Girls

by Frederick Busch

  “They don’t mind using motels. Or classrooms. Storage closets in the administration building.”

  I found the right master key on my ring and let us in. There was a small mound of sand, a rack of chain, hose from the old snow machines, a few plastic tarpaulins, and a very excited colony of mice.

  Rosalie said, “I thought maybe Chanel No. Five, or Poison, not the smell of cold mouse.” She held her nose with a mittened hand, and she looked about ten.

  “It’s the only pretty much hidden place where we can get kind of risky and wild the way you wanted.”

  “That’s what I wanted, huh?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  “You’re right. I guess it was a bluff.”

  “No,” I said, “you were turned on and risky-feeling. It’s possible we might get nuts up here, but I think what we’d get is cold asses and sore skin and smelly.”

  “This is the first scripture lesson, then.”

  “In what?”

  “In taking it easy? I’m not sure. Maybe in just being us and not some idea about us that one of us might have?”

  “I didn’t intend that. I’m not sure I could even come up with it.”

  “You really wanted to do what I wanted to do.”

  I nodded.

  She reached under my coat and cupped my ass and squeezed, then patted it. She said, “Let’s do second best.”

  “Anything you want,” I said.

  “Let’s go back down and I’ll drive my car home and we meet up later and be whoever we are.”

  “Could I kiss you first?” I asked.

  She said, “I think you have to.”

  I said to the dog, when I drove the Ford off campus after work, “You won’t starve. I promise.” I had taken the gun from the Jeep, and it was angled uncomfortably in the pocket of my coat. I put it in the glove compartment of the Gran Torino. “But we need to make a stop.” When I pulled into the Tanners’ driveway, I left windows open halfway down and told him to stay.

  She was in bed, the reverend told me.

  “Thank God they took her off the chemotherapy,” he said. “It was killing her. This way, she’s in her own house, and when she feels strong, she can putter. And, of course, she’s supervising the search.”

  He was probably right. In terms of full-time concentration on Janice Tanner, she was doing more than anyone in the state. Maybe, I thought, the man who took Janice had done more. The reverend went upstairs and I stood in the living room. There were no pictures on the walls except one of Jesus that looked famous and one of Janice that was famous for sure. It was the one with her glad eyes and sad mouth. I saw hooks where other pictures had hung. On the coffee table in front of the thin wooden settle, there were posters and newspapers. The top paper had an article about her parents’ efforts to find her. I had a metal taste in my mouth, and the saliva kept running.

  Tanner was back. He gestured to me, and I followed him up the steep, narrow staircase. I could feel the thermal current of the house as cold air rose behind us. I waited for the heating system to kick in. I was worried about how cold Mrs. Tanner felt.

  He gestured me to a rush-bottomed ladder-back chair beside the bed. The only light in the room came from a weak bulb in the lamp on the bedside table, which was a cracked cherry stand. The shades in the two windows were drawn and the overhead light was off. She lay on her side, curled up, her fists on the sheets, outside the layers of blanket she was under. In that dim light, even, I saw how sparse her hair was. She licked her chapped lips with her tongue. The skin of her face was the color of old oranges, and it looked like it would split and start bleeding if someone pushed against it. Her eyes, though they weren’t bright, were still smart, and they grew large as she fixed them on me.

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry. Nothing new. I just wanted to say hello, I guess. It’s only a visit.”

  She raised her brows and moved her head on the pillow a little, like she was saying she understood.

  I said, “And maybe look at Janice’s room. I never did that. Maybe I should do that.”

  Her smile was tired but real.

  “I hear the real cops do that.”

  She nodded.

  “So I thought I’d come and get real.”

  She said, in more than a whisper, “Did you want to pray?”

  I should have said yes, of course. But the thought of her God made me angry. I felt mad enough to wail like a child. I said, “No, thank you, ma’am. I can’t.”

  She said, “I would pray on your behalf.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I have a confession.”

  “You already did.”

  “You’re easy to want to take care of,” she said.

