Descent (20 page)

Part III

39

When Sean appeared suddenly
from the back of the station, emerging without escort through a steel door, his hair in oily disarray and a blond whiskering on his jaw—an older boy by far looking out from his blue eyes—Grant stood and rubbed his own jaw in an effort to keep the surging of his heart from reaching his own face. He put his hands in his pockets to keep them from reaching out and taking the boy into his arms.

Sean came to him, and they stood looking at each other.

“You didn’t have to come.”

“Do you think I could not have come?”

Sean sat on the hard bench and reached into the plastic bag he was carrying. After a moment Grant sat down too and watched his son feed the laces back into his boots, his belt back into the loops of his jeans.

They were driven to the impound lot in the backseat of a cruiser, retracing the route the boy had taken to the station the night before, down the same frontage road where the Paradise Lounge still sat, squat and ugly and meaningless in the gray cold morning. Though the snow had stopped only hours before, already a layer of grit seemed to have settled over everything. The officer dropped them at the lot another mile down the road and wished them a good one and then drove off with his radio squawking.

They reclaimed the key and crossed the lot toward the blue Chevy Grant had not set eyes on, like the boy, in more than a year.

“I changed the oil every three thousand,” the boy said. “Rotated the tires.”

Grant stripped a garish orange decal from the windshield and then reached into the truckbed and put his hand on the damaged tire. Finding the silver head of the nail with his thumb, he stood a moment touching it, as if he might divine from it all that had happened because of it.

Behind him, the boy looked at the flat and wanted only to sleep and to sleep.

They drove to a motel near the highway and Grant checked them into a single room with two large beds. He thought Sean would want to shower, he suggested as much, but instead the boy sat on the nearest bed, pulled off his boots, fell into the pillows, and was asleep. Grant drew the curtains and peeled the duvet from the other bed and settled it over his son, then sat down on the mattress across from the boy. He sat in the dimmed room studying the shape of the boy under the blanket. Eighteen now, he was. The age she had been.

After a while he wrote a note and placed it close to Sean, then retrieved it and went out the door to stand on the narrow concrete balcony. He seemed very far away from the mountains and the ranch and the people he had come to know: Emmet and his sons, Maria and her daughter. Farther yet from Wisconsin and Angela and the house where they’d raised their children; his onetime life.

He inhaled the cold air with its highway tang of diesel, and lit a cigarette. He looked west into the wind until his vision blurred, and then he turned to the east, to the city’s low industrial horizon under the low pewter sky. Semi after semi droning down the highway toward the sky.

WHEN HE RETURNED, THE
sun was low in the west behind the clouds and the room was nearly dark. The duvet had been thrown aside, and at the sight of the empty bed his heart dropped for a disbelieving instant before he saw that the bathroom door was shut, before he saw the seam of light at the floor and heard the exhaust fan groaning away on the other side.

He set down the grocery bag and opened the curtains and stood looking out at the highway in the gray dusk until the bathroom door opened and his son switched off the fan and stepped out. He wore a blue T-shirt and the same weary pair of jeans. The room filled with the scents of soap and shaving cream.

“I didn’t think you’d wake up till tomorrow,” Grant said.

The boy looked at him but saw only his dark shape before the window. He picked up his duffel and set it on the bed. “I don’t like motel rooms,” he said, fitting his things back into the duffel.

“I gather that from the inside of that truck. Have you been sleeping in there this whole time?”

“No. I slept out sometimes. Sometimes people put me up.”

“If you’d asked, I would’ve sent you money. Or a credit card.”

The boy zipped up his duffel, then stood and raked his damp bangs back with his fingers.

“I bought some orange juice,” Grant said. “Cokes. A couple of sandwiches.”

The boy got into his jacket. “Can we just go?”

The Chevy was still warm and Grant fit the key in the ignition but did not turn it, and they both got a cigarette lit and sat with the windows half down, saying nothing, until the boy said without looking: “You want me to drive?”

“No, I’ll drive.”

The boy flicked his ash. “You were gone a while.”

Grant looked over but the boy would not meet his glance.

“I was looking for a place to get that tire fixed,” he said. “But it’s Sunday. Everything’s closed.” He took hold of the key, then let it go again.

“Sean.”

“What.”

“Talk to me. We have to talk.”

“What about?”

“Sean.”

The boy inhaled, blew sharply at the window. “What am I supposed to say?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t either.”

