Nat was in a mood to challenge the prevailing philosophy and, of course, his fate. “You know what’s wrong with this? I’ll tell you what—I am the grease. Society’s grease. Because I go out there, and I sell, and sometimes I don’t necessarily sell product that I actually have. Actual product may not move that well. I like to think that I sell dreams—but in the end, it’s always back to the unholy dollar, isn’t it? In the end, your clients never seem to remember how good you made them feel when you were closing. All I know is, every time I try to be a little bit more ambitious, try to really make something of myself, something bad happens. And it just keeps getting worse. I’m a young man, but I sure don’t feel young anymore. Business is starting to take quite a toll on me, I’d have to say. It’s getting to where I often wish I wasn’t such a self-starter.”
“Sometimes in the joint,” said Leonard, “you’ll run into an accountant, or some fingers-in-the-cookie-jar little turd, and they’ll be the most miserable people in population. Even in some low-security, rinky-dink cakewalk they’re miserable; poor fucks aren’t on the road to enlightenment. Accountants. You only have to talk about a shiv, and you bleed ’em white. They’re uncomfortable all the time. Greed does that to you.”
“Well, that’s not me,” said Nat. “I don’t want that much. I’m not asking for more than anyone else—a place I can call my own, an attractive wife. I’ve always wanted a collie. Wanted an insurance agency at one time, but I doubt that I could be bonded now. It would be very hard to get into law school, probably.”
“How old are you?” Leonard asked, incredulous, disgusted.
“Twenty-five.”
“What a quivering square. Why don’t you just accept it? You can’t get in that club. They’ll never let you in. It’s root hog or die for you, Cindy Lou. You’re a criminal now. A junior criminal. Spicy.”
“You don’t know me,” said Nat, hopefully. “How could you know me at all?” There followed the long, hiccupping sighs that meant he was preparing to weep again. He would empty himself of salt.
“You better stop that whimpering, Pam. You know that turns me on.”
“Why can’t you call me by my real name? That is not too much to ask. Do you think this is in any way fun for me, or pleasant?”
“I would hope you were entertained. I know I am.”
“I get it. I get it. I know you have needs, and I imagine they have to be taken care of somehow. I understand that. We’ve been all through that. If I have to help, if I have to help you with that then I will, but . . . ” A sound burst up through Nat’s nose; his terror at a tipping point, it rang in him as he considered his fix. The bleat of a wounded doe, it was the only expression he ever tried to suppress.
“I told you,” said Leonard. “Didn’t I tell you that you better not keep that up. Oh-oh, it’s that glow again. I get that glow for you when you do that.”
“I said I’d help. You don’t have to—oh please. Wait. Nohb.”
Meat banged metal. The prisoner at Henry Brusett’s feet snorted awake; Jamie, no doubt wide-awake now. They heard Nat being dragged across concrete floor, slippers slapping in a furious resistance that saved him nothing.
Henry Brusett loathed his fascination for this but he could not quit it.
“Wait . . . Pleease . . . ”
“What else is there for me? You know what I like.”
“Anh. Anh. Auhngg nuuhgh.”
Afterward, for a little while at least, they would lie down, Leonard contentedly, Nat cocooned in his hard-won, temporary safety—and they would sleep. For his part of the routine, Henry Brusett would get up then, sit at the picnic table, and enjoy the voluptuous quiet. He had a bundle of letters from his wife that he kept in a paper sack with his reading glasses, and these came out when he could be alone with them. The envelopes were marked in soft pencil with the date and time of their sealing, and some of them were quite fat. It seemed she was in the habit of making notes to him throughout her day. He’d read them in order, first to last, and it was while reading these letters that he’d first discovered the little tremor developing in his right thumb. Wide, gray strokes on oatmeal paper, a child’s writing tablet. Her pencil was a thick instrument, and she could fit very few words per page. She wrote to say she had picked the corn. The nannies loved the husks and tassels, and now their milk was worth drinking again. Chokecherries were starting to look like they’d come in thick this year. The truck was leaking oil from the transfer case. She could deliver him books, but then he would have to leave the books in the jail. The jail had a policy about every single thing. If he wasn’t too mad, she wondered, would he please see her? Wouldn’t he see her so she could say how sorry she was? She’d been meaning to do that even before they took him away.
