Descent (7 page)

10

The truck
, a long-bed
blue Chevy, moved down the interstate under a low moon and the fading vault of stars. No crew cab, three years old, in good shape. No bumper stickers or decals. No gun rack. It held cruise control steady at 77 mph, two miles over, all its bulbs alight and nothing out of the ordinary but the out-of-state plate. The driver was heading north and if there was another passenger or any kind of luggage or possessions in the cab with him, these were stowed out of sight. Ten miles from the upcoming town on a steep grade, the Chevy swung into the left lane to pass a flatbed hauling a tremendous black stone, a monument of some kind, and then it swung back into the right lane again, and the silver SUV that had been following did the same and bloomed with flashing lights, red and blue, red and blue, strobing soundlessly in the dark predawn.

The officer sat back there running the plates. In the truck, the boy squinted at the headlights in the rearview and pushed the mirror out of true.

Out over the desert the moon had struck a black edge of sky, the flat of a mesa, and sat flat-sided itself in a field of stars. Tossed, unknown stars; a strange heaven. With his head half out the window he looked and looked, disbelieving, almost dizzy, until at last there was Pegasus, and from there the others: Cepheus, Cassiopeia, and Andromeda, the king’s daughter, chained to her rock. Naked, forsaken, watching the sea. He was not a great student but he had learned the stars. The idea that they’d been there, in their places, long before their names, long before the first eyes saw them.

The officer, walking up, put his light on the boy’s face, and then into the passenger’s seat, lighting up a red roll of sleeping bag and a green duffel, the duffel incompletely zipped on a gray nest of tubesocks. Below the duffel on the floorboards sat a canvas carpenter’s bag with leather grips and a brass buckle fastened across the mouth. It looked full and heavy.

The officer lowered his light and stood in the frame of the window, half lit like a moon in the beams of the cruiser. Under the hatbrim he was black-eyed and smooth-faced and he wore a black shiv of mustache. His jacket bore the insignia of the sheriff’s department but he was too young to be sheriff. He asked for the boy’s license and registration. He put his light on one document and then the other and then flicked it to the boy’s face again, throwing white pain into his eyes.

“This your license, sir?” In his voice was that lilt of another land, another people, older than anything.

“Yes.”

“This says you’re seventeen.”

The boy waited.

“That correct?”

“Yes.”

“How long you been sucking on those cancer sticks?”

The boy glanced at the cigarette between his knuckles. “Sorry?”

“You the oldest seventeen I ever saw.”

The boy waited. “How come you pulled me over?”

“Failure to signal when you passed that flatbed. Who is Grant Courtland?”

“My father.”

“This his truck?”

“Yes.”

“He know you got it, way out here?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean what do I mean? Does your Wisconsin daddy know you are driving his truck in New Mexico.”

“He knows I’ve got it.”

“But he don’t know where you’re at?”

“No.”

The deputy watched him. “What did you do back there?”

“Back where?”

“Wisconsin.”

“Nothing,” said the boy.

“You did something.”

“No, sir.”

“Yes you did. You left.”

The boy kept looking at the deputy. No sound but the cruiser’s idling engine. After a minute the deputy leaned a little closer and lifted his face in a peculiar way. As if to take the boy’s scent.

“Where you coming from, bro?”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s twice you asked me that. I mean where you been
at,
before you come through here?”

“I was in California for a while.”

“California.”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“Sorry?”

“What were you in California for.”

“To see the ocean.”

The deputy stared at him. “These are some poor answers, bro.”

The boy waited.

“You steal this truck from your daddy?”

“Was it reported stolen?”

“I asked you a question.”

“No, sir. I borrowed it.”

“You borrowed it.”

“Yes, sir.”

The deputy squared himself and glanced up the highway to where the truck’s shadow on the road reached long and thin for the dark beyond. His torchbeam slashed mildly up and down as if he were testing the flashlight’s weight in his hand. He told the boy to step out of the borrowed truck and go stand behind it in the lights of the cruiser.

