The Other Shoe (24 page)

“Henry'll tough it out,” Meyers assured her. “He's been through a lot worse than this, and he'll be all right.”

It seemed to her that Meyers knew every living soul in Conrad County, frequently knew their whole genealogy and how they were likely to behave in a given situation. He graded people, like any livestock, much in terms of their breeding, and often quite accurately.

“I can't think of any other way to say it, so I'll say it again—you've got him in there on a charge you can't prove, and that's wrong.”

“Okay,” he said. “Then let me hear it from him. That I'm wrong. And why I'm wrong.”

“He's so . . . If I let him say anything at all right now, that'd be malpractice. Mal-something. I think he's probably trying to protect his wife.”

“Why's that?”

“I don't know, but at least I don't reduce my theories to writing, and flop 'em in front of a judge, and have some poor guy thrown in jail.”

“You've got the means to fix that.” Meyers propped his boots on the ruined quarter of his desk. “Here's the keys to the jailhouse: He can plead to whatever he did. He can make something up, for all I care. You can make something up for him, and who'd know the difference? Tell me some tale that's got a plausible defense in it. Tell me the kid fell down. Something. If this isn't what I've called it, just have Henry tell me so. I'll do about anything for him that I can, but what I can't do is back off altogether and pretend that nothing happened and nobody's dead. If I bailed on every shitty case I saw . . . I know it's thin, so I'll be real flexible, but I won't just pitch it. I can't. Henry knows that, too.”

“Henry knows? How do you know what Henry knows or doesn't know? At this point? The guy is too far gone. In some ways.”

“I hope not,” said the county attorney.

“I suppose he's another friend of yours?”

He knew most of her clients of old. The county attorney had surprised her at times with an easy sympathy for them. But the county attorney was privileged to decide when and where his sympathy was due. Giselle Meany's own compassion, too long overtaxed, had become a creaky mechanism, just another set of rules to trouble a girl when she should be sleeping.

“You want this taken care of? Go down and talk to your client. Give him a way out.”

“Hoot, what are you . . . ? What are you trying to do here? This is getting a little strange, if you ask me.”

“Have him tell me what I want to hear, and we can get this out of our way—business as usual—let's have that sad story and be done with it.”

“Jeezus, Hoot. Buck up. Did you really think everyone can always afford the truth? They don't even know it half the time.”

T
HE TELEVISION WAS
turned off, the talking died away by stages, and then, finally, when the toilet was no longer being flushed, Henry Brusett thought he might come out of his shelter. His own bowels had been demanding release for some hours, but as this was only one of several agonies, and not the most pressing of them, he thought he could stand it if it meant avoiding the other prisoners. When at last there was nothing to be heard in the cell but his own gurgling gut, he risked to lift the blanket and was met with the tired light from a bulb that was never extinguished and with a stranger's steady, hooded stare. There was a plate steel picnic table within a few feet of Henry Brusett's bunk, and the man was sprawled along one of its benches with his back to the opposite wall of the cell. A big animal, comfortable in its lair, the man was amused by and expected Henry Brusett's alarm at seeing him there. A trail of tattoo question marks ran down his cheek as tears. “Can I fluff up your pillow, prisoner?”

Now what? Henry Brusett couldn't fully straighten out of the S he'd made of himself on his bunk, and so he duckwalked to the back of the cell where a partial cinder-block wall was raised, the official concession to modesty upon which a flaccid two-foot penis had been inscribed. He opened his jumper and slid it to his knees. A black paste flowed from him the moment he sat down, a pudding acrid as
burnt metal, and he tried calmly to wonder if there would ever be an end to the ways he found to disgust himself.
FUCK YOU WENDY
was scrawled on the wall, and
THIS BUDS 4
U
YO
, and
ARE WE HAVING FUN YET
? When he flushed the toilet something more poured from him, something that smelled, at least, as if it had once been organic. Henry Brusett could not recall having eaten enough to account for so much waste. He flushed the toilet again, but the bowl hadn't emptied before he was forced to turn and embrace it, the chalice he'd just befouled, and his eyes bulged, and he puked all that was left in him, and then he puked to no good purpose, and after several twisting minutes of this he was very tired, and he rested with the stainless steel bowl for his cool pillow.

