He did not attempt home again, though he continued paying bills addressed to that location. Juanita told him that Davey had enlisted in the army, that Davey was in training, that Davey was discharged, and then in every subsequent call she said that there was still no word from their younger son. And Denny, she informed him, who was supposed to have an IQ of 126, had got himself put in a group home, a particular group home, in fact, that allowed smoking. Henry Brusett was to see no savings with the boys gone from the house. Juanita told him every time they spoke that her stomach was not good, and this regularly resulted in astounding expenses. She had tried everything for that touchy gut except to forgo her twenty cups of coffee a day. Henry Brusett, thinking he’d signed on for some of it, would call, and in all the years, the decades of calling, Juanita never once asked after his whereabouts, his well-being, his doings. He was to Juanita only another ear, and it might have been any ear, in which to pour her troubles. Still, he called her at decent intervals to hear his share of it.
Henry would see some benefit of that first wreck. Overnight he was in middle age, a time of life to which it seemed he’d be well suited. Moving slower, he found he paid better attention, witnessed a somewhat richer parade of events. Poor circulation in his blunted foot made it prone to chill and even frostbite, and in winter he could no longer work long hours out of doors. So, in those Octobers following his first accident, he would set up on the outskirts of some new town with his lathe, his collection of planes, drills, and routers. He started with making Quaker chairs. There would be seasons of shaping rocking horses, of making gleaming cedar chests, and he was heartened by the discovery of this higher intelligence in his hands. But Henry Brusett was also discovering around that time that he was beginning to fall away from his species, that in virtually anyone’s company he was suddenly aware of all his shortcomings and miserably unhappy with himself. To do a bit of commerce, he thought, should be a healthy thing, and so he had forced himself to do business and to take an occasional hand of pinochle or cribbage, and wherever he went he tried to have his morning egg at a diner with a regular trade, to meet people. Pointedly timid, he was fortunate in his encounters. He met with very much kindness but would have preferred to do without it. In all seasons he was his work, and he was at ease only in solitary labor, and there were times still, sometimes on the side of a mountain with a newly sharpened chain, when, with the thing snarling in his grip, he’d have his potent thrill again.
Early one May he was sent to clear an old roadway in Jimminy Gulch. The road had been dozed to briefly serve a logging site a generation earlier; closed and in disuse since that time, the track was now overlain with deadfall, set upon by volunteer growth, and it was obscure enough in its contours that company surveyors had gone ahead to redefine it on the mountainside with blue tape strewn like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs. Henry Brusett, the patient, hourly employee, was just as happy to advance not at all as to clear a hundred yards a day. Impertinent little pine had grown up in the road, and many of these were tall already, if scrawny, and all were fairly gleaming with a pitch that dulled and gummed his saws by noon each day. He would smell of these peculiar trees, of this particular pitch for as long as he worked Jimminy Gulch. Eventually the job, the road, took him up onto a slope overlooking a high desert valley of buff grass and sage, and here the sky was infinite and backlit. Here, day by day, the sky was cloudless.
At the road’s end, a landing had been made; a turnaround for log trucks had been pushed well into the mountain and was still circumscribed by a scabby wall of gravel, raw and unreclaimed. In making this wound the Cat had undercut a ninety-foot bull pine so completely that the best part of its root system groped out into thin air. Standing on nearly nothing, the tree stood, nonetheless, erect. Half-dead and in piebald bark, it had become tenement to beetles, squirrels, and jays. In an older calamity it had been split by lightning or somehow broken so that it had grown a forked crown. There were green needles, though, at the top of either crown. Under the suspended root ball, a tuft of red fur remained of the fox who had birthed and suckled her kit here. But the tree stood uncertainly above ground that the company intended once more for road, and so, with the arrival of Henry Brusett, its time had finally come.
