Girls

by Frederick Busch

  “So you went to the farmhouse up there where the vampires live—”

  “They were very nice to me.”

  “And instead of calling me, you called a stranger from a stranger’s house.”

  “The stranger,” she said, “was a tow truck stranger. You do not offer a tow truck, among your attractions.”

  “I have towed you out of every other snowbank in the county.”

  “I thought you’d be in the shower.”

  “Or shaving,” I suggested.

  She said, “Balancing the checkbook.”

  I said, “We’re joking about this, right? We’re being relaxed and friendly and we’re joking about this?”

  “He got me home, Jack. And he was polite and helpful. He kept calling me ma’am.”

  “Did you correct him?”

  She put her head down on her hands and rolled her head to signify no.

  I poured coffee for us, then let the dog in and rewarded him with a biscuit for identifying his own door. He lapped a lot of water from his dish, groaned, and lay down under the table. I knew he was on Fanny’s feet. She lifted her head and looked at her coffee, then leaned back in the chair.

  “And you’re only tired?” she said. “Not sick?”

  “Not sick. I started in doing the room.”

  She put her cup down.

  I said, “We’d pretty much decided.”

  “Pretty much,” she said. “I thought we might talk about it again.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “Well, there isn’t much point. Not if you’ve begun. What’d you do?”

  “There is a point. We can talk. I can stop. It doesn’t have to happen.”

  “What made you begin?”

  I shook my head. I shrugged.

  “And what did you do?”

  “I took a lot of wallpaper down.”

  “The Bambi?”

  “That’s the wallpaper.”

  “Why does it have to come down?” Her eyes were full.

  “So I can build the bookshelves we talked about.” I sounded to myself like a reasonable man, but I’m not sure that’s who she heard.

  “But Bambi doesn’t have to come down for us to make bookshelves. We could’ve seen the paper through the shelves. That wouldn’t have hurt anybody, Jack. She used to look at the wallpaper. She used to make noises at Bambi, Jack. She would have learned to talk to him. How can you take it down?”

  I did not tell her that I’d done only two walls and that there were plenty of fawns with big eyes. I took a sip of coffee and I sat an instant. Then I said, “I’m sorry. I think I didn’t understand. I have to get a shower and change my clothes.” I went upstairs.

  When I came down, the dog was lying behind the living room sofa, slapping his tail against the floor, which meant Fanny was on it and blowing her nose. I put my boots on and I went out to shovel snow. It took me an hour of sweating in the very cold, very still day to clear the area between my car and the road. I dug around the axles to make sure they were clear. Then I started up the old bomber and went in to tell Fanny she was snowbound. The tow truck had left her car in the road, and the plows had gone around it, sealing it behind a thick wall of snow. She wasn’t in the living room. I heard her upstairs, and I heard the dog’s nails. I tracked the sounds and knew she was in the room, looking at what I’d erased.

  I heard something shatter and I figured it might be a coffee cup. I hoped it wasn’t a window. I heard objects against a wall. I heard—I barely could hear it—the sound of Fanny breathing hard while she lifted things. The studs clattered and there was a thick, solid noise that could have been a sheet of plasterboard getting holed. I knew what she looked like. Her eyes would be huge. Her face would be wet with her tears. It would be very pale. She would lift and push like a man. She was trained to be physical. She knew about wreckage. Right now, she wanted some. When she went like this, her lips curled in on each other and she looked through whatever she was moving into the air and onto walls and floors. She was there, but she also wasn’t, and her empty eyes were frightening.

  I knew she had waited until she thought I was gone. She was never not fair. She had waited so that I wouldn’t think of what she did as warfare. It wasn’t. I knew that. It was mourning. It was grief. It was some kind of general rage. I thought there had to be a difference between those feelings. I thought I could ask Archie Halpern what the difference might mean. Or Fanny, I thought. Archie would tell me how she’d be someone to ask. I sipped a little hot coffee and I called Strodemaster. He shouted into the phone. I took one of our telephone pads and a pen. It seemed to make sense to take notes. You take notes, I’d learned on my jobs, and you can focus on something besides your feelings. That would be a sound idea today.

