Descent (5 page)

6

Angela walked.

She walked and her mouth was dry and there was the supermarket sign across the street like a bloodstain in the gray, side-blown rain. The trees were lashing themselves. The umbrella filled with wind and lifted, brute and purposeful. When the little walking figure lit up she stepped into the crosswalk and a man said
Shit
and she stopped just short of the collision—bike and bicyclist skidding by quarter-wise to the road, tires locked, rainwater fanning, a wet grimace of face under the helmet and then the wheels unlocking and the bike righting and the man glancing over his shoulder not to see if she was all right but to tender his disbelief, his fury, before facing forward again and pedaling on through the rain.

She crossed the road, crossed the parking lot, and the glass door swung open and she stepped into the supermarket’s vast fluorescence, thinking of the winter day she’d first seen him on that bike, that three-speed from another century, himself an unlikely figure in army surplus trench coat and canvas haversack, like some courier of the tundra.
Grant Courtland,
someone told her. Pulling up next to her another day at a crosswalk and turning to her and waiting for her to look. Waiting. And when she looked at last she saw first the redness of his face, the bright blooms of cold on his cheeks, blooms of some essential enthusiasm, and next the eyes, stung-wet and very blue, and lastly the lips as he smiled and said,
You look nice today.
And rode on.

In her apartment over the Polish bakery he would read to her, fragments of which she could still recite:
Homeless near a thousand homes I stood,
and
O! speak again, bright angel-a
, and
I’ll example you with thievery.
Years later he couldn’t believe she remembered the lines when he himself did not.

Such days, such nights. Such heat in the dead of winter! How could it ever end?

Th
e sun’s a thief. . . .
Th
e sea’s a thief.

Can you recite too what the father said that day?
said Faith.

Yes:
God does not ask His children to bear that which they cannot.

Right.

But neither does He permit them to not bear it. Therefore He asks His children to bear the unbearable.

He knows you have strength you don’t know you have.

“Excuse me.” A woman was reaching past her for a bottle of water. Angela said, “I’m sorry,” and moved aside.

Angela stared at the bottles. So many choices. She selected one and studied its list of ingredients: water. A little boy of perhaps five was standing beside her. She looked down at him and he looked up. Brimming blue eyes and teartracks on his cheeks.

“Where’s your mother?”

He shook his head.

Angela looked around.

“All right. Don’t worry. Come on.” She turned and walked and the boy followed. After a moment he took hold of her skirt. As they passed the long produce bin the indoor thunder sounded and a fine mist fell from unseen jets, dewing up the bright tomatoes, the perfect heads of lettuce.
Th
e thunder is to warn you,
Sean said, ten years old,
so you don’t get sprayed.
Caitlin said,
Oh, really?
and stepped forward with her summer arms.

“Bradley!”
came the cry. A quick breathy commotion bearing down from behind. “Where are you going?” Wild, puffy eyes and all the goods her arms could carry as she groped for the boy’s hand. “Where are you going with
my son?”

“Nowhere,” Angela said. “We were going up front to—”

“You just walk off with someone’s child in a grocery store?”

Angela looked at the woman. Then she looked at the boy, his face buried now in the woman’s thighs.

“He looked like a very nice boy,” Angela said, and the woman’s mouth convulsed mutely. She dropped a bag of cornchips and let it lie there so that she might palm the boy’s head and lead him away.

Angela paid for her water and walked outside. Still raining, though the wind had moved on. The little trees of the parking lot seemed to be collecting themselves, checking for damage. Under a concrete shelter sat a number of iron tables with a number of people using them: supermarket employees on smoke break, businesswomen stabbing at salads. Was it lunchtime already? One old man writing in his notebook. She stood across from the old man and asked if she could sit down and he looked up over thick plastic frames, one eye pinched nearly shut and the other a clouded blue marble. He said, “By all means,” and she sat down and opened her bottle and drank from it, watching the rain.

She looked at the old man again. Bent over his notebook with what looked like no pencil at all in the twisted and swollen fingers. Heavy brown overcoat and a tweed cap finger-darkened at the brim by a lifetime of donnings and doffings. A wooden cane was hooked on the table edge, thinner at its topmost curve as if by heavy sanding. She looked at his hands again and saw the tiny pen.