  “That’s what my wife once said.”

  “Lucky woman,” she said.

  “Isn’t she. I’ll ask your husband to take me to the room.” I leaned over and kissed her temple. She smelled like wood that’s been in pond water too long. She was coming apart inside.

  The reverend said, in the hall, outside her closed door, “I didn’t know Mrs. Tanner was praying for you.”

  “It’s an arrangement we have.”

  “I’d be pleased to pray for you, too.”

  “You’re very kind, Reverend Tanner.”

  “But you ought to make the effort also.”

  I nodded, but I didn’t have anything more to say because we were in the room now. I put my hand up and he looked at it, and then at my face.

  “I’d like it if I could be in here by myself a minute.”

  “Clues,” he said.

  “Clues.”

  “Randy told us about the uncertainty principle.”

  “I have a lot of that.”

  “The observer of a phenomenon changes it through the act of observation,” he said.

  I said, “That sounds reasonable.”

  “So I’ll leave you to your own uncertainty.” He smiled to be sure I understood the joke.

  I nodded. I didn’t.

  “I’ll be outside,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “In the hall. If you need me.”

  “I’m not going to touch anything, Reverend. I understand it’s precious to you. I’ll keep my hands in my pockets.”

  “Less alteration of the phenomenon observed,” he agreed.

  He flipped a light switch, and he closed the door. I took my hands out of my pockets, but I did keep them to myself. I couldn’t find her here. I saw paperback books and school notebooks on a cheap maple desk. On the wall I saw pictures of her parents outside her father’s church, and I saw clipped photos in dime-store frames of people I guessed from their hair and clothes were rock singers. There was, of course, a Jesus in a wooden frame. I looked in some plastic-covered albums at pictures of junior high school kids. In the books on the shelves were some postcards. They were scrawled on in round inky writing by kids writing to Janice over a summer. There was a book called Generation X that looked a little difficult for her. There was a book called I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and one titled The Light in the Forest. I learned from them that maybe she felt trapped. But most of anything I’d ever read was about someone who was trapped, so I wasn’t making much progress.

  I didn’t think I was going to find stuff taped under drawers or glued inside the covers of hardcover books, and I relied on the state police for that kind of search. I did do the obvious—look between the mattress and the box spring, feel behind the wooden headboard, lie down on the floor and move slowly in a circle, looking for something that might have slid down. Zero. What I’d expected, plus some extra sensations in the ribs. I smelled one of the little bottles of cologne on a painted metal tray on her bureau and it was sweet and sad.

  But it could be anyone’s room, I thought. What made it Janice’s?

  I looked at her coronet. It seemed to me to be tarnished. I held it in front of my mouth. I smelled her saliva. I put my lips where she put hers. Then I put it back and I sat on the bed. I lay on it. I tur
ned my face to the pillow and sniffed for the smell of her hair and soap and skin. I pressed my face in and down. Then I sat back up because I didn’t want to be found like that. I smoothed away my impression on the pillowcase. I looked across at the little wooden bookcase she used. English books and history books, a book on earth science and one on physics, a clutter of photocopied sheets that I reached for and looked through: math quizzes with bad grades and handouts for English, and no invitation from a psychopath to meet after school. I opened and closed some bureau drawers.

  Here’s what the great detective, the interrogator of mysteries, the famous payer of attention, came up with: Janice had been hiding while she lived here. Her parents knew the good little girl and maybe that’s what she was, but she was also someone else. The room was like a set for a high school play called Typical Girl. Of course, Rosalie had already known this. When I came into the hall, the reverend reached around in front of me and turned off her light.

  He said, “Clues?”

  “Sir, did you change anything in there? Add anything, take anything out? You know, after you became worried? When the police started investigating?”

  “That would be Heisenberg on a huge scale!” he said.

  “Yes, wouldn’t it. Did you?”

  “That’s how she left it. Socks to saxophone.”

  We were on the stairs. I said, “I didn’t see a saxophone.”

