The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  I stepped back. “I’m shampooing Leslie next week, all right?”

  May nodded, and the other one nodded. May let go of my pants. “You’re putting on weight,” she said.

  I shrugged.

  “Misery must agree with you.” She turned, and then the other one did, and they went along the corridor. I buttoned my coat and went out through the smokeless visitors’ lounge, wishing as I went.

  I always kept the jail for last. It was a county jail, where prisoners waited for trials or indictment for minor offenses, or were held if they were being transported from, say, Auburn to the psychiatric hospital in Rome. The jail was in the basement of the county sheriff’s offices, and was across the street from the courthouse, across another street from the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. If you stood on the steps of the elegant Victorian that housed the jail, you could see our public library and a government office building where people made arrangements for food stamps. It seemed like a rather large town, but it was really a very small city, the smallest in the state. In order to qualify for state aid in repairing the streets, our city had to file its street plan. We were found to have too few streets, according to a government rule, so we renamed certain avenues at either end. West Broughton had run, in two blocks, across the main street (a state two-lane) into (unsurprisingly) East Broughton. The town fathers renamed them, and the unsuspecting motorist now drove from West Broughton, across Route 12, and up a street called Samson Drive, never encountering East Broughton or any other Broughton. I nipped the yellow light and drove across 12 onto Samson, which was in the general direction of the jail, but which wouldn’t bring me directly there.

  Samson ended at a narrow lane that went up a steep hill toward a small municipal swimming pool named for a phys ed teacher who’d been thought to die in Korea. But he’d come back. The town was embarrassed by its own emotion, I suppose, and the poor fellow was punished—though everyone treated him well in person—by the neglect his pool received—clogged pool drains and a torn umbrella for the lifeguard. The road needed repaving and its potholes were his payment for the municipal embarrassment. My son had worked there in the summer of his sixteenth year. I walked around the pool and looked down into its gray slush growing like a fungus in the shaded end. I climbed up onto the chair where he’d sat and I sat in the cold air and crossed my legs, leaned forward against the weight of my overcoat as if I might declaim. There was nothing, though, to say there, just as there was little to say in jail. As the afternoon darkened, I went there.

  At the desk, near the wooden staircase with the tops of its newel posts carved into giant acorns, a deputy sat to log me in and reach to pat my shoulder. I knew where to go—through the heavy wooden door beneath the stairs, and then, on metal rungs, down. Another deputy waited for me and opened the heavy barred gate so that I stood at the open end of a U made of cells. A television set high on the wall showed the cable sports channel. A local physician who doubled as the county’s jail doctor was examining an Oriental man. The doctor, who smiled at me over the new prisoner’s shoulder, said, “You may think a thing like that just heals. Let me tell you: very little ‘just heals.’ You get help, or you get sick. Understand?”

  The deputy, who’d come in with me, was carrying his magazine as he escorted me to the cell. I said, “Bobby, I didn’t know they were allowed to sell magazines like that.”

  He said, “Oh, yeah. The first amendment covers crotches now.”

  He opened the door and I went in. The smell of the disinfectant wasn’t unpleasant. I discovered that each time I was there. I put my briefcase on his bunk, and then I looked at him. I think my body was confused about drawing careful breath, lest I smell something awful, and looking through hooded eyes, lest I see something cruel. I winced when our eyes met. But he was just a boy, a very tall and muscular sixteen-year-old boy who should have been attending his junior year in high school but who waited trial for vandalism. He had broken into the high school computer room twice. He’d done damage. And we all agreed, after the counseling and the tests, after the generous leniency of the school board, and after my wife and I had posted bail the first time, for larcenous behavior and several varieties of felony, that this time, awaiting hearings, Charlie—Chilly to his friends—would spend the dozen days in jail.

  He was larger than I, and his hand, when I pulled at it, seemed to weigh more than I remembered hands weighing. Everything about him was large, and too big for me to move easily. His face was the same clenched thickening face of a boy I remembered as pretty. He looked at me with sharp-eyed disgust.

