The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  Given my academic record, no vocation-with-coat-and-tie plus prospects of a sleek-apartment-in-a-bigtime-city: two.

  Noplace to live except here, in trade for too much work, or at home, in exchange for enduring desperate lessons about life plus the long, silent evenings of a faltering marriage that ought to have died some time ago: three.

  Present prospects had dimmed for me with the rise, you would have to say, in immediate pleasures—landlady problems, you could call them: four.

  I apparently could not paint a picture unless I worked in a bright, heated studio, supplied like a locker room for the gifted and talented children of the managerial class, by a high-tuition college, and that was a kind of truth you had to face, I was beginning to think, or you might end up teaching design in community colleges and overdosing on whatever it was you could—now that you had some kind of salary—afford: five.

  She knocked five times, it seemed to me, and I am not kidding. I knew who it was, and I was spooked because she was there and because it felt as though she was reading my mind.

  She came in, as I expected her to, and, as I expected her to, she said, “Oh, Jesus Christ. How can we let you live like this?” I wasn’t surprised that she was a little tipsy.

  She wore a red wool mackinaw with black designs, the kind of hunting coat somebody would have used twenty-five years before. She wore a long-billed red woolen hat with earflaps, and old black woolen gloves. Her face was shiny and flushed, her crinkly, bright brown hair had bits of ice in it, and her eyes were wide and light. When she took the hat off and beat it against the side of her leg, ice flew up into the light and disappeared, and her hair sprang out, giving her face a wild look, as if she reacted with shock to something nobody else could see. I smelled the sweetness of the Manhattans she drank, and the smoke from their kitchen woodstove and from her cigarettes.

  “You mind if I drop in?” she said, unbuttoning the coat.

  “Want some soup?”

  “Is that what that is.”

  “I dug the potatoes up in your garden,” I said, staring into the pot. “You don’t mind, right?”

  “You must be strong as an ox to get to them. Well, you are. The ground’s so damned hard, David. You know, we’d have given you potatoes. And—whatever. Soup. Dinner whenever you want it. I keep telling you that.”

  I nodded. “Would you like some?”

  She kept her coat on. “It’s awfully damned cold in here.”

  “There isn’t any heat.”

  “We’ll get electric baseboard heating installed. Come spring. The land will sell by then. Property sells better in the spring. We’ll have some money, and we’ll make you comfortable. We promised that.”

  I nodded.

  “But you’ll have left by then, you’re saying.”

  I said, “You know, Rebecca, I don’t have any idea. I don’t have plans for anything except the wall, and maybe building you some raised beds for the garden.”

  She was standing closer, then, directly behind me, and then she was leaning in on me, first against my back and then against the rest, holding on from behind with an arm around my waist. It made me uncomfortable that a woman who once had been married and who wore an antique coat like that would feel the need to hug me. I guess you would say I felt unworthy.

  “Tell me more about raised beds. They sound fascinating,” she said, running her hand up under my shirt. I felt her cold nose at the back of my neck and I felt the words against my nape as she said them. “Whatever they are,” she said, “you build us some.”

  “Your mother won’t shell out for the lumber. She won’t ever fix this place. She hates me. She thinks I’m a wastrel and the last of the hippies and the seducer of her kid,” I said.

  “Don’t be insulting,” she said. “You never seduced me. Yes, you did. But I knew you didn’t mean to. You were respectful. You pay your respects, and you stand there being shaggy and a little shy, and people sometimes, anyway, no matter their intentions or any of that, they fall in—whatchamacallit.”

  “Did you ever think of that as scary?”

  “It’s the word you’re scared of,” she said. “You’re saving it for Miss Plexiglas Maidenhead of the Short Attention Span. But that’s fine. Really. Let’s say fall into ... flesh. That’s what happens when people get to be postgraduates.”

  “You always talk about how old you are,” I said.

  “Postgraduate, I said. Who said anything about old?”