“What kind of pen is that?”

He held it up. It resembled an elongated black suppository.

“That’s a space pen,” he told her.

“A space pen.”

“It’s the pen they use in outer space.”

The pen itself pointed to where that was.

“It’s antigravitational, is why,” he said.

“What does that mean? It defies gravity?”

“It doesn’t, the ink does. You can write upside down. You can write on the moon.”

He gave her a last good look at the pen and resumed his writing.

Angela drank from her bottle. The rain fell steadily on the parked cars. Women in sneakers made a run for it, water spinning from the cart wheels.

“Do you mind if I ask what you’re writing with such a pen?”

The old man hesitated. He didn’t look up.

“I’m writing notes. For my grandson.”

“Where does he live?”

“He doesn’t. He’s dead.”

“Oh. I’m sorry . . .”

“He died serving this country.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well,” said the old man.

Angela was silent. Then she said again that she was sorry, and the old man scratched at the tip of his nose. He stirred a finger in the white hair of his ear. “I figure I’ll go on writing him like before. He’s got a wife and a little boy and I figure that’s why I’m still here, so I can tell him how they’re doing. I know how crazy that sounds.”

Angela shook her head. “No,” she said.

He wrote for a while and then he put down the pen and took his writing hand in the other and rubbed at the knuckles. He looked over his shoulder at the rain as though it had been hounding him all his life. He said: “An old aunt of mine told me one time, Simon, if you knew what growin’ old was you wouldn’t be in no rush to get there. I didn’t know what to make of that at the time.”

She waited. “And now?”

“How’s that?”

“What about now?”

“Now?” He looked at her, somehow keenly for all his eye trouble. “Now I wonder why a man lives so long he doesn’t even know the world he’s in anymore.”

“Granddad?”

A woman came up behind him, a little boy in tow. Same woman, same little boy. The woman didn’t seem to believe what she was seeing.

Angela smiled at the old man. “Thank you for letting me sit with you.”

The old man touched the tweed cap and got slowly to his feet. The little boy handed him his cane. “The pleasure was mine, young lady.”

7

A
t midmorning Grant helped
the old Labrador into the cab, then drove the three miles through the foothills to the cafe for his coffee and eggs and the Denver paper. Other such Saturdays, when he would return to the truck an hour, sometimes two hours later, the dog would be asleep on the bench seat, having been asleep the entire time, but on this morning, when
he returned after only thirty minutes, the dog lifted her head and watched him glassily, as if puzzled in her dog brain to see him back so soon. He got in and said nothing, and did not scratch her ears, nor turn on the radio, and as he drove back through the hills she cast baleful looks at him until at last without looking he said, “She wasn’t there. So what?”

By the time he pulled into the long gravel drive he’d not been gone an hour, but it was the hour in which the black car returned.

Billy.

He brought the truck to a stop and sat staring at the car across the front pasture. Bright, glossy black and parked at a careless angle next to the old man’s blue Ford at the side of the house. The two bay mares grazed the fence line near the county road, as far from the house and the black car as they could be. The dog sat watching him, quietly panting.

“Not a thing to do about it,” he said finally, and drove on toward the house. He parked beside the El Camino and stepped out of the truck and the dog spilled out behind him and limped around the corner of the house and disappeared.

He lit a cigarette.

Heat rose from the black hood. In the cab a litter of coffee cups and burger bags and crushed Marlboro packs. In the bed nothing but a flat tire and a tire iron, flung there, from the look of them, in a moment of disgust.

Grant walked around the side of the house and onto the dirt cul-de-sac with its grassy island and the blue spruce at its center, and as he came around the spruce he saw the aluminum ladder leaning against the eaves of the old ranch house, the old man up on the pitched tin roof in a blaze of reflected sunlight, on his knees, clinging one-handed to the brick
chimney.

“Shit,” Grant said. He stepped on his cigarette and went to the foot of the ladder. “I see you couldn’t wait for me.”

Emmet shifted for a look down, his lenses flaring. “—How’s that?”

“I said I see you couldn’t wait for me.”

The old man turned back to his work. “Did wait, by God. Waited all morning while this roof got preheated.”

