The Other Shoe (12 page)

“How can they not know who he was?”

“Maybe he lost his ID,” she said. “In fact, let's just say that's what happened. He lost it.”

“He
lost
it?”

“That's right,” she said. “Lost it before he ever got here. Henry, look, a lot of things can happen when you just sleep all the time. You pull that Rumplestiltskin thing, or whatever, and stuff's going to happen while you're asleep. Not very much, but just sometimes when I'd been out cuttin' wood, and I had my wedding ring off, so I wouldn't get it caught, and I'd keep it off if I stopped in at the Bitterroot Room for a beer. That's all. Not much. I had a few ideas, that's all. But you were asleep and asleep and asleep. And then I, I just tried to wake you up—again—and I couldn't even get a peep out of you, and then, all of a sudden you're . . . I don't know. Imagine how you must feel.”

“I'd like to get my head clear,” said Henry, “but I can see already I might not make it. You say they don't know who he is?”

“Doesn't seem like it so far.”

“That is the loneliest thing I ever heard of. Poof, and you're gone, and nobody who knew you is any the wiser.”

“Yeah, but it's better for us, I'm pretty sure, if they don't know. So maybe we better not get sentimental about that.”

“Honey, you do what you . . . but I'm asking you, if you could at least give him a name, then I'd like to give him that much back. Talk about the least you could do.”

“Yeah, when you put it that way, I know. Man. Shit. All right. But you gotta help me, Henry, okay? You think you can?”

“Help you?”

“Find out his name.”

“You didn't know it?”

“I know how to find out what it was,” she said. “But it'll take some doing. I think we gotta break a few more laws, maybe, to get it.”

“But—you didn't know his name?”

“Right. So now I guess everybody's ashamed. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

“We gotta live with this,” she said. “We just gotta find some way to live with it.”

“There's days on end when I don't envy the young at all.”

“Nah,” she said, “enough of that, now. Let's just do what we gotta do.”

They waited until dark before they drove down to Red Plain, where they fueled at Orsino's and where Karen did not invest her complimentary quarter in the keno or poker machines. She did buy a sparkling quart of malt liquor. She drove them past Larry's Conoco, looking in the lot for an honest little car with Iowa plates, and they saw it, and they went on to cross the bridge and park in a stand of failing cottonwood on the far sandbar, just off the road, down near the river. They watched the water spin wherever it met resistance under the moonlight. A full moon, of course, entirely unobscured and shining near daylight down on them and their mission. A lone drake strutted back and forth on the packed sand beach, searching perhaps for the flock that had already taken wing above him. Karen fretted in preparation.

“What if there's nothing in there?” she said. “'Cause, if there isn't, if I don't find something in there that says who he is, I won't know. I wouldn't know who he was except he came from Iowa. He said he was in school there, had a kind of a girlfriend; he was almost a professional man, too, a pharmacist. That's what I really wanted. I wanted him to talk to you. If you would've woke up, then I doubt . . . ”

“His name,” said Henry, “is all I want to know about him.”

“Just a couple more swigs,” she said, “and then we'll do it. I gotta try and calm down.”

They made another pass down Main Street to reconnoiter and lay a plan. The young Iowan's car had been fitted between the tow truck and a school bus that was also awaiting parts or repair, and from the street a passerby would see the K car only from a certain angle and only briefly. Karen thought that if she could reach it without drawing any attention to herself, then the rest shouldn't be too hard. She decided to approach it on foot, down through an alley leading up to the rear of the lot. “Good thing we hunt,” she said. “That's where an honest person can learn to be sneaky.”

Henry said he'd wait for her with the motor running, wait across Main Street and across the tracks, behind the grain elevator.

Karen's pulse tripped along at a rate much faster than any she'd ever achieved as a hunter. She put her fingers in the door latch but said at the last moment, “There's no reason why you should have to be in on this, honey. Why don't we just call it off? For right now. I'll come back later by myself.”

“Go,” he said. “I'll be over there waiting for you. You don't need to take any big chances, but go.”

The alley was narrow and bound on one side by old brick work, on the other by a tall hedge of lilac; moon shadow was available all along her way, and Karen kept to it but met in the dark with a limping dog, an exhausted old chocolate Lab that seemed to know they were both intruders there, and they stiffened and gave each other as wide a berth as the alley would permit, and Karen climbed over a chain-link fence, and, once onto Larry's lot, she immediately lost heart. She hid behind the school bus, her back pressed to it, and it was the most mercilessly solid thing she had ever touched, and this the hottest night ever recorded in Red Plain, Montana. Karen could not make herself be calm or very smart.

Think
, she thought, and she thought that it was impossible to steal from the dead, and that it was honorable to name them as necessary, and Karen knew that what she was after should not be very jealously guarded. It was not reasonable to tremble so.
This is not wrong
, she thought. And she thought of her waiting husband, that he had been waiting a while now, and she thought of this and that, and then, when she knew that courage was never coming, she decided to go on without it, and she dropped to her knees and crawled around the nose of the bus. Still on her knees, and sweating like the heroine of a jungle movie, she tried both doors of her dead friend's practical, forlorn little car. They were both locked. In what should have been an inauspicious hour of an inauspicious Sunday night in late summer, it seemed that someone's headlights were sweeping down Main Street every few seconds; the traffic seemed consistent with the end of a ball game or a popular person's funeral. Karen waited on all fours, and she wondered if she were to stand and look into those oncoming lights her eyes would reflect red in them like a cat's.

