Descent (27 page)

Billy said he did and the man went on.

“Well. Along came the summer between grade school and middle school. Magical summer. All of us shooting up like weeds, smell of chlorine and cut grass. It’s about the Fourth of July—day before or day after I don’t recall—and young Becky is out back suntanning on the patio. By now it’s been a good two years since she’s said a single word to Delmar, through that fence or at school or anywhere else. Fact is, she’s hardly even
seen
Delmar in all that time. The boy never comes out in the yard anymore, not even to play with that sorry little dog of his. The back door opens, dog goes out, pisses, shits, back door opens again and dog goes in. Like living next door to Boo Radley. You know who that is?”

Billy didn’t. It didn’t matter.

“So Becky’s out on the patio, which was nothing but a concrete slab with weeds growing in the cracks, catching some rays in that red bikini she wore that summer, oh Lord. Browning those arms, that stomach. Smell of coconut oil. She’s got the sunglasses on and the headphones going and she doesn’t hear him. Never even turns her head.”

The man fell silent, staring into his glass. He gave the glass a turn as if to set the contents in motion and thereby his story again.

“Her own daddy found her like that, Billy. Lying there in the July sun with those headphones still going and her little forehead pushed in like a bad melon. Glass of iced tea sweating on the concrete and a red Stillson wrench lying there beside it. You know what a Stillson wrench is, Billy?”

“Pipe wrench.”

“Big one. His daddy’s, about yea big.” He shook his head like a man in dismay. He drank.

After a minute Billy said: “Did they think he did it?”

“Think who?”

“Delmar’s daddy. The Roto-Rooter man.”

“They might of, at first. But then Delmar himself came out with the whole story.”

“What was the whole story?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why did he do it?”

“He said it just come to him. He couldn’t say why.”

Billy picked up his cigarettes and got one in his lips and lit it with the Zippo and set the Zippo carefully down again. He pulled on the cigarette and side-blew the smoke away from the man.

“What happened to him?” he said. “To Delmar.”

“They took him away. Becky’s folks got divorced and moved away. Old man Steadman moved away and we never saw nor heard another thing about any of those people again. The world just rolled on.” He lifted his beer and tilted back a drink. Made an adjustment to his cap. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I think he was just too young for himself, old Delmar.” He raised his glass again but didn’t drink. “I think if he’d of waited, if he’d of just let himself grow into himself, he’d of been all right.”

Billy drew on the cigarette and blew a slow cloud into the space between himself and the image of himself.

“I never told that story before,” the man said. “I wonder what made me tell it now. Talking this man’s ear off.”

THEY SAT. THEY DRANK.
After a while the man drew the edge of his thumb over his lips corner to corner and said: “They ever find that girl?”

“What girl?”

“Up in those mountains.”

“No, they never did.”

The man shook his head. “How about that boy, then?”

Billy had drained his drink to the ice and was preparing to stand. “What boy is that?”

“There was a boy too, wasn’t there? A little brother or something? Got hurt up there on his bike?”

Billy looked at him.

“And she left him there,” the man said. “That girl. Threw a blanket on him and just left him there, as I recall.”

“That’s right,” Billy said. “A boy on a bike.”

“Where’s he at now? That boy?”

“Damned if I know. They were just tourists.” He raised his glass and tumbled an ice cube past his lips and broke it in his molars, the sound enormous and concussive in his skull. Then he said: “That boy wasn’t worth shit for evidence.”

“He wasn’t?”

“Anything he saw got knocked clean out of him.”

The man shook his head. “That’s a pity. That’s a flat-out pity.” He sat staring into his glass. “It sure is a funny world, isn’t it, Billy.”

“That’s one word for it.”

“What’s another one?”

“I don’t know.”

Billy sat another minute, and one minute more, then peeled off a five and got to his feet. “Gotta hit the road, Joe. But I’d like to buy you one more. Just for calling you Steve.”

“You’re off, Billy?”

“It looks like weather and I’m heading right into it.”

They both turned to look at the window behind them. The man and the woman were gone and the grayness that Billy had left in the hills had rolled down onto the city as though it sought him out.

“Good talking to you, Billy. Next time I’ll buy.”

“That’s a deal, Joe. You take her easy.”

“Drive safe now.”

Coldness had come down with the gray and it had a sharp coppery taste to it like blood. Three cars sat in the lot: his own El Camino, a burgundy and white Oldsmobile, and an old, high-sitting black Bronco with new mud on the tires and sprayed along the body in heavy four-wheel-drive patterns.

