The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  “I thought of you,” Patrick said. “I did. I thought about you and Les in your new house and you in your new job. I thought about Pop all alone. He’d be so bad at that, I thought. And I was right. He eats bologna on white bread with mayonnaise. That’s his dinner, some nights. With a can of light beer to wash it down in front of the TV.”

  “He knows how to eat intelligently. He knows how to cook. I’m not his mother.”

  “No. You’re mine.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “And that’s why you’re here.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Because I own a Colt Arms AR15. If I didn’t own it, you wouldn’t be here, right?”

  “I’d have waited until you invited me.”

  “You’re always welcome, Momma.” He looked to her like someone else, and she wanted to cry out a warning to him, tell him that he was disappearing, that he needed to return. “Just like I should know I’m always welcome in your house in your new life with Les, who is such an experienced traveler and he knows about mooses.”

  There was one window in the room, a beautiful twelve-over-twelve with crazed glass and mullions probably gone to pulp. She imagined that it would sell for more than a month’s rent if the wood, through some miracle, hadn’t completely rotted. The light that came in was like the water you look up through when you open your eyes at the bottom of the pond. She could see him by it, and, turning, she could see a knapsack and a duffel bag hung from nails spiked into the walls. Behind them and across the wide room was an old, dark veneer closet with no doors, and, in a corner of the closet, as she looked over her shoulder, she saw the weapon’s ugly mechanisms, dull but a little lit by what was left of the window light that spilled into her son’s room.

  “Do they give you a bathroom here?”

  “Downstairs, in the back corner. You want me to show you?”

  She shook her head. “I’m all right.”

  “Momma, you are always all right. You land on your feet.”

  “Dearie, no, I didn’t fall. I just kept living my life is all.”

  “Pop said you fell in love. That’s falling.”

  “It wasn’t falling, though, so much—what I’m saying about the next thing? That’s what it was. That’s what it felt like. ‘Oh! We’re here now. We aren’t there anymore.’ It wasn’t about your father, all of a sudden. It was Les. I even tried to not let it be, but it was. And it couldn’t be Bernard. It couldn’t be your father. No matter how I wanted things to work.”

  “Shit just happens and have a nice day. The kid used to say that, PFC Hopkins, the one that I lost. He used to say that when he fired his weapon or when they opened up on us. ‘Have a nice day, motherfucker.’ He was the boy that I lost in Falluja, doing house-to-house.”

  “No, you didn’t lose him, dearie. They shot him. The officers told you what to do and you did it and he got wounded.”

  “No, he was plain damned killed. He bled out while he kept on moving his feet. Never stopped until, you know, he stopped. I was fire team leader and he was my SAW gunner and they just hollowed him out. I tried to stop the bleeding with my hand, but there wasn’t anyplace to put it. You’re supposed to apply pressure. Right. Apply pressure. But on what?”

  She knew that tears ran down her face. She wished that Patrick could cry, too, though she had her suspicions that crying might not do all the good she used to think. It did help you realize that you were miserable, she knew. Maybe that was useful information. But she wanted to stop crying because she didn’t know what tears might goad him to do. This was new between them, part of the so much unfamiliarity. That, she thought, was also something worth weeping about.

  “Patrick, what’s the danger?”

  He motioned with one hand, sweeping it before him. He smiled, but his dark eyes told her nothing.

  “Really. You told your father there was danger lurking.”

  “And he told you?”

  “Well, we’re worried, dearie. Guns make people worry. And you came home troubled. So naturally we’d talk about that. As your parents. As—because we love you.”

  “But you didn’t send Les,” he said, “your new next thing, with his travel experience, and knowing a lot about life.”

  “This is about us,” she said, thinking that the words had come out in a whine.

  Patrick said, “Wrong us. This is about reservist PFC Arthur M. Hopkins of Rome, New York. And rifleman Sweeney Sweeney of Madison, and PFC Danny Levine out of Gloversville, the ones who were not KIA. And me. I was the corporal let us get separated from the squad. I was the one directed our fire onto a little square sheep-shit hut, and I was the one got us shot to wet fucking rags. That’s the us.”

