The Other Shoe Page 13

  Alone again, he rowed back to shore.

  ▪ 11 ▪

  IN HIS SECOND year of law school, while Hoot Meyers was home for the Christmas break, he happened to be watching through the kitchen window when his father’s final heart attack draped him over the top rail of the pole corral. Dusty had spent the last moments of a charmed life walking out to moon at his new colt, sugared coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other. As a Lutheran elder said at his funeral, he would now be missed by anyone who’d ever known him. Dusty was beloved because he’d been content. He’d played the same Gibson dreadnought all his life, and, as beer and bait and tackle are easy enough to acquire, he’d never needed to strive very much or contend for much, and he was well known and universally liked. As was often remarked, Hoot Meyers was not in many ways his father’s son; it had been lineage and love with them, but they were not alike.

  So he sold the colt to help cover the bill from the funeral home, and there was a party he did not attend, a wake without the body but with a free lunch, and then the funeral, and then Hoot Meyers went back to Missoula and a mandatory semester of tax and commercial law, a brutal study that felt to him like expiation for some failing of his own heart. He also pulled the occasional shift tending bar at George’s Indonesian Lounge, and two or three mornings every week he’d drive home to observe the ongoing collapse of the Meyers’ estates, which had become, he soon discovered, encumbered by tax liens. Dusty had let it go to weeds, and Dusty, strangely adamant about it, would not lend his consent to any other use of the family’s lands while he was alive. “Let it alone,” he’d say, as if there were something pristine and fine about their scattered properties, the many hearty crops of knapweed and milk thistle where even mule deer wouldn’t bed. “Just let it alone; your Grandpa Felix had me roped into that deal long enough. You start messin’ with it even a little bit, then pretty soon that’s all you ever do, and you’re not a dollar ahead for it, either. They pay me just so they can let their cows out on those fields. Run somebody else’s cows—run ’em in, run ’em out, that’s what I like—easiest way I ever heard of to turn a buck.”

  The Meyers holdings, during Dusty’s reign over them, had been so neglected as to be unfit even for poor pasture, and now the widower’s son could not escape a certain joy at the absence of his father’s interference. It was not very flattering to find that on becoming an orphan his strongest impulse was to dirty his fingernails in his inheritance. One Sunday just before midterm exams, a day he should have spent in his carrel at the law library, Hoot Meyers found himself instead driving his one-ton truck through early-morning fog on Highway 200. The ground, having thawed, was breathing, and he wanted to be on the mountain at dawn, and he did not wish to suffer anymore the misery of considering capital gains, and like-kind exchange, and third-party complainants, and so he thought to be on Bailey Peak all day, doing something.

  A set of headlights appeared and blinked off again, somewhere down the highway. Meyers slowed. Again the headlights appeared and blinked off. They seemed no closer. Finally his own headlights brought up a shape in the eastbound lane which proved to be Mike Callahan’s Volkswagen, parked on the shoulder. Callahan, with no jacket and apparently no idea of the cold, sat on a front wheel well with his palms pressed together and his hands and arms forming an arabesque above him. Henry Brusett was in the driver’s seat, his leather sombrero pulled low. Meyers slowed and slowed, wanting to slide by. He stopped at last, and with many reservations he called across the road to them, “What are you guys up to?”

  Callahan’s hair was cut to cheek length in a Buster Brown that pinched his narrow face and twitched with his every movement so that he seemed possessed of ridiculous, uncontainable energy—this style had never been fashionable. “We almost made it,” he said, in awe of himself.

  “Made it where?”

  “Back,” said Mike Callahan.

  Henry Brusett rolled his window down. “Transmission,” he said.

  “You can’t get it in any gear?”

  “We had it in third,” said Henry, “for about the last thirty miles. Just about burnt ’er up. Then even third went out, and here we sit.”

  “Well, I’d give you a ride,” said Meyers, “but I’m going up the hill, up the mountain.”

  “Up the mountain?” challenged Callahan. “Sermon on the Mount?”

  “Yeah. My place. Thought I’d try and get a little something done today.”

  “You got a place?” Callahan mugged incomprehension.

