Frederick Busch - Girls

I waited. His head moved. I was afraid to hit him again, but I didn’t show it. I came in closer. I said, “You can imagine what I know how to do with my feet.”

He wheezed out a sound that might have been a word.

“Did you see the girl? Hear a single word about her?”

He made a sound.

“When you talk to your wholesalers, you might mention this conversation. I want you to understand: You stay off of my campus. I want them to understand I want to know anything they know about this girl. Who’s doing what to girls, where, when, anything. You call security and have them find me and I’ll come where you are and I will drop some reward on you. Otherwise, I drop the rest of me on you for ten, fifteen minutes, and you’re done. You’re all over. Tell me you understand.”

He said, “ ’Kay.”

“ ’Kay,” I said. “Good luck with your vehicle. It seems to be stuck in the snow.”

I walked back to the Jeep, and I got inside with casual movements. I drove carefully away, relieved to see, in the rearview mirror, that he was on an elbow and was moving his legs, preparing to stand. I took the first turn I came to, and I went for maybe a mile, then I parked. I let myself shake. I hadn’t seen action in a long time — if you can call it action, using old skills and long training and a half-buried craziness to beat up on a wild child who made his living in sales.

Someone authentic, like Sergeant Bird or even Elmo St. John, if they had seen me, would have called me a mindless vigilante and knocked me over with a sap or just put a bullet in my leg. I was disgusted. I thought of leaning out the door and vomiting. I also thought of Janice Tanner, and the other faces on the brightly colored sheets, and I settled for standing by the front of the truck and peeing into the snow. Then I got in. I called myself a bully. Without trembling now, I drove quickly to get back to work.

After a little double-talk with the dispatcher, I spoke to everyone on duty and caught up, then started to patrol. It was snowing again, not heavily, and I had the wipers working in a very slow beat. Kids trudged into and out of classroom buildings and one tall woman, with dark hair trailing out behind her, ran. She was wearing a patterned dress and high heels as she went along the broad alley that connected the lots behind the academic buildings. I gestured her to get in the Jeep and I gave her a lift. She had a wide, shy smile and she left a smell of perfume in the front. I flexed my hands and took a breath and felt lonely.

I saw my English professor at the front of his long, low gray car, a new one, a Cadillac de Ville. He seemed to be puzzled, so I stopped and said hello and he gave me a little salute. His smile was embarrassed. I’d have been embarrassed, too, wearing puffy-looking sneaker things with leather trim on khaki cloth with thick soles under pea green corduroys and a kind of quilted slicker with a long-brimmed hat the color of the shoes.

“They’re a new development in thermal footwear,” he said. “The insulation is very lightweight, and the cloth is Gore-Tex. It repels moisture and keeps the heat in, but your feet breathe.”

“Lucky feet,” I said. “Is there a problem here?”

“I thought you might be coming up one of these days to talk about your grade for last semester’s course.”

“No,” I said, “I was able to read the letter. It said C.”

“Plus,” he said.

“Plus.”

“I was afraid you might be disappointed.”

I shook my head. “I get credit for the course,” I said.

“Well.”

It seemed to me he was trying to figure out whether I could understand the subtleties of all his very interesting emotions. I didn’t want to name them for him, but I knew they included smugness, condescension, and superiority over the semiliterate. He looked around for a translator.

“I don’t worry about my grades,” I said.

He said, “ There you go.”

“Can I help you with your car?”

“I guess I popped the hood open this morning when I checked the oil and then left it open. I can’t seem to close it.” I found a heavy screwdriver in my toolbox and then I lifted the hood partway up. I asked him to hold it in place. The snap latch above the grillwork was closed. I used the shaft of the screwdriver to pry it open. Then I gestured him away from the hood and dropped it shut. It fell into place.

“It must have been this way awhile,” I said, thinking of the witnesses in Chenango Flats, wondering if an old woman at her window at dusk might mistake the jammed-open hood for something bulbous on the front of the dark car.

“Yes, I expect,” he said, ready to be rid of me now.

I tried the subtle approach. “You get to Chenango Flats a lot? I think I might have seen this car there and didn’t know it was yours.”

He said, “Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. Just wondering.”

“Just wondering about me and Chenango Flats? I see.” He opened his door and positioned himself to sit behind the wheel. “I appreciate your coming to the rescue,” he said.

“Sure,” I said. “Nothing to it.”

“Why in hell would you ask me questions about Chenango Flats, Jack?”

His big strong head was ducked, as if he was trying to read his instruments. Then his head came up and he stared into my eyes. I tried to read anything there besides amusement, a little confusion, the idea that I was no longer very interesting to him. It occurred to me I wouldn’t mind learning he was the one.

He took his eyes off me and started the car. I let go of the door when he pulled it to. As he backed away and drove off slowly, with no further word or gesture for me, I realized his car had done the talking for him. Its insignia said I could never afford it, and the soft-suspension trundle of its rear end had said, I turn my back on you.

There was no reason, really, to suspect him, and stretching a hood left ajar into a bulbous protrusion was probably silly. I wasn’t much of a cop. I knew that. Beating up William Franklin was like beating on the world in general. My life, before I was done with him, had shrugged and picked its teeth and waited for me to get back into it. I was going to have to straighten up, I thought. I was going to have to straighten everything up.

In the service, working a case was easy. It was always clear, except for suspected theft of company funds, and one case of suspected spying, when I went no place with either one. Usually, the guy was in stockade for me, waiting to scrounge a cigarette and tell how scared he was. Here was his knife. Here was the picture of the civilian male or, sometimes, American soldier or, often enough, whore in the hospital or medical examiner’s, and here was the wound. I talked to the prisoner, he told me what I knew, including his fear and often enough his regret, and then I attached the transcript to the incident report and wrote my own report, and I moved on. They always confessed to me. I was good at that part. And they were stupid. And there wasn’t anyplace a soldier could hide.

The one we thought went over to the NVA was Chinese-American, a scared young kid who was educated and intelligent, and we were racists and he was innocent. Everyone figured all the guys with slanted eyes were on the same side. I wrote that in my report when I said he was innocent. They told me I might have made a field-grade promotion to second lieutenant, at least for the duration of the action, except for that report. I told Fanny I thought it was the warrior lieutenants from VMI disliking it that a guy who didn’t go to college and who seemed a little hard might get to attend their briefings. I came out a sergeant at twenty-four and that was all right, and I had some skills. But I didn’t know what to do about Janice Tanner, and I was afraid of making a mess. I didn’t want anyone hurt because of me. Except, I told myself, William Franklin of Staten Island, New York.