We went up their drive and I told him to stand in front of their back door. I reached around behind him and knocked. I wasn’t careful about keeping distance between us. I knew if he moved on me, I would hurt him. It would hurt me, too, but I didn’t care and I wanted to break him up and he knew it.
I only wanted the Reverend Tanner to open the storm door and hear me say, “Bring your wife.”
He moved. She came slowly to the door and her husband held her from the side and from behind.
She looked down the steps, and she looked. The feeling was of a focus being tightened and held. She finally said, “Oh God.” It took her a long time to say. What I hated most about that minute or two was that I couldn’t be in the kitchen and hold on to her.
I marched him back to his house and through his vomit. I was determined to step on his glasses and I did, dragging the frames along with his stink through the kitchen. I sat him at his table while I phoned.
I left a message at a number I had never called, the dean of faculty’s office. I said, “Please tell him that Associate Professor Randolph Strodemaster, with tenure for life, is about to be arrested for killing the girl he used to rape every night.”
When I hung up, I turned to him. I was going to say something smart about his not minding if I made some toll calls. He was sitting with his legs crossed, one smelly boot hanging beside his torn-up shin. His hands were folded in his lap, and he leaned back in his chair like a man waiting for breakfast. I smelled the vomit, the old food, the stink of his garbage, the new, dark smell of his urine.
“How could she crawl around with you?” I asked him.
“Are you jealous, Jack?”
I didn’t bother to threaten him. I’d become too tired. We were both so weak, I think we could have gone to sleep where we were.
He said, “I can be charming, I think is the answer. I know a lot.” His voice was leaking up now, like gas escaping. I thought I could even smell the process of his bowels inside him. “And I loved her. I’m a daughter’s father, don’t forget. I know how to love a girl.”
I was too dizzy to turn around to him again. I leaned on the wall beside his phone and called Elmo St. John’s office to leave a courtesy call. Then I phoned the state police barracks and asked for Bird. They told me he was supervising the execution of a warrant. I told them to get another warrant, this time for Professor Randolph Strodemaster, and to get here soon. He’d confess.
He said, “My attorney’s in Norwich. I’ll want him here before I say a word to the fuzz.”
I said into the phone, “Tell Bird I might shoot the professor before he gets here.”
Then I hooked a chair with my foot and pulled it over to the phone. That cost my ribs a bit. I probably made a noise, because Strodemaster looked sharply at me. “Never,” I said. “You’d have to murder me to get one yard away. I’d leave maybe a pint of all of you for them to arrest. You don’t understand. I want to kill you. Sit there and be quiet.”
I got Archie Halpern’s assistant. She was ordinarily a very patient woman, but she didn’t understand why I didn’t understand how when Archie was with a patient, we none of us were supposed to disturb him.
I told her it was a matter of life and death. She said it always was. I said I meant death for real. No more breathing, I said. She told me I had to be nuts. I reminded her what office she worked in.
After a few minutes’ wait, Archie came on and I said, “I found the guy who killed her.”
He said, “Did you hurt him?”
“Hardly at all.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Not yet.”
“Do you feel any better, Jack?”
“You know, I really don’t,” I said.
“After what you told me, I didn’t think you would. On the other hand, I didn’t think you’d catch him.”
“Why should you have?”
“It’s wonderful you did.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“Don’t do anything rash.”
I started to laugh, and I didn’t know how to stop. I giggled pretty stupidly, and then I was crying.
“Jack,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You should see him.” That made me laugh again, so I hung up.
Someone brought a chair out for Mrs. Tanner. She lay back in it with her bright golden blanket around her, sitting on her throne like the queen of nothing.
Strodemaster and his lawyer talked to Bird. Strodemaster made marks on a topographical map the state police insisted on using. I didn’t try more than once to point out how on a map like that you need to see the shape of the land like you’re looking from above, and with all the snow, of course we couldn’t. The cops were in charge and all of us did what they said. And Mrs. Tanner watched us.
