Free The Other Shoe by Matt Pavelich

it. It’s not a very . . . not civilized, I’d say.”
    â€œI never cared for ’em.”
    â€œI 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?”
    â€œI can run you home.”
    â€œOh, thanks. But you did enough already.”
    â€œThat’s all right.”
    â€œYou don’t wanna drive way out there just for that.”
    â€œAfter all the favors your people have done me?” he said. “Sure I could.”
    â€œShe’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.”
    â€œYour 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.”
    â€œYou’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.”
    â€œOh, 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.”
    â€œThat’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 seeinto 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.”
    â€œGrouse are stupid,” said Mr. Brusett, “and some are really stupid. I’ve