The Other Shoe (4 page)

At least she'd told them nothing.

Over their body armor they'd worn uniforms of an ugly, glossy brown fabric, and they'd tried to act like they were her sneaky new friends, and through the night the deputies and the detective and finally the sheriff himself had all made quite a point of reminding her that she could go, that she could leave whenever she wanted, and really, if she didn't intend to help them, she might just as well take off. What? Did they really think she liked breathing these fragrances they must buy by the ounce and wear by the pint? And go where? In the middle of the night with no way home? To Fitchet Creek? Did they think their coffee was so delicious, or that she'd been so fascinated by their silly, numeric way of talking to each other? She did not know what she could afford to say, or how she could say anything without further hurting someone, and she was not going to be of much use to the authorities, or herself, or anyone else, but she had sat with the poor officers through the shank of the night, and none of them could bring themselves to leave, and all she gave them for their company and kindliness was the shoddy refrain she'd framed in the first few minutes of the interrogation, before the camera had been arranged: “It's a terrible thing, I know it is, and I am so, so sorry. But, please, I just wouldn't know what to tell you, and please, please, please, no lawyers.” Soon their smiles were brittle and vacant, their questions rare and further and further from the point, and she sat with them, with nowhere else to go, almost basking in their disgust until she went to sleep. Sleep, if you could call it that.

What was hers to say? She had gone well out of her way to avoid learning that poor boy's name. She knew that Henry, for reasons Henry had yet to mention, had hit the boy with his cane, which broke,
and which she instantly, convulsively, broke in three more pieces and sent down the creek. It had been a stick, then Henry had used it for his cane, then as a club, and now it was sticks again, caught in a thicket or washed all the way to the river and indistinguishable from hundreds of thousands of other sticks. But they had never for an instant considered trying to dispose of the boy, and that, of course, was the problem, this dead boy she'd think of as dead for as long as she lived, and surely there would be hell to pay; but what was hers to say about it? Nothing.

She had driven in dread down to Buck and Mimi's, the Knuths big-eyed at their darkened door—here's the neighbor wanting to call cops—and Karen had called the dispatcher and hinted broadly at their trouble, told its exact location, and then she'd gone back up the mountain to wait with Henry, squatting on her heels like a farmer in his field, but turned a little away from the boy and from Henry, who was also sitting on the ground so as to cradle the boy's head in his lap, and while they were waiting for the others to come she might have asked her husband, “Why? Why, Henry, did you have to hit that poor guy so hard? Why'd you hit him at all?” Or she might have said, “He never meant to hurt me. Did you know that?” But she hadn't asked for explanations, hadn't offered any, and so there were none, and they found, she and her dear, gentle husband, that they dared not speak at all. There in the dark, waiting, she'd known already that she was never to have the luxury of confession, and that she was far from done with doing wrong.

She needed to pee. The door to the hallway, steel of course, had no latch on her side, but only a hole for a huge and complex key she did not possess, and another hole for a window looking onto a near prospect of more cinderblock. Someone's odd impulse had made the door powder blue. She banged it with the meat of her hand and it clanged like an empty holding tank. “Hello?” A fan blew distantly in
the ductwork. She turned her back to the door and began to kick at it with her heel, and in kicking she attained a calm, eased the pressure in her bladder, and she was still kicking at the door when it opened. “Oh . . . ” She stumbled backward into the hall and nearly into her liberator, who looked to be a cowboy dressed for a wedding with his white shirt and blue jeans and thick brown hands. “Thank you,” she said. The man was of her father's age, or her husband's, but he had a readier smile. He used this on her. Rather than reading his eyes she considered his boots, and these were slightly encrusted with dung. He seemed authentic. “I didn't mean to raise such a fuss,” she said. “Well, I guess I did, but I couldn't get anybody to come. I really needed to use the restroom. They said I could leave, but when I tried to I . . . I'm still okay to leave?”

“That's what I came to see about.” The man's glasses had been repaired at the bridge with a glob of solder; his hair, iron and oak, was just long enough to stand in disarray. “You should never have been behind a locked door. I'm sorry about this, Karen.”