We waited two hours for a state roadworks bulldozer to be brought up on its tractor trailer. By then, local men had brought in wood by pickup truck, and they’d started a fire just behind Strodemaster’s barn to keep Mrs. Tanner and most of the rest of the hamlet warm. The dirty smoke blew back at them and up, but they sat in front of it, accepting the heat and watching us through the raggedy darkness of the early afternoon.
Archie had come out. He’d been held away from the house by the police and he’d argued awhile and then left. I didn’t like seeing him go. I thought he could talk to Mr. and Mrs. Tanner. I thought he could talk to me.
We were out now where the bulldozer had pushed a poor road through the snow. Bird was the least of the law now, he and the cop he’d arrived with. There was a captain, and we’d been told a colonel was on his way. There were a number of plainclothes investigators wearing bulky jackets under the bright, thin windbreakers labeled STATE POLICE. Some of them also wore baseball hats that told them who they were. They carried notebooks and wrote in them. I couldn’t imagine what they could think of to say.
I looked back over to the local people at their fire. If you could look down from above, the way the topographical map did, you would see Mrs. Tanner in her chair and the rest of them standing in a loose semicircle. Then you would see the road cut through the snow like a wound, showing corn stubble and even in places the frozen mud below it. Then you’d see us, and we’d look as small as the rest of them if you saw them from above, working a hundred yards or so away from the fire and the parked vehicles and what in that hamlet would pass for a crowd. It was growing. Word had spread on the scanners and people were driving in.
The investigators agreed that they thought he was lying about how far he’d carried her when he laid her into the snow, planning to come back in late March or early April and use the laws of physics to bury her at night for good. But we all thought it was right to start looking where he’d indicated and then move back toward the house.
The snow was to be moved toward the south end of the field. We would move it back while moving ourselves north and west toward the barn. The police had brought shovels and so had the state road crew, and people in the hamlet had loaned us some. There were twenty men and women, middle-aged or younger, most of us cops, who dug shallowly, almost scooping more than digging. Behind us were the people with shovels and buckets who moved what we dumped while we widened our circle at the end of the road in the snow. If you were looking from above, you would have seen us making awkward motions and not getting very far down.
I began to have a kind of daydream. I’m in Hannah’s bedroom, in the plaster dust and pools of Sheetrock screws and splintered wood and the clawed-looking walls. I’m in there alone and Fanny is gone, at Virginia’s, and then the dog comes clicking down the hallway, his tail wagging as he rounds the corner into the room, because he’s happy about showing Rosalie in.
She either says she was lost for forty minutes finding the house and then her car went into a snowbank and she walked the rest of the way or she doesn’t bother. I can never decide. She’s holding a shopping bag in each hand. Her face is bright from walking in the cold and because she wants to see me.
I’m sitting
against a far wall, near the window, but not looking out. I don’t know what to say to her, so I raise my hand a little and then let it drop back to my lap.
Rosalie says, “Your wife isn’t here.”
I shake my head.
“I don’t care if she is.”
“You’d care,” I say. “She’d be at least a battalion’s worth of mean if she found you.”
Rosalie says, “Found us, you mean. And let her be. I brought you soup. The makings of soup. I make wonderful vegetable soup, and I have a bottle of Barolo that we deserve to drink, and also my toothbrush.”
“This is really dangerous,” I say.
“No. It’s really wonderful.”
“Well, yes. It is. And dangerous.”
She has set the bags down and is letting her coat drop down her arms.
“Fine,” she says, “dangerous.”
She goes to her knees, then lies between my legs and along my chest. I put my arm around her. We lie in the corner where the crib had been, and I wonder whether to tell her.
“Faculty don’t do this,” I say instead.
“Faculty do anything they want, Jack. And I can tell you something.”
“Do you have to?”
“This is the real scene of the crime,” she says.
