Descent (6 page)

8

The bus rolled to
its hissing stop
and the door swept open and Angela climbed up into a smell she loved. You couldn’t define it but it was a smell all buses had and it was the smell of childhood. The school bus, yes, but her father had been a driver for the city and he would tip his cap when they came aboard,
Good afternoon, ladies,
and they would drop their quarters coolly—
Good afternoon—
and go down the swaying aisle in their summer shifts, their sunglasses, bikini strings playing at their napes, and they would sit where they could watch him, the way he turned the great wheel like a ship captain, swinging their hearts through space when he took the corners, the cordial way he had with every kind of person who stepped on board—and then coming to their stop and tipping his cap again, and these two girls, these identical sun-browned girls kissing him on the cheek, one, two, and skipping down the steps into the sunlight and not turning but feeling the following eyes, the men especially, as the bus rolled on.

Summers of secrecy and love and something else. Of hearts aching for something they could feel just beyond them, around the next wide-swinging turn surely, or the next.

An old woman sat directly behind the driver with a kind of mesh duffel in her lap and after a while a tiny head poked out of the duffel with enormous bat’s ears and round, wet eyes to look about, licking its muzzle with the smallest tongue. At the very back of the bus were three slumping teens, two boys and one girl, skinny black jeans everywhere, oblivious to all but their phones.

Angela watched her town go by. The shopping center. The university. The church where she was married. The soccer field that had been a drive-in theater in its last days when they were sixteen and dating, do you remember that?

Th
ose Meyers twins everybody thought we
must
go out with?

Identically ridiculous.

Identically boring.

Identically bonered.

Oh my God!

The bus stopped and the old woman with the tiny dog stood and went carefully down the steps. Angela watched her open up a yellow umbrella on the sidewalk, taking care to keep the dog dry. No one else got on. The door swung shut again and the driver signaled and suddenly Angela was on her feet. “Wait! Wait, please,” she called to him, “we need to get off.”

The teenagers, the driver—everyone—watching her make her way, just her, down the aisle.

THE OLD WOMAN TOOK
the path that led to the old section of the cemetery, her umbrella climbing a far hill like a cartoon sun amid the dripping trees, the wet ancient stones, and Angela took the path to the newer section, with its smaller trees and its modern stone benches. She’d not been here for so long, but somehow she was calm; the markers and the grass plots and what lay beneath them did not frighten her. Perhaps it was the rain, the absence of sunshine, of birds singing. Perhaps it was the pills.

Her father was here, awaiting her mother, who lived on, half oblivious, in the nursing home. Faith was here too. And next to Faith’s plot was an island of empty grass, the turf undisturbed, unstoned. Back then there’d been plenty of empty plots, but Angela had known. She’d known. Her parents could not imagine the girls separated; they could not imagine Angela a grown woman with a husband, children of her own. You could not imagine burying your children—putting their bodies into the earth while you went on living, growing older—until you had buried one. This was what the second plot had told her.

Do you remember how freaked out you were? Like you were expected to
go too?

It wasn’t that. I thought I should go. It wasn’t fair for you to go alone.

Fair to whom?

She swept the water from the bench as best she could and sat down and
at once felt the dampness in her skirt, the deep chill of the stone. She breathed in the sodden air and blew a faint mist. The rain beat dully at her umbrella. The blood was moving thickly in her veins, dividing, seeking its separate ways.

The bench was cold and hard and the air was cold and there was the smell of leaves and earth and rain, and the umbrella spread over her like a dark canopy, and she sat very still in that sheltering space until the bench became the same stone bench where Caitlin had sat—looking at these gravestones, this pale and cold Virgin with her missing fingers like Grant’s and the brass plaque at her feet,
Right Reverend . . . Mercifully Grants, in
th
e Lord, Forty Days of Grace.

Did she pray before the shrine, her daughter? She would ask Sean—did
Caitlin pray? Did you?

What would it mean if they didn’t? What would it mean if they did?

