The Other Shoe Read online

  “No.”

  “But you knew him. You knew him when he was our little Mikey, and I think you know exactly what I’m talking about—sure, he could be kind of impulsive, but such a good heart. Basically so trusting, and he was a good boy, and I’d like to get some of these rumors stopped.” Here, at last, her voice rose.

  “I hadn’t heard those.”

  “Hoot.”

  “You’d be very surprised at how little gossip I hear. This job takes me pretty well out of that loop.”

  “I need to know what happened to my child. If I . . . He was my only child, you know.”

  “I’ll see if anything was missed or overlooked the first time around.”

  Meyers, as he thought of it, would be nearly as interested as Mrs. Callahan to revisit the investigation. No findings had ever been published, but he was an official now with the means and reason to know—had he been implicated? Had Henry? Were innocents harassed? Meyers warned Mrs. Callahan—and he saw her eyes go into soft focus to discount it—that the passage of this much time would have to mean that the trail, if there was one, if there had ever been one, would be cold. Cold. What a choice of words. He could, and very often did recollect exactly the sensation of touching her Mikey’s drooping hand.

  Conrad County’s missing persons files, fifty years’ worth of them, were kept in a mildewed banker’s box in the basement of the courthouse. Only eighteen incidents had been recorded in all that time, and all but two of those had been cleared within a day or two of the first report—hungry, sheepish hunters making their happy way home or found hunched over Ritz Crackers and tins of potted meat, the picnicker who’d spent a night outside, not a hundred yards from a busy Forest Service road, a woman who’d reportedly given herself up for dead. In the unresolved folder there were just two files. The thicker of these concerned the case of Bella James, who’d last been seen gurgling and learning to roll over on a blanket near her drowsing mother. The Elisis municipal park? Meyers could picture no such location, but this had been June of 1952.

  And there was, of course, the less tragic but equally complete mystery of Michael Patrick Callahan.

  Notes handwritten in pencil indicated that there’d been a search of Mike’s Volkswagen for evidence of foul play, and that no such evidence was found. The mechanical condition of the car was advanced as the best explanation of how it happened to be parked along the road. A vial of fifty crosstops was found humming under the driver’s seat, an empty Annie Green Springs bottle on the floorboard.

  The file also offered a small sheet of stationery with floral borders and lined along one side with Mrs. Callahan’s flowing, Palmer Method script, a list of names, of associations:

  John Scatcavage, friend

  Marshall Howlett, friend/co-worker

  Bella Fondren, waitress/acquaintance

  Henry Brusett, friend

  Lee Warren, business owner/employer

  Jim Callahan, biological father (probably Omaha, Nebraska)

  Herbert Valens, grandfather

  Cap Warren, Darren Orth, “Goodge” Nicholson, friends or acquaintances

  There were check marks in red ink beside just two of these names—Henry Brusett’s and Lee Warren’s, and a third scrap of paper in the file, this one torn from a wire binder and with jottings on it in yet another hand, another shade of ink:

  Warren—boss MC misses a lot of shifts sometimes goofy at work always scatterbrained maybe in with some bad company not sure probably last to see him Thursday 19th later in the evening

  Brusett—HB has been working out of town Callahan pretty good friend of his but hadn’t seen him lately no bad company will call if hears anything

  With that the official inquiry, at least as contained in the file, was finished, and Mrs. Callahan was right—no one had been very curious about the fate of her boy. But the only promising lead had been followed. Someone had talked to Henry, and Henry must have had to tell that questioning someone that he did not know what had become of his friend. It was not in Henry Brusett to lie easily or well, but it seemed he’d lied well enough.

  Meyers sent letters to some of the people named on Mrs. Callahan’s list who had not been interviewed before. For reply he received a baffled call from Goodge Nicholson, an outraged one from the grandfather Valens. Neither of them, of course, could offer any insight, any new information. “New information” was the phrase that occurred four times, always in the negative, in the letter Meyers then wrote Mrs. Callahan. The letter also contained his final promise to her—he’d keep the investigation open.

