The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  “Oh, Lin, the guy couldn’t help it. Matthew couldn’t help it. He didn’t know who he was when you got married.”

  “He knew. People know. They’re all too goddamned glad to tell you how they always knew and always felt and always wondered and always hoped. And then they met the guy, who was always knowing and feeling and whatevering and praying to meet my absolutely heterosexual husband and convert him.” She stopped and looked at me the way you would make an apologetic face to a stranger and ask if they knew the time. “Am I making any sense, Dad? Am I being logical?” She smiled a smile I knew from her childhood. “Did I just say it was Matthew’s fault or it wasn’t? I can’t remember. Was it he knew or he didn’t and the guy converted him? I mean, I know I’m making sense about possibly not making sense, but I’m not sure, at this juncture, whether Matthew volunteered to leave his wife and children and room and board and the meal plan plus activities fee, or whether he had this attack of not-heterosexual that kind of set fire to existence. At least as we know that we know it.”

  She set her face close to the thumb tissue she was tearing. Two lunch tables over, the sad girl with dull blonde hair was leaning over her journal. A smiling man in aqua pajama bottoms, T-shirt, double-breasted blue suit coat, and aquamarine hospital slip-ons came into the room adjusting his dark blue beret. What had looked like a moustache seemed, as he passed our table, to be a double line of scab from deep cuts. Across the room, a very fat woman in a bright red bathrobe was using a hole puncher on the pages of a glossy magazine.

  When she saw me watching, she waved. “Don’t worry,” she called, “I know to clean up after myself. I’m responsible.”

  I waved back. Linda watched me. I shrugged at her. She said, “You didn’t answer.”

  I almost muffled my sigh. I said, “To tell you the truth, Lin, I can’t remember the question.”

  “Right,” she said. “Me, too. It’s the meds. They try and keep you stupid with pills here. It makes you more tractable. Was I a tractable child? Do you think I was a tractable wife?”

  “I’m sure you were a fine wife.”

  “And the other category I mentioned?”

  “You were my beloved child. You still are.”

  “Do you think I’d try and kill you, Dad?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think a child would ever try and kill her parents? His parents? You know: general, all-inclusive whoever the parents are the parents of? Do you think they’d try?”

  My throat closed down and I shook my head.

  She said, “Depressives or women whose husbands get converted to gay will often get very, very down on the anniversary of something bad that happened to them. You probably knew that.”

  “No,” I said, “I didn’t. But it makes sense.”

  “Oh, it all makes sense,” she said, “if you renounce the logic you’re used to and accept either the word of your doctor or the policemen who took you away.”

  “No one took you away, sweetheart. Remember? I came here with you.”

  “And who’s to say you aren’t the cop?”

  “Oh.”

  “‘Oh,’” she said, in a deep tone. Then, in her own voice, she said, “Now, what could have happened five years ago to the day I was arrested and locked up?”

  “You weren’t arrested, sweetheart.”

  “No. All right. If not five years, then maybe three. Maybe it was only the one-year anniversary of the event. Who’s to say? Except your doctor or the cops. But in either case, what was it the anniversary of that flipped me out and I drank all that horrible whiskey—what was it, Dad?”

  “Lagavulin.”

  “Matthew’s favorite Scotch. Plus Ambien plus Darvocet plus precious, pure, and dependable Bayer baby aspirin. Puke City, huh? So: what was the question? Ah! Anniversaries. Well, the group and I have been pondering the matter. Did you know that it turns out I like group? I bore the asses off of them all, but I talk and talk and talk. And they’re so crazy, they’ll join in about anything after a while. So they pondered my pondering. And they decided it’s you, Dad.”

  All I could say was, “Me?”

  She gave me the toothy, unfelt grin. “I predicted you’d say that. Well, to be fair, I thought you’d say, ‘Who? Me?’ But that was close enough.”

  “Linda,” I said, “me?”

  The man with the beret and the suit coat was bleeding from the upper lip and it had dripped onto his T-shirt and the table he leaned over. A tall, fat nurse in a pink uniform held a little green towel to his face and helped him to stand. She led him out of the room. “Don’t you be dripping blood all over me,” she told him.

