The Other Shoe (36 page)

H
ENRY
B
RUSETT WAS
stronger than he'd been in some time. Having passed through the worst of withdrawal, and for lack of any better occupation, he had devised some anodyne exercises; he stood astraddle of the drain in the floor with his feet at shoulder width, and with both hands he reached as high as he could reach, and in the chromed mirror above the sink he made for an interesting ruin. He knew he'd look even worse if he were distinct in it, but Henry, on his own side of the bad reflection, was reclaiming parts of himself he thought had suffocated. He had learned how to turn down certain side streets in himself for hours at a time, go to places where the pain was not so strong, and, as with every other thing of importance he'd ever learned, he had learned this in the hardest possible way and too late. He'd learned to breathe well at last, to become tall.

“You're going in that courtroom,” Nat predicted, “and they'll take one look at you, and they'll—never in a million years, my friend. You just don't look the part. You're gone, and I'm, oh, but, don't get me wrong—I really appreciate what you've done for me so far. It's been above and beyond. Very slick, though. To look so rough. I mean, they'll just never buy that you could even . . . even if you wanted to. Appearances mean so much, don't they?”

“If I do get out, I'll tell Tubby what's been going on. He should be able to come up with something for you. To help. Maybe they'd get him out of here. They must have transfers.”

“Tubby? No. I already told you, no. Didn't I? If Tubby, or if
anybody
else knew, that is the only possible way this could get any worse.
Our little secret, okay? We all know some of the things that will happen to us some day, but does that mean we have to talk about them all the time? That's unhealthy, Henry, but, oh, just when I was starting to heal down there. What you have to do, though, you just have to enjoy the moment. We have to. I'll tell you what we should talk about, we should be talking about your plans for when they let you go. What you need to do, my friend, is get out there and really seize the old bull by the horns; get out there and make yourself healthy again, and just get with it again. You just can't know how much it would please me to think that
somebody
is getting ahead in this world.”

“Anda,”
said Leonard from his bunk, from out of several weeks of stupor.
“Rápido.”

Nat regarded him with unslaked rage. “Having to listen to him, having to listen to him all the time, that'll be almost as bad as . . . It's that poison he's always talking. I hate that so much. That really takes the wind out of my sails.”

S
UNDAY AFTER SUPPER
, Tubby brought round a Salvation Army suit, a houndstooth the lawyer was insisting Henry wear in the morning, along with a white shirt and black socks, and a pair of black shoes two sizes too large for his feet. It was all dead man's wear. He also received a brand new change of skivvies and a Bible with silk ribbon tucked into the book of Job. The latest of Karen's letters came as well, and these were from a series she was writing on grocery sacks that she tore along their sides to make of them a single long sheet that came to him rolled as a scroll and sealed, barely, with Scotch tape. She'd told him she thought it bad luck to buy any new writing paper now; she'd tried to spell superstitious. Under jail light, her soft pencil was hard to decipher on the wrinkled brown paper, and her scrawl became quite wild upon such broad and unlined surfaces. He had from these letters,
because they were a little hard to read, the small additional pleasure of solving an easy puzzle.

Remember that bob cat kitten I told you I found. I let him come into the house. He moved in but goes outside to do his stuff, but then he bites right thru my hand. That part by my thumb. That is sore. When you see me that is why I will have a bandage on. I should be glad it was just my hand. But I am not. I did not want to look this way when I was in the court
.

To think that anyone, having seen her face, would take much notice of a bandage—that modesty was one of many ways she wrung his heart.

I am worried but I am not worried and I know that doesn't make good sense. You know how bad I am at explaining so I won't even try. I do believe in you for one thing. I have been thinking a lot but I don't get any new ideas except I know what I did wrong. Which was very wrong. And you are the only one I can believe in or understand so I wish I knew what to do. But I do know really what I will do. I think they told me. You should not have to worry. Also you should not have to be in jail. Maybe there are some things I can do to take care of you when you are free. I should take care of you and I know you don't like that but I should anyway. Only if you need it but I think you need it. It has been hard. We had hard frost last night. Is that early? My hand is so big but it is not any new colors or bad yet. I am sorry if this is bad writing. I really like that word penmanship. It is Saturday nite honey and the only reason I even know is because you're trial is coming up so fast. I keep track a little bit because of that (of time)
.

