The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  The cooperatives made money by shipping the lobsters downstate to the resort restaurants and into Boston and New York. The lobstermen, after they bought fuel and paid for repairs, made little profit, he imagined. And he suspected that it was all they knew to do. He wondered if they depended on federal food subsidies during the winter if they couldn’t find work repairing vacation houses or salting roads for the highway department. He wondered how many silent, angry children, how many battered wives, that life produced. He wanted Ada Shields, his editor, to tell him about this coast, about saltwater fogs and who ran the lighthouses and how you knew which pound to buy the lobsters from and what the lobstermen’s families ate—frozen Salisbury steak, he’d have bet, and artificial gravy on packaged mashed potatoes, all of it washed down with pop poured from plastic two-liter jugs. He knew himself to be a freelance hack with a need to dodge steady work and the habit of asking questions in order to deflect attention from himself. Ada’s purpose, which he was coming to regret, was to prod him into studying the self he had tried to omit from what, together, they were working on. She had inherited the house from her parents, and it was where she hid out, she said. According to her assistant, Mason ought to be flattered to be invited for a working week. He knew, as he played dead for Ada’s ardent dog, that he wanted their conversations to be local and not about his time with Alpha Platoon because then, he thought, he might not lie under the winking stare of Murphy, unable to sleep because he was selling out, as if by the pound, the Marines live and dead with whom he had patrolled the southeastern deserts of Iraq in order to compile the book he’d once believed it was important to write.

  It had begun well enough. The first chapter opened with a character called Mason, who was mostly not him—a vehicle, as he thought, for conveying the strategies of the old men who made this war, and the courage of the young ones taking fire for them—who was on his way, after his time over there, back to the States. This Mason sat in a dark, icy Frankfurt bar, drinking too much and therefore talking too much to Leon Rosenthal, an Israeli businessman who was, of course, not in business. Mason didn’t know whether he was a civilian, but he was certainly in some aspect of intelligence. It could have been as high-powered as vetting for assassinations—he was that secret, and that rock-hard confident—or he might have conducted random harvests of raw data from big-mouthed sources, Mason thought, like himself. Rosenthal was a small, muscular man with gold-rimmed glasses that rode over big, dark, angry eyes under a high forehead. He wore a blue blazer with three horn buttons that he kept fastened over an open-necked shirt. He sat straight on his barstool as if a child at school. Mason had recited some of his adventures although he was embarrassed, even as he spoke, because he believed that the little man knew more than enough about wars on his own. In the book, uncleverly exchanging one brand of dinnerware for another, he called the little man Spode.

  Mason was telling about Captain Goldsworthy’s outrage when his orders were reversed. In Badra, Major Harvey Fathers had spent a night organizing checkpoints and patrols and Captain Goldsworthy and his Alpha Platoon had run Checkpoint Eight One, Mason in the compartment of the pig, feeling like a child in grown-ups’ clothing under the heavy flak jacket and the oversized, chin-strapped battle helmet. At 0400 they had killed the driver and blown up his truck. The captain had reported the kill, and Major Fathers had instructed them to patrol to the north for two hours at a leisurely pace, then descend at high speed back to the Eight One checkpoint and see if their departure had lulled some bombers, posing as religious pilgrims, into trying to cross over.

  At 0530 new signals came in from the major. Division had instructed Battalion to instruct Fox that priorities were reversed. Standing outside their vehicles they listened to Captain Goldsworthy say, “The situation is now officially a clusterfuck. You will not be looking to capture or kill. We will interrogate all incoming personnel. Those that we have no choice except to deem true pilgrims, we will respect their faith and permit them to cross over from Iran”—he said it Eye-ran—“in the hope that the message will go out that U.S. guys are good guys. We will permit the pilgrims to find whatever it is they are looking for. Salvation, I believe. Salvation is all right, and they are welcome to try and find it. You will not fire unless you are fired upon or deem yourselves in peril. In which case, you will kill with efficiency. You will try to check with me on any peril factor. But you will stay smart and therefore live Marines. And he fucking well had better not be putting any salty language in my mouth when he writes his tale of Alpha’s derring-do.”

  At that point, watched by the platoon, Mason stowed his notebook away. The captain consulted his own notebook and then he pulled down on the hem of his flak jacket as Mason had seen him do a couple of dozen times a day. He made himself remember the gesture to record when he could.

  “All right,” the captain said. “We will carry out the mission. No questions? No answers? Let’s get back to the goat rodeo.”

  Rosenthal, now named Spode, said, “My friend, you enjoy the colorful captain, and he is doubtless a brave man and a bold leader. Goat rodeo: colorful American vernacular. With the occasional fucking this or that. Of course: American. But what you should be remembering is the real importance of that particular moment. In two or three years from now, and probably less, you will think of the goats and the fucking and our chance encounter, yours and mine.” He poured more Pilsner. “You will know, because I am lecturing you about it, that the captain’s address marks the moment when the cancer cells began to grow. And not only inside of the goats. This is the gospel according to Rosenthal, commercial traveler, you ran into him in the Getrunken Pferdchen saloon in Frankfurt in the benign, well-ordered German republic. You’ll remember, yes? That they brought the money in, those so-called pilgrims your patrols suddenly permitted to cross. They purchased the information and assistance and of course the weapons that will punch the bloody holes in your soldiers, who will be pinned in place in Iraq, dead Hussein or live Hussein, for a decade. This is minimum, I’m talking about. Boys will grow up expecting that part of their young manhood must be wasted in Iraq. They will become sullen and probably brutal, like our children serving in Palestine in what is finally an occupation, not a war. Those pilgrims from Iran who your President forgot to fight, they assembled the resistance cells, they organized the terrorists. And Iran”—he made a show of pulling back his sleeve to check his watch—“Iran as of this moment has won your little off-the-cuff war.”

