Descent (32 page)

63

Kinney told the girl
who he was and that he’d followed his brother, Billy, up there. She was still on her hands and knees, and he scanned the snow for blood.

“How bad are you hurt, Caitlin?”

She gave a sob and faltered and he caught her by the upper arm. More bone than arm under the leather. He knew by this how light she would be.

“All right, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re gonna be all right now. We’re getting you down off this mountain.” He found his radio and pushed the button twice and waited. He pushed twice again and as he waited he heard someone coming through the woods, moving smartly but cautiously. He doused the torch and drew the gun again and leveled it over the hunched girl, who grew silent and rigid.

“Who all’s up here, Caitlin?” he said under his breath. “Is he up here, the man who took you?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“What about Billy? Where’s Billy, Caitlin?”

Before she could answer, a man appeared in silhouette and Kinney saw the shape of the man’s hat and he lowered the gun and blinked the torch twice to guide him. He told her it was all right, it was just his deputy, and she began to breathe again.

The deputy came through the trees at a lope and he stopped beside them and set the shotgun across his knees and leaned upon the shotgun gasping like a man at the end of a hard race. He was as pale as the girl and when he met the sheriff’s eyes the sheriff saw he was badly shaken.

The deputy looked at the girl on her hands and knees in the snow. He looked at the one big cowboy boot she wore and the loop of belt making its dark smile in the snow. He looked at the running shoe on her other foot. He seemed not to have the breath or words to speak.

“What did you find, Donny?”

The deputy lowered himself to his knees beside the girl, as if to pray, or beg. The girl watched him with her wet eyes.

“Did you find him?” she whispered.

“Find who?”

“The man,” she said.

“All I found was Billy,” he said.

Her eyes searched his. Then her head dropped again heavily, black hair spilling to the snow.

Kinney looked from the girl to his deputy. “Tell me, Deputy.”

“Sheriff, I think we need to get this girl to a hospital.”

“I know it. Tell me what you saw up there.”

“Sheriff, I don’t know if I can.”

“By God, Donny.”

The deputy shook his head dismally. He reached to touch the girl’s shoulder but stopped himself. “Miss?” he said. “Can we take a look?”

She did not answer or move. Then, in silence, she pivoted onto one hip and shifted around to sit in the snow with her arms stiff behind her and her legs stretched out, and thus arranged she raised the single boot into the air before the deputy, as if proffering it. As if in some weird invitation of undress.

The deputy handed the shotgun to the sheriff.

“What are you doing, Deputy?”

The deputy took the boot in his hands and began, gently, to pull. It came off more easily than Kinney would’ve predicted and when it slipped free he did not understand what he was seeing. At the end of her white thin leg there was no foot. There was the heel—and nothing else. A stunning illusion. As if the rest of the foot were still inside the boot. The deputy tilted the boot and the blood ran from it like oil and Kinney looked again and saw the black sooty wound and he smelled the seared meat smell of it.

“My God,” he said.

The deputy tilted the boot farther and something heavy slipped along the shaft from bootheel to mouth and landed in a dark clot on the snow.

“What is that?”

“I think it’s his socks, Sheriff. Billy’s socks.”

Kinney looked at him.

“He got shot, Joe. He didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”

Kinney frowned. He adjusted his hat. Then he handed the shotgun back to the deputy and slipped an arm under the girl’s knees and the other around her back and rose to his feet lifting her easily.

“Don’t,” she said. “I can walk.”

“I know you can, sweetheart, but this will be faster.”

“Let me help, Sheriff.”

“No, she don’t weigh nothin. Grab that belt there and get it on her leg.” The deputy did so. “Higher,” said the sheriff. “Just below the knee. Pull it tight. Tuck in the end. Are you in pain, sweetheart?” he said, and even as she shook her head he said, “Jesus, what a question.” To the deputy he said: “Now watch our backs with that shotgun, Donny. Anything else moves in these woods you go ahead and shoot the sonofabitch.”

The girl hooked one arm around his neck and with her face to his chest he turned and they headed down the mountain, moving slower than they might have, not for the weight of her but for the care he took not to jostle her or allow her to come into contact with any branch or bough or to himself slip on the steep trail. She was not bleeding badly and he didn’t believe she’d lost much blood, and if she’d not gone into shock by now he didn’t believe she would and his sole desire in the world was to deliver her gently and safely to the cruiser.

