Текст книги "Descent"

Автор книги: Tim Johnston

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

27

They rode the storm eastward and by the time they reached the outskirts of Omaha it was dark and the ice had grown thick at the edges of the windshield where the wipers and heat fought it back, and when the Chevy’s tires strayed from the tracks in the whitened road, rails of slush crushed beneath them with a wet, explosive sound.

They came into more lanes and more traffic. A semi plowed by casting a filthy wave over the windshield, and through the wash of it they saw a pair of taillights ahead but in a strange place and at a strange tilt. A little farther on they saw the tire tracks cross suddenly before them, twining in helices before trailing away into the median, and then they saw the black SUV down there and the blue glow of the phone inside and the man’s lips moving calmly as if he were only continuing the conversation he’d been having before he spun off the highway.

“All that rig and there you sit in the median,” said Reed Lester.

“We could be next,” said the boy.

“I doubt that.”

“Four-wheel drive isn’t any good on ice and I haven’t got any weight in the back.”

“You want me to get on back there, boss?”

The boy looked over. “Would you mind?”

“Hell, no. Just pull over a second.”

“I thought you might just go on out your window.”

“I could. But if I fall, then where will you be?”

The boy watched the road. The red starbursts of taillights. The bleary lit signs of gas stations and motels drifting by.

“Maybe we ought to just pull over someplace and see what happens with this,” said his passenger.

“You said you were just going to the other side of town.”

“I am but it’s a big damn town and this traffic’s gonna get a whole lot worse, and I’m in no hurry. Are you?”

The boy stared out at the storm. “You know any place to go?”

They left the highway and drove along a business strip of car lots and liquor stores and many dark, derelict buildings. In the midst of it sat a small restaurant of boxcar shape with neon beer signs burning in its windows and a radiant sign in the shape of a palm tree declaring its name which was the Paradise Lounge.

“You like burgers?” Reed Lester asked.

“Sometimes.”

“This will be one of those times.”

Lester directed him to park in back and he did so, bringing the Chevy to rest in the cratered gravel lot among another dozen cars and trucks. They transferred the wet backpack from the truckbed to the cab and the boy locked the truck and followed Lester toward a red metallic door.

Inside was a noisome crowd which somehow gave the impression of having arrived out of the inclement night hours before, and all together. Faces turned to take stock of them and turned away again with no show of impression good or bad. The air smelled of seared beef and perfume and alcohol. Islandy music piping down from the ceiling and everywhere on the walls large, richly colored images of white sands and turquoise waters and brown-backed girls.

They found two stools at the bar and sat in the electric glow of tiki torches and ordered two beers from the bartender, a large yellow-haired man in a Hawaiian shirt who, in a practiced glance, saw two men weary from the road and the weather, and turned to draw their beers. Placing the pints before them he said, “You gents going to eat here or wait for a table?”

Lester looked to the boy and the boy shrugged and Lester said they’d eat there if the bartender didn’t mind.

“I don’t mind if you don’t mind.”

“Why would we mind?”

“I know I’m pretty, but most dudes come in here would rather be served by Barb or Patti.”

They rotated on their stools and took in the waitresses, one blonde, one redheaded, both in Hawaiian shirts and both older than either of them by ten years or more.

“We’ll keep an eye out for a table,” said Lester, and the man made an approving face and took a pencil from behind his ear. “So,” he said. “What do you want on those burgers?”

THEY DRANK THEIR BEERS and watched without comment the college wrestling match under way on a TV above the bar, two muscular near-naked men twining like pythons, until the channel switched unaccountably to a basketball game. In the backbar mirror the boy saw himself and Lester sitting side by side and it seemed an odd, implausible thing to see. When the bartender brought their burgers, fat and tottering on nests of fries, they both set into them gratefully, though the boy was not hungry.

The bartender indicated their glasses but only Reed Lester was ready for another.

“I don’t much follow college sports,” he said to the boy around a mouthful of beef. “You?”

“Not much.”

“What do they call them in Wisconsin, is it Buckeyes?”

