Girls

by Frederick Busch

  So that was a nothing I could perform.

  And I could tell them their girl was under a repair bay in a truck stop someplace. Or in a frozen-over lake, I could say. Or eaten by wolves if out of doors, by rats if in.

  She was a local girl. I thought of bracing local thugs, except we didn’t have any. We had violaters of labor laws and health codes, we had income-tax evaders, and we probably had some wife beaters and child abusers, but I didn’t know out-and-out bad guys whose names I could toss around.

  I thought, Call Sergeant Bird.

  I thought, You call your wife.

  From a secretary’s phone in Admissions, I called Elmo’s dispatcher and asked her to relay my request. The boys and girls and their parents were looking at videotapes of the campus they sat in. I went down to the basement to show the flag at the cash-payment window and the soda machines and the bursar’s office and then I drove down to the physical education complex. They had step machines and free weights and lifting machines that cost more than our fleet of four-wheel-drive vehicles. They had an Olympic-size swimming pool and Olympic-quality kids to dive into it and swim it end to end. I was good enough to sink like a weighted sack of cats and thrash and drown.

  I did a turn through the off-campus apartments and looked into the lighting in the laundry rooms. We’d had an incident there. Someone had talked too aggressively to a girl. She described herself as a woman in the interview room, and I called her that in my report. But she was a girl. She had freckles across the top of her nose, and she was skinny, but with nice shoulders. She wore one of those floppy-topped sweaters that purposely fell by accident off half of the shoulders and chest of the girl or woman who wore one. I did not mention costume in the interview or report. It was considered bad form. She’d been frightened by a big boy, and she had a right not to be, and I was making sure Buildings and Grounds had increased the lighting and put in a phone.

  Next was the cluster of science buildings. They looked like factories. Outside of the physics building, I saw Strodemaster’s high, battered old Land Rover. It looked like it had just come off the desert, pursued by Bedouin shooting movie rifles. I think maybe Strodemaster wished it had. He was parked in the no parking zone in front of the loading dock. I took out one of the cards my administrative vice president had given me as part of the promotion package. It cost them about eleven cents to print the cards up, and you were supposed to feel important—instant cheap morale. On the card, I wrote “Naughty.” I’d give him the ticket next time. He was the kind of man who made you want to provoke him, maybe even hurt him, and partly because he acted like everybody was born with glands, lungs, heart, liver, and the need to make Randy Strodemaster happy.

  I drove along to the humanities building, and Dispatch let me know that the New York State Police would meet me at a diner called Junior’s a couple of miles north of town. The cop who’d meet me would be there near one, and he could stay for half an hour. I made sure to be on time. The state policeman had gotten there early. Sergeant Bird was tall, slender, tough, and very politely careful about me. His blue-black skin made the purple of his necktie against the gray of his uniform shirt seem brighter. He drank coffee and chewed on a grilled cheese with tomato sandwich. I became so hungry, I thought I was going to drool. I ordered the same. Junior’s was a big square room with small tables and comfortable wide wooden chairs. The waitress kept pouring extra coffee into cups, and Junior, in the kitchen, listened to tape cassettes of opera while he cooked. His whole name was Ruggiero Nazitto, and he liked to talk about coming to America not to make pizza.

  “Good food here,” Bird said.

  “He puts garlic on everything.”

  “Smart move. So, what’s your interest in my missing kids?”

  “The family of Janice Tanner would like more information. They don’t know how to get it. You aren’t volunteering much, apparently. So they asked me to do something. What they asked for is anything, actually.”

  “Well, you’re doing anything,” Sergeant Bird said. “What qualifies you to ride the same horse as me?”

  “I didn’t say I was. I had a little experience in the service.”

  “Which, judging from what I see, was not the day before yesterday.”

  “A while ago,” I said. “I was an MP. I got into some stuff and I ended up attached to Intelligence. It was mostly surveillance and, right before I was done, some interrogation.”

  “Army?”

  I nodded.