  When he next saw her she lay among banked candles, still very ruddy in that creamy light, done in by pancreatitis. She had died in the deep of the winter when Father Yelich finally finished sealing off the drafts in the Catholic church, and Meyers, a late arrival to the funeral, stood bowed at the back of the choir loft, under the arching ceiling, and generations of her students and their parents and their children had come to sweat in dark clothing, and mourners stood outside in the cold, and the censers, with their addition, made the air near the rafters so close and cloying that it penetrated Meyers’s clothes and lay like syrup against his skin. There were tulips handmade of construction paper and heaped round the bier; her dreamily illustrated One Thousand and One Nights was propped against the casket, a book she’d read to them scores of times through the years.

  She’d asked for a Latin mass, and with the several eulogies that were said, and the heat and stench, it all went on too long for the largely Protestant crowd. But all were agreed, even the irreligious Meyers, that justice demanded for Mrs. Callahan, either for her sufferings or for her good works, a berth in her own particular heaven. All the formalities should be observed. From high above, Meyers saw that she’d been laid out in the pale gray blazer she’d worn to conduct her holiday concerts, and he knew the bright smudge on its lapel to be a brass lark. Mrs. Callahan had also asked that each of her former students in attendance that day should pass by her casket and leave her a note, even if it was nothing more than a name, but thoughts and wishes were encouraged, too, and pencils and sheets of her own vibrant stationery were provided for the purpose. Meyers joined in the slow moving rank, and when he reached her, he saw that the mortician had made her strange and stern. Meyers had written her to say:

  I am sorry. Maybe we can all rest in peace now.

  He dropped the note unsigned.

  The reception afterward was hosted by the Ladies Auxiliary at the steak house that had sprung up just down the road from the old school. The school had been maintained since Naomi Callahan’s retirement as a sort of museum, but it was too small to seat them all, and so the Ladies had provided for some vans to shuttle back and forth between the school and the banquet room of the steak house. This day was also by way of a reunion. The school district was dissolving, and the school itself had been sold. Next spring the teacherage was to be torn down and the schoolhouse to be renovated for use as a realtor’s office. The new owners had given every assurance that the bell—of course!—would continue to hang in the belfry, but the sense among those visiting the school that day was of another good thing passing. Meyers was careless enough to board a van upon which Mrs. Henry Brusett then shooed her family, Henry and their two boys, one writhing article for either lap, aliens with moon faces smeared in blue frosting. There were two more women along who looked to be too near to Mrs. Callahan’s age to have been her students. Their driver, the apologetic chair of the school board, another of the endless Orths, seemed to think he should narrate their short trip, and as a tour guide he told them that Mrs. Callahan had for thirty-two years single-handedly run one of the last one-room schools operating in the continental United States. He said that during several of these years she’d received no pay at all. One of the Brusett boys began to cry and kick in his mother’s lap and the van suddenly smelled sweetly of baby shit.

  The Belknap school had the look of a country church, a brave, often luminously white little outpost at the corner of two county road
s, set among malnourished apple trees. On the grounds a tall set of swings had been built of welded pipe and set in concrete footings, along with a similarly made teeter-totter and a hoop and a backboard upon a pole. The ruts and hollows under this equipment were filled with ice. Inside, the school was very much as Mrs. Callahan and her last class had left it, very much as it had always been, that one immortal room with its sink and stove and refrigerator, the smell of white glue, the recessed stage always awaiting their next performance, and the cloak closet, the clock, the globe, the piano, the library, steam radiators along the walls, desks of indestructible tiger-striped oak that had been cast off from an even earlier school, and that were now, as particularly venerable, particularly prized antiques, more valuable than the building. Looking for certain inscriptions in pocketknife and pencil lead, former students moved among them, tenderly stooping to touch the wood.

