The Other Shoe (27 page)

“You'll be all right,” Tubby said, “if you start eating something. We've got old Germaine back in the kitchen again, and she's not too bad a cook, either, so you better get up and eat when I bring it. Keep your strength up. Keep that asshole from getting any extra cake.”

“Good cook?” Leonard could not let this pass. “She boils hot dogs. And what would your idea of
bad
food be? We get the sweepings off the slaughterhouse floor—in my opinion that woman, that Germaine of yours, must be a miserable, miserable human being.”

“One square of cake for you, Leonard. That's all anybody in here is entitled to.”

“Waste not, want not.” The big inmate leaned down and past Tubby, who cringed a bit, and he looked in upon Henry Brusett where he lay, and he offered him another strain of advice. “If I were you, old-timer, I'd go ahead and fast. Why not, considering the alternative? Why not do a Bobby Sands?
That
was an outlaw. Brits couldn't hold him, could they?”

Having let Leonard get in behind and above him, Tubby was crouched at the edge of Henry Brusett's bunk with no ready defense and no line of retreat. He sought a lighter, friendlier tone. “You mean that lounge-type guy? You mean that old singer they used to have? Was that the Bobby?”

Wide awake now, Henry Brusett closed himself in again behind his blankets to wait to feel better, and he lay for a while supine, and then he lay by turns on either side, and then face down, and then he sat up for a time, not all the way up as the bunk above him wouldn't permit it, but with his arms angled behind him like the legs of a deck
chair. Pain management. He wished to be more alone in this. Deeply and conscientiously he breathed himself in—in and out slowly through the nose, until his nostrils were chapped with it, and still he felt as if he'd been gripped at his shoulders and feet, that vast hands were twisting him, and at times he'd catch himself groaning, and then his good leg also cramped, and his hamstring seized so hard and suddenly as to jerk him off his steel rack and hold him arched up and away from it for a long, long moment. Finally the muscle unbound, and he lay back. Eventually, some of the pills took hold.

There was Leonard's voice and two others beyond the blanket, a small society of inmates gathered at the picnic table, just feet from his head. The younger voices, dog's-belly voices, spoke of things from the television, of actresses and other personalities and of how they should properly be used. One of them went on for a time with his opinion of the expensive brands of toilet paper advertised so heavily at that time of day. These prisoners seemed not to have guessed that they were stupid, and so they kept offering bad jokes and juvenile boasting, and all of it in the dangerous hope of somehow pleasing Leonard. Leonard suffered them to say very little, but these muffled, vacant youth were too dull ever to be entirely discouraged.

“I can't believe,” said Leonard, “that you'd brag about shooting a helpless animal. You sick, sissy little prick. What are you—humming now? There'll be no humming, goddamn you. Unbelievable. The company I keep. That old hipster in there, he's got the ticket, blitzed out of his mind on some fine pharmaceuticals, opioids I'll bet, and look at me. Shit, do I not suffer? Priscilla, you better quit crimping that fucking hole card; I happen to know that's a jack or a queen. Who's suffered more than I have? I've got pain. I've got people in here humming, cornpone willies, it is just completely beyond the pale, and next I suppose somebody breaks out a harmonica—but do they ever bring me anything for
my
pain? They'd never dream of it.”

When at last Henry Brusett's jaw unclenched, he forced himself up and out of his gray sanctuary and to the sink. He made himself naked before the other prisoners, and they appraised him as meat gone bad while he bathed. He scrubbed himself entirely, washed out the washcloth, and scrubbed himself again. If a man had to mortify himself, then he may as well be thorough. He knelt before the sink to get his head under the faucet, and even the city's chlorinated water was an improvement over how he'd smelled before—on no account was he quite so ashamed of himself as he was ashamed of how he'd come to smell.

“That,” Leonard told the others, “is your classic whore's bath.
That
is a guy they just can't disturb. I mean, what could they possibly do to him? Look at him. What'd you get blown up, or what? Glad to see you getting clean; that was my one and only gripe with you, but now you're remarkably clean.”

Henry Brusett also washed his jump suit in the cup-sized sink, and he wrung it out and put it on again, and he sat on the concrete floor to wait for it to dry.