Th
ere was a sound, a small rustling, and she saw at her feet a black beetle scrabbling over the yellow aspen leaves. It carried another beetle in its jaws, this second beetle smaller, weightless, inert with death, or perhaps the paralyzing bite.

Pray with me now, Angela.

Somehow she was alone in the woods. Grant, the sheriff, the rangers, the dog handlers, the volunteers—all had fanned out and moved on. Nobody noticed she was not with them. She picked up the walkie-talkie and looked at it: something was wrong with it, the battery was dead.

Pray now? she said. Before this shrine?

Yes
.

Is this Lourdes? Cures and miracles? Our Lady of the Missing Fingers.

Please, Angela.

Th
e bland white face like a china doll in the dusk.
Th
e clipped, bloodless fingers. Stump-Fingered Lady of Our Missing, keeping watch over the old stones. Crooked old markers of once living Americans, frontiersmen and their kin, drawn west by such scenes and dreams as their minds could conceive.
Th
ere was that documentary they’d watched about the Donner party: women, children, whole families, freezing and starving in the mountains, eating each other. Some party, said Sean, twelve years old. Caitlin said she would have done what they did: she would’ve eaten to stay alive. Grant—Grant was not there.

Th
e sun was down.
Th
e air gone autumn cold, October cold. Her breaths pluming and dispersing like a series of ghosts.

Do you remember when he came back that time, that summer, with his hand in bandages?

Yes, of course
.

How he got down on his knees at my feet? How he begged for my forgiveness?
Th
e promises he made?

Yes.

No more drinking, no more women. He wasn’t asking for forty days, he was asking for a life. A whole new life. And I gave it to him. I forgave, and I took him back, and I believed God would grace us the more for our fight, for our resilience. And now here we are. And you ask me to pray before this rock?

You did before. After that day on the lake. You didn’t stop praying then.

You didn’t leave me. You never left me!

Neither has she, Angie. Neither has Caitlin. You’ll see. But you have to fight. For her, and for God, but most of all for yourself.

What if I can’t? What if I’m broken, like these fingers?

Oh, honey,
said Faith, and said no more, for there were lights in the woods—swinging, wayward lights, like headlights knocked loose. Voices out there, calling.

Angie! Angela!

Her heart leaping wildly—Caitlin! What is it, she cried, what is it?

Th
ey were upon her, they came crashing over the fallen leaves in the dark, putting their hands on her. Grant’s face, inscrutable behind the beam of light—Angie, Christ . . . we thought we’d lost you.

9

On certain hot days
after the work was done Emmet would step onto his porch across the way with a beer and sit in one of the wooden rockers and stare out at the land. In time Grant would come over and they’d sit and talk about what the weather was bringing and what must be mowed or painted or planted or mended the next day, watching the dusk slide down. Emmet would tell Grant to smoke and Grant would say he’d get around to it but then wouldn’t because of the old man’s throat, and in silence they’d watch the stars swim up over the hills. The bats and swallows in their soundless, extravagant dances.

At this day’s end in early September Grant filled his mug and stepped outside and went down the steps, the dog rising stiffly from her place under the porch to follow. The black El Camino sat as before, as it had sat all day.

“I see you had the same idea,” Emmet said, raising his coffee.

“Seemed like a night for something warm.”

“Fall’s coming. Set down, partner.”

Grant lowered into the other rocker that had been meant for Alice
Kinney and for the remaining days of the old couple’s lives. The dog sniffed up a spot farther back on the porch, turned twice, and dropped with a huff to the boards.

Emmet had napped and shaved and there was pink in his face above the red windbreaker and he’d dragged a comb dipped in scented oil through his white hair.

“That patch looks good from here,” said Grant.

“How’s that?”

“I say that chimney patch looks good from here.”

