Girls

by Frederick Busch

  He said, “You got me feeling guilty, man.”

  “What are you guilty of, Randy?”

  “Your whipped ass, Jack. I don’t ask you for help, you don’t get going into this stuff, and the hoodlums don’t hurt you. It couldn’t have been a fair fight.”

  I said, “I don’t believe I know of any fair fights.”

  “Really?” he said. “That’s a cruel, frightening Weltanschauung, Jack.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh. Point of view? I don’t know—view of the world, maybe. Way of looking at things?”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s German.”

  “It’s a German way of looking?”

  “It’s a German word.”

  “Sounds it,” I said.

  He was walking back and forth again. There wasn’t much of anyplace to walk. It was a two-person room, and the only reason there was space for the chair was that Virginia had pushed the empty other bed against the wall. But he paced. He looked sweaty and less healthy than when he’d begun. I thought of him out there in Chenango Flats with his girlfriends and his garbage and his devotion to poor yellowing Mrs. Tanner. I tried to see him in graduate school and then his early days at the college with a wife who loved him. I could only see him alone. I couldn’t imagine him with a wife or with the girlfriends he was said to bring home. I could only see him in the bathrobe with its stained front. I remembered the smell of his kitchen. I was confused by his language and his shiny-faced energy. I was disturbed by how much he wanted me to like him.

  “Jack,” he said, “promise me.”

  “What, Randy?”

  “You’ll get out of it, the involvement with … with this whole awful Janice Tanner story.”

  I thought, listening to him, what I’d thought when my English prof had carried on about something we’d read. It always sounded prepared, which was a silly reaction, since these guys got paid to come to class prepared. I guess it sounded insincere, what they thought they were supposed to say instead of what they felt. I don’t know. I remember thinking I wasn’t cut out to be listening to these people. And what they felt wasn’t supposed to be my business, anyway.

  “This is my own fault, Randy. I handled a lot of stuff wrong. Remember what I told you—I haven’t been an investigator for an awfully long time.”

  He said, “Yes, I remember. What I thought at the time was, What’s an investigator? He picks up data? I thought I could do it. I was trained. Investigators are like scientists. Scientists are investigators. I didn’t do Janice any good, did I?”

  I said, “Maybe.”

  “Maybe I did?”

  “Maybe investigators are scientists. What I did, when I worked it seriously, I listened. I just tried to hear what they said. I did a lot of interrogations. I was good at it.”

  “At listening,” he said, walking to the door and turning to walk back.

  “At listening,” I said.

  He said, “Listen, then, Jack. I’m the one at fault here, not you. You have broken ribs. The cartilage that binds two of them in place is torn away. You have two simple fractures in your fingers. Fanny told me you were pissing blood. Your face is puffed and black-and-blue. You look like you can’t move a lot of the rest of you. You’re out. I hired you, for a great big nothing, and now I need to fire you. Please. All right?”

  “Randy,” I said, “relax. You professors. All of you. You talk and you talk. Relax.”

  “Get outside and go for a run on the sticks.”

  “What?”

  “Go skiing. That’s what I should do more of. That’s what I’ll do. But no more—what shall we call it, detective work?”

  “I think you call it getting beat up.”

  “Good description,” he said. “Good man!”

  “That’s me,” I said, wondering if Fanny would enter the room again.

  She’d been on for four days, and by the time the roads were cleared and most of the area’s power restored, they sent her off for a couple of days’ break, and they sent me with her. Security would dig my Ford out and run it a little to charge the battery. My vice president for administration had interviewed and hired a temp to fill in until I came back. When I did, I could decide whether we would keep her. I was pleased he had listened to me about hiring a woman. All I needed now was for Fanny and me to be all right, and for the missing girls to appear unharmed in their homes.

  Here’s what I thought. I thought about Ralph the Duck, who didn’t have any feathers. I thought, Once upon a time.

  I truly wished, as Virginia wheeled me to the door and helped me into Fanny’s car, that I knew something about prayer. Mrs. Tanner did, I thought. Presumably, her husband did. Maybe Janice did and maybe it comforted her. I wished for that.

