The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  Snuyder heard himself sigh. He could see the letters coming out of his mouth and into a comic-strip bubble: Ahhhh. He waited for Arizona to tell him who she was, and whether he was in love as much as he thought he remembered he once had been.

  Arizona said, “They have to do it. I don’t know anything. And nobody else is gonna say word one. I expect a superficial investigation, announced vindication, and a prompt resumption of jurisprudence as usual.”

  “And then there’s the matter of the law,” Richard said.

  Arizona, handsome and intelligent, with great brown eyes and a fondness for dark striped shirts such as the maroon one he wore, smiled a broad smile. “Absolutely,” he said. “There is always the law, and the public trust, Your Honor.”

  Manwarren called over the curtain, “You guys believe this? They want me to believe this bimbo just won a trip around the world for two, all expenses paid, by telling grease ball over there with the microphone that Columbus didn’t discover America?” The muted shrieks of the victor poured around Manwarren’s voice.

  The woman in the car had screamed. Arizona poured Powers’ into Snuyder’s glass with its plastic straw, then he held the straw low, near Snuyder’s pillow, so the judge could suck it up. He emptied the glass. Arizona might know her, he thought. But he couldn’t be asked. Snuyder was ashamed to remember his wife and his children, his work even down to the specifics of the cases he had tried months and years ago, when he could barely remember the presence, much less identity or necessary intimate facts, of a woman he had carried with him toward jail for certain, and possibly (if Hilary was right) toward death. But she wasn’t dead. The nurse had told him that no one was dead. He thought of someone with no face who sat in a wheelchair, paralyzed. He saw her—she was like a burglar in a stocking mask, terrifying because faceless, unnatural—lying in an iron lung, crushed in a fetal sleep forever, staring through a window and drooling, staggering like a monster with hands like claws at her waist, serving the judge’s sentence and locked away from his mind.

  Arizona slid the Powers’ into the drawer of the bedside table when he left. The pain pills and the Powers’ combined, and Snuyder flinched. The doctors would have to cut and cut before they found out what was wrong with such a man as he, he told himself. He closed his eyes against the undeniable blade, as if they were cutting, as if they were at the flaccid organs and slimy bone, searching for what was the matter. For him.

  It was Hilary who woke him when she sat in the visitor’s chair with some effort, swearing as she fell back into the deep seat. After a silence—she breathed as if she had a cold—she said, “How’s your catheter, Judge?”

  “Hil. Do you know who she is?”

  Manwarren turned the volume down.

  Snuyder whispered: “The woman in the car?” He took a breath and then shouted, “Manwarren! Turn the sound up! Mind your own business!” He felt as though he’d been running. “Bastard,” he said. He shouted it: “Bastard!”

  The sound came up slightly, but Snuyder knew that Manwarren was unchastened.

  Hilary said, “Why, who would that be, Your Honor? How is your catheter, by the way?”

  “I hurt all over. Okay? I’m in a lot of pain. I’m humiliated. I’m under investigation, Hilary. They’re looking into my comportment on and off the bench.”

  “I didn’t know you’d done it on the bench. And you can’t really blame them. A suicide is not always the most stable interpreter of the law, never mind his other little quirks and foibles.”

  “It’s apparently because of the woman. That was all I could get from Arizona.”

  Hilary said, “I wish I could get more from Tony. He’s really a piece.”

  “Please don’t talk like that.”

  “Do I really need to tell you about the hypocrisy of this discussion?”

  “No.”

  “You know I’m disgusted with you. That’s an easy one. Disgust is easy and seeing it’s easy. But what kills me—”

  “Hil, I can’t remember a lot. I remember us, overall, you know. And a lot of times and things. But I can’t remember a lot.”

  “And that includes the slut in the car? That’s what kills me. It’s so sad for you that you can’t. I feel sorry for you. You son of a bitch.”

  “Hil, she’s literally a slut?”

  “Oh. You boy. You infant. You expect me to keep track of your infidelities and log your bedroom transactions, don’t you. You’d ask me for help. You know, knowing me, I’d probably give it. You—boy.” She wept mascara lines down her face.

  Snuyder said, “I’m promiscuous? I thought I remembered that I really loved her.” Their silence widened, and a woman on the television set said, “I wouldn’t dare tell them that!”