Dawn was coming, a creeping shade of violet in the east. The boy smoked his cigarette and dropped the butt and mashed it under his boot toe. The air smelled dryly of sage and juniper and rocks and dirt but it was a cold smell, and even without the cigarette his breath smoked white. September, he thought, early September. The seasons might be changing but they were not his seasons and he didn’t know the signs. He shuddered and tried to shake the pain out from under his kneecap. He’d slept a while at the rest stop, the sleeping bag as pillow, but then the cold and pain had got to work on him and he’d driven on.

The deputy’s black eyes appeared in the rear window of the cab, above the passenger’s seat, and were gone again. Between the highway and a far mesa ranged a field of pale grass with the dark heads of chaparral rising out of it like the humps of sea monsters. Standing there not thirty yards away was an antelope, or pronghorn. Sharp corkscrew antlers, one obsidian eye fixed on the boy. The boy stared back, his own eyes aching, and he thought of the Chinese man leaning down, widely unlidding one eye between finger and thumb and sinking his needle light into the helpless ball, smell of rubber fingers,
Hello, Sean, I’m Dr. Lee. White lights beyond the Chinese man’s needle light flooding in and then the sudden bomb of leg pain that sent all lights streaking like comets across his vision—and within the streaking lights was the car or the jeep-thing that had come out of the trees and locked its tires in the dirt, the yellow lenses of the man behind the wheel and the look on his face which was no look at all just his yellow eyes as the jeep-thing slid. And then the boy must have slept again because he woke himself talking. Answering questions when he became aware that he was answering questions. No feeling at all in his leg, as if they’d cut it off. His mother and father off to one side and another man looking down on him, big man in a sheriff’s jacket. Holding a sheriff’s hat in his hand, big serious face trying to look friendly.

Good, Sean. You’re doing just fine. Now, I need you to do something for me. It’s real important. I need you not to tell anybody else who ain’t a lawman what you just told me. Do you understand? Anybody else asks, you just tell them you don’t remember a thing. Nothin about no sunglasses, nothin about no blanket, none of that. Do you understand?

Everybody staring. Mother father Chinese man sheriff.

Can you do that for me, son?

“Step on back here,” said the deputy.

The boy came up and glanced in the window. Socks and T-shirts strewn over the unrolled sleeping bag and down on the floorboards, the canvas bag on its side with the gear tumbled out. The glove box gaping, all its junk stuffed back in as if to gag it.
Don’t say it, Dudley. Don’t say a word.

The deputy said, “What’s wrong with your leg?”

“Is that it, then?”

“You borrow those tools from your daddy too, in that grip?”

“Some. Some are mine.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

“My daddy come in the house one day to take a shit and when he comes back out to the garage his table saw is gone. Somebody borrowed it.”

“That wasn’t me.”

The deputy turned his face and spat.

“Tell you what, bro. You don’t look to me like nothin but dumb white trouble, and I don’t want none of that anywhere near my town or on this highway even. You copy?”

The boy gazed over the truck into the east where the dawn was coming. The stars and their kings and their creatures all swept away in the tide of light.

Little brother, the man with the yellow eyes called him.

“Yes, sir,” he said, “I do copy. But I need gas. I was planning on stopping for gas.”

The deputy raised his beam like a great sword. “There’s a Shell station fifteen miles up the road, exit 151,” he said. “They got all kinds of gas there.”

11

F
ebruary. The days dull and leaden and cold. Sitting at the dining room table head bowed to his homework when she came down the stairs and hushed by in slippers and housecoat stirring the air with her sleep-smell on her way to the kitchen. Watching her pour water from the filtered pitcher and stand at the sink holding the glass to her chest, staring out.

An hour after school, an hour before dark.

Do you want to go somewhere? he said. Pen stilled and denting his finger in a dull bite.

She turned as if surprised. Her hair a lifeless drapery. Eyes backed into shadow.

We could go to the store, he said.

No, sweetie. Parts of a smile came to her face and she turned back to the window. Do you need money? she said, lifting the water, sipping.

He shook his head. She held the glass to her chest.

It’s still there, she said, more to herself than to him.

Th
e twenty-seventh of February, this was. Two days after her nineteenth birthday.
Th
e two of them had been back in the house for three months. His father was in Colorado, in the same motel room where he and the boy had lived.