“Badgers,” he said. The word flaring red on the white field of memory—her running shorts on the mountain, in the woods.

“Know what they call them here?”

He didn’t, and Reed Lester leaned and said cagily: “Cornhuskers. You believe that? Who can say that word without thinking cornholers?”

They finished the burgers and worked the fries. The bartender came to check on their glasses and rapped a knuckle on the bar. “Nothing personal against you gents, but there’s a booth opening up over there if you want it.”

They looked and Lester said, “What do you say?”

The boy glanced out the near window. The sleet was still coming down hard. Endless needles shooting through the red haze of the neon beer sign.

“I don’t mind sitting a while, but I won’t drink any more.”

“You sit and I’ll drink.”

They carried their glasses to the booth and the redhead, Patti, took their order and went away.

“How old you think she is?” said Lester.

“I don’t know. Thirty.”

“I think more like thirty-five. Still, she might be about as good as it’s gonna get in the old Paradise tonight.” As he said it the front door swung open and two young women blew in hunched and clutching each other and gathering control of their skating bootheels and laughing. “Holy fuck my hair,” one said, and they laughed again and cast their made-up eyes around the room.

Reed Lester raised an eyebrow at the boy.

The girls spied the two empty stools at the bar and hurried over and seated themselves with considerable tugging on short skirts and shifting of bottoms and tossing of hair.

“Bombed,” the boy said.

“They might not mind being bombed in a booth,” said Lester. He looked at the girls and his grin died away. “Shit.”

Two men had come across the floor to bookend the girls. Or not men but large boys in red and white football jerseys, baseball caps set backward on their skulls. Each bent toward the near girl, stiff-arming the bar in reverse images of capture. The name on the bigger boy’s jersey was Valentine. At a table across the room two other boys also sat watching, and after a minute the girls turned to look at the table, and then leaned and consulted into each other’s hair, and then they laughed and rose together from their stools and with more skirt tugging preceded the boys across the room. The smaller of the jerseyed boys snatched two chairs from an adjacent table without asking and all sat down and introductions began.

“Cornholers,” Reed Lester said.

The waitress returned to set their drinks before them and moved on again. The boy didn’t want to be there, but he wanted to be sober and so he drank his Coke while Lester drank his Jack and Coke.

“I used to watch such geniuses as these watching Mia at the bars,” said Lester.

The boy looked at him.

“My girlfriend—the Cuban? I’d see them huddling up and calling the play. Sure enough, some cornholing genius would come on over and start talking her up, like I wasn’t even there. She’d look at me like she didn’t know what the hell was going on, like what was she supposed to do, she’d just been sitting there. And she had just been sitting there, is the thing, boss. That’s all she ever did and still they came.” He swallowed half his drink and sat pondering the remains. “Well,” he said. “That’s all she did whenever I was around. But I wasn’t always around. And then, after a while, neither was she.”

“Where was she?”

“Where was she? Where was she, you ask? I asked myself the same thing. I began to get a little dark in my mind, boss, I confess it. I went by her building. I went over there just to see if I could catch her coming or going. I wanted to see her face, I wanted her to look me in the eye, that was all.” A cheerless smile crept into his lips. “Well,” he said. “You can guess where this is going. I’m standing there across the street one night and this black Caddy pulls up and sits there idling for five minutes, twenty minutes, I don’t know, until finally the dome light comes on and out she pops, smiling back at the man in the car, wiggling her fingers at him. Mia. My Mia. Jesus.”

He hunched over his drink, raised it to his lips and drank and then returned it to its wet ring on the table.

The boy wanted a cigarette. He looked in vain for a clock.

Lester watched him from under his eyebrows. “The thing is, I knew that car, boss. And I knew the old bald head that lit up when the dome light came on. It was the writer. The famous writer the college had rented for the year.”

The boy waited for the name of the writer, but Lester only lifted his glass again and swallowed and winced.

