The Other Shoe (2 page)

“Pay me? What kinda person you think I am?”

He'd never seen anything like her, eyes as beautiful as Easter eggs, and sweetly and cautiously glancing off Teague as if he were someone of interest. In the cab of her truck she pulled two sweating bottles from her cooler, twisted their caps off. She toasted him, and the report of that faint collision traveled well up Teague's arm. This girl was the biggest surprise he was ever likely to encounter.

“Where you coming from?”

“Courville, Iowa.” How fondly he said it. How fondly he meant it. Home. “And Iowa City, too. School, you know.”

“So, whadda they say? In Iowa?”

“Say? About . . . ?”

“‘Cheers'? Or ‘Here's to Mabel'? Or what?”

“Oh. ‘To good health'?”

“Sure. You could use some.”

The beer tasted, he thought, like superior bread, and felt like quicksilver at the back of his throat. He tried to savor it, but his thirst wouldn't let him. He drained the bottle in three long pulls, burped in rapture into his soft fist. “Excuse me. But that is quite the . . . Are you Mabel, then?”

“Am I . . . ? Oh, no. That was just an example. Of something they might say.”

“Well, you'll think this is kind of funny,” Calvin Teague admitted, “but I took a vow. When I was thirteen, I was at church camp, and I told Pastor Stensvold I'd never touch a drop. Of alcohol. And I haven't
either. Until now. You wouldn't believe the grief I sometimes took at school. Even the real Christian guys in the house, everybody, they all loved this stuff. Now I see why. But, anyway, I wasn't too good at baseball or camp crafts, so I just took that vow. I was sort of caught up in the spirit.”

“What that preacher don't know can't hurt him.”

“No,” he said. “They say at home, what my folks always say, anyway, is ‘Ignorance is not bliss.' So I think I'll have to tell him, if I can still find him. I think if you make a vow, and then break it, you have to tell the person.”

There was wonder in the girl's eyes. “You are a straight shooter,” she said. “I like that. Or I think I do.”

His hands felt as if they were floating above his lap.

“I've never met a pharmacist,” she said. “Except for the ones in the drugstores, when they hand you your pills.”

“If I've passed my boards,” said Teague, gaudy in his honesty now. “And then when I'm certified, then I'll be, you know . . . ”

“Certified. Wow. I've never met anybody from Iowa either. Where'd you say you were goin'?”

“I wanted to see the ocean.”

“The ocean?” she asked. “The Pacific? Well, I couldn't get you that far, but I could sure feed you.” Her wrist was hooked over the steering wheel, and as she drove off with him, some of her braid worked free and issued like vapor from behind her ear. Everything he noticed about her was new to him, and extravagant, and sweet. It occurred to him that if she was tender at all it must be because she thought him an idiot. Calvin Teague, the third generation of Teague Drugs in Courville and Handy, Iowa. He expected eventually to live in a brick residence on Mill Pond Lane and to serve on the school board and the boards of the better local charities, and he thought he'd probably marry the deeply loyal Janice Hartnett who stood to inherit Hartnett
Seed; his ordered and placid life had rarely needed explaining. He was unfailingly pleasant and obvious and, really, there was not much to be explained. But, oh, to somehow convince this girl what a capable fellow he was, despite present evidence to the contrary, in spite of how she'd found him.

“You know,” he said, “I had it all planned out. Everything. I checked all the fluid levels and belts and the spare tire and everything before I left home. It was going along fine, too. Until this morning. I stopped to take a picture of an eagle, I think it was, a real big bird—oh man, the camera's gone, too—but anyway, when I got back in to go, the K car wouldn't start. So there I was, middle of nowhere, about a mile the other side of that Pair O' Dice bar, so I walked up there and must've had three cups of coffee before the tow truck finally came out from Red Plain.”

“K car? That's a Plymouth, isn't it? One of those old Plymouths?”

