Girls

by Frederick Busch

  I hated that word. Die. It made me furious with her. I heard myself seething when I breathed. I pulled my scarf and collar up above my mouth. I didn’t want her to see how angry I was because she wanted to die.

  I called, “Remember me?”

  I was closer now. I could see the purple mottling of her skin. I didn’t know if it was cold or dying. It probably didn’t matter much to distinguish between them right now, I thought. That made me smile. I felt the smile, and I pulled the scarf down so she could look at it. She didn’t seem awfully reassured.

  “You’re the sexual harassment guy,” she said. She said it very slowly. Her lips were clumsy. It was like looking at a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “I gave you an A,” I said.

  “When?”

  “It’s a joke,” I said. “You don’t want me making jokes. You want me to give you a nice warm blanket, though. And then you want me to take you home.”

  She leaned against the rock face when I approached. I pulled the blanket out, then zipped my jacket back up. The snow was stopping, I realized, and that wasn’t really a very good sign. An arctic cold was descending in its place. I held the blanket out to her, but she only looked at it.

  “You’ll just have to turn me in,” I said. “I’m gonna hug you again.”

  She screamed, “No more! I don’t want any more hugs!”

  But she kept her arms on her chest, and I wrapped the blanket around her and stuffed a piece into each of her tight, small fists. I didn’t know what to do for her feet. Finally, I got down on my haunches in front of her. She crouched down, too, protecting herself.

  “No,” I said. “No. You’re fine.”

  I took off the woolen mittens I’d been wearing. Mittens keep you warmer than gloves because they trap your hand’s heat around the fingers and palm at once. Fanny knitted them for me. I put a mitten as far onto each of her feet as I could. She let me. She was going to collapse, I thought.

  “Now, let’s go home,” I said. “Let’s get you better.”

  With her funny, stiff lips, she said, “I’ve been very self-indulgent and weird and I’m sorry. But I’d really like to die.” She sounded so reasonable, I found myself nodding agreement.

  But I said, “You can’t just die.”

  “Aren’t I dying already? I took all of them, and then”—she giggled like a child, which of course is what she was—“I borrowed different ones from other people’s rooms. See, this isn’t some like teenage cry for help. Understand? I’m seriously interested in death and I have to stay out here a little longer and fall asleep. All right?”

  “You can’t do that,” I said. “You ever hear of Vietnam?”

  “I saw the movie,” she said. “With the opera in it? Apocalypse? Whatever.”

  “I was there!” I said. “I killed people! I helped to kill them! And when they die, you see their bones later on. You dream about their bones in splinters and with blood on the ends, and this kind of mucous stuff coming out of their eyes. You probably heard of guys having dreams like that, didn’t you? Whacked-out Vietnam vets? That’s me, see? So I’m telling you, I know about dead people and their stomachs falling out. And people keep dreaming about the dead people that they knew, see? You can’t make people dream about you like that! It isn’t fair!”

  “You dream about me?” She was ready to go. She was ready to fall down, and I was going to lift her up and get her to the truck.

  “I will,” I said, “if you die.”

  “I want you to,” she said. Her lips were hardly moving now. Her eyes were closed. “I want you all to.”

  I dropped my shoulder and put it into her waist and picked her up and carried her down to the Jeep. She was talking, but not a lot, and her voice leaked down my back. I jammed her into the truck and wrapped the blanket around her better and then put another one down around her feet. I strapped her in with the seat belt. She was shaking; her eyes were closed and her mouth was open. She was breathing. I checked that twice, once when I strapped her in, and then again when I strapped myself in and backed up hard into a sapling and took it down. I got us into first gear, held the clutch in, leaned over to listen for breathing, heard it—shallow panting, like a kid asleep on your lap for a nap—and then I put the gear in and howled down the hillside on what I thought might be the road.

