The Other Shoe (19 page)

“That's what it's tryin' to tell us,” said Henry. “It says, ‘Relax.' Says, ‘Wait and see.'”

“Relax? How I'd like to. Nothing on this earth
relaxes
me.”

“That,” said Henry Brusett. “
That
I understand.”

The crest, when they reached it, was sunk in trees and offered no view at all, but they had attained a ridge, and along that ridge lay a logging road quite familiar to him. The road became his new constant, though he knew that following it meant very many miles of gradual switchback descent. It offered, at least, that much certainty, and as they descended through the waning day, and as the drug began losing strength, Meyers felt himself dipped in nostalgia—he'd come to consider this hike the last episode of his youth, the last thing he could ever afford to do for the pure hell of it. Blithely still, he endured his blistered
feet and the ache that had clamped itself around his back during his struggles in the snow, and he felt an affection for Henry Brusett that seemed to come of nothing more than the fact that he was there by his side, making the same walk.

“Did you hear I was getting married?” Henry asked.

“No.”

“You're invited to come.”

“I'll be there.”

“You know Juanita Swan? It's her.”

“Juanita?” He recalled a slim young thing at a pancake supper, just pretty enough to be full of herself. “Has she got that, I guess you'd call it ‘red' hair?”

“Wild Abandon Red, yeah. She's gotta keep touching up her roots, so there's always a bottle of it in the bathroom.”

“So you've been living together, huh?”

Henry was proud to admit it.

“You like that?”

“I'm used to it,” said Henry. “No, that's not accurate. I should just say I like her, 'cause I do.”

“That's Sam and Elena's youngest girl?”

“Sam,” said Henry, as if he'd just stumbled upon him in the trees. “Oh, caahhh. I hope he never finds out about this. He would not understand. He would really, really not understand. I'm supposed to go saw logs for Sam pretty soon.”

“How would he find out?”

“Well, if I didn't get straight again, if I just stayed high.”

“We're okay,” Meyers said, “I'm coming down from it already.”

“Me, too. But I've still got a long, long way left to go. You believe this stuff? My brain's been rewired. Who knows how we'll think from here on out?”

“We're all right, Henry.”

“Yeah, I think so. I wasn't too sure there for awhile. That was gettin' to be too much. I stayed fairly calm, though, didn't I? I sure tried to.”

“We're fine,” Meyers said again. “I'm surprised it lets you down as easy as it does. I still feel pretty damn good, in fact. A lot better than usual. I get myself in a tub, I'll feel great.”

“My cheeks are tired,” Henry noted. “Usually you wouldn't smile that much. Those muscles just don't get used that much. Even so, this is no way to be, is it? Not for an old married man. And that's what I'll be. Soon. Real soon, if she doesn't get her period. She wants to be a June bride. Who wouldn't?”

“This is one little story, Henry, that we don't necessarily need to tell on ourselves—Our Big Adventure with LSD. Callahan, I don't know. You can never know what Mike'll say, but whatever he says, no one necessarily believes him.”

“You've always been an old man in the way you think. You think ahead, you think behind—that is a lot of work in your mind, lot more than I'd want to do. But I guess somebody has to keep track of things.”

“Old man,” Meyers complained. “My mother used to call me that. My own mother.”

“I don't think Juanita would be very happy to hear about this, either.”

“She won't,” said Meyers. “I don't see where she'd have to. You did all right for yourself, bud, and a little thing like this shouldn't screw it up. Should it? Altered states, they call 'em. We had our little go, and now I'm good. You? You think you'll need to do this anymore?”

“No,” Henry said. “Way I see it, I've gotta be a family man now. That's what I want to be.”

“And I,” said Meyers, “have got to get my ground in some kind of shape. So I've got that, and you've got your Juanita—boy, did you ever get the better end of that deal. There's absolutely nothing better than a pretty girl in my opinion. Congratulations.”

“Also, she makes the best french toast I ever tasted.”

They came into view of Meyers's land lying far below them, and the road went round a bend and into more trees, and they lost sight of the home place again for another mile and a half, so they walked on, and when it rolled into view again they were all but upon the meadow. “Look at Mike,” said Meyers. “Stretched out on the back of that flatbed like it was a Sealy Posturepedic. He must've finally worn himself out.”

He was not, at first, very convincingly dead.

Meyers called to him as they came, called him Sleeping Beauty and Creeping Doody and Lawrence Welk, but Callahan didn't stir. He seemed a little off-color, but they were still hallucinating mildly. Meyers pushed at Callahan's shoulder and it yielded. “Dream guy, wake up.” Then he knew, and he touched the hollow of Callahan's throat, and Callahan's flesh was cool and still. He slid the boy's eyelids back and there was no recognition or hope in them, and Callahan's hands, when Meyers took them up, were fish-belly white and cold.

Henry, having never touched him, reached the same conclusion. “No,” he said. “Not that. That cannot be. That just can't.”

Hoot Meyers walked circuits around the truck while Henry wept for a young friend, dead, so far as they could tell, of bad luck.

“I told myself this morning, ‘You better drive on by.' I knew this could not go right.”

“Mike,” said Henry Brusett. “Mike.”

“So what do you think we better do, Henry?”

“Do? Well, we take him somewhere, we tell somebody. You should know, Hoot. If anybody'd know what to do. Shouldn't we try and bring him around?”

“He's cold. Cold. The place to take him would be the hospital. We'd take him to the hospital, and they'd tell us what we already know.”

“Was it an overdose?”