  The tiny village Janice Tanner’s parents lived in was like a long crossroads separated from an ice-choked river by a cornfield that ran about a third of a mile. Under all that heavy whiteness was corn stubble. In the spring, I thought, deer would wander down from the hills and across the river and into the field. It would be good to see them doing that if spring ever came. I didn’t believe it would.

  Most of the population here was in the houses that lay parallel to the river on either side of the road. I’d seen dozens of hamlets like this one. The children, some very young and some almost teenaged, shifted in clusters from lawn to yard to lawn to yard, from game to game. Kids grew up here, before they moved to driving and drinking and sex, by fishing together and torturing frogs and picking the worms from tomatoes in gardens, and when you drove through and saw them in noisy clusters, it occurred to you that human life was possible.

  I drove to Strodemaster’s house and went in the back door. He was in a heavy blue woolen bathrobe and unlaced boots. “Here he is!” he called. He acted embarrassed. He didn’t want to meet my eyes. I tried to think of a way to get him off the hook, but I couldn’t. I’m not very good at that. He shouted, “Damn it, Jack, I’m glad as hell. Good man!”

  He brought me coffee I didn’t want, and breakfast cake in a supermarket wrapper. When I looked at his kitchen and the toothpaste stains down the front of his bathrobe, I remembered that his wife had left him. She had taken their kids, a daughter and a son. I remembered that gossip had him driving her out. He periodically moved in local women, but they left promptly enough, and he was a handsome-looking, lonely-looking, shabby middle-aged man. Let that be a lesson to you, I thought, tracking the green-white drip marks on his bathrobe.

  There was a stale, sweet smell in the kitchen, or leaking into it from elsewhere in the house. He might have profited from taking the garbage out, I thought. I got used to it soon enough. The birch-veneer kitchen suite had been bought at Sears, I figured, with a coupon booklet for paying it off. The floor was linoleum, a kind of vines and sticks pattern that made me feel I was going to fall through the flimsy sticks. The wallpaper complemented the floor, though there seemed to be very large bugs on whatever the tiny white flowers were. I didn’t want to know about wallpaper. He was talking about the police, finding it necessary to call them “the fuzz,” and I realized that at about the time I was doing my work in the war, he was probably calling me some kind of killer.

  On the far wall, next to the telephone, was a large black chalk-board surrounded by cork. There were curled notes and cartoons tacked in the cork. A piece of chalk attached to the board by red string hung straight down. On the board, someone had written “Oregano” and, under it, a different hand had written “de Bergerac.”

  Strodemaster called, “Here they are!” and Janice Tanner’s parents came in. They were shy-looking people, tall and a little stooped. They looked like brother and sister. I could see the daughter’s pointed chin in their faces, and her large eyes, though neither of them had eyes that drew you as hers did. The husband had very long arms and legs, a short torso, and a long neck. The wife was better proportioned, and at first I thought she was tanned. I realized, after a while, that she was brown-yellow from cancer or the treatments.

/>   They sat at the table and we all had to have cups of coffee and doughnuts and pastry. Mr. Tanner nodded at the plate before him and said, “Piece of cake, you could say.”

  Mrs. Tanner ignored him. Strodemaster said, “You’re a gutsy man, Reverend.”

  Mrs. Tanner seemed to be shivering. She looked up and caught my stare. She gave me a little smile.

  Like a kid, and despising myself right away, I blew on my hands to show her it was really the temperature, not the dying.

  Strodemaster saw, and he moved out of his chair to the living room. I heard his footsteps and then the furnace coming on. He returned, chafing his hands. He sat, and the silence began.

  Finally, I said, “I’m not an investigator.”

  The father looked at my pad and my pen. “I’m a campus cop,” I said, “a security person. I have some training, but I got it twenty years ago. I don’t carry a weapon. I don’t have a license to investigate. I have a pistol permit, but I can’t imagine what good it would do us. I did a little investigating in the service—this was years ago. Not too much, not that successfully. What I mostly did was bully drunk soldiers and drug addicts and men who were sad about their marriages. That kind of thing. What I do now is run after college kids who drink too much, mostly. So you shouldn’t expect me to know a lot, or to be able to find out a lot. You need to understand how little I can offer you.”

