The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  Jonas stood in the center of his big brother’s countryside with a glass in his hand and dusk upon them, and he wept like a very young boy. He didn’t speak of Jay’s cruel relish in the telling of the story. And he didn’t claim that Jay had dispossessed him of a portion of his past. He simply wept. And Jay stood a few paces from him, and then moved in to touch his brother’s shoulder, hot beneath the dirty shirt. Each moved back at the contact. Jonas continued to cry, while he smiled and shook his head. Jay nodded, as if to agree with Jonas that it couldn’t be helped.

  TUESDAY WAS USUAL, in that no new diseases were presented in the practice, and no fevers spiked so high in the ward that children’s brains were damaged, and everyone was going to get better. He stopped the aspirin for a child with stomach irritation, though he thought that the real source of irritation was the parent who dispensed the aspirin. He prescribed a seasickness medicine for the young woman who kept falling down; although he explained it as an inner-ear infection that interfered with balance, he could not persuade the child’s father that she didn’t suffer epilepsy, and he therefore prescribed Valium for the father, but not out loud.

  To make up for the work shunted to his partners the day before, he came to his clinic early and worked without a break, and he treated plantar’s wart, and he gave children allergy shots, and he tested their urine, and he swabbed at crimson throats. He stared down over tongues and under uvulae to ferret where diseases hid. The kids looked up and he looked down and, while they gagged over his tongue depressor, he made gagging noises back at them so that they watered at the eyes and retched and giggled at once. He was happy all day.

  Because he’d started early, he finished early—it was too bright and pretty a day for parents to make the trek to the clinic; on a nasty day, with nothing better to do, they’d show up, he knew—so Jay decided that it was time for a drive to Spruce Plains. He needed something to read, Jay decided. He knew a bookstore, and he went there. Outside, parked in his red car, in a day so brilliantly lighted that even afternoon felt more like a start than a finish, he listed to himself what he must do. A quick joke with Rachel, if she was there, and no protracted teasing: she grew sour under scrutiny or with attention—be avuncular, but also be quiet. Be reserved. Hold back. Make no more jokes with Nell about marriage. Say: Nell, you are a secret person. I know more about the hidden places inside children’s throats than I know about you. I understand that you’re hiding. I respect this. I hide too—look at my high hill, my dusty road, my house of many rooms, surrounded by so much forest and field. I don’t presume to say you need my comfort or that I can give it.

  “Hi, Rachel.”

  “Nellie! Jay’s here! Hi, Jay.”

  “I thought you were calling her Mom from now on.”

  The girl with large eyes and pale skin and a curly permanent—she looked to Jay like a high-fashion dog with human features—shook her head with, probably, pity. It came off as bitchiness, and all at once he felt the fatigue of his day. “That was probably what you wanted,” she said. “Mom and I have a different relationship. We try to communicate our feelings. I have this need to be her peer. I think it has to do with my father and everything.”

  Jay nodded. He wondered what it would be like to give this girl an allowance and smell her shampoo and watch her sneak off to beer parties. He wondered what it would be like to become Rachel’s peer.

  “Oh, yes,” Rachel said, snapping her fingers theatrically enough for Jay to see—he was supposed to see—the posturing. “I forgot. Mom’s at the market.”

  “Which one? I’ll catch up with her,” Jay said.

  “The one in Millerton. You’d probably pass her on the road. Sorry I didn’t remember, Jay.”

  “You’re close to peerless, Rachel. Thank you for thinking of it finally.”

  “Would you like to buy a book, Jay? Or did you come to talk to Nellie? Or whatever you do to her, ha ha.” She showed her long white teeth, and Jay decided that he’d been reminded of terriers, Scottish terriers. He turned a paperback rack around too loudly on his way out: another victory for the dogs.