  Thinking of the bottles of Czech beer they drank, and of all the water that Alpha Platoon consumed under orders to hydrate themselves, Mason knew that he would have to dare the dog and get to the bathroom.

  “Murphy,” he said, “I give up.”

  The dog’s tail banged on the bedroom floor as if a dedicated child were slamming a hunk of hawser rope down, again and again.

  The house remained silent. Murphy banged another volley, and Ada, from her upstairs bedroom, called, “Oh, Murphy, you goofy boy.” The squat Labrador froze and then, with his nails scrabbling on the slippery floor, he ran out of the bedroom, past the bathroom down the hall, and then up the steps as Mason walked into the shower. He turned his face to receive the warm water in his open mouth. After the early days with Alpha of Fox, when matériel convoys bypassed them in order to get to Baghdad and north of it and there wasn’t enough water for showers, when the heat swung between 125 and 135 Fahrenheit, he had vowed never to be ungrateful for water, whether it came in the form of ocean, thunderstorm, or droplets from a leaky pipe. He still felt the grit that had caked the inside of his lips and that sat on his teeth no matter how often he drank to rinse it off.

  He had forced himself to make entries in his journal as Alpha fought, patrolled, and bounced between contradictory directives from Battalion. He’d written paragraphs to later be stitched onto what narratives he could generate on his word processor. And he had managed to file several stories, one dictated over a military phone in Badra to an intern at the magazine who patted his every word
into a word processor, making him feel as important as one of the real war correspondents. This was the material that he and Ada Shields were turning into a book, she assured him. “It’s all here,” she said several times a day. “You wrote it. This is just one of those wine racks or bookcases or children’s toys you order from a catalogue. ‘Some Assembly Required’? I’m the Some-Assembly person. Though I do not know boo about the children’s toys part of it.”

  She was taller than he, very slender, very pale, a little stoop-shouldered, and long of arm and leg. She wore scuffed brown penny loafers over bare feet and usually denim shorts and a work shirt. Twenty times a day, for three days, she had opened the barrette that held her thick, dark hair behind her neck and gathered handfuls to fasten again. The intimacy—the bareness of the back of her bent neck, the opportunity to stare at her unseen because she closed her eyes to fix her hair—had compelled him and embarrassed him. And he had wakened this morning to think not only of the heat, the sand, the eye of the torn, burnt truck driver, and the lunatic eyes of the dog, but also of the tall, slouching editor who read herself to sleep at night by going over what he had said to himself in the intimacies of fright, discomfort, and even despair during six weeks of Operation Enduring Freedom.

  They sat now in her breakfast room in the old house that smelled of mildew and salt and resin. A few lobstermen worked their traps farther out, but the gulls had given up on them, stalking instead the broad, flat granite sheets between the back of the house and the sea, while crows made the noises of argument in the evergreens around them. Mason had heard a half of the phone call while he was drying himself after his shower. He hadn’t been able to discern her words, but he had listened to her tones, which began sulkily enough and quickly declined into bitter single syllables.

  While they chewed English muffins in silence, Ada stood to bring more coffee to the table and, pouring, announced, “I believe that I am starting to smoke again. Would you like to file any objections?”

  “It sounds like you’d slug me if I did.”

  “I might.”

  “No, then, I think. No objections.”

  “No, tell me straight. Never mind, don’t bother. I know it’s stupid and suicidal and obnoxious. But I mean, aside from the usual arguments.”

  “Strikes me as a terrific plan.”

  “I’ll stop again. You aren’t, I don’t know, allergic to it or something?”

  “Just to the cancer part.”

  She said, “Well, I’ll stop again. Before you leave, I’ll stop smoking.”

  “Is it time for me to go?”

  “Is this a tolerable process for you? Doing the work like this?”

  He nodded.

  “It is not time for you to go. We almost have the shape. Structure is the concern for us, because you know how to tell stories. It’s—it’s like your dead Iranian. He’s all over the book. It’s like the book’s his body. He’s all blown up, so how would you put him back together? Same for us with the book. We’re reassembling a body of experience. It’s going to be different from what happened outside you, in the desert and while they were driving all over, but we have to find the shape it took inside. What your memories made it, what your emotions—well, you understand. You know what we’re doing. And you know we aren’t done.”

  “You paid me a pretty good penny,” he said.

  “One hell of a lot more than a penny.”

  “It doesn’t seem entirely fair that I get the more-than-a-penny, and you still have to do all this work.”

  “That’s what I do,” she said. “I buy broken, and I fix.”

