All I could think to say that morning—I heard my voice; it sounded like a kind of wounded groan—was “Oh. Hello.”
Dottie, on her way into the kitchen, said, “Hello to you. That was pretty enthusiastic for first thing in the morning.”
It wasn’t you, Dot. It was the one I loved. It was the daughter of the one I loved. It was dead people. That’s my job: meet ’em and greet ’em. Hello.
I put the cigarette out against the wall of my restaurant and stripped it, letting the tobacco and paper fly in the wind. I put the filter in my pocket. I wondered how many ash marks pocked the wall outside the kitchen. I went back in, tucked and groomed in the men’s room, wiped the sink clean, and rearranged the white cotton washcloths we folded on a table to be used as towels. Then I went to visit my customers. I managed, by striking off at odd angles, to save until the last the table of three or, depending on how you feel about it, four, one of whom was a woman who could have been the twin of the picture I had seen in the paper. Note this: she was not Courtney or a sister. I could see the differences—a dimpling of chin, a fullness at the neck, the closeness of this woman’s eyes compared to Courtney’s and Tamara’s.
Nevertheless, how is that for extracorporeal life? Most nights, you sell food and drink and it’s deposited in verifiable flesh. Here, in twelve hours, I had seen two ghosts, and one of them ate a steak of swordfish marinated in oil, white wine, thyme, marjoram, salt, and red pepper flake, accompanied by a scallion risotto and roasted carrots along with a glass of house white at a table one quarter of which was occupied by somebody dead.
The pictures had been moved. The one of the dead fellow walking with his rucksack was, despite the absence of his face, facedown. The other lay near the son, Kent, who was finishing the last of a Black Angus steak we sear on a grill over hardwood and dried grapevines. A good bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the Vieux Telegraphe, was close to his plate. His mother had given up on her grilled fresh sardines. She was drinking mineral water. Her Scotch was unfinished. She looked to be tasting something spiny and corrosive. As I came up, and Linda’s face assumed its look of amusement, I heard the old woman say, “And then, every time, in spite of my best efforts, I remember the dishonesty and disloyalty. How can I forgive them? And I try. You compartmentalize your life, and soon you get locked in one of the compartments. And I was locked in another. And guess who’d kept the key?” She raised the mineral water, then put it down. “Still,” she said.
Luc hurried past. He was sweating through his shirt and his face ran slick. His eyes were huge, and I couldn’t imagine his being able to see for the constant batting of his eyelids. I held a finger in the air, which was normally a sufficient signal for my waiters. It meant they must meet me at the back corner of the service bar now.
Linda said, “Is everything all right, Peter?”
“Aren’t you kind to ask, madame,” I said. “It’s a busy night. I must seem preoccupied. Forgive me. Are you pleased? Are we pleasing you tonight?” I had to look at her—I don’t know. Yes: I had to look at her encyclopedically. I did. I looked at the way her throat creased when she moved her head. I looked at the folding of flesh at her wrists when she moved her flatware. I looked at the width of her shoulders, the size of her muscled upper arms, the flatness of her barely arched brows.
She said, “What?”
I fled the question. “And you, madame?” I asked her mother-in-law. “Sir?” I said to the son.
Most of a bottle of wine was in his answer: “Ask him.”
“Pardon?”
“You didn’t ask him.” He pointed with his fork at the photographs on the table. Luc went past again, and I raised my finger. He nodded, raised his finger in reply, and all but loped for the kitchen. Tonight, Luc was the amphetamine king, I thought. Tomorrow, he was on probation or canned, I didn’t yet know which. I carefully did not look at the woman who smelled so good, who smiled so cruelly, and who bore the face of the woman whose face on her daughter had greeted my day.
The old lady’s lips were pursed. It was as if she fought a pain. She looked at her son and then at the photographs. She shook her head. The son gestured again with his fork. I looked at the unused place setting. He was there, of course, though I didn’t see him. The son did. So did the widow. I didn’t watch to see where the daughter-in-law looked. Though the rest of them couldn’t see who sat in Linda’s place, I knew, and I didn’t want to know, and I stood in silence, my hands clasped before the waist of my lightweight midnight-blue tuxedo, a man of admittedly studied elegance who tried to smile for the clients. Who couldn’t, though.