She wrote to say she’d fixed the truck, she thought, with something she’d found at the auto parts store called Liquid Steel. Was this a repair she could rely on? She wrote to apologize and apologize and apologize, though she never specified her wrongs. She wrote to say that, though she was doing all the things she usually did, she seemed to have so much extra time on her hands. Did he feel like he had extra time on his hands? Sorry—stupid question. She wrote to say she’d started to prepare the trailer for winter, cleaned the stovepipe, and she’d already begun to bed the garden; there were a few good radishes left in the ground. Now, she wrote, she had realized she’d been letting him take care of too many of the details, the bills and all, and she thought the responsibility of it had maybe got him down a little bit, but she was doing a needlepoint, she said, with a bluebird on a cherry tree, and she’d send it to him when she was done. If he wasn’t already home by then. She included a sketch of the pattern, the finished bird. Karen recounted how her father had been around to say she’d better come back and live with the folks again, she’d better get a divorce, she’d better try real hard to get right with her Lord. He’d offered her the use of her old room, and she wouldn’t even repeat what she’d said to that, but she’d answered him so that she doubted they’d ever speak again. Not if she could help it. “GOOD RIDDENS!!!” she wrote.
She wrote to promote a plan in which they would move to Elisis when he got out of jail, and he would take the healing waters every day, and she might find some work at the big hotel or maybe at the pole yard. She needed steady work, she thought. People came to Elisis from all over the world to heal, and here it was just a little ways down the road from them. They should think about moving.
She wrote to say she’d talked with the lawyer and she knew just what she should do. She said she missed him, but knew that everything would turn out fine. It had to. She loved him, same as always, and she could hardly wait until he felt better again. They needed to get back to eating their meals together when he got home, doing things together again, and just being together. It was time to stay positive, she wrote. “Positive, Positive, Positive,” was the whole of one letter. “You are not bad!!!” read another.
She wrote to say that their luck was due to change and it almost had to change for the better. She wrote and mentioned the current temperature on Fitchet Creek. She wrote to say that sometimes, when she missed him too much, she got out the hammers and played Mattie Groves. Everything would be fine in the end, she said. There had been a moose around lately, a cow that had moved into the head of the marsh on Road 262.
Henry Brusett broke open that morning’s letter, and it began with a declaration: She’d been depending on him too much, and she knew it, but now he could depend on her because she would never let him down. Not anymore. She would not let him down. There had been another reversal with the goats; she didn’t know what the girls had gotten into, but their milk tasted skunky again. And, “I keep coming in every visitor day and they say you didn’t put me on the list yet, but I will keep coming because I know you will be ready to see me some day and some things you have to say face to face. You may think this is very bad and your right but we have to stick together. This experience really shows you how much it is important. Those turkey
s are back around. I got some corn for them so they will stay this time.”
Henry Brusett read it all in order, and returned each scrap of paper to each envelope as he finished with it. He restored each envelope sequentially to its place in the bundle, and when he’d finished a night’s reading, he’d rebind them all with a twine that he’d twisted up out of threads pulled from his jumper. This packet gave him Fitchet Creek as it had been when she’d first joined him there, a paradise with a short half-life, ten acres where they offended no one and where kindness, of all things, was the prevailing order. Fruit of an abandoned orchard. He bundled the letters and put them back under his mattress, and then, dread quietly accumulating, he awaited the rest of the day. Leonard woke, and urinated, and reclaimed his usual post at the picnic table, mopping his face and neck with a bare hand as if to spread the rictus of boredom across his features. “Why the fuck don’t you ever say anything? You and your Gary Cooper thing, who needs that shit with a headache going on? With his usual fucking headache. Who appointed you the fucking riddle of the Sphinx? Say something for once. What’s on your mind?”
