Girls

by Frederick Busch

  Archie asked, “You want to come by the office, Jack? Or the house?”

  “I’ll see,” I said. “You know. Thank you.”

  He looked sad. I couldn’t imagine what I looked like. He gave me half a wave, and I waved back like he was a hundred yards of snow and ice away from me. When I was outside the Blue Bird and looking back up at the window tables, I saw the poster, taped to the back of the storefront so people walking by could read it. That was the first one I remember.

  I saw another one in the window of a pickup truck parked at the curb, and there was one in the window of the Radio Shack. When I got to the security building, there was a poster tacked to the door. The signs were eight and a half by eleven, in black and white. In large letters at the top was missing. Underneath was the face of a little girl—fourteen, according to the sign—with a sweet smile and white teeth and wide eyes. She weighed ninety-six pounds. She was five feet tall. She had gone from Sunday school to her house in one of the little towns south of the college, and she had never arrived. She looked happy and fragile. It was easy to think of a large man with his hands around her upper arms, compelling her into a car or truck or doorway. It became such a huge county, when you looked at the picture, in the hugeness of New York State, in such a big continent. You could cry, looking at her face.

  It had bloomed overnight, and I saw it everyplace. Anthony Berberich had a poster taped to the window of his Jeep, and every building I had occasion to enter that morning had posters taped and tacked onto doors and bulletin boards and corridor walls. Her family was doing what they could, and I wished I knew them so I could tell them so. My throat ached at the thought of seeing their faces, or hearing them talk. I’d have given a lot to know, without having to ask them, what they did to erase from their minds the idea of the fear she must have felt. Of course, I didn’t have to ask. They didn’t erase it because they couldn’t. I wondered if Fanny had seen the posters at the hospital, and I nearly phoned. But she might have been able to sleep, I thought, and probably that was why I didn’t call.

  I wanted not to see the picture of the missing child, but wherever I went, she was looking back. Her name was Janice Tanner. I knew a Tanner Hill in the vicinity, and I wondered if it was named after her family. On the way home once after work, I had driven up the road over Tanner Hill. It had looked pleasant and far from everyplace else, and I hadn’t seen a child in skirt and sweater and sneakers who was in jeopardy. I saw my English professor, but I pretended not to. I waved to a kid who was a friend of mine, Everett Stark, who’d come to school after four years in the navy. I once asked him how he was doing, and he said, “Man, ain’t nothin around here but white folks and cows.”

  I had to park up behind a little tan Chevrolet import that kept rolling down the worst part of the classroom building hill. I stopped the Jeep in the middle of the road, with the bumper just touching the car, and I hit the roof light to keep student traffic off us. They raced up the hill to get to their illegal parking places and they believed that death and maiming were limited by law to people over twenty-two. Once I looked at the little car’s tires, I understood. They were almost bald. I walked around to the driver’s side and she looked at me the way I sometimes look at sheriff’s deputies filling their quota of speeding tickets.

  “Morning,” I said.

  “I’m late for class,” she said. Her voice was harsh, but in an interesting way. She had a big mouth and a beaky nose and hair sprouting all over the place from under her dark woolen cap.

  “I can get out of your way and let you roll back down,” I said, “or I can try and push you up, or I can chock your wheels and drive you to class if it’s a real emergency, or we can hang around a little and you can be abusive.”

  “I’m not being abusive,” she said.

  “I know. I figured you were thinking about it.”

  Her smile was very broad.

  “You might get angry when I point out that your tires are shot. If I was a cop, I’d cite you for that.”

  “But you’re not.”

  I shook my head. “I’m a campus cop. Like an usher in the movies.”

  “When did you ever go to a movie with an usher? You must be old.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how old,” I said. “I’ll try and push you up. Let go your brake when you feel me behind you and give it just a little bit of power. I’ll do the rest.”

  She blushed and looked away, then smiled the smile. “I assume that was not a double entendre.”

  “Doobel what?”