The girl for her part rode in his arms like a child to whom sleep has come no matter what, no matter where, though it wasn’t sleep she surrendered to but something more absolute, more exquisite, which was abandonment. Abandonment of thought and of fear and of responsibility and of strength. She surrendered to abandonment and in her surrender she felt the downhill pull of gravity and she believed that the man who carried her was in fact a man-shaped sled or toboggan and she its only passenger. Sailing down the mountain slope with the song of speed in her ears, beat of his heart against her ribs, whole unto herself but also belonging to the snow and the wind and the moon and the mountain. Altogether more effortless and fleet than she’d ever been in any footrace and putting nothing but distance and more distance between herself and the life up there, which was no life but only the momentary interruption of life, and every second on this man-sled delivering her farther and farther from shack, chain, sleeping bag, Monkey. Down and down the great slope, the sweetest ride, joy of speed, down and down and unstoppably down.

64

They came around
a
final bend and found the El Camino broadside to the road as before and the cruiser beyond it downslope. Both the sheriff and his deputy were breathing harshly. The full moon hung above them on its high sweep, and on the deputy’s wrist a small round face lit from within told them it was just midnight. The deputy unlocked the cruiser and opened the rear door and went to the other side to help the sheriff arrange the girl along the bench seat, her body so meager in the folds of clothes. He saw something protruding from one of the jacket pockets and after a moment understood that it was a shoe. The other running shoe.

“How’s that, Caitlin?” said Kinney. “Can you ride like that?”

She nodded, gazing around the interior as if it were the cockpit of a spaceship. Kinney told the deputy to start up the cruiser and get the heat going, then he had him radio Summit County for ambulances and officers. When that was done the deputy came around again and stood behind the sheriff who was still tending to the girl.

“You want the emergency kit, Sheriff?”

Kinney looked more closely at the wound in the dome light. The blackened curled lip of skin with its bright scarlet fissures. “No, I’d rather spend the time driving toward the EMTs. And anyway I don’t believe we can do much better than what’s been done.” He reached for the belt below her knee and noticed for the first time the silver oval of buckle, the snakehead with its ruby eyes, and for a moment it froze him, as the face of a true viper would. Billy had put it on that morning, or whenever he’d gotten up. Mindlessly fastening the buckle and getting on with his day. Then Kinney thought of the girl’s father, Grant, and the boy Sean, down on the ranch. Going about their day, their night, with no idea, just no idea. He uncinched the belt and watched for the blood to seep from the wound and cinched it again.

What in the hell, he thought. Just what in God’s own hell.

“Sheriff,” she said as he was withdrawing from the cruiser. She’d removed Billy’s glove. She held out her bare fist. He reached in and cupped his hand and the keys dropped into his palm.

“He gave them to me,” she said.

“Okay. You lie still now. We’re gonna get you to the hospital before you can say boo.” He moved to shut the door and again she said, “Sheriff.”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry. What I did to him.”

He didn’t understand. “Hush, now,” he said. “Don’t talk.”

“Sheriff?”

“Yes?”

“Do you have a phone?”

“There ain’t no signal up here, sweetheart.”

“Can I just hold it?”

He found the phone and she closed her bare hand around it and rested her fist on her chest.

He shut the door and handed Billy’s keys to the deputy. “I need a favor, Donny.”

“Ask it, Sheriff.”

“I need you to stay up here with this car. Just stay here with the shotgun and don’t do nothing else but keep an eye out. If there’s another man up here I don’t want him getting by you, is that clear? You put him down before he gets by.”

“I will, Sheriff.”

“It won’t be long before Summit County gets here.”

“Don’t worry, Sheriff.”

Kinney clapped a hand on the deputy’s shoulder and stepped to the driver’s door, and then stood there, ready to open the door. The deputy hadn’t moved.

“What is it, Deputy?”

The deputy sawed his finger under his nose.

“Donny,” said Kinney.

“She was chained up like a dog in that shack, Sheriff. Looks to me like she did that to herself. With an ax.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, Sheriff.” The deputy looked down. “Hell. There was two feet up there. Human feet. Just lying there. Like shoes. One of hers and one of his. Billy was already dead when it happened, you could tell.”

He looked up again. “Now why would she do a thing like that, Sheriff?”

Kinney studied the dark shape of the girl in the back of his cruiser. Pale oval of face in the shadows. He heard again the sounds they’d heard from the trail: one wooden blow. Then the other. Lord God if only she’d waited fifteen, twenty minutes, he thought. But there was a man up there with a gun and she might not have had twenty minutes or even ten.

He turned back to the deputy. “Why do you reckon she did it, Donny?”

The deputy bumped the barrel of the shotgun against his leg. “I’d say she did it for practice, Sheriff.”

Kinney nodded. “That’s how it looks to me.”

He opened the cruiser door and got in and switched on the headlamps, spilling light once more over the road and the deserted El Camino. He turned to speak to the girl but she was out, the phone still clutched to her chest. He powered down the passenger’s window and told the deputy to look sharp. Told him to be nothing but smart and he would see him later at the hospital, and then the deputy stood to watch the sheriff back the cruiser deftly down the road.

