The Other Shoe (20 page)

“There'll be a lot,” Meyers said, “a lot to do.” He would never in her company be more than a tongue-tied ten-year-old.

“But you, young man, are just the fellow to do it. You always have been. You're young, but I think the people know you're the kind
of person who gets things done.” She did not cease to smile. Never. Meyers remembered the rhythm of this now, and how she would circle around in her own good time to her question, to making some velvet demand of him. “Mr. Smith,” she observed, “poor old thing. Bless him. En. But he had gotten to the point that he wasn't really equal to the job anymore. He did so well, for so long, but the drinking, that catches up with a person after a time. Sooner or later. The temperance people had a good point, really.”

Hoot Meyers had argued a number of cases against En Smith, and the man's lawyering, if nothing else, had never been besotted. “From what I can see, he was pretty darned efficient. I don't know what else he was, but you can look through the files and see he kept right on cranking the pleadings out.”

“I'm sure,” said Mrs. Callahan. “I'm sure he was doing the very best he could. But—Mike. It's Mike, you know. For me. That's what I'm always thinking about. It's years now, Hoot; it's getting to be years, and right from the beginning almost nothing was done about it, and I get the feeling they want me to believe that he just vanished off the face of the earth, because no one has ever seemed too concerned to find out what might have happened to him. I, I can't get anyone to really look into it. Not until now. But, Hoot, I happen to know what kind of young man you are. You're thorough, you're tough, and persistent—I mean, as a child . . . if anyone can find out for me, you can. I waited until you were elected. I waited until you had the mandate of the people. But now it's time. I think I can let you be my hope. Will you be my hope?”

No. No one's hope, least of all Naomi Callahan's. “I'll look into it,” he said, and he gave her a lawyer's tiny, calibrated promise. “I'll do what I can for you.”

“It will help so much, I think, if someone who knew him is doing the looking.”

“I knew him, but by the time he . . . I didn't know him all that well anymore.”

“You weren't exactly moving in the same circles.”

“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 roads, 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.