Frederick Busch: Girls

He sat back and looked at his desk. He raised his hand. I knew what he was going to do. My day had been nothing but. He waved good-bye.

It was beginning to snow when I got back in the Jeep and told the dispatcher I was patrolling. I went to the top of the campus and worked my route down, then drove to the dormitories and sports buildings that were adjacent to the campus. I wrote out tickets to two Saabs and a Toyota 4Runner, then ticketed some shabby old American cars to show that I would treat the professors the same as their students. I drove a kid with a busted leg from his classroom building to his dorm. He complained about the pressure of the crutches under his arms. Then I came back to the social sciences building to pick up a coed and her wheelchair and take her to her apartment. She made jokes about her legs that didn’t work, and she didn’t complain about the chair.

The snow grew denser, and I worried about how bad it would be for Fanny on our road. They often didn’t plow it in heavy snows because very few people lived on it. She was a competent woman, an emergency room head nurse who could handle any sort of disaster I’d heard of. She was tall and square-shouldered and had level, bushy eyebrows that were the same dark brown as her hair. She wore her hair up at work, and when she came home, she let it drop, saying, “Ahhh.” I used to watch her do it, and I’d feel my muscles let go, knowing we were home, both of us together, and now it was all right. She was a terrible driver, though, especially in snow, because she was so used to being in control. When you drive on ice and snow, you have to know there are certain kinds — the loose-packed, wet, slick-surfaced snow — that can kill you. You have to know how the dense stuff will let you control a lot of the motion of your car. But, whatever kind it is, you have to be able to let go just a little, stop steering at certain kinds of slide, stop overcontrolling because it looks treacherous, and simply permit the weight of the car, plus its momentum, plus a tiny adjustment of the wheel, plus accelerator , not brake, to take you through the turn. But Fanny was used to controlling situations. It was her job. I’d pulled her out of snowdrifts, embankments, roadside ditches filled with slush. She’d telephoned from strangers’ farmhouses and from public phones in the center of town. I worried as much about the strangers in the farmhouses as I did about the skids.

I wondered what degree of sleeplessness she’d have to reach before it affected her work and a doctor would report her. But who’d they report her to? You don’t find good nurses from good programs very easily in upstate New York. They couldn’t afford to lose her, so they might leave her alone and she might commit some terrible mistake. And driving home, with so little sleep, after the constant push of the ER, what might she drive into, given an unlighted country road and her hands squeezed too tight on the wheel? I saw her leaning forward, steering with tired, jerky motions. I saw the car, on a slithery hill, going into a long, fast loop.

We were going to have to talk. Archie was right. But he’d sold me to Strodemaster. Well, not completely, not really. He told the guy I’d had some experience in the loss of children. It wasn’t a secret, really. We just didn’t talk about it. Strodemaster wanted the girl found, and that was all right. Archie thought I could help because he trusted me. All right. And what he had told me, again and again, casually, as casually as a round-faced, sweating man who looked like a hog in love could be casual, was that Fanny and I needed to talk all the time, not just when it exploded in us.

About our child.

So we would have to talk. So that Fanny wouldn’t turn her knuckles white against the steering wheel and come off the road and pitch through her windshield. I couldn’t help seeing what the glass of a windshield looks like after someone has gone into it in a collision. There’s always so much blood, and it ends up in the starred but not shattered off-white sections. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle joined with blood.

I parked outside the humanities building and started in the basement, trying doors, making a note of who was working in an isolated corner of the building as late afternoon got dark and the snow intensified. It was too early, really, to be checking the building, but I needed to be out of the car and out of the thoughts about Fanny that hung inside it like someone’s cigarette smoke. The posters about Janice Tanner were on the walls and many office doors. Her smile had a downward tug to it, like she might be someone who would easily cry. But it was a bright smile, and her dark eyes seemed to be smiling, too. She was very small and fragile-looking. After a while, after seeing the smiles, and the eyes, and the word missing, I couldn’t look at her. When I saw one of the posters, and its promise of a reward for information, I had to look away.

I went back to the Jeep and answered a call about a disturbance at one of the fraternities. The row of them, very large houses, very well kempt, lined the street across from the bottom of the campus and its hill. The disturbance was a fight. By the time I arrived, it was a fight that was over. One boy was on his hands and knees, bleeding from the nose and mouth into the snow. The boy who had apparently put him down stood with his arms at his sides, his shirt torn open, and he wailed. He was like a dog, with his head pointed up, and with shrill yipping noises coming from his face.

I got the boy who was down to sit on my running board, and I stopped the bleeding from his nose. I used his shirt to stanch it, then wrapped him in a blanket. I took his name and told him to stay put. I talked to the one who was making all the noise. I took his name and told him to stay where he was. According to the president of the house, a big handsome kid who looked like he could have taken either of them, and who seemed more upset than either of them, they had fought over a girl. “A woman,” they called her. I made them shake hands. They embraced and wept together. I heard one of them say, “Fuckin’ bitch,” so I knew American manhood was defended again. I took the bloodied one to the college infirmary. His assailant insisted on coming. I wrapped him in a second blanket. I had thought of taking them to the hospital. I thought I might see Fanny in case she was in before her shift for some reason. But the infirmary was closer, and it was open, and I followed the rules. I wrote a report while I waited, and then I took them back.

The snow was very, very bad now, and I thought seriously about calling Fanny or stopping at the hospital. She hated it when I said she drove badly, because she insisted on doing everything well. So I finished the rest of my paperwork at the security building and I started home. The worst of our weather was in February and March. It dawned at twenty below, often enough, and often enough it didn’t reach zero. On February afternoons, I drove home in purple-blue darkness, the headlights making the ice sparkle. This afternoon, it was black, and the snow was thick, and I couldn’t see with the lights on their high beam. I kept the headlights low, made sure the cocoa doormat was squarely over the hole through which exhaust as well as cold air leaked in, and I did a steady twenty miles per hour off the campus and north, instead of south toward home. There was a small, shabby lumberyard I knew, endangered by the hardware chains that also sold wood, and I gave them my business in the name of general revenge. I had to estimate the dimensions and quantities of drywall and studs, nails and drywall screws and joint compound. I should have known it by heart, since Fanny and I had talked off and on for months about almost making the decision to do the room.