She knew him? From last night? Did she know him? No.

“I really didn't mind,” she said. “I was just sleeping, and I can sleep about anywhere if I'm really tired.”

“It's an evidence locker, or it's supposed to be, but they use it for a break room and every other damn thing.”

“They just wanted to talk to me,” she said, “which I can understand.” The officers had been, all in all and in their creepy way, gentlemen, and she felt she should be a little apologetic on their behalf.

“Go through there.” The man lifted his chin toward another blue door at the far end of the corridor. “There's a short flight of stairs, puts you in the lobby. There's a lady's room. It's breakfast upstairs. You want some eggs? Sausage? Coffee?”

“That's nice of you to offer, but no thanks.” Karen turned from the man and went off to a freedom she didn't much want.

Outside, she stood on the buckled sidewalk between the jail and the courthouse. There was no bus line here, no taxi, and she knew not a soul on earth whom she'd think of calling just now to ask for help. There were animals at home, waiting to be fed. There was Henry. Henry—she would have to go back into the sheriff's office and ask, back into the jailhouse to ask for any news of him, because her husband might by now be a mess.

A green pickup, Forest Service surplus, pulled into the parking lot and stopped just across the sidewalk from her. The man from the basement was behind the wheel with his arm slung over the door and his sleeve rolled almost to his elbow, nursing a toothpick that gave his lip a still more skeptical fold. “I'm headed up your way, you want a lift?” His engine rattled a homebuilt stock rack, galvanized pipe to which he'd lashed a shovel and a pitchfork and a kind of bunting made of bundled orange baling twine. “It's no trouble.”

“I should wait for my husband.”

“Henry's long gone. Didn't they tell you? He left last night. Guess they offered him a ride, but he wouldn't take it. They even offered to put him up in that new cheapo motel out by the old post office, but he didn't want that either.”

Her husband on the highway—slow, slow, and none too distinct in the dark. “So he took out walkin'? He's got one leg three inches shorter than the other—it's kinda bent in, got arthritis all through it. He's stubborn, and he'll try, but usually he don't walk that much. He can't.”

“I guess he managed it last night, though. Climb in, don't worry about that stuff.” The man swept a pile of documents from the passenger's seat and onto a floorboard already furnished with a coil of rope and a horse-and-a-half motor leaking oil onto some Sunday's glossy ads for lingerie. He offered her a baggy of withered ears; her gorge rose in her throat. “Turkish apricots,” he said. Firmly she showed him her palm, not “no” but “hell no,” and her throat flexed again. “I get 'em
at the health food store when I'm in Missoula or Sandpoint, them and wheat germ. They'll go through you like a dose of salts.” He shook her hand, and, without ever releasing it, he backed away from the curb.

“Who'd you say you were?”

“I didn't. I'm Hoot Meyers.”

“Oh. You're the whatta-you-call-him, huh?”

“The county attorney.”

“Yeah? Shit. Sorry, but you know, shit. I mean, really.”

His name had blossomed in gold every four years for as long as she could remember. The same gold-on-maroon signs at every important junction of Highway 200, instructing travelers to reelect Hoot Meyers, Independent, for County Attorney. Justice himself, if you believed the
River Register
, called to comment on everybody's troubles. A big shot. His name came up when people were going to jail, and she'd never heard it spoken fondly.

“And here I thought you were just tryin' to be neighborly.” Karen had found a brassy tone she liked but knew she'd never sustain; she regretted her life very much, the secretive life to come. Not that she'd ever been too relaxed in public.

“Lost a filling,” said the county attorney. “Had a filling about the size of a Subaru fall out of my tooth last night; Loosma told me he'd get me in this morning, get me kinda comfortable.”

“On Sunday? It's Sunday, isn't it?”

“Dr. Loosma's a good man with that novocaine needle, too, so I'm headed to Red Plain. You're right along the way.”