  “My little joke. I liked the alliteration.”

  But I did think of socks. They’d most of them been white, though she had some bolder colors. “Could I go back up a minute, Reverend?”

  I went to her room, telling him to wait downstairs for me. I got the light on and the door closed, and then I looked through her socks. I found one pair of stockings. The drawer contained the things of a child, not a fourteen-year-old pushing to be grown. I went to the drawer beneath it, which I had already looked through, but very hastily. I wondered why. I thought, You would have been a shy father.

  The drawer held little brassieres, sad small things that looked like models of the genuine item. I looked through them and found, on the bottom of the stack, a brown paper bag. In it was a bag from a chain I’d seen in the Syracuse mall. Inside that bag was a little black bra made mostly of lace. Under it was a matching pair of underpants. I looked at her stacked underpants: all white. This pair, in the bag, looked narrow-cut, like they’d come up thin at the crotch, and again very lacy. She had kept the receipt. She must have worked hard baby-sitting to save up for them.

  The great payer of attention read the receipt three times before he figured out what worried him. The bill was for “2 pr wmns pnts and 2 brs.”

  So now I knew what she was wearing when she left: the other set. She was wearing sexy underwear. Her mother would have been the one to pry in a daughter’s underclothes, and she’d been too sick. Her father would be as frightened of poking as I was. Though, finally, I hadn’t been. Had I? Good of me to find the courage to try to smell her body on her bed, to finger her little sexy disguise.

  But maybe she hadn’t been disguised. Maybe the real kid was the one in dramatic lingerie. Why would a child wear clothes like that? Who’d get to see them? I listed on my fingers. One, the girlfriend she has the secret with, and they giggle and they make believe. Two, herself, but maybe not worth it for the money. Three, the boy who takes her clothes off. I found myself moving slowly in a circle in the room, the underpants rolled in my fist.

  The door moved, and I barked, “Wait!”

  The door closed. I kept circling. She was wearing the other set of matching panties and brassiere because she was going to meet the boy, or go someplace with the boy, and he was going to take her clothing off and see what she wore for him.

  Or man, I thought.

  I thought of Rosalie Piri.

  A man like me, I thought. I was going to wipe at the sweat on my face with her panties, when I stopped myself. I put the clothes back in the package inside the brown paper bag, and I replaced it in the drawer.

  “Sorry,” I whispered.

  I stopped and looked at the books again, running my finger from poetry to the thing about the caged bird and on through her school-books. I was on my knees, holding on to the edge of the bookshelf.

  I said, “Sorry.”

  Then I stood. It took me a long time. I tried to make the room look like I hadn’t been there. The cops might as well not have been. They’d assumed, as I had, that she had run away or been taken and that no clues were going to help. Probably, I thought, they were right. Unless what they wanted was to find the guy and kill him or break his body up. I thought I might be close to wanting that. I thought I might be close to doing it.

  When I came into the living room, the reverend said, “She’s asleep.”

  “Would you say good-bye for me, please?”

  He looked as pleasant as he had when he was making his terrible jokes. But he said, “I really can’t. I can’t bring myself to use that word with her.”

  “Would you tell her, then, I sent my best?”

  “You’re very decent to us,” he said.

  I could only think to thank him, and I did.

  I had bought a small bag of kibble for the dog, and Rosalie put out water for him in a thick white bowl. He wagged as he ate to show he knew he was with company. I went outside with him and he checked out her little yard, then climbed through sparse hedges into the neighboring yard to pee and snoop. When we went back inside, Rosalie had changed into her terrible outfit of boxer shorts and flannel shirt. She was wearing ankle-high fleece-lined soft leather cabin boots, and I admired the hard muscle in her calves.

  “I feel you looking at my legs,” she said from the stove, parting them.

  I went over to her and was compelled to reach down and stroke her inside the back of the shorts. I felt her harden the muscle and then relax it. The way she trusted me with who she was when she relaxed it was as exciting to me as the skin I stroked.