  “They’re a joke,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “Navy Intelligence is a joke. Army’s almost competent. And I was all right. Really. I did some stuff. I found a truckload of missing weapons. I stuffed an outfit of pharmaceuticals merchandisers. You can check me out.”

  “The request is already in and working.”

  “So you wanted to look me over.”

  “Small college security cop has the police chief, who is one of a of four in a tiny upstate town, request full cooperation, which means disclosure of physical evidence as well as a siphon on my time? You bet your paper white ass I look you over.”

  I was wrestling with strings of hot melted cheese and boiling tomato. I said, “Mmmm.”

  He nodded like I’d told him something, and he wiped his hands on his paper napkin, which he’d folded into sixteenths. His fingers were long, the nails pale, and he moved his hands with tremendous certainty. They looked like he could go from wiping his fingers to performing surgery.

  “I’ll read your jacket when it comes in,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll think about it. Because I can use … well, I can actually use anything. I can tell you that much. Anything. One answered question I might not get to ask.”

  “You’re buffaloed,” I said.

  “We have a little.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “You don’t have time, I figure, to take a leak more than once a day. So you get a request from Elmo St. John, who is not J. Edgar Hoover—”

  “Thank Christ,” he said.

  “And you drive over here, you take a lunch break when you look like you eat one meal a day, and that’s late at night, alone, because your wife doesn’t talk to you, she’s so pissed off about your work schedule. And you’re here because you got zero on the Tanner thing, and then the little kid a county over.…”

  “There’s another one,” he said.

  I put the other half of my sandwich down.

  “You’ll see the posters soon. I think it’s unrelated. It might be. It’s outside of Buffalo, near the Canadian border. I hope it’s Buffalo’s. It feels like a fucking plague, doesn’t it?”

  “Their faces,” I said.

  He said, “I hate it. I have two daughters. And the pissed-off wife, you’re right. I think of my daughters. It seems to be white kids who get snatched, except in Atlanta or the Apple. But you never know. Here’s one of those times you sink down onto your knees and pray for bigotry.”

  “Amen,” I said. “We really have to stop him.”

  “Them.”

  “You’re pretty sure they’re unrelated? There’s more than one guy doing this? Isn’t that worse?”

  “I know what you mean. It’s like a condition. It’s like … weather. If it’s just a crazy person, we’ve got a possible shot.”

  I said, “Will you catch the call if there’s a threat against the Vice President? He’s coming to campus in a month or two, and we might have an incident.”

  “Anything I need to know?”

  “I’ll brief you on it. When you get back to me on this.”

  “Slyly done,” he said. “I’ll read your file. I’d bet I’ll be back in touch with my quid for your little pro quo.”

  “That Latin’s Greek to me,” I said. “Can I pay for this?”

  “I’d rather you owe me, just in case I get pissed off at you down the road, Jack.”

  “What’s your first name again?” I asked.

  “Sergeant,” he told me.

  I went to Strodema
ster’s house after work, but he didn’t answer. I opened the back door and called for him, but I still didn’t get an answer. The kitchen was as smelly as last time, which meant he still hadn’t taken his trash out. You get that way, living in the country, because the more trash you take out, usually to the barn or garage, the sooner you have to stick your pails or bags in the truck and get them to the county waste-management site—dump, as we once used to say.

  On the chalkboard, in the Oregano hand, but under de Bergerac, someone had written Bring more stuff!

  I called, “Randy!” There wasn’t an answer, and I left.

  I almost went to his barn to look for him, but I wanted to get my visit over and go home. I loved his barn. It was set about twenty yards behind the house. It had a thick dry-point foundation wall, and the wood that went a story above it looked to be in wonderful shape. Inside, a fine-gauge tongue and groove divided it into bins and stalls. There were corners to go around, two sets of stairs to the upstairs loft, and several areas of floor that were cobbled. I’d often thought that with enough land around it, I’d consider buying the barn and converting it to a house. Fanny and I could do the job, I thought, and I still had it in mind—buying the property, selling off the house, keeping the rest of the land and the barn. I didn’t know if we could move back into a town, though. Small towns sap your strength because you lose your privacy. We needed ours. We hadn’t strength to spare.