65

The boy fell asleep
quickly and all at once and in his sleep he returned to the glen on the mountain where the stone Virgin watched over the crooked stones. There was the coldness of the stone bench and no sound but the chattering aspens, a sound like wind chimes made of bird bones, and in the dream he leaned to search for the tarnished plaque but behind the scrub growth there was only more growth, and he rooted and pulled in despair until something moved at the tree line and he looked up and there she was: black toss of ponytail, bare legs blotched pink and red, the scant shorts and the running shoes all brilliant white in the shaded hollow. She said
Th
ere you are
and pulled up before him winded, hands on hips, her head cocked to one side. She asked him where he’d been and he said he’d been right here, and she asked why and he said because he was waiting for her and she asked why and he said because he didn’t know the way down and she shook her head and said,
Dudley, the way down is down. It’s always down. Didn’t you know that?
Then she knelt to retie one shoe and as she was doing this something else moved in the woods, some plodding and reckless thing, and she looked up and smiled, and then, like a sprinter in the blocks, she rose and flew, leaping once more into the woods. He tried to follow but when he stepped into the trees there was no sign of her, nor any sign of trail. He stared into the pines and he heard his name, and when he opened his eyes a hand was on his shoulder and a face was hovering in the dark, eyes shining, and he said
Don’t, don’t . . .
but the words were only in his heart and his father shook him again, almost violently, and said, “Sean, wake up. Wake up. You have to get dressed.”

“Why?” he asked, still in the woods.

“Because they found her.”

He stared at his father in the darkness, his father staring at him.

“How do they know?” said the boy, and his father said, “Because she told them.”

Part V

66

Something was buzzing—
a terrific
and malevolent insect, a great scarab. It sat wide and hard-shelled on her chest, it sat on her mouth, and she couldn’t breathe; she swung an arm and struck a soft small creature near her head and the animal released a childish, laundered smell and the smell told her where she was, who she was, and when she knew this she knew what the buzzing was and she blindly reached for it, toppling the capped water bottle onto its side, the bottle sending the vial of pills rolling off the table and bouncing on the carpet with the faraway sound of a fallen baby rattle.

She swung out her legs and sat with the phone in her hand, reading the bright small screen. The room faced east and the windows were a deep shade of blue. No idea how long she’d slept. The alarm clock sat blank and pointless, unplugged long ago by her husband. The phone buzzed twice more before she answered.

“Angie,” Grace nearly cried. “Where are you?”

“At the house,” she said thickly. She picked up the water bottle and unscrewed the cap.

“The house?” It took her sister a moment. “What are you doing there?”

“Running the streams.”

“Running the what?”

“The . . . water. Running the water. For the traps.”

“Angie, are you all right?”

“Yes. I’m fine. Why?”

The heat had stopped blowing, the furnace paused. No one, nothing, moved in the house. It felt empty as a museum after even the guards have gone home; the paintings unlit in the vast gloom, gazed at by no one but the white-eyed statues. She looked about her at the posters, the furniture, her daughter’s things; they were losing their power to devastate her. They were becoming like her memories.

“Well,” Grace said, “I’ve been calling. Did you lose your phone, or what?”

Angela could see her sister’s face: the anger and disbelief. The fear. The face of an adult woman whom she loved without question and into whose tiny lungs she had once blown life, a fact that was known but could not
be felt.

“It was in my bag,” Angela said. “I didn’t hear it. I’m sorry, Grace.”

“Well—” said Grace. She took a breath. “How did it go this morning?”

“How did what go.”

“Teaching, Angie. Did you teach?”

“Not really.”

“What does that mean?”

“They sat and read their book. They pretended to. Real teacher-of-the-year stuff.”

There was a long silence. Angela glanced at the screen. “Are you there?”

“I’m here.” Grace’s tone became casual. “Have you been at the house all day?”

“No. I walked around. I rode the bus.”

“You rode the bus?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you go?”

“Nowhere. The library.”

Grace’s son hollered at her from somewhere in the house; she didn’t answer. “Angie,” she said. “I’m coming over.”

“Don’t, Grace. Seriously, I’m fine.” She was putting her things back into the tote bag. Shouldering it. She restored the teddy bear and the ape to their places. Smoothed the duvet.

“Well—are you coming home? I mean, are you coming back for dinner?”

There was the sharp rap of the little brass knocker on the front door downstairs.

“Go ahead and eat without me,” Angela said. “I’ll warm something
up later.”

“But Angie—”

The door swept open and a man called “Hello?”

“I have to go, Grace, someone’s here.”

“Who’s there? Who was that?”

“It’s no one.”