At last, Red Plain settled into a Sunday rhythm again, and Karen felt it safe to rise from her knees and pick through the bed of the wrecker until she'd found a length of pipe in it. The pipe would be her hammer. Karen swung from the hip. The shock of that first blow made a crystalline fabric of the driver's side window and traveled up into her wrists as voltage, and she dropped the pipe, and it rang off the car then bounced on the pavement, tolling like a cracked bell. She dropped to her haunches to squat and wait and listen, and when all she heard was the crickets in their incessant surprise, she found the pipe where it had rolled under the wrecker, and she rose with it once again and delivered two more blows to the window, swatting as best she could with her face turned from her target, and at last she punched a hole in the safety glass, and she reached through it and unlocked the door.

She threw herself into the front seat so that she lay face down across it, her face pressed to the square beads of glass she'd just blown out of the window. A light swept through the rear window and off the rearview mirror, and Karen lay on her greasy cheek, hoping she was only sweating. She did not wish to bleed here. She'd made so much noise.

It was dark inside the car, darker still in the glove box; working by feel she found in it a lead weight for a tire rim, and five American Legion poppies, and a pencil stub. He was the kind of boy, she thought, who would have had his insurance in order, his registration ready for display, and Karen Brusett lay there, not very disappointed, while another light passed through the car. One of these lights would be stopping. Wouldn't someone be coming for her? So much noise. Having terrified herself, she bolted, and, backing out of the car, she banged her head on the door frame. “God,” she called, high and loud. “Damn.” As she paused to absorb the pain, she happened to see the leatherette folder strapped to the driver's visor, and she snapped this free and crawled back around the car and the bus and vomited, and climbed the fence again and ran back into the dark side of the alley where she stopped to catch her breath. She put her hands to her knees and heard herself panting, and then the old chocolate Lab sidled out from behind a trash bin as if he'd been called to come, the happy and confident dog now, and he came and jumped up and planted his dusty forepaws on her hip. Her heavy friend.

“Scat, buddy. Scat.”

Still winded, Karen ran. She went along the alley another two blocks, turned north, and circled back across Main Street with the dog frolicking in and out of her path and plunging along trying to herd her. Then the dog, in its decrepit playfulness, began to bay at the moon. Karen shifted into a breathless sprint. Even howling as it was, and lame
and old, the dog was able to run with her, and it ran with her all the way back to the waiting truck.

“Go,” she told Henry. “Go, go, go, let's go.”

The chocolate Lab had risen to his hind legs to bid her farewell and bay. Where had it found the strength to do all this? “Shush,” she said, far out of the beast's hearing. “Shush, boy. See that, Henry? That dog latched onto me. I think he thinks he's mine. I tell you—the stuff that's been happening to me lately. Could you hear all that racket I made gettin' in and out of that car?”

“You find anything? What's that?”

“I don't even know,” she said. “I didn't stop to . . . Sorry I took so long. I kept freezin' up. No, don't turn. Let's just go straight on out of town. God
damn
. Now it's runnin' after us. You believe this? Go, Henry, let's not worry about that little speed limit too much.”

“He won't run far.”

“Yeah, but step on it,” she said. “He's like a actual demon.”

A
WAITING A CALL
, Hoot Meyers paged through a portfolio of fifteen pictures of a corpse on a gurney, a thing presently without history or anyone to lament it and only slightly more tragic than a dissected frog. There was fascination, a comfort—
this is not me
—in seeing a stranger so utterly dead. Rigor mortis had rolled the upper lip into a sneer revealing good teeth. A careful, recent haircut and a clerk's pudgy physique. During the last hours of his life the boy had been bruised on his calves, his butt, and his shoulder blades, and these injuries, in the opinion of the medical examiner, were sustained some hours before the fatal one. It seemed he'd had a hard last day. At the back of the boy's head, shot from several angles, was a window cut into the skull to reveal a blood-laced mass of chicken fat, still glistening, recently the seat of a soul. The coroner's report mentioned seminal discharge in the corpse's shorts, but naked in death the penis lay abject upon the shriveled scrotum, and only about the eyes, not merely closed but clamped shut, was there any semblance of will in it.

Meyers held a piddling modern notion of mortality, the sense that when he himself expired he would merge with the infinite. But to do what? And what had he made of his time as flesh and blood? The enduring accomplishment of his tenure in office was a maple tree that had grown up outside his window, and it was none of his doing. Once, these sunny summer mornings had been hellish affairs, the sun
streaming straight in from the east or shredded by the county's tattered blinds, the old fluorescent fixture blinking and ticking in the resulting dark. Now the blinds were long since removed. Now the red leaves had risen up to provide a dappled shade on his corner of the courthouse, and in the serenity of such mornings he might briefly drift like the lily pad on a pond.

The phone rang in the outer office; from the tone of his secretary's first remarks he knew that she was speaking with her grown daughter concerning one of her grown son's many misadventures, their inexhaustible topic and bond.

“Nelda,” he called around the corner. “Nelda, we need to keep that line free.” Meyers operated on the cheap with one incoming phone line and one legal secretary.

“It's kind of a crisis, Hoot.”

“No doubt. You've got five minutes, okay? You tell me this guy's gonna be calling, and you don't get a number so I can call him back if I need to, and then you tie up the phone all morning. We've got to do better than that.”

“All morning? I'm sorry, but all morning?”

“Five minutes,” he said. “Take five minutes. You can't get it fixed from here—whatever it is.”

Nelda ignored him and said to her daughter, “Yes, he's forty, but that girl knows he's just a big kid. She should know that by now. And it was a hamster. A hamster, for Pete's sake. She knows how he is, but she just keeps blowing up over the slightest little thing. He needs to find a girlfriend who doesn't always see the worst in people.”

Meyers closed his door against it.