Authors: Matt Pavelich
The Other Shoe
THE
OTHER
SHOE
THE
OTHER
SHOE
Matt Pavelich
COUNTERPOINT
BERKELEY
Copyright © 2012 by Matt Pavelich. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-61902-042-9
Cover design by Silverander Communications
Interior design by
meganjonesdesign.com
COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Nick and Riley, and to George Withrow
Whoso removeth stones shall be hurt therewith; and he that cleaveth wood shall be endangered thereby
.
E
CCLESIASTES
10:9
Proceed then, my Lords, with that sentence which the law directs
â
I am prepared to hear it. I trust I am prepared to meet its execution. I shall go, I think, with a light heart before a higher tribunal, a tribunal where a judge of infinite goodness, as well as of infinite justice, will preside, and where, my Lords, many, many of the judgments of this world will be reversed
.
âT
HOMAS
F
RANCIS
M
EAGHER
,
IN HIS
S
PEECH FROM THE
D
OCK
prologue
C
ALVIN
T
EAGUE WALKED
out of Red Plain at four thirty one August afternoon carrying an old Boy Scout backpack to which he had strapped a flannel sleeping bag. Grasshoppers rattled in the weeds, and the tar of Highway 200 was soft underfoot. Too shy and too well brought up to hitchhike, he marched through an indifferently farmed mountain valley with his back turned to oncoming traffic to discourage the offer of a ride. Sweat rolled down his neck. He had no hat for his freckled head, and he hadn't thought to bring any water.
For some miles he continued to smell cut alfalfa, but as he walked he never actually saw this harvest. Pastel homes had been trucked in and flung around the landscape to subsist on ten-acre plots in gardens of tired machinery; some of them were also beauty salons or secondhand stores or shops for small engine repair. Concrete figurines of Mother Goose and Snow White were offered for sale on someone's tiny lawn where a hand-lettered sign said,
U
PAINT OR
W
E PAINT
A
LWAYS
Y
OU
'
RE
C
HOICE
He passed a herd of squat black cows, several grain fields plowed under. From the shade of a fading barn, a barnyard dog shot out to bark and bare teeth at him. Teague retreated through the far borrow ditch. Drenched in a new, clammy sweat, and extremely alert, he went
on, and when he came to an astonished cat lying flattened on the road he raised his eyes for reliefâfor the larger vista. Even the mountains had been molested. Square tracts had been cut into the mantling forests; in the clear-cuts, gray undergrowth was revealed, and gray shale and gray dirt. The clear-cuts looked, in fact, like vast incrustations of mange. The people who lived on this land were corrupting a great beauty, and Teague, raised on judgment and forgiveness, could not help but dislike them for it. Time and again cars bearing local license plates politely slowed for him; time and again, also politely, he waved them on.
His legs, unaccustomed to much sun at all, soon hinted pink, and he ducked into a culvert to change back into his long pants. In the pipe he smelled wet loam and moss, and he supposed this was it, some of the adventure he'd vaguely intended. On the strength of this notion he went on, his own man now, and he achieved a pleasing, ground-eating lope that brought him by late afternoon to the mouth of a long canyon at the valley's western end. Here the highway and a railroad track converged to run close along the north bank of a river on either side of which slabs of rock reared thousands of feet up out of the scree, the earth's massively broken crust.
In the canyon he smelled creosote, road tar, a field of mint, alfalfa still, and even the rocks, which seemed to breathe some cautionary odor. He walked under and then into the sun for hours, storing the day for use against all those impending beige days, all the plodding days and years that lay just ahead of him. He must be certain to remember exactly how far he'd walked, how tired he'd been, remember how once, one endless day of his twenty-fourth year, he'd exceeded himself out in a wild place where nature held him in benign contempt. So Teague was proud of himself, proud even of his raging thirst until he realized that the answer to it had been with him all day, that he'd been walking beside the river, more or less, for about as long as he'd been walking. Adventurer? Not really.
He crossed the railroad tracks and climbed a high mesh fence; he caught his pants leg on its top strand and fell to the other side to lie for a long moment on his back, on the railroad's vicious red roadbed rock. He crossed a field that caked his socks with burs. The river at this point was a solemn green thing sliding by like muscle under flesh, and there were no easy approaches to it. Hips working like a skier's, Teague slid down a steep gravel bank, his shoes filling intolerably with sand and small pebbles. He was standing one-legged on the little bit of beach and had removed a shoe and was brushing at his foot when he lost his balance; the naked foot escaped his grasp to rest very briefly on a round, slick stone in the river. Then he was sitting in the river, chest into the current and cooling rapidly.