“I bet he got just got too chilly. He must've quit moving, sat down to space out, and it probably didn't take long at all. It never did get very warm today. He'd been wet, no jacket, cold all day. Bet he sat down and keeled over. So, you say you want to take him to the hospital? That's where they'd start with the questions.”

“I'd like to know, for sure, how he died,” said Henry. “I think his mother would, too.”

“All right, then. And you want to answer those questions? You think you'll be in shape to be answering questions in an hour or two? Or less. What would we tell 'em?”

“What'll they want to know?”

“Listen to me. What we've got in our blood right now is a felony.”

“In our blood?”

“They'd autopsy Mike. They'd find it in him, I think. And—they'd probably want to know why we let him lay out cold until he died, too. There's another felony, maybe, that could be a bad one. They stack up quick, once you get started. We're way on the wrong side of this. What'll we tell 'em? Tell 'em we were only trying to help him out?”

Callahan's body had an endearing quality, like an infant in deep sleep.

Meyers pressed. “So, what do you want to do?”

“Crawl under a rock.”

“There's some good features to that plan.”

In under an hour they had shifted their day's work so that Callahan lay under many ton of stone, where he should always remain now that they'd committed themselves to add insult to injury and crush him so terribly. He would lie here for as long as they were ashamed of themselves, and that, as they had supposed from the moment Meyers had rolled the first rock onto Mike Callahan's chest, must be forever.

H
E GRADUATED
,
MOVED
home, and rented a cupboard of an office above the old bank. Immediately enmeshed in several divorces, Hoot Meyers bought the annotated fifth edition of
Professional Ethics for Attorneys
, which told him over the course of its two thousand pages that his loyalties belonged to whoever paid him first. It was a mercenary code, nothing he didn't already know, and the book was never to describe to his satisfaction just how he might honorably do the work he'd taken on. He'd become an instrument of the precise revenge that festers out of betrayed loves; he'd enlisted profitably in wars the combatants rarely wanted to end. As soon as he hung out his shingle the clients came to his office, righteous with old anger and new stratagems, and they were often disappointed at how little he shared in their outrage.

Do you know how many loads of laundry that man did the entire time we were married? One. Ruined my best summer blouse. Now he wants the damned washing machine?

Marital assets. Hoot Meyers charged his clients in six-minute increments to hear each new installment of their sad sagas, and he bore witness to that second, terrible intimacy where confidences are turned for use as weapons, and children become bewildered pawns. For someone new to the profession, he was making very good money, but it soon became clear to Hoot Meyers that so long as he was a paladin in family
court, the hairs in his nostrils would smell a little singed, and there'd be very few places or events he might attend in Conrad County without encountering someone who despised him, frequently with good cause. He tried not to reflect too much on the majesty of the law. He had very often to remind himself that all he'd wanted from the profession was a drought-proof crop, a cash cow, and it seemed he'd have that. Who was he, after all, to take exception to anyone's evasions? He made his living. He repaired equipment a generation out of use, and piece by piece he began to reclaim his grandfather's ground. He bought some red heifers.

Then one Friday night, an Independence Day, En Smith, longtime county attorney, stuffed with flank steak and angel's food cake and flush with bourbon and Seven-Up, ended his term of office at sixty-five miles an hour, asleep at the wheel of his Brougham. He left an office in such disarray that a number of local attorneys declined the commissioners' offer to replace him pro tem, but when the commissioners narrowed the field at last to young Hoot Meyers, he claimed the office at once, and he found that he made a ferocious prosecutor, a useful and resourceful hypocrite. He gained convictions. He stood for election and was elected, and in the security of his victory, he married Claudia Donabli, a determined little beauty with charcoal eyes, a supervisor of nurses, and eventually he'd be a father who bought his son a mare and a set of the
World Book Encyclopedia
. His properties were ever more populated by festive, thick little cows, and as his operation grew, he sometimes thought that it was all better than he deserved, better even than he'd intended.

It was shortly after his first election that Naomi Callahan made, unnecessarily, an appointment to come in to see him, and he was relieved when she came that she hadn't been wasted by grief as he'd almost expected. She still resembled a hale Mamie Eisenhower. An old woman all her life, with the prissy posture that comes of wearing
a girdle, she took his hand when he offered it and she grasped it in both of hers, and one soft talon traveled a bit up his arm and gripped him there, and she beamed bravely at him, too delighted at first even to speak.

“Well, look at you, Hoot Meyers.”

Meyers could not agree to look at himself. He offered her one of the creaking chairs he'd inherited from En Smith, wood that needed to be glued again in its joints, and she sat across from him with her huge purse by her side. Meyers had, as her student, made just such a purse himself and long, long ago given it to his mother, who had called it her hamper; it was a rude design of woven reeds that tended to fray after any use at all; Mrs. Callahan was forever sending her charges home with another artifact—she was strong on arts and crafts. And geography. Now her hands lay knotted in her lap, a little prayerful, and she seemed to think they'd made quite a success of him. “Just look at you,” she demanded. She sat among tawny stacks of first-series
Pacific Reporters
, books Meyers had just then been moving out of his office, and while these towers were no taller than the seat of her chair, she seemed small among them and surreal. She sighed, and the prow of her bosom rose and sank, that haven for so long to so many tiny heads—she'd been especially kind to her younger students. What could you say to such a woman? To Mike's mother? Poor Mrs. Callahan. He'd avoided her for quite a long time now, no easy thing in the county seat.

“I am so, so pleased for you,” she said, “and what you've made of yourself, and I can also say I'm pleased for the community, too, because we've needed a young man in here. Some real energy is needed right now in this office. So much more is going on these days.”