The Other Shoe (30 page)

“I know you would,” he said. “Let me sleep on it.”

Back at the barracks cell Henry Brusett learned that the banging they'd heard during the lawyer's visit had come from Nat reaching through the bars to latch onto the back of Tubby's belt. There were several versions of the episode, but in all of them, Nat's arms were through the bars, and his fingers were well hooked into the jailer's belt, and he'd hung on too hopefully while Tubby dragged him again and again face-first into the bars.

“
Blam, blam,”
as Jamie eagerly described it. “It was just
blam, blam, blam
, and I said, ‘Woooh,' and after a while I don't think he could've let go of that belt if he wanted to. Which he probably did. Want to. Sure glad it wasn't me. Could you even let go, man? Should've seen it, your face was just really bouncing off them bars.”

“
‘Oh, please, please,'”
Leonard mimicked and mocked. “
‘Let me out. Oh, Tubby, let me out.'
Like Tubby can just take it on himself to let you out of here. He's a flunky. What's he supposed to do with you, put you out in the exercise yard they don't even have? He supposed to go and tell the judge you asked for a pass to attend the fair? What the fuck? If you tried that in any other joint, prisoner, they'd break you up. Break your arms at least if you got hold of somebody through the bars that way.
‘Oh, let me gooh, oh, let me go.'
Don't you know that's disgusting? Tubby should've used his baton on you. You're too lucky.”

“Lucky? He wrote me up for disorderly conduct.”

“He should have,” said Leonard. “There are some kinds of behavior you just can't allow, not even in here. That whining of yours, for instance.”

Nat sulked all of that day, flinching whenever he forgot, and drew breath over his freshly chipped teeth, his large and glossy underlip. His brow, also enlarged, suggested more intelligence than he really owned, and it was not until supper that he was finally struck with the starkest thought yet. “Another charge? Oh, noooh. Now I see
what they're . . . You know what? They'll probably try and use that to revoke my other ninety days. Suspended time, suspended time, it always, it sounds so good when they're handing it out—but one way or another, you always serve it, don't you, you wind up serving every last day, and it's always about the almighty dollar. Isn't it? Isn't it? Money, or something. No, no, no, no. No. If that county attorney has his way, I'll probably be in here for six, six
months
?”

“Do you know,” Leonard asked them generally, “why anyone bothers with iceberg lettuce? This is not food. These things that
look
like food, or they
look
like tools, or toys, or weapons, or whatever when they're in the store, but then you buy these things, and you find out they're useless. They don't work, they fall apart. It's shoddiness, it's whorishness, it's modern life, that's all, and it chaps my ass. I like to think that if I was a craftsman, I'd be a
craftsman
. If I was a farmer, I'd grow fucking food.”

Nat, the hard old soul, the fawnlet, winced once more and wept again, just as he wept at the release of every fellow prisoner, a very regular event in a county jail. He had developed the tic of stroking his lank forelock several thousand times a day with the heel of his hand. “They just keep piling it on. I have never
hurt
anyone. I'm a
kind person.”
He trembled over his noodle dish. There were flecks of boiled egg on it, and it was nothing he'd ever eat. “I'm
not, I am not.”
He was becoming sallow. His eyes had begun to move, jailhouse fashion, primarily side to side. “Who ever thought I was so . . . really? Yaaahw, ugh. Gaahd.”

“The essential minerals,” said Leonard, “are in the air you breathe. Even bad air. So that's how you do your time, you shut up and you keep breathing, and, Tallulah, you can even skip the breathing for all I care. As long as you shut up.”

They'd been given something pink—not lemonade—to drink. Germaine's casserole that evening was of ingredients she'd rendered
gray, and this lay on their trays undisturbed. They ate their quivering slivers of canned peach, which only reminded them they were hungry. They watched a show with a handsome vampire. There was a crime drama with several aggressive women in it. Leonard watered himself at the sink, drinking out of his cupped hands, and on his way back to the picnic table he whirled in passing, neatly, precisely, and he kicked Nat high on the outside of his thigh, kicked him hard enough that Nat grunted, and pressed his cheek to the table top, and grunted again as if to defecate.

