“Is it true you can still get hung in Montana?”
Her chin rocked back and in, and she instantly calculated, “No. Well—yes, technically. But this is not a death penalty case. They’d have to do a bunch of different things to make it one, and they haven’t. Oh, no, this isn’t even close to a death penalty kind of thing. So we can take that right off the table.”
“Yeah? I thought I might finally get all the kinks pulled out of me. What happens if I say I’m not guilty?”
“I ask the court to set it for jury trial. Which is, in my estimation, the best way to go right now.”
“That would be a lot of trouble.”
“I’m not saying we’d necessarily go to trial. We’d ask for one. In fact, that’s fairly standard at this stage of things. This is where all those rights you keep hearing about really start to matter a little bit. What we do is use those to try and get you some reasonable result. Or, I should say, the best result available.”
“Reasonable? You think we can get there from where we’re at?”
“Again, I’ll leave that up to you, Mr. Brusett. It wouldn’t be easy, I didn’t say that.” The lawyer seemed a tough little gal, and only trying to help.
“Don’t leave anything up to me. If you do, we’re off to a bad start. Everything that’s been left in my hands is, well, you can see.”
“I’m very confident. I am very, very sure you’ll make a good decision. But I want you to make a smart one, too.”
There was some strange tension in his cheeks; he was smiling. He remembered that he was to give her no cause for alarm, and he said, “You ever been over to Playfair in Spokane? You strike me as somebody who might like to get a bet down on a horse.”
“If—” she said. “Say you actually did kill that guy. And you meant to. Then that means you’re guilty, of course, but it doesn’t mean you have to say so. Also, there would be several scenarios where you would not be guilty. If you just got messed up while you were trying to help him. Say there was an accident, or somebody else—say you came along after he was hurt. You tried to help. Or what if you did do something? You hurt him? Killed him? That’s not necessarily murder, either, not if it was an accident, or if you thought you had to protect yourself. If you meant to protect yourself or even to protect someone else. That’s a defense to murder. Problem is, if you raise that particular defense, then you might have to prove it. Prove you really needed to do it, then you wind up talking about how and why you killed somebody, which is always a dicey topic to get started on. Who knows how someone else, somebody who’s looking at the incident long after the fact and a long way from the heat of the moment, who knows how they’d see it? Fear can be hard to explain.”
“I’m sure it is,” he said. “Anyway, who cares what I’m scared of?”
In another quarter of the jail, Tubby’s highest falsetto suddenly sounded above a deep, industrial banging, “Get your fucking hands off me . . . I will, I swear . . . get . . . get . . . I swear to God . . . I . . . said . . . get off.”
“Please, please, please . . . oh . . . pleeease.”
More banging, which ceased, and then the distant television, as ever, droning into every metal crevice of the jail. Some laughter, live laughter from the cell.
“Nat,” said the lawyer, having recognized the lesser voice. “I’ll bet he’s a pain to be with back here, isn’t he? I hope he’s not constantly getting into more trouble because a guy like that can generate more work than you’d ever . . . Look, Henry, unless you let me do something about this bond, you’ll be in here until we get this taken care of, and things do tend to drag on sometimes in the system. There are times, and this could be one of those, when delay can work to our advantage. The longer it goes, I think, the better off you are. Look, there’s some loony people, there really are. I see some unbelievable folks. There’s people, and I have to admit it—even though they’re my clients and it’s usually my job to prevent it if I can—some people I just can’t wait to see safely locked up again. One thing I know is—you’re not one of those guys. Okay? Sometimes I just have to believe that about somebody. I know this poor kid is dead, and I’m pretty sure it’s quite a tragedy, too. But it’s not anything you can fix now. It’s my whole idea that you don’t fix one tragedy with another—that makes no sense to me—and what I’m telling you is the poor kid’s dead but not one single officer of the law or of the court, including me, knows how he got that way. As I see it, unless that changes, unless there’s more to this than meets the eye—or unless somebody chimes in with some new evidence—you should walk away from this thing eventually. Just pretty much walk away. I don’t see a conviction. You’ll do what you need to do, but I think there is a way past this if you choose to take it. Which wouldn’t be the worst thing that ever happened.” Now she was also talking to herself, he thought, trying to convince herself of something.
“What’s a guy supposed to say, anyway?”
“Tomorrow, if you follow my advice, we’ll enter a ‘not guilty’ and ask for you to be let out of jail pending trial. And, by the way, if we don’t get you out, would you please see Karen when she comes in for visiting hours? It’s kind of mean to keep her away, don’t you think? She just needs to see you with her own eyes, and I don’t think that’s too much to ask. As long as they’re not trying to prevent it, there’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t see her. She’s come around to ask me about it several times, and I don’t know what to tell her.”
“You think I do?”
“You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. She only needs to see that you’re all right.”
“I think she’ll take your word for it, won’t she? Let her know I’m okay, would you? I’m sure there’s things incubating back here. Nobody should be exposed to this stuff if they don’t have to be.”
“All right.” The lawyer had him sign two papers, which she read to him but which he could not force himself to hear. She collected all the rest of her documents, bundle by bundle, and she laid them in her briefcase. They’d served little purpose here. “It doesn’t seem like we’re necessarily getting anywhere at the moment. So let me just say what I want to happen. I’d like it if you took my advice and you let me enter a ‘not guilty’ for you tomorrow. They’ve got the burden of production, burden of proof, all of that. That’s right where we’re at as far as I’m concerned, and what I’d like to do—for now—is go ahead and put the state to its burdens.”
“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 wate
r.
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.
▪ 20 ▪
“THE 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.”
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