  “What’s wrong with him, Henry?”

  “He called and asked me to come and pick him up. He was stuck in Spokane. So I did. I brought his car over to get him, which was maybe not a good idea.”

  Meyers was only a few years older than Callahan and Brusett, but he’d been that many years older during their early boyhood, and so they continued to look upon him as their elder.

  “Henry Brusett,” crowed Callahan, “is one of the best people I’ve ever met. You ask him for a favor, and he doesn’t ask you ‘Why?’ Or ‘How much?’ Or ‘How many?’ Or ‘How long?’ ‘I’ll be right there,’ that’s what he tells you. And he is. Right there. A right-there person, that’s how I’d describe him.”

  Callahan had failed for once to overstate. Henry Brusett was generous to a deep fault. For Henry’s sake, Meyers thought, he’d better offer them a way off the road. “Like I say, I’m headed up the mountain, but you’re welcome to ride along.”

  “Where?” Callahan’s head flipped as if to track the flight of a roman candle.

  “So here you are,” Meyers assessed, “you’re sitting by the side of the road, fucked up as you can possibly be, and I bet you’re holding, too, aren’t you?”

  “Well, Lord High,” said Callahan.

  “Acid,” said Henry Brusett.

  “On you?”

  “On Mike.” Henry’s moustache had in those days involved half his face; he was solemn behind it. “Or he did have some of it. They were in his jeans, but he just had ’em loose in his pocket, and every time he went after some change or something, a few fell out. And I didn’t—you know I just said, ‘Good riddance.’ Don’t know if there’s any left. It’s just little bits of paper. He’s been takin’ it for days, I think.”

  “Mike?” Meyers inquired.

  “I’m not deaf. I can hear better than you can. Just call me Angel of the Morning.”

  “We’re getting you out of here,” said Meyers. “You’ve got no business being anywhere near the beaten path right now.”

  “I am not,” said Callahan, “paying anybody to tow this car. But they could have it. You could have it if you want. No. Henry, you’re the one. I now declare: This is your car.”

  “Go ahead,” Meyers suggested, “hand him that pink slip and a pen, if he wants to sign it over to you, Henry. Be a blessing to motorists everywhere.”

  Mike Callahan’s mother, the sainted Naomi, had been the only teacher any of them had known during their first six years of schooling, and as well as her gentle guidance had worked with all her other students, it had been insufficient to the rearing of her son, and the boy had just never mustered the strength of character or imagination to think well of himself. Since high school Mike had tried and quit a community college, go-cart racing, fine wines, archery, six jobs, and one marriage, and though he was fairly new to hallucinogens, he thought that here at last he’d found his abiding passion. “Usually,” he told them, “usually you’re just the nucleus, the . . . proton, and you’re just sitting there. Drop acid and you get to be the electron for a while. I mean, spiihn.”

  This, Meyers thought, was the first interesting thing he’d ever heard Callahan say. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go.” He was not much concerned with the fate of Mike Callahan, but he didn’t want anything too out of the way to befall Mrs. Callahan’s son.

  Callahan stood, crouched, and stood again in a surfer’s stance, his legs thrust fore and aft, his hands and elbows cocked to balance him. “Eeewh, I don’t know if I can
get inside that truck. I mean, fit. Look at me.” A new impulse made him rock up onto the balls of his feet and remain poised on them, the ugly ballerina.

  “Get your ass over here, and let’s get down the road before anybody else comes along and sees you this way. Come on, Henry. You blistered, too?”

  “Straight,” said Henry Brusett. “I don’t think I’d care for it.”

  They brought into the cab the smell of bundled air fresheners and, as an undertone, the smell of Henry Brusett’s cowhide jacket. Callahan sat in the middle with an expression usually associated with private time, of shocked gratitude, and he quivered at the pleasure of being in his skin. “You know the way you’ve been led to believe, how the world is so heavy? Wrong.” Meyers posted up through the International’s gears, and all through their whining progress to overdrive, Callahan declaimed so as to be heard over it, “You can touch the hand of God, and it only costs you three dollars and fifty cents. And, Ireland? We’re way better. Way better. Way better. Try saying that. That makes your mouth feel great.”