  “No, you’re afraid that you’re the scary older woman.”

  “I’d just as soon you do not predict my intentions or supply me with meanings. What happens,” she said against the back of my neck, “is that people fall into flesh.”

  I turned off the stove. She was pulling on me and my leg went back for support, and she pushed her groin against it as she dragged me by the waist, and I started to fall. She straightened and caught me, big as I was, because she was a strong woman and she liked to prove her strength. I pushed off, turned, and we were standing straight again. I put my hands inside her jacket.

  She hissed because I had touched bare skin. I said, “No wonder you’re cold.” She pulled me toward the built-in bed a few feet from the stove.

  “You aren’t resisting,” she asked. “We could cancel the rest of the badinage and just enjoy ourselves. Do you think?”

  “I’m not resisting,” I said.

  “I’m not resisting either,” she said.

  I tried to say how grateful I was, and how worried about my gratitude, and how she turned my temperature up like an oven. But the idea of saying it and of knowing she had heard it would make me sad. What happened a lot, that year, was that I worried about making myself sad and then about permitting myself too much pleasure. It was like taking care of a sick roommate, or a patient, except that he was me. The lights were on, but we closed our eyes. You always want a little darkness when you go to bed with someone who’s a stranger you will probably never know much better but who you like a lot. You end up watching yourself and each other, which is what you need, together, to get past. And I knew her well enough to know that the end of anything at all could make her sad—of her marriage some years ago, of her father’s life last year, of her twenties this year, of her mother’s money, of whatever she and I were caught in, and probably, I thought, of what she would describe as the end of her happiness or sanity or something immense and dreadful to conclude.

  “You don’t need to call Julia those Miss Whatever names,” I said, “do you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Very much. Absolutely very much. She’s got training-bra spring in her tits, and she’s got you forlorn. Yes, I do.”

  “You don’t even need a bra, Rebecca. Look at you.”

  When she looked down at herself, as I looked up her chest, beneath me, where we lay, her eyes nearly crossed. She put her hands on herself and said, “They’re hard as ice.”

  “It’s the cold.”

  “So, David,” she said, “let’s be practical. Get me warm here, will you?”

  It was Rebecca in the darkness I wanted, so I pulled the covers up over us, and I also closed my eyes. I lay inside her, and she lay beneath me inside her dead father’s hunting coat. Later on, I thought that we hadn’t solved very much between us, and then, still later, after she had gone to the house, as I stood at the stove in the smell of natural gas and of her whiskey and vermouth and cigarettes and soap while the soup slowly cooked, I thought that we hadn’t done so badly at what it is you do when the weather is bad, and prospects are slim, and it is best to not be wholly on your own.

  The next morning, there was some kind of dazzle in the sky. The clouds were milky and low in a blanket, and little flecks of sun broke through. They made me think of the flecks of ice in Rebecca’s hair as she shook them off in the dull light of the trailer. They also made me think of the gray-white plastic walls of the trailer, which were flecked with a gold-colored paint. I noticed the sky, and then the low gray car that was parked behind the kid’s cabin at
the motel. It looked as though it had been in a fire, or as though whitewash had been dumped all over it and badly cleaned off. I wondered if the stains on his jacket had something to do with the charred look of the car, an old Pontiac with busted springing in the back which suggested that someone had used it for hauling heavy freight over long distances.

  I lugged and wrestled a long, flat rock that would serve as a kind of keystone for the wall, at what was once, years before, the beginning of their driveway, when they kept it paved and when anyone drove on it to visit them. The wall would be about three feet high and would separate their land from the road for a hundred feet, ending at the other end of their former driveway, near the stone house where Rebecca and Mrs. Josephine Peete managed a very small estate, mostly by selling off parcels of their property. They were in a corner of what had been hundreds of acres. They were the only year-round residents, and in winter, without the protection of foliage and brush, they could see the A-frames and faux-Victorian cottages of their neighbors.

