Descent by Tim Johnston
The Life Before
Her name was Caitlin, she was eighteen, and her own heart would sometimes wake her—flying away in that dream-race where finish lines grew farther away not nearer, where knees turned to taffy, or feet to stones. Lurching awake under the sheets, her chest squeezed in phantom arms, she’d lie there gasping, her eyes open to the dark. She’d lift her hands and press the watchface into bloom, blue as an eye in which blinked all the true data of her body, dreaming or awake: heart rate 86 bpm, body temp 37.8°C, pace (0), alt. 9,015 feet.
Alt. 9,015 feet?
She looked about the room, at the few dark furnishings shaped by a thin light in the seams of the drapes. To her left in the other bed lay her mother, a wing of blonde hair dark on the white pillow. In the adjoining room on the other side of the wall slept her father and brother. Two rooms, four beds, no discussion: she would not share a room with her fifteen-year-old brother, nor he with her.
The watchface burned again with its cool light and began to beep and she pinched it into silence. She checked her heart: still fast, but it wasn’t the dream anymore, it was the air at 9,015 feet.
The Rocky Mountains!
When she’d seen them for the first time, from the car, her heart had begun to pump and the muscles of her legs had tightened and twitched. In a few weeks she would begin college on a track scholarship, and although she had not lost a race her senior year (courtland undefeated! ran the headline), she knew that the girls at college would be faster and stronger, more experienced and more determined, than the girls she was used to running against, and she’d picked the mountains for no other reason.
In the bathroom she washed her face and brushed her teeth and banded her ponytail tight to her head and then stood staring into the mirror. It wasn’t vanity. She was looking to see what was in this girl’s eyes, as she would any girl, so she would know how to defeat her.
She stepped back into the room and for a moment she thought her mother was awake, watching her from the bed, but it was only the eyelids, pale and round in that dim light—a blind, unnerving effect, like the gazes of statues—and Caitlin opened the connecting door and stepped from one room into another exactly like it and shook the boy awake.
THE SUN WAS STILL climbing the far side of the mountains, and the town waited in a cold lake of shadow. The black bears that came down at night to raid the garbage bins and lope along the sidewalks had all gone back up. The streets were empty. No one to see the two of them passing under the traffic light, no one but them to hear the slow blink blink of its middle eye.
Caitlin was not yet running but high-stepping in a brisk pantomime of it, like a drum majorette for a parade consisting of the boy alone, wobbling along behind her on the rented bike. The boy wanted to go back for sweatshirts, but it was July, she reminded him, it would warm up.
His name was Sean but she called him Dudley, a long-ago insult which had lost its meaning. They’d come into town the day before, up from the plains on the interstate, up through Denver and then into the mountains on a swinging cliff of road that swung their hearts out into the open sky, into dizzy plungings of bottomless green, the pines so thick and small on the far slopes. Up and up they’d climbed, up to the Great Divide and then down again—down to nine thousand feet, where the resort village appeared suddenly in the high geography like a mirage. The wintry architecture of ski shops and coffeehouses at midsummer. Chairlifts hanging empty over the grassy runs. Impossible colors at this height and air like they had never breathed before.
Now, in the blue morning, they drew this air into their lungs and coughed up white clouds. The smell of pine was like Christmas. “Here we go,” Caitlin said, and she turned onto a road called Ermine and began to run in earnest, and the boy followed.
Not bad, he thought at first—wide, smooth blacktop with plenty of sky overhead. But then the road grew steep, the trees loomed denser and nearer, and the bike began to jerk in mechanical palsy as he cursed through the gears. He stood on the pedals and rode openmouthed, sucking at the air. Where his stomach overspilled his shorts the sweat ran hot and slick. Ahead on the black road the pale shape of her grew small and dim like some leggy and teasing sprite. “Slow down!” he called, at great cost of breath, and then fell to watching his own quivering thighs. It was snowshoes all over again:
Caitlin stomping out ahead of him on the lake and he slogging behind, the old wooden snowshoes colliding, tripping him—the lifeless heap of himself in the snow (the whole dark lake underneath, the thin floor of ice), red-cheeked Caitlin appearing suddenly and reaching down. C’mon, Dudley, stop screwing around . . .
When he looked ahead again she’d stopped, and he rode up to her, and planted his feet. “Jesus Christ, Caitlin . . .” Trying not to sound like a desperate, gasping fatty. His heart whopping.
“Shh,” she said. Her chest was heaving too but she was smiling. Her burning lungs, her banging heart, were ecstasies to her. Back home, across a wall of her room, track ribbons lay feathered like the wing of a brilliant bird. “Do you see it?” she said.
“What?”
“Up there.”
“What?”
“Just off the road. He’s right there.”
Then he saw it: a small red dog with a thick tail. But not a dog. Something wild, with black little eyes and huge, listening ears.
“What is it?” he said.
“I think it’s a fox.”
“What’s in its mouth?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a pup,” he said. “It must be her pup.”
“No, there’s blood.”
“So she killed it. They do that sometimes.”
They watched, the fox watching them, until at last it about-faced, the small body yet in its jaws, and went trotting up the road and was gone.
The boy swung the backpack around and rooted inside for the spouted bottles. Caitlin had stopped not because of the fox but because she’d come to an intersection and was unsure of the way. She remembered the young man at the bike shop with the oil-stained fingers (with the tattoo spider climbing his throat, with the very green eyes) saying there’d be signs, but there weren’t any, not here.