The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  ABSENT FRIENDS

  RALPH THE DUCK

  I WOKE UP at 5:25 because the dog was vomiting. I carried seventy-five pounds of heaving golden retriever to the door and poured him onto the silver, moonlit snow. “Good boy,” I said because he’d done his only trick. Outside he retched, and I went back up, passing the sofa on which Fanny lay. I tiptoed with enough weight on my toes to let her know how considerate I was while she was deserting me. She blinked her eyes. I swear I heard her blink her eyes. Whenever I tell her that I hear her blink her eyes, she tells me I’m lying; but I can hear the damp slap of lash after I have made her weep.

  In bed and warm again, noting the red digital numbers (5:29) and certain that I wouldn’t sleep, I didn’t. I read a book about men who kill each other for pay or for their honor. I forget which, and so did they. It was 5:45, the alarm would buzz at 6:00, and I would make a pot of coffee and start the wood stove; I would call Fanny and pour her coffee into her mug; I would apologize because I always did, and then she would forgive me if I hadn’t been too awful—I didn’t think I’d been that bad—and we would stagger through the day, exhausted but pretty sure we were all right, and we’d sleep that night, probably after sex, and then we’d waken in the same bed to the alarm at 6:00, or the dog, if he’d returned to the frozen deer carcass he’d been eating in the forest on our land. He loved what made him sick. The alarm went off, I got into jeans and woolen socks and a sweatshirt, and I went downstairs to let the dog in. He’d be hungry, of course.

  I WAS THE OLDEST college student in America, I thought. But of course I wasn’t. There were always ancient women with parchment for skin who graduated at seventy-nine from places like Barnard and the University of Georgia. I was only forty-two, and I hardly qualified as a student. I patrolled the college at night in a Bronco with a leaky exhaust system, and I went from room to room in the classroom buildings, kicking out students who were studying or humping in chairs—they’d do it anywhere—and answering emergency calls with my little blue light winking on top of the truck. I didn’t carry a gun or a billy, but I had a flashlight that took six batteries and I’d used it twice on some of my over-privileged northeastern-playboy part-time classmates. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I would waken at 6:00 with my wife, and I’d do my homework, and work around the house, and go to school at 11:30 to sit there for an hour and a half while thirty-five stomachs growled with hunger and boredom, and this guy gave instruction about books. Because I was on the staff, the college let me take a course for nothing every term. I was getting educated, in a kind of slow-motion way—it would have taken me something like fifteen or sixteen years to graduate, and I would no doubt get an F in gym and have to repeat—and there were times when I respected myself for it. Fanny often did, and that was fair incentive.

  I am not unintelligent. You are not an unintelligent writer, my professor wrote on my paper about Nathaniel Hawthorne. We had to read short stories, I and the other students, and then we had to write little essays about them. I told how I saw Kafka and Hawthorne in a similar light, and I was not unintelligent, he said. He ran into me at dusk one time, when I answered a call about a dead battery and found out it was him. I jumped his Buick from the Bronco’s battery, and he was looking me over, I could tell, while I clamped onto the terminals and cranked it up. He was a tall, handsome guy who never wore a suit. He wore khakis and sweaters, loafers or sneaks, and he was always talking to the female students with the brightest hair and best builds. But he couldn’t get a Buick going on an ice-cold night, and he didn’t know enough to look for cells going bad. I told him he was going to need a new battery and he looked me over the way men sometimes do with other men who fix their cars for them.

  “Vietnam?”

  I said, “Too old.”

  “Not at the beginning. Not if you were an adviser. So-called. Or one of the Phoenix Project fellas?”

  I was wearing a watch cap made of navy wool and an old Marine fatigue jacket. Slick characters like my professor like it if you’re a killer or at least a onetime middleweight fighter. I smiled like I knew something. “Take it easy,” I said, and I went back to the truck to swing around the cemetery at the top of the campus. They’d been known to screw in down-filled sleeping bags on horizontal stones up there, and the dean of students didn’t want anybody dying of frostbite while joined at the hip to a matriculating fellow resident of our northeastern camp for the overindulged.

  He blinked his high beams at me as I went. “You are not an unintelligent driver,” I said.