  “Do you want pubic hair or anything with your scrambled eggs?”

  “Everything,” I said.

  “Good. That was the right answer.” She shut the burner off and turned from the stove to stick her hand out. Her eyes were closed. I took her hand and shut my eyes to join her, and we led each other to the bedroom. “Stay,” she called to the dog, “if you don’t mind.”

  I loved the darkness, and I loved the feel of her skin. I kept denying that we made my ribs hurt, or my fingers burn, and we made love with her riding me, her hands, at the end, in my hair and her body on top of me, bandages and ribs and all. It hadn’t taken long, because I was filled with urgency and hungry for as much sensation of her, inside and out, as I could have. It occurred to me to ask if we should do it differently to be better for her, but I was led to be quiet by the way she pulled the covers up and rolled to the side of the healthy ribs, wrapping her legs around my left thigh, rubbing her toes on my right calf. I heard the dog sigh and lie against her bedroom door.

  I came out of the sleep because I’d heard a question, but not its words.

  “Hmm?”

  “The little girl.”

  I thought of Professor Rosalie Piri, her small body under and around my own, which was big and ugly and busted.

  I made more noises and touched her tight skin where I could.

  “Tell me what you saw in Janice’s room,” she said.

  “Stuff.”

  “Cops know how to brief one another,” she said. “Come on.”

  I sighed. I wanted to sleep beneath her and above her and smell her breath and kiss her stomach and make love again.

  “Brief me,” she said.

  I recited the room. I told her about the sexy underwear and the coronet and the books and Heisenberg and Mrs. Tanner.

  “So all we really know,” I said, “is she went voluntarily.”

  “So we have to backtrack. Boyfriends, teammates, the girls she might have confided in.”

  “No, the state police are good at that. They’ll be doing that any
way. They always look for boyfriends. So we don’t have anything much, except it wasn’t, probably, a stranger who killed her.”

  “You should always try and get killed by a friend.”

  “I’m your friend.”

  “And you wouldn’t hurt me. You adore me, Jack.”

  “I do?”

  “Tell me how much you adore me or I’ll crush your balls.”

  “Your hand’s too small.”

  “I warned you.” But her hand on me was gentle and then very exciting.

  “Oh dear,” I said.

  “I warned you,” she said, moving on me. And then she said, “You don’t have to love me. It’s all right if you can barely tolerate me.”

  “I can barely tolerate you,” I said.

  “I can stand you, too. About this much. About this far. Well, no. Maybe, oh my, maybe we can—this far. Yes, I can stand you this far.”

  oracle

  SCUTTLING IN Janice Tanner’s room hadn’t done my ribs any good, nor my fingers. Neither had scuttling under Rosalie Piri. Because it felt too good with her. Because it all led to seeing Fanny’s face. Fanny when our baby died. Fanny feeling old because Rosalie wasn’t. Fanny needing to lift me and shake me, Jesus Christ, and get me well. Fanny moving out to make me move.

  I said to the dog, “Sometimes they take these things and climb up into the upper floors on college campuses and they take out targets of opportunity.” I made sure the safety was on and then I put it in the pocket of my coat. The problem was its front sight, which was too high for easy working in and out of coat pockets. A belly gun is supposed to clear for action without getting caught on clothing or equipment. That, and a size that makes for hiding it, are its excuses for existing. Otherwise, nobody needs a .32-caliber piece. And this one was too broad and too heavy. It was guaranteed to do nothing much for anyone unless you were ten or twelve yards, at most, from your target, and you put a cluster into him—all, or most, of the cylinder. In the service, I had refused to carry the standard issue to the military police for close-in combat. I’d taken the idea from pilots who wouldn’t carry their standard-issue .38 in its shoulder holster. Like them, I lugged the World War I .45-caliber Colt with its horrendous kick that made for buck fever and that tended to intimidate more people than it wounded. You looked into its bore, and you obeyed. I didn’t know what the .32 would do if I fired it in anger, because I’d never wanted to. Now I did.