  We passed the cemetery. I told her that was a good sign. She didn’t respond. I found myself panting, too. It was like we were breathing for each other. It made me dizzy, but I couldn’t stop. We passed the highest dorm, and I got back up into four-wheel high. The cab smelled like burnt oil and hot metal. We were past the chapel now, and the observatory, the president’s house, then the bookstore. I had the blue light winking, the V-6 was roaring, and I drove on the edge of out of control, sensing the skids just before I slid into them, then getting back out of them the way I needed to. I took a little fender off once, and a bit of the corner of a classroom building, but I worked us back on course, and all I needed to do now was negotiate the sharp left turn around the administration building, past the library, then floor it for the straight run to the town’s main street and then the hospital.

  I was panting into the mike, and the dispatcher kept saying, “Say again?”

  I made myself slow my talking. I said we’d need a stomach pump, and to get the names of the pills from her friends in the dorm, and I’d be there in less than five minutes.

  “Roger,” the dispatcher said. “Roger all that. Over.” My throat tightened and tears came into my eyes. I felt a kind of stupid gratitude.

  I said to the girl, whose head was slumped and whose face looked too blue all through its whiteness, “You know, I had a baby once. My wife, Fanny. She and I had a little girl one time.”

  I reached over and touched her cheek. It was cold. The truck swerved, and I got my hands on the wheel. I’d made the turn past the ad building using just my left. “I can do it in the dark,” I sang to no tune I’d ever heard. “I can do it with one hand.” I said to her, “We had a girl child, very small. I used to tell her stories she didn’t understand. She liked them anyway. Now, I do not want you dying.”

  I came to the campus gates going fifty on the ice and snow, smoking the engine, grinding the clutch, and I bounced off a wrought-iron fence to give me the curve going left that I needed. On a pool table, it would have been a bank shot worth applause. The town cop picked me up and got out ahead of me. He used his growler, then his siren, and I leaned on the horn. We banged up to the emergency room entrance and I was out and at the other door before the cop on duty, Elmo St. John, could loosen his seat belt. I loosened hers, and I carried her into the lobby of the ER. They had a gurney, and doctors, and they took her away from me. I tried to talk to them, but they made me sit down and do my shaking on a dirty sofa decorated with drawings of little spinning wheels. Somebody brought me hot coffee—I think it was Elmo—but I couldn’t hold it.

  “They won’t,” he kept saying to me. “They won’t.”

  “What?”

  “You just been sitting there for a minute and a half, shaking, telling me, ‘Don’t let her die. Don’t let her die.’ ”

  “Oh.”

  “You all right?”

  “How about the kid?”

  “They’ll tell us soon.”

  “She better be all right.”

  “That’s right.”

  “She—somebody’s really gonna have to explain it to me if she isn’t.”

  “That’s right.”

  “She better not die this time,” I said.

  Fanny came downstairs to look for me. I was at the northern windows, looking past the mullions, down the valley to the faint red line along the mounds and little peaks of the ridge beyond the valley. The sun was going to come up, and I was looking for it.

  Fanny stood behind me. I could hear her. I could smell her hair and the sleep on her. The crimson line widened, and I squinted at it. I heard the dog come in behind her, catching up. He panted and I knew why his panting sounded f
amiliar. She put her hands on my shoulders and arms. I made muscles to impress her with, and then I let them go, and let my head drop down until my chin was on my chest.

  “I didn’t think you’d be able to sleep after that,” Fanny said.

  “I brought enough adrenaline home to run a football team.”

  “But you can’t be a hero, huh? You can’t be discovered. You’re hiding in here because somebody’s going to call, or come over, and want to talk to you—her parents for shooting sure, sooner or later. Or is that supposed to be part of the service at the playground? Saving their suicidal daughters. Freeze to death finding them in the woods and driving too fast for any weather, much less what we had last night. Getting their babies home. The bastards.” She was crying. I could hear the soft sound of her lashes. She sniffed and I could feel her arm move as she pawed for the tissues on the coffee table.

  “I have them over here,” I said. “On the windowsill.”