“About two nights after that first night, I see that black Caddy parked outside a certain bar, this certain local craphole where the old professors go to run their hands up the skirts of their students in the back booths. So in I walk and there they are. Having the conversation of their lives. Just about knocking their goddam heads over the table and him with his old claw on her wrist and the next thing I know I’m walking on back there. I’m walking back there and they both look up and at the sight of me Mia’s smile falls away, just falls away.”

He stared into some remote place, some sector of vision beyond the boy’s right shoulder, turning his glass slowly in his hands.

“I stand at the booth and the great writer looks at me. With his bald head and his goatee. He looks at Mia, and he looks at me again and he says: ‘The jealous boyfriend, I presume?’ And I look at him and I say, ‘It’s an honor to meet you, sir, I’m a great admirer of your work,’ and he nods and says, ‘That’s very kind,’ and I say, ‘How do you like fucking my girlfriend?’ ”

Lester lifted his drink, sipped at it, set it down.

“Mia says something but I don’t hear it. It’s just me and the writer now, and we’re just staring at each other. ‘Young man,’ he says finally, very quiet. Very serene. And I remember every word, boss. ‘Young man,’ he says, ‘I can only assume by such a comment that you have made the assumption, based perhaps on my age, perhaps on my demeanor, perhaps on God knows what, that I will not stand up from this booth and knock you on your insolent ass. That is a poor assumption. On the other hand, it is absolutely true that I would prefer to stay seated as I am. Why don’t you sit down and allow me to buy you a drink?’ To which I replied: ‘I read one of your books once, you old cocksucker, and I would sooner have another one force-fed up my ass than have to read it.’

“Well,” said Lester. “The great writer turned to Mia and excused himself, as if he was going to the head, and he got out of the booth and turned and took this funny, old-school jab at my gut, but he caught me on the wrist and I heard some of his bones go and before he got his hand up I came around with the left and sat him back down in the booth with the blood pouring from his nose, just gushing from it, all over his nice shirt and his sport coat and all over Mia’s hands when she came around and tried to sop it up with cocktail napkins. Jesus, she looked like a nurse trying to stop a gut wound with those little goddam napkins.”

He lifted his glass for the watery dregs.

The boy looked away, his eyes drawn to the electric tiki torches at the bar. An erratic simulated guttering that, when watched, was not erratic at all but cyclical and predictable.

“So then what,” he said, turning back.

“Then what what.”

“What happened?”

Lester regarded him dully. “I’m sitting here with you, aren’t I?” He tipped his empty glass and crushed some ice in his backteeth. “I got hauled up before the dean, and do you know what he says? Says I can get the hell offa his campus by five p.m. or go directly to jail, my choice. I told him I didn’t take the first swing and he says that’s not what the great writer says, and I said that that bar was full of witnesses and he says that’s not what a single one of them says. I said there’s one who didn’t say that and the dean says which one is that and I say Mia, the girl who was sitting there through the whole thing. And he shook his head at me, the dean, and said, son, there was no girl sitting there.”

The boy got up to have a smoke. He walked past the bathrooms and he saw the pay phone he hadn’t seen coming in, and he thought about the time of night and he thought about the last time he’d called—a few days after she’d gotten out of the hospital, and although she was upbeat, although she said she was happy to hear his voice, all he could hear in hers was that place: the hall walkers, the mutterers, the TV gazers, the weeping, the forgotten, the broken.

He stepped through the metal door and into the cold and sleeting night.

A man stood smoking under the yellow light, his back to the wall, one leg cocked and the heel of his cowboy boot set to the bricks. The sleet blew over the scant eve and fell at an angle to a place just a few inches in front of the toe of his other boot. He touched the bill of his cap and said, “It ain’t much but it’s dry.”

The boy put up his collar and got a cigarette in his lips and the man produced a lighter and lit him.

“Pretty night,” said the man. His face was deeply lined, the stubble on his jaw half gone to silver, his eyes in shadow under the cap bill. “You all got far to go?”

“Not too far.”

“That’s good. I believe this will turn to snow, and snow on top of ice, that’s about as fun as it gets.”

