The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  I’d noticed the trailer before, its trim fence taut on pressure-treated four-by-fours, but I hadn’t thought about the posts in the gravel drive, nor the very large links of chain that hung between them, nor the sign that said, in high, childish letters, KEEP OUT. I saw a thinner, brighter chain that was looped around the steps in front of the darkened trailer in the darkening woods. I didn’t see Bear.

  I was breathing too quickly for the effort involved in parking a car and walking from it to step over a thick chain and go up the little hillside to climb four steps and knock on the aluminum door of a white metal and plastic trailer with blue trim that was maybe twenty feet long. I raised my hand to rap at the storm door when someone opened the interior door a crack and said, “Get off of my property.”

  “Give me back my dog, and I will,” My voice was so high, I hardly recognized it.

  “There isn’t any dog here. Get out.”

  “I know my damned dog’s here. I want him back.”

  “He’s mine.”

  “Bear!” I called.

  “You stay right there, Buddy,” the man’s voice said. It had a flat dullness to it that seemed strange, since it also sounded angry. “His name’s Buddy,” the man said, “and my brother bought him for me over in New York. Now, you get the hell off my property.”

  “I guess you want to talk to the cops,” I said.

  He said, “I knew it was you. I knew it was you. I knew it was you. Goddamned Howard, huh? All the way over from Ohio, huh? Big undercover motherfucker Howard, huh? I knew it was you!”

  The door opened a little wider, and I called, “Bear!”

  The barrel of a rifle came out. I remember staring at the sight because it seemed to stand so high. I heard a metal sound, and I jumped off the porch and ran down the gravel drive, falling near the bottom and letting myself roll under the chain. I ran around to the far side of my car and crouched there. I thought I saw the trailer door close. I sat on the ground and shook. Everything shook. When I finally inched myself into the car and turned it around, driving almost too low in the seat to see, and when I was back in my own driveway, I thought that I could use some of my professional gear once I pulled the gravel out of the cuts and washed my hands.

  I thought: The barrel of a gun.

  I thought: I did hear him lunge inside the trailer when I called his name.

  I told Arch Constantine, the deputy who arrived forty minutes later, and he wrote an incident report for me to sign.

  He asked, moving his three-cell flashlight on the table, and studying his juvenile handwriting, “Did you feel menaced, Doc?”

  “Menaced. Arch, you’re damned right I felt menaced. I was scared.”

  “Scared’s fine, but menaced is what the law’s about. Menacing. Was he menacing you?”

  “There’s a law against it?”

  “There sure is. I believe we’ve had him on it before, this Lester Scott guy. The sheriff knows about him. A number of us do. He’s a head case. And you felt menaced, then.”

  I nodded. I hesitated, but he smiled. He had a sweet smile for a man who was almost seven feet tall and perhaps as heavy as two of me. It was a crooked face, as if he’d been broken and put together again with some difficulty. “Menaced,” I said. “I ran.”

  “I understand,” he said, tapping the report.

  “I ran away, Arch. Like a kid.”

  He said, “I’d just as soon you did, Doc. I’d like to keep you alive. You take care of two of my nephews and you’re the only fun we get down at the cells unless one of the prisoners gets a package of food. You let us deal with the perpetrators and you forget about them until we lock them up. That strike you as fair?” He smiled the smile I often enough used with the parents of my patients. I thought of the tiny clenched face of Roger Pettefoy in the ward and of his mother, who’d trembled when she spoke with me.

  “Deal,” I said.

  When he was gone, I fed Pooh and then walked around the house, waiting for word. I watered the plants, many of which looked sicker than the children I’d treated that week. I let Pooh out and called the hospital. I shouted at the Head of Shift because I hadn’t been called about Roger Pettefoy. She told me, stiffly, that no instructions to call had been left. I told her how wrong she was, that when Charlene Novak heard orders she wrote them into the chart. She told me how improved the baby was, and I gave her orders and insisted that she read them back. Then, of course, I apologized. I said, “My dog—” I was able to stop myself, so that when she asked me what I’d said I could reply, “It’s been a long day. Forgive me. Please call me if the child’s signs change.” I said, “Deal?”

