blanched face under the watch cap resembling his brother. He thumbed off the safety of the gun and released the air slowly from
his lungs.

The sound of erratic footfalls arrived in advance of the figure, and Kinney watched the white breaths erupting before the white face, and in time he heard the breaths too, hearing not only the exertions behind them but also the ragged bursts of speech within them—a breathy convulsive incantation as fierce as it was unintelligible.

At last the figure came lurching into his line of fire and he threw his light on it and a gloved left hand swung up reflexively and there was no weapon in it, nor in the right, which remained down and fisted and close to the right thigh.

“Not another step,” said Kinney, and the figure stopped. The splayed, outstretched hand wavered in the torch beam, its shadow covering the face like a huge smothering glove. He saw that it was not his brother but some impostor in his brother’s clothes and a poor one at that: swamped in the leather jacket, blue jeans lapsed into accordion folds from the ankles up. Or rather from one ankle up, for on the opposite leg the pant leg was bunched above a cowboy boot, where a strap had been fed through the pullstraps of the boot, the impostor holding the resulting loop in his gloved fist like the bridlereins to his own right foot.

“I want to see both your hands in the air right now,” Kinney said, and after a moment the unsteady figure let go the strap and fell at once to both knees and then to all fours with a high, awful whimper. Black hair spilled from the shoulders and hung trembling in the sheriff’s torchlight.

“Look up,” said Kinney. Such shoulders as there were under the jacket shook visibly. Droplets fell amid the lank hair, dazzled in the light, and were consumed in the snow.

“Come on now,” said the sheriff more gently. “Look at me.” He lowered his beam and when the light was off of it, the fallen head lifted and showed him the face under the cap and for a moment he believed he was seeing the face of his own daughter—haunted and drained and ravaged by illness.

“My Lord God,” he said. He came from behind the tree holstering the gun and knelt beside her and looked into her wild wet eyes. “Sweetheart,” he said, “what’s your name?”

62

They had been silent
a long time, smoking in the moonlight, when Grant said: “I thought about trying to stay on here. I talked to Sheriff Joe about it. I thought I might cover the mortgage for a while. But it would mean selling the house back home. It would mean going back there and putting everything in storage. Or selling it.”

The boy thought of the house in Wisconsin, his bedroom above the garage, all his childhood things, bed and books and fighter planes hung on fishing line. The ribbons on Caitlin’s wall like a bird wing, her trophies and posters and the stuffed ape he’d given her one Christmas and that sat on her bed still. Everything untouched in the cold dark and not a sound anywhere. He lowered his head and blew into his cupped hands and said into them, “What about Mom?”

“What about her?”

“Is she planning on staying with Aunt Grace forever?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you getting divorced?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“No. We haven’t talked about anything but one thing in a long time.”

The boy thought of the waitress, Maria, and of Carmen.

Grant reached for the ashtray on the porch rail and stubbed out his cigarette.

The boy said, “You think she still believes in God?”

Grant nodded. “Yes.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

The boy looked at him and looked away.

“I don’t know,” Grant said.

“Do you think it would’ve changed things?”

“Would what have changed things?”

“Believing. Before.”

Grant stared at him, at his profile in the moonlight.

“Is that what you think?”

“Sometimes.”

They were quiet. Across the clearing from out of the shadow of the house slipped the shape of a cat, sinuous and black on the snow, stalking something. She was nearly to the blue spruce when she stopped, one forefoot stilled in midstep, and her eyes ignited in her face like tiny headlamps, green-gold and molten. For a moment the world was still. Then the boy scraped his boot on the step and those lights blacked out and the cat turned and slunk back into shadow. They watched to see if she would reappear but she didn’t.

“That house back there is the only thing left,” said the boy.

Grant got another cigarette in his lips and offered the pack to his son but he shook his head. Grant lit his cigarette and exhaled a blue, ghostly cloud.

“I don’t know what else to do,” he said. “Do you?” He looked at the boy. Blond whiskers silvering in the moonlight. He still saw the young boy he’d been not long ago, but he knew that he alone saw it, that it was the image a father carries, burned into the eyes by way of the heart.

The boy shook his head and said that he had wished for something terrible. Terrible.

“When?” Grant said. “Just now?” He was thinking of the falling star.

“No. When we went to see that girl.”

Grant looked at him. “What did you wish for?”

“I wished it was her. I wished it was Caitlin.”

Grant looked away.

“I wanted it to be her so we could take her home.”

Grant shook his head. “I shouldn’t have let you go down there.”

“You couldn’t have stopped me.”

Grant sat shaking his head. “I’ve had this conversation a thousand times,” he said. He stared into the sky. “I never should have let you go up into those mountains, I say.”

The boy was quiet. The moon sat in the eye of its ring.

“You couldn’t have stopped me, she says. Maybe not, I say.” He stared into the heavens, his eyes burning with its lights. “But I should have tried.”