They both looked to the west, where the dropping sun flared suddenly between the clouds and the horizon like the eye of a great bird cracking open, round and blazing.

“I only tried to help her.”

“I know you did, Sean.”

“How?”

“How what?”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know you. Because you’re my son.”

“Those aren’t the same thing.”

“They are to me.”

The boy sat without moving. Grant crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. After a while Sean did the same.

“So now what?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you going back to the airport, or what?”

“I don’t know. Where are you going?”

He didn’t answer.

“Where were you going?” Grant said. “Were you going home?”

“What home?”

“Wisconsin.”

The boy was silent.

Grant said: “She’s home from the hospital, did you know that? She’s back at Grace’s.”

“I know. I talked to her.”

“When?”

“Just after she got out.”

“It wasn’t prison, Sean. She was there voluntarily.”

“I know.”

“She’s doing much better. She’s talking about teaching again.”

The boy nodded. “That’s good.”

Grant drew his fingertips along the dash, looked at them, rubbed the red dust with his thumb. “Do you want to go there now? We could put you on a plane. Or—” He didn’t finish.

“Or what?”

“Or we could drive there together. If you wanted to.”

The boy glanced at him, and turned back to the sun. A tepid orange disk sitting exactly on the edge of the world as if it could go no further. It didn’t seem possible that the whole western half of the country lay before it and not beyond it. The mountains, the deserts. The wide plate of the sea, all waiting for their own sundowns.

Without turning he said, “We can’t do that.”

“Can’t do what?”

“We can’t leave her there.”

Grant said nothing. In his chest were two hearts, two thudding fists. One of these hearts beat with the memories of his daughter, and the other beat with the sight of his son before him. Each the more furiously in the presence of the other.

He put the Chevy in gear and pulled out of the lot. He found the on ramp and accelerated up it and merged into the westbound traffic, into the lanes of cars and trucks and semis all racing toward the horizon as if they meant to catch it, as if they might go flying over it as if over a rise in the road, thereby forcing the sun back up into the sky, again and again, keeping it indefinitely aloft, the day indefinitely alive.

40

They drove the long
midwestern state again, end to end, exactly as they’d driven it that July long ago when there had been four of them and everything, even Nebraska, had been worth looking at, and then had driven it again when Grant and the boy returned in the two trucks. Now it was just the two of them once more, in the single truck, and they drove at night and there was nothing to see but the same length of highway, the same median, and the same bleak radius of snow-blown nothing that came along with them and around them like a moving island they could not escape. Just outside of North Platte Grant stopped for gas and to use the restroom, and when he came back out Sean was still asleep, slumped against the door, against the roll of sleeping bag.

Later the boy sat up and squinted into the oncoming lights and asked where they were, and Grant said they were just inside Colorado, and did he want to stop for dinner? Sean said Okay and they took the next exit, but when the waitress came to the counter in the overlit diner he set aside the menu and ordered only coffee.

“That’s all?” said the waitress.

“Yes, please.”

“How about a little plate of hot beef sandwich? Folks drive from all over for the hot beef sandwich. I’ve got this old couple drives all the way from Sterling for it. Though I guess I would too if I lived in Sterling. And was old,” she slyly added.

Grant told her that they themselves had driven from Omaha and the waitress cried,
“Omaha!”
as if announcing some appalling discovery on the floor. “What on earth were you doing in
Omaha?
”

The boy looked to the window, which held only the reflection of the diner: himself and his father sitting there.

Grant handed the waitress the menu and said they’d just been passing through on their way to the hot beef sandwich.

When she was gone he said, “I thought you were hungry.”

“I never said I was hungry.”

“I asked if you wanted to eat and you said yes.”

“You asked if I wanted to stop for dinner. I figured you were hungry so I said okay.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“What do you mean why?”

“What’s the difference?”

He stared at his son, his thin face, and for a moment he could have been just some young man in the diner, just off the road like himself.

The waitress returned and filled their coffee mugs and went away again.

“When I was fat everybody tried to starve me. Now they want to shove food in me I don’t even want.”

“You were never fat,” Grant said, and the boy looked at him. “You just had some vertical compensating to do.”

They got back on the highway and the boy drove while Grant slept. The night was clear and there was little traffic and he tracked a three-quarter moon as it overtook him on the left, cold and steady. In time this same moon pulled from the black foreground a luminous row of teeth, and he watched in bleary confusion before he understood what he was seeing, which was the first snowy reef of peaks, yet hours away, baring itself to the plains.