  Driving home, he had two thoughts that rotated in his head like the twin propellers on a pinwheel, around and around, so that neither went anyplace, and everything else got spun away. He thought that parents needn’t be villains to make whacky kids, and then he wondered who ought to take the blame, and whether blame had purpose here. And then he thought that children never should be villains because their throats were so tender and, in infants, the thighs and forearms so innocent and made to be kissed; and yet they so often were villainous, he went on as the pinwheel spun, raping women in parking lots and running amok in subways in New York and sitting in someone’s rural bookstore with twenty-one-year-old eyes and the face of a cunning small dog and the tongue of an asp. Around and around they went, and nothing came of Jay’s unwisdoms, and soon he was home, and there—parent and child, villain and victim—was Jonas to greet him.

  Jonas was beginning to smell bad. He was starting to rot, Jay thought. He wore no socks. He had left his scuffed loafers, wet from high grass, at the side door, and Jay could see that his feet were rimmed with dirt and had dark long nails. The anklebones showed dark patches too. His thoroughly wrinkled and matted seersucker pants carried staleness through the air, and his same blue oxford cloth shirt was stained under the arms and reminded Jay of what a high school gym locker had smelled like. Jonas had shaved on his first day there, but not today, and his dark jowls and bruised eyes, the slackness of the skin around his mouth, were challenged only by his great round heavy golden watch on its wide golden band: it proved that he wasn’t a bum, that he was a prosperous man of business whose life had fallen down to stink and disarray.

  They had drinks in the field again, because Jonas liked the sense of a lot of room around him, he said. This time, they carried a vacuum jug of vodka martinis, and as they strolled, like two old men in the neighborhood, they drank with the freedom of those who know there’s more. Pollen blew around them, and seeds floated. The breeze that carried them carried also the smell of cows and the algae on still water and the lavender that was planted at the edge of the lawn behind the house—a combination of perfume and decay, like the merging of colors on the bushes themselves, the bright light purple in feathery clusters melting into dull brown mush. The wind took all the smells away, too, and sometimes they walked as if sheltered from the sensual world, although it lay about them, breathing.

  “How was your day?” Jonas asked. But he didn’t wait for Jay to tell him. He said, at once, “I feel like a housewife, asking that. Did you have a hard day at the office, dear?”

  Jay nodded and sipped and kept walking. The ground was spongy here, and he wanted to get to a higher, firmer place.

  Jonas also said nothing. They walked, and sometimes one or the other would sigh loudly and sniff, as if to tell his brother how fine the air felt going up the nose and past the hidden organs of taste and smell.

  Finally, Jonas said, “I called home.”

  “Did you talk?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Was she glad?”

  “That I wasn’t dead or anything. Yeah. And that I thought to call. You don’t leave somebody worrying you’re dead or something.”

  “Did you talk more, or is that the way it was?”

  “We talked more.”

  “Good.”

  “Not good, Jay.”

  “You mean you talked tough. You told her all about the facts of life, is that what you mean?”

  “I told her the truth,” Jonas said. “I told her what I’ve come to believe. Hey: three strikes and you’re out. I swung three times, she swung three times, so we’re out. Everybody’s out. I said that. Even Norma knows it’s three swings and three misses and that’s that. I took her to a Mets game once. She fell asleep in the sun.”

  “You instructed her about love,” Jay said.

  “Love, we got. That’s what I told her. That’s not—with us, that isn’t the problem. I wan
ted her to know that. It’s—needs, Jay. It’s different needs, is all. Everything. But I wanted her, so she would remember it later, I wanted her to know the problem isn’t love.”

  “So if love doesn’t matter, how come you put so much time in, telling me and your wife and Christ knows who else that love isn’t in short supply?”

  Jonas stopped, wheeled, pointed a finger at Jay, who was panting behind him up the rise that enabled them to look at the meadow below, and then the forest surrounding the house and the clearing it hid within. “Hey, don’t crow about it. Don’t get swelled up like you’re teachin’ me something. Because I don’t see you with twelve kids and a sweet little wife or nothin’, anything. Anything. You know what I’m saying here, Jay? You’re the one almost never was married, and our mother goes around saying she hopes you’re not a fag.”

  “She does?”

  “Well, she doesn’t say it. She thinks it.”