“Or a Chrysler or something. But mine's been very, or mostly, it's held up really well so far. I've made zero major repairs to it. Until now. Then in Red Plain, I find out it's the wiring harness. A fuse failed and the whole thing burnt out. They said it might be as long as a week before they can get another one because of the age of the car, which is not so old, or so I thought, but he said there's so few of these left on the road they're like antiques already—you should've seen the rubber on those wires.”

“I bet you went to Larry's Conoco, didn't you?”

“They were the ones who sent out the truck. They were the only ones in the phone book with towing service. But they did finally come along and get me, so I was very glad about that.”

“And I bet you talked to Larry.” She seemed dumbfounded at his haplessness.

He had been captive in Red Plain to a man with a prominent Adam's apple, a grave manner, and his name stitched on his shirt:
Larry. It had never occurred to him to disbelieve the serious mechanic. Now if, along with everything else, he'd been swindled, he didn't want to know about it. It seemed he was an oaf in nature, lost in the lay of the land, and also, possibly, a poor judge of character. “I only had a week and a half to make this whole trip,” he told the girl, “so I thought I'd just set out kind of hiking.”

“To see what you could see.”

“Exactly.” She understood him after all.

“But you're still quite a ways from the coast. Especially without your shoe.”

“Well, I wasn't, I didn't intend to . . . As I said, I'm in kind of a spot.”

She hummed a tune having to do, he thought, with a faithful dog, something numbing from kindergarten or Bible school, barely audible over her ratcheting engine. She turned off the highway and onto a dirt road threading first through cottonwood and birch, and then into an endless stand of ragged pine that crowded the road so closely as to form a corridor. A girl in huge boots. He never would have imagined.

“Sorry,” she said. It did not seem to him that she was yelling, though she was. “Scraped the muffler off last week. Kinda got high centered. It's pretty loud if you're not used to it.”

Less anxious about love than anyone he knew, he had always expected that it would come to him, eventually, in some stately way befitting his patience. A comfortable, durable love. He leaned out his window to clear his head; the air was turpentine. His sober self floated near, there in the gummy ether with Janice and his mother, and they were all disappointed in him. He was another man entirely than the boy he'd been this morning, but he knew that if he said so the girl would think he was getting carried away. As he happened to be.

“You married?” she wondered as if from far away. “Got a girlfriend or anything?”

He felt much as he had while sitting in the river; the girl had asked a simple question, she'd want a simple answer. “No,” he said.

“Any kids?”

“Kids?” Calvin Teague could not remotely see himself as a family man, not yet, but this girl seemed to think it feasible. Girls. Women. They were to him the furthest, strangest end of biochemistry. This girl, at least, did not seem deliberately to confuse. He liked her very much. She made a second turn and they began to mount a road that had in some recent season been a streambed, the surface was still channeled and the truck wallowed over it like a boat. “Forest Service always wants to close this road,” she said. “But so far they can't. 'Cause it's our access.”

“You sure have a lot of privacy.” He did not ask how much. Could she be alone here?

“Yeah,” she said, “I've always lived somewhere off in the woods. Always will, probably.”

“That's good.”

“Oh? Why's that? Good?”

“It's sort of everybody's dream,” he said, though it was not particularly his own. “Living off by yourself, you know, like Walden Pond.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Make your own rules, only responsible for yourself. That'd be pretty ideal for a lot of people.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “I think it's been way overrated.”

They came to a small clearing where an antique bulldozer stood mired at the end of its ugly work, the end of the road, an end of civilization. The girl's dog flung itself from the top of the load, and Teague flinched as it flew past his window. The dog's legs buckled on landing, but it bounced up and pranced to meet three penned goats, and these, in their own odd, stiff friendliness, pressed themselves to the edge of their enclosure in greeting. “Ethel, Jean, and Jenny,” said the
girl. “You just hate to get too attached to the little buggers, 'cause they don't survive real good up here—that's why we don't have a billy at the moment—but they get to be pets anyway. And then, the minute you're a little bit sweet on 'em, then along comes a cat and chews 'em up for you. Those cougars got long memories, too; they'll come fifty miles outta their way once they've had a nice snack on Fitchet Creek. Cats, coyotes, we even lost one of these little guys to a hailstorm.”

