The Other Shoe (5 page)

The humming in his hand resumed, now in level and measured tones.

“Yeah, all in due course, in due course,” he said, “but right now it's Sunday, and I got a tooth killing me, and I been needing to do some welding, and, yeah . . . that's right. Sure, that'll be fine. Oh, and if I were you, Frosty, I'd leave that buffet alone; they've poisoned quite a few citizens with that buffet of theirs.” The county attorney silenced his phone and returned it to the shoe box where it rode rattling among .22 shorts and pennies and small silver. “They call this progress? You got satellites overhead of you now like so many mosquitoes, and the bastards can get you anywhere you happen to be. I do not call this progress.” He turned to her, took his eyes from the road to do it. “The boy's brain swelled, and that was all she wrote, or so says Farinelli. You may have met him, he's the emergency room doc. We'll wait and see what the medical examiner thinks, but I don't expect any real different conclusions.”

“I can't imagine what you must think of me.”

“You're all right,” said the county attorney. “That business when you were a girl I'm sure you did what you thought was right. What you had to do. That's all I ask of anybody anymore.”

“What I
did,”
said Mrs. Brusett, “what I finally
did
was marry Henry. So, sorry, but you'll see it's the same as last time, I won't be sayin' anything. I just, I just can't imagine, and I'm not too impressed with myself, either. But there it is.”

“You're all right,” he said again.

“My folks had that satellite dish, and we must've got about a hundred channels—in all those crime shows they say to shut up when you're in trouble with the law. Or if you think you might be. Those guys last night, I bet they read me my rights ten times. They keep sayin' I don't have to tell 'em anything, and I don't have to tell 'em anything, and I really don't have to tell 'em anything if I don't want, but then they kind of lean on you to say something anyway. They want you to ‘help' 'em. Is that fair if they do that? Is that a right thing? I'm a . . . ? I'm a what, a suspect?”

“Kid's dead, and his blood's all over Henry's coveralls? That'll raise some concerns. Neither one of you has a thing to say about it, so that does make people curious.”

“Cops?”

“Yeah, cops.”

“You,” she said.

“Not me,” said the county attorney. “I really don't care to know. I can stand a little mystery now and then.”

“You must think I'm one of these real, real crappy people.”

“What I think,” he said, “is that you've got the right idea. And you should stick to it. Just stay quiet.”

“That's your advice?”

“That's my advice.” He expected it would be taken.

“So you're on my side now? How did that happen?”

“I'm on your side, and I'm on Henry's side, and I'd appreciate it if you'd tell him that for me. Make
sure
you tell him that, all right? I'm
letting you know, and I'm letting Henry know that this shouldn't turn out too bad for you. Especially if you can keep to yourselves about it.”

“So if we're suspects—we're suspects, huh?—but, if we're suspects, aren't you the other guy, the guy on the other side? Our enemy, kind of? Shouldn't it be somebody else telling us what to do?”

“Usually, yeah. But—how to put it?—I'm gonna give you, both of you,
all
the benefit of the doubt. You see?”

“What are we suspected of? Exactly?”

“What do you think?”

“I don't get what you're telling me, then.”

“Keep a lid on it,” he said. “You're both already inclined that way, so maybe this doesn't have to be too bad. If you can keep to yourselves with it. Whatever it is. And, no matter what I do, it'll be best for you guys to just keep quiet. In fact, it might be a good idea if you never mentioned this conversation we're having right now. Except to Henry, of course.”

“You know Henry, too?”

“Man and boy I've known him. We were in that Belknap school together, that one-roomer Mrs. Callahan used to run. When I got my Rambler in the eighth grade I'd take him to school sometimes. School in town. That was before his folks lost their place down below us.”

“So, what're you sayin'—you know he's a good guy?”

“Right. He was when I knew him.”

“But a suspect?”

“Yeah, a suspect. I can't do anything about that. It's quite a long way from being a suspect, though, to being indicted, and it's a long way from that to being convicted of anything. Lotta things can happen along the way. Henry's always been one of the good ones, far as I know, and that's my happy little understanding, and I don't care to know anything different at this late date. I believe you're all right,
too, a good person. You and Henry are both good people—or good enough—so I'd like to leave well enough alone. If you see what I'm saying?”

“No. But I do know that if I did say anything, I wouldn't know what to say. Let me off up at this turnout, would you?”

“Whatsit, five, six miles still to your place from here?”

“Maybe just three,” she said. “But I really do need to stretch my legs.”

The county attorney let her off on the highway, and Mrs. Brusett crossed it and set off up the road into Spurgin Gulch, her flip-flops sucking and slapping at her heels. Within a mile blisters had raised between her toes, so she kicked off her thongs and went on on grimy feet. Why couldn't everyone just behave? Why couldn't she? Why must every moment be lived in the bottom of her gut? She searched herself for forgiveness, just any forgiveness for anyone, but she'd still found none when she turned up a track that cut the kinnikinnick and wild strawberry and bear grass of a north-facing slope, and through a channel in a stand of dog's hair pine, tall and dense, she climbed the shady road home.

G
LUM AS A
girl, she had stood outside her family's happiness, betrayed by it, a tolerated guest at the many thousand ceremonies by which the Dents were forever appreciating themselves as plain but honest folk. It was this. More than anything else, it was this constant bragging on their honest ways that had made Karen so often despise them, because they lied slyly in their silences. Never a word passed between them, for instance, about the too obvious fact that Galahad Dent could scarcely stand to look at his daughter. His eyes might touch upon everything and everybody in a room, but when they came to Karen they went over, past, or through. He would look at her only so often and for only so long as was absolutely necessary, and then as if she were a stain.