  Linda came around the table. She sat on the chair beside mine. I could smell her sweat and something salty and sweet at once. I was so tired, then, that I almost put my head on her shoulder. “Dad,” she said. “Daddy.”

  “Sweetheart,” I said.

  “You looked so bewildered.”

  I nodded.

  “I am, too,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “You do know.”

  “I think I do, Lin. Matthew, and the children, and plain damned fatigue. It tears the wings off airplanes, you know. Metal stress fatigue. The plane looks fine and unless you examine it very, very closely, and often they don’t, it takes off and then a piece of the wing tears away.”

  “The plane comes down,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And everyone on board is killed.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “And they reassemble all the little pieces they collected on the floor of some huge airplane hangar in Queens or Texas. They put it back together.”

  “But not to fly it. Just to know.”

  “Like here,” she said.

  “No. Here they help you get back up in the air.”

  She leaned in close. Her breath had something like iodine on it, and the phlegm you smell on a sick, small child. “I don’t want to fly anymore,” she said.

  “Sweetheart, they’re going to help you do whatever you want.”

  “Can I still be married to Matthew? And he’ll love me,” she said.

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not what you told your father.”

  “What about my father?”

  “You know. Shh.” She looked behind her, at the girl with the journal. She looked across the table toward the woman with the hole puncher, and the others, at farther tables with their visitors. She whispered, “When they cut off his leg.”

  “That was diabetes, Lin. It was very bad, and he was old by then. His heart was in awful shape.”

  She sat back. “And he asked you to help him.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “And you said you thought he should die. He told me,” she said in very reasonable tones. “I know about it.”

  “It was the night before the procedure—the amputation. He was very frightened, very upset. He hadn’t much hope. He told me he had already discussed it with his doctor. He’d told his doctor he didn’t think he wanted to live like that anymore. ‘Like this,’ he told me, and he pointed at the leg they were going to take. It caused him terrible pain. He was in pain all the time that we talked. And he had angina very badly, his heart was pretty much shot. He told me his doctor said, ‘All you have to do is stop taking the medication. I’ll write it up as heart failure.’ And he looked at me, Lin.”

  She said, “Like this?” She stared with a cowlike innocence, and she looked silly. I shook my head. “Then like this?” She looked pointedly at me, just as my father had. I looked away. “Got you,” she said.

  “So I told him I would help.”

  “Help what?”

  “Help take the medicines away, or pour them out into the sink, or whatever he wanted. I really didn’t have much of an idea. I just thought he was asking me for help, and I wanted him to know I would give it. Even if it meant I’d go to jail.”

  “They’d have put you in jail?”

  “If somebody wa
nted to accuse me of euthanasia, yes. It’s murder, or manslaughter, or something terrible. It means years and years in jail.”

  “I am not staying here for years and years.”

  “No. But you aren’t in jail, Lin. You’re in a hospital and you’re getting out soon to be with Max and Allison. You never told me you talked to my father about this.”

  “After they cut off his leg and he didn’t stop taking his medicine. When he was alive until he died of old age.” Then her face was alight again, and she said, “But maybe he didn’t. Maybe he finally died of you.”

  “We never talked about it again. I thought he’d forgotten.”

  “Yes, but how can anybody really know you didn’t talk about it again and then what if you did it, Dad? You see?”

  “Well, because I didn’t do it and he didn’t do it and he lived for several more months, almost a year.”

  “Except he told me.”

  “Told you what, Lin?”

  “He said, ‘Harold wants me to die. Harold told me to stop taking my pills. My son Harold said he wants me to die.’”

  “No.”

  “He did. He told me. I was there with him and the nurse went out and he told me. I was his only grandchild, remember. He and I always talked.”

  “Yes. He loved you plenty. But he couldn’t have said I wanted to kill him.”

  “Wanted him to die, he said.”

  “Yes. But I mean no, Lin. God. Sweetheart, once a person hears something like that about himself and somebody dead, he can’t fix it. I can’t fix that anymore.”