Time and distance, and not too much of that—a little separation, and she was running out of things to say to him. Her last letter had been written very early that very morning.

I know who is good
.

You are. Very good
.

You know
.

You can trust me. I am always on your side and did not forget who is good
.

I love my good husband. Wait and see. You will see what I mean
.

I don't have to say it. I can be quiet and you will know. When I'm quiet no matter what
.

I think you don't read these but you will know what I mean soon
.

I hope it isn't mean if I tell you that boy was a good boy. Or maybe he was a man. He was nice in a nice way and this is hard for us but what can we do. Bad people would not care but I am the kind of person who sees him all the time when I close my eyes. That boy was way nicer than I am and that is one of the things wrong and I have been wondering if you read my letters or if they read these letters, if the cops do. What do I ever say? Do they get a thrill when I say I love you? When you get home I will put so many eggs in your cake you won't believe it. I know how much you like it rich. No matter how hard I work I cannot sleep now. I get tired but cannot sleep. It is the middle of the night again. What can I say? For sure I will say good luck because I am out of room on this sack
.

Forever yours
,

Mrs. Henry Brusett (also known as Karen)

M
EYERS LIVED IN
the house he'd bought his wife as her reward for surviving her illness, and he kept her ashes in a pot. He'd managed to give Claudia less than two months of her darling Craftsman-style home down by the river, and now he was already rounding into his second decade here. His son Robert had made Claudia's urn, and it was displayed with several other Robert Meyers ceramics in a Plexiglas case above the mantel, pots on sculpted sand, on reed matting, pots as kinetic and pregnant as seeds, and proceeding from out of a serenity that Hoot Meyers envied, even begrudged, even of his son. For his part, in his generation, he could appreciate elegance as it occurred, but it would never be the dominant theme of a house he'd densely furnished as a museum. Meyers owned a McClellan saddle, if he no longer owned a horse. By his bed stood a treadle-driven grindstone, a Swede saw, an ice auger; similar devices were all through the house, standing idle now, but ready to serve, to bore, to crush long after the men who'd made them were no longer even afterthoughts. From every parcel of land he had ever owned he'd gathered up at least one of these indestructible tools, equipment that, like Hoot Meyers himself, had its proper historical place somewhere near the end of the Iron Age, and his clutter could make getting up to pee in the night an iffy proposition; Meyers had left himself just a few narrow lanes to negotiate his way through his house, and his toes were frequently some shade of red or blue. Once he'd been up for any reason, he rarely succeeded in going back to sleep.

He kept spread on the wall above and behind his refrigerator the blood orange fan she'd carried in
The Mikado
. At eye level, at every snack and meal, Claudia's permanently rising sun, the only artifact in the house that he dusted with any diligence. Well acquainted with 3
AM
, Hoot Meyers made coffee and scrambled some eggs. He stood, breakfast in hand, at the picture window overlooking the river. There was a tower on the far shore with lights and cable rising to it from the
near shore. Closer at hand, two tall poles bore crowns of osprey nest that were sometimes active all night. There had been a drawdown at the dam earlier that week, and wide, green mudflats had been revealed along both banks of the river; all through dusk a hatch of some newly prolific bug had been shimmering just above the water. Now the water was black except where the cable lights and a waning moon were reflected in it.

A cider press, a cracked bellows.

