The Other Shoe (18 page)

This, Meyers thought, was the first interesting thing he'd ever heard Callahan say. “Come on,” he said, “let's go.” He was not much concerned with the fate of Mike Callahan, but he didn't want anything too out of the way to befall Mrs. Callahan's son.

Callahan stood, crouched, and stood again in a surfer's stance, his legs thrust fore and aft, his hands and elbows cocked to balance him. “Eeewh, I don't know if I can get inside that truck. I mean, fit. Look at me.” A new impulse made him rock up onto the balls of his feet and remain poised on them, the ugly ballerina.

“Get your ass over here, and let's get down the road before anybody else comes along and sees you this way. Come on, Henry. You blistered, too?”

“Straight,” said Henry Brusett. “I don't think I'd care for it.”

They brought into the cab the smell of bundled air fresheners and, as an undertone, the smell of Henry Brusett's cowhide jacket. Callahan sat in the middle with an expression usually associated with private time, of shocked gratitude, and he quivered at the pleasure of being in his skin. “You know the way you've been led to believe, how the world is so heavy?
Wrong
.” Meyers posted up through the International's gears, and all through their whining progress to overdrive, Callahan
declaimed so as to be heard over it, “You can touch the hand of God, and it only costs you three dollars and fifty cents. And, Ireland? We're way better. Way better. Way better. Try saying that. That makes your mouth feel great.”

Callahan, under the best of circumstances and at the very height of his coherence, was never going to say anything useful, but there'd been a kaleidoscope lurking in him, and now he was not so easy to ignore. Meyers was somewhat jealous that so much lightness and facility had come to this callow boy so easily. Hoot Meyers knew only how to make sense, and it was always laborious. “Tell you what,” he said, “with a couple extra hands, I might move some rock. You guys want to make some money today, long as you need to get yourselves out of the public eye? I could pay you a little, but you'd really be earning it.”

“I should ride in back,” said Callahan. “Know how dogs ride, with their tongues hanging out?”

“If you were a dog,” said Meyers, “I'd let you. Now, try and jack down a little.”

They arrived at the home place that morning with the rising sun, and Callahan stood on a stump to embrace it, and he invited it to advance and see them and make them warm.

Meyers drove the truck along the lower perimeter of the property, and Callahan and Brusett walked alongside, loading rock onto the flatbed. Later, whenever he thought of this day, Meyers would always remember that neither of them had ever asked him why he might wish to do something so pointless as to move rocks from one part of his field to another part of it; they simply agreed to help him and never did think to ask after the purpose of what must have seemed, at least to Henry, a futile exercise. The boys, with no other options before them, had been along for the ride, and Meyers had been, as usual, responsible for all that happened.

The work was hard and clumsy, but Callahan, frolicking like a puppy off its leash, moved right along with it, and he said the sky remained stable, that the ground often whirled when he looked down. “But not sick, it's not like the drunk-whirlies—Not-At-All. I
will
say, I've never been
less
sick. In my whole life. Wow. Woohw. Every little breeze blows right through my whattayacallum? My intestines. I am so clea-ean.”

Henry, invincible in those days, a thirty-gallon barrel of a boy, walked along on the other side of the truck at a pace that would allow him to do whatever he was asked to do for as long as he was asked to do it.

Eventually Meyers, out of fairness to his little crew, and seeking to make them more efficient, thought he should abandon the brutality of having them lift the rock up and onto the flatbed, and so he fashioned a stone boat by pulling the hood off the resident wreck of an Oldsmobile, and by blowing holes in its nose with his .06 so that he might hook a chain to it, and with a clevis pin he attached the chain to the draw bar of a tractor, and with that they were off and running. Callahan and Brusett ran along behind and tossed rock into the loud hollow of the upturned car hood, and they described skid trails in the mud and gradually made a mound of rock on the upslope. Only when Meyers himself got thirsty—and this would be another source of shame in his recollection—did he think to offer the others a chance to drink. He'd worked them that morning like Egyptians. “Hop on,” he told them at last, and they boarded the stone boat, sitting side to side, and he slid them to the truck, where he got the pack of Fig Newtons he'd brought for his lunch, and then he dragged them on to the stock tank, and they drank like camels from the pipe that fed it, and Meyers tried to distribute his cookies as a snack.

“Not for me,” said Callahan. “The only reason I even drink is so it'll rain.”

Henry Brusett took one as a courtesy and he put it in his mouth and bit it. “People eat these things on purpose?”

“You have to chew it a little. What's wrong with that?”

“Well, it's glop, is what it is. Hadn't you noticed it's quite a bit like shit? Now I'm thirsty all over again, and what about all these seeds? Man, you should warn people first, before you give these things out to 'em. I mean, thanks and everything, but . . . hoo.”

With infinite care, with hands already stiffening from that morning's portion of work, Callahan turned out his hip pocket to catch some pennies and a nickel and a complex wad of lint, and some lavender scraps of paper about as large as his smallest fingernail, imprinted with tiny rainbows. “Three,” he said victoriously. “That's a lot. Of this. They said it was Sandoz, and I think they were right. I probably better take 'em before these get lost, too.”

“Nah,” said Meyers. “Now, you don't need any more. How long you been without sleep?”

“It's all I need,” Callahan declaimed. “Your problem is you think you've gotta sleep to dream. But there's dreams everywhere, if you know how to grab 'em.”

“Now you're sounding like the Navy recruiter, Mike. My luck, I'd catch a nightmare.”

“No. No. Look. This is it. I'd be happy to share. Somebody's gonna take it because it's a sin to waste. Be like the, like the, I don't know. The Host? Along those lines.”

“Neither one of us slept much last night,” said Brusett. “And I am startin' to wear down.”