  But I asked it anyway. “Charlie, you okay?”

  His expression remained. He gestured at the one-piece toilet and the bunk bed and the metal bureau built into the wall.

  “Nine days to go,” I said.

  He sat down on the bunk and looked away from me. I opened my coat and sat beside him. He wore a light gray one-piece boiler suit. It was unbuttoned almost to the belt line, and I saw how little hair he had on his chest, or on the arms I saw in his rolled-up sleeves, or on the smooth, hard face. I was sweating in the heat of the jail, but I wore my coat anyway. His skin looked dry.

  “Mom’s—”

  “I don’t want to talk about Mom, please.”

  I nodded. I was going to say crazy or dying or praying, and none would have been right, and none would have been fair. She was doing what I was doing: hating the decision, hating its occasion, hating our life, and hating the government that had jailed our son. She was also, as I was, approving the decision, cooperating with the sheriff and the board of education, and we were hating us. While we mourned our living son, we ground our teeth while we slept and in the morning shared our nightmares about punishing him.

  I put my hand on his long, heavy leg, and he twitched away. I said, as he must have known I would, and as I knew he loathed hearing, “We love you, Charlie.”

  But he tamely nodded. So I pressed.

  “You know that?”

  He nodded again. He said, “Can I ever come home?”

  I said, still looking ahead, “I think they want to bring it to trial.”

  “Prison farm,” he said.

  “For juveniles.”

  “I don’t think it’s as little as that word.”

  “No,” I said. “They’re tough bastards there. It’s a mean, bad place. We’re trying to keep you out.”

  “The lawyer was here,” he said.

  “I know. We talked to him afterward.”

  “He must be expensive. His suit was very far out.”

  “He’s got a closetful. Yes.”

  “Does he think—”

  “I don’t know, honey.” He looked up. I looked over. Neither of us had called him honey since he was small. Now, it seemed to me, in his long and heavy age, looking at his life taking shapes he had never imagined, he was small. “But we’ll do everything, everything, we can.”

  “Except let me come home.”

  I focused on my slush-dampened shoes.

  “I know,” he said. “Reality.”

  “I didn’t use that word with you, did I?”

  “Isn’t that what this is supposed to be about?”

  It’s what it is about, hon.”

  “I know. But I wish I could come home again.”

  “Honey, you’ll come home again. That isn’t—”

  “Won’t they take me straight from here to the prison farm after the trial?”

  I couldn’t look at him, because I couldn’t admit to him that I had never considered his not, eventually, being home. “Reality,” he’d said. I reached to throw the overcoat off my shoulders, but it felt too heavy for my hands. My chest and stomach were soaking through my shirt, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to shiver.

  “Here,” he said. He stood, and I did too, and he went behind me and reached around, and he pulled the coat back and off.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I don’t—”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what happens to me.”
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  “It does?”

  “A lot. All the time. That’s all that happens here, except food and the bathroom, and the lights going off. TV.”

  “It does?”

  “You want to see my homework, Dad?”

  “You did it?”

  “I had the time.”

  He handed me several sheets of the rough paper I had left with him. His handwriting, slanted acutely, yet rounded at the tops of looped letters, capitals especially, looked as it had looked when he was in the sixth or seventh grade. I was afraid to read his work. I was afraid that he had written about himself, or us. And I was afraid that he had not. “Great,” I said. “Should I read this at home? Why don’t I do that.”

  Okay,” he said. “I don’t care. You can bring it tomorrow. You coming tomorrow?”

  “Of course I am,” I said. “That’s what I do.”

  “Okay. How about economics? The chapter quiz on inflation and unemployment, all of that.”

  He took a sheet from the looseleaf notebook I’d left with him, and he examined it before passing it over. I opened his text to the end-of-chapter test, and I read the questions about lowered market demands for labor in an inflationary society. I kept looking at the graphs, and at the circles with their colored pie slices.