Then he felt himself rising away from it, hoisted from the head by his hair and from the waist of his half-mast jump suit, and this was not the passage he had wanted, that smooth ascent from the mortal coil; this would be his fellow prisoner's doing, the work of the man at the picnic table—Leonard, he'd supposed—for whom two hundred pounds must be a doll's weight. Maybe a squalid little death had come—which might do. Toes dragging, nose running, Henry Brusett did not even try to look around behind. He was flung into his bunk. “Don't you die, you fucking Lazarus. I'll abuse you if you die in here. County time is hard enough as it is without that. They tell us you're in here for murder, but you don't seem to carry yourself like that much of a man. Get a grip.”

It was the best advice he'd had, but a goal already out of reach. Henry Brusett wasn't equal for now even to the rebuilding of his enclosure, the reclaiming of his battened dark, and so he made a shell of himself again, but with eyes for Leonard, Leonard who had decided Henry was a kindred, a sufficiently lost spirit, and so he made like a friend to fill the wee hours with reminiscence and with four-square observations from his life as a detainee.

“I specifically
do not
like dead people. That's where I draw the line, because they're, well, they're too icky for me, and it's probably a good thing I'm squeamish that way, probably accounts for how I got to have a few glorious years on the outside. No bodies. After the reformatory, I had seven years there when I wasn't even on parole, and a Firebird with many extra horsepower, girlfriends, and none of this institutional-grade meat. Aw, it's pussy I miss. Pussy I grieve. No bodies, though, that's such a simple little rule of thumb. You can do quite a bit of mayhem before you ever catch any serious time—unless you leave a body—and that's where you made your mistake, Geronimo. But even if you're, you know, spotless in the mortality department, eventually they'll get around to calling you a sociopath, and you start to hear a lot of this raving about the good of society, and the next thing you know, you're just completely screwed. Sociopath? Isn't everyone? It's just a question of who's got the courage of his convictions. They say I may be eligible for parole if I can just exhibit fifty, sixty years of good behavior. I'm even wanted in Mexico,
cabrón
. There's a little country brothel down in Chiapas where you pay by the week and the girls have big, soft eyes, and the buying power of the peso is just unequaled, and I even ruined that for myself, so you might accurately say that I
am
incorrigible. But Conrad County? Con? Rad? County? I have never killed anyone. Weenies and green beans, night after night? For entertainment it's this one channel and the pamphlets the church ladies bring down. I've learned fifteen ways to get to heaven, sinner, but I've also read that King James Bible several times—every joint's got a Bible—and what they say is in it, ain't in it. Hope for mankind? Shit, that fucker's plague and pestilence front to back—and dirty dealings—isn't the gist of it they crucified our Lord? So for entertainment? Goddamn you stink, skunky—let's see, what do we do? You box these assholes' ears. Some of these guys come in here picking their teeth, I swear to
God, with a straw. So I like to make 'em shit their pants. What else is there to do? Think it's anywhere near six? They turn on the television for
The Morning Show
. April and her remote control—whattaya want to bet I get my hands on her some day? Yeah, but it's your county thing here, your steady string of drunks, and every last one of these local doozies comes in here oozing Old Thundermug, just
bleeding
it out their pores. Them or meth junkies, who smell even worse. Right now we've got a shoplifter, chronic shoplifter, and a guy sitting out some fines. Murder, huh? That's actually pretty good. We'll double-team 'em, pardner. We'll just scare 'em to death. You ever feel like you were at the top of the food chain? When Tweedledee and Tweedledum wake up, we'll have some fun with 'em. They just de-
mand
to be hurt.”

Henry finally managed to ask, “How do you get a shower?”