  FANNY HAD LEFT ME a bowl of something made with sausages and sauerkraut and potatoes, and the dog hadn’t eaten too much more than his fair share. He watched me eat his leftovers and then make myself a king-sized drink composed of sourmash whiskey and ice. In our back room, which is on the northern end of the house, and cold for sitting in that close to dawn, I sat and watched the texture of the sky change. It was going to snow, and I wanted to see the storm come up the valley. I woke up that way, sitting in the rocker with its loose right arm, holding a watery drink, and thinking right away of the girl I’d convinced to go back inside. She’d been standing outside her dormitory, looking up at a window that was dark in the midst of all those lighted panes—they never turned a light off, and often let the faucets run half the night—crying onto her bathrobe. She was barefoot in shoe-pacs, the brown ones so many of them wore unlaced, and for all I know she was naked under the robe. She was beautiful, I thought, and she was somebody’s red-headed daughter, standing in a quadrangle how many miles from home and weeping.

  “He doesn’t love anyone,” the kid told me. “He doesn’t love his wife—I mean his ex-wife. And he doesn’t love the ex-wife before that, or the one before that. And you know what? He doesn’t love me. I don’t know anyone who does!”

  “It isn’t your fault if he isn’t smart enough to love you,” I said, steering her toward the truck.

  She stopped. She turned. “You know him?”

  I couldn’t help it. I hugged her hard, and she let me, and then she stepped back, and of course I let her go. “Don’t you touch me! Is this sexual harassment? Do you know the rules? Isn’t this sexual harassment?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said at the door to the truck. “But I think I have to be able to give you a grade before it counts as harassment.”

  She got in. I told her we were driving to the dean of students’ house. She smelled like marijuana and something very sweet, maybe one of those coffee-with-cream liqueurs you don’t buy unless you hate to drink.

  As the heat of the truck struck her, she started going kind of clay-gray-green, and I reached across her to open the window.

  “You touched my breast!” she said.

  “It’s the smallest one I’ve touched all night, I’m afraid.”

  She leaned out the window and gave her rendition of my dog.

  But in my rocker, waking up, at whatever time in the morning in my silent house, I thought of her as someone’s child. Which made me think of ours, of course. I went for more ice, and I started on a wet breakfast. At the door of the dean of students’ house, she’d turned her chalky face to me and asked, “What grade would you give me, then?”

  IT WAS A WEEK composed of two teachers locked out of their offices late at night, a Toyota with a flat and no spare, an attempted rape on a senior girl walking home from the library, a major fight outside a fraternity house (broken wrist and significant concussion), and variations on breaking-and-entering. I was scolded by the director of nonacademic services for embracing a student who was drunk; I told him to keep his job, but he called me back because I was right to hug her, he said, and also wrong, but what the hell, and he’d promised to admonish me, and now he had, and would I please stay. I thought of the fringe benefits—graduation in only sixteen years—so I went back to work.

  My professor assigned a story called “A Rose for Emily,” and I wrote him a paper about the mechanics of corpse fucking, and how, since she clearly couldn’t screw her dead boyfriend, she was
keeping his rotten body in bed because she truly loved him. I called the paper “True Love.” He gave me a B and wrote See me, pls. In his office after class, his feet up on his desk, he trimmed a cigar with a giant folding knife he kept in his drawer.

  “You got to clean the hole out,” he said, “or they don’t draw.”

  “I don’t smoke,” I said.

  “Bad habit. Real habit, though. I started in smoking ’em in Georgia, in the service. My C.O. smoked ’em. We collaborated on a brothel inspection one time, and we ended up smoking these with a couple of women—” He waggled his eyebrows at me, now that his malehood was established.

  “Were the women smoking them too?”

  He snorted laughter through his nose while the greasy smoke came curling off his thin, dry lips. “They were pretty smoky, I’ll tell ya!” Then he propped his feet—he was wearing cowboy boots that day—and he sat forward. “It’s a little hard to explain. But—hell. You just don’t say fuck when you write an essay for a college prof. Okay?” Like a scoutmaster with a kid he’d caught in the outhouse jerking off: “All right? You don’t wanna do that.”