  “You gonna grade it at home?”

  I thought of sitting in our kitchen and drinking coffee and reading Charlie’s quiz. I could see myself checking his answers: DOWN. UP. MARKETPLACE. SPIRAL. I saw his answers as if pressed, with Leslie’s leadless pencil, onto Leslie’s Invisible Pad. I saw myself standing soon, as I would. I saw myself waving from the door of Charlie’s cell as I had waved to Myrna from the cab of my truck. Where we live is named for someplace else. How we live is named for something else. I saw myself, the traveling teacher, sitting in our kitchen with my pale wife. I would work at my exam. The question would ask me: Name the name for what we’re living now. LOVE U Leslie had written. BOLOGNA. Charlie said, “Dad?” Name the name.

  TO THE HOOP

  DUANE AND I didn’t talk about how she killed herself or where. With us, it was as if anything to do with mothers or wives had begun two years ago. I had never told him in the first place that Jackie packed not only every suitcase she could find in the house, but cardboard boxes, brown paper bags, and plastic carryalls. It was as though we’d decided to move, and Jackie had left without me. In the bedroom was everything she’d owned—souvenir stones, creased postcards, old photo albums, discarded reading glasses, and out-of-date clothes she hadn’t worn for many years. There were thirty-five shoes. I looked for half an hour for a missing stack-heeled cordovan pump that would have slid onto Jackie’s left foot.

  She had taken a room at the Howard Johnson’s, not ten minutes from where I worked. She had eaten enough complimentary capsules, spansules, and tablets, manufactured by my firm, and had washed them down with enough complimentary cough suppressant and her own dark rum, to do the job, and stop her heart.

  Nor did we discuss the women I sometimes brought home after about a year had passed. The women were good sports, and so was Duane. I would introduce them, and he would duck his head and step forward, blushing, and would shake their hand in his big fingers, then escape. He smiled at them, but not at me. And even after Cheryl stayed some months with me—with us, you’d have to say—we didn’t speak too much of her. She was the last. After Cheryl, it was Duane and me.

  And I stopped telling him stories of how at fifteen I had been strong and tall, though smaller than he was, and able to run all day in two- and three-man half-court games in Brooklyn’s summer heat at Wingate Field. I wanted to tell him that I’d finally figured out why boys would play on blacktop courts from eight in the morning until the sun went down. It was because the other teams who challenged us would not only win the game: they’d win the court. It was winner-take-all, I wanted to say. Of course, he knew that.

  I was careful to be silent about Duane’s own play. I watched him, though, as he practiced outside our house in the country hills. In cold autumn winds, in thick winter snow—he’d use a shovel and a push broom to clear the old dairy ramp outside the barn on which his backboard was mounted—Duane made lay-ups, sank his smooth jump shot from fifteen feet out, leaped again and again to cradle the rebounded ball so that his feet didn’t touch the ground until he’d rolled the ball over the rim. In games at his high school, against less muscular boys with fewer skills and less flexible bodies, he grew gawky, he—who could practice in a snowstorm all of an afternoon—became breathless, and then he ran with stiffening thighs and locked elbows; he would forget to set a screen for the shooting guard, he would neglect to block out opposing forwards and would yield up rebounds, he would panic when passed the ball and would shoot from too far out. And I, forgetting myself, would cry from the bleachers, “Power move!” I would bellow, “To the hoop! Take it to the hoop!”