He climbed the embankment and saw that, short of building a scaffold to it, there would be no way to notch the downslope side of the tree, so he got uphill of it, and he set about dropping it with one oblique cut down through the trunk. The wood was sounder than he’d expected, and his chain duller than he’d thought, and he wore through rather than cutting it; he made and breathed a powdery sawdust. When at last the tree did begin to tip, its immense leverage pulled at the roots remaining in the bank, and all in a moment the ground beneath Henry Brusett’s feet was liquid, flowing downslope, and he was backstroking upon it, trying to check his fall, and his idling saw bounced by him, and then from above came the crack of one of those crowns breaking free, and he looked up to see that the broken part would not be following the graceful swoon of the tree, but the snag would tumble straight down at him. Without time even to hope for the best, he turned from it, heard pine needles gathering pace, and it hit him.
The snag did him a world of harm, but it never did knock him out. It was clear from the beginning that the tree was to spare him nothing. With vertebrae fractured and exposed, with a broken femur and his lacerated kidney bleeding in and out of him, he had walked a half mile and had driven thirty more to finally pass out in St. Joseph’s parking lot, near the emergency entrance. He’d been in the news for it, a human interest story, an impossibly lofty example of the local grit, but Henry Brusett made an embarrassed hero, for he was aware of no courage in himself. Then as now, and for as long as he might be given to live, he was only trying to feel a little better. He was obedience to pain, nothing more.
In the hospital he inhabited a twitchy, narcotic dream that gave over to agony every four hours as his shot wore off. He lived shot to shot. He lived, at first, on a diet of ice chips, as he was in surgery on successive mornings being reinforced with steel pins. Even in that first week, when he lay suspended in a harness face down above his bed with the gash in his back periodically aflame, the nurses would come round and approve his luck. To survive such a horrible accident? To have feeling in his extremities? He was very lucky, they told him, that he hadn’t severed his spinal cord with all his shenanigans. Nurse Buchanan went so far as to say that he was a miracle, but Henry Brusett was a citizen of the scientific age, and he only wanted his shot.
Juanita never did visit him, though she must have known where he was; he was still in the hospital when he received some papers asking for his signature to consent to a divorce he wouldn’t have thought necessary. They’d never formally married, so the formality now of becoming unmarried seemed a bit evil. In a separate note, the only one she’d ever written him—he didn’t even know her hand—Juanita explained that she needed to sell some things to start her new life in Alberton with someone named Ted. She needed to sell the house on Blackbird Lane. She needed clear title. She knew he’d understand. She wished him the best of luck in all his future plans and urged him to get well soon. Henry Brusett, still half-encased in casting and gauze and gluey disinfectant, signed her paper. Why not? Juanita was the lesson he wished he’d never learned, and he was cheaply rid of her at any price. How odd to feel any disappointment at all. He was left with what Juanita hadn’t wanted or what he hadn’t known they owned, and ordinarily he had his wits about him, and that, he’d supposed, might be enough.
As soon as he was able, he parked the ModernAire on a piece of ground where he’d once meant to have a hunting blind and a warming hut. With a settlement from workers’ compensation, he drilled a well there, and then he moved to Fitchet Creek where he hoped he might privately heal. It was touch and go. He’d become the concern of bureaucracies, Social Security and Woodman Accident and Life with its sunny agent, Kline Interhoffen, and for a time they kept trundling him off to specialists; eventually, though,
when all available experts had agreed that nothing useful might be rebuilt from what was left of Henry Brusett, he was made a pensioner and mostly left alone. Mr. Interhoffen assured him that, as Woodman’s client in perpetuity now, he would never have to be uncomfortable. Prescription drugs, regardless of type or amount, were 100 percent covered under Henry’s plan, and there were some very sophisticated therapies these days for dealing with, really, any discomforts people might have. Mr. Interhoffen asked only that he tell his family and tell his friends that Woodman really does pay up. Kline Interhoffen asked that he spread the word, as a satisfied client: If you’re covered under Woodman, you should never have to suffer. “In this day and age? There’s absolutely no point in it. But you have to have coverage, and that’s why I like my job so much.”