  Callahan, under the best of circumstances and at the very height of his coherence, was never going to say anything useful, but there’d been a kaleidoscope lurking in him, and now he was not so easy to ignore. Meyers was somewhat jealous that so much lightness and facility had come to this callow boy so easily. Hoot Meyers knew only how to make sense, and it was always laborious. “Tell you what,” he said, “with a couple extra hands, I might move some rock. You guys want to make some money today, long as you need to get yourselves out of the public eye? I could pay you a little, but you’d really be earning it.”

  “I should ride in back,” said Callahan. “Know how dogs ride, with their tongues hanging out?”

  “If you were a dog,” said Meyers, “I’d let you. Now, try and jack down a little.”

  They arrived at the home place that morning with the rising sun, and Callahan stood on a stump to embrace it, and he invited it to advance and see them and make them warm.

  Meyers drove the truck along the lower perimeter of the property, and Callahan and Brusett walked alongside, loading rock onto the flatbed. Later, whenever he thought of this day, Meyers would always remember that neither of them had ever asked him why he might wish to do something so pointless as to move rocks from one part of his field to another part of it; they simply agreed to help him and never did think to ask after the purpose of what must have seemed, at least to Henry, a futile exercise. The boys, with no other options before them, had been along for the ride, and Meyers had been, as usual, responsible for all that happened.

  The work was hard and clumsy, but Callahan, frolicking like a puppy off its leash, moved right along with it, and he said the sky remained stable, that the ground often whirled when he looked down. “But not sick, it’s not like the drunk-whirlies—Not-At-All. I will say, I’ve never been less sick. In my whole life. Wow. Woohw. Every little breeze blows right through my whattayacallum? My intestines. I am so clea-ean.”

  Henry, invincible in those days, a thirty-gallon barrel of a boy, walked along on the other side of the truck at a pace that would allow him to do whatever he was asked to do for as long as he was asked to do it.

  Eventually Meyers, out of fairness to his little crew, and seeking to make them more efficient, thought he should abandon the brutality of having them lift the rock up and onto the flatbed, and so he fashioned a stone boat by pulling the hood off the resident wreck of an Oldsmobile, and by blowing holes in its nose with his .06 so that he might hook a chain to it, and with a clevis pin he attached the chain to the draw bar of a tractor, and with that they were off and running. Callahan and Brusett ran along behind and tossed rock into the loud hollow of the upturned car hood, and they described skid trails in the mud and gradually made a mound of rock on the upslope. Only when Meyers himself got thirsty—and this would be another source of shame in his recollection—did he think to offer the others a chance to drink. He’d worked them that morning like Egyptians. “Hop on,” he told them at last, and they boarded the stone boat, sitting side to side, and he slid them to the truck, where he got the pack of Fig Newtons he’d brought for his lunch, and then he dragged them on to the stock tank, and they drank like camels from the pipe that fed it, and Meyers tried to distribute his cookies as a snack.

  “Not for me,” said Callahan. “The only reason I even drink is so it’ll rain.”

  Henry Brusett took one as a courtesy and he put it in his mouth and bit it. “People eat these things on purpose?”

  “You have to chew it a little. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Well, it’s glop, is what it is. Hadn’t you noticed it’s quite a bit like shit? Now I’m thirsty all over again, and what about all these seeds? Man, you should warn people first, before you give these things out to ’em. I mean, thanks and everything, but . . . hoo.”

  With infinite care, with hands already stiffening from that morning’s portion of work, Callahan turned out his hip pocket to catch some pennies and a nickel and a complex wad of lint, and some lavender scraps of paper about as large as his smallest fingernail, imprinted with tiny rainbows. “Three,” he said victoriously. “That’s a lot. Of this. They said it was Sandoz, and I think they were right. I probably better take ’em before these get lost, too.”

  “Nah,” said Meyers. “Now, you don’t need any more. How long you been without sleep?”

  “It’s all I need,” Callahan declaimed. “Your problem is you think you’ve gotta sleep to dream. But there’s dreams everywhere, if you know how to grab ’em.”