“I can’t think of anything.”
“Come on, you can do better than that. You’ve heard many chapters from my tale of woe, so, come on, you better try a little harder than that. It’s your turn. It’s the middle of the morning-night, whatever. Tell me something. Anyfuckingthing.”
“There’s digestion. That’s what I think about quite a bit. I usually got stool like concrete, so that’ll occupy your mind. What do you want to hear about it?”
“Fuck you and your fucking bowels. You’ve been alive, tell me something. You ever been to war? Ever steal anything interesting? Ever loved your neighbor as you loved yourself?”
“I never had many neighbors. Probably why I don’t have many stories. Never knew I’d be called on to entertain.”
“You’re a hard-ass, aren’t you?”
“No,” said Henry Brusett, “and I never even thought I was.”
“Yeah? Well, that’s all I am. Little bit limited. I’ve got what they’re calling a small skill set. You know what the cancer rate is among recidivists? The average life span? You’d prefer to die with your boots on, or, in our case, your shower slippers. Aaah. Who’s ever worth shaking down in here? I mean, ever. These penniless fools. If we could ever just get a couple hundred or so together, I bet your cousin Tubby could come up with all kinds of goodies, couldn’t he? I’d like to get my head up in the ventilator shaft with a spliff. Anything. Except meth—I just cannot tolerate that odor. What do you like?”
“I’m good the way I am.”
“Yeah, you would be. You get yours delivered, don’t you? Percocet? That may be my all-time favorite. Got over my fear of needles just so I could jam Percocet in my arm. Ever try that in a vein?”
“No.”
“It’s delicious. You should get your hands on a works.”
“I don’t get high on it,” said Henry Brusett. “It gets me just about normal.”
“Much as you’re taking? Oh, that’s a shame. That’d put me in a low, slow orbit around the moon.”
“You think you’d like that?”
“I’d like,” said Leonard, “a spike through my eye, if it meant a moment’s diversion. It’s the tedium, baby. That’s the enemy.”
“Well,” said Henry, “I’ve noticed Fess and Tubby, they don’t watch me swallow. You want to make a deal?”
“Deal?” said Leonard into a suddenly overburdened friendship. “I don’t make deals in here, prisoner. I take what I want, and that’s the deal. I don’t want to get started on any other precedent. You better give me some fuckin’ pills if you’ve got ’em to give.”
“It’d be everything I can do,” said Henry Brusett, “not to swallow those once they’re in my mouth. So, no, if you get the pills, I get something.”
“Or I could just take ’em from you. I do hate this dealing. It’s unnatural to me.”
“Or I could just swallow, like I usually do. Like I’m supposed to do. So, what then? You gonna work me over? Wouldn’t get you any drugs. You want these, you’re gonna need my cooperation. I’ll give you all but the one, the anti-anxiety. That wouldn’t do you any good.”
“Oh, I’ve got anxiety,” said Leonard. “I’m the poster child. So what do you want? Out of this deal?”
“Want you to lay off that kid.”
“Why? Got a little crush, have we? Why didn’t you just say so. Not that I’d share. Is that all?”
“Him and the other one. And everybody. Leave ’em alone.”
“What are you, a prude?”
“Little bit, yeah. You might call it that.”
“Got any idea how wasted your sympathies are? But, all right. I’ll go for it. Give me all my lovelies, and that’s your guarantee. I get a load on like that, and I’m pretty Zen. My appetites would tend to zero out, which is the whole idea of downers, isn’t it? But I’ve seen how you jones without these, man, so here’s another part of the deal—no dying, okay? Don’t you curl up and die now, because, personally, I don’t care to be haunted in here. That would be the last straw.”