  “Well, you heard it, Dad. So I guess it’s broken now because that’s what he said. And every time you think about Grandpa, you’ll think about him telling me how you wanted him to die. Maybe you weren’t clear when you and he had that conversation.”

  “No,” I said, “maybe I didn’t make myself clear.”

  The girl with the journal walked past us, reading her pages. She said, “Bye.”

  “Bye-bye,” I said. “Good luck.”

  “I guess maybe you wish I didn’t tell you about it,” Linda said.

  “You told your group therapy session about it.”

  “Oh, sure. We were wondering if it was the anniversary thing that could have flipped me out. Only, I couldn’t remember when Grandpa died. Whenever it was you did or didn’t kill him.”

  “So why did you think it might have been some kind of anniversary, since you had no idea when it happened?”

  She leaned in closer, until her shoulder fitted under my arm. She pushed up with her shoulder and I put my arm around her and hugged. “It’s a simple enough mistake to make,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

  “About me wanting to kill my father.”

  “Right.”

  “Right,” I said. “But it wasn’t an anniversary.”

  “Good,” she said. “It would have been easier, if we could have blamed it on that. But good anyway.”

  “Good,” I said. I looked at the hole puncher punching and the little scattering of glossy dots that lay across the woman’s table. She waved and nodded, and I waved back. I said, “I really think it was fatigue, Lin.”

  “You’re saying my wings got tired.”

  “It’s hard, staying up in the air.”

  “Sometimes you have to come down,” she said. She said, “Okay.” She sat against me and then moved off to sit in a different chair at our table. She said, “Okay.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Buy Allison something pretty, Dad. Would you do that? I don’t know what. Just so it comes from me.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ll find something.”

  “And get Max something about ball. Any kind of ball. If it rolls or bounces, he wants to do it.”

  “He’s a bouncer,” I said.

  She yawned and shivered. “It’s late out, isn’t it?”

  “Probably it feels like that,” I said, “because you’re tired.”

  She closed her eyes and I remembered reading bedtime stories to her. Suddenly, her lids went up. She caught me looking. She said hoarsely, “We’ll find out for sure.”

  “Find out what, Lin?”

  “If you’re the one who goes to hospitals and visits people, then they die.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” she said.

  PATROLS

  HE KEPT HIS EYES closed because if he opened them he would see Murphy’s mad, bright stare. Since Marty Mason had been there, the bunchy, gleaming black dog had left his owner’s bedroom late each night to patrol the hallway outside the guest room and then the room itself, his claws ticking on the wooden floors while he investigated corners and spaces under furniture, his snuffling inspection punctuated by soft panting, as if he breathed in whispered tones on account of the hour. Then he would settle beside Mason’s bed and, head erect or laid on top of his extended paws, he would watch. He was ready, Mason knew, to slap his tail concussively against the bedroom floor if his owner’s guest should meet his devoted glare. Closing the guest bedroom door meant only that Murphy would scratch for admittance, whining softly until Mason opened the door so that the dog could check the room, then settle down to watch the guest.

  After tonight’s long period of stillness, Mason lay between waking and sleep. He’d begun to think of himself as buoyed, like kelp or driftwood or a boat of shallow draft, on top of the waters of the cove. Now, at dawn, the radios of the lobster boats broke the rhythmic night noises—the regular panting of the dog interrupted by its small, strangled squirts of body gas, the rising tide and the slap of ocean on stone, the winds off the sea washing hard against the house—that had carried him out of nighttime and into the day.

  He wasn’t surprised that he thought he could feel the greasy grit of sand on his fingertips and in the corners of his eyes, over his teeth. He wanted to get to the bathroom and drink from the tap to wash his sandy mouth out, but the dog farted and winked in the brightening room, so he played dead. He thought, of course, about the dead Marines and the dead hajis, as the live Marines called them, and the one Iranian, a bearded man in Western clothes, driving north and west over the Iranian border in a white Toyota long-bed truck into Checkpoint Eight One, established and commanded by Captain Jerome Goldsworthy with whose Alpha Platoon, five light armored reconnaissance vehicles, Mason traveled as journalistic baggage because Major Harvey Fathers, commanding Fox Company, had told Goldsworthy to carry him along for the sake of public relations.