  I drove a few houses over to the Tanners’. She answered the door, saying that her husband was at his church, having a painting bee with a few retired people who had volunteered to do the walls of the Sunday school.

  “The paint in churches, we’ve found, gets worn away quicker than in other buildings. I think it’s the friction of the souls. They grind themselves against the ceiling and walls. Come in here, if you would, Jack, so I can lie down.”

  We went into their small living room with its bold Victorian wallpaper of blowsy, fat flowers in vertical stripes. Water simmered in a speckled blue basin set on top of an airtight stove, and music was playing from a radio on the windowsill. Mrs. Tanner lay on a long blue sofa, her head on a boldly patterned pillow of yellow, maroon, and blue. “I was listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams. I was trying to find out why the English say Ralph as Rafe.”

  “I didn’t know they did,” I said.

  “They do seem to.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “What, dear?”

  “Nothing, ma’am.”

  “You look so uneasy. Do you”—she sat up and put her palms on the sofa—“do you know something?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “No.”

  She lay back down very quickly, as if she didn’t have the strength to sit up.

  “I met today with one of the state investigators. He’s very determined. He wants to find your daughter.”

  “Janice,” she said.

  Janice.

  “Someone said there was another missing child. I had the most dreadfully selfish thought.”

  “You were afraid it would—”

  “Dilute the search for Janice. Yes. I’m ashamed. How did you know?”

  “I just thought like a parent, I suppose.”

  “Yet you’re not one, you said.”

  “I am not a parent,” I said.

  “That’s too bad. You ought to be.”

  “I guess I wasn’t meant to be one, Mrs. Tanner.”

  “You see? You knew perfectly well all along what I meant about patterns and plans.”

  “How do you feel, Mrs. Tanner? How’s your health?”

  “You mean the cancer?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Did your wife tell you we met last night? I felt poorly—it was the treatment, not the disease—and poor Mr. Tanner decided he had to rush me through the night and snow and ice into the emergency room. And there was your wife. She is the loveliest, kindest, most competent woman. Some people are simply born to give care, aren’t they? Oh, she should be a mother!”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But I’m all right. I’m not bedridden yet. It hasn’t blown me up or torn me down yet. I’ve decided that Janice will be returned to us between now and her birthday. It’s in March, the twenty-second. I’ll be alive.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Of course. And Janice will be home.”

  I didn’t know what to do. I sat on the ottoman with my legs out in front of me and I squeezed my palms into my kneecaps and agreed.

  She said, “Really, Jack. I assure you.”

  “I thought I was supposed to be assuring you.”

  She didn’t answer, and I stood. “Mrs. Tanner?”

  “It’s fine,” she said after what felt like a long wait. “Don’t worry. And I feel certain you’ll get your turn.”

  The weekend was long and quiet and icy and long. Temperatures fell by Friday night to twenty-five below zero, and they didn’t rise more than twelve degrees during Saturday. We had long ago sealed the fireplace up with an insert, a small iron stove from Vermont, and Fanny and I carried in load after load of wood. We had the thermostat set high for the oil burner, and, in the back room, which was heated by electric baseboard units, we turned the thermostat all the way up. Fanny wore an old woolen shirt of mine under a thick wool sweater, flannel pajama pants under her jeans, and heavy ragg socks inside of her wool-lined moccasins. I wore the down-filled vest I used for outdoor chores in autumn. Nothing much helped. One of us was always looking through the kitchen window at the thermometer and reporting on how bad it was, or turning from the radio or television set to repeat a number always ending in below zero. The windows frosted up in fan shapes. On Saturday afternoon, when the temperature rose closest to zero, I started our cars and kept them running a good while. Then, shutting them down, I set old blankets and tarpaulins over the engines to insulate the batteries and wiring. I ran a droplight on an extension cord from the mudroom, where we plugged in the washer and dryer, out to my old Ford, and I arranged the bulb to lie above the battery, under blankets, to provide a little heat.

