Descent

He peeled off his gloves and stashed them in his pocket and unholstered his sidearm and found his stance behind the small pine, digging his boots into the snow. He raised the Maglite and rested it on a branch at eye level where the sight line was clean, training both gun and unlit flashlight on the place twenty feet ahead where he knew the figure would come into view.

Through the intervening boughs he made out the hobbling shape and he saw the blue-black gleam of leather in the moonlight, and although he believed he recognized the jacket he saw nothing else in those palsied movements or in the blanched face under the watch cap resembling his brother. He thumbed off the safety of the gun and released the air slowly from

his lungs.

The sound of erratic footfalls arrived in advance of the figure, and Ki

At last the figure came lurching into his line of fire and he threw his light on it and a gloved left hand swung up reflexively and there was no weapon in it, nor in the right, which remained down and fisted and close to the right thigh.

“Not another step,” said Ki

“I want to see both your hands in the air right now,” Ki

“Look up,” said Ki

“Come on now,” said the sheriff more gently. “Look at me.” He lowered his beam and when the light was off of it, the fallen head lifted and showed him the face under the cap and for a moment he believed he was seeing the face of his own daughter—haunted and drained and ravaged by illness.

“My Lord God,” he said. He came from behind the tree holstering the gun and knelt beside her and looked into her wild wet eyes. “Sweetheart,” he said, “what’s your name?”

62

They had been silent a long time, smoking in the moonlight, when Grant said: “I thought about trying to stay on here. I talked to Sheriff Joe about it. I thought I might cover the mortgage for a while. But it would mean selling the house back home. It would mean going back there and putting everything in storage. Or selling it.”

The boy thought of the house in Wisconsin, his bedroom above the garage, all his childhood things, bed and books and fighter planes hung on fishing line. The ribbons on Caitlin’s wall like a bird wing, her trophies and posters and the stuffed ape he’d given her one Christmas and that sat on her bed still. Everything untouched in the cold dark and not a sound anywhere. He lowered his head and blew into his cupped hands and said into them, “What about Mom?”

“What about her?”

“Is she pla

“I don’t know.”

“Are you getting divorced?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“No. We haven’t talked about anything but one thing in a long time.”

The boy thought of the waitress, Maria, and of Carmen.

Grant reached for the ashtray on the porch rail and stubbed out his cigarette.

The boy said, “You think she still believes in God?”

Grant nodded. “Yes.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

The boy looked at him and looked away.

“I don’t know,” Grant said.

“Do you think it would’ve changed things?”

“Would what have changed things?”

“Believing. Before.”

Grant stared at him, at his profile in the moonlight.

“Is that what you think?”

“Sometimes.”

They were quiet. Across the clearing from out of the shadow of the house slipped the shape of a cat, sinuous and black on the snow, stalking something. She was nearly to the blue spruce when she stopped, one forefoot stilled in midstep, and her eyes ignited in her face like tiny headlamps, green-gold and molten. For a moment the world was still. Then the boy scraped his boot on the step and those lights blacked out and the cat turned and slunk back into shadow. They watched to see if she would reappear but she didn’t.

“That house back there is the only thing left,” said the boy.

Grant got another cigarette in his lips and offered the pack to his son but he shook his head. Grant lit his cigarette and exhaled a blue, ghostly cloud.

“I don’t know what else to do,” he said. “Do you?” He looked at the boy. Blond whiskers silvering in the moonlight. He still saw the young boy he’d been not long ago, but he knew that he alone saw it, that it was the image a father carries, burned into the eyes by way of the heart.

The boy shook his head and said that he had wished for something terrible. Terrible.

“When?” Grant said. “Just now?” He was thinking of the falling star.

“No. When we went to see that girl.”

Grant looked at him. “What did you wish for?”

“I wished it was her. I wished it was Caitlin.”

Grant looked away.

“I wanted it to be her so we could take her home.”

Grant shook his head. “I shouldn’t have let you go down there.”

“You couldn’t have stopped me.”

Grant sat shaking his head. “I’ve had this conversation a thousand times,” he said. He stared into the sky. “I never should have let you go up into those mountains, I say.”

The boy was quiet. The moon sat in the eye of its ring.

“You couldn’t have stopped me, she says. Maybe not, I say.” He stared into the heavens, his eyes burning with its lights. “But I should have tried.”

63

Ki

“How bad are you hurt, Caitlin?”

She gave a sob and faltered and he caught her by the upper arm. More bone than arm under the leather. He knew by this how light she would be.

“All right, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re go

“Who all’s up here, Caitlin?” he said under his breath. “Is he up here, the man who took you?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“What about Billy? Where’s Billy, Caitlin?”

Before she could answer, a man appeared in silhouette and Ki

The deputy came through the trees at a lope and he stopped beside them and set the shotgun across his knees and leaned upon the shotgun gasping like a man at the end of a hard race. He was as pale as the girl and when he met the sheriff’s eyes the sheriff saw he was badly shaken.