Hard-sole footsteps on the oak floor at the bottom of the stairs. “Angela?”

“I mean it’s only Robert from across the street. He must have seen the light on downstairs.” She stepped out of her daughter’s room and closed the door.

“Angela—”

“I have to go, Grace. I’ll call you back.”

HE HAD SEEN THE
light and no car in the drive and had come over to make sure it was her. Or one of them. A good neighbor. Watching her come down the stairs—“Are you all right?”

“Yes, of course. Just checking on things.”

“Is everything all right?”

“It seems to be.”

“Good. Good.” He stood there nodding, looking about in the light from the kitchen. His shirttails out, cuffs turned back. Blue jeans and black loafers. Smiling at her uncertainly. “You look nice,” he said. “Did you teach?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Nodding. Checking his watch. “Have you eaten?”

She locked up and they crossed the darkened street, their footsteps lost in the scuffling sounds of two boys playing basketball in the spilled light of a garage. April cool but a feeling of the coming summer too, the hardest months. He followed her in and shut the door and offered to take her jacket but she kept it despite the warmth of the room. The air was densely spiced with the roast he’d been cooking for much of the day. He did something with computers and could work from home.

He turned down the music, an opera, and stepped into the large open kitchen and picked up the bottle. “Italian,” he said. “Insanely good.” He poured her a glass and she came to the bright plum color of it and sat in one of the high bar chairs and watched him lifting lids, stirring the steam, giving names to the smells. One thing he’d learned was food. Another was wine, though he wasn’t a bore about it. His hair was gray but had not thinned and there was the cowlick at the front, a springy disobeying forelock he wore long, like something from his youth he couldn’t give up, like something which served him still.

He stirred and spiced and tasted, talking all the while. It might’ve been a summer night with the children chasing fireflies over the back lawn, the dog, a little terrier, yapping in dismay.

Both boys in college now and the terrier, like Pepé, buried under a tree.

“Don’t you like it?”

“Hmm?”

He indicated her glass.

“Oh. No, it’s lovely.” She raised it for a sip.

He had good manners and would not ask after her family nor talk about his boys. He talked about his house and the improvements he would like to make this summer and the Chinese elms he was thinking about planting.

“Do you know a good realtor?” Angela said.

He stopped stirring to look at her. “A realtor?”

“Yes.”

He stood there. The thick, wet blurpings of the sauce. He turned back and began stirring again, but absently.

“I’ve done some work for a couple of them,” he said. “People speak very highly of Leslie Brown. I’ll give you her info.”

“Thank you.”

He checked the roast and lowered the flames under the pots and they took their glasses to the living room. She had always admired Caroline’s taste, and she let herself sink into the deep sofa, fabric the color and fineness of a wheat field in a painting. There had been a time, a very long time, when she could not admire, could not even notice; pleasure lay at the bottom of the sea. She toed the sneakers from her feet and put her head back. Robert joined her on the sofa, crossing an ankle over his knee. On the mantel were the same pictures in their silver frames: Peter and James growing up and grown. He and Caroline much younger. The dog alive. Everybody happy.

The male tenor began to sing, the notes rich and pure.

Robert sipped his wine and held the glass to the light.

“I saw him today,” he said.

“Saw who?” She rolled her head on the sofa back. She was tired. It took her a minute.

“Oh,” she said, and sat up a little. “Where?”

“At the gym. My gym. He has joined, apparently.”

“Oh.” She didn’t know what to say.

“I was just coming out of the steam room and he was just coming in. Five minutes earlier and there we would have been. Like Romans.”

“I’m so sorry, Robert.” She touched his forearm.

“Ah, shit—that’s life, right? You run into the man your wife prefers to sleep with. One day we’ll go for a beer, he and I. Watch a bit of the game. He’ll turn out to be a pretty good egg. Life goes on. Isn’t that the idea?”

“No,” she said. “That’s not the idea.”

He looked at her and his face changed. He uncrossed his leg and turned to her. “I’m sorry, Angela. I’m an idiot. I—”

She shook her head, “No, I didn’t mean that. I was only saying . . . I was only saying I’m sorry, that you had to go through that today.”

“It’s nothing. Christ. It’s so trivial.”

“It’s not nothing,” she said.

He glanced at the mantel and then looked down. He seemed to be studying the sofa, the square of cushion plumped and risen between them like bread.

Outside, in the window, trees reared in a wave of sweeping light, appeared to pirouette, lapsed again into darkness. A man said gently: “Come on, we haven’t got all night.” There was the jingle of shaken tags.

She reached to touch the fallen forelock. Training it back, hopelessly. He looked up. His entire story in those eyes. Story of the world.

“Can we just be quiet for a while?” she said. “Can we just sit here and listen to the music?”