  “Did it shock you?”

  “Fuck, no, it didn’t shock me. I just told you. It violates certain proprieties.”

  “But if I’m writing it to you, like a letter—”

  “You’re writing it for posterity. For some mythical reader someplace, not just me. You’re making a statement.”

  “Right. My statement said how hard it must be for a woman to fuck with a corpse.”

  “And a point worth making. I said so. Here.”

  “But you said I shouldn’t say it.”

  “No. Listen. Just because you’re talking about fucking, you don’t have to say fuck. Does that make it any clearer?”

  “No.”

  “I wish you’d lied to me just now,” he said.

  I nodded. I did too.

  “Where’d you do your service?” he asked.

  “Baltimore. Baltimore, Maryland.”

  “What’s in Baltimore?”

  “Railroads. I liaised on freight runs of army matériel. I killed a couple of bums on the rod with my bare hands, though.”

  He snorted again, but I could see how disappointed he was. He’d been banking on my having been a murderer. Interesting guy in one of my classes, he must have told some terrific woman at an overpriced meal: I just know the guy was a rubout specialist in the Nam, he had to have said. I figured I should come to work wearing my fatigue jacket and a red bandanna tied around my head. Say “Man” to him a couple of times, hang a fist in the air for grief and solidarity, and look terribly worn, exhausted by experiences he was fairly certain that he envied me. His dungarees were ironed, I noticed.

  ON SATURDAY WE went back to the campus because Fanny wanted to see a movie called The Seven Samurai. I fell asleep, and I’m afraid I snored. She let me sleep until the auditorium was almost empty. Then she kissed me awake. “Who was screaming in my dream?” I asked her.

  “Kurosawa,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Ask your professor friend.”

  I looked around, but he wasn’t there. “Not an un-weird man,” I said.

  We went home and cleaned up after the dog and put him out. We drank a little Spanish brandy and went upstairs and made love. I was fairly premature, you might say, but one way and another by the time we fell asleep we were glad to be there with each other, and glad that it was Sunday coming up the valley toward us, and nobody with it. The dog was howling at another dog someplace, or at the moon, or maybe just his moon-thrown shadow on the snow. I did not strangle him when I opened the back door and he limped happily past me and stumbled up the stairs. I followed him into our bedroom and groaned for just being satisfied as I got into bed. You’ll notice I didn’t say fuck.

  HE STOPPED ME in the hall after class on a Thursday, and asked me How’s it goin, just one of the kickers drinking sour beer and eating pickled eggs and watching the tube in a country bar. How’s it goin. I nodded. I wanted a grade from the man, and I did want to learn about expressing myself. I nodded and made what I thought was a smile. He’d let his mustache grow out and his hair grow longer. He was starting to wear dark shirts with lighter ties. I thought he looked like someone in The Godfather. He still wore those light little loafers or his high-heeled cowboy boots. His corduroy pants looked baggy. I guess he wanted them to look that way. He motioned me to the wall of the hallway, and he looked up and said, “How about the Baltimore stuff?”

  I said, “Yeah?”

  “Was that really true?” He was almost blinking, he wanted so much for me to be a damaged Vietnam vet just looking for a bell tower to climb into and start firing from. The college didn’t have a bell tower you could get up into, though I’d once spent an ugly hour chasing a drunken ATO down from the roof of the observatory. “You were just clocking through boxcars in Baltimore?”

  I said, “Nah.”

  “I thought so!” He gave a kind of sigh.

  “I killed people,” I said.

  “You know, I could have sworn you did,” he said.

  I nodded, and he nodded back. I’d made him so happy.

  THE ASSIGNMENT WAS to write something to influence somebody. He called it Rhetoric and Persuasion. We read an essay by George Orwell and “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift. I liked the Orwell better, but I wasn’t comfortable with it. He talked about “niggers,” and I felt saying it two ways.

  I wrote “Ralph the Duck.”

  Once upon a time, there was a duck named Ralph who didn’t have any feathers on either wing. So when the cold wind blew, Ralph said, Brr, and shivered and shook.

  What’s the matter? Ralph’s mommy asked.

  I’m cold, Ralph said.

  Oh, the mommy said. Here. I’ll keep you warm.