The boy nodded. He smoked. “You going far?”

“Not as far as I come. But it’s those last miles, ain’t it? Especially when you got something worth getting to.” He turned and caught the boy’s eye and the boy half smiled and looked away.

The man gestured at the trucks in the lot. “I’m guessing that one there. That Chevy.”

“Sorry?” said the boy.

“I’m saying that’s your Chevy there, the blue one.”

The boy stared blankly at the truck. He could see the man watching him in the corner of his eye. “What makes you say that?”

“Well. From the look on your face when you stepped out here I took you for a man who has not had the pleasure of this particular smoker’s lounge before. And I see them Wisconsin plates. And I see what looks like a fair amount of gear in the cab there, like a man on the road.”

The boy drew on his cigarette. “Which one’s yours?” He was scanning the lot for an off-duty cruiser, or a detective’s car.

“Black Ford over there with the topper,” said the man.

The boy looked. In the rear window of the topper was an American flag decal and on the bumper below was a sticker with the words SMITH &

WESSON and nothing more.

“I guess you could sleep in there if you wanted to,” said the boy.

“You could, it weren’t packed so tight a mouse can’t lick his nuts.”

They smoked and looked out on the foreshortened night. The patter of the sleet on the roofs and hoods of the trucks. The boy’s head felt clearer for the cold air.

“Coming here I found a dog by the side of the road,” he said. “A German shepherd. Had a collar and tags.” He shifted his weight and didn’t look at the man.

“Dead?”

“No.”

“Somebody hit him?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you do?”

“There wasn’t anything to do.”

“So what’d you do?”

“I finished him. Then I set him under a tarp by the fence. There’s a phone number on the tags.”

The man looked at the boy and looked out at the storm. “My daddy shot a dog once. Old Jim-Jim.” He smoked and shook his head. “I can still hear that rifleshot like it was yesterday.”

Out on the frontage road a police cruiser crept slowly by, the dash-lit face of the officer turning to take them in, filing their images away.

“Whoever hit that shepherd didn’t even slow down,” said the boy.

“Does that surprise you?”

The boy studied his cigarette. “Maybe they didn’t know they hit it.”

The man looked at him. “You always think so well of people?”

“No, not always.”

The man took a last pull and held the butt before him as if it were some strange new thing. “Used to be a man could chase a good meal with a good smoke and never get up from his table. You remember that?” He tossed the butt into a pothole brimming with slush and pushed off from the brick and touched the bill of his cap. “You take it easy now.”

“You too.”

“Stay out of trouble.”

28

There’s the jeep-thing, of course—somewhere. Stowed in a cave of scrub woods with more scrub piled on top to cover it. She knows when he’s used it by the smell of gas on him and the smell of the places he’s been, a hamburger joint, a barbershop, a bar. The smells inside these walls are finite and the ones he brings back from the outer world must be sniffed and identified, like guests confronted by the family dog. She sniffs for the smell of the motel where she stayed with her family. The restaurant where they ate, the Black Something. She sniffs for the smell of her mother’s perfume.

Once a month he fetches groceries and she knows it’s once a month by the dates on the magazines he brings, National Geographic, Field & Stream, and this is how she knows roughly how long she’s been here too. No newspapers. Nothing to tell of herself or of the search, nothing to tell of her brother—how long he lay there and who found him and how they got him down the mountain and how his leg

is and You never should’ve left him, never should’ve done that, lying there so scared and his leg all wrong, and the man said he saw on the news when he went down that the boy was fine so stop asking him—and sometimes he brings a bright new shirt from the boys’ department because he won’t shop in ladies’, nor buy tampons or liners, such things were already here, stacked and stacked on a shelf above the toilet. Th e sight of them telling her everything that first day, everything.

People see him when he goes in the jeep-thing, when he goes down to wherever he goes. Th ey must. He moves among them like anyone would. Completes transactions. Trades pleasantries. He wore a ring that first day but not since and there is no woman down there, she knows this as any woman would. Does anyone give him a thought? Th ink him strange?