  Captain Goldsworthy was a slight, slender man who struck Mason as being made entirely of hard leather. His South Carolina accent was musical, Mason wrote in his notes, and he never raised his voice, even if he swore with conviction. He never chided Mason or complained about having him in tow. In fact, he never addressed him. He referred to Mason exclusively as he or him, as when, standing before Mason, looking sourly at his Orvis-catalogue traveler’s vest and L. L. Bean khakis, he told one of the rifleman scouts to make certain he knew how to fasten the rear scout compartment hatches of the captain’s vehicle when they needed to swing the turret cannon to the rear. Mason rode in that small scout compartment with three Marine infantry, sweating and sucking warm water from plastic bottles and banging against the walls. “Make sure he stays inside the pig until you know for certain we’re in a safe environment,” the captain told his scouts.

  Now, before dawn, at Checkpoint Eight One, Goldsworthy had opened his turret hatch and positioned the vehicles, establishing his firing lanes. Mason heard the hatch go up forward of the turret just after a short, thick PFC, William Pontelecorvo, from Rahway, New Jersey, had pushed their hatches, behind the turret, up and out. About a half an hour later, they heard the driver of the truck gear down, either because he meant to, or to feign stopping. It was apparently a feint, because he began to go up through the gears, gathering speed, and they pinned him with the lights.

  The captain said, “This is irksome.”

  Mason heard the driver say, “Sir.”

>   In his soft, low voice, the captain said, “There’s a cure for irksome.” He said, “Button the forward hatch.” He said, “Gunner. Battle sight. Truck in the open.”

  The gunner called back, “Identified.”

  Pontelecorvo said, “He armed with the HE.”

  The captain gently said, “Fire.”

  “On the way, sir,” the gunner said.

  The 25mm turret cannon fired three times. Mason was deafened at once. Pontelecorvo must have been right about the high explosive shells, Mason thought, because although their hatches faced away from the action, he saw the air of the nighttime desert go whiter than their lights had made it, and then he saw bright fragments, blown vertically, raining down around them. He heard voices as if from a distance, and he couldn’t hear the fragments strike the ground. When Pontelecorvo permitted him to leave the vehicle, Mason stood with some of the platoon a few dozen yards from the burning truck. The Marines edged closer, he noted, and then closer, as if to prove that they were unafraid of secondary explosions. Then they moved even closer, flinching from the heat but needing the risk, and he joined them because he was afraid to stay behind and seem to be afraid. What was left of the driver lay partway between the truck and the Marines: some beard on some of the cooked face with one wide eye in it, strips of burned gristle, a section of clean, white rib cage, the halved corpse sprinkled with powdered windshield glass that caught their lights and reminded Mason—he faced away from the Marines to write it shakily in his notebook—of ice droplets in the air on a very cold night in St. Paul.

  As he thought of the roasted, torn face and its eye, Mason thought of Murphy’s ecstatic glare. He remembered the sand in their mouths, and how the night winds carried grit to them as it filled the hairy nostrils of what was left of the driver. Mason raised his fingers to rub at his gums, as if he were still there, watching the corpse’s nose fill up. The dog slammed his tail and Mason set his arms down, trying to breathe like someone asleep.

  The lobster boats were coming in, some with small outboard motors and some on throbbing, big diesels. He had seen them over the last several days as they drove at a buoy, the lobsterman somehow knowing, out of all those hundreds of bright, bobbing markers, which were his. Then, alongside, he cut his engine and while the boat wallowed on the tide he hauled his trap by hand or by machine, withdrew a lobster if he found one, baited with the chum that drew the prowling gulls to circle the boats, dropped the trap overboard, and took off full-bore for the next nearby buoy. Some of the boats broadcast ship-to-shore CB chatter, while most of them played country music on their radios, nasal complaints about death and passion and diminished prospects.