Soon enough, Henry Brusett had made the acquaintance of a clutch of doctors who shared Mr. Interhoffen’s progressive humanity, and, drugged, he went on, mending slowly, ever incompletely. The view from the ModernAire suggested he’d outlived his race—from his door he saw trees and sky and clutter of his own making, and all of it too close at hand. He’d been extinguished without being killed.
▪ 19 ▪
TUBBY SAID THAT the public defender did not seem to have a very good way with some of her clients, and she had been attacked three times in this very jail, so now there was a policy requiring her to be monitored when she met with them here, since there was only one working surveillance camera in the whole jail, the one in the holding cell. The policy was in place for the lawyer’s own protection, but she’d still gone to court to try and get it changed, and the judge had denied the motion, and so it was the holding cell where they’d talk.
“That’s just so you know, cuz—somebody’s watching you the whole time you’re in there, or they’re supposed to be, and it’s not that anybody thinks you’d do anything really . . . it’s not that anybody thinks you’re any weirder than anybody else, but just be careful, okay? No sudden moves. She spooks pretty easy, and you can’t hardly blame her. That one guy split her lip dang near up into her nose, and for a gal, you know—woo—that really did not improve her looks. She’s been a little jumpy ever since.” He pushed a thick brass key into a blue door. “Usually, they’ll have a plea bargain cooked up, some take-it-or-leave-it thing for you.” Tubby liked civility in his workplace, and he spoke well of almost everyone there. “Maybe she can explain it to you. She tries hard, you’ll see.”
Just a few days previous Henry Brusett had passed hours in this closet of a room, but it was no longer familiar to him. The lawyer was in it. She sat on the bench among stacks of documents she’d made, and she was writing on a legal pad in her lap, and she was, as he’d remembered her, unafraid of him. She shook his hand, and when he felt her measuring him through his grip, he tried politely to slip free.
“How’ve you been feeling, Henry?”
“Fine.”
“You’re getting your meds, I take it. Makes quite a difference for you, doesn’t it?”
“It’s to where I need ’em anymore,” he said. “Which is, I know it puts everybody to extra trouble.”
“Sit,” she said, and she nodded at the small bare patch she’d left on the bunk beside her.
“I couldn’t read anything in this light,” he apologized. “Not without my cheaters. Do you mind if I stand?”
“I want you as comfortable as you can be.” She was mild and practical. Probably kind.
Henry Brusett pressed his spine to the wall and knitted his hands to keep them occupied and still. His fused neck kept his eyes up, his gaze aimed at the top of the lawyer’s head, which was divided by a wide part. She wore a child’s dime-store barrettes.
“It’s just another day or two,” she said, “at most. Can you hang on that long? One way or another, I think we’re close to getting you out of here. When you see the judge, we’ll ask for an OR again, and what I’d like to do is have you talk a bit—or testify—about your health. I’ll have you explain your medical condition, and why it’s not a real good idea to have you in here. Why you’re not a flight risk. I’m sorry I didn’t get here earlier—we do have so much to talk about, but I thought, well, I thought we’d better wait until you were stabilized on your meds again. Before we talked.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“No, I really should have been in, but I kept thinking I’d get you out of here, and then we wouldn’t have to . . . they can’t hear us, by the way. They can see us on the monitor, theoretically, but they can’t hear us. This makes me, and I mean this instantly makes me claustrophobic. Every single time I come in here. How anyone stands this I . . . but we really do need to talk because for once it seems like there may be quite a bit I can do for you. I think we may actually have the upper hand—unless I’m missing something. These people aren’t really the kind to hide the ball, so I don’t think . . . I wanted you to have a chance to get more—what? Collected, I guess.” Her voice hurried on like a tire sent rolling down a hill. “I’m sorry. I should have been in a lot earlier, and I am sorry, but I have been working on getting you out of here. I really have, and by hook or by crook we should be pretty close to getting you back home. I hope.”