Th e yellow coin of light has slipped over the ninth gap in the floorboards and she pushes herself up from the cot and shuffles into the bathroom following the blue beam of the hiker’s headlamp that precedes her like eyesight itself.

Bathroom. Please. It is like some prairie outhouse with a dry, house-style porcelain bowl. She pulls the thin door and fits the little hook into the eyelet, takes down a box from the shelf and drops one tampon unwrapped into the water bucket where it swells and floats like a small drowned thing. Four more in this box. Twenty more in each of the four remaining boxes. Was this her schedule, her tenure here? Behind the toilet, low in one corner in the dark old wood, is a patch of a lighter shade. Once, she got down on hands and knees and looked closely. Felt with fingertips. Faint small scarrings in the wood. Hatch marks. Months and months of calendaring, incompletely sanded away. It sickened her and taught her: Don’t count. Don’t mark. Don’t believe in a foreseeable end with its nothing to do but wait, and wait.

She sits and pees with a hollow pattering sound into the dry bowl, lifts the tampon from the bucket by the tail and drops it into the bowl and with a tilt of the water bucket sloshes everything down to wherever it goes when it goes down, obeying laws of gravity and geography. Th e Great Divide deciding even this.

In the dull small mirror screwed to the wall is a pale miner, halogen moon in the center of her forehead. Th e pajamas lie on the floor and she stands as if risen out of them, all her flesh crawling in the cold. She soaks the washcloth in the remaining bucket water, soaps it and washes herself while the girl in her head takes up her story again midsentence . . . but there was one thing I had to tell myself every morning when I woke up in that place . . . the voice not hers but the voice of an older, tougher girl, speaking as though to a gymnasium of girls, all their faces composed while their bodies imagine and their hearts beat with strange excitement, and she is one of them, knee to knee with her friends. Listen, is the girl’s message, this could happen to you.

She takes up the sour gray towel and dries herself quickly and begins to dress.

What did I have to tell myself?

Th ere is only you. Th ere is only you.

IN THE OUTER ROOM she throws her arms one way and then the other, limbering her spine. Rolls her head on her neck and bends at the hips to grab her toes. So bent she clasps her arms around her knees and hugs herself into a compact human fold, breathes in, her upside-down heart thudding evenly, breathes out. She touches the thick band at her ankle, the hard iron within the leather liner, no more strange to her now than her own foot. She releases her legs and gathers up the chain in her fists and stands, leaning until all her weight is opposed to the remaining length of chain, and she begins to walk, clockwise, like a mule turning a mill wheel.

Th e steel plate, about the size of an index card, makes its minute adjustments under the four bolt heads, revealing hairlines of raw wood as she half circles the compass and then returns. Th e movement of the steel plate is good, but her focus is the ringbolt itself, the small half hoop of steel welded to the plate, its gritty underbelly of red-brown where she has nurtured corrosion on a diet of water, sweat, orange juice, urine, and Coke. (Rust particles are harder than steel, sweetie, her father told her once, by way of comfort when a swing chain dropped her on her fanny; abrasive wear is inevitable.) With her every straining pass the connecting link traverses the arc of the ringbolt, and back again, transmitting a grinding kinking code up through the links to her hands. Th e turnings have become grainier, noisier, and she stops every six passes just to listen—for whistling. For footfalls.

Th e coin of light is on the last floorboard before the lion’s foot and she releases the chain for the day. Kneels down facing east and tests the ringbolt with the tender backs of her fingers. Hot. She wets a fingertip and blots up tiny particles like spilled salt. Presses fingertip to lips and tongues up the taste, the peculiar rusty tang she loves now, so like the taste of blood. Good work. And off in the woods she hears the whistling and she stands and brushes off her knees. Good girl. And the whistling is coming and she goes to the cot and lies back and picks up the magazine and opens it and stares at the picture of an Egyptian mummy. Th e magazine is trembling, her fingers trembling from her labor, the jumpy kinking and twanging of the chain still alive in her hands like crazy heartbeats. Good work. Good girl.