The Other Shoe (15 page)

B
EFORE
M
EYERS COULD
escape the courthouse on Monday morning, Commissioner Cornish had cornered him with an offer of free lunch at the Outlook, and before Meyers could take the first bite of his club sandwich, the commissioner had begun to pose hypotheticals about how a public official, an elected one, might safely cheat on his wife. Legally. Cornish seemed to remember reading something about some morals clauses somewhere. Was there such a thing? Who would they bind, and to what? The official's buckteeth were yellow and gray, and he wore a bolo tie, and he was far too proud of himself and nervous to be anything but the lothario in the clandestine fun he kept suggesting. The thought of this malformed fellow in bliss threatened Meyers's appetite. “Adultery?” he said, lifting his eyebrows, keeping his voice low, and investing the concept with dreadful majesty. The commissioner paled and excused himself from the table. Meyers finished his sandwich. He ordered and ate a caramel sundae, admiring from his alcove the misting falls below.

After lunch he met with the county sanitarian and Sam Baxter concerning Mr. Baxter's septic system, which was simply the overturned and buried body of a '57 Ford Crown Victoria. Baxter had come to inform them that he'd raised a dozen children, his own and some strays, on the garden patch that grew right above that septic, so he knew it had to be safe, and Baxter, a man no doubt decrepit from
birth and who breathed grievance like spores, rocked side to side on his heels, his eye always on the door. Nobody, he said, would ever convince him there was anything wrong with that septic.

“Maybe not,” Meyers told him, “but now it's come to my attention that you're breaking the law with this, so you know I can't let it slide. You need to get yourself one of those cast-concrete septic tanks, get yourself some real seep line, and some pea gravel. I'll grant you, everything does cost more these days, so I'll give you four weeks from tomorrow to have it done. If you don't, I'll get an injunction against you to where you can't even relieve yourself in your own toilet, and I'll get the judge to fine you a hundred and fifty dollars a day until you do come into compliance. We can go that way, if you want. You're poisoning that aquifer, Mr. Baxter. You'll have your written notice by tomorrow's mail.”

“Who votes for you?” Baxter despaired. “What kinda people would vote for you?”

“Not many,” said Meyers, “but I run unopposed.”

At two there was a hearing for young Jesse Jones who should be sent, Meyers suggested, to juvenile detention in Troy, and the boy's mother, Mrs. Loretta Jones, hung at Meyer's elbow wafting some violet concoction over them and constantly interposing, “ . . . no . . . oh, no, because he's really only . . . no, that's wrong.” The public defender argued that it would be unnecessary, that it would be contrary to the relevant statute and unkind to lock this young man up, but in the end the magistrate ruled for the state, and as Jesse was being taken off, he shot a leer over his shoulder at his mother, a grin of crazy triumph intended also for the county attorney. Still, Loretta Jones pleaded, “Wait. Now—wait, I'm telling you, I already told you this bruise was an accident. Really. This thing was my fault. I was, I was mad at him, so I said what I . . . If you just have to lock somebody up, why wouldn't you lock me up? For lying? Wait.
Wait.”

Then, before the public defender could get away to her office, Meyers caught up with her in an empty length of courthouse hallway to tell her, “I've decided what I can offer your salesman. The guy pleads to all six counts, max sentence on all counts, but to be served concurrent. I don't know if I'll ever get time to dictate it or get it written up, but that's what I'll offer.”

“Which is still six months in jail. These were some nickel-and-dime misdemeanors. Six months? Hoo.”

“Theft by fraud,” said Meyers, “to me is the worst kind. Gullible people tend to be poor. Thirty, forty bucks, that's something to them. It's the idea of the thing, the sleaze of it that kind of gets me. Guy cheats old ladies on make-believe cosmetics?”

“You're telling
me
about poverty now?”