  She didn’t know what I meant, apparently, and she disconnected.

  Pooh barked at Arch when he returned. He ducked as he came in and he refused to sit. There was no dog in the car and none beside him but Pooh. The deputy said, “I’ve dealt with him before. I was right. He’s crazy.”

  “I believe it.”

  “No,” he said. “He’s crazy. He thinks your name’s Howard.”

  “I know that.”

  “He thinks you work with the DEA.”

  “Drugs?” I said.

  “He thinks you followed him from someplace in Ohio, and before that from someplace down South, and he thinks you’re a spy for the DEA. You’re some kind of undercover agent. I thought he was going to shoot me, sure as shit. He hates law officers. He hates uniforms. Mostly, right now, he hates you. That’s why he’s got your dog.”

  “He admitted it was mine?”

  “Sure did. Dog came wagging to the trailer, and he just chained him there. Wants you to know it.”

  “Why?” I tried not to let it sound like Why me?

  “He’s not sure, he says. He says he thinks, maybe, he’d enjoy shooting you through the chest. He was particular about that, about the through the chest part. He says he’s got a load of guns and ammunition, and he would take great pleasure in killing you and any of your cop friends.”

  “Jesus,” I said, “you were—”

  That was when he did sit down and lean over his legs and look at the clouded blue linoleum of the kitchen floor. He nodded. Then he whispered, “I did think he was ready to put me down.”

  “Jesus,” I said, “you can’t get killed because of a dog, Arch.”

  He looked up, suddenly. He smiled his sweet smile. “Thank you,” he said. “I’d at least like a chance to talk it over with my sergeant and more than likely the sheriff. We can’t have him doing whatever he’s doing with guns, that’s for sure. And if he’s got your dog, we have to get it back. There’s the drug thing, besides. The marijuana. You’ve heard about it. Let me talk to people about warrants or whatever, and what to do next. You do me a favor?”

  “You bet.”

  “Don’t go back there. He will kill you.”

  “That’s a deal,” I said.

  Later, when I sat in the kitchen and wondered for some reason whether I smelled to my colleagues and nurses and patients like a sour old wooden house inhabited mostly by dogs, I thought of how noble I had been. Well, of course, we can’t have deputies murdered for the sake of a dog.

  Well, of course, I thought.

  I heard from the hospital, with a dutiful report on Roger Pettefoy bouncing back. In the morning, I woke on my sofa across from Pooh, who glared from his, and I heard the sound of an airplane flying low. It was just light, it was Sunday morning, and I would have to be in the hospital to check on the kids, but not until nine or ten. I had five hours on my own, and I knew how I would spend them. Pooh lay still, pretending not to be there, until I was in the kitchen, making coffee. I heard his groan as he half slid and half fell onto the floor.

  By six I was in the car, parked at the intersection of Lester Scott’s road and mine. I walked through brush, keeping parallel to the road. I had my flashlight, but only used it with my hand cupped loosely over the lens. I wore a dark, heavy Irish sweater we had bought maybe fifteen years before in Clifden, and it almost fit. Putting it on, f
ighting my way up into its bulky sleeves, I had realized how little I’d been eating. I wore an old tan tweed cap, dark work gloves for no reason I could give, and I carried the heavy pocket knife I kept sharpened in case I had to do an emergency tracheotomy. I had carried it for years and never used it. I’d no idea why I brought it with me now. Maybe, if he shot me in the head, I would need to cut an airway in so I could breathe while dying.

  Of course, I was panting. I sweated heavily, and I imagined myself as pale, as radiating my feeble heat and light through the woods like a beacon. The light plane gargled and buzzed not far above, a couple of hundred feet, maybe less. I progressed by staggering, by falling, by taking short, uneven steps, by gasping and muttering, by pulling myself ahead, this hand on that branch, this foot pushing off that unsteady rock I hadn’t, anyway, seen in time to not fall on, but for all of my inability and fear, I felt something I can only describe as health.