  “Maybe you’re the one who thinks it, Jonas.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  Jonas looked at his brother, and his brother looked back, and as it hadn’t done when they were kids, and as he hadn’t expected it now, at their age, or at this moment, Jay’s stomach lurched and hot phlegm crawled in his gullet, an instant’s awful taste that subsided, but that was part of a fact now. He had tasted it. And it was not because of what Jonas had said. Jonas lifted weights in health clubs. He played basketball several times a month with men who once were boys with him in the schoolyards of Flatbush. Jonas would worry about men who lived alone, and Jay had known that. But it was what he saw when he’d stared at his brother: the retreating but still heavy hairline, the broad nose that in profile was close to the face, the upper jaw’s overbite, the configuration of whiskers, the size of the very dark eyes. What he looked at every morning in the mirror, early, humming to himself while the water sent up steam and the utter cleanliness of the daily shave made him glad to be awake—that was what he’d seen in Jonas. He had looked at himself. He had seen how far and proximate, and both at once, they might be.

  Would he, Jay, maybe married and with kids, living, say, with a beautiful dark woman who had not gone home to a Southern city, and never mind the cultural problem and the racial garbage and the neighborhood bastards who might sit on his children’s lives with deadweight buttocks—would he be gone from them by now? Would he have fled? Would he have traveled this far from them? And what if Nellie came there tonight and said to him: Yes. What if he then held his temper for enough years to permit Rachel to possibly grow tolerable? Would he, one day, be fleeing Nell as Nell had fled her former husband to come here and sell books to women with matching hats and gloves? Was everyone born to be separate? Was his baby brother here to tell him that?

  He poured them each a drink, and they drank. They said nothing more. He poured them each a half of what was left in the jug. It was getting cold. It was dark. Jay said, “Cheers. Here’s to what you want.”

  Jonas looked at Jay with Jay’s face; Jay looked back with Jonas’s. “To what I need,” Jonas said.

  “All right.”

  And then they went back down the hill, and over the meadow, through marsh and firm field, and over the fence, and along the yard and inside. Jay made an olive oil and garlic sauce for spiral noodles. He left the garlic peelings on the stove and fetched a bottle of Barolo that one of his partners had given him. They ate and drank in silence, except for Jonas’s pronouncement that the food was good. They put the dishes in the sink, and Jay said that he might, at gunpoint, do them later.

  In the livingroom, Jay played records—the Vaughan Williams London Symphony—and Jonas went upstairs, perhaps to telephone, Jay hoped. He didn’t know why he hoped it. Surely, he wanted it for Norma and Joe and Joanne. He wanted it also, and maybe he wanted it mostly, for himself.

  At the door a few minutes later was Nellie. He had been nearly asleep, slumped in the armless rocker, and he’d heard the crushing of gravel stones beneath wheels. Looking out the window, he’d seen her Jeep. So he was up and shaking himself awake and moving to the door as the knock sounded. It was constant, and Nellie didn’t summon him that way. She knocked and knocked, was calling him for help, and he skipped along the floor in his stocking feet, wondering why she didn’t simply walk inside. Then, opening the door, he saw why. She was holding Rachel. She was carrying her across her chest, and she had knocked with an arm under strain. Rachel’s face was too white. Her eyes were open, the pupils dilated, and she looked almost shocky.

  He held the door wide and Nellie staggered past, heading for the livingroom and its broad sofa. The bass of the big speaker was growling. Nell, panting, went to turn the record player off. Her eyes were huge when she came back, still gulping at the air, to stand above Rachel, who lay on the sofa with her knees curled up and her fist clenched, the right fist clenched, and dark spots on her cheek and forehead.

  “Something happened,” Nell said. “I was—something happened.”

  He turned on the lights at either end of the sofa and he kneeled to look at Rachel. He expected that Nellie would tell him what the matter was, and he waited, but she said nothing more. He smelled Rachel’s breath, which was steamy and fetid, weak, and he touched her face very carefully at the sides, and then he started to feel at her bones. The face was abraded and scratched, puffy in spots where the vessels were bruised against the bone. He knew that her left arm was broken. He stood, went for scissors and a quick wash of his hands, then came back to see Nell covering her to the waist with a comforter. “There’s nothing wrong with her legs?” he said. Nell shook her head. She kept blinking, he saw, and he was worried that she was going to faint. There was blood on Nell’s white shirt. She looked like a meat cutter or a surgeon, there was something familiar about the white garment and about looking on it for spatters of blood. Then he bent forward and down to see what Nell had done to her daughter.