  I knew that praying was more than wishing. It was more than talking loose and swearing careless oaths to what you wished would bail you out of the shit. When I was in the service and people fired on each other while I was working, two times I heard men scream to Jesus and God the Father, “Oh please please please don’t kill me God Jesus please.” I’d got in the habit, there, of using those names as messily as anyone else had, and I’d known at the time and I knew now that praying was something else.

  I thought, as Fanny drove us home, that I could work as hard as I wished, bullying bad guys and giving up my rib cage and doing all the powerful listening I could, but that something else had to happen. I didn’t know what it was. I wasn’t thinking about God. I had no ideas about God. God worked His, Her, or Its side of the street, and I worked mine. It wasn’t what Mrs. Tanner would think of as God. But we all needed more than we were bringing to the situation, I thought.

  We skidded out, but Fanny caught it.

  “You all right?” I asked her.

  “Fine.”

  “Fanny, you’re so amazingly pissed off at me.”

  “Why is it amazing?”

  “Because I haven’t done anything bad except get my ass kicked is why.”

  “And your little short professor—what’s her name? Your faculty friend?”

  “I find this hard to believe,” I said.

  “No,” she said, “you should believe it. Walking into your room and talking through me like I’m hired help. Excuse me, I’m sure, pro-fessor. Do you knock her off in some maintenance shack or something? Or is she what you do in your truck when you aren’t rescuing the daughters of the upper crust?”

  “I don’t knock anyone off. You, of everyone in the world, should know that. You know who I am. You know how I’ve been. Come on, Fanny. And how could you suspect me of something like that?”

  “Oh, it’s worse than suspecting you, Jack. It’s her I’m suspecting, too. All I needed was one fast look at her curly little mouth and her tight little body and the expression in her eyes when she looked at you. That girlish little blush? Dear mercy me, Jack, you can’t be that naïve. No one can. Which means you know what’s going on, whatever it is.”

  “Which is nothing.”

  “Whatever it is,” she said. “And you know. And I know. Maybe the registrar knows. Maybe she gives you a grade. And I believe that terminates this portion of the journey’s conversation, thank you very much.”

  Fanny had apparently arranged to have us plowed out, and she was able to park close to the house. We went in together. She was near me, in case I slipped, but otherwise she was distant. The house smelled cold, and I headed for the cellar door and went down to hit the restart button on the oil-fired furnace. It started up. I walked the cellar, inspecting the water pipes. None down there had burst, and when I was back upstairs, I called up to Fanny to ask if anything on the second floor had burst and run.

  From the head of the stairs, she said, “No.”

  I made a fire in the woodstove and it didn’t take that long for the furnace to heat the water and circulate it to the radiators. The house began to warm and creak as wood and metal expanded, and it felt alive, though not as hearty as I’d have liked.

  Fanny called do
wn, “I was wrong. There’s no water running up here in the bathroom.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  All she said was, “Good.”

  I fetched the heat gun and wedged myself into a corner of the mudroom. That was where the pipes ran vertically, along the wrong wall, the outside wall, to the upstairs. I set the heat gun on low because I didn’t want to fire up the lath inside the plaster walls, and I warmed the pipes up. If we were lucky, the problem was a kind of slush or light ice, and I could melt it.

  Five minutes later, Fanny walked into the kitchen, around the corner from me, and said, “There’s water now.”

  I turned the heat gun off and lay on my back on the mudroom floor where I’d crouched. My ribs felt worse than they had for a day. I was going to have to learn, I thought, about behaving differently. Maybe if I told Fanny I was hurt and was about to act better, she would forgive me.

  I thought, Forgive you for which?

  She said, “What are you doing?”

  I said, “I’m resting a minute.”

  “What’d you hurt?”

  “Ribs.”

  “You jerk.”

  I nodded.

  “You unbelievable jerk.”

  I nodded.

  Instead of coming over to help me, or to give me codeine-laced tablets, or lie down beside me and murmur comfort, she walked away.