“I’m coming up now.”

“Bring some Crisco with you.”

“Some what?”

“Crisco. You can’t fry your ass without Crisco.” He frowned under the brim of his straw cowboy hat. You could make him smile with a joke, but when he made one himself he frowned. Beneath his coveralls he wore only a sleeveless undershirt, baring the white knobs of his shoulders to the sun. His red windbreaker lay on the ground below like a fallen helper.

Grant climbed the ladder and stood watching the old man scour the base of the chimney with a wire brush. “You might’ve got your boy to spot you on the ladder at least,” he said, and Emmet glanced across the sky to the other house, then resumed his work.

“He come in a little after you left and went straight to his room. Walked right by me like a ghost.” The back of the old man’s neck was a dark leather chamois, red in its seams. Thick smile of scar running under the jaw where part of the throat had been removed, the scar a bright crimson in the sun. Grant thought to say something more about Emmet’s son but then remembered his own son, gone one morning without good-bye, without even a note. Half a year ago now. More. Taking Grant’s blue Chevy for good measure. Could’ve called the cops. Still could.

“You think that’s clean enough for fresh jack?” Emmet leaned away from the chimney and Grant looked for the place to grab him if he slipped.

“I think that’ll do.” A five-gallon bucket hung from the top of the ladder and inside was a bristle brush, a small spade trowel, and two fresh tubes of roofing cement. When Emmet was finished with the bristle brush, he took the caulking gun from Grant and began to squeeze the black cement into the deep crack where the flashing had split and pulled away from the brick.

“She’s thirsty up here,” said Emmet.

“Is she?”

“Like a tick on a tumbleweed.” He emptied both tubes and took the little spade trowel and began to work the cement like black icing. After a while he wiped his brow with his forearm and said: “How’s that look to you, contractor man?”

“Like I did it myself. Better.”

“Like hell. You’d of tore out half this roof and put new flashing on.”

“This will do for now.”

“That’s all I’m asking. The next man after me can do it his way.”

Back on the ground Grant stowed the ladder and they went up on the porch for the shade and looked out at the sky as if to watch for the storm that would now come along and test their work. But the sky was clear and the old man’s joints told him there’d be no rain today nor any day soon. The dog lay under the porch in the dark with her chin on her paws, listening.

“Come up to the house for lunch,” Emmet said. “I got coldcuts, and we could fry us some bacon, and not that goddam fake bacon neither.”

Emmet’s house sat stark and handsome in the sun. From the outside it appeared to be a large two-story log cabin cut from the very pines that marched down the hills to surround the ranch’s meadows and pastures, when in fact it had arrived in sections on the back of an eighteen-wheeler ten years before, and the men who brought it had put it together in two days and the walls inside were as smooth and white as any art gallery’s. Emmet had done it for Alice, his wife, but she got to enjoy the house for less than a year before she died, all of a sudden in the night, from a clot in her brain. Guess what you can count on, said the old man: nothing.

Grant put his weight on a sprung board in the porch floor and said he had half of a leftover steak he’d better eat. “Split it with you, if you like.”

“Don’t feel like steak today. Don’t feel like coldcuts neither but I gotta eat something so I can take my goddam pill. Which reminds me.” He peered at his wrist and began to rub at a smear of black. “I put a few of my prescriptions in there, in your cupboard. Behind your Cheerios. They’re ones I don’t take too often but they cost a damn fortune. If you wanna put them someplace else that’s fine by me, I’ll just ask you when I need them.”

“All right.”

The old man took one step down and stopped and looked off. He stroked craftily at his throat and said: “You see that waitress this morning at the cafe?”

“Which waitress?” Grant said.

“Which waitress, he says.” He took the remaining two steps to the dirt and bent for his red jacket and spanked the dirt from it and fed his arms into the sleeves. He sunk a hand in one pocket and said, “The hell? Oh, that,” and he stepped back to the stairs and reached a fist up to Grant. “You might as well take these too. For the time being.” Grant put out his hand and Emmet spilled the shotgun shells into his palm like candies. The old man zipped his jacket up to his jaw and tugged his hatbrim down and began to make his way across the clearing, hunch-shouldered and small-looking, as if the storm had come after all.