He stepped up to the Bronco on the passenger’s side and peered into the front seats and there was nothing in there but car. Seats, dash, floorboards. As if it were newly bought or up for sale. He looked more closely at the paint job and saw that it was not the original, nor the work of someone who painted cars for a living. He moved to the rear and bent to the tinted glass of the hardtop and saw in the cargo space an orderly array of gear: five-gallon gas can, fat coil of towing rope, a good-sized tool or tackle box, and two paper grocery bags, all of it seized in a black elastic webbing.

He stood and looked at the back door of the bar. He shook his head. “Shit,” he said, and walked away. Then he stopped and went back. He made a diving mask of his hands and peered inside again. One of the grocery bags was less than full and no way to tell what it held. In the other the tops of two boxes were visible, one box top rectangular and anonymously white, the other a square of light blue with the word
Tampax
in bright yellow.

He straightened and looked about him with his hands in his jacket pockets. His right hand playing the weight of the lighter around and around. He could feel the liquor swimming in his brain.

“Shit,” he said again. And turned and walked to his car.

He sat with the engine off and watched the first volley of sleet break across the glass. After a while he started the car and drove across the road to the 7-Eleven, backed into a space, and killed the engine again. He took his phone from his pocket and checked the time. Two thirty in the afternoon.

He drew on his cigarette and held the smoke, staring at the phone. Then he exhaled and dialed. The call was forwarded and a deputy answered and Billy asked to speak to the sheriff.

“He’s fairly jammed up right now, Billy. I’ll have him call you back.”

“I need to talk to him now, Denny. It’s critical.”

“Critical?”

“It’s important, Denny.”

“Donny. I’ll tell him to call you, Billy.”

Billy blew smoke from his nostrils and grinned. “I’d be very grateful, Donny.”

The sheriff called back an hour later. By then, Billy was climbing the interstate through a heavy sleet going to snow.

“Thanks for returning my call, Sheriff.”

“What is it, Billy?”

“I got a question for you.”

The sheriff, in his office, was going over some of his father’s—their father’s—old papers. Some so old the ink had begun to fade. “Ask it,” he said.

“Those Courtland kids, up on that mountain, when the girl went missing.”

The line was silent as the sheriff got his bearings. “What about them?”

“There’s something you never told anybody. Isn’t there.”

“Not following you, Billy.”

“There’s always something you don’t tell. That only the cops know about. That’s how it’s done, right? Procedurally speaking.”

“Billy, are you drunk?”

“I ain’t had a drop.”

“Sounds like you’re driving too.”

“Listen, God damn it. I just want to know what you didn’t tell nobody, that’s all. It’s a simple question.”

The sheriff was silent. Billy watched the fat wet flakes coming down. The dark grooves of tiretrack in the gray slurry of the road. The Bronco’s taillights simmering far ahead, hot and beady.

“If I didn’t tell nobody,” said his brother finally, “I didn’t tell nobody for a reason, so why would I tell you now?”

“Because I’m asking. Because who gives a damn now?”

The sheriff said nothing. Then: “You better get off the road, Billy. We got a storm up here and it’s headed down there.”

The line hissed and crackled. He was climbing higher now and losing his signal. He thought he’d lost it, was about to hang up when the sheriff said, “Go home, Billy. I mean it. Those folks ain’t none of your business now.”

“Now?” he laughed. “Hell, Sheriff, they never were.”

51

The Bronco held
a
good pace on the interstate, a legal but bold pace for the conditions, which had gone from sleet to a heavy snowfall in a matter of miles as they drove upward and westward, leaving the new foothill greens behind and traveling back into the high old winter of the mountains. The El Camino was not a mountain car nor a snow car but in the winter Billy kept two hundred pounds of sand in tubular bags heaped over the rear wheels, and on this day in early April the snow was not too deep, and he had the tracks of the cars before him, the tracks of the Bronco, to keep his treads close to the pavement, and he climbed the mountain interstate with ease.

The light was flat and gray and there were two good hours of it left and he drove without headlights, keeping well back from the Bronco. He’d passed the exit for home eight miles back and now he was approaching the exit for the pass that would take him up to the divide and down again into the resort town where the Courtland girl had gone missing, in the county where his brother was sheriff, and he slowed, anticipating the exit—but the Bronco’s taillights went on, and the tracks went on, and he shook his head and smiled. Old Steve was a smart one: You did not go hunting in your own backyard. Or shop or drink. You got your goods from some other man’s backyard far away, and up here you did not have to go very far to be far away.

“But how far, Steve?” He checked his fuel gauge and saw that the tank was half full. And half empty.

“Where we going, Steve?”