“Every five days they take us down to the shower room, whether you need it or not. Take you down one by one. You get about five minutes. Oh, it's the Bastille, Pierre, for all practical purposes. You want to try and find a rat to tame or something. I wrote to Denny Rehberg about our conditions, but believe it or not, the good congressman hasn't got back to me. So, anyway, best you can do is drag over to that sink and use it like a fuckin' birdbath, and some of these drunks can't be bothered, so then it falls to me and
I
scrub 'em down, and they come out very rosy, too. You play euchre? I'll teach you a game they call Calypso. That's just about an endless pastime.”

“Can you sleep in here? Doesn't seem like you sleep too much.”

“Sleep? That's not how I cope. In point of fact, I
don't
cope. They serve a decent breakfast, and that's the highlight of your day. I've been here twenty-one months, and night is day, day is night, and they tell me I've set a modern record for consecutive time in this bunghole. You thought they'd try to break you, but no, now you see, that's too much trouble. They just throw you away is all they have to do. Throw you
away, and leave you to your own devices. Let you break yourself. Ask me if I care. Fuck it. Bring it on. Life is good, or so I'm told.”

He went on without pause, and in time, Leonard's voice was joined by others, some of them long dead, and all the early ones were agreed—tough it out, they said—for that was the faith of Henry Brusett's fathers and the practice of the women of his line. Wait for it to be better, they said, it's all you can do, and for nearly all his existence, Henry Brusett had been as tough as any, more uncomplaining than most, but now he was someone else; arthritis made his old hurts new every day, and he knew he'd not quietly outlast it as he was supposed to do; no amount of patience or fortitude was to be rewarded. There was only the medicine now, and if it was ever long out of his blood then he began to be sick in every stitch of himself, sick, in part, just for lack of the medicine, sick so that his large muscles clenched, and his small muscles twitched, and his stomach ground away with or without anything in it, and he could feel his nerves misfiring, feel them weary of delivering the same old message. Without the drugs he could only wait for exhaustion to knock him out, and that was always much too long in coming. He'd been built for endurance, not understanding. It seemed he was regulated by a timing belt and that it was slipping.

B
USY HANDS SEEMED
the most reliable way to blur the fact that she didn't miss him very much. Karen Brusett had made Cream of Wheat for breakfast. Feeling stout, she went out to turn the heap in the compost bin; Henry had shown her this marvel of sweet rot, this way of making chocolate soil, but once again she noted how her husband was not quite the sum of his parts or of her remembrance. For all his presence here he was very much gone, and an absence of rather small consequence in her leaky heart. She fed and watered the chickens, fed and watered the goats. She milked. She hammered some Cape Breton reels she'd sent away for, and she read her horoscope in last week's paper, and all of it seemed a little luxurious. And poor Henry, locked up. Once, she had dreaded to be alone; now she relished it, and she was rewarding her husband very shamefully for how he'd helped her to this independence. In all the world she owed only Henry, knew only Henry, really, but there had been such a long sadness with his dwindling away, and she was tired of it. Still, she meant to do better by him.

Having once encountered Katherine Hepburn at the city library, coltish on the cover of an old
Life
, Karen Brusett had come to own a pair of high-waisted khaki slacks and several demure blouses and a string of fake pearls. This is what she sometimes wore to town, what she now wore when she expected to encounter other women there, or if she wished to be taken seriously. The townspeople seemed to think
her somewhat unclean in her usual mode of dress, and often they'd been right enough. She lived a little dirty, but now she had also taught herself how to apply lipstick, and how to do the essentials of a manicure with a pocket knife, and so she cleaned and groomed, and she put on her maidenly pumps and the perfume she'd got for their second anniversary, and she was driving in to see about her husband when a recurrent exhaust leak sprung once again from under the Triumph. A gray, fuel-rich vapor leaked through the floorboard at the shifter, and Karen leaned out past her windshield and into an onrush of clear air that scoured her eyes. Her hair, gathered in a bun, burst into capering strands, and wasn't she just the saucy gal racing to hop the mail plane to St. Paul? And still not cured of daydreaming.