  At the foot of the stage, to either side of it, were china cabinets now belonging to Mrs. Callahan’s estate. She’d used them as showcases for framed pictures of each year’s student body. Meyers was studying these when Orth of the school board came up to explain that it had been decided that the small balance remaining in the district’s general fund would be used to publish a volume containing the class pictures, year by year. Would he be interested in helping them name as many of the pictured students as possible? They were looking for people from different eras who would know names, especially family names.

  Meyers said that he could of his own knowledge identify nearly all of them. He pondered this haunting fact. From across the room, not very far at all from the perspective of a grown man, he watched Mrs. Brusett settle her spreading ass on the piano stool. A woman who would never recover from making her children, she pulled the older of these once again onto her lap, and was mesmerized by his strong, discordant pounding on the keyboard. Henry stood nearby with the other, younger boy in his arms, the little one whose face did not move and whose body never ceased moving. A steam pipe happened at that moment to bang like a shot; it banged again, upsetting the boy in Juanita Brusett’s lap; the pianist began to swing stiff-armed back at his mother’s head. Juanita, for her part, rained slaps on her son’s thighs. Henry held the other child and looked away. Meyers found himself approaching them.

  “So now we know,” he told Henry, “why it didn’t warm up too much in here. Air in those pipes. You want to help me bleed ’em?” There were a succession of valves in the line leading out of the boiler and to the radiators, and when the boiler had been silent for a while, it was necessary to sequentially let the air out of the lines before steam would decently translate to the radiators above. It was a job for two, and any boy who’d ever reached the fourth grade here had been instructed in the art, the partnership, of bleeding the lines.

  Henry offered the child in his arms to his wife, but his wife said, “Nooh, no,” and waved him off, and so Henry, his odd baby still on his hip, followed Meyers down the ladder into the cellar. The child was not alarmed, not interested, and its fixed face was yellow under the cellar’s sickly light, and its hair was a shock of corn silk.

  At each of the valves in the line, there hung a crescent wrench on a string. Meyers reached deep into a crawl space to open the last of these valves; the smell of pack rat was profound where he’d placed his head. Henry, working one-armed, opened the valve nearest the boiler; a hiss issued from either vent. Meyers stood on tiptoe to reach—as boys they’d used a footstool for the purpose—and, stuck in his balletic pose, he faced Henry’s son, who stared at him with an infant’s frankness, an ancient’s recognition. “I think you can twist yours off now, Henry. I’ll leave this one open till it really spits at me.”

  Henry put his child on the floor, and he pointed to the concrete between its splayed legs and said, “Stay. You stay put, Davey.” He never looked away from the little one as he opened the firebox and threw in several tamarack blocks. The little one never looked away from Meyers, not even when his father scooped him off the floor again.

  “It beats me,” Meyers observed, “how she kept this outfit down here from coming to somebody’s attention. I can think of a couple, three agencies that would’ve closed her down right then and there if they had any idea about this boiler being here. This boiler was brought over on the Mayflower.”

  “Newfangled. She hated that, didn’t she? Anything newfangled. Remember how she made you use both sides of your paper? She was the original environmentalist and about the only one I ever liked.” Henry’s baby struggled to free himself again from his father’s arms, but in its sallow face there was no evidence of struggle, not even when the child used it to batter his father’s chest. Henry set him on the floor again.

  “My wife’s pregnant,” Meyers said, “so I guess I’ll be a dad myself here in a couple months.” Would Henry regard this as good news? Henry wasn’t saying. “Henry,” Meyers went on, “I’ve been wanting to thank you. I saw that they came and talked to you back when Mike disappeared. Somebody came around and asked you about Mike, didn’t they?”

  “Did you notice? Not one person has mentioned him today. You’d think somebody would say something about him, too, since he was about the biggest thing she had. Him, not this school. He was by far the biggest thing in her life. You think people just got used to not talking about him?”

  “I hate to say it, but I don’t think he ever exactly springs to anybody’s mind. Mikey didn’t leave much of a hole in the world.”

  “Yeah, but there wasn’t that much wrong with him, and he was my friend, too. I haven’t had many. But I kept my mouth shut anyway. Didn’t I?”

