The Other Shoe (21 page)

Henry offered the child in his arms to his wife, but his wife said, “Nooh, no,” and waved him off, and so Henry, his odd baby still on his hip, followed Meyers down the ladder into the cellar. The child was not alarmed, not interested, and its fixed face was yellow under the cellar's sickly light, and its hair was a shock of corn silk.

At each of the valves in the line, there hung a crescent wrench on a string. Meyers reached deep into a crawl space to open the last of these valves; the smell of pack rat was profound where he'd placed his head. Henry, working one-armed, opened the valve nearest the boiler; a hiss issued from either vent. Meyers stood on tiptoe to reach—as boys they'd used a footstool for the purpose—and, stuck in his balletic pose, he faced Henry's son, who stared at him with an infant's frankness, an ancient's recognition. “I think you can twist yours off now, Henry. I'll leave this one open till it really spits at me.”

Henry put his child on the floor, and he pointed to the concrete between its splayed legs and said, “Stay. You stay put, Davey.” He never looked away from the little one as he opened the firebox and threw in several tamarack blocks. The little one never looked away from Meyers, not even when his father scooped him off the floor again.

“It beats me,” Meyers observed, “how she kept this outfit down here from coming to somebody's attention. I can think of a couple, three agencies that would've closed her down right then and there if they had any idea about this boiler being here. This boiler was brought over on the
Mayflower
.”

“Newfangled. She hated that, didn't she? Anything newfangled. Remember how she made you use both sides of your paper? She was the original environmentalist and about the only one I ever liked.” Henry's baby struggled to free himself again from his father's arms, but in its sallow face there was no evidence of struggle, not even when the child used it to batter his father's chest. Henry set him on the floor again.

“My wife's pregnant,” Meyers said, “so I guess I'll be a dad myself here in a couple months.” Would Henry regard this as good news? Henry wasn't saying. “Henry,” Meyers went on, “I've been wanting to thank you. I saw that they came and talked to you back when Mike disappeared. Somebody came around and asked you about Mike, didn't they?”

“Did you notice? Not one person has mentioned him today. You'd think somebody would say something about him, too, since he was about the biggest thing she had. Him, not this school. He was by far the biggest thing in her life. You think people just got used to not talking about him?”

“I hate to say it, but I don't think he ever exactly springs to anybody's mind. Mikey didn't leave much of a hole in the world.”

“Yeah, but there wasn't that much wrong with him, and he was my friend, too. I haven't had many. But I kept my mouth shut anyway. Didn't I?”

“And that's what I wanted to tell you, wanted to tell you how much I appreciate that. You really had a lot less to lose—if we . . . I know you wanted to do what was right, and instead I let you get caught up in the worse thing I ever did. You didn't have to be, Henry.”

“I went along with it easy enough. We were out of our minds, or I know I was—I don't take so much as an Alka-Seltzer anymore. After that.”

“I only ever talked to her that one time,” said Meyers. “After. But that was enough. It came into my mind, not every day but pretty
damned often that I should tell her, and every time I decided against it. So here I am at a good woman's funeral, kind of relieved about it. What a specimen. Well.” Meyers flinched and reared back. “There. There, that's nothing but steam. I think we finally got it purged. At least she's done wondering now.”

Henry stooped to keep his baby from crawling onto the boiler. “We never did have that wedding,” he confessed. “Remember, I said you'd be invited? We just never had one. Kids came along, and we never had time for it. I guess we're married, anyway. Common law.” Henry had then given his hair and beard to do what they liked, prophet-in-the-wilderness style, and he'd been given this horrid family.

“I know Mike was your friend,” said Meyers. “I didn't mean to make light of that.”

“This one,” Henry said of the child, “they make up a new test for him every few weeks, and it's a thousand bucks here, a thousand bucks there. He's just a strange, strange boy, Davey is, which is about all these tests have told us. They don't quite say why. It's too much for Juanita, so I have to hire sitters for him when I'm off in the woods, and I'm off in the woods all the time so I can pay for everything. One thing leads to another.” He picked the child off the floor again; its grubby body went rigid in his arms, and it turned to stare once more at Hoot Meyers. The baby's mouth hung slack, but there was intelligence enough in its eyes.