  Hilary sighed. She said, “I think I’ll go home. I understand they’ll bring you back for therapy, and you’ll use a walker. You’ll be able to walk someday. I feel sorry it’s so bad. Also, Richard, I’m moving. During the latter part of the week. I’ll telephone you.”

  “Where?” he said. “Did we decide to do this?”

  Hilary shook her head. “It started when you told me you were moving out.”

  “Yes,” he said. He remembered at once, and as if he looked through transparent overlays: long arguments, slower and longer conversations, Hilary on the phone, Hilary weeping black lines while holding a teacup to her mouth, himself standing before her and wishing aloud that he were dead. He remembered the words about remorse that he had tried to say, and the fear of how they’d tell their sons. Hilary had told him about Warren, calling from college, in tears, because he had sensed that it all had gone wrong. Snuyder said, “I’m sorry. I don’t remember women. A woman. The woman, I guess you’d call her.”

  “Yes,” Hilary said.

  “I apologize. If it’s because of her, I apologize. I don’t suppose it would make any difference now, seeing that I don’t know her anymore. Is she the—”

  But Hilary was up and moving. She was at the door. He heard the squelch of her crepe soles on the linoleum floor.

  He said, “I suppose not.”

  She said, “See you, Judge.” Then, too brightly, she said, “Actually, I’ll see you in court.” She laughed too hard, and she left.

  Manwarren called over at once. “You know what, Dick? I think you shoulda hit the pole a little harder, you don’t mind my saying so. You’re in a pickle, to say the least, big fella.”

  “You think I’m in a pickle, Manwarren?”

  “Call me Manny.”

  “I’m going to make a call, Manny. While you sleep. I’m going to have a man who runs a chain of fish stores in Syracuse—I’m going to ask him to have an employee in the Manlius packing plant come over here while you’re sleeping and kill you. He’s going to open your chest with his bare hands, and he’s going to tear out every vital organ in your body one at a time. And he won’t wear gloves. His nails will be dirty. He picks his nose. Do you understand me, Manny?”

  The sound increased in volume, and bright voices clung to the ceiling tiles. She had been in the car with him. She had screamed when they’d hit. Hilary was leaving because of her, and he didn’t know who the woman was. The set cried out and the voices rose. He was alleged to have attempted suicide. He would never walk normally, and his sons would not come to him. He knew that too. Hilary would take all their money and the men on the ethics committee might remove him from the bench. He thought they wouldn’t, since none of them was terribly honest either, and each was equally impeachable. They would probably reprimand him, and he would suffer a trial-by-headline. But he would return to the bench, he thought. He would live alone in an apartment such as the ones near the Sangertown Mall. Or perhaps he might move into Clinton, where the old large houses east of town were divided into Victorian cells for bachelors and men such as he. He would drive alone to work and sit in his courtroom. He would say who was right in the eyes of the law. He never would know who the woman had been, or what they had been together, or why.

  It was an em
pty mourning, he thought—abstracted, like a statement about how dreadful the starving African babies are. He wondered if the woman he loved and didn’t know might have told him she was leaving. Perhaps he had aimed at killing her.

  He heard himself whimpering, and made himself stop. He heard Manwarren’s television set, and then the dogs in the trailer who’d whimpered, he’d been told by the deputies, before they heard the foot on the door; once rescued, they’d begun to bark and wail. He thought of Lloyd and Pris, armed and marching, in their terrible fetor and loss, to recover their starved, sick dogs. They were separated now. Poor Lloyd: he had taken the hostages, and only when his prisoners lay on the floor in the deeds-recording office had he realized that he wanted to insist on one more prize, the operation that would change Pris’s sex. It was then, Snuyder remembered realizing, as he’d read Lloyd’s deposition, that Lloyd had understood how permanently separate he had always been from Pris and probably always would be. “He don’t love me,” Lloyd had said. “How could he?”

  It was a case he had wanted to try. They were accused of a dozen public-health violations and twenty or more violations of the civil and criminal codes. And they were so innocent, Snuyder thought. No one should be allowed to be so innocent. Shots rang out on a TV show, and wheels screamed. Snuyder jumped, remembering the sound of locked brakes. She had been there with him, in the same small space. And he had leaned back, locked his elbows and knees, and had driven at the pole. He had. And he would not know her. And even that was not the worst part.