Th
e boy got into his jacket and his crutches and went out the back door and over the icy pavers to the metal building and unlocked the door and stood a minute at the threshold staring at his father’s desk, his breath mushrooming into the trapped cold.
Th
e woman in her skirt. Her bare legs. Getting up to smile, shake his hand. A client, his father said.

When he emerged from the metal building he seemed to move along on strange implements: elaborate clattering fusions of crutch and shovel and yard rake. In this way he came around to the front of the house and to the curb and he swung down into the street under the black arms of the sycamore where he and Caitlin used to climb and he looked back.
Th
e window was empty.

It was a red squirrel, spread-eagled as if to embrace the road, the world, preserved by cold, skull crushed.
Th
e county said they’d come but they didn’t.

He stood in his crutches looking at it. Why didn’t you stay in your nest, stupid?

He set the rake tines over the body and the square-point shovel behind the plush, riffling tail—but some clinginess would not let him rake the body into the shovel and instead he had to work the blade spatula-wise under the tail and under the little hind feet and along under the belly and finally the head, prizing that up with a small ripping sound. He took the rake and crutches in one hand and bent on his good leg and lifted the weighted shovel and held it level while he got the black bag open, and then he spooned the shovel carefully in and tilted until the stiff body dove splashing down into darkness. He bread-spun the bag and put a knot in it and got on his crutches again and looked back and the window was empty.

What could he tell her that would help her?

What did he know?

He knew everything up until the moment he was hit, was in the air, was watching himself in the air, as if he would not participate in such a thing, was struck again, and there was nothing to know but the brilliant new pain of brokenness.

As for the rest.

It rolled on despite him, without him.
Th
ings he shouldn’t know, couldn’t know, but that were no less true for that. As if something more than his knee had been changed in that slamming instant. As in the comic books he once loved: the ordinary made fantastic by fluke cataclysm, by the weird laws of accident.

It felt like shame. Like crouching outside the basement window listening. You couldn’t say what you knew without saying how you knew it: I crouched. I listened.

And who would believe him, anyway? Not even himself. Least of all himself.

What happened up there, Sean?

Only what I’ve told you. Only what I’ve told you.

12

She took the turn and he didn’t call out to stop her and she ran on down the unpaved road, forty, sixty yards before looking back, and then running backward a few strides and then stopping and running in place, hands on hips—and she’d taken two steps back toward the road when he came laboring out of the shadows, heaped over the handlebars, and he didn’t call out and she turned and ran on and did not look back again.

Th
e light grew thinner here.
Th
e forest lusher and wilder the higher they climbed. As if they were entering a peculiar kind of wildness that thrived on altitude and lack of oxygen. It must have occurred to her to wonder what purpose such a road served and where it might lead.
Th
e instant before she stepped on it a lizard the size of a man’s finger twitched from the red silt and slashed away into weeds.

Afterward, she would believe she’d known it was coming. She would believe she’d seen and not seen something back in the trees. Heard the low breath of it, or smelled it, or merely sensed it back in there, just out of view. Or maybe it was only that it seemed, later, like the sort of thing that would have to happen on such a road, in such woods. In any case it came, monstering through the trees at an incredible speed, crushing deadfall, the whip and scream of branches dragged on sheet metal and then the suddenly unobstructed roar that made her wrap her head in her arms, the sound of tires locking and skidding and the thing slamming into what sounded like the sad tin post of a stop sign and then the meaty whump and the woof of air which was in fact the boy’s airborne body coming to a stop against the trunk of a tree.

A haze like atomized blood rolled uphill and beyond it sat the car—or truck or jeep-thing—come to rest perfectly broadside to the road like a barricade. Completely still and soundless.

Sean was not in the pink haze of dust. Was not on the road anywhere. She saw the bike, the incongruent orange of it far back in the green and she knew the boy was there too because of course he would be where the bike was. But then something moved in the foreground and it was an arm, lifting as if in lazy hello from the scrub growth at the base of the tree, and she went to him with a barb of irritation in her heart—you are ruining my run—and then she said, Oh, shit, and dropped to her knees beside him, the pink haze all around her like the tinted air of dream. When she saw his leg her heart slid coldly.
Th
e purple balloon of knee and the lower leg folded at some exceptional angle.

Shit, she said, shit.