H
ENRY
B
RUSETT HADN
'
T
lasted long without his medicine. The walk back home from jail had hurt him, and he couldn't make the pain subside at all, so within a few days he gave in and scuttled around to different druggists in different towns to get his many prescriptions refilled. He traveled his two-hundred-mile circuit for Lortab, and Lorezapam, and Percodan, and Percocet, and pills with names unknown to him, and pills to help him tolerate other pills, and then home again to that buoyant wait for nothing. One of the pills, or some combination of them, commended him in his weakness, so he took them all to be sure of the effect, but no matter what he took, he could not subdue the new alertness in him that had come of killing that boy, and not all the knockout drops ever concocted could make him sleep through the first few hours of dawn. These were, he suspected, precious days.

He would sit by his wife's bed to listen to her breathe and mumble, to watch as gray light crept through an oval window and slowly sketched her where she lay. It was how they had been conjugal, but now when she woke and saw him there beside her she would weep—so, so unequal, she said, to all that blessed love. Rather than see her cry, Henry Brusett began to spend the early hours in the garden, often on hands and knees, on soil damp with dew and radiantly painful in all his joints. He liked to eat a carrot straight from the ground. He
liked how, in the midst of any apocalypse but winter, there was always weeding to be done. Day followed day. Karen went out to pick huckleberries and came home with a quart jar well filled, and they made their fingers, lips, and guts an inky purple.

She'd begun to speak of a time when her husband would be healthier, and of how they might live in a place where he could more easily get around. “Somewhere with, like, sidewalks, and where I could get a decent job. Regular money. I'm sure we could do that if we put our minds to it—live in society. Like everybody else. I mean—
they
all do. Maybe we should try it now.” Why not, she wondered, give the goats away and make gumbo of the chickens, and just kind of try for once living among other people? They both knew, however, that his wife was as much society as Henry Brusett would ever willingly tolerate. After a week had passed and still the police hadn't returned, she was made so bold as to ask him, “Do you think you might have any sperm I could possibly use? 'Cause I'd sure like to have a baby while we're still . . . I'd like to have a baby is all. You know. It's what you're supposed to do. I say we get off all these bad habits and get on to something better.”

She'd taken to playing the tune about someone's daughter far away, the rolling river, and Henry Brusett, her constant audience, heard her devise a dozen variations on the theme, and from his comfy, fuzzy hell he was determined to listen so long as she was inclined to stroke the strings.
Shenandoah
. This was a most satisfactory world, but a small one, and he expected to fall or be pushed off it at any time.

A visit one morning by Deputy Lovell ended the suspense. “Mr. Brusett,” said the plump young lawman, “I am Deputy John Lovell of the Conrad County Sheriff's Department. Henry Brusett, I meant to say—you are Henry Brusett. Anyway, I've got a warrant for your arrest.”

“All right. Can you let me get dressed? You caught me right in the middle of a bath.”

“Could you go for a cup of coffee?” Karen asked the deputy. “Or are you in a big hurry?”

“The charge,” said Lovell, “is deliberate homicide on Calvin Teague, so that means it's pretty serious.” Deputy Lovell made rapid mention of Henry Brusett's many rights. “Do you understand these rights I have said to you?”

Henry held a knot of towel at his waist, his gourd of a belly rolled out in a furry, rude display. “Yeah,” he said, “but can I get dressed?”

The deputy searched the pockets of the prisoner's jeans, and when he found them empty, he watched Henry put them on, and then a sweatshirt, and then his boots. Lovell took him out and shackled him close, his wrists and elbows secured to the belly chain, his strides hobbled to six inches—all this though no one imagined that Henry Brusett had the will or the capacity to run. Karen followed along at his side, arms tight across her chest and mouthing a long message, not one word of which he understood from the gyrations of her lips. But he made a quick dip of his chin as if he did understand, and then, just as he was being tucked into the back of Lovell's cruiser, she asked him aloud, “How long you think you'll be?”

