Chris Offutt - The Good Brother

Joe leaned on the crutches to rest, his armpits raw.

“What is this place,” he said.

“The Bitterroot Valley.”

“Nice country.”

“That mountain over there was named for my great-great-grandfather, one of the first to homestead here.”

“When was that?”

“Nineteen-twelve. I’m fifth-generation Montana. Not too many of us.”

“Counting your kids, you all go through folks pretty quick.”

“People in my family either die off or ran off.”

“Your dad one of them?”

“He died after Mom run off. Coop was drinking hard. Owen left and I went down to Texas for three years. It wasn’t easy around here for Johnny,”

“Don’t reckon.”

“He’s scared of you,” Botree said. “He thinks you might want to get him back.”

Joe shifted his weight to look her in the face. Her eyes were neither hard nor soft, but regarded him with patience. She gave nothing away.

“I’m not mad at Johnny over it,” he said. “He didn’t know me so it wasn’t anything against me personal.”

She nodded.

“It was a mistake or you all wouldn’t have kept me alive.”

“There’s some who think that was the mistake.”

“Who?”

“Just people.”

“What people?”

Botree adjusted her hat until its brim jutted from her forehead in a straight line. The action served to enclose her in a private space.

Joe backtracked rapidly through events, trying to learn what made him a threat. The only reason they’d want him dead was if he’d stumbled across something valuable. At home that meant coming too close to someone’s whisky still or pot field. Here, the ground was too rocky for marijuana, and liquor was legal everywhere.

“Up there in those woods,” he said. “I got too close to something, didn’t I? What was it, a gold mine? Or maybe you’re a bunch of gun runners. What is it, Botree? I know it’s something because Owen and Frank didn’t want me to go to a hospital.”

She turned her head to gaze across the valley. A rainbow formed beside the mountains as the dark cloud moved south, firing lines of lightning toward the water.

“Don’t getting shot give me a right to know?” Joe said.

“A right?” Botree said. “What do you know about rights? We got ten in the Constitution, and none of them cover somebody else’s business. I wouldn’t get into rights if I were you.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Joe said.

“You don’t have to cuss at me.”

“I ain’t,” Joe said. “I’m cussing in general. I never cussed a person in my life. I just want to know what’s going on.”

“You got your secrets, too.”

“There’s a difference.”

“There always is when it comes to someone else.”

“I got shot over your secrets.”

“The fact is, Joe, they ain’t mine to tell.”

“Who, then?”

“Damn near anybody else. Owen, Johnny, Coop. Take your pick.”

“How about Frank?”

“Him, too.”

“Who is he, anyhow? How come he don’t come around?”

“He plays a lone hand.”

“Everybody out here does.”

“It’s the way we are, Joe. That’s what all the old pioneers came out here for. The mountain men first. It’s a way of being free.”

“Free?” Joe was astonished. “Freedom ain’t silence, freedom’s being able to talk. You all don’t say nothing.”

“It’s not either one,” Botree said. “It’s just doing what you want to do and not hurting nobody,”

“Well, I sure got hurt.”

“I know it. We all know it. That’s why we took you in.”

“Hell’s fire, the way you talk, I ain’t no more than a stray dog.”

Botree smiled briefly.

“In that case,” she said, “it’s a good thing I like animals.”

Joe stretched on his back. Sun followed the rain cloud along the valley, peeling shadows from the mountaintops as if lifting dark scalps. His face warmed. A hovering hawk was a smudge in the sky. His leg throbbed from the climb, but it was the pain of exertion rather than damage.

He picked pebbles from the rubber tread of each crutch, thinking that the crutch had not progressed in a hundred years. Someone could make a lot of money with a new design. He remembered Boyd’s ideas for inventions — a razor with a narrow blade for men with acne; hand tools with a retractable cord that fastened to your clothes. His greatest idea was a tire-changing tool that used the car engine to remove lug nuts.

Joe pulled his good leg beneath him and rose unsteadily, using the crutches to push himself upright. Botree didn’t offer any help. She showed neither pity nor sadness for him, only a kind of dispassionate concern, similar to how he’d felt about Rodale’s dog. He looked at her narrow back curved inside the man’s wool jacket. Her hair flowed over the collar. She was lovely.

“Botree.”

His voice was gentle and she turned to him. Her dark eyes were soft, her lips slightly parted. He wanted to say more but couldn’t. He felt like a child. He craved her touch, her smell. He turned and began his tedious descent.

Last year’s dead grass swayed above the fresh green tufts. Pasture fence surrounded the house while pronghorn grazed with the cattle on the upper slopes. Botree’s children waited at the bottom of the hill. Abilene was eating a spider in a casual fashion, as if raised to it. His brother watched without judgment.

“When we’re all dead,” Dallas said to Joe, “will there be dinosaurs?”

“Yes,” Joe said.

Dallas nodded slowly, as if the expected confirmation lent credence to a grand theory. Joe waited for him to continue, but the boy was distracted by the glitter of a button on the ground. Joe leaned against the fence. Botree joined him. Sunshine glowed through dandelions gone to seed.

Joe felt a contentment the likes of which he’d not experienced in nearly a year. He no longer missed Boyd and he didn’t feel homesick. What he missed was Virgil. He felt like a man who’d abandoned his religion without having found a replacement. The laughter of the children drifted in the still air. He glanced at Botree and away. The sky was a plank of blue between the far peaks.

During the next several days, Joe refused narcotics and endured the gnawing pangs of withdrawal. His appetite returned. Botree continued to care for him as she might an animal — providing regular food, kind words, the occasional gentle touch. Joe was bothered by his dependence, although he was glad of the attention. Every morning Abilene asked which was Joe’s bad leg and began pounding the other one.

Owen brought a checkers set to Joe’s room and beat him easily. Coop came by once, standing rigid and awkward in the presence of a damaged man. Joe never saw Johnny, an omission for which he wasn’t sure if he felt gratitude or disappointment. Rodney visited, smelling of horse and dog, carrying a six-foot length of rubber sliced from an innertube. He looped it through the handle of a window, tied the ends together, and showed Joe how to exercise his leg. He hooked his ankle into the loop and strained against the rubber, then shifted position and demonstrated how to strengthen the muscles of the thigh and hamstrings.

Each day Joe spent two hours exercising. He used a sock filled with number-four shot as an ankle weight and performed a variety of leg lifts. His knee felt stronger, but he despised the tedium of routine and wondered what bodybuilders thought about during a workout. He discarded the crutches for a cane.

Owen came to his room one afternoon while Joe was icing his knee. There was a change in his demeanor, a remoteness that Joe had come to think of as the Montana distance.

“There’s something we got to do,” Owen said. “I’ll be waiting in the mud room.”