The Other Shoe (35 page)

Nat was alert again. To have any currency in this market would improve his current standing, and he'd seen the generous impulse enough to know what it looked like. “Happy to do whatever I can. Which isn't very much, while I'm in here. But if there's any way I can be of service, you just name it.” He pulled at the neck of his jumper and stroked his face with a wobbly hand.

“I need you to talk to Henry Brusett for me. I need you to go back there right now and convince him he has to come and see me. Now. As he may have told you—or I may have mentioned it—his trial is set for Monday. This coming Monday.”

“What would happen,” Nat wondered, “if you won?”

“What would happen?”

“I mean, they'd just let Henry right out of here, wouldn't they?”

“Well, yes.”

“Immediately?”

“The judge orders it upon the verdict. The right verdict, and off he goes.” She spoke as if she were well acquainted with the ritual. “He walks out of court a free man.”

“
I
,” said Nat. “
I
need to get out of here. Before anybody else. Me. Me first. Trust me, it's that important.” But no one Nat had ever known for more than three days would squander a moment's trust on him, and, pitiably, he knew this. Whatever he said was qualified.

“I thought we'd already covered that pretty thoroughly. Nat, can you talk to him for me? Would you? Please?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Today,” she said, “I mean, as soon as you go back there, I want you to tell him he has to talk to me. Right now.”

“He's probably asleep. He stays in his cube. We all do.”

“You can wake him up. It's important.”

“Yeah?
He's
important.”

“Oh, come off it now, don't tell me you can find anything to envy in Henry Brusett. Come on. Listen to yourself.”

“What if he loses? What happens then?”

“He's not losing.” Her rare, slow, flat bravado. She was far too smart to ever be entirely confident. “He doesn't have to lose. Especially if you can get him back here to me. He really doesn't need to run the risk of losing. I don't know, maybe he's doing better now, but he wasn't looking very good, or sounding very good, and a trial's quite an ordeal. There's really no reason to go through it now. The message—and I tried to tell Tubby all this already, but Tubby got it garbled up—is this: I can get him out today. No trial. Will you tell him that? The closer we get, the more they're offering. I can get him out. He doesn't even have to say anything at all. They'll let me speak for him.”

“Is that good? You speaking for him? He's
what?
Getting out?”

“If you can convince him to talk to me. But it's got to be today. We've got until the end of the day. Let him know he can be out of here before supper if he'll just talk to me.”

“Him?”

“I spring who I can, Nat. Anybody that I can get out of here, I get out of here. I do what I can do. For everybody.
He's
got a break, and we really need to grab it. I mean, it would be negligent endangerment, no felony even. Time served. No probation, nothing. Just get him to come in here and give me the okay, and he's out.”

“Yeah,” Nat, speaking as the co-conspirator now. “I'll let him know. I'll see if I can pass it along. Still, I have to wonder, I do wonder a little bit—I sure wish somebody could help
me
, that's what I wish.”

S
HE COULD NEVER
quite get the hang of wearing casual clothes; any sort of trouser seemed to emphasize Giselle Meany's strangely made hips, but trousers were necessary if she wished to sit with due modesty in the plastic stands of the high school's gymnasium, seating made for midgets. As an oddity among the others here, she knew her presence made them self-conscious, but so long as she lived with Sheila, she could expect that most of her Saturdays would be claimed by team sports, the wholesome rigor of sitting in someone's punishing stands. Season by season, Giselle found her daughter's many games obscure. Even volleyball's mild rituals had never really explained themselves to her, and she had at times further estranged herself from the home crowd by cheering at wrong moments; she often failed to grasp the import of a play, a ruling at the net.

Everyone here, it seemed, had grown up steeped in these games and had from infancy known everything about them, and Giselle heard profound discussions of the rules, of players' strengths and weaknesses, of coaching blunders. She deplored and envied the common ability to heap abuse on the officials, and she was often touched at how people in this famously small state knew the parents of competitors from other towns. These competitions were generational, essential she supposed, and there in the middle of it all, two or three times a week for the last several years, sat Giselle Meany, oddly happy, her enthusiasm somewhat in check, her hams aching. With a special gift for remaining the stranger, she sat with women of apparent and imposing competence—matrons of all ages—and there were women who tanned to improbable tones under sun lamps and went draped in gold to every bake sale, and women who, in studied self-abasement, wore their sweat clothes and ten-dollar tennis shoes. Giselle did not like to believe that she was superficial, but she could not believe that she belonged. Girls talked of girls. Boys talked of girls and feats of petty dominance. She overheard them. Women talked of food and children, men of machinery
and reverently of rain and contemptuously of the government. She sat among them. In theory they had the game in common, a desire to see their children publicly succeed, but Giselle Meany usually found herself at a slightly different event. “Go, girls,” was her cry. “Go.”

She had come early and claimed a seat along the top bench so that she might have the wall behind her for a backrest. Her Sheila had never, not even as a freshman, played with the junior varsity, but Giselle was bullied by the egalitarian impulse to come and see the lesser team play, though it meant more hours on the benches. It was touching to watch these younger girls—the uncoordinated and the lumpish girls, their every move full of apology and hesitation, who tried so hard, so ineffectually. Their ball was on the floor as much as in the air, and the junior varsity squads played a surreal and heartbreaking game resembling soccer as much as anything, and these games could be very long. Giselle watched, however, to offer her most sincere encouragement, “Okay, girls. Go.”

Meanwhile, Sheila was somewhere in the building, somewhere well out of sight, awaiting her turn.