  SHE MIGHT RETURN. He would have to decide about trying to heal, or waiting for her next door to death. He forced himself to breathe evenly, as if he slept. The TV set made sounds. The dogs stood on the bed and chairs, they cried their pain and hunger, their fear. Manwarren cackled. The police would come soon with questions. He was held together with pins. He was going to die, but of natural causes, and many years from today. He knew it. He smelled the dark air of the trailer, and he heard the gaunt dogs whine.

  RERUNS

  WHEN THE State Department officer telephoned to ask if I was the Dr. Leland Dugan whose wife, Belinda, was traveling as a journalist in Europe and the Middle East, I answered in a manner even I, at the time, found cagey and evasive. “Yes,” I said. “I’m Dugan. But she isn’t really a journalist. Of course, she does journalism. But she’s a sociologist. On her tax return she calls herself a teacher.”

  One of our recent fights had been about income tax returns. Belinda had wanted to be a married woman filing separately. I’d tried to show her that such a category cost us money. She’d been resolute: “I will not sign on some line tagged spouse. Underneath your name. I won’t be underneath you anymore.”

  “So I’ve noticed,” I’d told her.

  “In the Lebanon,” the State Department officer said. His way of saying it—the Lebanon, as if this were the thirties and we were in Whitehall discussing Middle East chappies—made me pay attention. I am paid to pay attention to the stories people tell. I should have done better, but it had been a difficult morning, and one of my patients, seeking to test and protest at once, had sat before my desk for twenty minutes without speaking, daring me to intervene. I hadn’t, and for the thirty subsequent minutes, he’d bellowed and ranted, sweating and heaving and, finally, leaping from his chair. “I don’t feel better,” he’d said, like a huge, sore child. “I don’t feel better at all. So now what am I supposed to do?”

  I said to the State Department officer, “Would you tell me again, please?”

  That’s how I learned that my wife, Belinda, anthropology-sociology professor on leave and part-time free-lance journalist, had gone to Beirut and was now a prisoner of some group on whom the Department of State sought further information. That was when I began to think of distances—the width of oceans, the length of borders, the prairies inside lives—as personal facts, and not just my patients’ reports, or my wife’s.

  I said, “She’s alive?”

  “When they keep them there, they’re alive, Dr. Dugan. Dead, they come straight home.”

  “She wouldn’t want to come straight home, either way,” I said. I chuckled, but he didn’t laugh back politely. He said that someone had been sent, early that morning. I was not alone, he said.

  I telephoned Kate, and then I canceled patients for the day. I thought of the man the State Department had sent. He’d have to come a winding, hesitant route. He would, as so many strangers to our cold, bleak countryside do, drift and get lost, then recover, wandering on, doubting his direction, feeling compelled to continue. He would take a route along the ground like those my patients take in time and language when they try to tell their story to me. He’d already have flown from Washington to Syracuse, or Washington to one of the New York airports, and then to Hancock in Syracuse. He’d drive the seventy-five miles in his rental car—on Route 81, then 690, then some of Route 5, then lots of 92 to 20, 20 to 12B, 12B to 12, in slow traffic through small towns, and in the wide barren spaces in between. We are so far from everyplace.

  I collected Linda at the central school, and I told her. She was flushed, at first, because she’d been stared at by other adolescents as she left class early. She grew pale, then, and in the stairwell, at the main doors, she said, with dry lips clacking, “But who wants her?”

  “Nice try,” I said. We went for Melissa, who was in the elementary building. As she walked into the office, Lissa, seeing us, began to cry. “It’s okay, baby,” I said. I kept saying it. “Baby, it is fine.”

  Linda said to her, “She isn’t dead.”

  Melissa cried harder.

  “We’ll talk about it,” I said. “She isn’t sick, and she isn’t hurt.”

  “And she isn’t coming home,” Linda said.

  I told her, “Thank you.”

  In the car, after a few blocks, after listening hard and riding silently, Melissa asked, “But who kidnaps mothers?”

  And Linda had a question, too: “You think they’ll rape her?”

  I asked Melissa, “Do you know what Linda’s talking about?”

  “Do I like know what rape is?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mostly,” Lissa said.