I don’t answer. I know that what I want to do is not think about the crib, or Fanny coming home, or Fanny never coming home, or the truth of what she has just said. I want to unfasten Rosalie’s jeans. I want to do it so much that I start and she helps, standing to slide them down her legs more easily. While she stands above me, I unfasten my own, and she holds the top of my head and slowly, not closing her eyes or looking anywhere but into me, she slides slowly down until we are locked to each other, wet and then not moving.
“How long can we sit like this do you think?” she says.
I start to buck up, but I want to feel everything slowly. Her small hands are strong on me, her muscles move powerfully. I want to hear us be together. So I stop. I lean forward, forgetting my ribs, and I listen to her heart through her shirt. She adjusts a little, and I hear the sound of our wetness.
She says, “Jack?”
I nod against her shirt, maybe make a noise.
“Is the dog watching us?”
I stopped myself, but I was happy a minute, though my ribs were naturally not cooperative. This wasn’t a comfortable motion for them. No motion was. I worked at not making noises and at scooping the snow. I looked down into it, seeing grit and pieces of vegetation and coarse crystals of ice. I was looking for a small young face with a glad mouth and unhappy eyes. She would come up, I thought, like someone floating in a pond. She would rise while we dug, and if you were looking from above, you’d see her surfacing. I stopped and took some very short, choppy breaths. That was the best way to regulate it, I had found. I was looking down the road toward the fire and I saw Archie’s car return. It was followed by Fanny’s. Archie parked his sloppily. He usually drove it like that. He got out and he went around to Fanny’s car and opened the door for her. At that distance, she looked like anyone else at the end of winter in a heavy coat. But I knew it was Fanny and then I saw the dog. Archie looked at a patrolman and shook his finger and talked awhile. They got passed through.
Now, dogs can’t see as well as nearsighted old people. And he surely couldn’t have smelled me over that long distance. But he came down the sloppy, raw roadway straight toward me. Two investigators began to wave their hands and call commands. Stop. Sit. Get that goddamned dog away.
I whistled. He stopped, he searched the wind with his muzzle. I whistled again. He found me and barreled in. We said hello a little. Then I pointed to an area we’d scooped through down to nubs of corn, and I told him to sit there and stay. The first few shovels of snow he saw powdering toward the south of us, he was up and ready to chase. I pointed at him and he saw me and he sat. After a while, he understood what we were doing, I thought. His big chest stuck out and his muzzle was raised as he watched us sift the snow. He knew this kind of work.
If you watched us from above, you would have seen the small men and women making themselves move slowly and carefully. There was the huge field out behind the barn. There were the little creatures hauling some of the millions of tons of snow. There was the dog, watching, like an expert consultant. There we were, scooping up ounces from the tons.
Fanny and Archie stood in the bulldozed road now, partway between the people in the hamlet and the people performing the actions that were required because it wasn’t safe to be a girl. The sky behind them and around us looked like somebody had poured milk straight down along it to the ground. The sun was in it, and I suppose it was strong and spring was going to come. But I didn’t warm up, even when I was shoveling. I stopped more than I should have, but my ribs were moving in sections again and my fingers had no grip.
I thought, We could dig here forever. Then I thought, No, only until full spring. All we had to do was wait. But we couldn’t. We wanted our girl back.
Everyone wanted someone back. It would be a hundred degrees of dry heat and I would be in an air-conditioned motel in New Mexico called the Arroyo, a little less than a year from now, and all those miles from the field we worked in that looked as big to me as North America, and I would still want our Hannah back, and so of course would Fanny. Mr. Tanner would be alone with only his church and his jokes and his heaven, wanting back his wife, who watched us now, wanting back the daughter we were reaching for under the snow. And Rosalie, who is a better cop than I am, would find me in my hiding place and get me talking on the phone.
Are you eating well? Are you sleeping well? She would stay on my trail. She would find me. She would call. And I would begin to suspect myself of counting on her. The phone would ring, and when I answered, I would hear the distance behind her voice and begin to regret it, and then Rosalie would say my name.