“Cat’s got his whatever,” the son said.
From out of the kitchen came Luc. He seemed to roll, as if on casters, across the floor. He moved with grace, the burden of his upper body cradled on stiff muscles, while his hips and thighs moved flexibly to cushion his cargo’s ride. I saw another waiter, Charles, and the barman, Raymond, as they watched Luc move. They were timing it, as they so often did. I had trained my staff well. By the time he’d arrived behind the old woman, then had moved around her and into her line of sight, the kid from the kitchen, Raymond and Charles had stepped forward.
Luc had listened well to my parting instructions. “We would like, ’sieurs-dames, to present, for the celebration of your birthday, this token of our absolutely happiest wishes.” His voice sounded ever so slightly as if he’d been sucking helium. His eyes goggled as his mouth moved. He bowed, sweating and red-faced, over the small gâteau made with no flour and crushed almonds and imported apricot preserve on which five token candles flared. “And may I ask whose birthday it is?”
The old woman looked at the cake. I saw again how thin and stretched her pale, frayed skin was. Her mouth was open. Her son, lying back in his chair, slowly lifted his soiled white napkin. I thought he might drape it over his face, but he carefully wiped his lips and pointed to the empty chair. I did not look at the daughter-in-law.
Luc strode to stand between the daughter-in-law and the photographs. He looked at me. I shook my head. He didn’t know what I meant. Neither did I. He sang, in his drug-enriched tenor, “Happy birthday to you—” And Charles and Raymond joined him, and so did the boy who made the salads, and so did several diners at tables nearby.
Luc mumbled some sounds as he realized he didn’t know the birthday celebrant’s name. He bestowed the cake on the table, he bowed, and he left to offer service to hungry people who awaited him. The other men went back to their work.
“I am so sorry,” I told the old woman. For she had been betrayed again. “It was a misunderstanding.”
“Yes,” she said. I tried to meet her faded, angry eyes.
The son cleared his throat. He held the photographs. He looked at them with a sorrow I found familiar.
The daughter-in-law’s expression was only a little puzzled. I realized she’d seen how susceptible I was to her. She wondered why, but not too much. She didn’t mind my appetite. She said to me, “Misunderstanding?”
“Yes,” the old woman said, “it always is.”
THE BABY IN THE BOX
IT WASN’T HIS JOB, it wasn’t his job, but there he went, in the only vehicle left, a blown-out Suburban with a hundred thousand miles on it and the seat pushed so far forward his belly rubbed against the wheel. He was fighting with the wheel instead of loving it. His father said that when he taught him to drive twenty-five years ago. Love the wheel, be gentle on the wheel, keep your hands on the wheel like you’re touching the tits on a girl you’re scared that will make you stop.
“Fucking dwarf,” he shouted as he pushed the truck around the long, uneasy loop of dark, slick county road between the cutoff to Si Bingham Road and the farm track called Cemetery Road in spite of its sign saying Upper Ravine. He was cursing the mechanic, a nephew of the sheriff, who changed the oil and filters on the deputies’ cars and who claimed he could change a timing belt and who couldn’t. His legs were short. At the station they called him Chicken Man because he walked with his neck
stretched and his shoulders back and his knees stiff, thinking it made him look taller. It made him look like a grease-stained, white-faced freak with those dead white eyelashes and knees that didn’t work. He pushed the seats all the way up when he test-drove the vehicles so his legs would reach the pedals, and he was a chicken-legged runt.
Pumping the brakes with not much hope because the pedal was almost on the floor to begin with, he remembered the Suburban was in the garage because of a master cylinder leak. So he was going to die, probably burning, when the truck went off the road into trees or those big rocks at the entrance to the snowmobile trail at the mouth of the state forest when the brakes failed and he rolled, and sprayed gas onto the manifold, and exploded.