  “Never mind,” she said. “Forgive me. Yes. I’ll—what you said before.” She rolled her window up and, like a child, waved a small hand in a leather mitten.

  Everyone was waving good-bye to me, I thought as I released my parking brake and put it in first and made contact with her car. She slid back down into me, but I held in four-wheel drive and we made it up to the social sciences parking lot. I put it back into two-wheel drive and pulled out before she could wave again.

  I radioed in what I’d done so they could add it to the day’s log. The dispatcher told me that a professor was asking for me.

  “Is that an emergency? Over.”

  “Negative, Jack. Professor Strodemaster says when you can. Over.”

  “So anytime I get what they like to call a spare minute? Over.”

  “That’s a roger, Jack. Soon as you empty out somebody’s ashtray for them and, you know, spread the peanut butter on their sandwich, you can drop in. He’ll be there all day, he said to tell you. Over.”

  I wondered if the vice president for administrative affairs had monitored our frequency. I figured class warfare was nothing new to him, but I thought I should tell the dispatcher we might tighten our procedures just a little. It never hurt to pretend you were a professional.

  I saw one of the cars I thought came over the hill from Masonville, which was north and west from town, in the direction of Syracuse. The school there was an agricultural and technical two-year-degree college that I had heard was often the difference in the lives of local kids. They learned computer skills, or took degrees in cosmetology or nutrition or modern farming methods. Recently, it had begun to receive large numbers of kids from the New York City area. Their high school guidance counselors thought or hoped or made believe that the hundreds of miles from New York were a buffer. They weren’t, and the trade in weapons and pharmaceuticals was large.

  It was an old, scuffed black Trans Am fitted out with an air scoop and a spoiler, and it probably sounded, running flat out, like the Concord jet clearing its throat. It was parked outside the student union, nose to the low brick wall, and I pulled up behind it tight, so I knew it would stay there. I asked the dispatcher to run a check with the state police, and to ask Big Pete, who was barely five foot six, to back me up, no lights or sirens. The car had a Masonville sticker on the rear window, a Grateful Dead head on the right rear, and a big silver crucifix hanging from the rearview mirror. I saw three crumpled brown paper bags on the floor of the passenger’s side. I knew I could safely bet a week’s wages that the kid who owned or drove the car had carried such a sack inside the union with him. I mean, these were upper-middle-class students, and they were accustomed to service. You sell them grass, you have to deliver. And the kids at Masonville, who were the children of parents supporting themselves through service jobs, if they lived with their parents and their parents worked, didn’t mind making a call.

  “You got a problem with my car?” the kid said. He’d come limping up after pausing only once—long enough to see I had his car and I’d seen him approach and he was mine.

  “If I use my best party manners, would you open it up and show me what’s in the bags in front on the floor?”

  He was short, broad, pale, a fine-boned Irish kid with curly dark hair and an angry mouth. His limp was the city stud’s tough-guy walk, and it grew even more exaggerated as he came closer. He said, “Would you like to maybe go fuck yourself? Or you got a warrant lets you look in my car? Or would you m
aybe want to show a little respect for a private citizen’s constitutional rights?”

  By then, Big Pete was there and sizing us up. He came over after a minute, and I said, “Pete, this visitor to the campus has been making a delivery. I asked to see the goodies he brought, but he said I should go fuck myself.”

  “Maybe fuck yourself,” the kid corrected, smiling. “A suggestion made with manners, same as you. It was just an idea. Maybe you got a better idea. I’ll listen.” He was under twenty, I thought. He seemed to consider himself an independent businessman, and he seemed to think of Pete and me as make-believe cops. He was right. The wind was shaking the vehicles and moving us around.

  “Get into my car,” I said, “so we don’t freeze. We can talk in there.”

  “Now, I got a choice? Or this is a show of force? Or what?”

  “Pete, you want to call in we’re having a conference and then wait in your vehicle awhile?”

  “Watch him,” Pete told me, with his gift for talking uselessly.

  When we were in my Jeep, the kid said, “We gonna deal?”