  “Now you’re sounding like the Navy recruiter, Mike. My luck, I’d catch a nightmare.”

  “No. No. Look. This is it. I’d be happy to share. Somebody’s gonna take it because it’s a sin to waste. Be like the, like the, I don’t know. The Host? Along those lines.”

  “Neither one of us slept much last night,” said Brusett. “And I am startin’ to wear down.”

  “You think that’s a problem?” Callahan was exasperated. They were simpletons, cowards. “Give me some men who are stout-hearted men. Please.”

  Meyers and Henry Brusett had known each other nearly all their lives, but never very well, and now they looked from one to the other—for permission, for a better idea, for a wiser head to prevail.

  “Well, I’ve see him work like I bet he never did before,” Meyers said. “So there’s that to be said for it. But what’s in his head? Would you want that? Can you get hooked on this, Mike? What am I asking him for? He could get hooked on milk.”

  “I’m right here, Hoot. Quit talking like I’m not here. Because I am. Quit that. I am right here.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “Hoot, what are you tryin’ to . . . do?”

  “Forget it,” said Meyers. “Okay. Give me one. I’ll try one.”

  “You?” wondered Henry Brusett. “You’re a college graduate, aren’t you, Hoot? Kind of a goody two-shoes? If you didn’t get in a fight once in a while . . . ”

  “Can’t even do that anymore. Littlest little thing and I wind up on probation, and, mind you, I’m the only one who got hit on that occasion. So let’s just say it is a fool who hires out as his own attorney; you could also say Dean Sullivan was not too pleased with me, and I’m on probation with him, too. I’ve got to stay completely away from that kind of trouble now, ’cause they already think I’m the wrong orangutan down there at the school of law. Does this stuff ever put you on the fight, Mike?”

  “It’s love,” said Callahan, pressing a dose into Meyers’s palm.

  “Is that what it is?” Meyers was a legend of hard sobriety. “Then it’s probably wasted on me.” He threw it into his mouth. “You just swallow it?”

  “Leave it under your tongue,” coached Callahan.

  Henry Brusett said that no piece of paper could be worse than the cookie he’d already tried. “So, I guess I’ll take one, too. Maybe I better, if you guys are.”

  Meyers’s higher education had occurred in Missoula, a nor
thern Babylon, and he had grown well accustomed to the reek of one incense and another, but he’d taken small advantage of the consolations of his age. The risks he took were not for pleasure, and he did not ordinarily aspire to happiness or enlightenment, but this morning he was tired of himself. A flake of paper in his mouth, not so significant there, not so flavorful as gum. Meyers didn’t expect to achieve anything like Callahan’s condition with it. He thought Callahan had probably taken too much, because that is what Callahan would always do, and Callahan was a right foil for any placebo or misconception or joke, a boy of far more imagination than intelligence and with no resistance to any passing fancy. Mounted once more on the driver’s seat of the tractor, Meyers surveyed himself pretty steadily for any sign of change, and after what seemed a long while of feeling nothing out of the ordinary, he was reclaimed by the monotony of driving at four miles an hour. Let those escape who might escape, but it seemed he was stuck in a mind with plodding methods, and he’d written the experiment off as a bust and his spirit as an unapproachable one, when, and somewhat suddenly, he was overtaken by a new appreciation for the warmth, the lovely, pulsing sludge of his blood within him. An ember glowed on either shoulder, and in the space of several minutes, he was purged of every last reason to dislike himself. The boys skipped and giggled behind him, rough-looking sprites; the brim of Henry Brusett’s sombrero rode up and down, the wings of a thick brown bird in flight.

  They gave over entirely to play then, and they took turns riding the stone boat like a sled, sitting on it at first, and then standing and being pulled at a high rate over remnant drifts of snow, pulled across wide and slushy ponds where snow had only just melted, and as acrobats and nymphs they rode, and they fell without being hurt, were soaked to the bone without being cold. Their histories released all claims against them, and they laughed continuously, a laughter at no one’s expense, and they ran without becoming winded.