“Not exactly.” As a criminal, she felt, she'd already become a quicker, keener judge of character, almost animal in her acuity, and she'd got the criminal's tendency toward outrage at any deception not her own. A lumber train clacked and rattled by, a half-million two-by-fours headed west; the county attorney's truck rolled east down Main Street. She smelled bacon and burnt coffee. After years of her husband's
high regard for her, Karen Brusett had finally come to believe that even such as she might be cherished, that she might be somehow adequate in this world; but now she foresaw a future of lying. They passed a gaggle of geese in City Park and out onto the highway, through the empty log yards of the Caradine and United mills. This town was her town, so far as she had any, but beyond her education here, and now groceries and licenses and medications, she had never discovered any deeper design in it nor the slightest bit of charm, and it appeared ramshackle and shabby even though she had little to compare it with. Leaving it always lifted her spirits.

She rested her head on the passenger's side window, and the county attorney's truck, a disgraceful vehicle for a man with a steady job, sent every bit of roughness up from the road and through the chassis and rattled her skull on the glass, and though she tried to nap, the prospect of sleep was terrifying. Her neck kinked. She sat up and opened her eyes.

“You all right?”

“Am I all right? I mean—what? Why couldn't they let us ride down in our own truck last night? Was there any reason we had to ride with those police guys? You know, they never really said we were under arrest, in fact they kept sayin' we weren't—but I think we were anyway. Kind of.” Complaint seemed the thing to do, but she was not accustomed to despise the tone of her own voice.

“They probably had other things on their minds besides your transportation arrangements. We got some sloppy deputies, and they're always the first ones to a crime scene. Makes 'em feel important. Then they go ahead and screw things up.”

“Yeah. I meant to ask you, though, do you . . . do you know me?” He'd be one to know the dirt on everyone.

“Ruth Hemphill? Remember her? Gal from Social Services, she brought you by my office one day. Been a while, you would've been about twelve, thirteen, around in there.”

“Eleven,” said Karen Brusett. “I was eleven. Oh. Oh, man, how could I forget that? But I don't remember you exactly. I mean, did you look the same?”

“I don't think I'd acquired these bifocals yet. You weren't there for long, pretty nervous if I recall, and it was only a couple minutes a long time ago. Not very much happened.”

“I wouldn't tell you anything. You had that lady there, she had her little thingy, that little box.”

“I used to have Nelda tape those deals with my ten-dollar tape recorder. Do it myself, but I sometimes get sidetracked and forget to mess with the buttons like I should. People get shy in front of a microphone. You shouldn't consider what happened with you all that unusual.”

“All that trouble so she could get my every word, and then I wouldn't say. Mrs. Hemphill was so pissed off at me. That was the only time I heard her use any cuss words. Aw, but, man, now does all that have to come up again? You can't believe how much I hate it that you know that stuff about me. I'd forgot all about that.” She'd forgotten nothing of the strangeness of those years.

“Ruth was a very diligent woman,” said the county attorney. “Still is, I suppose.”

“She scared me, you wanna know the truth. I don't think she meant to, but she just did. She could be way worse than whatever it was she was mad about.”

“She's got the flower shop now.”

“Flowers,” said Karen, “I could buy from her. I bet she's nice in there.”

Mornings of late had been long and gingery, and summer was ending before it had ever properly started. The river was low and the cottonwoods standing out on the sandbars stood in mist. A phrase of “The Entertainer” sounded, as if from a tiny, tinny calliope, in the
shoe box in the seat just between them; the county attorney took up his cell phone. “Used to be there were a few canyons where they still couldn't get me on this thing; now, seems like they can get me anywhere.” He thumbed the phone open and said into it, “Meyers.” There was droning in his hand, with points of emphasis. “Maybe,” he said in a way that seemed to mean “no.” Then he said, “Well, the first thing is, we've gotta get the autopsy back. And I should really know who he is—was. There's gotta be some police work done, and it better be better police work than what's been done so far. Or I've got nothing. Right now I've got a body, and that's about it . . . And who would I charge? And for what?”