“A
gentleman
,” Leonard instructed the others. “Finally a serious man in here on a serious charge, and how can you even hold your heads up in the presence of a gentleman? Sir, I never asked your name. What do you like to be called?”

With no hope now of being ignored, Henry Brusett surrendered his name to them.

“Why don't you come up here and sit with us?”

“I'm fine.”

“See? See that? Says he's fine. Somebody made hamburger outta that guy, but there he sits on a concrete floor, telling us he's just fine. Take notes, you pussies, and you might learn to conduct yourselves with a little dignity.” Leonard dropped to the floor and, with his hands formed in a triangle directly beneath his heart, and breathing like an engine, he did 160 correct push-ups.

Henry Brusett knew that to lie down again just now would be intolerable, and he saw that he'd need a certain ration of light each day, even if it was only this light, even if it meant being in this company. When lunch came, he made himself go to the picnic table for macaroni in margarine and oily coffee that proved savory and bracing. Now the octagonal pill was working, the one he took against the possibility of social encounters, and, as a simple courtesy, he sat with his fellow inmates. They watched
Tony's Bitterroot Kitchen
, a guest chef describing the easy, practical, and charming peasant cuisine of the Loire.

“Look at her chop,” said a petty thief who'd been four days without his chew and who was forever sucking at his nicotine-starved gums. “What are those she's workin' on?”

“Vegetables,” said Leonard. “Kale? Kohlrabi, for Christ's sake? How can you not know? You live on the outside where the things, where they actually grow. How can you possibly
not
know? But I imagine you're a Doritos man out there, aren't you?”

“I like chicken strips,” said the thief, “and I'm just one day away from having some, too. Chicken strips, and cheese strips, and Dr Pepper. Rent a movie. Get a blow job. I am never, never, ever,
e-e-ver
goin' back in jail.” The thief, Sydney as he called himself, was thin and round-backed and had a beard just sufficient to deepen the hollows of his cheeks. Aswim in his orange jersey, he sat at Leonard's side, within easy reach, but he could not refrain the regular mention of his sentence nearly served. “One day and a wake-up,” he would say.”

The other young man, who'd once referred to himself as Jamie, was half-finished paying the justice court its eight hundred dollars, and at fifty dollars a day, he had more than a week left to sit. He'd had no better offers. Bloodlessly he wondered, “You ever had scampi? That's what we had. Scampi. That time we went to Wenatchee? We had some wine, too, some wine that was supposed to go with it. Go with fish,
kinda. My Uncle Arch paid for everything. I mean, what a nice guy. He said he might get me something out in the orchards. Not picking or anything, but you know, some white-guy job.”

“I fuckin' hate seafood,” said Sydney the thief. “Hate the way that shit wiggles.”

“Everything wiggles,” said Leonard. “Everything wiggles when it dies, prisoner. Do you want to take the whole animal kingdom out of your diet?”

When he was alone, Henry Brusett was prone to wonder how he'd become so mortally shy, but among these inmates it was no mystery. Each of them sustained an atmosphere around him of humid warmth in which it seemed fungus must surely grow, and he might reflect as often as he liked that he was by far the worst of them, and still he felt defiled by their company. They were too many. They were too close. While the early news was on, Tubby delivered them yet another lad fallen low, and the new convict, with an expectant tilt of the head and an apparently expensive haircut, joined them at the picnic table. He introduced himself as Nat, said he'd been out on bail but he was checking in to do his ninety days, and suddenly, wetly, he wept.

“That's right, luscious,” said Leonard. “Let it all out. Have yourself a good cry. But you better know—that beat-to-shit old hippie you're sitting next to there, he's our murderer in here, and he doesn't go for a lot of nonsense.
Gnat
—parents can be so cruel. ‘Bug,' maybe, ‘Skeeter'—but
Gnat
?”

“That lawyer was of no earthly use to me,” Nat sniffed. “She was no good at all. Plead guilty? What kind of advice is that? I might as well just plead guilty? Why? So they can throw me in here?”