  We’d heard the stories for years, and Arch Constantine had more or less repeated them, but with more detail. Although I live on shale, clay, and bony ridges, I also live on water. The high valley that runs along the spines of hills a thousand, two thousand, feet high has water that drains off it. These mountain streams continue as creeks and brooks and branches—so they’re named on the map—to the Chenango River and the Unadilla. These empty into the Susquehanna, and that runs as far as Chesapeake Bay, and there you are, from here—from this little nowhere anyone heard of—gone to everyplace else.

  Farmers with moving water of any reasonable depth are attached to the rest of the world, in other words. You can bring a shallow-draft boat up into river-bottom country. What you load it with is the marijuana you’ve been growing half a mile back off the road, out of sight of troopers and deputies, accessible only to the harvesters, who work there while they’re screened off by the harvesting of soy or corn, or the spreading of manure. So the marijuana is grown behind the grass, then it’s ferried to deeper waters, and it’s taken farther by lazy-day fishermen in Boston whalers through a system of rivers as complicated as a network of human nerves, or by high school dropouts in fast, converted cars who use the Onondaga reservation as a distribution hub for shipments north to Canada, south down the thruway to New York.

  The plane came back over. Why Mr. Lester Scott decided I was working for some antidrug agency couldn’t have had much to do with what he saw. I was a scrawny, middle-aged man who hung around with dogs. I never carried a shotgun or a rifle, never paid attention (I was told) to anyone nearby. I couldn’t have the look of a narc. I felt myself smile. I was flattered.

  I was also winded. I was also near the trailer. A yellow light lay around the doorway and the top outside step. I heard the jingle of the chain as Bear moved away from the trailer. I heard the click as Scott locked himself back in. Commando-Doc peering through the brush on the subject’s perimeter, I needed only cork blacking to look like an unmuscular joke about films. His small lot was perfectly rectangular, I thought; all the corners were right angles. A small shed—garbage and tools, no doubt—was plumb in its relation to the trailer. His woodpile was neat, and what he’d split of the mound of round sections was piled in face cords between studs he’d spiked into the ground. Moving around the lot, I saw at the back of the trailer a single cinder block step beneath the rear door. From it, I could see a trail. It probably went to his marijuana crop. I could follow the path, set his crop on fire, then steal back Bear while Scott was distracted. Since I didn’t smoke, however, and since my emergency rescue kit consisted of Agway reinforced gloves and the tracheotomy knife, I needed another plan.

  I stepped out onto the back of his lot. I would like to say I glided, but in my rubber-bottomed winter boots I thumped. I walked alongside the trailer and, at the corner that would take me around to the side of his wooden front steps, I paused. I hissed. I gave the low, coded whistle that would bring my dog and, if they held him back, the steps and trailer too. He paused, I whistled again, and then he bent again to lick his loins. So much for Lassie, so much for Lad and Rin-Tin-Tin.

  As I bit on my lips and tongue and cheeks, and worried what I could reach of my head for a practical thought, I found myself stepping around the corner and walking to my dog. I whispered, “Bear, goddammit.” Probably, the goddammit did the trick. He looked and stiffened, he leaned forward—they are all myopic until they’re blind—and then he galloped, ass high, tail corkscrewing, big jaws open in what everyone who owns a dog will call a smile.

  The chain scraped as it tightened at the step, and Bear winced, a step or two short of me. Scott had put him in a choker meant for a smaller dog. I could see the furrow in his fur as it bit. I pushed into him, and back, so that the pressure eased. He burrowed into me, put his paws on my shoulders as he tried to swallow my face, and knocked me over. So there I was, one hand hooked inside a binding choker chain, flat on my back with my black dog standing on my chest, inhaling my nose and mouth.

  I heard the trailer door open and a flat, thin voice: “Get away from Buddy. Get off of my land.”

  I lay back. Bear had gone stiff. I closed my eyes and I said, “Fuck you.”

  “I did grant you the sporting chance,” he said.

  I heard a soft sound, the closing of a little metal latch. I heard the grate of some other metal mechanism, and I opened my mouth and eyes at once. I was on my feet, and I don’t remember standing. I kneeled at Bear and worked to loosen the choker. He had retreated as far as he could from the porch, so he’d tightened it, and the only way I could set him free was to push him toward his captor. There was some kind of important Zen semiautomatic large-magazine coveting-of-property message in that action, I think I thought. Scott put six, seven, eight rounds into the earth around me. Bear growled low, but also drooped with fear. He shivered, and so did I, but without the growl. I finally somehow pulled the collar off, tearing away some of Bear’s ear. He screamed, and they later found a chunk ripped open where the ear meets the head.