“You think that's a problem?” Callahan was exasperated. They were simpletons, cowards. “Give me some men who are stout-hearted men.
Please
.”

Meyers and Henry Brusett had known each other nearly all their lives, but never very well, and now they looked from one to the other—for permission, for a better idea, for a wiser head to prevail.

“Well, I've see him work like I bet he never did before,” Meyers said. “So there's that to be said for it. But what's in his head? Would you want that? Can you get hooked on this, Mike? What am I asking him for? He could get hooked on milk.”

“I'm right here, Hoot. Quit talking like I'm not here. Because I am. Quit that. I am right
here
.”

“Sure you are.”

“Hoot, what are you tryin' to . . . do?”

“Forget it,” said Meyers. “Okay. Give me one. I'll try one.”

“You?” wondered Henry Brusett. “You're a college graduate, aren't you, Hoot? Kind of a goody two-shoes? If you didn't get in a fight once in a while . . . ”

“Can't even do that anymore. Littlest little thing and I wind up on probation, and, mind you, I'm the only one who got hit on that occasion. So let's just say it is a fool who hires out as his own attorney; you could also say Dean Sullivan was not too pleased with me, and I'm on probation with him, too. I've got to stay completely away from that kind of trouble now, 'cause they already think I'm the wrong orangutan down there at the school of law. Does this stuff ever put you on the fight, Mike?”

“It's love,” said Callahan, pressing a dose into Meyers's palm.

“Is that what it is?” Meyers was a legend of hard sobriety. “Then it's probably wasted on me.” He threw it into his mouth. “You just swallow it?”

“Leave it under your tongue,” coached Callahan.

Henry Brusett said that no piece of paper could be worse than the cookie he'd already tried. “So, I guess I'll take one, too. Maybe I better, if you guys are.”

Meyers's higher education had occurred in Missoula, a northern Babylon, and he had grown well accustomed to the reek of one incense and another, but he'd taken small advantage of the consolations of his age. The risks he took were not for pleasure, and he did not ordinarily aspire to happiness or enlightenment, but this morning he was tired of himself. A flake of paper in his mouth, not so significant there, not so flavorful as gum. Meyers didn't expect to achieve anything like Callahan's condition with it. He thought Callahan had probably taken too much, because that is what Callahan would always do, and Callahan was a right foil for any placebo or misconception or joke, a boy of far more imagination than intelligence and with no resistance to any passing fancy. Mounted once more on the driver's seat of the tractor, Meyers surveyed himself pretty steadily for any sign of change, and after what seemed a long while of feeling nothing out of the ordinary, he was reclaimed by the monotony of driving at four miles an hour. Let those escape who might escape, but it seemed he was stuck in a mind with plodding methods, and he'd written the experiment off as a bust and his spirit as an unapproachable one, when, and somewhat suddenly, he was overtaken by a new appreciation for the warmth, the lovely, pulsing sludge of his blood within him. An ember glowed on either shoulder, and in the space of several minutes, he was purged of every last reason to dislike himself. The boys skipped and giggled behind him, rough-looking sprites; the brim of Henry Brusett's sombrero rode up and down, the wings of a thick brown bird in flight.

They gave over entirely to play then, and they took turns riding the stone boat like a sled, sitting on it at first, and then standing and being pulled at a high rate over remnant drifts of snow, pulled across wide and slushy ponds where snow had only just melted, and as acrobats and nymphs they rode, and they fell without being hurt, were soaked to the bone without being cold. Their histories released all claims against
them, and they laughed continuously, a laughter at no one's expense, and they ran without becoming winded.

Meyers was never to remember just how or why it had come into his head to climb the mountain, and he could never specifically remember leaving Callahan behind. But they had. They'd been wild to climb, he and Henry, and with no forethought or ceremony they started up.

The climbing was very hard almost from the start; they were into thick timber as soon as they'd left Meyers's high meadow, and in the forest shade, the snow remained in many places waist deep. They walked without benefit of road or trail, and reckoned that they were headed in the right direction so long as they were going generally upward. The trees obscured their track behind them so that they could not tell if they were advancing straight or meandering. Birds and chipmunks disturbed by their coming raised a chatter, and Meyers heard it as threat, as invitation, as choir, and as telegraphic code. Upon snow that he knew to be undisturbed, he now saw living Mayan friezes crawl, flowers budding and blooming as from a heavenly soil.

“You feel like Ulysses, Henry?”

“No, I don't think so. But I can feel my heart pumping in my ass. That's not too bad.”

“You look around and you think, ‘Nobody's ever been here before. No man.'”

“They probably have,” said Henry. “Somebody else has been everywhere you go. They've been everywhere.”

“Well, sure they have,” said Meyers. “But it doesn't
feel
that way. Here.
Feels
like we're the first ones.”

“I don't have a clue what you're sayin', Hoot. And, if you want to know, I usually don't. Why do you say those things?”

“What do I say?”

“You know,” said Henry Brusett.

They walked for five hours without another word between them, and never more than ten yards apart. With his marvelous eyes, Meyers sowed spring before him in the forest, and the forest promised in return a big but very coy answer; a shattering understanding of the universe advanced just ahead of him through the trees, and Meyers could not believe that, having had his whiff of this, he would ever entirely or happily return to the old confusions. Implication ran riot in him, accelerating until he could only just manage the cataract of his thoughts by clinging to the one very simple and sustainable idea, and he climbed. There were more and more reasons to climb.

“If we don't get up to where we can see something,” he said at last, “I'm lost. You know where we are?”

“Cabinet Mountains,” said Henry.

“And if I asked you the time, you'd tell me it was the twentieth century?”

“We kind of know,” said Henry. “But, don't you get it? Here's what I've found out: You just
kinda
know. Anything.”

“I've never been lost before. This'll take some getting used to.”