“Longer than I can go without my scrips, honey. My cousin Tubby's a jailer, so . . . Oh, and you might want to pick that corn tomorrow. Tomorrow's the day.”

Lovell, driving away, examined him fairly constantly over his shoulder, tight-lipped and tense about it, and Henry Brusett found that, though he was a murderer, he did not care for the deputy's pissant disapproval. He found once again that the presence of another human being filled his veins with hissing apprehension. Of all the horrors then marching through his head, the worst and most repetitive of them was the thought of the crowded life he was now likely to join. The deputy
wanted small talk. “You get any fishin' done this summer? I see you had some tackle up on your porch.”

Sere forest. August drought, the first of Indian summer.

“Judge wants to see you right away. A case like this, everyone likes to do the exact right thing. Make sure, you know. You want perfect procedure every step of the way, 'cause you're lookin' to get a real high conviction rate on your homicides.”

Henry Brusett's pulse surged against the drugs; he never had any secure notion of what to say, and rarely had there been much refuge in saying nothing.

“But who knows?” the deputy speculated. “Things might not be as bad as they look right now. Look on the bright . . . Well, you never know how things'll turn out. We got quite the legal system. You ever pray?”

Henry looked away.

When they reached the highway, Deputy Lovell, stung a little by Henry's unsociable ways, hit his lights and siren, and they made ninety miles an hour getting to Law and Order, and when they reached it, Lovell hustled Henry straight into a holding cell, and he said, “They'll book you after. So just sit tight, all right? Good luck, I guess.”

The room was small and hard. His breathing echoed bluntly under the noises bouncing through the jail. There was a bench along the wall, and cinched as he was, the most comfortable thing he could do was sit on it and stare at his knees. From some other cell laughter burst now and again from a cheap television. Riveted walls, all within arm's reach, a drain in the floor, the itch of old disinfectants in his nose, grain alcohol chief among them. This was not temporary; this was also not undeserved, but he had no reason to believe he could stand it. He wanted to tell them he was guilty and then to say no more.

In a near room a load of laundry ran through a washer, and then a dryer, and the machines could be felt pulsing in their turn through
the floor. A meal was served in the jail, but Henry wasn't fed, not that he wished to be—only evil could come of anything he might trust to his stomach. The rhythms of the television and other barely audible events marked the passage of time, and at times a banging developed somewhere nearby. He had the comforting sense he'd been forgotten, misplaced, and when at last the cell door swung open, regret rushed in on a draft of fresher air. A pleasant young woman in riot gear and a ball cap awaited him in the hall. “Mr. Brusett.” She smiled and held fast to the black baton on her belt. She stood with her legs well braced. “Everything all right?”

He was greasy with fear. “Sorry, I sure never meant to smell this bad.”

“You're a rose compared to some of 'em.”

“Does Tubby still work here? Tubby Ginnings?”

“He's been night shift,” she said. “Sorry you had to wait so long. They were gettin' everybody rounded up. Lotta times it's just me and the accused guy at these things, these initials. So, see, you're kind of a big deal now.” The girl's eyes and mouth were too small for her face and somewhat misaligned. Thrust up by a Kevlar vest, her arms rode out and away from her torso like a wrestler's. “Well, let's get this done, Mr. Brusett. See what they want to do with you next.”

The office of Aaron Mendenhal, justice of the peace, was filled like any other in the courthouse with houseplants and mementos from the home lives of bureaucrats, in this case a broken oar mounted on a wall, a bicycle wheel, and there were photographs of many Mendenhals, ranked by generation. The judge was robed and so ugly that it was hard to see any connection between him and the happy subjects of his family pictures. Henry Brusett could find no way to look past the spray of blackheads, the cratered nose, and even briefly into the man's eyes. The judge spoke of the state of Montana as if it were someone else in that already-crowded room, someone unhappy, and he spoke
of proceedings in another court, orders signed by another judge, and Henry Brusett stood as tall as he could make himself just before the desk on a patch of linoleum worn gray by worried feet. There were three of them behind him—the dumpling jailer, still winded from their climb to the third floor, and Hoot Meyers, and a sharp-chinned woman with a smashed mouth who wore a dark, heavy suit.