As the evening wore on they tried to play whist, but no one was confident of the rules. The cards, soggy with overuse, prompted the invention of a game in which each player was given three greasy face cards to skim at the floor drain, with scoring as in horseshoes. Attractive people mumbled from the television; Leonard insisted the volume be kept low. Leonard kept reciting a pessimistic line from a poem about the best minds of his generation. Nat, calmer now, somehow dreamy and sentimental for having been kicked, described the superior courtesy of the South and how he longed to return to it. Jamie, who lacked nearly any pigment of hair or flesh or personality, mentioned with the usual approval another of his uncles. “You know him? He's fairly well known. Clive? Clive Bakken? He used to have the tire shop?” Jamie was a secondary figure even in his own stories. Leonard assigned him to sit on the floor by the drain and retrieve each round of pitched cards, and Jamie was happy as a pup to do it.

Nightfall, for their purposes, came at eleven o'clock, when Tubby came around to click the television off and deliver the day's best dose of Lorezapam. Henry Brusett took the drug and set himself up behind his blankets again, gratefully out of sight, and while awaiting chemical transport, he heard Jamie as he settled into the bunk at his feet and commenced hours of soprano snoring. Beyond the blanket, Leonard was talking as if he might talk all night, and Nat murmured with
counterfeit interest at Leonard's tale of an affair with the astrologer Medea Miller, whose phony nose he'd had to bend. She wore the head scarf, he said, and the loopy earrings, but he'd been the one to make her look so authentically gypsy. All credit to Medea for her genius in spotting a mark and for setting up such a steady and easy grift, but her moon was in the money box and her greedy goddamned hand was in the seventh house, or whatever, and she'd eventually miscalculated and tried to chisel Leonard. But maybe she couldn't help herself.

As the second veil spread over Henry Brusett, the somewhat soundproof curtain of his nighttime dose, he fell back through his pet and shopworn recollections of his wife. She was the music springing from a near room. She brought him the consolations of sliced tomatoes or tea, and when she sang, she sang of the soft sigh of the weary, and on a cold day she would keep the stove stoked and the ModernAire smelling of bread and pine. As always when Henry Brusett escaped in this direction, he thought of times and places when she'd said she loved him—out on the water with the lake licking their plastic hull, on the muddy road at the base of Baldy, once over a supper of trout and cantaloupe. “I'd heard about it,” she'd say, “but I still didn't know really what to expect. So I was kinda relieved to find out who'd be the one—that you'd be.”

He knew, even as she was saying such things, even as his chest boiled for hearing them, that he should correct her. He should in fairness try to let her know how much remained for her to learn, and that she could never learn it so long as she was with him. For some safety she imagined she had with him, she'd given over an especially lush youth, and there was nothing equivalent or right about this obligation, but Henry Brusett had never found the strength to stop it. He couldn't bring himself to ask her to leave, and he couldn't make himself be mean to her, and he'd fumbled along appreciative, unable to show her a way off the tiny, barren continent of their marriage. Instead, he'd
become drowsing Henry, the coward who slept and slept and hoped to emerge from his diligent stupor one day to find that his wife had come to her senses and left him. One day she must leave him, and this had been for him the backbeat of their whole time together.

