The Other Shoe (32 page)

From the corner of her eye, Giselle Meany saw Karen Brusett raise her hand to ask permission of the judge to speak.

“Miss? You have something to add to this discussion?”

“He'd do a lot better at home, sir.”

“You're his daughter?”

“No,” she said.

“We'll take your remarks under advisement, miss. Giselle, do you have anything more?”

Henry's hands made a canceling motion just above counsel table.

“Nothing,” she said. “We have nothing more at this time.”

A
PRISONER MIGHT SLEEP
through a short incarceration, but not a long one. Jail sleep soon became, like jail food, a pale imitation of any real sustenance—there was no point in it, and little by little, the formerly hard-sleeping Henry Brusett was losing the knack of slumber. Even the drugs were of small service. At night he lay in a posture he had perfected that allowed no part of his flesh to touch the plastic mattress, and Nat and Leonard, who almost never retired to their bunks, were to the night what the television was to the day, a tireless source of low-grade fascination. He listened because, unless he wished to push his fingers deep into his ears, he had no choice.

“No debtors' prison in America?” Nat saw hypocrisy in everything, in every safe assumption. “That's all I am. At worst what I am is a debtor. And here I sit. Oh yes, oh yes, there's a debtors' prison, all right.”

“What do you owe?”

“A little product,” the cheat conceded. “I owe a few ladies . . . well, several, maybe, an apology. You know, that's a very good idea. In fact, I meant to do it all along. Sure, I'd just really sincerely apologize, and then maybe we could finally get this whole thing . . . And see, that's the thing, that's why I'm not a criminal. I never meant anyone any harm. Not even, like, economic.”

“You feel pretty bad, do you?”

“Not that bad, actually. It's not like anyone was really, I mean, what did I do
wrong
, really?”

“Why apologize then?”

“You have a point. Sure.”

“But you could,” suggested Leonard, “apologize for who you are.”

“How do you mean? Who I
am?
”

“You're a form of pollution, don't you think?”

“Oh, come on. That's a little . . . no, that's
very
harsh.”

“You smell very funny, prisoner, to any right-thinking citizen. You are the fish in their refrigerator.”

“No, I am not. I am a, quite a cordial kind of guy. You say these things because no one ever says them about you—mean things. You don't know how it feels. Because, if people didn't like me, I couldn't begin to . . . How do you think you have the right to call
anyone anything?
You? And, yes, I do hate it. I
do
think I'm too good for it. In here. I'd hate it if I was here a thousand years. I'd never get used to it. It is just so, so unfair. How is this even fair?”

“Do you know how many kittens are slaughtered every year? You sit here fat, dumb, and happy while they're being gassed and drowned and so forth—and you have the raw nerve to complain? To talk about innocence? You've just got to get beyond good and evil now; those categories have served their purpose, you can't get too involved with that in here.”

“Amen. But—oh—I don't know about that. I don't know if I could go quite that far. If I ever thought . . . There's evil, I know for sure. You're . . . ”

“No. I'm beyond it,” said Leonard. “The universe does not trouble itself about my conduct. The problem, really, is boredom. Why isn't that ever criminalized? These fuckers can bore you, and bore you, and bore you just mercilessly, and the authorities have no way to intervene.
You have to develop your own amusements, your own code. It can be hard, but we rise to it.”

Nat was in a mood to challenge the prevailing philosophy and, of course, his fate. “You know what's wrong with this? I'll tell you what—I am the grease. Society's grease. Because I go out there, and I sell, and sometimes I don't necessarily sell product that I actually have. Actual product may not move that well. I like to think that I sell dreams—but in the end, it's always back to the unholy dollar, isn't it? In the end, your clients never seem to remember how good you made them feel when you were closing. All I know is, every time I try to be a little bit more ambitious, try to really make something of myself, something bad happens. And it just keeps getting worse. I'm a young man, but I sure don't feel young anymore. Business is starting to take quite a toll on me, I'd have to say. It's getting to where I often wish I
wasn't
such a self-starter.”

“Sometimes in the joint,” said Leonard, “you'll run into an accountant, or some fingers-in-the-cookie-jar little turd, and they'll be the most miserable people in population. Even in some low-security, rinky-dink cakewalk they're miserable; poor fucks aren't on the road to enlightenment. Accountants. You only have to talk about a shiv, and you bleed 'em white. They're uncomfortable all the time. Greed does that to you.”

“Well, that's not me,” said Nat. “I don't want that much. I'm not asking for more than anyone else—a place I can call my own, an attractive wife. I've always wanted a collie. Wanted an insurance agency at one time, but I doubt that I could be bonded now. It would be very hard to get into law school, probably.”

“How old are you?” Leonard asked, incredulous, disgusted.

“Twenty-five.”

“What a quivering square. Why don't you just accept it? You can't get in that club. They'll never let you in. It's root hog or die for you, Cindy Lou. You're a criminal now. A junior criminal. Spicy.”

“You don't know me,” said Nat, hopefully. “How could you know me at all?” There followed the long, hiccupping sighs that meant he was preparing to weep again. He would empty himself of salt.

“You better stop that whimpering, Pam. You know that turns me on.”

“Why can't you call me by my real name? That is not too much to ask. Do you think this is in any way fun for me, or pleasant?”

“I would hope you were entertained. I know I am.”

“I get it. I get it. I know you have needs, and I imagine they have to be taken care of somehow. I understand that. We've been all through that. If I have to help, if I have to help you with that then I will, but . . . ” A sound burst up through Nat's nose; his terror at a tipping point, it rang in him as he considered his fix. The bleat of a wounded doe, it was the only expression he ever tried to suppress.