He followed the girl toward the trailer that must be her home. There was a considerable garden enclosed by chicken wire strung on tall poles; he recognized staked tomatoes and feeble stalks of corn. There was a pile of cordwood on a pitch of high ground, better situated than the trailer and about as big. “Fifteen cord,” she said, “give or take. And I've already sold quite a bit right off the truck, too.” She said she dealt almost exclusively in larch and that a truckload of it was worth an awful lot of money these days. “I'm dumb as a post most ways, but I do know where to find the premium firewood. Keeps me in beer and Cheerios all year long.” Her residence, parked in mud, was thirty-two feet long, ten feet wide, and sheathed in quilted aluminum. The ModernAire wore pot metal winglets as its crest, and it was flanked by a number of large wooden boxes. “Laying coops,” said the girl. Also attached to the trailer was a sleeping porch built of graying plywood and green netting; the girl led him into it and offered him the use of a lawn chair, and when he settled on it she stood above him, her fist on her hip. “You hungry? You like venison?” He so adored the color and pace and inflection of her voice that his pleasure in it often cost him the thread of what she was actually saying. It didn't matter. And if his legs ached for having walked so many miles on asphalt, that was also of no account. He was soaring; least of all was he hungry.

“I should probably try and call my folks,” he said, “see if they'll wire me some money.”

“You're miles from the nearest phone, honey.” As if he were a child wanting comfort and direction. “Why don't I just feed you? Myself, I've been dreamin' since noon about some fried spuds and a little bite of backstrap.”

The girl went inside the trailer and shortly, through the open door, he heard ironware resound dully on a burner. “We run most of our appliances off propane, the rest off the generator. When you hear that motor kick in every so often, that's the generator keepin' the meat and whatnot froze. People don't know how good they got it, just to hook up to the power line.” She began to hum again, and he heard her chop something, then oil spitting, and soon enough the odor of frying onions called up a general memory of boyhood. “This guy's quite lean,” she told him. “I took him outta season, poached him, you know. You don't mind eatin' illegal?”

He had never, not even legitimately, shot a deer, though he'd been on several expeditions for that purpose. He recalled himself walking through thickets in the narrow ravines that drain upstate grain fields—clumsy and loud, his borrowed shotgun rigged for plugs and sleeping like a babe in arms.

“I was out fishin',” she said, “and there was this little spike buck, and he kept hangin' down by the creek; I drownded a couple three worms, and there he still was, so I walk up to the truck for my .243, and when I get back down to the creek, he's still standin' there, not even browsin' anymore, just standin' there like he's been waitin' for me. So I shot him. Heart shot. Felt like I 'bout had to.”

He could no longer see her through the door; the girl did not have to move very far within the trailer to disappear in it. He tracked the sound of her boots on an insubstantial floor, heard her performing small tasks, heard a wood partition slide open at the far end of the trailer, which was not so far from him. She quietly lay down a scolding in terms he
couldn't make out. Her voice. No answer. Her voice again, a long pause, no answer. Talking to herself. Terribly, terribly lonely. He hoped so. Taking herself privately to task. But why? A cat, he thought, she must have a naughty cat, maybe a captive forest rodent living back there.

His thoughts veered wretchedly then toward Janice. His Janice, more or less, lodged in his imagination wearing a peach pantsuit. She stood behind some endless paper-covered serving table, offering food and pleasantries and subsisting nicely on her sense of duty, in her fog of old-fogey perfume. Because she was a nice person. A very nice person. Janice, who deserved better than his slim enthusiasm for her. Guilt rose up and sloshed back to the floor of Teague's being, all muffled. He felt very well. Drunk, perhaps. Unafraid, and yet acutely aware that he'd got himself pretty far into the wilderness.