But no blood that she could see, no flowing blood anywhere for her to stanch with her hands or tie off with her top. He began to lift his arm again and she said Don’t. Don’t move. Lie still. Did you hear what I said?
Th
ere was a stink in the weeds, as of some animal marking territory.
Th
en she looked at him again and the stain she thought was sweat in his shorts had spread and was spreading and she placed her hand on his shoulder and said, Oh, Dudley.

Don’t, he said, and she withdrew her hand.

Sean? Can you hear me?

His eyes were hard shut. A claw mark on his face had begun to weep scarlet beads.
Th
e helmet strap was sunk in the fold of his chin.
Th
e helmet was on his head. It seemed to nod.

Don’t do that, she said. Don’t move your head. Don’t move anything, okay? She laid her hand on his shoulder again and with her other hand she unzipped and rooted inside the pack until she felt her phone.
Th
e feel of this small familiar thing, undamaged, poured relief into her heart. Just relax, she told him. You’re gonna be fine, and she thumbed the keypad and she watched the little window for the signal.

It won’t work, said a voice behind her, and she gave a small hop and a cry, there on her knees, like a crow.

He stood just behind her. Having arrived without sound. Inhumanly large, in that first view. Rubbing his neck one-handed like a man who’d been working long hours and had taken a break to come check on them, this girl and this boy by the side of the road.
Th
e movement of his hand on his neck made a fleshy, intimate sound, and part of her mind dwelt on that. On the fact that she could hear it so clearly.

Th
ere’s no reception up here, he said.
Th
ere never is. He raised his other hand and showed her a small black phone, as if this were proof.

She peered at her phone. She redialed and watched the screen and watched the man at the same time.

I came out on the road and there he was, he said. Right in front of me like a deer. I didn’t believe it. A kid on a bike, up here. Son of a gun. What are the odds?

He took a step and dropped to his haunches all in one motion, and this new position—or the sudden, easy way he achieved it—changed him from an upright giant to a man with a much lower center of gravity, one for whom squatting was perhaps the more natural position, like an ape. He sat studying the boy through yellow lenses.

How you doing, little brother? he said, and she nearly said, Don’t talk to him. He smelled of pinesap and gasoline and sweat, and his existence took something away from her. After a moment of only feeling this, she knew what it was: it was her sense of herself as the eldest.
Th
e strongest.
Th
e one in charge.

And yet . . . he might be an expert on injury, on proper mountain procedure. It was his outfit: the pressed and tucked-in khaki shirt, the glossy black belt, the new-looking blue jeans and good hiking boots and the clean tan baseball cap. She looked more closely at the belt for gadgets and pouches, at the shirt and cap for insignia. She looked beyond him at the car or jeep-thing blocking the road but nowhere found any sign to tell her not to watch him, not to be ready.

You got knocked pretty good, didn’t you, little brother?

Th
e boy didn’t move. His eyes were shut.
Th
e inflamed red of the scrape on his cheek had spread to his entire face and neck. It was the color he turned when he was very angry or embarrassed.

I think he’s out, said the man.

Sean, said Caitlin. Sean, open your eyes.

Th
e man said, Let him sleep. His body needs it.

She gave the boy’s shoulder the smallest shake. Sean, open your eyes.

I wouldn’t do that, said the man.

He’s my brother, she said flatly, without looking at the man.

All the same, he said. He squat-walked one step forward and from there reached and pressed two fingers into the flesh of the boy’s throat.

His heart’s going like crazy, he said. After his hand was back out of view it occurred to her that he wore a gold ring. He’s just traumatized, said the married man. Help me get him into the truck.

No, she blurted, don’t touch him.

Okay, he said, okay.

His neck could be injured. She turned to him. Do you have a blanket or something?

A blanket?

Something we can cover him with? In case of shock?

Shock? It seemed a new word to him. He didn’t move.
Th
en he said: I’ll go look.

When he was gone she tightened her grip on the boy’s shoulder and pressed her free thumb to the keypad again. Come on, God damn you. She shook the thing. She held it at arm’s length in every direction. She raised it high over her head.

Go, said the boy.

What? Sean, what did you say?

A door slammed and the man’s boots came gritting back toward her. How had she not heard that, his boots in the dirt, earlier? He carried a thick square of cloth, military in color, and when he snapped it from its folds it released a rich kind of animal smell. He floated it down and got into his monkey-squat again to help her tuck it around the boy.