He showered, shaved, trimmed the hairs in his nose, and he pitched a change of underwear, a can of Right Guard, some gum, and a lightly used notepad into a war bag, and he walked to the courthouse with a suit and a shirt still in the drycleaner's plastic sack. For as long as he'd been a town dweller, he still found it novel and nice to walk to work, a brief walk on pavement, and to arrive there with his boots unmuddied. Meyers let himself in with his key and climbed up through the dark of the back stairwell. He did not need or use the lights; he preferred that it not be known how early, how sometimes absurdly early, he came in to prepare. His job wanted silence and seclusion, from which he might sometimes impose a moment's order. Only by winning what he thought he should win could Meyers endure or take much warm interest in himself anymore, and he liked to leave the impression that he won by luck or brilliance, or that he won because he was in the right, but his luck was manufactured here in this half-lit building. He suffered to completely prepare, and so, in most things, his judgment seemed to prevail, as was only proper.

But the routine for throwing a trial, if there could be such a thing, simply would not occur to him, and he was very much afraid he'd given himself six hours to dress for court—and to brood on it—a hundred times the time he'd require.

H
E HAD ALWAYS
wanted to say he'd hit the boy, but he knew that from the moment he might confess, that from then on and thereafter, he'd be hounded for his reasons, and it was his reasons he could not bring himself to speak. What would be left of a man who had admitted, who had accepted in himself, that he'd been so wrong-hearted and mean as to kill some poor kid? So he did not confess, and he would not lie, and the fruit of this principled cowardice was a hundred citizens congregating to make Henry Brusett their constant study. Now, no matter what came to pass, they would never devise a more perfect hell for him than this trial.

It was a churchy room with its ranks of pews, the judge's bench for an altar. Behind the bench a portrait of Wilbur Farrand Conrad, mournful in his vigilante's tweeds, stared down at everyone. Having given his bloodied name to this courthouse, this county, he was now quite as dead as any dangling road agent.

With much fussing, the bailiff arranged sixty-two citizens according to the plastic placards on their chests; he seated them fifteen abreast on the pews, and from the prosecutor's table, Hoot Meyers looked them over and made notes. In the gallery were reporters, and a high school civics class come to see the workings of justice, and there were loiterers and ghouls, and, off in the corner farthest from the accused,
Mr. and Mrs. Wesley Teague had joined hands with each other and with a local man of the cloth; they were unremitting in their prayers. Henry Brusett knew them at once for the young man's parents and thought that they were among the mildest people he'd ever seen. They were dressed in pastels, as for a garden party. Still, he could hardly suppose that they were there to wish him well.

There was no part of the room to which he might comfortably turn, but Henry thought it would seem artificial of him to stare a hole in the defense table or into his own folded hands, and, as was usual for him in any crowded place, he didn't know what to do with his eyes. “Coast to coast,” he thought he heard Ms. Meany say. “A farmer in every poem and kitchen.” She spoke to him in fast and low outrushes of breath, and she knew she was hard to understand. She had set out a legal pad before him and provided him with two sharp pencils; with one of these she slashed a clearer message:

HELP ME

GIVE ME GOOD JURORS, BAD JURORS

G FOR GOOD B FOR BAD

MARK BY NUMBERS WHAT YOU THINK

SEE LIST NEED YOUR OPINION AND

YOUR HELP PLEASE REAL IMPORTANT

He read his lawyer's note and was too ashamed and too embarrassed to do more than shrug.

Fine, she thought, because she did not think she would require his active cooperation. For once she might be getting all she needed of a man. Giselle Meany was set up at last in the right case, with the right cause and the right client, and she had assured herself in the middle of the previous night that this time she'd be the right advocate. In her mind, she welcomed Mr. Brusett to be as indifferent as he wanted; they were still going to win. He could be as mulish and mute
as ever he might wish, and so much the better, because his reticence was the meat of their defense; he simply seemed too shy to do much evil. Giselle thought she'd done well by him in the way of wardrobe, too—brilliantly, miserably turned out it in the Salvation Army sports jacket with its tiny, twisted checks and with its cantilevered shoulders, he did not look the wino as she'd feared he might, but a Cuban band leader, pre-Castro, and too ridiculous and secondhand to fit anyone's notion of a killer.