How to speak of this? She never did, and so Karen was left to wonder; her earliest memory was of wondering, “What have I done?”

The Dents lived at the north end of Fisher Meadow in a trailer house at the end of two long ranks of Lombardy poplars. There were no neighbors. When Karen had lived there with her parents and her brothers, she had lived as much as possible out of doors, though she had no particular taste for solitude or, in those days, for so much unrelieved nature. She recalled marking time alone, breathing visibly off in some stubbled field or up a brushy slope. Her girlhood was bound on one side by life in the cold or among the pestering gnats,
and on the other by her impatience for the daily fraudulence of what should have been her home.

For many years the hinge of Karen's week had been Wednesday, because it happened that her mother got fed up at some point with the Good Shepherd and quit the church in favor of a Wednesday-night bowling league, and because her father would stand at the kitchen window watching Mother, as he called her, leave, and he watched her like a lost boy during the whole time it took her to disappear up the lane, and every Wednesday he fussed at the expense and trouble of her night out, and every time as she went out of view he conceded that Mother had earned and needed her nights of freedom from them. Then, usually, he would make potato soup for supper. This was soggy onion and potato, adrift in greasy milk. He served it merely warm.

“Go ahead and pepper the hell out of it,” Galahad Dent would tell his children, and the twins, wads of Wonder bread in their little fists, would fall to that soup like kittens to cream, for the boys loved everything, and their cheeks would ripen like pie cherries. Leave it to the boys to delight and prosper so in a meal that Karen could on no account bring herself to swallow, though Galahad would from time to time force her to try it again. “Who,” he'd ask her, as if she were someone he'd recently met, “who do you think you are? You can't eat what's made for you? Go ahead and be as stubborn as you want, but this is it. This is all the supper you'll get.”

Karen could hold that soup in her mouth for a very long time. The stuff would pulse in her throat, and she'd gag and gag, but she had never given her father the satisfaction of seeing her puke. She held it until he was forced to relent and let her spit it into the kitchen sink, and then she was left with the vile aftertaste in her mouth. During these contests of will, a hatred vibrated her father's voice so that even the twins were uneasy at hearing it, so Galahad would take them into the living room and wrestle with them, a pair of mewling, farting,
relentless teddy bears, while Karen would clean up the supper dishes. He'd play with her brothers. He'd bathe them and put them to bed. He'd tell them—she could hear it from just down the hall—that he loved them. And then, sometimes, Galahad would put his head inside her door to say “good night.” Never more than that. In long, habitual hopefulness she would stand by her bed to await these visits, but then she'd be just enough startled when he came that she couldn't find a way to answer, though she wished to somehow make a conversation of it. Once he had come all the way into her room, and he stood there for a while pretending fascination for the poster on her wall, a poster she had already outgrown but would never take down, a princess with a sparkling wand who was also, as it happened, a pig. Her father had stared at this until he began to tremble, and then he had surrendered a single, unprecedented tear, and when it reached his chin he told her, “Get in bed.”

“I'm . . . my jeans are kind of . . . well, they're dirty.”

“Get in that bed,” he said. “And pull the covers up.”

After that he didn't come to her door. Wednesday nights her father would put the boys down with a little story, and he'd go to the living room, and sigh, and turn on the television. Karen would sleep then, lulled by muffled laugh tracks and with her dreams buoyed up by the fact that tomorrow, while tomorrow might be many things, would not be Wednesday.

One day she was taken along with the other girls of her fifth-grade class to visit the office of the school health nurse. There the girls were given a short lecture on touching. Some of it was good, they were told, and some of it was bad. Emily Schact asked for clarification. Resigned to answer, responsible for some answer anyway, the health nurse inhaled deeply and her great bosom heaved. “It depends,” she said. There was a silent thirty seconds before Emily asked, “Depends on what?”

“Like I said before,” said the health nurse, “didn't I already tell you this? It depends on who touches you. And where they touch you.” The health nurse illustrated her point with a drawing that was supposed to represent a girl's body but looked more to Karen like one of the weatherman's clouds, and it was for her purposes less illustrative. The health nurse pointed to it from halfway across the room, and one of the fifth-grade girls began to cry, several others to laugh. A second session was held the following week, and this time the health nurse had been joined by a county social worker to ask the girls individually, one by one and in promised confidence, particular questions about their experience of touching. Karen, thinking she was defending an indifferent father, told them that Galahad touched her all the time. Where? “Everywhere,” she said. Regular affection, she meant, affection in every room of the house. Touching. The health nurse and the social worker became grave and told Karen she could share with them anything she might need to say; they told her how important it was that she tell them everything. Their lips puckered in anticipation of hearing it. Karen thought that they must have seen through, and hated, her puny invention about being loved. “No,” she said. “This is that nice kind. Very nice. Probably the best, okay? Can we just leave it at that?”

Karen was not accustomed to very much of anyone's attention, not yet accustomed to the necessity of having to cover her tracks, and she suffered the interviews that followed—talks with the health nurse and with Mrs. Hemphill, the social worker, and eventually, very secretively, with her mother—in deep confusion. Karen soon lost track of the facts such as they were, lost or misremembered those things she'd told them or failed to tell them previously, and by the time she was taken to the county attorney's office she'd decided to stay quiet, to act as if she'd lost the power of speech altogether. Someone had mentioned their purpose. They wanted to find out if she was safe in her home, safe in the company of her father. Safe? Safety, as far as Karen knew, lay in
looking both ways before crossing any busy road. The truth, they said. They just wanted the truth. The only reliable truth lay crouched in her heart, composed of nothing like words, and was nothing anyone, despite what they told her, would really want to hear.