  She said, “And that’s the danger? Why you needed to buy the gun?”

  “Why not? It’s a reason. It’ll do. That better not be Les,” he said, his emptied face lifting as slow, heavy footfalls sounded on the raw lumber stairs.

  But she knew the weight and pace of the sound of the steps, and she knew that Bernard would appear at the door, a little out of breath, a little wide-eyed because he stared so hard when he was worried—a tall, broad, decent man she had tried to live with after losing every reason except gratitude, regret, and this lean, sad man who was their boy once.

  “Hi,” Bernard said. “I had to come. I couldn’t not come. Is that okay?”

  She stood and went to the doorway and kissed his cheek. She knew that he’d close his eyes. “You smell nice,” she said.

  “A different soap is all.”

  “Well, good,” she said, patting his chest, then stepping back. “Patrick was talking about Falluja.”

  “Terrible,” Bernard said.

  “That’s because of the sweeps they had to send us on,” Patrick said. “House-to-house is terrible in any place. The hajis are good at ambush. You get your unit isolated, and you are pretty fast all fucked up. They smell how all alone you get to feel. Not PFC Hopkins. He just said, ‘Have a nice day, motherfucker,’ and he sent over one long burst of 5.56 and then he died, all scooped out, that kid.” Patrick lit a cigarette and said, “I wish I had another chair for all the parents that are here.”

  “We’re good,” Bernard said.

  She said, “It’s fine, dearie.”

  “Okay,” Patrick said, “good and fine, then. But you don’t have to hover here, you know. I think I know what I must sound like. I think I sound like I’m blaming you for not being there, in Falluja. I’m not. Really. I wouldn’t want you there, all scared and doing your duty and shit. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. This is—I must be scary enough.” She heard his throat close down and she watched him blink and blink, his dark eyes suddenly as wide as his father’s.

  Bernard said, “Is this the post-traumatic—”

  “Private First Class Hopkins didn’t mention any open-sphincter stress syndrome while he was getting dead,” Patrick said, “so I would just as soon skip it, Pop. Nothing personal. I didn’t mean to insult you, right? You’re my man. Only ...” He crushed the butt into the coffee cup with the other butts and he lit a new one. “I apologize, Pop.”

  “No,” Bernard said, “I’m good.”

  “And Momma’s fine. And I am good to go. What?”

  Bernard had walked across to the veneer clothing cupboard. He squatted, and she heard his ligaments take the strain. “This is it,” he said. “I don’t see the clip. This does take a clip, am I right?”

  “We call them magazines,” Patrick said. “Mags. I’ve got a couple.”

  “It’s safety precautions, keeping them separate from the weapon,” Bernard told her.

  “I don’t see anything safe about it,” she said. “It’s ugly. It’s frightening.”

  “It’s efficient,” Patrick said. He drew in smoke, then said, “You’re thinking I’m going to open that window and set a pillow on the sill, then insert a mag and lean the weapon on the pillow and do some wild-ass-vet-on-a-rampage deal with people out there suddenly all falling down. But no wa
y. Do you know where we are? Greater downtown Earlville, New York, folks. There’s nobody out there.”

  “But Patrick,” she said, “you wouldn’t do it anywhere. You wouldn’t do it anyway. It isn’t you.”

  “No, Momma.”

  “Patrick, boy,” Bernard said, “you bought it. You went someplace on purpose and you bought it for plenty of money that you had to set down onto some gun dealer’s table.”

  “You’re right, Pop. I have to admit that.”

  She remembered them standing side by side and looking up at Patrick as he leaned over a rifle that he aimed at them. They were in the side yard of their first place, a tall Victorian farmhouse on a half an acre of land in a little hamlet that wasn’t very far from Earlville. It was summer, and Patrick had been working for weeks on his fort. As an eleventh birthday gift, they had opened an account in his name at the lumberyard, and Patrick had purchased small lots of planking and studs, an expensive framing hammer, galvanized nails. He had built himself a fort in the crotch of a young sugar maple outside the dining room, and he was up in his safe place after dinner in June, she thought, or early July—the sun was still high, and no one ever talked about autumn coming on—and she and Bernard looked up at their son. He looked down over the sights of his wooden scale-model Garand M1 rifle.