“I told you,” said Leonard. “Didn't I tell you that you better not keep that up. Oh-oh, it's that glow again. I get that glow for you when you do that.”

“I said I'd help. You don't have to—oh please. Wait. Nohb.”

Meat banged metal. The prisoner at Henry Brusett's feet snorted awake; Jamie, no doubt wide-awake now. They heard Nat being dragged across concrete floor, slippers slapping in a furious resistance that saved him nothing.

Henry Brusett loathed his fascination for this but he could not quit it.

“Wait . . .
Pleease
. . . ”

“What else is there for me? You know what I like.”

“Anh. Anh. Auhngg nuuhgh.”

Afterward, for a little while at least, they would lie down, Leonard contentedly, Nat cocooned in his hard-won, temporary safety—and they would sleep. For his part of the routine, Henry Brusett would get up then, sit at the picnic table, and enjoy the voluptuous quiet. He
had a bundle of letters from his wife that he kept in a paper sack with his reading glasses, and these came out when he could be alone with them. The envelopes were marked in soft pencil with the date and time of their sealing, and some of them were quite fat. It seemed she was in the habit of making notes to him throughout her day. He'd read them in order, first to last, and it was while reading these letters that he'd first discovered the little tremor developing in his right thumb. Wide, gray strokes on oatmeal paper, a child's writing tablet. Her pencil was a thick instrument, and she could fit very few words per page. She wrote to say she had picked the corn. The nannies loved the husks and tassels, and now their milk was worth drinking again. Chokecherries were starting to look like they'd come in thick this year. The truck was leaking oil from the transfer case. She could deliver him books, but then he would have to leave the books in the jail. The jail had a policy about every single thing. If he wasn't too mad, she wondered, would he please see her? Wouldn't he see her so she could say how sorry she was? She'd been meaning to do that even before they took him away.

She wrote to say she'd fixed the truck, she thought, with something she'd found at the auto parts store called Liquid Steel. Was this a repair she could rely on? She wrote to apologize and apologize and apologize, though she never specified her wrongs. She wrote to say that, though she was doing all the things she usually did, she seemed to have so much extra time on her hands. Did he feel like he had extra time on his hands? Sorry—stupid question. She wrote to say she'd started to prepare the trailer for winter, cleaned the stovepipe, and she'd already begun to bed the garden; there were a few good radishes left in the ground. Now, she wrote, she had realized she'd been letting him take care of too many of the details, the bills and all, and she thought the responsibility of it had maybe got him down a little bit, but she was doing a needlepoint, she said, with a bluebird on a cherry tree, and she'd send it to him when she was done. If he wasn't already home
by then. She included a sketch of the pattern, the finished bird. Karen recounted how her father had been around to say she'd better come back and live with the folks again, she'd better get a divorce, she'd better try real hard to get right with her Lord. He'd offered her the use of her old room, and she wouldn't even repeat what she'd said to that, but she'd answered him so that she doubted they'd ever speak again. Not if she could help it. “GOOD RIDDENS!!!” she wrote.

She wrote to promote a plan in which they would move to Elisis when he got out of jail, and he would take the healing waters every day, and she might find some work at the big hotel or maybe at the pole yard. She needed steady work, she thought. People came to Elisis from all over the world to heal, and here it was just a little ways down the road from them. They should think about moving.

She wrote to say she'd talked with the lawyer and she knew just what she should do. She said she missed him, but knew that everything would turn out fine. It had to. She loved him, same as always, and she could hardly wait until he felt better again. They needed to get back to eating their meals together when he got home, doing things together again, and just being together. It was time to stay positive, she wrote.
“Positive, Positive, Positive,”
was the whole of one letter.
“You are not bad!!!”
read another.

She wrote to say that their luck was due to change and it almost had to change for the better. She wrote and mentioned the current temperature on Fitchet Creek. She wrote to say that sometimes, when she missed him too much, she got out the hammers and played
Mattie Groves
. Everything would be fine in the end, she said. There had been a moose around lately, a cow that had moved into the head of the marsh on Road 262.

Henry Brusett broke open that morning's letter, and it began with a declaration: She'd been depending on him too much, and she knew it, but now he could depend on her because she would never let him
down. Not anymore. She would not let him down. There had been another reversal with the goats; she didn't know what the girls had gotten into, but their milk tasted skunky again. And, “I keep coming in every visitor day and they say you didn't put me on the list yet, but I will keep coming because I know you will be ready to see me some day and some things you have to say face to face. You may think this is very bad and your right but we have to stick together. This experience really shows you how much it is important. Those turkeys are back around. I got some corn for them so they will stay this time.”

Henry Brusett read it all in order, and returned each scrap of paper to each envelope as he finished with it. He restored each envelope sequentially to its place in the bundle, and when he'd finished a night's reading, he'd rebind them all with a twine that he'd twisted up out of threads pulled from his jumper. This packet gave him Fitchet Creek as it had been when she'd first joined him there, a paradise with a short half-life, ten acres where they offended no one and where kindness, of all things, was the prevailing order. Fruit of an abandoned orchard. He bundled the letters and put them back under his mattress, and then, dread quietly accumulating, he awaited the rest of the day. Leonard woke, and urinated, and reclaimed his usual post at the picnic table, mopping his face and neck with a bare hand as if to spread the rictus of boredom across his features. “Why the fuck don't you ever say anything? You and your Gary Cooper thing, who needs that shit with a headache going on? With his usual fucking headache. Who appointed you the fucking riddle of the Sphinx? Say something for once. What's on your mind?”

“I can't think of anything.”