  I wished, as I worked at getting up, that she could see me. It would have moved her, I thought, seeing my difficulties. I was on my knees in the mudroom when she walked—I’d use the word strode, actually—around me so she could get her parka from the wall.

  As she pulled on gloves and tucked her hair into her woolen cap, she said, “I’m going for the dog.”

  “I might lie down someplace where he won’t step on me coming home.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “Or you.”

  “Jack,” she said, “you don’t have to worry about my foot or any other part of me touching you.”

  I was remembering a time when we were in the bar of the Christopher Hotel, which is out on a country road that takes you toward Cooperstown by way of the hills. Around nine or ten on Saturday nights, the local men bring their dates in for a hamburger and some beer and some dancing. A woman I knew from the campus bookstore, Helena, was there with her boyfriend, who worked for the state fisheries. Fanny and I were eating a late steak, which is what they call the long, thin, greasy meat they charge extra for bringing to your table. The song that someone had punched on the jukebox was Stevie Ray Vaughan playing “Testify.”

  Helena is a tall and sweet-faced woman with long black hair that hangs halfway down her back and a busty, big-hipped figure. She came dancing over to the table by herself. She closed her eyes when she got to us and she said, “Jack, get up here and get some.”

  I looked at Fanny. She stared at me with a face I barely remembered from when we started going out in the seventies.

  I didn’t think you should have to be scared of your wife. You’d think I would have learned. I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  What happened was, I held her away from me, and she moved in a very sexy way to get in closer while moving much of her body at the same time. I more or less held on for the ride. The music ended and I got her back to her date, who didn’t look up from his conversation with some men. It was a piss-your-wife-off move on his part, and her dancing was a piss-your-husband-off on hers.

  When I got back to the table, Fanny looked like she was crouching in her chair. I leaned on my arms in front of her with my hands flat on the table. She took her knife, all smeared with steak fat, and she very slowly put it into the web of skin between my finger and my thumb. People looked over at the sound I made.

  Fanny handed me her napkin and said, “Here. Put some pressure on it.”

  I waited for her to tell me something else.

  She said, “Don’t expect me to be your nurse.”

  Moving up slowly to my knees on the floor of the mudroom, I told myself, You might have to expect less friendship now than you’ve been used to in the last little while.

  daughter

  WE HAD MORE SNOW on our road than I’d ever seen. I watched it from our bedroom window and our living room windows and our kitchen window. In the back room, I saw the vast amounts of snow in the field and at the edge of the woods. I saw plenty of snow. They delivered my car in it and went back to work at the campus in it, but I didn’t. I stayed home and, according to Fanny, I healed. What was wounded in her did not.

  While she was at work, I climbed out onto the roof from an upstairs bedroom, and I tried to shovel snow. The idea was to keep the stuff from breaking through the roof. It weighed tons. The idea was also that when the snow really began to melt, it would run under the shingles, and then if it froze again and melted, it would shove the shingles off or even break through the subroof. The dog stayed below, where the lawn would be if the snow ever melted, and he barked each time I tossed a shovelful over. That added up to five barks, because the pain was too bad. I settled for edging the stuff around with a stiff leg, then kicking sideways, in a clumsy soccer motion, to push it in powdering mounds off the roof. He didn’t bark for the pushes because they were probably not very impressive.

  I replaced a doorknob. That meant using a borrowed backset drill I should have returned to the hardware store half a season ago. I was terrible with it. I didn’t have enough body strength to set myself and wrestle tools around. I ended up with a hole about a foot in diameter. You’d have needed a knob the size of a beach ball for the door. I did some laundry, swearing again, as I always did, when I saw the label on the softener. No matter what brand, it’s always a sweet, cuddly little kid, or a bear you’re supposed to want to hug. I fastened an FM antenna to the radio in the back room and hung it out a window. I listened to music for a while, but I didn’t want to feel anyone else’s rhythms. I cooked. I made my infamous chili con carne with about twenty-five cloves of garlic and lots of cumin and oregano and chili powder and some shavings of dried chili. I couldn’t find hamburger meat or stew beef, so I hacked up some steaks I found in the freezer. Serve with ice-cold beer to someone who likes you.