  I had to park across the street because the cars and trucks of the news people were in our drive and on our lawn. A sheriff’s deputy led us through the onlookers and rural anchor-folk. Linda was grinning, I noticed, and she slowed against my arm as they questioned us; I pushed her home. Melissa said nothing. Her face was very pale, and her large eyes looked dark. In that way, she might have been Kate’s daughter. She wasn’t.

  Kate arrived from her pediatrics clinic, and I nodded at the deputy who called for permission to bring her along. When Linda saw her she said, “God!” Kate dodged the same fat little man I’d pushed past; he’d told me he was a reporter from a fundamentalist Christian radio station. She stood before a fellow from our local Progressive Country and Western Sounds station as he shouted into her eyes and nose, “Dr. Karagoulis! What do you think of Mrs. Dugan being kidnaped?” She shook her head. “What are you doing here, Dr. Karagoulis, if we may inquire?”

  Kate said something so low, I couldn’t hear it. The deputy brought her, and we went in. Kate put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me.

  “Jesus,” Linda said.

  Melissa said, “Hi, Kate!” Kate stooped to kiss her, and then she walked to Linda, whom she hugged, then kissed on the cheek. “I’m sorry,” Kate told her.

  “Tell my mother,” Linda said.

  “All right,” Kate said.

  “Sure. While she’s in Lebanon.”

  Kate said, “Wasn’t that cunning of me.”

  “What’d you tell the reporter?” I asked her.

  “I said I was making a house call.” She wore white twill slacks and a soft white man-tailored shirt, white socks, and shiny brown penny loafers. “I am,” she said, opening her large medical bag and presenting a smelly brown paper sack streaked with oil. She handed it to Lissa, who unpacked long submarine san
dwiches and Hostess Twinkies.

  Linda, who ate nearly as much as Kate, turned away, as if sickened by food. Then she turned back. Kate took cans of cream soda from her bag. “I thought we might force ourselves,” she said. We went into the back room, which was big and sloppy and filled with soft furniture. Kate took the ringing phone and unhooked it from its terminal. “I’ll hook it up when I call my service,” she said. “You guys go disconnect the other phones, please.”

  Linda said, “I might be expecting a call.”

  The telephone rang, and Kate stared down at Linda, who was at least six inches shorter than she. Melissa said, “I’ll show you how to do it, Lin.”

  “I better not miss any calls,” Linda said.

  Kate only nodded. And when they had left, and as the other three telephones one by one stopped ringing, Kate and I stood, trying to squeeze some private talk into what would be a public day. Finally, she asked, “Do you think it has to do with us?”

  “She has to do with us,” I said. “We have to do with her. We’re her symptoms. Whether or not we—”

  Kate said, “Whether or not we’re responsible for her situation.”

  “Her situation’s an extension of her mind. No. I don’t accept this blame.”

  “Well, I don’t want to,” Kate said. “But—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Yeah, but.”

  “But what?”

  “What, Daddy?” Melissa asked, behind us.

  “But I don’t think I’m gonna get my sandwich,” I said. “If that’s the man from Washington.” Bernie, our 130-pound Newfoundland, was roaring in the foyer.

  It was the deputy, and with him, shielded by him from the newspeople, was Mr. Pontrier from Washington, with his courteous introduction, and his letter from our senior Senator, and from the Secretary of State, and his verbal greetings from—he pronounced it as a single word—the-President-himself. Kate and the girls were gone when we went through to the kitchen. He laid his coat over a chair, and I ground coffee beans and set out mugs and milk and sugar and spoons, paper napkins. I threw away the greasy bag they’d left. It reminded me of the brown bag into which I’d put Belinda’s hair two weeks before she left. I had driven with it to the hospital, where I’d found Kate on pediatrics rounds. She’d been palpating the abdomen of a struggling infant, and I’d watched her close her eyes, as if to will her senses to her fingertips. In the corridor, I showed her the bag. Looking inside, she’d recoiled. “She cut it off,” I’d told her. “She left it strewn through my underwear drawer.” Kate had stared and stared, and tears had run from her enormous eyes. She’d wept, I remembered thinking, because perhaps she’d thought I didn’t know how to. It didn’t occur to me until Belinda was kidnaped that Kate might have wept for Belinda.