  “Yes.” She blew her nose, and the dog thumped his tail. He seemed to think it one of Fanny’s finer tricks, and he had wagged for her for years whenever she’d wept or sniffed or blown her nose. “Well, you’re going to have to talk to them.”

  “I will,” I said. “I will.” The sun was in our sky now, climbing. “I think that guy with the smile, my prof? She showed up a lot at his office the last few weeks. He called her ‘my advisee,’ you know? The way those guys sound about what they’re getting done by being just a little bit better than mortals? Well, she was his advisee, I bet. He was shoving home the old advice.”

  “She’ll be okay,” Fanny said. “Her parents will take her home and love her up and get her some help.” She began to cry again. Then she stopped. She blew her nose, and the dog’s tail thumped. She said, “So tell me what you’ll tell a waiting world. How’d you talk her out?”

  “Well, I didn’t, really. I got up close and picked her up and carried her.”

  “You didn’t say anything?”

  “Sure I did. Kid’s standing in the snow outside of a lot of pills, you’re gonna say something.”

  “So what’d you say?”

  “I told her some lies about the war. I ogred and howled. I don’t know, Fanny. I told her stories,” I said. “I did ‘Rhetoric and Persuasion.’ ”

  A couple of weeks later, Fanny volunteered for the 11:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. shift. We saw each other when she was coming home and I was heading out. I timed my leaving for work so we’d say hello. “Good morning,” we’d say. We’d sing it, to prove we weren’t angry or embarrassed or scared. The dog got a little confused about who was supposed to feed him his breakfast. We’d talk about that in the blue-cold mornings at the cars outside the house, and then I’d drive to work and she’d go in. Of course, we’d be home together in the house at night, but she’d be trying to sleep when I came in or I’d be sleeping when she was getting ready to leave. You can make a routine out of it, and that’s what we did.

  Here’s what I thought. I thought, Once upon a time.

  And I was not a dishonorable student, I guess. At the end of the term, he gave me a C+ for the course.

  bloom

  I WAS UP EARLY. I’d been up a good deal of the night. I let the dog out, then fed him and thought about feeding myself. Instead, I watched the early news from Syracuse. It was the same news I’d seen at two in the morning. A plane had landed in a river. A deputy had confessed to crimes. Arson was suspected in a fire. The President was not a crook. I didn’t want to taste my own coffee. I put a little extra weatherproofing on my boots, took a thermos that might be clean, and went out to the car to warm it up. As I knew she would, Fanny settled her car into the icy ruts in the drive. She turned the engine off and did what she usually did: sat with her head back, not moving, like she’d fallen asleep. I opened her door and said, “Hey.”

  “Hey,” she said, her eyes still closed.

  “Lousy night?”

  “Good one. Nobody died. Nothing got amputated. We had a blue baby, but he’s all right. The doctor’s scared to death because he gave him oxygen, but what could he do? Last time he did that, the kid went blind and he got sued for ten million bucks or something. Of course, they settled. It’s what you do. Kid doesn’t breathe, you flood him with it and you pray, and then you settle.”

  “So you’re sitting here praying? Or settling?”

  “I’m sitting here is all, Jack.”

  The sun was rising on the other side of the house, but the skies were overcast and it still felt like nighttime. I said, “The dog’s fed. I don’t remember whether I turned the heat up or not.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” she said. “If I’m cold, I’ll turn it up.”

  Her face was pale, and her eyelids looked dark, like her eyes were sore. “I better go,” I said.

  She nodded.

  I said, “I’ll see you later.”

  She nodded. She said, “Bye, Jack.” With her eyes still closed, she raised a hand in its mitten and waved.

  I said, “Bye.”

  The car I drove to work was possibly the last surviving Gran Torino station wagon manufactured by Ford in 1974. It was chocolate brown and rusted nearly through at a number of key points. At each of those points, where metal that simulated wood for an old-fashioned station wagon appearance was hanging off, I had laid on silvery duct tape. There was nearly nothing duct tape wouldn’t hold together. Among the exceptions would be people, I suppose. The car was heavy enough to get me over our unpaved and usually unplowed road. I could see ice glinting on the road through the floorboards on the passenger’s side of the front. While I slithered and slid, I leaned over and pushed the cocoa fiber doormat back into place over the hole. My breath hung around me in a cold cloud, so I felt like I was driving in the outside weather while I was staring through my private weather inside the car. I kept the high beams on for the outside stuff, and hoped for the best with what was in.