He didn’t pretend that he knew what was happening to the county or his job in it or the world. But he knew nothing much worked right, and on his night shift, often alone at the station, he smoked so much that his tongue felt burned and his chest ached and he recognized he was scared as much as he’d ever been in his life, including his months on patrol in South Korea with an Army platoon of psychopaths, illiterates, and whore dogs.
The rear end of the Suburban swung out as the county road dropped into the valley that ran up to Sheridan Hill Road, where he thought he had to turn. He considered trying to reach someone on the radio. He grabbed the transmitter, then pushed it back hard into its clamp. There wasn’t anyone to reach. He was the dispatcher. His chair was empty. His illegal public work place cigarette was probably just going out, his coffee maybe wasn’t quite ice-cold. He had left a note in the station logbook. He had traced over his letters several times with the county ballpoint pen, darkening the words until he’d torn through the page, so there would be no mistaking the emergency that had sent him away from his post. He blinked when he remembered what he had written: Baby in box. That was because he couldn’t remember whether you spell dumpster with a p and it embarrassed him to look uneducated. He snorted and almost blew his nose onto his uniform. He was always finding something, his father pointed out, to get embarrassed by. “You might be better off not thinking,” his father had said, making the face he made when he swallowed some of his drink.
“I could follow in your footsteps,” he hadn’t answered his father.
So they were down to four patrols at night, with the backup emergency vehicle still without a transmission because of course the chicken-legged white-faced son of a bitch was a liar as well as incompetent and he could no sooner change a timing belt than do a hip joint transplant.
And there was no one on overtime clerical work at night to help them catch up because they were cut down on clerical help during days as it was. And the sheriff himself was in Albany with a dozen other sheriffs to lobby against the new budget cuts. And the state police were all on call in Oxford, where the deputies had also gone, because a maintenance man laid off by the sheriff’s department had been turned down by Wal-Mart for a clerking job and had purchased a rifle at Wal-Mart’s excellent discount and had taken hostage several hundred thousand square feet filled with appliances, bright-colored dishes, pet food, plastic toys, and cheap clothes.
“We’re biting our tails here,” he’d said to the woman on the phone. “We’re turned around in a complete circle, three hundred and sixty-five degrees, and we’re shooting each other in Oxford, lady. I don’t have anyone to send.”
“Who is this?” Like she had a right to know and maybe she was going to dock him two weeks’ pay or something. “What’s your name?”
“My name is not the point, ma’am.” He tried to be polite because everything you said on the line was recorded.
She said, “It’s three hundred and sixty degrees. You got it mixed up with three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Anyway, it’s really a hundred and eighty degrees, if that’s what you mean.”
“If what’s what I mean, ma’am?”
“The turning-around thing. Look. We found a baby in the dumpster and you have to send somebody. A nurse. EMTs and the ambulance—”
“You found a baby in a dumpster, you say.”
“I don’t say. I mean, we really found it. We heard it crying.”
“Jesus,” he had said.
“Amen,” she said.
“What I’m telling you, there isn’t anybody here.”
“How can there not be anybody there? Isn’t the sheriff’s department one of those places there is somebody there? Isn’t that—what’s it called—government?”
“Restructuring, ma’am. The new budget thing, the contract, I believe they’ve been calling it?”
“We’re doing that here? In this county? Tonight?”
“I believe we are, ma’am. We can’t even use the copier without permission now.”
“This is a very small baby and she doesn’t seem to be healthy. Of course, a little time in a dumpster in November can cure you of being healthy.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he had said. Now, as he turned off, and the Suburban wobbled, and he headed uphill toward where he thought their house might be, he wondered whose baby it could be, and how you threw one away. Did you pitch it up and into the dumpster on the run? Would you climb inside the dumpster’s high walls and lay it there? What did you say when the time came to climb back over it and get out and onto the road?
He had said to her, “I’ll find you someone.”