The water didn't bear him away at first, but he couldn't stand. Each time he scrambled and fell back he landed a little farther into the current with his mouth a little nearer to going under. Then he was flailing, his butt bumping backward on the rocks, so Teague, not quite gone to panic yet, slipped off his backpack, and away it wentâwith the weight of that wet sleeping bag, and his shoe, and, as he would soon learn, everything. Sliding downstream and sinking out of sight. He rose only to fall back again, hard and deep. Then, breathing river, he finally managed to collect his feet under himself and stand. He could only just stand at first. The current was to his thighs and powerful, but then, with much the same caution with which he'd taken his very first steps, he took the few steps to the treacherous little beach and climbed the crumbling bank.
He lay down in knapweed, a new misery. Thirsty. Worse, much worse than before. The turban he'd made of his T-shirt was still wrapped round his head. So thirsty, but with every searing breath he was freshly resolved not to try the river again. Limping a bit for want of the shoe, he made his way back to the road. He thought he was between fifteen and twenty miles from Red Plain and about that
far from the next town on Highway 200, a town whose name he had already forgotten. He'd somehow retained his road map, of all things, but it was useless, fuzzy and illegible when he peeled its leaves apart. He knew only that he was at some far edge of a far state. He stood at the side of the road in his wet shoe, and his crotch was wet and chafed, somehow, even as he stood stock-still. Usually no one's fool, Teague hoped and expected that this would serve as the worst moment of his life. Nose blistering, lips pale, he was filled with all the old doubts and many new ones. He'd confirmed himself now as a little hometown fellow, fit to run a small circuit through thoroughly expected events, to live a prudent life. Why had he ever made himself available to all these accidents? He recalled his mother mentioning that as a toddler he'd suffered night terrors, and he remembered them, the feel of them at least, because they were all he'd known that might compare with being so much alone. He prayed, but not for deliverance, as he wasn't sure he deserved it. More sunset. It seemed stalled. As much as he feared the coming dark, he liked the long and lengthening shadows even less.
From the direction of Red Plain an engine labored toward him, the first familiar sound since he'd been standing by the road. A truck came out from the pines to the east of him and onto the open flat, a ponderous load of cordwood cinched to its bed. A chainsaw and a gas can and a mongrel rode on top of the load. Teague raised his arms like a referee signaling a touchdown. He felt foolish about the gesture, the extent of his problem. The truck came onâbehind the wheel, under a black baseball cap, a pretty mouth rounded in an “O” of decent concern. Someone female. The truck slowed, accelerated again, passing him, then stopped a hundred yards down the road. Weaving half on and half off the pavement, it rapidly backed toward him, the big load rocking laterally, and if Teague had been healthier then, or more capably concerned for his survival, he'd have
been running well before it finally, abruptly stopped, its bumper not ten feet from his knee. A bumper bent by previous misuse, a mottled dog grinning down at him. The driver leaned out. “Hey,” she said. It was a statement, a question, whatever he wanted it to be. She seemed friendly.
She stepped out of her truck and came back to him. Teague's throat was parchment and he could not trust himself to speak. She closed the small distance between them, a woman, a girl, a person of about his own age, whatever that made her. Wide suspenders framed her breasts and she wore boots that made her throw her legs in a rolling gait. Some kind of logger's getup. Over her right shoulder lay a thickly plaited chestnut braid, but she walked like a bully at the county fair. Two-cycle gas, sawdust, beerâhe smelled her drawing near. “Hey,” she said again. Gently, so gently. Her hands were larger and rougher than his own, but for all that she conformed to some very latent and very odd idea of femininity he'd been carrying around with him, never knowing or so much as suspecting his own secret tastes. Accustomed to the company of plainer, softer women, Teague could think of nothing to say to the one now regarding him like a found lamb.
“You okay, honey?”
Teague's instincts, such as they were, were never of much use to him, but he was ready to trust the belief he'd instantly formedâmore than that, he meant to rely on itâthat the girl was the soul of kindness.
“I saw you earlier,” she said. “Earlier in the day. You were a little ways down the road. What happened to all that stuff you had? That pack, and where's your other shoe?”
He'd wet his tongue enough to ask for, “Water?”
“Don't have any. Except in the radiator, which has probably got some antifreeze in it. Got beer, though.”
“I'm a pharmacist,” he declared. “Or I will be. And alcohol, if you're already dehydrated, alcohol . . . ”
“It's Miller High Life,” she said, “champagne of bottled beer. You better have some.”
His education and former resolve fell away from him, useless. Teague reached for his wallet. He'd left it in his cutoffs, and his cutoffs were in the pack, and the packâ“I couldn't pay you anything, I lost all my money in the river. I'm really getting to be in a bad spot.”