“Giselle, he did this when he was Richard Rennat in North Carolina and when he was Charles Tanner in Colorado and Utah, Casey What-was-it in Oregon. You get the idea. And you can see by his record that everybody just keeps punting him. Well, he's Nat Dinley here; we've got him by his Christian name, and we've got him dead to rights, and he's gonna do some time for once. I'll suspend half of it if you enter your plea before next Friday. After that I'll file it as a felony, common scheme, and we can talk about years, if it's a few months he's afraid of.”

Meyers had the spare half hour then for some approximately urgent paperwork, but he used it instead to tighten the C-clamps that held his delaminating desk together, and, because he was already fading at three thirty-five, he thought to nap in his chair, but along came Mrs. Ingraham once again, still incensed about her missing dolls, and he told her, again, that they were gone, that unless someone put them up for sale on the Internet or tried to move them through one of the pawn shops he himself had contacted, unless that should happen, her dolls were gone. With her long jaw and linen jacket she was clearly
money, and she would not be accustomed to disappointment; Mrs. Ingraham neither appreciated nor accepted his pessimism. What, she wanted to know, were the police for? How could they let things like this happen? Her hands were long and regal and flew to illustrate the several points she wished to raise with him.

“It's sad, ma'am, I know it is. But you can't stand guard over everything.” Her collection had been featured in the
River Register
's Society section, and Meyers had seen it there, as had, no doubt, the thief. From a well-appointed couch a cluster of stillborn horrors had yearned, arms outstretched. “Priceless,” Mrs. Ingraham had claimed in the article, “almost literally priceless.” Carlotta, the oldest of the collection, had been in Mrs. Ingraham's family for four generations, more than a hundred years. Her tiny slippers were modeled after a pair worn by a lady-in-waiting at the Sun King's court.

Mrs. Ingraham was new to Conrad County, but Meyers believed she'd been a woman of influence somewhere, that she'd be well equipped and well contented to be anyone's pain in the ass. Palsy or rage? It was exhausting to watch her shake, and so when Moon Pope, the brand inspector, called from up on Bailey Peak, his call came as a reprieve. One of Meyers's cows, it happened, was stuck in a ditch and would likely drown in it unless he, Meyers, got up there pretty quick to pull her out. Meyers made a great show of rushing away in concern. “Got an animal in trouble. Gotta go. Nelda has your number, right? Soon as we know anything else, we'll sure let you in on it.”

Mrs. Ingraham continued telling him as he passed through the outer officer that something must be done, and she called to him even as he gained the hallway and was making his way at last to fresh air. Something must be done, she said, and he must be the one to do it.

M
EYERS MAINTAINED HIS
hobbyist's herd of six cows and a randy bullock if only so there'd be something to kick at him from time to time, and so that he'd have calves to pull in February and to brand at Easter. There had never been any money in beef, not even in those years when he'd shipped his calf crop to Omaha by boxcar every fall, but Meyers could not tolerate the local countryside without at least a few animals in it to wear the U-Bar-U high on their right rump. In 1903, his grandfather Felix Meyers had bought, sight unseen, a cluster of mountain springs and the hundred acres in timber and meadow immediately surrounding them up on the sunny southern hip of Bailey Peak. Old Felix would learn too late that his ground had been graded in recent geologic times by the advance and retreat of many glaciers, that there was no depth of soil here, and that nearly all of that sweet, free water would percolate through his rocky dirt to be of little use to anything seeking to grow in it; the Meyers family had contrived by one means or another to remain land-poor ever since.

Just inside the gate was the sawmill where Felix had milled the planks, timbers, and boards to build a cavernous barn and the tall, narrow, and narrow-windowed farmhouse now listing on its crumbling foundation out behind a shelterbelt of mountain ash and willow. Meyers called it the home place though no one had lived here these
decades past, and if his chores brought him here several times a week, still it seemed new and necessary to him every time he saw it—a poor patch of ground sloping away to a good view so that a man might feel superior just for standing on it. Passing up the lane, Hoot Meyers looked to the door of the barn loft and to his father's lone contribution to the place, the rust-stippled hubcaps Dusty had nailed in fanwise display and the whirling wind chime of license plates he'd strung on baling wire, hung from a jutting spar, along with the usual block and tackle.