  “You didn’t see the ambush,” he’d said.

  “No, we didn’t,” Bernard had answered.

  “You don’t need to worry, though, on account of I won’t shoot.”

  “You know, I knew you wouldn’t,” she remembered telling him. She remembered, now, in the old feed mill, looking at her grown and damaged, dangerous son, how disappointing to the boy her confidence had been.

  “You knew?” he’d said.

  “I mean I was hoping,” she’d told him.

  “We hoped you wouldn’t shoot,” Bernard had said.

  “Please don’t shoot,” she’d called to him in the shadows of his fort.

  “No,” he’d said, “I won’t.”

  Across the room from their boy who was now grown up, Bernard stood slowly. He leaned against the wall and put his hands in the pockets of his khakis. He always wore khakis and a blue button-down shirt under the white medical coat he put on when he was in his pharmacy, filling prescriptions. He said, “I’m worried about you. You can understand that.”

  “And I’m sorry,” Patrick said. “I am. But now I think you need to go. You did what you could.” He’d gone onto one knee, his forearm leaning on the opposite thigh.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You said what you thought you should say, Momma. And it was nice to see you and Pop be friendly with each other.”

  “And does something happen now?” she asked him. “Is that what you’re saying? Because I won’t leave here if it is. I won’t.”

  Bernard said, “Me either.”

  Patrick flushed very dark. His lips were set in a bitter line. In the underwater light of his awful room, with his gray-flecked hair and his unfamiliar eyes, he seemed to her to be a new creature she must care for. She knew that she didn’t know how. But she walked slowly to the cupboard, expecting each time she stepped that he would order her to stop, and she was breathless when she stood near Bernard and the gun she was afraid to look at.

  Patrick said, “Please.” His voice was flat, as expressionless as his face.

  Bernard shrugged. She watched him take a deep breath. She squared her shoulders and waited.

  “I am warning you,” Patrick said in the flat voice.

  “Dearie,” she called to her son, seeking a level, low voice with which to address him.

  “No more conversation now,” Patrick said. “I warned you.”

  After twenty-five years, she thought, all they knew was this: standing in their separateness to hold their ground against their son. And what kind of achievement did that amount to?

  “I warned you,” Patrick said. He said, “Here I come.”

  He leaned forward, but he was far less graceful than she’d expected. He tripped off the mattress and then he caught himself. And she remembered this. She remembered standing in a room on an overcast day. It had to have been in their first house at the start of a long winter. Patrick was little and grinning. His chin was covered with drool. He’d raised his arms to the level of his shoulders. Then he reached higher. He lurched and then he righted himself and he made his way across the room in a wobbly march. She remembered how they’d clapped their hands to celebrate their boy’s first step. She remembered thinking that there, stumbling across the room, came the rest of her life.

  THE SMALL SALVATION

  HE SAW HER at the start and finish of playschool mornings as the children gusted about her like blown leaves. She seemed to him to smile like an actress playing a part. He thought of her as the pretty girl in high school and college who had starred in every play but who hadn’t gone on to anything but earnest, sweaty civic little theater since she’d been condemned to grow up.

  Her large dark brown eyes looked merry. He couldn’t tell if she was pleased or feeling ironic. She sat on the small, low child’s wooden chair in the center of the preschool playroom and indicated a little chair opposite. Her bent knees, parallel and pale, struck him as graceful. His long legs were locked, and he tried leaning back while he extended them.

  She hiccupped a laugh and said, in a bright and ringing voice, “Poor man. Should we stand?”

  “I’ve forgotten my preschool skills,” he said. “But I’ll be fine. This is fine.” He took a deep breath. He found himself staring at the silk scarf of cream and gold and black that was tied at her throat. He thought of it, or maybe he thought of her thinking of it, as a brave little scarf.