She seemed to think he was anxious to start learning the specifics of his fate, and from her guilty tone he could tell that she was just as happy to be talking to his chest. He was all but standing on her and very impressed to see that she could write one thing while saying another. Henry Brusett had trouble enough expressing even a single stream of thought. “Thanks,” he said. “For that. But I hope you didn’t waste too much time on it—or, what I mean to say—don’t bother. You can just forget about that bail.” He knew of a valley in British Columbia that the Mounties were said to ignore. He could go state to state, province to province, and only rarely touch pavement in his travels, but he knew he’d make a sluggish fugitive. “I set foot out of here, and I’m gone. I know that. I’ve got a good idea how that’d end up, too.”
“Henry, it doesn’t need to be that way. This may not be as bad as you’re thinking. It may not be nearly that bad. You’ll have to trust me.”
“There’s a real good chance I’d run,” he said. “I don’t have the cash or the legs for it, but I think I might still try and scoot if they gave me the chance.” More than anything else, he wished to be absent, and it was pleasant to think of himself wild-eyed and aloof in some woods—young again, whole again for being hunted.
“All right,” said the lawyer, “let’s talk about our long-term goal, then. Let’s just concentrate on getting you out of here once and for all. Which is quite realistic, I’m thinking.”
Goal. His lawyer was not a true believer in her own optimism, and Henry Brusett suspected it entirely. She had talked a better game, so far, than she’d played. He did not wish to owe her any gratitude, or to have anyone on or at his side. “What do they want me to do?”
“That’s just exactly my point. This is exactly what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t think they’re in any shape to tell you what to do. It may not seem like it, but you’re sort of in a position to dictate terms here. In a way.”
He had never dictated anything to anyone and was now almost too weary to speak at all. Never had he been so tired. “How do you go about just admitting that you . . . ”
“Whoa,” she said. “Let me talk first, okay? Then you can get off your chest whatever you think you need to get off your chest.” She held her fingers splayed and to the side of her face. “You’d better not pick an option until you know what your options are. Doesn’t that make sense? Let me talk first. And then, then maybe you’ll have a better idea of what you want to say. Or if you want to say anything at all.”
“I already know the honorable way,” he told her. “I know the honorable way to go, but I’m not sure I’m up for it. This is bad in here. There’s too many of us, and they never do turn the lights off. But you want to do the right thing, if you can.”
“The right thing? I guarantee you, Henry, it’s
not exactly a universal impulse, and I’m no expert myself, so I’ll leave that to you and your conscience, which, since you actually seem to have one—that could be complicated. There’s a few different ways this can go, all right? Tomorrow, we’ve got your arraignment in the district court, and the judge is going to ask you at some point, ‘Guilty or not guilty?’ What we need to decide is how you want to answer him.”
The lawyer made a chart with bold headings on her notepad, and as she jotted notes into the columns, notes Henry Brusett could not decipher, she was saying, “So what happens if you were to just tell ’em you’re guilty? Say you came into court and just spit it out, ‘I’m guilty,’ well then the judge keeps asking questions, or he’d have me walk you through some questions, because he has to be sure you really did, deliberately, intentionally kill somebody—or this specific somebody—and he wants to hear you say so on the record. He’d want to hear it in sufficient detail. Once you’ve satisfied him on those points, the elements, then he enters a judgment of guilt, and then he can do about anything he wants to do with you. The state owns you then. You’d belong to the Department of Corrections for a long, long time. And those people, they’re boobs, Henry. They’ve got their ‘programs,’ and their ‘facilities,’ and so on and so on, and it’s all just a cash cow for incompetents. They’ve never made anyone a better man, as far as I know. That would also be up to you. Personally, I think the few people I’ve ever seen fixed in any way—rehabilitated—it’s always been a do-it-yourself project. You can’t hire it done, you can’t have it forced down your throat.”
The Other Shoe Page 21