Grant raised his head to see the mountains rising in the night, and they both found their cigarettes and sat waiting for the knob in the dash to pop. They gapped their windows and smoked while the cold night spooled in and whistled around them like a mad spirit. The boy thought of the jail cell, the hard cold stink of that place, and he saw the man from the adjacent cell like a projection on the windshield: his bloodshot eyes, his disembodied hands hung in space.
I can see you ain’t no rapist, my man.

He blew smoke and tapped his ash in the gap.

“Do you think we’ll ever feel normal again?” he said.

“I don’t know. What’s normal?”

“I don’t know,” said the boy, watching the road, the mountains. “Not this.”

A few miles on, Grant put out his cigarette and powered up his window and the boy did the same and the whistling stopped and the cab grew warm again. Don’t forget about the airport, Grant said, and the boy said he didn’t forget, and two miles later they took the exit for it, and they found the green Chevy in the sea of cars, and after that they drove the two trucks in tandem toward the lighted city.

41

The boy kicked off
his boots
and fell back onto the little bed and watched as a multitude of near-invisible bodies rose into the space above him. Dense nebulae coalescing into shapely whorls like the formation of stardust into stars and planets and moons. Himself rising bodilessly and traveling through systems of light and color and mass that he alone had ever seen and that were his alone to name. But in the next moment, or what seemed like the next moment, there was a sound, and the alien worlds dispersed as if in fright and he opened his eyes and listened, and after another moment it came again, a kind of cry. A single windy note, short and uncertain. It came at slow intervals and he thought it must be his father in the bedroom across the hall fashioning some new kind of snore in his nose. But then he realized it wasn’t coming from across the hall but from his own room, and he sat up and listened, and then he leaned and looked under the bed, finding only dust and the old floorboards. The sound, louder and nearer, came again while he was bent over looking. After a minute he pulled on his boots and trod quietly down the hall and out onto the porch into the cold dawn.

He stood on the porch listening, his breath smoking. Then he went down the steps and got down on his good knee to look under the porch. Nothing there but packed dirt and a kind of smooth wallow, roughly lined by the remains of a once-red blanket. He dropped to all fours in the snow and crawled just under the porch to peer into the recesses of the crawl space, and when he was under there, waiting for his eyes to adjust, boots clopped overhead on the floorboards, the storm door hinges croaked, and boots came clopping down the steps.

“Did we bust a pipe?” His father stood stooped in the light behind him, hands on knees, face upended.

“No. The dog’s under here.”

“She’s under there?”

“I’m looking at her.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Looking at me.”

“Why doesn’t she come out?”

“I don’t know.” He called the old Labrador by name and told her to come on out of there. She made her whimpering sound and the boy said, “I think she’s hurt.”

Grant came up beside him on hands and knees. “Maybe it’s her hips.” He gestured and called to the dog and she scrabbled forward a few inches on her forepaws and stopped and whimpered. Grant watched her. He surveyed the crawl space and the dirt and said with his eyes on the dog, “Think you can crawl back there?”

They got the dog out from under the house and arranged her gently in the cab of the blue Chevy, and doing so the boy remembered the girl bleeding in the truck, and in his exhaustion he thought that that must have been something he dreamed.

They climbed in on either side of the dog and Grant drove to the county road and turned west, away from town, and a mile later he parked in front of a white two-story farmhouse, pink in the dawn, and after a moment a stately white-haired woman appeared on the screened porch and called down, “Is that you, Grant Courtland?” and Grant called back, “I’m afraid so, Evelyn.”

“I see you got your truck back.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Who’s that with you?”

“He came with the truck.”

“Don’t say? How are you, Sean?”

“I’m fine, Mrs. Struthers. How are you?”

Her head tilted back and she peered down at him from the height of the porch, the height of herself. “Mrs. Struthers is what my students call me. Were you ever my student?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I thought not. In that case call me Evelyn.” She held the door wider and gestured them up. “Come on, come up out of the cold and let me get some coffee in you.”

When the old man came down, Grant said, “I’m sorry about this, Dale, I know you’re retired but I didn’t know where else to go.”

“Oh, stuff,” said Evelyn, sweeping in behind her husband and going to the coffee pot. “Neighbors are neighbors.”