In the west a large bird sat atop the ridge on the point of a lodgepole pine that had long ago shed its branches and pointed like a needle at the sky. This same bird found this same perch at the same hour every day, as if to maximize its own effect before the sunset, resting in silhouette until prey or some other bird impulse set it moving again. By its regularity it had become an unspoken fact of the ranch, like the hills themselves—although once, early on, Grant had commented on the bird, and the old man had grown silent and still. Then he told Grant that his wife liked to say that if she must come back to this earth and not to heaven she hoped God would let her come back as such a bird—hawk or eagle or falcon. And if she did come back as one of these, said Emmet, she hoped she would have no memory of ever having lived as a human woman. She wanted to look down from the air and know the things a bird should know and nothing of what men thought or did, but just to watch them as a bird would, from up high, no more curious and no less wary than any other creature.

They’d sat watching the bird.

Do you believe it?
Grant had said.

Believe what?

Th
at a person can come back.

Emmet had set his boot down from his knee. Sipped his beer. Raised the opposite boot to the opposite knee. At last he said he didn’t know if he believed such a thing in any religious kind of way, if that’s what Grant was getting at, but he said his wife had been the one true thing of his life and when he looked out on this land and saw that bird setting atop it that way, well. He blew as if expelling smoke from his lungs.
I believe a man is likely to surprise himself with what he believes. Don’t you?

Now the bird pushed off and beat its wings twice and rode them south along the piney ridge, and the men were quiet and the dog slept, and into the heart of that calm there came a sudden piercing sound—a high, sharp whistling that sliced through the screens and made Emmet duck in his rocker as if struck to the back of the head. They both turned and found the whistler standing in the door, in the screen, lips pursed, looking from man to man. After a moment he turned the latch and brought the shrill notes out onto the porch.

“Quit now, by God,” Emmet said.

The whistling ceased midnote and Billy stared at him. “You don’t like that tune?”

“That wasn’t no tune I know.”

“That was Hank Williams, Pops. Here, listen.” He stepped between the rockers and turned to face the men. A tall, lean young man in a black leather coat and crisp white shirt. Dark hair stashed behind his ears and a small tuft of beard clinging to the underside of his lower lip. The coat was of a sporty cut and creaked when he moved.

“No, now, stop,” Emmet said. “You are painin my ears.”

Billy stopped, one hand paused in the air, a longneck beer bottle swinging in a noose of finger and thumb. He turned to Grant: “All of a sudden he hears like a bat.”

He sat on the railing and crossed an ankle over his knee in a mirror image of his father and began to jitter a black cowboy boot as if it were something they should all watch. His eyes appeared very blue in the twilight. He set his beer on the rail and got out his cigarettes and shook one up to his lips and began to put the box away but then gestured it at Grant.

“No, thanks.”

“You quit?”

“No, just holding off a bit.”

“Ah,” said Billy. He dropped his boot down from his knee and straightened out his leg so as to snake two fingers into his jeans and said around the cigarette: “So how’s tricks, Grant? I was wondering if you were still around.”

“Still around, Billy. How’s tricks with you?”

“Holding down the old fort over there, are you?”

“Just till the landlord kicks me out.”

“Ha,” said Billy. He uncapped a silver Zippo and spun the flintwheel and lit his cigarette and shut the cap again smartly. He blew smoke in the direction of the old ranch house and said, “I hope you like it cold. A man will piss icicles of a winter morning over there. And then what happens the second he moves out? They build themselves this overheated Ramada Inn over here.” He recrossed his leg and jiggled the boot in the air. The lighter moved restlessly in his fingers, silver, then blue-violet, silver again.

“Don’t you believe it, Grant. He’s had that whole house all to himself whenever he wants. Him and his friends.”

“Used to,” said Billy.

Grant sipped his coffee.

“What is the matter with you, son?” Emmet said.

“You’re welcome to it, Billy,” Grant said. “I can make other arrangements.”

“What? Hell, I don’t want in there. I don’t want nothin to do with that place.”

Emmet shook his head and looked away. Billy drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke thinly.

“Those are good-looking boots, Billy,” Grant said.

Billy held his foot still. He aimed the pointed toe at the porch ceiling.