Fourteen miles beyond the exit, just short of the great tunnel that delivered travelers all at once to the far side of the Rockies—to entirely new weather systems, to the long, slow descent to the western deserts and the coast and the ocean—the Bronco’s signal light began to blink, its brake lights flared and it took the exit for US Highway 6 and the Loveland Pass. It crossed under the interstate and picked up speed again on the winding two-laner and Billy let himself fall farther behind, as there would now be no place for the Bronco to go but up to the top of the pass and down again on the other side.

He took a switchback turn at its posted speed, the car slewing mildly, and when the road straightened again he checked his phone for a signal and found that he had one—a very scant one—and he entered a short text message and sent it.

The road wound high into the mountains, into heavier snowfall and finally into a gusting chaos of snow like the white rioting heart of the storm itself, before cresting and beginning its steep descent into the valley on the other side. Down and down and the snowfall growing lighter again at the lower altitude and the mountain switchbacks cutting once, twice, and
a third time across the Snake River before settling into an easier alliance with the river at the floor of the valley, both road and river turning according to the same geography, the same logic.

He kept the radio off, wanting to hear nothing but the engine and the regular sweep of the wipers. The liquor had left him all at once, leaving him edgy and wishing for a cup of coffee. He asked himself if he knew what he was doing, and answered that he knew exactly what he was doing, he was taking a drive, that was all.

There were no exits or even turnoffs for many miles. Then the posted speed limit fell, and another sign announced their arrival at a resort village, and the speed limit fell again and his heart lifted at other signs of organized humanity: the high shedroofs of the lodges, the Christmassy lights in the restaurants and shops, the cheering reds and greens of traffic lights. But there was little traffic so late in the season and when the Bronco caught the village’s outermost red light Billy knew he would have to pull up behind it or else draw more attention to himself. He was fifty, perhaps forty, feet away—the shape of the driver’s head visible through the rear window—when red turned to green, and signaling, the Bronco turned left.

“Go on through and double back,” he told himself; but he was afraid of losing him in the grid of streets, and at the last moment he signaled and turned through the yellow and followed.

The Bronco immediately turned left again, heading east along the rim of a large and nearly empty parking lot. Then it turned right onto a county road, which took them all at once out of the village and into the long mountainous valley to the east, and as there was no other traffic coming or going Billy let the gap between the cars grow once more. With his free hand he collected his phone and punched up and sent another text.

The road turned south and the speed limit fell and Billy rounded a bend to see that the Bronco had come to a stop at a T in the road. The intersection had come up suddenly and there was no hiding, and if the man checked his mirrors there’d be no missing the El Camino behind him. Likewise when the man went one way or the other there’d be no missing that the El Camino had done the same, and so he hoped the Bronco would turn right, where a sign indicated the town of Montezuma lay, instead of left, where there seemed little incentive or encouragement for any single vehicle to go, let alone two.

The Bronco sat idling at the T as if awaiting a break in traffic, but there was no traffic. The El Camino idling behind it. The snow drifting down.

“Go left, you son of a bitch, I dare you.”

The Bronco signaled left and turned, and Billy took his place at the T, signaled, and followed.

HE CAME TO ANOTHER
intersection a few miles on but the Bronco had not taken it, and he followed the tracks deeper into the range. The Bronco ignored two more turns and the road began to climb in increasingly steep cutbacks, as if here were yet another pass that would take them inevitably to another summit and another vortex of snow. But the snowfall remained light and the El Camino continued to find traction. His luck was holding, and he climbed another few miles toward the white ghostly peaks before his luck ran out.

It ran out all at once, without warning, when the Bronco’s taillights disappeared, as though the car had gone off the road. Yet when he arrived at the place where the taillights had vanished he found no tracks careening from the road—found no road at all but only the sudden crunch and ping of loose gravel under him, and the road, such as it was, diving into the evergreens ahead.

He pumped the brakes and brought the El Camino to a halt and sat looking into the trees. The mountains that lay above and beyond the trees were obscured by the trees themselves and by the fog of snowfall. He rolled down his window and looked out into the white emptiness of the gorge, the air thin and cold and pungent with the smell of snow and pine. He picked up his phone and sent a final text, then sat looking at the road ahead. Or what had been the road and which, but for the tracks, might have been just a minor clearing at the end of the road where the makers of roads, going back to men in wagons, had abruptly and inexplicably stopped.

He tugged at the hairs below his lip. He thought of the set of tire chains back at the barn hung on their barn spike with the horse tack. He sat a few moments longer, sensing the rising dusk in the bowl of the gorge, in the shades of the pinewood. Then he said, “All right, son, let’s see it,” and he lifted his foot from the brake and drove on.