  It was time to take more of the little pills with codeine in them. I did that and then I put the chili away without eating it. Since I was still in my boots after working on the roof, I put on a sweater and a parka, found my gloves, used shears to cut off two fingers of the right one, told the dog to stay, and I left. Getting stuffed in behind the wheel was painful, but I reminded myself that I’d taken pills and they surely had kicked in by now. I reminded myself again, then got the car going. I backed it up by using the mirror so I wouldn’t have to try to twist my body, hoped that no one was coming down the road that minute, and drove toward Chenango Flats.

  It looked so small, I was thinking half an hour later, when I entered it from the south. There was the river, with heaps of ice and snow at its banks, and the crusts of ice at its edges. There were the railroad tracks no trains went over anymore. I thought of southern and midwestern towns I’d been in during the war, where the trains ran all the time. That was when I started to hear a little blues music, and to understand how much of it was the sound of trains. In the songs, they were always leaving. The fields were attached to houses, so the children grew up, if they weren’t Janice Tanner, as part of the crop. I drove slowly through, passing Strodemaster’s large, empty-looking, dark Victorian farmhouse and his beautiful stone and planking barn. I passed his neighbors and came to the crossroads. I knew one wing of it headed east toward a quiet, small lake. I’d heard that children, if they weren’t Janice Tanner, ice-skated there. Heading south a little more, having passed maybe eleven houses, I came to the Chenango Flats Baptist Church.

  It was small; it had a stubby excuse for a spire and no cross on top. The five-foot cross, fashioned of wood stained a piney color, was on the clapboard out front. The congregation wasn’t rich. The glassed-in announcement board said that the Reverend B. Tanner’s Sunday sermon
would be “God on His Knees.” I wondered if Mrs. Tanner approved. It took several minutes to emerge from the car. I tried to keep a straight face in case someone was watching. Outside a church, I thought, who do you expect to be watching you? I didn’t look up. I went through the narrow anteroom into the church. It was all on one level. It was painted a harsh white. There was a set of about a dozen pews, and behind them several rows of folding chairs, some wood and some metal. In the front, I saw a battered black upright piano off to the right. Few lights were on, and daylight through the narrow unstained windows didn’t turn anything awfully bright.

  I came halfway down the aisle to stand under the low ceiling made of tin plates with designs on them, and I tried to imagine what the Tanners said and thought when they were here. I tried to sense their comfort but couldn’t. I closed my eyes and tried to hear Mrs. Tanner’s voice. I felt a pulse beating in my ribs, I thought. Something, surely, was banging away inside in that vicinity. I tried to hear Mrs. Tanner praying. I tried to hear Janice. I had never heard her voice. I didn’t think I would.

  Dear God, I thought, keeping my eyes closed. I thought of men I’d known in the service who prayed. They had prayed at bad times, I thought, and maybe to someone religious their prayer would seem selfish, tainted by all their need. A lot of American servicemen beat up whores. They were exhausted, frightened men, and their experience was mostly of loss. They lost girlfriends and wives at home. They lost money over there, and they lost face. They lost some battles, though they won some. They couldn’t tell because everything was measured in killed bodies and we told them they outkilled the enemy, but the real estate they’d thought to gain was either given back or retreated from because goals and strategies were changed at the level of command. So they felt like losers. And they lost their friends. Men died in terrible ways, of course, and they saw them die, and no one told them how to mourn or gave them time or occasion. Men they loved were torn to pieces and everyone was slicked with their blood and no one stopped a minute to say their sorrow for them. And some of them cut up girls in the bars and brothels. They beat them badly. And we arrested them after viewing the crime scene. And one of us was always saying, “My God,” or “Dear God,” or “Jesus Christ.” I think we might have meant something, but I never knew what, and I couldn’t feel what this building was for.