  They stared at me. The father blinked, the mother seemed hardly to move her eyes from me, and Strodemaster ate a jelly doughnut and drank with a lot of noise. His doughnut leaked on his fingers and as he licked them he made a kind of low hum. He seemed very happy in a strange way. It annoyed me. I thought he ought to be sad. But he was enjoying this. I guessed because he wanted it so much. He seemed to have appetites for everything. His bathrobe picked up blots of coffee mixed with milk and crumbs of cake.

  “Are you religious?” the father asked.

  “Well,” I said. “No.”

  “I’m a pastor. That’s my church you passed, driving in. Sunday school is taught in the basement by my wife here. Our daughter came out of God’s house and she disappeared. You wouldn’t see that part of it as meaningful, I take it. Or would you?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I wouldn’t take it up with God, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “She’s alive,” the mother said.

  I nodded.

  “No, she is. I feel her. I felt her after we conceived her, and I feel her stirring now. She’s alive. She’s well. She’s frightened, but she’s coping. She always could.”

  “She looks lovely. In the picture. You’ve done a wonderful job of getting the posters out.”

  “Everybody’s helping,” the mother said. “How could you not help a child that good?”

  I nodded. “And what, exactly, did you think I might be able to help with?”

  “Oh,” the father said, “sort of interpreting for us, in a way. I don’t know what the authorities mean when they tell us things. They’re very busy; they’re a little unwilling to talk too much about their work, I think.”

  “Habit,” I said. “They don’t mean to be cruel.”

  Strodemaster raised his eyebrows. He wanted them to mean to be cruel, because he’d lived a life on the assumption that anyone not sleeping with him might be working against him. He must have been a child of ferocious appetites and pretty basic satisfactions, I thought.

  I said, “Look. I can get names from you, investigators on the case, and I can visit them and ask what they know. I can tell you what they tell me, if they tell me. I was wondering. I drew this up in the car.” I turned the pad over and showed them my little note. It asked whomever it might concern to tell me as their agent whatever the Tanners were allowed to know about the search for their child. I asked them to sign and date their signature and they did.

  The mother said, “Do we pay you a retainer?”

  “No, Mrs. Tanner. I’m not a lawyer or a detective. I’m just a friendly volunteer. I want you to have your daughter back.” My throat tightened up when I said it, and I shut up.

  Mrs. Tanner said, “There is a cosmological dimension, you know.”

  I said, pretty stupidly, “Like a—something about God?”

  She nodded, smiling very tiredly. “A manifestation of His intelligence. A plan. Perhaps a test. It might be a desperate woman who needs a child,” she said. “I feel something like that. Somebody who doesn’t want to hurt anyone. Somebody with a very deep need.”

  I had to say it. “No, it’s a man. It nearly always is.”

  Mr. Tanner said, “You know that.”

  I wanted not to answer that, so I said to her, “A plan, you said. God has a plan? Is that what you mean?”

  She said, “I pray for it. If not Janice back, and safe with us, and whole, then God’s design.”

  Her husband nodded, but his eyes were closed, and I know he was weeping or working not to.

  She took my left hand in both of hers. Her skin felt clammy. Her fingers felt light, powerless. She didn’t seize me; she only held. She said, “You’re very decent to help. It makes you sad, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s a sad business,” I said.

  “I think you’re dealing with more than that,” she said. Her voice had a tendency to lift, a lightness that I associated with her limbs. She was being cooked from the inside out by the radiation or the chemicals, and now she had to carry this. Three cheers for God’s design, I thought.

  They gave me names and telephone numbers and, like an investigator, I wrote them down. When I looked up, I saw that all of them were watching me. The expectation in their eyes reminded me of the wallpaper I should not have taken down.