  So she spread her big, feathery wings, and hugged Ralph tight, and when the cold wind blew, Ralph was warm and snuggly, and fell fast asleep.

  THE NEXT THURSDAY, he was wearing canvas pants and hiking boots. He mentioned kind of casually to some of the girls in the class how whenever there was a storm he wore his Lake District walking outfit. He had a big, hairy sweater on. I kept waiting for him to make a noise like a mountain goat. But the girls seemed to like it. His boots made a creaky squeak on the linoleum of the hall when he caught up with me after class.

  “As I told you,” he said, “it isn’t unappealing. It’s just—not a college theme.”

  “Right,” I said. “Okay. You want me to do it over?”

  “No,” he said. “Not at all. The D will remain your grade. But I’ll read something else if you want to write it.”

  “This’ll be fine,” I said.

  “Did you understand the assignment?”

  “Write something to influence someone—Rhetoric and Persuasion.”

  We were at his office door and the redheaded kid who had gotten sick in my truck was waiting for him. She looked at me like one of us was in the wrong place, which struck me as accurate enough. He was interested in getting into his office with the redhead, but he remembered to turn around and flash me a grin he seemed to think he was known for.

  Instead of going on shift a few hours after class, the way I’m supposed to, I told my supervisor I was sick, and I went home. Fanny was frightened when I came in, because I don’t get sick and I don’t miss work. She looked at my face and she grew sad. I kissed her hello and went upstairs to change. I always used to change my clothes when I was a kid, as soon as I came home from school. I put on jeans and a flannel shirt and thick wool socks, and I made myself a dark drink of sourmash. Fanny poured herself some wine and came into the cold northern room a few minutes later. I was sitting in the rocker, looking over the valley. The wind was lining up a lot of rows of cloud so that the sky looked like a baked trout when you lift the skin off. “It’ll snow,” I said to her.

  She sat on the old sofa and waited. After a while, she said, “I wonder why they always call it a mackerel sky?”
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br />   “Good eating, mackerel,” I said.

  Fanny said, “Shit! You’re never that laconic unless you feel crazy. What’s wrong? Who’d you punch out at the playground?”

  “We had to write a composition,” I said.

  “Did he like it?”

  “He gave me a D.”

  “Well, you’re familiar enough with D’s. I never saw you get this low over a grade.”

  “I wrote about Ralph the Duck.”

  She said, “You did?” She said, “Honey.” She came over and stood beside the rocker and leaned into me and hugged my head and neck. “Honey,” she said. “Honey.”

  IT WAS THE WORST of the winter’s storms, and one of the worst in years. That afternoon they closed the college, which they almost never do. But the roads were jammed with snow over ice, and now it was freezing rain on top of that, and the only people working at the school that night were the operator who took emergency calls and me. Everyone else had gone home except the students, and most of them were inside. The ones who weren’t were drunk, and I kept on sending them in and telling them to act like grown-ups. A number of them said they were, and I really couldn’t argue. I had the bright beams on, the defroster set high, the little blue light winking, and a thermos of sourmash and hot coffee that I sipped from every time I had to get out of the truck or every time I realized how cold all that wetness was out there.

  About eight o’clock, as the rain was turning back to snow and the cold was worse, the roads impossible, just as I was done helping a county sander on the edge of the campus pull a panel truck out of a snowbank, I got the emergency call from the college operator. We had a student missing. The roommates thought the kid was headed for the quarry. This meant I had to get the Bronco up on a narrow road above the campus, above the old cemetery, into all kinds of woods and rough track that I figured would be choked with ice and snow. Any kid up there would really have to want to be there, and I couldn’t go in on foot, because you’d only want to be there on account of drugs, booze, or craziness, and either way I’d be needing blankets and heat, and then a fast ride down to the hospital in town. So I dropped into four-wheel drive to get me up the hill above the campus, bucking snow and sliding on ice, putting all the heater’s warmth up onto the windshield because I couldn’t see much more than swarming snow. My feet were still cold from the tow job, and it didn’t seem to matter that I had on heavy socks and insulated boots I’d coated with waterproofing. I shivered, and I thought of Ralph the Duck.