  In game after game I saw his coach let him play fewer minutes. He came to sit on the bench more bunchily, hunched in upon himself as if hiding. At home he insisted on more silence about his play, and his grades began to slide—not enough to provoke a call from school, but enough for me to notice. I saw problems coming. They were the weather I watched for as if I farmed for a living, instead of running communications at the corporate offices they’d shipped me to from headquarters in Cincinnati. During the day, I ran our house organ, writing articles on management shifts and new products, consulting about publicity and community relations, lying for a living, trying hard to make it sound as if I told pure truth about stomach settlers and decongestants and the people who lived here in the center of New York State, with its harsh long winters and splendid, suddenly concluded summers, manufacturing pharmaceuticals and mourning for the Cincinnati symphony and civic theater, the movie houses and bus lines of a real city, as they called it. I watched with a cruel contentment as my colleagues drew their pleasure from tales of each other’s failures and malfeasances. I was a New Yorker. If I wasn’t there, then almost anywhere would do.

  I called him Dude because that is what his teammates called him, slapping high-fives with the lazy slow-motion casualness they saw among black players on television. These boys were white, and their bodies knew, if their minds didn’t, or their tongues wouldn’t say so, that the dark grace they imitated was the standard for the toughness of their practice habits and the courage of their play.

  In the car after a Tuesday night scrimmage, as I drove us home, I yawned and made a joke of my fatigue by stretching my jaws immensely and offering the noise of what I told him was an aging hippo in heat. On the unlit snowy country roads which glowed beneath our lights, then disappeared into the general dark behind us, he turned to me and said, in a low, controlled, and sullen voice, “Would you mind not shouting at me during the game?”

  “Oh. Hey, I was shouting to you. You know, cheering for you.”

  “I know. I kept looking at you. Did you see me?”

  “I did. I thought you might be glad to know I was there.”

  “It made me nervous. I played lousy. All six minutes he had me in there.”

  “You looked a little tight.”

  “I looked a little lousy.”

  “Tentative, maybe.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I meant, you didn’t seem to—”

  “I know what tentative means.”

  “Sorry. I will shut up. As long as you don’t think I was scolding you. I hate it when parents scold their kids on the court.”

  “I think I’m screwing up because you’re there.”

  I turned in at our short driveway. “You don’t want me to come, Dude?”

  “And would you call me Duane, please?”

  “I will. And I’ll stay away from games for a while. Right?”

  “Thank you,” he said as formally as if I’d picked up his athletic bag and handed it to him.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  In the cold kitchen, while Duane turned that morning’s approximation of order in
to something shaggier, I lit a fire in the wood stove and made us sandwiches. We always ate some snack before he yawned his way through homework before going to bed. Seeing me slice ham, he said, “Nothing for me, thanks. I’m keeping my weight down.”

  He was on the stairs, and something like “Good night” trailed his slow and heavy-footed climb. So I was alone, with ham and good intentions, and the usual fears that ranged from drugs to teenage schizophrenia. Jackie had died alone, and in silence. She had left us no word.

  I put more wood into the stove, closed its damper, took off my jacket and tie, and sat with the day’s mail. Letters still, though rarely, came for Jackie and me, mostly flyers and occasional cards from people I’d forgotten. I sometimes thought of our lovemaking, or afternoons in shopping malls. But mostly, these days, I remembered Jackie’s rage. Once, when she was saying she hated having to love me, she had snarled—I’d seen her even teeth. With her face red and her teeth showing, she had sat before me. And then she had walked to the stove, bearing our cups, and had poured us more coffee. And then she had taken both our cups away, before we’d sipped, before she sat again, and had emptied them into the sink. She’d stood over it, with her back to me, and had said, “When I went to bed with you on Friday nights back then, this was not my idea of Saturday mornings.” She had left her Coach bags, and her printed personal stationery, and a basketball player who, when the ball was in his hands, grew wide of eye, twisted at the mouth, and leaden of limb.

  I fell asleep in the kitchen, listening to the split cherry-wood sizzle and pop. It filled the air with sweetness. I could almost taste the wood, and it made me wish that Duane could. When I woke, the kitchen was cold. Duane and I were in the house, but that didn’t help either of us.

  The next afternoon, late, when Duane met me in the school parking lot after practice, he threw his gym bag into the back of the car, dropped into his seat as if he’d been slung there, and he said, “I want to quit.”