  The plane flew low above us, and I heard other engines and so did Scott. A yellow power company truck was almost out of view where it idled, to the left of his house. I couldn’t see its cherry-picker crane, but as the yellow light inside his doorway vanished, I knew they were cutting his power off. A big ambulance slid up, and so did two navy blue state police cars, and then the red and white sheriff’s cars, one after another, maybe half a dozen, and then several unmarked cars pulled in. By then, I was holding Bear against my chest with his paws folded in against my arms.

  I said, “I’ll tell them you could have killed me and you didn’t. I’ll tell them how you fired into the ground.”

  He looked up at the plane as it returned. He raised the rifle and he fired. He said, as he shot, “A man gets a vote in this country. A man still gets a vote. Man good as niggers and DEA sneakthief undercover lawyers, keeping him from what’s his due and guaranteed Constitution rights. Spics in Talladega get the vote, and so do I.” He squeezed off round after round. I heard the cops calling, as if to warn, by sheer power of their cries, the unprotected pilot in his plane. I turned my back to Scott because I was afraid he was going to shoot us, and I didn’t want the dog to be my shield. I couldn’t move my feet. I knew I had wet my trousers, and then I felt the warm trickle as Bear took my cue. He didn’t feel heavy, though he must have weighed close to eighty pounds. It wasn’t his weight. It was my legs. They wouldn’t move. So I crouched with my back to Lester Scott as the plane came back—this time I heard the troopers and deputies cursing the pilot—and flew in, slow and low and large above us.

  Scott fired a round a second, it sounded like, and though I thought I was deafened by the noise of his rifle, I heard one of the lawmen call Down! at the same time that I heard Lester Scott say in his flat, uninflected voice, “I know you. I know you. I know who you are.” He fired twice again, and then the rescuers fired. They must have posted snipers with military rifles because two shots, which boomed and echoed in the forest, struck him at once. Imagine swatting a side of beef with a breadboa
rd. I heard the bullets go in. I was on my knees by then, unable to breathe. The right side of my back was numb, and I figured out, at about the time that I registered the second volley of shots—lower in register, tinnier—from everyone else firing, that one of the troopers or deputies had shot me. I figured it was a mistake, though you never know how angry someone in that situation might become at a civilian fouling their rural drug bust.

  It was a high adrenaline morning, all right, with men screaming commands through bullhorns, the airplane roaring back and forth, lower and lower, it sounded to me, and everything in my body pumping head to toe and side to side. I lay on top of Bear, unable to move. The numbness on my back had been replaced by a very deep and profoundly disabling pain. I didn’t think I could breathe anymore. I hadn’t the breathe to tell them. I knew the Bear, beneath me, hadn’t moved. So I didn’t, anyway, want them to pick me up. I lay as still as I could, shaking and feeling wet all over and breathing very shallowly. I heard them gabbling and laughing and commanding one another to perform all sorts of actions.

  Someone said, “Most of the motherfucker’s plastered onto the trailer, and the rest of the trailer is halfway shot to shit. I believe we have lowered the resale value for his motherfucking estate.” They laughed high up in their throats, and the smell of cigarette smoke poured over us.

  I was going to croak a brave and wounded doctor’s joke about smoking and its toll on one’s health. I remember that. I remember opening my mouth, timing myself against the pulses inside my ribs and under my lungs, but I couldn’t shape the big, hissing syllable I’d need to start with. The spotter plane went over, and then someone turned me. I gagged and started to cry, I’m afraid.

  It sounded like Arch Constantine, a deep voice in genuine sorrow. He said “Aw,” the way we said it as kids when something that seemed as important as our lives—a skate key, a baseball glove—was lost or stolen. He said “Doc.” Then he said “Aw” again. I drifted out and then came back to hear him tell me, “Here’s the gurney, Doc.”