WHEN
YOU
ARE FREE
▪ 22 ▪
SHE WAITED THEN in dismay, but no one came, and before long Karen Brusett was longing to be harangued, or made to feel guilty, or for any human exchange, but no one ever came. She canned applesauce and corn, more provision than she could easily store. She finished the embroidery for Henry, a plump bird among plump fruits, a pattern built of intricate stitching. Though faithful to her daily correspondence, she came to regard it as self-indulgence; Henry must not read her letters because he never gave in to her many pleas to let her come and see him. Her letters, she imagined, were only a journal and served only to reveal how she became, without at least a little company for direction or for distraction, mortally bored and boring. She was not nearly so self-sufficient as she had thought herself at Henry’s arrest, and she feared a winter in this purer solitude might freeze her solid.
Karen had been hoarding more firewood than she could ever reasonably hope to sell or burn, and drinking beer at all hours, and one morning out on Rugged Cross Road, with her load lopsided on the truck and with High Life on her breath, she was startled if not surprised to see an urgent light display in her rearview mirror. The officer behind her made his siren yip, and she looked for a wide spot in the road. She’d been courting trouble, she knew—no insurance, no current wood permit, no decent jack or jumper cables; her deficiencies were legion. She owned a driver’s license that she didn’t even bother to carry, and she was a disaster, and she had gone out of her way to bring it to someone’s attention. Now that attention had arrived in the form of a deputy making his way to her side with his hand on the grip of his pistol, and she found she didn’t necessarily want it.
“Ma’am.”
“Hi,” she said without exhaling.
“Remember me?”
“You’re . . . ?” Was he flirting with her? “From . . . ?”
“Deputy Sisson,” he said. “I was there that night you . . . ”
“Oh,” again with an inhalation. The deputy had been different at night, more boyish among the other officers. She remembered him as pale in someone’s headlights. “That’s right. Sure, now I do. How are you?”
“How am I? Fine, I guess. You know why I stopped you?”
“No,” she said somewhat truthfully—there were so many possible reasons.
“The way you’ve got your dog up there, that’s against the law. What keeps it from flying off every time you stop or make a turn? All it’s got is a lumpy little spot to stand on, and that’s . . . You didn’t know that was a bad way to go?”
“I did, but she won’t ride in the cab. She just barks and barks if you put her in the cab. It’s, it’s horrible. But I do not like to break the law.”
“That isn’t the real reason I stopped you,” said the deputy. Karen Brusett felt her troubles multiplying. Wh
at else? Would she have to walk a line on the highway for him? Say the alphabet without singing? She could not be very drunk, she thought, and still be this embarrassed. She could hardly afford to pay any amount of fine. But maybe this officer would take her to jail. This might be her best chance of seeing Henry.
“I’ve got a subpoena for you,” he said. “Sign right here.”
“What’s this?”
“Just what it says. You’re to appear as a witness for the state.”
“State of Montana and Henry Brusett? Well, this would be—Henry’s trial? Wouldn’t it? I thought they weren’t gonna have that, not for a long time yet. They must’ve got satisfied he’s not crazy, which I could’ve told ’em for free. But, already? This is so soon.”
“Says October 15,” the deputy noted. “Ten in the AM. SO be there, or be square. Or be arrested, actually. Sorry, didn’t mean to be unprofessional. They’ve got us on these thirteen-hour shifts. You get goofy after a while.”
“But—against my own husband I’m supposed to testify? Against my own husband?”
“I guess so. You might want to go home, ma’am, and brush your teeth before you do too much more driving around. And get the dog off the top of that woodpile, too, would you?”
Karen Brusett did not drive home. She drove in that direction until the deputy was out of sight, and then she turned around in the road and made straight for the county seat, where she might expect to encounter even more police. Nosy police. Hard by Karen’s side Clementine barked without pause, tireless and intentional, and much closer than she knew to being abandoned at the roadside. In town, the mushroom burger deluxe had become the special at the drive-in, and two demolition derby cars were on display in an abandoned lot. Greg’s bakery had gone out of business.
The Other Shoe Page 24