  The Tanner family printed more posters. The amount of the reward was now five thousand dollars, and I wondered where a preacher with a very sick wife finds that kind of money. The new posters were on yellow paper, and some were a foot and a half or two feet high, so there was another crop, a new flowering of her face. It was the same photograph, and the enlargement made it coarser, like she’d aged while I watched. Her mouth looked more vulnerable in the new version, and I found that I couldn’t meet her eyes.

  Girls run away, and not only to the Port Authority bus terminal on Forty-second Street in New York, and not only from the country. Boys and girls run away. I knew no statistics, and I hadn’t talked to a cop about it, but I assumed they ran away a lot and were stolen very little. You read about it, of course, but it’s usually an infant taken from a stroller or a carriage. Once in a while, a drunken father or boyfriend punches an infant to death, or burns it, or the mother kills and buries it. If the child is older, I thought, and a girl, and she hasn’t run away, she’s dead. I remembered a few cases of kidnapping and the rest were murder, or rape and then murder. I worked not to think about Janice Tanner in some maniac’s car or trailer or furnished apartment. I tried not to think of her blood on bathroom tiles or her body in a crawl space, moving a little every time he slammed the door going out or coming home, like she still was alive and very badly hurt and frightened. I worked not to imagine her alive. I tried not to observe her fright.

  I went to work every day. Sometimes at home, after a while, I slept. One day, I took the dog for a long walk over the hill behind the house, pushing myself through it until the snow, which was the height of my knees a dozen yards from the door, was up to my waist. The dog leapt, tearing himself loose, then sank in, then worked himself free, jumping again. His tongue hung out, stiff and pink, like he’d been running for an hour. I was heaving and blowing, gasping with high sounds.

  “We’re a couple of old guys,” I told him.

  He breathed in choppy pantings and his winking, friendly, alien eyes stayed on me. He was a dog bred for errands, and he waited for me to find one. The spittle turned to ice around his long, blunt muzzle, and he seemed content to pause before the next episode of our mission. I wanted to be like that. I wanted to know that orders were coming and that I’d soon perform them, and then the job would be done,
and I would dive slowly into the curving path made by my flanks while I circled and circled, as if I was clearing away a nest, and lie down and sleep.

  My feet were numb and my hands were cold. The winds drove past the collar of my parka and up my sleeves. My nose and cheeks hurt and even my eyeballs felt cold. It was time to turn around. The milkiness of the broad hill before us and around us was getting darker, which meant more weather coming on. It was time to fill his aluminum water dish and lock the dog in the kitchen and go to work. I tried to turn around, and my feet were slow to move. I had difficulty lifting them and wasn’t surprised when I fell. He was over and at my face, licking me, delighted with our new game. I lay where I was and closed my eyes. He shoved his muzzle into my face and I felt his paw on my chest.

  “Good game, huh?”

  I heard myself breathe out noisily, then take in icy air with less pleasure. I listened to that for a while, and the little snorts of the dog.

  I said, “Okay.”

  He left off, because he knew the tone. It meant not okay. He was waiting nearby, and I ought to be standing by now, in motion. Of course, a man doesn’t walk away from his house through a field of deep snow one morning in February just before work and lie down until the winds cover him with blown snow and then die.

  “I didn’t say anything about dying,” I said. My mouth wasn’t working right, or I didn’t want it to be. That was it. I sounded like someone trying hard to be drunk. I didn’t like that sound, and I rolled onto my side and, when the dog returned, because he suspected action, I leaned a little of my weight on his shoulders and I got to my knees and then stood.

  “Good trick,” I told us. “Good.” I took my glove off and found the biscuits in the pocket of my coat, and I gave him one.

  “Aren’t we clever,” I said.

  Fanny’s car was in the drive, which had been plowed twice since she’d been stuck. The winter was the worst I could remember for snow, and for getting up to fight through the cold and ice and balky motors and the difficulty of simply walking between two points, a feeling in the air of not enough oxygen. Drivers on campus were cranky and less and less thoughtful. The snowplows seemed to come less frequently, though we needed them more. Fanny still drove, I was certain, with her knuckles white and her mind not focused on the surface of the road. I was glad to see her car, to know she’d made it home. But I was also a little sneaky in my approach to the side porch, because I had a need to come and go unnoticed.