  She nodded. She clasped her hands on the hem of her dark, figured jumper. She raised her brows, and he realized that he was supposed to begin.

  He said, “My grandson—”

  “Jeremy’s lovely.”

  “Jeremy is,” he said. “But he’s shy.”

  “Don’t worry. Look at you: you’re shy.”

  He felt himself flush as he said, “I am?”

  “And you’re a fully functioning grandfather. Shy’s all right.” She smiled as if he were Jeremy’s age. She might not have intended to, he thought. But what did it mean if she had?

  “Yes.”

  “Was that the problem you called about? I mean, that’s utterly swell, if it is. I’m happy to address it with you.”

  He shifted his legs and felt that his knees had come to the height of his face. In the basement of the village’s Baptist church, on an errand that was sad and even ridiculous, but inescapably important, he addressed this younger woman on behalf of his daughter’s child and he was certain that he was a fool.

  He said, “Someone took Jeremy’s cape.”

  Her face creased in sorrow. She shook her head. “Oh, it saves him,” she whispered.

  Jeremy’s mother, his only child, had cut the cape from a piece of white corduroy. She had stitched a red J on it and sewed the grosgrain ties with which she fastened it around him. He wore it every day. He had stood, solemn and invulnerable—less vulnerable, anyway—as Nora tied it on.

  “And somebody took it,” he said.

  The teacher responded as if to the child. “Do we know that someone actually stole it? Could we have misplaced it?”

  “Mrs. Preston, he came home without it. He was as pale as a piece of paper. He couldn’t talk. He went to his room, he threw up his lunch—”

  “Ill? Perhaps he’s ill.”

  “Illness doesn’t jettison a cape. Getting the cape swiped made him feel sick.”

  They sat too far apart for her to reach him, but she leaned in his direction with her arm out. “Of course. I understand,” she said. “You’re a good grandfather. Is Jeremy’s father back?”

  “This is such a small place, this village,” he said. “No. No, he isn’t. I think that he won’t be.”

  “It’s good you’re here visiting, then.”

 
; “It’s why,” he said.

  “You’re Pop-Pop, yes? He talks about his Pop-Pop. Your daughter, Nora, she’s lucky to have you. I understand the place she’s in.”

  He wondered if he was supposed, now, to ask her for details.

  She looked at the linoleum between them, then she looked at him from underneath her brow. His eyes skittered from hers but he forced himself to look again at her resigned, sad face. He thought, frighteningly, of slapping her to punish this theatricality. He thought next of holding her face between his palms. Looked away again.

  She said, “Both my parents were dead when my husband left. My sister visited a brief little while, but of course she had a life to return to. What do you return to—ah, is there something to call you besides Pop-Pop? Do you prefer Mr. Royce?”

  “Bing.”

  “As in Crosby?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “It’s an upbeat name. You inspirit us all, Bing.”

  He said, “You’ve been wonderful to Jeremy, Mrs. Preston.”

  “Muriel?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” she said, smiling what he thought of as a gracious smile. He wished she would simply talk to him instead of demonstrating what she intended her words to mean. But he also liked looking at her, and she clearly wished him to.

  “The cape’s gone. Nora and I looked at home. You didn’t find it here, or you’d have said so.”

  “Poor man. And poor, poor Jeremy.”

  “Muriel, would you mind terribly if I stood up? My knees are strangling.”

  She made the hiccup of laughter again and put a hand over her mouth. She stood, saying, “Here.” She extended her cool, small hand and he took it and she tugged. When he was up, she slowly let go of his hand and said, “There’s so much of you. You just kept coming. Unfolding, I meant—you know.”

  Her eyes met his. She was pleased to have said it that way, he was sure.

  “Thank you,” he said. He looked away, at the walls decorated with pasted constructions on rough paper, at crayon drawings of towering stick-figure parents and little sheltered stick-figure kids. He was afraid of seeing Jeremy’s. He wanted Muriel Preston to find another reason for taking hold of his hand.