The Other Shoe (8 page)

Mr. Brusett gave her a chocolate bar when she came out to him where he waited at the tire rack. “Tell you what,” she said, “that's my last parade, and I don't care what I have to do to get around it. It's not a very . . . not civilized, I'd say.”

“I never cared for 'em.”

“I gotta ask you one more favor. Could I borrow a quarter to call my mom? Is it a quarter to call? Aren't you supposed to leave people money when you use their phones? Even, like, gas stations?”

“I can run you home.”

“Oh, thanks. But you did enough already.”

“That's all right.”

“You don't wanna drive way out there just for that.”

“After all the favors your people have done me?” he said. “Sure I could.”

“She's gonna be so mad. Or maybe she will, or maybe she won't, I don't know. I've always made it home on the bus, like I'm supposed to. I guess it was kind of an emergency, though, and I could tell her that.”

“Your mom? What if I let you off at the head of the lane? Maybe she wouldn't know the difference. Far as she'd know, you came home like every other time.”

“You're way too nice,” Karen said. “I don't think that would work, though, 'cause it's a couple more hours until the bus would get out there. I guess I could just wait in the weeds a while, but I'm already kinda cold.”

“Oh, I think we can kill a couple hours,” he said. “About all I ever do is kill time.”

He turned his heater to high and set a fan to ticking and whirling behind it, and they drove out to Badger Bridge Road where, without waiting to be paid for it or even thanked, he left the saw he'd repaired at someone's hunter-orange door, on a porch full of funked equipment and arching cats. The same road brought them, a little farther along, to a switchback that they mounted steadily, though it was steep, and they'd soon reached an elevation upon which snow had fallen all the previous night, but a dry snow that achieved no great depth. Mr. Brusett stopped and got out of the truck and walked some hundreds of yards up the road, and he shot a grouse. The bird's head lolled from his fist as he walked back to her with it. He was a long time coming because he stopped like a dog to ponder every little disturbance on the ground. When he finally reached her he apologized. “I got an elk tag when the season opens, and I really like elk, too, but if I don't get one right close to the road, I don't get one. So I have to do a lot more scouting than most guys. There's a little herd that travels through here sometimes. Took a nice bull right up around the bend there, a couple years ago. Had him loaded in half an hour. All I had to do was winch him off the mountain with a come-along. You'd rather be lucky than good, but it sure don't hurt to keep looking all the time, especially when you got a chance to see a fresh sign.”

“That's all right,” she said. “I didn't mind waiting. This is a real good spot for me.” He'd left her on a ridge from which she could see
into all the valleys that had contained her life, could see that part of Fisher Meadow where two faint lines joined to form the corner where, she knew, the Dents' mailbox stood, and she liked the world reduced this way: train line, power line, the Clark Fork and Flathead rivers, gray rivers, lines on a map, vines in a dead garden. She considered the huddled homes below and enjoyed the truly effortless sympathy to be had for creatures so insignificant as to live in them; Karen found that at this altitude, she was even somewhat tolerant of herself. She liked to cut new snow. She told Mr. Brusett, “My dad got a pheasant once. But he must've got too close, 'cause he kinda blew it up. He brought this thing home, it was about half bird and half BB shot, and Mom just laughed at him, which kind of hurt his feelings.”

“Grouse are stupid,” said Mr. Brusett, “and some are
really
stupid. I've knocked 'em over with sticks while they were looking at me. Species like that, I don't see how you could call 'em a game bird, and I also don't see how they survive, but they do, and they're everywhere. And you can eat 'em. Pretty dark meat, and gamy, but if you don't need variety, and if you didn't need a few vitamins, you could probably live off of just grouse.”

“Sounds like a awful lot of feathers and guts to me,” she said. “They must really breed like rabbits, huh?”

Her bird was the magpie, she told him. She stalked them with a wrist rocket. She said she'd flung an awful lot of shots at them and never hit one; everywhere you went, there's another magpie standing just out of range, or standing on a window ledge, an inch from a big, expensive window—they did not make targets of themselves, and if they were as elegant a bird as the sky could ever offer, still they never pretended to be anything but scavengers, and something irresistible in her told her to drive them off. “But I never do connect,” she said. “I don't even wing 'em or anything, 'cause I'm right-handed and left-eyed, that's what I think it is. It's that and my ammunition. Can't
always afford marbles or think to buy 'em when I'm in a store, and I absolutely cannot make a rock fly straight. Almost any rock's gonna wobble or hook or go way catawampus when you shoot it.”

“Well,” said Mr. Brusett, “I got something you should try.” He stopped again, this time to let her fire his little pistol, and she used a box of cartridges to chase shattering pinecones down the road. Mr. Brusett said that he had quite a few more bullets for it, and he'd give them to her, give her the bullets and the gun, too, because she'd sure get better use of it than he ever could. She was a natural. Though it was so, and though she wanted as much more shooting as she could get, Karen said, “No.” She said that he was trying to be way too kind. “
Too nice
?” she said. “I wouldn't know how to deal with that.” But Karen stood to be persuaded; she did love the accomplishment of hitting, with that little catch in the breath, hitting exactly where she aimed. With the pistol would come that black holster, too, and she could certainly see that strapped to her thigh. But then she happened to think that in her short acquaintance of the gun, she'd learned to make it deadly but not how to make it safe.

“And who needs another tragedy?” she said. “You're always hearing about people gettin' shot. I can't believe how many people seem to get shot, and a lot of 'em for not too good a reason.” Still, she wanted it. “No,” she said, “that'd be way too much.” But she wanted her little sweetheart, with its bark and its bite, she wanted that pistol pretty keenly now.