  “But meanwhile,” he said, “I can’t help noticing you’ve got stuff going on....”

  “Stuff.”

  “Stuff in your life. Private stuff.” She left the table to open and close drawers in the pantry. Then she was back, sitting opposite him, looking unhappily at him over the cigarette she lit, sighing. He waited, as if he were the one who drew in the smoke. “It makes you sad,” he said. “It makes you smoke.”

  “Thank you,” she said, “but don’t worry. The private stuff is just one more—what did your Marine Corps rifleman call it? ‘One more shit storm in paradise’?”

  Murphy took the half of buttered English muffin she handed down to him, and he fastened his thick black muzzle carefully around it, as if the muffin were alive, and then he carried it off to the doorway of the breakfast room with his head up. He lay and licked it, watching them, then closed his mouth around it, raised his head, and worked at the bread while butter and crumbs leaked down from his leathery lips.

  “So I should mind my own business,” Mason said.

  “I appreciate the attentiveness,” she said. “You’re a man who has feelings. That’s a nice part of the book—your honesty about being afraid, your sweetness about the younger men in combat, and the children you observed in the villages. And—listen. Listen, this is just the killing each other part you’re overhearing when I’m on the phone. It’s natural, it’s part of the cycle, and when you go looking to be happy, if that’s what this is about, then you have to do it. There’s the smiling part—first shy, then plain damned glad, then the way people smile right after they finish sexing each other tired. There’s the happy habit part—you know, how you get to understand each other’s arriving early or arriving late, ordering drinks for each other because you know what the other one likes, all of that. Then there’s the no longer working smoothly part, and that runs into the let’s just shoot each other part. I more or less happen to be in that particular aspect of the human misery sometimes called a relationship. I’ve been there before. As a matter of fact, it’s one of my specialties. Look,” she said, “I’m already chain-smoking. See how fast it all comes back? So could you tell me what that was about the Spanish Gate?”

  The dog banged his tail against the floorboards and made a sound that was half growl and half yap. Mason knew by now that it signaled his desire to go outside. Ada went to the back porch door and held it for him. She stood at the door, her cigarette in her mouth, while she bent, blinking her eyes against the smoke, and loosened her barrette to gather her hair and fasten it again. Then she held the cigarette and looked out through the screen.

  “Do you remember?” she asked.

  “Where did that come from?”

  “One of your notebooks. Some day in September, October. Just before you went over to Kuwait to join up with the Marines. I could find it. You wrote something about mussels in white wine with brown bread.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I did? I don’t remember doing that. But it has to be about Galway, and this little restaurant near the Spanish Gate. We were—I was—there was somebody with me, and we were drinking a lot of white wine and eating mussels, and these thick slices of coarse brown bread. We got pretty drunk, as a matter of fact, and very fast.”

  “So it wasn’t just the wine that did it,” Ada said, sitting again now that Murphy had returned.

  “It wasn’t, no. I was with a friend, as I said.”

  “A man or a woman? Can I ask? Has to be a woman.”

  “Woman, yes,” he said. “Her name is Marianne Neal. We were in the smiling part of it, according to your breakdown.”

  “Excellent word,” she said, “breakdown.”

  “I was thinking that something terrific might possibly happen. And of course, a few days later it did. Just, it was terrifically unhappy. We were drinking and eating, we’d just come from some antiquarian fair in a great hall someplace in the city. Terrific city, Galway. Being there made me happy. I’d bought a brass jam pot for her that she thought was beautiful. Marianne’s a poet,” he said.

  “Oh, now, never even approach the outskirts of a poet,” Ada said. “Didn’t you know that by then in your life? They love pain. For you if it can’t be helped, but for them if they have any say in it. They specialize in the five stages of misery. First, get some love going. Second, find a way to want to kill yourself because of it. Third, polish it and polish it. Fourth, insert it in
a vital organ. Anyone else gets snuffed, it’s a shame. If the poet, however—this is Number Five—if the poet manages to sustain a dreadful, agonizing, not quite totally fatal wound, then there you have it: a long cycle of poems at the least, and quite possibly a book of them. Never go near a poet. Of course, you know that now, don’t you?”

  They went to work. Each of them took notes, and Ada managed the papers, arranging pages and renumbering them. She indicated with glued memorandum slips where he would have to provide new material or insert old. She asked him, over and over, to tell her the meaning of what he had thought were clear, simple sentences. It was a history of unworthiness, he believed, the story of a man without courage who traveled with young men and their officers who went only toward trouble, whereas he constantly wanted to run away.

  “I was always making believe,” he told Ada during their lunch break. They ate chicken salad sandwiches and drank rosé under the steady stare of Murphy, whose panting, Mason found, established the rhythm to which he chewed. “I was scared. I was ashamed of being so scared. I made noises like somebody who hadn’t ever heard of being scared. I kept wishing they would just, goddamn it, turn around, go back.”

  “You suggest it plenty,” she said, “but maybe you want to talk about it directly. Give examples—what they did automatically, compared to what you wanted to do or would have done if nobody else was watching. Fear’s a great topic. Everybody wants to hear about it. You know: how to fail.”