Struthers regarded the back of her head, then turned to Grant and the boy and jerked his thumb at her, as if to say there was nothing more to say nor better way to say it. She turned and fitted a mug of coffee into his waiting hand and so armed he said: “All right then. Let’s see what you got.”

Grant pulled the truck around and parked before a small red outbuilding, and he and the boy carried the dog inside and settled her onto the stainless-steel table. The boy cupped his hands and blew into them and the old vet said, “I’m sorry about the cold. I don’t hardly heat anything but the house anymore, and hardly that, cost of gas.”

Cold as it was the air smelled richly of kennel and ammonia and pine.

The old man set down his coffee and reached into the pocket of his white coat and put something under the dog’s nose and in one chomping instant the offering was gone. He placed his hands on her, playing them slowly through her fur, watching her eyes, frowning, pausing, moving on again and waiting for his hands and the dog’s eyes to tell him something. He slipped one hand underneath her and she gave a yip and swung as if to bite his wrist but only licked at it furiously. He reached into his pocket again and again she took the treat and licked her chops and watched his hand.

“Way under the house, you say.”

“About as far as you could get,” Grant said. “Had to send skinny under there to pull her out.”

The three of them looked at the dog. The dog watched the vet.

He sipped from his coffee and set it down again. “She’s got at least two cracked ribs under there. One is just about broke but not quite. I’d guess a horse kick right off. But of all the horse-kicked dogs I ever saw I never saw one got itself kicked from underneath like this. I don’t know what kind of horse could pull that off, do you?”

Grant held the old man’s eyes. Then both turned again to the dog, as if she might put an end to speculation with her testimony. Grant stood in silence and the boy watched him and watching him understood that something had been discussed between the two men that though he’d been right here, was not available to him—as if he’d dozed on his feet, or blacked out.

“Can you do anything?” Grant said.

“How do you mean?”

“For the ribs.”

“There’s not a whole lot I can do for cracked ribs but wrap them up. And she’s old.”

“Right,” said Grant. “Meaning?”

“Meaning she’ll be a long time healing, if at all. And she’ll be in pain.”

Grant nodded. “Is there something for that? For the pain?”

“Sure, sure,” said the vet. “But.”

Grant and the boy and the dog waited. Struthers took his clean-shaven jaw in his hand and worked it over. “I’m not sure she ought to be going back there, Grant, is the thing,” he said.

“No,” Grant said.

“I mean it ain’t my business . . .”

“No, I think you’re right.”

“And I can’t keep her here.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to, Dale.”

“I’m just not set up for it anymore. And Evie can’t have an animal in the house for her allergies, never could, all these years. The Lord said no children and then he said no pets either, all you get woman is this old man comes in end of the day smelling of horse and dog and everything else.”

“Seems to me she’s had plenty of kids, Dale,” said Grant. “Hundreds of them.”

Struthers didn’t seem to hear this, but then he looked up from under his silver eyebrows and said, “Thirteen hundred and twelve.”

Grant watched him.

“She’s got ever last grade book going back to her very first class, year we were married. Takes them out time to time. Goes through them one by one, like picture albums.”

“NOW WHAT,” SAID THE
boy.

“Now we go see a friend.”

They were in the truck again, driving back toward town. The dog in her trussings nested between them, blinking drowsily as the painkiller found its way into her blood. The sun climbing the pines, washing the snowy boughs in a restless glitter. They came around a turn and Grant brought the Chevy to a stop behind a school bus. Flushed little faces in the rear window, too listless at that hour even to stick out their tongues.

The boy got a cigarette to his lips and depressed the lighter knob.

“Give me one of those,” Grant said. “I’m out.”

The lighter popped and they took turns with it.

“Are you gonna tell me what’s going on?” said the boy.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

Grant shook his head. “Can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

“Well, what do you think then?”

“What do I think?” Grant flicked his ash. A young girl and a younger boy came out of a small clapboard house and made their way to the bus. The bus door folded open and the little boy stood stomping some last-second imperative into the snow until the girl nudged him and he hauled himself aboard and she climbed up after him. The door rattled shut and the stop sign clapped to and the bus rumbled on, towing the Chevy behind at a distance.

Grant said: “I’m wondering if Billy didn’t do that to her.”

“Billy.”

“Emmet’s son. That’s his car at the house. The El Camino.”

The boy looked at the dog. He watched the rear of the bus.

“Why would he do that?”

Grant drew on his cigarette. “I’m not saying he did.”