  He cut Rachel’s sleeve away. He wasn’t talking in his easy chant—he sometimes had to use it for injured children who were frightened—because Rachel wasn’t frightened. She wasn’t there. She watched him from somewhere back behind her eyes, she winced as he got the sleeve off, but she was pretending not to be there. He saw that the fracture was simple, a clean green snap and nothing puncturing the skin or major blood vessels. He went for tape and some old lath he’d saved for kindling. He splinted her and then, with a flashlight, looked once more at the bruises and scrapes, looked inside her mouth and nostrils and eyes, peering down into her secrets but not finding Rachel, just her blood. He telephoned the hospital—Jonas wasn’t on the line, he noted—to say that he’d need an orthopedist at the hospital in half an hour. He ordered the X-rays so there would be no delay. He got Rachel up. “We’ll take the Alfa,” he said. “It’s faster. You can take the Jeep if you want to come. There’s only room for two in the Alfa.”

  He heard himself pause because, he knew, what he said next would matter tonight, later on, and tomorrow, when it would be just him and Nell and what they needed to say, and what they ought to be doing. Then he saw his brother in his rotting clothes at the livingroom doorway. His brother Jonas was watching him, but with Jay’s own face. Jonas looked at the battered child, but with Jay’s face, except that Jonas was smiling now: a great wide smile had twitched over his mouth from right to left, like a carpet being unrolled. So Jay knew how pleased his brother was about being right.

  And Jay, no better than anyone, turned his back to the cruel and frightening face that he recognized, and he said to Nell, “And I’m not sure that I give a good goddamn whether you get there finally or not.”

  Nell didn’t answer. She was looking at his hands. They were balled into fists. He held them cocked across his chest. He realized that she expected him to punch her, just as she had punched and torn at her child. He wondered how much she wanted him to, and he wondered how far he’d be tempted to start in swiping at her frozen face. He banged his hands against his chest while his mouth made a shape he hadn’t determined. Her face collapsed into its p
allor, and she stiffened as if struck, hard, with a hard hand.

  He saw her eyes and then he turned from her. Rachel was gray-white with pain. He put the blanket around her carefully and he leaned above her to shepherd her out, past Jonas’s grin, to his car. He buckled her lap-belt carefully, and he settled the blanket about her as if she lay in bed. Nell watched them, and then she climbed up into the cab of the Jeep. Jay started the Alfa and put it in gear without waiting for the oil to heat, and they went down his road, Jay and the girl he detested.

  He hadn’t intended to stop his car, but he did. He said to Rachel, “A minute. Just a minute.” He walked back to the Jeep that was idling with a high roar on the steep decline of his road. When he walked past the brilliance of her headlights, the air at the side of the cab seemed densely dark. He said to Nell, “Let me see your hand.”

  “What?”

  “The hand you hit her with. Let me see your hand.”

  “The—what did you say?”

  “I want to see if your hand’s hurt. You can break bones, hitting someone like that. Your hand has twenty-seven bones. Most people don’t get to meet most of their bones. Is it swollen? Does it hurt?”

  “I didn’t hit her,” Nell said.

  “You didn’t?”

  She looked down her headlights. They converged on the little red car, and the still shoulders and head of her daughter. “You think you know about this,” she said. “You think you know all about it.”

  He said, “I’ll see you there.”

  He went back to his car and when he sat behind the wheel, he saw that Rachel was crooked in the seat, her head along her own shoulder, her flesh gone clammy, her breath a kind of snuffle and wheeze. She looked like a broken stuffed dog. He drove very quickly down the rest of the hill, descending alone with what needed him, and when he raised his face to look in the rearview mirror, the great high sneering grille of the Jeep was close behind.