Sheila was, biologically, the daughter of an assistant professor of phenomenology whose specialty was chaos theory and who dutifully and distantly sent support payments from wherever he then happened to be chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes in the European manner; Sheila's mother, of course, was the improbable Giselle Meany, which must be so awkward for the poor girl. There'd been nothing in her daughter's breeding to predict this glorious beast, and Sheila was so obviously a self-invented creature, five and a half feet of vindication and accelerated evolution who made an invariable pre-game meal of oatmeal and toast four hours before she expected to play. Sheila liked her predictable surge of energy, and as she took on fuel, she would describe for Giselle what and whom to look for in that evening's opponent. “Candy. Candy
Cain?
I am so, so glad you stuck me with just a regular name.
But she
is
six feet tall. She's strong as a guy, too, so if she gets a decent set—
boom
—and you don't want to be under that when—
boom
—she'll come right down with it.” In the car, she would talk a bit faster and more randomly, and then as they neared the gym, she would pull her game face on and cease to talk at all, and then at the gym they parted company, and Giselle would not see her girl again until she led the varsity onto the floor, circling it with her long, pointed stride and with a volleyball tucked under her arm like the head of some earlier adversary, and her jaw working, and she'd run them in a grand circle round the gym, gather them into a smaller one where the team joined arms and leaned in at each other, and, their hips swaying, they would come to resemble the floating, sucking organism glimpsed in a microscope.
Oooh-aaah, Oooh-aaah
. Theirs was a masculine cry, but more piercing.

High above, Giselle stood near a speaker through which Aretha Franklin demanded respect, and Giselle was sore pressed to contain her pleasure, but Sheila had pleaded with her never to clap for them again during warm-ups. “Never,
ever
—okay, Mom? It just isn't done.” Now that the evening's proven athletes were on display, aficionados had begun coming into the stands, and Giselle began to hear her daughter's name on their lips. “You get down and see that Weeksville game? That little Meany is gettin' to be a killer, just a killer for 'em. She gets better all the time.”

To hear these praises made Giselle happy, then nervous—they expected so much of her girl—it was nerve-racking to have a transcendent daughter, and so, to pass the time until “The Star Spangled Banner” was sung, Giselle made her way to the lobby against an inflow of fans, and she fell into one of several long lines working slowly toward a concession stand manned by densely pimpled pep clubbers. These teens invested every transaction with layers of confusion, and Giselle pretended patience for it and slowly shuffled forward. She wanted bottled water, something to occupy her hands, something to wet her mouth.

Of those faces familiar to her in the surrounding crowd, nearly all belonged to men. Cops and former clients. Overwhelmingly she knew men, men who might, if they were caught glancing in her direction, offer her a curt nod. Giselle, for her part, gave everyone alike the glazed look of a bank teller. Deputy Totter was there, out of uniform, and just behind him Jack Harney, a criminally hard husband, who had fallen into one of the lines, to all appearances ravenous for his hot dog, and Harney stared steadily ahead to where he was to receive it, and he would look at nothing else. One may not smile upon such acquaintances. Such acquaintances were about all she had.

Giselle Meany was just enough disfigured that she was not accustomed to be stared at in polite company, and so at first she found it hard to credit her sense that someone's frank gaze had fixed on the side of her head. Used to the privacy of ugliness, she needed an effort of will to turn and confront the interested party.

She didn't know him. His was a face she would have remembered, and she knew she'd never seen him before. He did not turn away. Between them a pair of schoolgirls, eight or nine, and blond, and each with a paper dollar in her fist, debated the merits of Lemonheads. Giselle didn't know this man, but he didn't look away, and she guessed that he was interested, that he was emboldened because he'd been born, probably, with roughly the same defect that she'd acquired at work, an upper lip with a leonine partition, a lip stretched and divided and flattened until the only expression left to its owner was one of constant chagrin. They exchanged this look. He was a man otherwise well made and of about her own age. His left hand was out of view. She'd never seen him before, and wasn't likely to see him again, and she was thinking hard for something sane to say to him when the man spoke to her.

“You're that lawyer, aren't you?” He formed his words well down in his throat, and they were compressed for passing through
immobile lips. The girls' wheaten heads turned up at him and their chatter ceased.

“I am,” she said. Giselle almost regretted that her own speech had been left unimpaired, and she certainly regretted her local celebrity. Conrad County's criminals were numerous and poor, and her efforts on their behalf were much in the papers, and her work and unfavorable reputation dogged her everywhere. “Yes,” she said. “I'm probably the one you're thinking of.”

“You're the one who does the trials.” Emphatically not a question.

“Most of the criminal trials. I'm the public defender.”

“This one they've got coming up on Monday, is that yours?” A tidy fellow possessed of a few terrifying certainties, he was, from the nose up and the chin down, no doubt handsome. Groomed and ruddy, and if only he hadn't also been so angry, and if only his eyes had been any other shade of blue.

“It's mine,” she said. “I'm involved in that one.”

“Yeah? I got a jury summons. Now the clerk tells me I have to come. They can actually haul my ass to jail if I don't.”

“Sorry, I know it's . . . Sorry. I don't know what to tell you. But the way things look right now, we will be sitting a jury. Who knows, maybe you'll find it interesting.” She might have assured him that he would never sit on any jury trying any client of hers, but she didn't.

“Twenty-five dollars a day,” said the man, “and gas to and from. You do realize a guy can't pay his bills that way? Don't you? These things, if you ask me, are a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. These trials you people do.”

“I have never done a single one I could get out of doing,” Giselle claimed. “So . . . ”

This was true. She was not especially good at trial; she worried too much and too obviously, and she was too often caught staring into the headlights. There was no game, she thought, no game of any kind
that she'd ever play with anything like her daughter's confidence. “ . . . so, be seeing you Monday morning. Bright and early, huh?” She had come to wish a maximum of inconvenience for this other high-strung harelip.