Frederick Busch - Girls

She didn’t answer, and I stood. “Mrs. Tanner?”

“It’s fine,” she said after what felt like a long wait. “Don’t worry. And I feel certain you’ll get your turn.”

The weekend was long and quiet and icy and long. Temperatures fell by Friday night to twenty-five below zero, and they didn’t rise more than twelve degrees during Saturday. We had long ago sealed the fireplace up with an insert, a small iron stove from Vermont, and Fanny and I carried in load after load of wood. We had the thermostat set high for the oil burner, and, in the back room, which was heated by electric baseboard units, we turned the thermostat all the way up. Fanny wore an old woolen shirt of mine under a thick wool sweater, flannel pajama pants under her jeans, and heavy ragg socks inside of her wool-lined moccasins. I wore the down-filled vest I used for outdoor chores in autumn. Nothing much helped. One of us was always looking through the kitchen window at the thermometer and reporting on how bad it was, or turning from the radio or television set to repeat a number always ending in below zero. The windows frosted up in fan shapes. On Saturday afternoon, when the temperature rose closest to zero, I started our cars and kept them running a good while. Then, shutting them down, I set old blankets and tarpaulins over the engines to insulate the batteries and wiring. I ran a droplight on an extension cord from the mudroom, where we plugged in the washer and dryer, out to my old Ford, and I arranged the bulb to lie above the battery, under blankets, to provide a little heat.

The rest was moving slowly, going to windows to look at the threat, and sitting in the house near the stove and talking about the cold. We did not discuss the room upstairs, or our daughter, or the errand that Strodemaster invited me into, though we talked in general about the missing girls.

Fanny said, late on Saturday afternoon, when we drank chicken broth in mugs near the fire, “What if she ran away and she’s outside in this?”

“It would have to be hell in the Tanners’ house to want to be outside in this, wouldn’t it? I don’t know about him, but she seems a gentle woman. Strong person, you know, but gentle. I don’t know what in hell the preacher’s up to. Probably raping her every night.”

“They don’t quite rape them,” Fanny said. “They seduce them. Daddy needs you. Why are you so beautiful , I can’t stay away from you — so it’s the girl’s fault. It isn’t as violent as rape. But it’s also more violent.”

“You get them in the ER?”

She shook her head. “Not usually. They don’t come in hurt, as a rule. Sometimes they go wild, and they kill him, and he comes in all cut or bleeding or burned. Once, this was when I was in nursing school, they brought a guy in — his sister-in-law had done him. She waited until after he worked the daughter over and he was sleeping. She tied his hands and feet to the bed. He was on his back. And she hammered nails into him. She said he twisted a lot, and his wife kept trying to rescue him, and the nails banged off his ribs, but she did a lot of damage. She was trying to sink these big spikes, they looked like, into his heart. The wife kept saying she would press charges, she would press charges.”

“Against her sister, right?”

“Oh, of course.” Then Fanny said, “When you talk to Archie — are you his patient?”

Fanny was in the morris chair I had pulled over. She had her legs up under her, and I’d put a comforter over her lap. For a while, she had looked relaxed. But now her brow, which had looked pale but relaxed, almost smooth, was a furrow of twisted parallel lines pushed up by her wonderful eyebrows, which had risen as I rocked. The dog felt the tension increase. He sat up, then laid his head on his paws and watched us.

“Not a patient. No. Sometimes, going in, when I stop at the Blue Bird to fill up on coffee, if I’m early, we have a cup together and we talk.”

“About us.”

“About the salary cap in the NBA. About campus politics that percolate down to the infrastructure people like me. About the weather. Sometimes—”

“It was the sometimes that I think I was asking about.”

“Sometimes we talk about emotions.”

“Because you’re such a garrulous fellow and you just can’t stop pondering out loud about the way folks emote?”

“Exactly,” I said. The lines on her forehead were slightly less bunched.

“Tell me.”

I closed my eyes so I could say it. “Sometimes I worry about if I’m smart enough, educated enough. I don’t know. Strong enough? Something enough. To be useful to you.”

I rubbed my face like I was tired. It kept my hand in front of me, and it kept my eyes shut.

“Useful,” she said.

I made the sound you make when you agree with someone.

She said, “Jack.”

We still didn’t talk about the wreckage upstairs in the room. Sunday night, we got Fanny’s car running, and her wheels squeaked off on the frozen road. In the morning, the dog wandered away while I worked on starting the Ford. The oil sounded like sludge and the starter sounded like a very weak cough, but it turned over, and I let the engine run while I stumped around on numb feet, trying to get the dog in. He burst up from the woods below the house with snow powdering off him like water in the wake of a fast-moving ship. His head was high and his jaw was clamped. He was full of victory and pride, and he carried a loop of frozen blue-maroon intestines two feet long. He had clearly been to the mother lode of all sickness-provoking snacks for dogs, and he’d returned in glory. I let him run around the yard a few times, circling me to make sure it was understood that an event of major importance had taken place. Then, when he fell to his belly a few feet away to begin his meal, I made him drop it. I carried the guts in, put them inside a plastic bag, and hauled them out to the trash pails in the garage. I didn’t want us smelling them while they defrosted.

The dog escorted me and his fading triumph, and I thought of kitchens and rotten garbage, and I wondered again what Strodemaster kept beneath his sink. Probably it was a matter of how long he kept it more than what he kept. He was the kind of man whose wife had a long job description, I figured, and it included trash removal, pest control, and bathrobe cleaning. Now that his wife was gone, he couldn’t ask his girlfriends to shovel and sweep. Fanny had nothing but scorn for women like his wife who let themselves get run like appliances.

I thought of how I’d lied to Fanny and then told the truth. I couldn’t stay angry at Archie, because he knew too much about us. And because he’d worked so hard, with such delicacy, to help me out. I left early, apologizing to the dog, as I always did, for locking him in the kitchen for the day. I realized that I wanted to get to the Blue Bird and have an early cup.

His side of the window table was dusty with powdered sugar and crumbs and little crumpled sugar packages. He was wearing a huge, thick turtleneck sweater that had a collar that came almost up to his ears.

“Jesus,” I said, “you look like one of those U-boat captains in a movie.”

“I was told at home this morning that I look like Erich von Stroheim,” he said. “Have a pastry. They frosted them with maple this morning.”

I handed my thermos to Verna and I burned my mouth on coffee. I said, “Your pal Randy Strodemaster asked me to help out with something.”

“Something,” Archie said.

“This missing girl, Janice Tanner, you son of a bitch.”

“I take it that you don’t agree with me that talking with her parents would be beneficial.”