In this winter, though, in the field behind Randy Strodemaster’s house, I leaned on the shovel. I was looking at Fanny, who talked while Archie listened. I wouldn’t ask them where he had gotten her from, Virginia’s place or ours. Wait and see, I told myself. I knew I couldn’t. Look at me and these other people, what we were doing when all we had to do was wait and see.
I went back to work and then I had to stop again. When I looked toward the road, I saw Archie with his hands in his pockets. Fanny was gone, and so was her car. I wasn’t completely sure I could move anymore. I made my fingers close around the shovel. I made myself breathe the short, choppy breaths, and I scooped some snow.
I thought I should remember to tell the Tanners about the physics book in her shelves. I didn’t think of it, I would tell them. I would mention Rosalie and it would please them, I thought, knowing that a stranger had pondered so hard about their child. They would want to know it was maybe another clue. Rosalie had been certain Janice wouldn’t have taken physics, since she’d been less than capable with numbers. Strodemaster gave her the book, since numbers were what he knew—Rosalie was sure of it. Teachers do that kind of passing their books along to kids. The young are so lucky, I thought. We so love teaching them. I would want to ask Archie why a little girl would buy her underwear in a fuck-me clothing store for a man like Strodemaster. Maybe I would also ask Rosalie. I felt like I needed an expert to tell me about anything human, though on all other information, I was absolutely informed. I wondered where Fanny had gone. I wondered if Strodemaster’s wife had moved out because of something with him and his daughter. It could happen, I thought. I leaned over to spit onto the snow and moved it off behind me where somebody breathing hard was moving it farther away.
People were talking, but not very much, and I could hear the rushing sound of the big fire back near the barn. The dog sat very still, watching the hole slowly grow. He was getting ready.
Here’s what I thought. I thought about Ralph. I thought, Once upon a time.
I made myself work. I was like the others. Whether we believed in spring or not, we did not want to wait. If
you watched us from above us, you would have seen it. Spring or not, ribs or not, fingers or not, we were going to move the entire field.
Girls
FREDERICK BUSCH
A Reader’s Guide
A Conversation with Frederick Busch
Q: Upon finishing the book, I recalled the first chapter, which I then re-read. I realized that it now felt like the “last” chapter. What was your plan with this design?
A: I first wrote the book going from the beginning of chapter two to the end. And I was dissatisfied—as I worked on the beginning—with plunging the reader too quickly into so much grimness. And although the first chapter doesn’t make you sing, it has a little bit of humor to it, and it seems to me to help set the scene for who this man was, and whom he became, and to give the reader … the slight sense there was hope for him after the events of the book.
Q: Why not bring Jack and Fanny back together? They clearly loved each other.
A: Because people who so clearly love each other nevertheless do not always know how to live together. That’s reason one. Reason two is the plot I created made it impossible to bring Jack and Fanny back together. The only way they can live together is for her to not think he killed their baby. The only way they can live together is for him to not know she killed their baby. Now how can you undo those two things? I wanted it to be a kind of paradox: He loves her so much he takes the blame for what she did, to the point where she can’t take him because of it. And she can’t take what it does to him: It makes him a very bitter and difficult man.
I loved Fanny, and I wanted him to stay with her more than my readers imagined … [the short story] “Ralph the Duck” appeared in 1989 … and became chapter two. And you see Fanny is a little softer in that story, a little less self-protective, more accessible to Jack. I wanted Jack and Fanny to have a possibility of happiness. But they kept returning to me, and the more I thought about them, the more I wondered, why had Jack made her cry? A lot of people noticed her sorrow, so I must have made her sad without intending to make her quite that sad. I learned from my readers who Fanny was, and I began to want to know about her sadness. Whenever a storyteller wants to know something, he or she tells a story to find out the answer.
Girls Page 27