“I knew you would,” she’d said.
“How come?”
“You sounded slightly human is why.”
So there he was, slightly human and slightly in control of a huge Suburban that was slightly losing brake fluid and slightly on the way to rescuing a baby that a person had put in a dumpster filled with maybe green garbage and cat vomit or, say, furring strips with nails sticking out and busted Sheetrock and old insulation with mouse turds all over it like raisins in a cake.
He finally did switch the radio on and turn it to the tactical band. He heard the state cops in Oxford and a voice he thought he recognized as the day shift supervisor for the sheriff’s department. No one was asleep, and they were all about forty miles south and more than busy. And he was here. They would talk about him failing to man his position. They would talk about the calls coming in that he was not there to answer. Maybe one of the off-duty clerks would decide to come by. Maybe Chicken Man would walk stiff-legged in his sleep and come take the calls. Maybe no one would call.
“My name—you asked me for my name,” he’d said.
“All right,” she’d said, “but that was when I was going to try and get you fired.”
“It’s Ivan. It’s Ivanhoe, but I don’t use it. Ivan Krisp.”
“But really Ivanhoe,” she’d said. “It’s a very unusual name. Do you spell the crispy part with a c?”
HE RAN OFF the road about half a mile away from her house. He’d been driving fast on Sheridan Hill Road when the surface curved and dipped at once. He’d seen moonlight on wet shale and had pushed the brake pedal down to the floor, figuring he wouldn’t get much pressure because of the leak. It had been perfectly amateur maneuvering, and he’d slewed right and gone nose down a few dozen yards past the shoulder into a young stand of hardwood, taking some trees down and whacking his chin on the wheel.
“Okay,” he said. “You’re not hurt.”
His knees did hurt, though, and he was afraid he was going to walk like Chicken Man for the rest of his life. His head was beating, and his chin was bleeding, his hands were wet with his own blood from cupping his face and rubbing it. Probably he looked like somebody shot in the brains. Good way to be sure of keeping Ivan Krisp alive, he thought, is you shoot him in the brains.
Bigger-bellied than when he was young, if you said it kindly, and lard-assed and gut-hung if you talked like a sheriff’s deputy commenting on the department night dispatcher’s physique, he fought his way out of the door and up, on his hands and very sore knees, to Sheridan Hill Road. He continued to answer a sheriff’s department emergency call by responding, as it happened, at one. A.M. of a very bright night
in November, on foot. He called out Whoooooo! Which was his rendition of a siren, but it hurt his face and he shut up.
He sped on call, a public servant responding to the public’s need, by trundling on his banged-up legs so fast his belly wobbled and his chest ached. He couldn’t quite catch his breath, and he had to stop and open his coat to bend over, heaving for air. This will be the way we do it in the new restructuring, he thought: chubby men with funny names would go out on foot to answer calls for assistance. They could carry whistles, and every time they panted they could blow the whistle so vehicular traffic would know to pull over and wait on the side of the road until they were past. You call them, and you could lose a family member, convert to a new religion, develop a hobby, move to another county and leave the empty house for sale before the sheriff’s department showed up, he thought. He stopped and caught his breath, or some of it, and lit a cigarette, and coughed so hard on the first hard hook of smoke into his lungs he almost threw up. That’s government, he thought.
It was almost two by the time he reached the house. It was a low farmhouse with yellow aluminum siding and a dark green dumpster, one of the long ones, outside on the side of the road, hard against the front of the garage. The outside lights on the house and garage lit the road up, along with the pale blue of the moon. Lights were on in the house. He waited at the door to wipe his face and catch his breath. He listened for the cries of an infant.
The woman who came to the door said, “My God, what happened to your face, Deputy?”
He looked at the blood on his hands. “I had a little fender-bender a ways down there, toward County 29? Cracked my chin on the wheel, and it might not have stopped yet.”
“I’d say not,” she said.
“Chins and foreheads,” he said. “They look worse than they feel. Though I have to admit it feels terrible.”
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 37
