63
Kinney told the girl who he was and that he’d followed his brother, Billy, up there. She was still on her hands and knees, and he scanned the snow for blood.
“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 gonna be all right now. We’re getting you down off this mountain.” He found his radio and pushed the button twice and waited. He pushed twice again and as he waited he heard someone coming through the woods, moving smartly but cautiously. He doused the torch and drew the gun again and leveled it over the hunched girl, who grew silent and rigid.
“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 Kinney saw the shape of the man’s hat and he lowered the gun and blinked the torch twice to guide him. He told her it was all right, it was just his deputy, and she began to breathe again.
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.
The deputy looked at the girl on her hands and knees in the snow. He looked at the one big cowboy boot she wore and the loop of belt making its dark smile in the snow. He looked at the running shoe on her other foot. He seemed not to have the breath or words to speak.
“What did you find, Donny?”
The deputy lowered himself to his knees beside the girl, as if to pray, or beg. The girl watched him with her wet eyes.
“Did you find him?” she whispered.
“Find who?”
“The man,” she said.
“All I found was Billy,” he said.
Her eyes searched his. Then her head dropped again heavily, black hair spilling to the snow.
Kinney looked from the girl to his deputy. “Tell me, Deputy.”
“Sheriff, I think we need to get this girl to a hospital.”
“I know it. Tell me what you saw up there.”
“Sheriff, I don’t know if I can.”
“By God, Donny.”
The deputy shook his head dismally. He reached to touch the girl’s shoulder but stopped himself. “Miss?” he said. “Can we take a look?”
She did not answer or move. Then, in silence, she pivoted onto one hip and shifted around to sit in the snow with her arms stiff behind her and her legs stretched out, and thus arranged she raised the single boot into the air before the deputy, as if proffering it. As if in some weird invitation of undress.
The deputy handed the shotgun to the sheriff.
“What are you doing, Deputy?”
The deputy took the boot in his hands and began, gently, to pull. It came off more easily than Kinney would’ve predicted and when it slipped free he did not understand what he was seeing. At the end of her white thin leg there was no foot. There was the heel—and nothing else. A stunning illusion. As if the rest of the foot were still inside the boot. The deputy tilted the boot and the blood ran from it like oil and Kinney looked again and saw the black sooty wound and he smelled the seared meat smell of it.
“My God,” he said.
The deputy tilted the boot farther and something heavy slipped along the shaft from bootheel to mouth and landed in a dark clot on the snow.
“What is that?”
“I think it’s his socks, Sheriff. Billy’s socks.”
Kinney looked at him.
“He got shot, Joe. He didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”
Kinney frowned. He adjusted his hat. Then he handed the shotgun back to the deputy and slipped an arm under the girl’s knees and the other around her back and rose to his feet lifting her easily.
“Don’t,” she said. “I can walk.”
“I know you can, sweetheart, but this will be faster.”
“Let me help, Sheriff.”
“No, she don’t weigh nothin. Grab that belt there and get it on her leg.” The deputy did so. “Higher,” said the sheriff. “Just below the knee. Pull it tight. Tuck in the end. Are you in pain, sweetheart?” he said, and even as she shook her head he said, “Jesus, what a question.” To the deputy he said: “Now watch our backs with that shotgun, Donny. Anything else moves in these woods you go ahead and shoot the sonofabitch.”
The girl hooked one arm around his neck and with her face to his chest he turned and they headed down the mountain, moving slower than they might have, not for the weight of her but for the care he took not to jostle her or allow her to come into contact with any branch or bough or to himself slip on the steep trail. She was not bleeding badly and he didn’t believe she’d lost much blood, and if she’d not gone into shock by now he didn’t believe she would and his sole desire in the world was to deliver her gently and safely to the cruiser.
The girl for her part rode in his arms like a child to whom sleep has come no matter what, no matter where, though it wasn’t sleep she surrendered to but something more absolute, more exquisite, which was abandonment. Abandonment of thought and of fear and of responsibility and of strength. She surrendered to abandonment and in her surrender she felt the downhill pull of gravity and she believed that the man who carried her was in fact a man-shaped sled or toboggan and she its only passenger. Sailing down the mountain slope with the song of speed in her ears, beat of his heart against her ribs, whole unto herself but also belonging to the snow and the wind and the moon and the mountain. Altogether more effortless and fleet than she’d ever been in any footrace and putting nothing but distance and more distance between herself and the life up there, which was no life but only the momentary interruption of life, and every second on this man-sled delivering her farther and farther from shack, chain, sleeping bag, Monkey. Down and down the great slope, the sweetest ride, joy of speed, down and down and unstoppably down.