  “And that’s what I wanted to tell you, wanted to tell you how much I appreciate that. You really had a lot less to lose—if we . . . I know you wanted to do what was right, and instead I let you get caught up in the worse thing I ever did. You didn’t have to be, Henry.”

  “I went along with it easy enough. We were out of our minds, or I know I was—I don’t take so much as an Alka-Seltzer anymore. After that.”

  “I only ever talked to her that one time,” said Meyers. “After. But that was enough. It came into my mind, not every day but pretty damned often that I should tell her, and every time I decided against it. So here I am at a good woman’s funeral, kind of relieved about it. What a specimen. Well.” Meyers flinched and reared back. “There. There, that’s nothing but steam. I think we finally got it purged. At least she’s done wondering now.”

  Henry stooped to keep his baby from crawling onto the boiler. “We never did have that wedding,” he confessed. “Remember, I said you’d be invited? We just never had one. Kids came along, and we never had time for it. I guess we’re married, anyway. Common law.” Henry had then given his hair and beard to do what they liked, prophet-in-the-wilderness style, and he’d been given this horrid family.

  “I know Mike was your friend,” said Meyers. “I didn’t mean to make light of that.”

  “This one,” Henry said of the child, “they make up a new test for him every few weeks, and it’s a thousand bucks here, a thousand bucks there. He’s just a strange, strange boy, Davey is, which is about all these tests have told us. They don’t quite say why. It’s too much for Juanita, so I have to hire sitters for him when I’m off in the woods, and I’m off in the woods all the time so I can pay for everything. One thing leads to another.” He picked the child off the floor again; its grubby body went rigid in his arms, and it turned to stare once more at Hoot Meyers. The baby’s mouth hung slack, but there was intelligence enough in its eyes.

  LET ME GO?

  ▪ 13 ▪

  HENRY BRUSETT HADN’T lasted long without his medicine. The walk back home from jail had hurt him, and he couldn’t make the pain subside at all, so within a few days he gave in and scuttled around to different druggists in different towns to get his many prescriptions refilled. He traveled his two-hundred-mile circuit for Lortab, and Lorezapam, and Percodan, and Percocet, and pills with names unknown to him, and pills to help him tolerate othe
r pills, and then home again to that buoyant wait for nothing. One of the pills, or some combination of them, commended him in his weakness, so he took them all to be sure of the effect, but no matter what he took, he could not subdue the new alertness in him that had come of killing that boy, and not all the knockout drops ever concocted could make him sleep through the first few hours of dawn. These were, he suspected, precious days.

  He would sit by his wife’s bed to listen to her breathe and mumble, to watch as gray light crept through an oval window and slowly sketched her where she lay. It was how they had been conjugal, but now when she woke and saw him there beside her she would weep—so, so unequal, she said, to all that blessed love. Rather than see her cry, Henry Brusett began to spend the early hours in the garden, often on hands and knees, on soil damp with dew and radiantly painful in all his joints. He liked to eat a carrot straight from the ground. He liked how, in the midst of any apocalypse but winter, there was always weeding to be done. Day followed day. Karen went out to pick huckleberries and came home with a quart jar well filled, and they made their fingers, lips, and guts an inky purple.

  She’d begun to speak of a time when her husband would be healthier, and of how they might live in a place where he could more easily get around. “Somewhere with, like, sidewalks, and where I could get a decent job. Regular money. I’m sure we could do that if we put our minds to it—live in society. Like everybody else. I mean—they all do. Maybe we should try it now.” Why not, she wondered, give the goats away and make gumbo of the chickens, and just kind of try for once living among other people? They both knew, however, that his wife was as much society as Henry Brusett would ever willingly tolerate. After a week had passed and still the police hadn’t returned, she was made so bold as to ask him, “Do you think you might have any sperm I could possibly use? ’Cause I’d sure like to have a baby while we’re still . . . I’d like to have a baby is all. You know. It’s what you’re supposed to do. I say we get off all these bad habits and get on to something better.”