Frederick Busch - The Night Inspector

I watched them in their tense dispersal in positions of apparent ease. I stared at the bulge of the head above the back of the neck, at the muscles of jaws that moved as they chewed, at the winding and unwinding of harness strings, the random chopping with a knife into the earth between his legs of a soldier who could not face his food.

When I was standing behind a tree and breathing shallowly, for silence and control of my frame, and when I had stared at the sparse hairs of a young man’s face, at the man who seemed to scratch at lice inside his pants, at the older man who lay on his side, supporting his weight on his arm — he stared past the fire and into the darkness, at nothing his companions could see — I held my breath and eased my finger around. I held him in my sight, his obvious regret and grim considerations, and I fired. I heard the smack as the shot went into his neck, but I was already reloading, and because I thought to kill them all, leaving a camp of corpses for the pursuers to find, I hurried my shot at the man who itched. I killed him, too, but it went in lower than I wished, between his shoulder blades, and I heard his lungs begin to bubble as the youngest one cried, “Oh, Jesus! Dear sweet Jesus Christ! Oh, Jesus Christ! Oh, Mother! They’re killing us. Mother, they’re—” And then he stopped because I took him in the face. I saw his teeth explode through his jaws — harbinger, if only I knew.

A couple of them had rolled by now behind their satchels and blanket rolls. I moved to a tree several dozen yards to my left, changing my angle of fire and confusing their angle of return. I reloaded. I put a rapid shot into their tack and two above it, in case the early shot had driven them up and back. I heard a sound like a whistle, though my right ear had stopped functioning, and it seemed to come a terribly long way; I knew it to be the lungs of the man I’d hit in the back. I thought I heard someone sobbing, perhaps a man I’d wounded with the last few shots, and then I scampered. I went back through the forest as if I’d walked these woods in daylight and dark all my life. I slammed into a tree and was floored for my confidence, gasping and seizing at my nose to feel whether I had burst it. I took two deep breaths, shifted my rifle to the hand not numb from my collision, and I jog-trotted from the edge of the woods toward our encampment. I did not hear myself thrashing in the forest or over the field because the shots reverberated in my right ear, while the left felt plugged with cotton wool.

I saw Sam Mordecai’s narrow, wide-eyed face, and he saw mine. But he called for the parole; I assumed that his demand was what I could not hear. I slapped my deafened ear with my palm to show my difficulties and I whispered, or I thought I did, “Medusa.”

“The lady with the snakes,” he replied, shouting at my left ear.

“Look at me and turn to stone,” I said. I was able to somewhat hear myself, but as though underwater. “Hurry, Sam. Their posse hasn’t got here yet. They’re on their way.”

“In my faith,” he shouted, “we could maybe look at you and turn to salt. A pillar, even, of salt. But that’s my best offer.”

And I said, “Done.”

I said it again to her—“Done for good, I fear”—when Jessie could not rouse me past, let us say, a certain point. She was shameless with her mouth, venturing beyond scruples or their absence to an obvious pleasure she took, both in the pleasure she gave me and in sensations of which she did not speak but to which she obviously responded.

Now she lay beside me, completely unclothed, while I, still wearing the mask, lay in an unresponding nakedness. My hand, which dangled from the bed as droopily as my peter lay athwart my thigh, was, I realized, stroking the head of the bearskin rug with which I had presented her that night in celebration of my uncivilized behavior of the morning with Lapham Dumont.

She spoke in the carefully modulated tones of the superior student of the Florence, Florida, Methodist Academy where, the child of a slave, her mind was trained for a career of teaching by the Reverend Foster’s wife, and her body groomed for her present position by the Reverend Foster himself. He dismissed her on account of her unsightly, unseemly, and un-Christian tattoos, never feeling the necessity to make clear to the student body or his faithful trustees how it was that he had come to see them in the first place, banding her lower breasts and torso as they did. Jessie said, sweetly, “Bumfodder, Billy. A couple of nights ago, you rose like the moon. You don’t lose the ink in your pen that quickly.”

“Are you sure?”

“Are you acquainted with anyone else who knows the subject better than I?”

“I don’t like to think of it like that.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Well. Sometimes, perhaps.”

“Do you think of me sucking away at some big Irishman? Slurping my mouth all over him? As if he were a piece of ice, and myself in heat, if you know.”

“I know, Jessie.” She put her hand on me and I flinched.

“Yes,” she said, “but a little firmness there already, I’d say. Let’s go one better. He’s turned me over and pressed my face down into the pillow. We know what he wants, don’t we? There goes his big, blunt finger, pressing in, and I say something about the cold cream, and so he must say something about his hot cream, and he presses his suit, let’s say. Let’s say he presses on. I’m facedown into the pillow, and he’s immense in me. Christ! He—”

I turned over and I pressed the mask upon her. She tensed and went still.

“Sometimes,” I said, “I would surrender an arm if I could kiss you.”

“Take off the mask,” she said.

“I’m—”

“Oh, no? What’s this I’m feeling? Remove it, please. The mask, not your— That’s right. Not your— No, you know what to do now, don’t you?”

It was the night I asked her again to tell me what the tattoos represented.

“Well, I’ve just now told you,” she said.

I left off asking, and I lay in my pride and in my childish resentment.

“You tell me something,” she whispered.

I said, “Yes.”

“What were you remembering? What were you thinking about? When you couldn’t. When you thought you couldn’t.”

“Hue and cry,” I said, “crimes, misdeeds, and misbehavior.”

“You evade me.” She turned and kissed the crushed, crimped bony flesh beneath the scars at the side of what was left of my face. She kissed my ear. She nipped it, and I felt it down through my spine. “Tell,” she said.

“My work in the War.”

“The rifle work.”

“Assassinations, yes.”

“The dead are burdening your body,” she said.

“The dead bed me that I might not bed you?”

Jessie said, “Perhaps.” Then: “This one,” she said, taking my hand and moving my finger along her ribs to the swell of her breast, “this is my mother’s time on Pukapuka. She was taken from there as a girl.” She moved my hand along her to the other side; I cupped her breast lightly because the flesh was beautiful and perfectly smooth, and because she permitted and even wished me to. “This is the story of my father in the Indian encampments.” I read the story with my hand, and with its fingers. My nerves read. I remained there, eyes closed, in the tale of the man escaped from captivity to whites, now captive again to redskinned people. I listened with the outer flesh of my body for the moment he met Jessie’s mother, and how she came to be there in the Seminole place, and how they coupled, and how they parted. Then she moved my hand to her belly, my fingers lower and, as she moved her legs apart, in. I understood little but felt much, and I therefore was grateful and burdened at once.