“I took them off a man down in Denver thought he could play nine-ball. A fool and his boots are soon—hey,” he said, looking beyond Grant, “there you are, girl. Come on over here.”

The dog lay in the shadows watching him. She looked at Grant.

“Don’t look at him, come here.” Billy pinched the cigarette in his lips and spanked his thighs and the dog rose slowly and went to him, her head low. “You don’t remember how to come when you’re called?” He took her head in his hands and shook her.

“Let up on her,” Emmet said.

“Aw, she loves it. Don’t you, Lo, don’t you, huh? We used to wrastle like goddam alligators.”

“She’s too old for that now.”

Billy stood and removed the cigarette from his lips. “Damn it, Pops. Don’t you think I know my own damn dog?”

Emmet stared at him, then looked away.

Billy picked up his beer and tipped it back, the sharp knob of his throat working until the bottle was emptied.

“All right then,” he said. “Can you loan me a few bucks, Pops?”

“What for?”

“What for. So I don’t starve. All I got is eight bucks and a check I can’t cash till Monday.”

“Why didn’t you cash it before you come up here?”

“Because I didn’t, that’s why. Now can you loan a man a couple of bucks or can’t you?”

Emmet pulled his billfold from his hip pocket and adjusted his glasses to peer inside. “All I got is a twenty.”

“That’ll do.” Billy stashed the note in his shirt pocket and looked at the dog again where she’d resettled herself on the floor next to Grant. When he stared at her the dog pinned her ears.

He began tugging at the patch of hair under his lip.

“Well, Grant,” he said. “It’s good to see you again, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“Why would I mind?”

“Why would you mind?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you—?” He looked from Grant to Emmet, and back. “Because seeing you here means that that brother of mine still hasn’t found that daughter of yours, that’s why.”

Grant looked at the young man. Held his blue eyes. The first he’d known of Billy Kinney was in the mountains, in those early days when they lived in the motel—the sheriff stopping by one day to say he’d be gone for the day, driving down to Albuquerque. Angela staring at the sheriff with eyes that held only one concern, one question, always:
What did he know?
It’s nothing, said the sheriff, I gotta go get my little brother out of jail, be back as quick as I can. It had stunned them—the first time since they’d known him that the sheriff had not seemed to be entirely theirs, devoted exclusively to their needs. They could not object, they could not blame the sheriff, but neither could they bear it, this abandonment, because within it was the message that, in time, the investigation, the manpower, the reporters, the world, would all move on.

“God damn it, Billy,” Emmet said, leaning forward in his rocker, clutching the armrest with one hand. “What in the hell is the matter with you?”

“What? Nothing’s the matter with me. What’s the matter with you? I’m just trying to be friendly here.”

“Why don’t you go be friendly somewheres else?”

“Jesus Christ, I didn’t mean nothin. He knows that. Don’t you, Grant.”

Grant sipped his coffee. “We’ll see you later, Billy.”

Billy looked from one to the other and shook his head. He flicked his cigarette into the dirt and went nimbly down the steps. A moment later the El Camino roared and a red stain of taillights spread over the dirt at the corner of the house. The tailgate came briefly into view and then lunged forward, throwing up red fans of dirt. They heard the car progressing down the drive, heard it idling at the county road, revving throatily, but there was no squealing of tires, and after a few seconds the sound of it faded away altogether.

Across the way, over the doors of the machine shed, the automated farm light had come on, lighting up a scrim of grit in the air they could taste.

“I gotta say I’m sorry for that, Grant.”

“No you don’t, Em. I got a boy too. He’s just young.”

“He ain’t that young. And I’m too old. I was already old when we had him. I wonder if that’s why.” Emmet stared into his coffee. Grant stared out at the night. A bat dove blackly into the light to snatch a moth and wheeled away again. Soundless as a thought.

“I’ll say one more thing,” said the old man. “Though I know a man ain’t supposed to say such things aloud. But if it come down to just one of these boys coming home, yours or mine? I’d of voted for yours.”