Wait. She peeled back the blanket and reached into the pack again and found the boy’s phone and brought it out and pressed it into his palm.
Th
e fingers closed slowly around it like a dying spider. Sean? she said. Nothing. His eyelids were shut but not at rest, the delicate skin busy with minute twitchings. As if he were a small boy again and she were watching him, waiting for him to talk in his sleep (so she could tell them at breakfast, them trying not to laugh and the boy burning red).

Th
e man stood behind her, a little to the left, and after a moment Caitlin pushed up from the dirt and began to brush fine pebbles and grit from her knees. She continued brushing after there was nothing but the red impressions in
her skin.

Okay, said the man. We best get going.

She turned to him. She was a tall girl, five eight, most of it legs, and in his boots he stood no taller.

I’ll drive you on down to where your phone works, he said. Drive you to your folks, if you want. Or the sheriff. Whatever you want.

And what? she said. Leave him?

He’ll be all right here. Nothing will touch him.
Th
e man hung his hands on his belt by the thumbs and gave her a kind of smile. Don’t be afraid, he said, and until that moment she hadn’t been.

I’m not afraid, she said. It just doesn’t make sense. You can drive down until you get reception. Call 911, tell them where we are.

He stood looking at her with the yellow lenses. Maybe you misunderstood me, he said. I’m offering to take you down where you can make a phone call. Heck, I’ll drop you in front of the sheriff’s office if that’s what you want. But if you send me down there alone, well.
Th
at’s likely to be the end of it, far as I’m concerned.

Her face, she believed, was a perfect blank. She stopped herself from lifting her phone again. When she spoke, her words sounded to her like stones dropped into sand.

What’s that supposed to mean?

It’s supposed to mean that I hit this kid with my vehicle and I may not feel like getting sued by his daddy.

She crossed her arms and uncrossed them.

You’d really be in trouble then. If you left, she said.

No, he said. I’d just be more careful.

I’ve seen you. I’ve seen your car.

Miss, do you have any idea where you are?

She stared into the yellow lenses. What kind of a woman was waiting for this man? Slept in his bed?

Fine, go. Go down the mountain and go to hell you white piece of shit, we don’t need you.

Please, she said aloud. Please.

Th
e man sighed. Look, he said. Here’s the situation. Stay here with little brother and roll the dice on me making a phone call, and maybe he goes into shock and dies in front of your eyes, okay? Or, after I’m gone, try and run down to where you can make a call yourself. You could ride that bike, but I doubt it, from the looks of it. Or come with me and be down within range in ten minutes. I’ll let you out the second you have a signal, that’s what you want, and the sheriff or daddy can grab you on the way up. Now that’s the deal on the table, miss, you can take it or leave it but you need to decide quicklike. He began patting his
pockets—jeans, khaki shirt—looking for cigarettes or keys or some other misplaced thing. Have yourself a minute to think while I get this vehicle straightened out.

He walked away and she looked up the road and then down the road. Treetops swooning in a high wind. Sunlight spilling bough to bough to reach a random spot on the forest floor. Or not random at all, she thought, but the same boughs, the same spots of floor, day after day, the sun on its fixed course and every bough fixed in its place and nothing random about it but the eyes seeing it from this particular vantage at this particular hour of the day. She saw the face of the Virgin, and the memory of that place—the white aspens, the hard chill of the bench, the smell of chocolate and the sound of his desperate chewing—took hold of her like a memory of girlhood and left her heartsick.

She knelt and touched his shoulder again.

Sean, I have to go. I have to go down where I can get a signal, and then I’ll be right back, with Mom and Dad. With an ambulance.
Th
en we’ll all go back down together. Okay? All you have to do is lie here and I’ll be right back, I promise.

She began to rise, and stopped. He’d said something.

What? she said. Sean?

Don’t, he said.

Don’t what?

Don’t go.

You want me to stay?

No.

What do you want me to do?

His slack, red face. Nothing in his eyelids but the tremblings of dream.

He said something else, hoarsely, weakly, and she leaned closer. What? she said, nearly as weakly, and held her breath, watching his lips.