They were silent. The little faces at the back of the bus watched them. The boy took a last drag on his cigarette and crushed it in the tray.

“Yes you are.”

They followed the bus through town and for another mile beyond that before Grant turned into the woods down a narrow drive where the snow lay brilliant and trackless between the pines, a small one-story house at the end of the drive, cornflower blue with darker blue shutters and a bloodred door. Grant made a space for the Chevy on what might have been the lawn so as not to block either of the Subaru wagons parked before the house, and when he opened his door the dog forgot about her injury and tried to stand and he placed his hand on her skull and said, “You stay here. Both of you.”

He shut the door and the dog began to wheeze in distress for what she couldn’t see, and the boy spoke to her. “He’s walking up to the house. He’s knocking on the door. Someone’s at the window. The door opens. It’s a woman. Dark curly hair. It’s the woman from the diner, that waitress, I forget her name. She looks out and waves . . . I wave back. He steps inside and the door closes. Maria is her name. Maria Valente.”

The red door opened again and Grant returned to the Chevy and got the dog halfway into his arms and the boy came around to collect the remaining half, and when they were free of the truck Grant said to put her down but hold her up, and the dog looked around in confusion until he told her to do her business, at which signal and without the appearance of another thought she lowered her haunches and released a long hissing stream into the snow.

They carried her into the house and placed her on the bed of blankets Maria had prepared on the tiled entrance, and Maria squatted to stroke her head. Then she stood again and all three looked down at the dog. They were still standing there when the girl arrived from somewhere in the house, sock-footed and carrying a large backpack in one hand and a cell phone in the other. With the barest of glances at the two men she dropped the pack and sat on her heels before the bandaged dog and began to pet her.

“What happened to her?”

The dog sniffed at the girl’s bare knee. Licked it.

“We’re not sure,” Grant said. “She might’ve got herself kicked.”

“By what?” She looked up—she looked from Grant to the boy, and back. She seemed about to say something else but didn’t say it. She turned to the dog again, stroking her ears.

“Poor Lola,” said the girl, “poor Lo.”

The boy looked at his father, then at the girl again. “You know this dog?”

She glanced up, her brow furrowed, as though there must be something wrong with him. “Of course I know her.”

“She goes over there some Saturdays,” Maria explained. “To help with those horses.”

They were all silent but the girl, who went on soothing the dog with her hands and her voice.

Grant said he’d come by later with food for the dog and to take her out, and Maria handed him the key and he slipped it into his pocket. He said he’d find someone who could take the dog in for a longer time but she told him not to worry about that, that they would see how this went, and the girl said with finality, “We’ll take care of her.”

Maria went to the kitchen to find a water bowl, and the girl stood and with a tug at her skirt turned and put her dark eyes on the boy. “I’m Carmen.”

“I know.” He said his name and the girl said, “I know. I just didn’t think you knew mine.”

“You were in my history class,” he said.

“Briefly,” she said. “A brief history.”

At their feet the dog showed her old fangs in a great yawn.

The girl checked her phone, then turned and opened a closet door and withdrew a red woolen jacket and got into it. She dipped her white-socked feet into suede boots of a plush, primitive style, and bent once more to rub the dog’s ears. She hoisted the pack from the floor and called, “I’m outta here, Mom,” and Maria called back, “Okay,
tesoro.
Be careful on the snow, I love you.”

“Love you too.”

She gave Grant and the boy her smile, and then she stepped around the dog and opened the red door and for a bright instant as the morning sun found her she blazed in a red pirouette and was gone.

WHEN HE AWOKE AGAIN
the room was sun-swamped and hot and he lay staring at the large yellow blister directly overhead. Empty smooth eggshell of plaster shaped by a leakage long since moved on to some other course or else hunted down and stopped at its source. He listened for the sound again, the dog or the ghost of the dog restored to her foxhole beneath the floorboards. But when the sound came again it came distinctly through the pine door. Through the two pine doors shut to each other across the narrow hall.

He got up and opened one door, waited, and carefully opened the other.

This room on the western side would not see daylight until the afternoon and his father lay on the bed in the chill gloom, facing him. The blanket drawn over his ribs but his shoulder and arm exposed, bare and white, the arm hooked over a pillow as a child holds a stuffed animal. As a man holds a wife. When he spoke he seemed to be speaking to the boy, his voice as plain and clear as if he were asking the time. But his eyes, or the eye that was visible, was shut. The face slack.