The springs issued from the highest corner of the tract to feed a stock tank and a ditch, and, always prolific, they had run at full pool all summer. Only the day before, Hoot Meyers had been up to close the headgate of the ditch so that the runoff wouldn't overwhelm his pond below, which was choking on green silt so late in a warm season. Now, just below the headgate, the ditch banks were gluey mud, and he found his best breeder cow there, thrashing as he approached her through the pussy willows. Not fifty feet from a brimming, galvanized stock tank, she had chosen to drink from the ditch, and she was stuck in it, her hips upslope and well above her head, and her forelegs were sunk to the hocks in mud, and her rear legs sunk past the knees. She'd been struggling for hours, her every movement sucking her deeper into the clay. She had been flinging her head, and the reeds all around were draped with her slobber. She could only fight in fits and starts now, and she was near collapse, nearly resigned to dying.

Meyers took his boots off and waded out into the ooze. He got in front of the animal so that he could press his shoulder up into her brisket, and, hoping she wouldn't start to throw her head again, he shoved. He shoved again, much harder but with no more effect, and the cow laid her great chin on his shoulder. He backed away. He went to his truck for his lariat, and from the ditch bank he roped her, but even as he was dallying off on his bumper, he knew that he might keep
the cow up for a while this way, but that he'd never pull her out alive; the loop would strangle her if he were to pull it that hard. He lacked the rope to build a harness, and his gun rack was presently empty, but he did have his pocketknife, which happened just then to be sharp, and he considered this. Decency might eventually require him to slit her throat. Slit her throat and drag the meat out of the muck however he could, and no finicky concern then for the crushed windpipe or broken neck or legs. Just drag her out. But the mess of it. The hours of butchering to be done in the dirt; Meyers thought of the heavy dance he'd have to do with that poor, doomed creature in the mud, and he thought of the last several calves she'd thrown, voracious babies with something in their breeding that made them tender as veal.

He slid his boots back on and jogged back down to the old mill yard, and he was reminded of his age—his lope was no longer an efficient or comfortable gait even for going downhill. From the millworks he removed the long canvas belt that had driven the old mill's head saw, and he dragged the belt to the barn, which he entered. Spider webs soared through the shuttered light and into the gloom under the rafters, and from a clutter that was general and generations deep, he selected a singletree, a shovel, and, just in case he could not save the cow, a splitting maul. There was rope everywhere, but it had been nibbled by field mice and torn by pack rats and was unreliable. Meyers drove his tractor with its front-end loader back up to the cow.

In compound low, he walked the tractor up the dry side of the bank and nosed the bucket out toward her. If he pitched forward now, he'd have at least two things in the ditch, at least one of them, very likely, dead. He set his brake and switched the motor off. He removed his boots again and waded out to the cow with his armload, the long belt, and the singletree. He meant to get the belt under her belly and lift her, or at least bear enough of her weight so that she could scramble out. The apparatus would consist of the belt under the belly and
twisted in loops to receive the singletree, and he'd tie the eye of the singletree to his rope, and the rope to the bucket hoist. And pull her up. Meyers stood wriggling his toes in the mud, trying to imagine just how he was to accomplish all this rigging with just one set of hands when, providentially, Deputy John Lovell came in through the gate and up the hill in a cream white Corvette. To Lovell's possible credit, he used the Corvette no more tenderly than he used the sheriff's million-mile cruisers. The car passed into a grassy stretch of lane where its tires disappeared, and it came on like the gliding predator, but loud, continuously knocking and scraping, and as he came nearer he brought with him the high wail of an emasculate saxophone which persisted even after he'd parked. Some kind of mood music, Meyers guessed.

Deputy Lovell carried most of his weight in his hips and thighs, but even with this low center of gravity he'd never be much good off pavement; afflicted with every kind of clumsiness, he climbed the bank.

“John,” said Meyers. “I don't suppose you want to get dirty, do you?”