“You pleaded?” Leonard was concerned for him. “You
pleaded out?
How many counts?”

“Six. But six misdemeanors. I mean, these were just misdemeanors. Your so-called ‘property crimes' at that. They always tell you,
‘Just cooperate.' That's what your public defenders say. But really—you should really
never
cooperate.”

On television there was a blond girl in a department store, followed by an older woman at a desk, followed by ads for adult diapers and corn chips. There was a short film about a girl whose leg had been reattached, but not very successfully. Tubby brought tepid turkey loaf under a lime green gravy, and from the moment this meal made its appearance on the steel picnic table, it was clear to everyone that Leonard would avenge himself on someone for it.

“This is just more of that waste product,” said Sydney. “They keep feeding us this waste product.” And to the newcomer, “I am almost done with this shit. This time tomorrow, I'll be playin' keno and drinkin' Schlitz.”

“Couldn't they just warm it up a little?” wondered Jamie, who had got the jailhouse habit of posing the futile question. “How do they get it so cold and stiff like this?”

“Aw, dear lord,” Nat said, contemplating his starvation. “What are you supposed to eat in here? I thought you guys looked a little skinny. I've got food allergies. I've got sciatica. This won't be a good fit for me.”

“You'll learn to love it,” Leonard said. “We sure like having you here.”

“No,” said Nat, his downy cheeks abloom, “I know you're kidding. And I know probably no one really
likes
it in here—very much—but it's just not for me. The thing, mine . . . it was a mistake, a couple mistakes and that's my so-called
crime
. Because I really was going to get, well, every one of those ladies was supposed to get her cosmetics. That's what I actually planned to do. Get those ordered. I could still do it, too.”

Leonard leaned to their new associate and looked him up and down.

“Cosmetics,” said the newcomer. “Timeshares. Supplementary insurance. In business you try to stay flexible. I may be young, but I'm a businessman with a heart of gold, but then that's what always bites me in the, you know, the hind part. Some little bookkeeping problem. If I could just get out of here, I could always generate whatever I needed to make those ladies happy again. I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a businessman, so wouldn't it be better for everyone if they'd just let me do business? I could be out there paying taxes.”

“But we like you in here.”

“Yeah. I know you're kidding with that, Mr., uh . . . ?

“That's Leonard to you. We're now on a first-name basis, Mildred.”

Steadily subduing his gag reflex, Henry Brusett broke the skin that had formed on his supper, and he ate it.

W
ITH A LONG
, thick torso on short, bowed legs, he looked like an ape, and he'd been born to pack a saw through the woods. Henry Brusett felled trees from the Selkirks to the Big Horns, and with his Husqvarnas throwing snowy sawdust, he'd dropped timber enough to raise a city, made money for everyone who'd ever used him, and he'd dragged the ModernAire many thousands of miles to go sawing logs. All those timber sales and all that devastation and income had made him a good reputation in the woods. He was the homely kid who came early and stayed late, and who ran hot all day. He'd been a natural disaster for hire, and in those years he'd lunched on sardines and saltines and measured himself in board feet, and for a very long time he was the high, wide, and handsome Henry Brusett, to be found on some eminent ridge a long way from home.

As a young man he had hoped, like anyone else, for a loving family, and he had thought that a draft of new kin might be the answer to a burrowing loneliness, thought that because he'd selected them, because they were more or less cut from his same cloth, that he might have some hope of reaching understanding with such people. Only too late did it occur to him that he should have founded such a family on a happier wife. Juanita did not for any reason smile in his presence, not even after he'd invested so much in her teeth. The woman seemed to eat as patiently and continuously as a cow. She bore them children,
and the boys were her boys, creatures in her image, mean, sneaky, and unsatisfied—but she didn't like them. No one liked the boys, least of all the many professionals who'd tried to diagnose them. As none of his family was salvageable, Henry Brusett bought them a good house with a dry basement in an otherwise empty neighborhood, and he made sure to call them on the third Friday of every month at seven in the evening, and if they were home to take those calls, they would ask him for money. They were welcome to his money. When they had it all, as was frequently the case, it was a relief to tell them so. Out of stubbornness he loved them.