  The rest was moving slowly, going to windows to look at the threat, and sitting in the house near the stove and talking about the cold. We did not discuss the room upstairs, or our daughter, or the errand that Strodemaster invited me into, though we talked in general about the missing girls.

  Fanny said, late on Saturday afternoon, when we drank chicken broth in mugs near the fire, “What if she ran away and she’s outside in this?”

  “It would have to be hell in the Tanners’ house to want to be outside in this, wouldn’t it? I don’t know about him, but she seems a gentle woman. Strong person, you know, but gentle. I don’t know what in hell the preacher’s up to. Probably raping her every night.”

  “They don’t quite rape them,” Fanny said. “They seduce them. Daddy needs you. Why are you so beautiful, I can’t stay away from you—so it’s the girl’s fault. It isn’t as violent as rape. But it’s also more violent.”

  “You get them in the ER?”

  She shook her head. “Not usually. They don’t come in hurt, as a rule. Sometimes they go wild, and they kill him, and he comes in all cut or bleeding or burned. Once, this was when I was in nursing school, they brought a guy in—his sister-in-law had done him. She waited until after he worked the daughter over and he was sleeping. She tied his hands and feet to the bed. He was on his back. And she hammered nails into him. She said he twisted a lot, and his wife kept trying to rescue him, and the nails banged off his ribs, but she did a lot of damage. She was trying to sink these big spikes, they looked like, into his heart. The wife kept saying she would press charges, she would press charges.”

  “Against her sister, right?”

  “Oh, of course.” Then Fanny said, “When you talk to Archie—are you his patient?”

  Fanny was in the morris chair I had pulled over. She had her legs up under her, and I’d put a comforter over her lap. For a while, she had looked relaxed. But now her brow, wh
ich had looked pale but relaxed, almost smooth, was a furrow of twisted parallel lines pushed up by her wonderful eyebrows, which had risen as I rocked. The dog felt the tension increase. He sat up, then laid his head on his paws and watched us.

  “Not a patient. No. Sometimes, going in, when I stop at the Blue Bird to fill up on coffee, if I’m early, we have a cup together and we talk.”

  “About us.”

  “About the salary cap in the NBA. About campus politics that percolate down to the infrastructure people like me. About the weather. Sometimes—”

  “It was the sometimes that I think I was asking about.”

  “Sometimes we talk about emotions.”

  “Because you’re such a garrulous fellow and you just can’t stop pondering out loud about the way folks emote?”

  “Exactly,” I said. The lines on her forehead were slightly less bunched.

  “Tell me.”

  I closed my eyes so I could say it. “Sometimes I worry about if I’m smart enough, educated enough. I don’t know. Strong enough? Something enough. To be useful to you.”

  I rubbed my face like I was tired. It kept my hand in front of me, and it kept my eyes shut.

  “Useful,” she said.

  I made the sound you make when you agree with someone.

  She said, “Jack.”

  We still didn’t talk about the wreckage upstairs in the room. Sunday night, we got Fanny’s car running, and her wheels squeaked off on the frozen road. In the morning, the dog wandered away while I worked on starting the Ford. The oil sounded like sludge and the starter sounded like a very weak cough, but it turned over, and I let the engine run while I stumped around on numb feet, trying to get the dog in. He burst up from the woods below the house with snow powdering off him like water in the wake of a fast-moving ship. His head was high and his jaw was clamped. He was full of victory and pride, and he carried a loop of frozen blue-maroon intestines two feet long. He had clearly been to the mother lode of all sickness-provoking snacks for dogs, and he’d returned in glory. I let him run around the yard a few times, circling me to make sure it was understood that an event of major importance had taken place. Then, when he fell to his belly a few feet away to begin his meal, I made him drop it. I carried the guts in, put them inside a plastic bag, and hauled them out to the trash pails in the garage. I didn’t want us smelling them while they defrosted.