The Other Shoe (11 page)

On their first Christmas together, Henry gave her a hammer dulcimer with a rosewood sound box and hammers worked in yew. “Those pegs,” he said, “I had to buy. For those I had to send a bank draft all the way to Birmingham, England.” He gave her a tuning fork as well.

“You made this, Henry? This is the most beautiful thing I ever saw in real life, but, honey, you know, don't you, I'm not one of these skillful people? You might've kinda wasted this on me.”

“I've seen you shoot.”

“Yeah, but I don't think that would have much to do with . . . ”

“And I've heard you sing.”

“It's just, I don't have a very complicated mind.”

“Oh,” he said, “it'll get that way.”

He then showed her a deed naming Mrs. Henry Brusett a joint tenant on a 10.8-acre parcel in the Diamond Peak Ranger District—the accompanying map showed them surrounded on all sides by miles and miles titled to lumber companies or the federal government. “Joint tenant,” Henry explained, “means that when I die, the property is automatically yours. It is anyway. It was yours as of last Thursday down at the clerk and recorder's. Joint and undivided.”

“Henry.”

“Makes for a hideaway. Or you could sell it, get something else, do something else if you wanted. Should be worth a little something with the improvements and everything.”

“When you die? Henry, that's a topic I don't care for, okay? It's just gruesome, to get into that.”

“Well, I don't have any plans that way. I mean, just in case.”

“Please,” she said. “We're practically still on our honeymoon.”

There would be no honeymoon, for theirs was not that kind of marriage. Her portion was his kindness, and he could not be other than kind to her, and she found this very comfortable. But Fitchet Creek was, just as Henry had warned her, in the middle of a snowbelt, and in those months when the snow was deep, it was necessary to park the truck down on the main road, and eventually they rarely left the place at all, and their little residence became, just as Henry had said it would, close and steamy as a womb. In winter his bones attacked
him, and he could endure the pain but do very little else while it was at its worst, and Karen, having found herself essentially alone again, learned in their first winter together to play all the tunes in a book called
Soldier's Joy
. In winters to come she learned to play them at tempos so hot her hammers blurred above the piano-wire strings.

S
HE HAD BRUISED
her heel walking barefoot, and the last half mile home was an unbalanced agony, a window into her husband's life. The shower shed had been encircled with wide yellow tape, and she found Henry out on the sleeping porch, sitting on an overturned five-gallon drum and wearing only the fat man's jeans they'd given him at the jail. In five years of marriage, this was the first she'd seen of his naked torso, his naked feet, the first she'd seen of his many wounds. He wore a towel over his head and breathed vapors he made with a camp stove and water on the low boil in a saucepan. From out of his depletion he looked up at her, a bead of sweat at the tip of his nose. The flesh around his eyes was so swollen and discolored that she thought at first they'd beaten him. “You're home,” he said gratefully.

“Does that tape around the shed mean we can't use the shower now?”

“I'll hook the propane up so you can get a hot shower inside.”

“That's all right,” she said. “I can do that. Can I see your back? Maybe I shouldn't ask, but can I?” There was damage on it he mentioned infrequently but lived with always, an injury with which she, too, had been living.

“You don't want to see that.”

“But I do,” she said. “You're my husband, and it's time I put my foot down and took a look at you.” She went around behind him. A rope of raised tissue snaked down his shoulder, down and across his back, and into the waistband of his secondhand jeans; lesser scars, livid little starbursts, clustered all around it. “No wonder.” She touched the rubbery mass where it passed between his shoulder blades, and he didn't shrink from her touch, and she thought it might be warmer than the flesh surrounding it. But she had small experience of his flesh, healthy or hurt. “They tell me that when you break your back, usually it gets the spinal cord, too. Which don't heal at all. I could've been baggage. Could've been dead. Very elastic spinal cord, they told me. Some guys get all the breaks. Honey, hand me that shirt, would you?”

“It's all right,” she said. “It's hot in here. And where do you think they got this thing? You gotta wonder who came in wearing it. Let me get you one of your own, honey. I thought this would look worse. Well, no, it looks pretty bad. But you get over it almost right away. Seeing it. You think something like that scares me?”

“It's too ugly,” he said. “Know how many times I've seen that thing myself? Too ugly for me, anyway. You've got to rig up some mirrors, and—I've seen it twice, which'll be plenty.” He put the shirt on and sat again as he had been sitting before, as if he'd just been kidney-punched.

“They would've rode you home, Henry.”

“You know how I am.”

“Yeah, but to get yourself all crippled up over it—for you that was a dumb kinda walk to take. Looks like they let you wear your own boots, though. Mom'd call that a blessing.”

“I think those people, those cops and everybody, they might be comin' back. If they got to lookin' around in the medicine cabinet, or my room, I could get into quite a little trouble. More trouble I
don't need. Those authorities find a couple hundred sample packs, they know you must be some doctor's special little buddy. Couple guys writing the same prescriptions, they find all those bottles, and pretty soon quite a few people could be in trouble.”

Regret was in everything this morning; she felt anemic under it. “I can't get used to thinking of us as criminals. Can you? Are we? We must be. If you stop and look at it, we were already breakin' quite a few laws. Just the way we been livin'. I been known to cut forty, fifty cords of firewood on one five-cord permit.”

“Yeah, we're some real desperadoes, honey. Look, we've had the right principle—just stay out of sight. We let everybody alone, they let us alone. That works, as long as it's workin', but now we're somebody else's business. That won't be good. I feel very bad about what I did, but so what? That kid's still just as dead. So I don't know what happens now. I don't even know what should happen.”