  The kid backed from the door of his cabin as I loaded a wheelbarrow with rocks to set out in a bottom layer leading from the keystone. He didn’t come down the steps to wait for the bus, and he didn’t wear his backpack. That was how I knew it was Saturday morning.

  “Hey,” I called across the road.

  He looked at me, but his face showed no expression and he didn’t reply.

  “I live over here,” I said. “In the little trailer in there.” I pointed in the general direction of the pine trees. “How’s it going?” I asked, trying to sound like an all-right person.

  He studied me, and then he took his hands out of his coat pockets and lifted them a little way into the air before him and, with no expression, shrugged. He looked like a miniature man who indicated that fate would have its say.

  “I’m David,” I said. “I work at this place.”

  His hands were back in his pockets and his pointed, pale face gave me nothing.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s time to work.”

  I fitted the stones together right. I knew how to do that because all I ever did right as a kid was build. I’d constructed a fortress near my parents’ place in South Jersey, narrow but tall, maybe fourteen feet high, made of wood on a stone foundation—not drypoint, like this one, but made solid with mortar—and it still was there. My mother reported on it when she and my father came to see me, after I had finally graduated. She’d been kneeling at the little refrigerator in my trailer, putting packets of food inside, and she had just told me how my fort still stood, when she began to cry. I thought she was crying about the size of the trailer, the smell of it, the pretty powerful sense it radiated that, living in it, you had given up on acquiring a future. I didn’t ask her, though. I sat back at the little fold-up table and let her pretend not to cry while she, down at the refrigerator, pretended not to know that I observed her weeping. Giving that kind of privacy to each other can be almost as good as a set of walls, or a door you can close behind you. My father had never learned about it, and pretty soon he was standing behind her, almost shouting down onto her head. “Lily! What? What’s wrong?” He turned to look at me, and something about my face—maybe the nothing I tried to compose on it—made him think about shooting me, or slugging me, or shouting. “Lil,” he said, “tell me.”

  When I looked up from the second barrow load, the kid was on the Peetes’ side of the county road, and he was watching me.

  “I guess you’re allowed to cross the road,” I said. “Your mother lets you do that? Your father?”

  He said, “Traffic here is surprisingly light.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Surprisingly light.”

  “Yes. There isn’t very much of it at all.”

  “No,” he said, moving his arms, “and you don’t see a great deal of commercial traffic, do you? I would say it’s mostly residential.”

  “That’s what I would say too,” I said. I was on my knees, and they were growing cold, but I was afraid that I would startle him if I rose. “So how’s school?”

  “School is a responsibility,” he said. “Some things—you just soldier on. Do you know that expression?”

  “I think I’ve heard it used,” I said. “And that’s what you do on schooldays? You soldier on?”

  He nodded.

  “You don’t like it, though.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” he said. “It’s what I’m supposed to do, so I do it. School’s all right. Are you a college student?”

  “No,” I said, “but I used to be.”

  “What exactly are you?”

  “I’m the handyman,” I said. “I do the chores for Mrs. Peete.”

  “Like building a fence,” he said.

  “This is going to be a wall, actually. You can use it as a fence, but it’s a wall.”

  “How do you know the difference?”

  “Well, I know because I’m building it. You’ll know because I told you.”

  “And I might tell someone else,” he said. “So they would know.” His lips looked swollen, his skin seemed almost blue beneath its pallor. His hands were broad, with long fingers, and he kept returning them to the pockets of his coat. “So if it keeps a person out, it acts like a fence. But it’s a wall.”

  “This baby is nothing but wall,” I said. “So I told you, right? And I told you my name?”

  “David.”

  “So now you can tell me yours.”

  “All right.” He looked at the ground before him, and I wondered if he was making one up. Finally, he said, “Artie.”

  “Artie what?”

  “Artie Arthur.”

  “Glad to meet you, Artie.”

  He said, “Hi.”