  “I don’t know what you think a deal is. If we’re trading, I’ve got your car, and I know you’d like it back eventually. What’ve you got for me?”

  “You can’t keep the car. It’s private property. I bought it, I paid for it, and I pay the insurance on it. I’m on my lawful way, good-bye. You keep smiling when I talk. I’m funny? All I got to do is call a cop. You can’t. You’re breaking the law. I studied up on this shit in college, man.”

  “I’ll give you my radio and help you make the call. Then I’ll tell the cop what’s in the front of your car.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “We’ll let the cops find out. What do you like, local guys, sheriff’s deputies, or state troopers?”

  “No, see, they got to obey the law, too. It’s to protect a citizen like me from guys like you, they throw their weight around. I got a professor could tell you this shit like he told it to me.” He had a sweet smile. He must have destroyed the girls with his lost outlaw number. “Any kind of cop,” he said, “they got to have a warrant.”

  “What’s your name, Mr. Bill of Rights? It’s coming in on the radio any minute.”

  “You ran me?”

  “I saw it in a movie one time, so, yeah, I made the same noises they did. And guess what?” I was hoping the dispatcher would call back with the registration.

  “You fucking ran me? You can do that?”

  Dispatch came in with it. William Franklin of Staten Island, New York. He had enough points on his license so that one more ticket would ground him.

  I said, “Dispatch, this is Jack. Over.”

  “Dispatch.”

  “Ask Elmo St. John to stand by. Nothing yet, just stand by. I think I may need him to write a town citation for disturbing the peace. Or dangerous driving on a county road. Or reckless you name it. Something you could detain someone for. Over.”

  “Elmo to stand by. Roger.”

  “He’s the village cop,” I told William Franklin. “He’s a prick like me in a silly uniform. Except he can write something besides parking tickets,” I said. “We’ll get your license canceled for a year or so. It’d hurt your education in constitutional law. Wouldn’t it?”

  “What’ll it cost?” he said. He sounded older than me.

  “Who you deal to here.”

  “Names?”

  “Unless you prefer to go by the customer number on the label of their L. L. Bean catalog.”

  He breathed out a long, sour breath.

  I picked up the microphone and clicked it.

  “Dispatch. Somebody in trouble? Over.”

  “This is Jack. Is Elmo ready? Over.”

  “Dispatch. Elmo’s curious. He says to tell you he never wrote a dangerous-driving. He’s curious, and he’s on his way.”

  I said to the kid, “You ready?”

  He nodded. “You made up your mind,” he said. “You own my ass and that’s that.”

  “That’s that.” I canceled the local police, I sent Big Pete back on his rounds, and I wrote down the names the kid from Masonville gave me. I knew he was lying and so did he, but short of some kind of savagery, some battery and mayhem, I was getting nothing from him but a little hesitation, the tiniest beginning of fear. He might shy away after this, though I wouldn’t have sworn it.

  William Franklin was in the right-hand seat in front, half-turned to me, and he was telling me lies.

  I said, “That’s everyone?”

  “That’s everyone, boss.”

  “You need to see this from my point of view,” I said. “I’m supposed to protect these kids. Their mommies and daddies want me to, you know, watch over them a little.”

  He smiled what was really an attractive smile. He had a nicely textured complexion and clear dark eyes.

  I turned to face him directly. I squared up on the seat and laid into his left cheek and temple with my right forearm. It was a short chop, which is how you want to do it. Long, loopy blows diminish the power that a short one will focus. His head snapped back and struck the passenger-side window and his eyes rolled up. They didn’t stay shut. They fluttered, so I knew he wasn’t quite out.

  “Please don’t come back to campus,” I said.

  He said, “I—”

  “Please,” I said. “Don’t call me anything. Don’t threaten me with lawsuits or the real police. Just go away. Leave these boys and girls to spend their money on booze and prophylactics and carfare to wherever they go to get their tans. Just leave, please.” Then I said, “You feel all right to drive?”