“You did what you thought . . . ”

“I did what I did,” he said.

“You think they're comin' back?”

“They said they might. One of those deputies did. He could've been woofing, but they might be comin' around. To investigate. Though I can't see where there'd be much left to look at.”

“There wasn't much, was there? Just . . . That dang water heater burns so much propane, I really hate to go back to usin' it.” Henry was sometimes no better company than a hundred-pound sack of potatoes. Henry and his old hurts, Henry and his new ones. “I didn't tell anyone,” she said. “Not anything. Did you?”

“With all those people around? All of 'em lookin' right straight at me? I was lucky I didn't swallow my tongue.
Couldn't
say anything. They saw how much it bothered me, so then they make it a point to stare you down. How could we have got any farther out of everybody's way? We didn't go lookin' for trouble. Did we?”

“One thing we could do, we could just go ahead and tell somebody what happened. I think we'd only have to tell one person. That should be enough.”

“What happened? What do you think happened?”

“Well, you thought, you must've thought . . . ”

Henry's head swiveled in the negative.

“But you could still say that you thought—something.”

“No,” he said.

“You wouldn't have to lie. Everybody, and I mean
every
body has been tellin' me not to say anything. So I think that's probably right, don't you? If we just didn't say anything? At all?”

“Want me to get that water heater hooked up?”

“No,” she said. “I can do it. It'll be nice to feel a little bit clean again.”

But first there were her morning chores, for which, this morning, she was grateful. The goats were restive and hungry. The nanny Jenny, previously mute, had lately developed a tremulous, heartrending bleat, and she met Karen with this, and it sounded the whole time that Karen milked her. Two days earlier, Jenny had eaten a pair of black jeans that had blown off the clothesline and into her pen, and her milk was still gray with it. Nature. Karen weeded the garden with her short hoe. She picked and ate a tomato. She unloaded the truck and shored up a collapsing corner of the woodpile. She stacked some orphan tires. While the police and ambulance people had been there the night before, she'd known a ludicrous moment of embarrassment about how hillbilly they'd let the place become, the clutter and half-assed geegaws everywhere, and just plain garbage. So Karen went about clearing up, and picking up, and she established a burn pile and made a layer of order on the clearing, and only when she'd made it presentable did she happen to think that her sudden tidiness must surely seem suspicious in the eyes of any return visitor. Well, suspicion would be thick on the
ground now, no matter what she might do or not do, and having seen Fitchet Creek through the eyes of strangers, she'd been ashamed. It was half past two in the afternoon, and she was not at all tired, or not in any useful way.

Karen, very ripe, decided that she must bathe at last, and she attached a propane canister to the small water heater that served their bathroom. When she'd lit the heater's pilot light, and as she waited for the water in the tank to warm, she saw that the shower stall had grown a film of mold during its time of disuse. She got a bucket, a brush, and some liquid bleach, and she stripped and went into the shower stall like an avenger, scrubbing. She began to cry. She cried, recovered, and cried again, all the while leaning into the scrub brush with both hands. Breathing caustic fumes, she nearly fainted, and so she finished the job with a milder solution, and then at last she cleaned herself, draining the hot water tank. She dressed and asked Henry if he was still not hungry. He said he was not, but she gave him peanut butter anyway, a smear of it on a slice of an early apple. He sat on his bucket, barefoot, and she saw how one of his big toes jogged in at a sensational angle.

“I've been a little shaky,” she said. “What about you?”

“Me too.”

“You scared? I am.”

“Not yet,” he said. “Not like I will be.”

“All right, but . . . Henry, was it just your extra pills you threw away, or was it everything? 'Cause I, I don't think you can stop like that, all at once, because you been, well, you know. You been on it so hard for such a long time now. Much as I'd like it if you could, I don't think you should try and stop all at once that way. Try and do that with everything else that's going on right now? Too much. I don't think it's a good idea. You better try and come down easy, huh?”

“I was a man once,” he said. “Good, bad, indifferent—I couldn't tell you, but I used to be some kind of man.”

“I'm not sayin' anything,” she said. “That's what I decided to do. They don't seem to know too much. They can't seem to figure it out, so I'm zippola. It's my right.”

“Do you know what you pay for that right, honey? I'd just as soon you told 'em what happened. I really wish you would.”

“You could,” she said. “In fact, you're the only one who really, really knows. Why don't you?”

“I keep tellin' myself I was addled. Like it would make a difference.”

“Oh. But it does.”

“I've been poor me in my own mind, and now that's all I am. You get to feelin' sorry for yourself, and before you know it you're . . . it's like the old-timers used to say . . . you know, I'd be kind of offended if you did do anything to protect my sorry ass. Why get saddled with some story you have to go on repeating the rest of your life? It'd be beneath you.”

“No,” she said. “I stay quiet. That's what the guy said. You know a Hoot, a Hoot somebody-or-other?”

“Meyers?”

“He's that main law guy? And he told me to stay quiet. I caught a ride with him, and he said we'd be okay if we stayed quiet. Which I don't understand, but that's what he said, and he told me to be sure and tell you, and I think he kind of said he liked us, and so we'd be okay. But, does that sound like a trick to you, Henry? You know him, don't you?”

“No trick,” said Henry.

“And you know him?”

“I used to. He's probably about the same as he was. Same person, more or less.”

“Then . . . we're okay?”

“I doubt it. I'll have to pay for this one, I think.”

“Henry. Don't be that way. They don't know who he is. I get the impression they can't do very much about it if they don't know who the person was that died.”