Frederick Busch - Girls

But by now, the lean one had hit me twice in the ribs, big, pounding blows. He worked the heavy bag, I thought. Or maybe he just killed people with his fists. He missed my nose but caught my temple. Then he caught my nose. I didn’t want to bend over or go down, but I did both, in segments, and one of them, the Indian who was up again, I thought, caught me on the back of the neck. It wasn’t the correct way to deliver that blow, which was lucky for me, but it was done quickly and with malice, which was unfortunate for a man in my position, which was down and exposed.

I was in the snow now, on my knees, and almost out of business. My head went back a few times and made contact with the car. Someone was landing feet in my belly and ribs. A shot took my elbow, and I went facedown. I tried to roll under the Jeep, and I got partway there. They pulled me out. I tried to cover up, but I couldn’t see and I couldn’t make my arms work. My mouth was filled with blood and I thought I was maybe breathing it in, because I started to cough.

William Franklin said, “You let him spit his blood on you like that?” It was yoo. He said, “You gonna let him give yez AIDS?”

One of them said, “Holy shit.”

Someone else said, “AIDS motherfuckin’ fag.”

They continued to deliver the message with their feet. They’d let go of me by now, and I worked my body into as much of a ball as my disconnected-feeling limbs could manage. I tried to cover my head with my arms. I couldn’t tell if I had. Nothing much was operational.

I thought he was whispering down one of those cardboard tubes that paper towels come wrapped around. He said something in hollow-sounding whispers, but I couldn’t understand him.

Another one — maybe it was Franklin — shouted over the wind, and I did hear him. He cried, “Don’t piss us off.”

Another one said, “This is not about pissed off. The man understands.”

My tongue was too big for my mouth. I kept swallowing liquids. I was blind. I was trying to decide about breathing, because it hurt. I knew if they did any more, it would kill me.

They did a little more. They went twice more to the body and I decided not to breathe. I wondered if they’d killed me. Someone dragged me someplace. I was cold. Someone drove a car away, maybe my Jeep, I thought. I thought if I was thinking, maybe I wasn’t dead. I heard their Toyota turn over, a low, nasty rumble, and then they left.

After they were gone, I listened to the snow rattling on something, maybe the backs of my ears. I heard a low chugging noise that I thought might be my Jeep. I waited a little while longer to see if I was dead. I opened my eyes. I actually opened one. The other didn’t work. I saw the Jeep about ten or fifteen feet away. You can walk that , I thought. I moved a little. I thought, So crawl it. I moved again, and then I thought, Roll.

I inched there. My hands were alongside my body and my face was down. I moved my knees and, each time I did, I quickly learned it was important to hold my breath. That fooled my body between the throat and the waist into believing the pain was better. A few fingers didn’t work, and I couldn’t lift my arms. My legs were sore, but they could push. My forehead and the front of my face got very numb from the slush and snow and ice, but that was good. Numbness was wonderful. I wanted more. I dug my head into the snow and I pushed with my knees and angled my shoulders, and within no more than a month, I seemed to be near the car.

The door was open, and I could use the running board, I thought. I did my little trick about compressing and holding a breath, but my breaths were shallow little gaggings, anyway, and there wasn’t enough air on all of the campus to reinforce whatever was broken in there. I hadn’t read a lot of detective stories, but I’d seen some movies on TV, especially the old ones in black and white. First thing that happens, I thought, the tough-ass, wisecracking, lone-wolf detective smacks a hood. He calls him a cheap hood so everybody understands. Then the hood gets a hundred armed men to absolutely beat the smirking detective’s ass into paste. They start by hitting him on the back of the head with the butt of a gun and then they take him apart. But I hadn’t seen how the guy gets up into his car when his body doesn’t work and the bad guys are gone.

I apparently went off to sleep. Why not call it going to sleep? When I came back, or awake, or whatever you might say, I was on a hip on the running board. I said, “Reach up for the wheel.”

Not for two years’ salary and the Land Cruiser and one of the squat guys thrown in as chauffeur.

“Please reach up for the wheel,” I said.

I understood the urgency. Shock was a problem. And I had lost too much body heat, so there was hypothermia, and then there seemed to be some bleeding, maybe internal, and a number of body parts and mechanical items didn’t work. I thought of kidney and spleen and liver. Kidneys sounded likely, I thought. There had been a couple of hands to that region and more than a couple of feet. I really ought to reach for the wheel, I thought.

It was his whimpering that woke me up. It was my whimpering. I was on the front seat, lying down, and making a hell of a noise. It took me the rest of that week to sit up and then make myself lean far enough out to pull on the door. I was very noisy, and I vowed to stop acting out of character. Jack, I reminded myself, was the quiet one with the jumpy cheek muscles and all of that reserve that puts people off.

The parking brake was on. I released it after a while and then I was able to steer with my elbows clamped to my sides and my fingers doing most of the motion. I got it into first and I left it there. I didn’t want to move my arm to shift or my foot for the clutch. I kept my foot on the gas. I was able to turn the bubble light on, and I drove. A few times, I rolled into things. I refused to shift to back up, and that seemed to work. I’d hit something and make that noise again and then I’d step a little harder on the gas and the Jeep would slide away or the object would slide away and I’d go forward. That was how I went, forward and down, forward and down.

I thought I was past the library. It was hard to tell because there was no traffic on the street below the campus, but I thought I’d passed the library. “Left,” I said.

I choked a little and I spat a lot, and I tried to aim the Jeep straight. I saw the shape of the dormitories to my left, and then came the athletic buildings, then the hospital. I was a quarter of a mile away from it. All of its parking lot lights were on and the ambulance portico was bright. I almost got parked beneath it. I missed by a few feet and bent some of the fender and grille around the brick-veneer post at its right-hand side. I hit the horn and tried to open the door without moving my left arm from where it was clamped at my side. I couldn’t get the door released. I moved my right hand again and pressed at the horn. I kept it there, and soon they came out.

I thought it was so lovely. The big metal door swung out and Fanny in white uniform trousers and shirt and white sweater came running. The door swung in, then out again, and she was followed by another nurse pushing a gurney. Fanny pulled the car door open, and she looked so tough, so used to finding someone like me who came spilling out of a car and almost through her arms. I waited to feel the snow again, and the ground, but I didn’t because she caught me. I remember thinking how with those big shoulders and strong legs of course she would.

She said, “Jack dear god Christ Jesus Jack. What? What ?”

Before the other nurse finished helping her move me onto the gurney, I remember saying, or gargling it like somebody in the shower with an open, filling mouth, “Fanny. Fanny. Nobody fed the dog.”