Henry Brusett knew there'd never be a full accounting because that would require that he tell his little story. He would have liked to claim that he did not remember, but ten minutes of bad night had become the endpoint and burial ground of his every reverie, and he remembered it incessantly. He had smelled half-burnt kerosene in his sleep; its fumes had accumulated as an oily slick in his sinuses, and he sat up in seemingly combustible air and in his own dismal odor, a rancid presence refreshed with every disturbance of the blanket or his coveralls. How long had he been down? A long time. The clock in Karen's room counted out each second with two clipped knocks, and Henry Brusett did not even bother to look for her there. She was not in the bathroom, but her jeans and suspenders had been shucked to the floor, and one stiff sock stood alist beside them. The cane was in his hands, must have been in his hands while he slept. The lamp guttered on the counter in the kitchen, and one side of its chimney was sooted velvet black. Crystals were set racing in Henry Brusett's blood; he didn't know why he was terrified. He went outside. The cane,
tonk, tonk
in the sleeping porch,
thog, thog
on the ground. He went out under stars so abundant they appeared to have frayed and torn the firmament. The cane,
donk, donk
on the boardwalk. When he arrived, he should have come as no surprise.

But he'd never looked in on her in the shower shed before, had he? It was become almost his life's work to respect her privacy.

And he hadn't called out as he was coming, there was no
Are you there?
His eyes adjusted poorly to starlight. A small beam on the towels, on the rock—he might have stopped to pick the flashlight up, to see better.

A back not hers, an unfamiliar shirt, running water.

Before he'd selected any particular reason to strike, the cane was in motion, a stave obedient to misbegotten instinct, and while the blow was in transit Henry Brusett lived a life compressed, a life, like most, filled in its latter stages with regret. He felt and heard the cane snap, an undertone of thumped melon, and no outcry.

He dropped the broken cane as the boy took one step back.

The boy collapsed.

And there was Henry Brusett with open arms, waiting to catch him.

“T
HE JUDGE
,”
SHE
said, “is almost ready for us. I understand he likes to do these in chambers. It's a little more intimate that way.” The subject of the hearing was a baby girl named, thus far, Baby Rita, the child wrapped in her adoptive mother's arms and so new to the world as to still be writhing in it; Baby Rita lifted her wobbling head and included Giselle Meany in a look of all-embracing disbelief.

“See how strong? Oooh.” The radiant Mrs. Olds was a latecomer to motherhood, and she had a happy disposition for a client. “See how curious?” Mr. Olds hovered at his wife's shoulder, looking on through thick glasses and trying hard to share the thrill. This studious man would have noticed how the baby commanded all attention, and perhaps he had already guessed a crushing future in his wife's devotion to it.

“She's one week old today,” said Mrs. Olds. “So, in a way, this is sort of a birthday, too. Can you get over how tiny . . . how perfect? They say we have to be really, really careful of heat and heat rash. But they say that air-conditioning can be hard on them, too, the little ones, so we'll have to figure something out. Really, though, the weather is getting cooler now, so that should help. You want to have everything perfect for her, if you can. Good ventilation and everything.”

Giselle Meany's own maternal impulses had only ever been sufficient to their purposes, and seemed slight in the face of such joy and
addled concern. “You'll do fine. My Sheila, even when she was that size or so, she always seemed to tolerate about every kind of weather better than I did. She still does. They're rugged little things, they really are.” Giselle Meany didn't usually think of her carelessly beautiful daughter during work hours.

The court reporter, a chubby, silent woman who traveled with the judge and did many small chores for him, stepped out into the hall to beckon them into chambers, a room cluttered with cardboard boxes bound in duct tape and coated in dust, a room that was aired just twice a month when District Judge Carbon Samara deigned to hold law and motion day in a county seat he despised. He was, in his robed and saturnine person, as imposing as his chambers were disgraceful. A blister of a human being with a polished skull and a friendly way with these potential voters, he pumped the Olds' hands and wondered if they were getting enough sleep, or was the little one dictating otherwise? Mrs. Olds said the greatest pleasure she'd ever known was to nap with the baby on her chest, and the judge made his appreciative face, and at this Giselle Meany very nearly snorted.

Judge Samara then settled behind his desk and glanced at the papers she'd filed. “Giselle, is this the first adoption you've handled?”

“As you know, Your Honor, I've had to concentrate my practice on criminal . . . ”

“Is this the first adoption you've handled?”

“Yes.”

“Presumably the first petition for adoption you've written.”