  I reached across him and opened the door and shoved him. He spilled but landed on his feet, holding on to the door frame.

  I said, “Don’t dare to slam the door.”

  He left it. I reached across and shut it, then backed up. He unlocked his car and sat in it awhile. I backed up farther, and he came back, then drove downhill. At first, he went quickly, but I stuck my hand out my window and made the downward-pressing signal to go slow, and after a while he saw it and cut his speed. I followed him until he was at the light across from the Blue Bird. When he drove out of town, he lifted his hand out the window and hoisted his third finger into the air above the roof. I went back to the campus, telling the dispatcher where I’d been. My arm felt a little strained under my coat, but I knew it was my imagination. The body was just remembering the blow it had delivered. It had been an excellent shot. And the rest of me, that minute, sad to say, felt exceptionally good.

  The teacher who sent for me, Randolph Strodemaster, was a big, noisy man who couldn’t decide whether to be a small-town local booster or a big-shot physics professor. He lived in a hamlet a few miles from school. It straddled a river and once supported a leatherworking industry. He knew its history and told it, he was a member of its volunteer fire department, he served bready meatballs and sticky spaghetti at their fund-raising dinners, and he was said to incorporate small-town lore into his lectures on quasars and quarks. He was supposed to be important for his work, at least in his department. He liked me, I figured, because I was as big as he was, and because I was local and because I didn’t know anything about his profession and because I was a campus cop. He was the kind of man who made it his business to know the deputies and EMTs and the men who hauled gravel from the bed to the construction site. He did his own masonry, and he had rented a backhoe and run it himself when he had to lay in a leach field for his waste-disposal system. He was famous in his town, I was told, for making a mess of his sewage.

  “Randy,” I said at his door. He was in the new science building, which, as far as I could see, consisted of empty classrooms and small offices with expensive-looking furniture. It smelled of electricity.

  “Jack, boy,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “What’d I do?”

  “You came up.”

  “You sent for me.”

  “Tell me you came because we’re friends.”

  I said, “Ran
dy, damned right.”

  “Good man.” He stood, took a sport coat from an upholstered chair, moved the chair a quarter of an inch, and motioned me to sit in it. He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt that showed the bunchy muscles in his arms and shoulders. I should have known that he lifted. He probably worked out with the football team. His gold-rimmed glasses had slipped down his nose and as he sat he pushed them back up.

  “I’m not just an asshole who teaches hard science, Jack.”

  I waited.

  “I’m a pretty good guy.”

  Why not? I nodded.

  “I live in a pretty good town.”

  “I heard it was nice there.”

  “Heaven on earth,” he chanted. “You know who else lives there?”

  I shook my head.

  “The Tanners,” he said.

  “Who? Oh, the family. Of the—”

  “The little girl, Janice. The one who’s missing,” he said. His big, hard face looked like a slab of light oak with a line of dark grain where the mouth should be. He looked like those movie heroes who swing through windows on a rope, gun firing, muscles jumping, the hard lines of the mouth showing how upset they are with evildoers. He had big hands with long fingers and thick, broad nails. They moved on each other, like he had a rash or like each hand gave the other one comfort. I didn’t know him well and I didn’t want to. I never trusted men who tried too hard to make me like them. I never knew why they would. And he looked as sad as anyone I’d seen since sunrise.

  I said, “The state guys might find her. They’re good.”

  “They’re good,” he said.

  “You think she’s in trouble? You think she didn’t just run away?”

  “They waited a week, Jack. They had the cops in two days, state the same night, they waited until a week was out, and then they did the posters up and started running ads—you know, they did what you can do. Meanwhile, the fuzz are doing what they can do. And it’s not enough. And they know their child. She’s one of those ‘go to church, join the cheerleaders, do your homework and help Mom with the chores’ kids. She wouldn’t run away. I know her. I really think they’re right. A lot of us do. The fuzz keep hoping she took off, so then they won’t have to run a search and try to find her and admit they can’t.”