  “I hope you don’t mind my noticing,” I said, “but I really couldn’t help it. There being so little traffic around here to look at. I’ve seen you leave for school.”

  “Bus 26.”

  “And I’ve seen you come home on it.”

  “Well, it’s my bus,” he said. “Number 26.”

  “Yeah. No, I was wondering, when you get home from school is there anyone around to say hello? Or goodbye when you, you know, start to soldier on?”

  His face was almost purple, the blush coming in over that milky skin with blue beneath it. “Nobody’s neglecting me,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t think so. Absolutely not. I don’t need to hear anything,” I said. “Zero is good enough for me.”

  “Zero probability,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Zero as a base.”

  “All right.” But he had nothing more to say except, after a while, “I have to go.”

  “I’ll cross you,” I said.

  “The traffic here is surprisingly light,” he said, “so there’s no need to bother.”

  “Surprisingly light,” I said. “Catch you later.”

  He removed his right hand from his pocket and he waved it as an infant would, holding it before him and opening and closing his fist.

  “Bye-bye,” I said.

  He looked to his right, then to his left, and he dashed for the motel grounds and his cabin, admitting himself with the brass key on the oval tag. At the door, he turned to look across the road. “Domicile,” he called, sweeping his arm about him, and then he went in.

  I arranged a few more barrow loads, and Mrs. Peete drove past as I worked, her face set and her eyes wide with panic. She would not have agreed with Artie Arthur about the traffic on our road. Even the memory of traffic was enough to undo her. And my presence didn’t help. I worked for a while longer, then got myself away from the vicinity of the house, now that Mrs. Peete was gone. If I didn’t, I would drift up the driveway and finally I would knock at the door, hoping that Rebecca would be in. And then I would have to admit to myself what I had done, and I would be forced to guess why, and then I would be stuck with my answer, either making up lies to contradict it, or agreeing with myself about my needs. At that time of my life, I was bent
on the conquest of many of my needs, among them the falling into anything, even, sometimes, what Rebecca referred to as the flesh. It was what I had decided to aim for—speaking of fences and walls—after Julia secured her passport and cried the night before she left, and didn’t cry in the morning, and then was gone.

  I took myself down the road, away from their house, and into the hummocky field, through which I walked to the swamp behind it. Hundreds of trees had come down over the years, leaving only dozens standing, and most of them dying or dead. Everything there was a kind of icy gray—the surface of the water, the vegetation on top of and around it; even the gigantic flying dinosaur, the blue heron who roosted in one of the trees, was gray. The air coming over the water was steady and cold. I had never been to Central America, but when I thought of Julia living with some kind of not-quite-royal person who was dedicated to aiding the orphans of war-torn states, I thought of this kind of damp wind and this kind of desolate countryside. She would be brave and beautiful in it, and he would be earnest, and at night they would drink some kind of brandy and list their good deeds and then devour each other’s body in some bullet-pocked hotel room. The heron was at the far side of the swamp now, in the top limbs of a dead aspen. He looked to be about a million years old.

  I went a little closer to the swamp, ducking under evergreen branches and the leafless branches of oaks. Closer, I could see something green in the water, and I wondered if spring was really so close. I was very tired, I realized, of clenching myself against the cold. It was not vegetation, though I thought I could smell some. It seemed to be cloth. I went as close as I could, with the toes of my boots almost in water, and I saw that the cloth was in layers, green and bright blue, red and white stripes, a good deal of white. Near a tamarack still without needles, but with black-green buds on it, I saw a large oblong green garbage pail. I squatted at the edge and studied the cloth. It might be clothing. It might be someone wearing it. I thought, of course, about Artie Arthur and whoever he might no longer live with. I thought, too, of the burnt car that had parked near his cabin. Julia would lead me to the cabin and knock on the door and make inquiries. Rebecca would insist on our conferring in bed, or at least in a clinch. I would have done either, I suspected, with either of them.