  I stopped at the Blue Bird to fill up with coffee for the day. Two broad streets met at the top of town, and the Blue Bird looked out on them both. Local contractors and snowplow drivers and nurses coming on and off shift and the old people, who didn’t sleep a lot, came into the Bird and drank the oily coffee and ate yeasty cakes and slippery eggs. There was a no smoking section in the back, and because it consisted of only two booths, most of the college people went to another joint, where they had less fun but better air. I sat at the counter and asked skinny Verna with her high voice and wattled throat for a cup of coffee and a full thermos, and I looked for Archie Halpern. He was the gentlest of them. He was the best of them.

  When I saw him in a window seat, I took my coffee and went over.

  He moved around the pepper and salt, the napkin holder, the menu, and a dirty spoon.

  “I started out trying to make room for you,” he said, “but you’re really not going to sit on the table, are you?”

  I shook my head and sat down.

  He had a very short crew cut and a sloppy shave, so his round head looked fuller than usual. He ran his thick hand over his head and his smile looked embarrassed. “I swore I’d cut my hair off if the hockey team made it to the tournament.”

  “Who’d you promise?”

  “Can’t tell you.”

  “A counselor deal,” I said.

  “A kid’s doing his best to fuck his life up, and I’ve been doing some work with him.”

  “You’re good at it.”

  He shrugged. He said, “I’m not sure I’m that good. I wouldn’t call you too well-adjusted, you taciturn son of a bitch. Is that face for me or the coffee?”

  “Both.”

  “How’s Fanny?”

  I nodded.

  He said, “Yeah?”

  “Yeah what?”

  “Yeah, what in fuck are we talking about is what,” he said.

  He began to sweat. At first, I used to think it was a trick. I learned after a while that when he began to concentrate, his metabolism speeded up. Often enough, by the end of an hour or so, his clothes wo
uld be wet. I said, “You don’t need to go to work on me, Archie.”

  “Fine.”

  “I didn’t come over here to freeload a little psychological health.”

  “Jack,” he said, “I couldn’t do it for you with a wheelbarrow and shovel, you’re so fucked up.”

  I nodded.

  “I was joking,” he said.

  “No, you weren’t.” I shrugged to show him how I didn’t care.

  “Jack,” he said pleasantly and low, “you’re so full of shit. You look like you got run over before you got out of bed.”

  I leaned down to my coffee and then sat up. I looked at his little eyes in his big face. He kept it deadpan when he worked. I said, “I guess I was looking for you. But it wasn’t to make you work. I was just looking for a no-stress breakfast.”

  He laughed, a high, choppy sound I liked. “Like no cholesterol,” he said.

  I tried to laugh with him.

  He said, “Are you talking to Fanny any more than you’re talking to me?”

  I shook my head. Then I said, “This morning. I tried again.”

  “You sad motherfucker,” he said. “You tried talking English and she didn’t jump up and down, right? Remember what I said about you have to live communicating? Remember? All the time, not just when you get frightened?”

  I said, “How’d you know about the frightened?”

  There was sweat on his upper lip. He wiped at it.

  “Archie,” I said.

  He clasped his hands. I did the same, but my cup was in the way and I spilled it onto the table and jumped up.

  He said, “It’s fine, Jack. It’s all right.”

  Verna, bringing my filled thermos, came with a big yellow sponge. “Don’t you listen to him,” she said. “It’s not all right. And you didn’t eat nothing, neither.”

  Archie said, “She wants a bigger tip.” She swatted at him with the sponge.

  People went back to eating and talking and smoking, and Verna left. I stood beside the table, laying money on it and zipping my coat.