F
ROM THEIR FIRST
afternoon together Henry Brusett said that he knew he'd eventually bore her, but in the beginning she saw no end to him. Though he warned her early on that he'd been named a mental defective by the Social Security Administration, they both thought him competent enough to teach her how to shoot, to hunt and fish, how to run a saw in slash and in heavy timber. He would not, he said, show her his way of doing things; he would show her the right way, and in his company she finally learned to read the country she'd so poorly inhabited thus far, for Mr. Brusett knew what wanted direct sun and what wanted shade; he knew what lived in standing water and which birds ate voles and which birds ate berries and seed; he could find weasel, ferret, and ringtail pheasant if he wanted them; and viscerally he contained the knowledge of the day, sometimes the hour, when trees would fruit, when flowers would bloom; and when all these things that he knew bubbled up in him, apparently because she was near, they would smile at each other. “Listen to me,” he'd say. “I just go on and on, don't I?”

“I like to hear that stuff. If I didn't, why would I be here?”

He told her she'd tire of it, he was sure, but as long as she'd be his legs for him, he'd be happy to point things out to her. He had only to get himself a little way off the road before he started finding and describing to her new threads in the tapestry of his practical understanding.
With an eye to harvest, he showed her that an alder thicket was an almanac, and for Mr. Brusett the grass and the weeds lay this way or that way not randomly but for some reason, and the wind never merely blew, but blew from a certain direction, at a certain velocity, carrying a specific, telling scent. He was a barometer, never surprised by any weather. For Mr. Brusett, all things, saving Mr. Brusett himself, served perfectly some purpose, and through him Karen was introduced to a reassuring order. “There'll be a mayfly hatch tonight, and if you got a fly-casting rig at sundown, you'll have good fishing. About anywhere along the river or the lower parts of the creeks. There I go again, the endless expert, huh? But it's true, watch and see.”

Karen's solitude out of doors, after she'd spent some time with Mr. Brusett, was a larger, more sovereign place; there was more in it to see and to think about, and though he'd furnished her with many new resources for being alone, she now preferred passing time in his company. She had never before been so useful to anyone, never nearly so necessary.

“I was married over twenty years to the same woman,” Henry once told her, “and I didn't know her good enough, really, just to pass the time of day. Same thing with my boys. Same thing with everybody.” He said that the state had once tried to patch him back together, back when he'd gotten bunged up, but they'd found that he was a little crazy, too, and so at that point everyone threw in the towel, and they put him on full disability, and now he was one of those drains on society that a working man always hated. They told him he suffered a form of high anxiety, a severe case of something to do with other people. “But see?” he said. “When I'm around you I get to talkin' like the old gals down at the beauty parlor. Which I kind of like. When I'm around you.”

Henry was to give her at different times the small pistol, a Buck knife, and six years of
Reader's Digests
, and she learned to avoid
looking for very long at or commenting favorably on anything he owned for fear that he'd make an instant, irrevocable gift of it. Henry's was a sometimes terrible gratitude. He did her the favor of seeing her, though, of attending so closely to her existence as to know her shifting essence, to confirm it, and for this favor she was every bit as glad of his company as he was of hers, but she never would convince him of it.

The Dents saw her apprenticeship with the puzzling Mr. Brusett as a very fine thing, and they were pleased with the occasional fish that came of it, and venison and duck, and at finding red fir split and rucked high and deep on their porch. When Karen brought home her .243 Savage, her first gainful wage and first substantial property, Jean offered thanks in prayer: “Lord God,” she said, “thank you for this rifle, and for the blessing of showing our girl a way to get by.” Karen knew that the Dents liked to see her put to good use, but Karen knew that what especially pleased them was having her so frequently off somewhere with Mr. Brusett and not, therefore, lurking around the property, in and out of sight. They liked her better at a distance, and they always had.

As graduation approached, Karen had only one certainty regarding her future, and that was that she'd lived with the Dents as long as she could. Her folks were hinting often and broadly that they felt the same. She received as a senior many pamphlets that offered ways to go about putting herself on the road to success, or suggesting programs that would allow her to seize opportunities “
NOW
.” There were loans available. Her mother became very excited for a time at the hope of Karen becoming a dental hygienist; in just eighteen months she could be earning a good living and have her independence, too. Or, Jean suggested, what about becoming a certified care attendant? That was a goal that could be reached in six weeks, and the enfeebled and slightly disabled were, according to the literature, to be found in every city and town across America. A licensed CCA could work anywhere. But
Karen didn't think she'd have the patience or compassion for those careers. She wasn't drawn to secretarial work, didn't think she'd like bookkeeping. She was too shy, she thought, to be in the armed services or to be a waitress. She was not lazy, or so she hoped; she simply couldn't think of how, in very practical terms, she was to begin life apart from her family.

In April a reporter from the
River Register
came to collect copies of graduation pictures. The reporter told the seniors that the graduation issue was the
Register's
number one printing all year, that an extra four hundred copies would run, every one of them crammed with sheets and sheets of coupons for the meat department at IGA. The reporter provided forms on which they were to write out their full names, their parents' names, how long they'd been in district schools, and, in twenty-five words or less, what they intended to do next. “Karen Ellen Dent,” she wrote, and “Jean Dent,” and “Galahad Dent,” and “13 yrs,” and, rather than admitting that she'd been too stupid to imagine any future at all, she wrote, “I have a job helping my friend and that is where I would like to maybe live with him.” Her picture and aspirations were published countywide the following week, and the day following that, she stood at Henry Brusett's door with her father, who had brought the .243 to the meeting also, and not with the intention of returning it.

“Brusett,” said Galahad, “what have you been up to?”

Henry, in his long johns and a chenille bathrobe, had tried to invite them into his strange old trailer, and when that failed he stood on his metal stoop, blinking. His boots were on, unlaced.