Frederick Busch - Girls

The sleep, or whatever you want to call it, was fine. I woke and it hurt and fairly soon I went under or somebody put me there again. It went like that quite a few times. Then I came around for a longer stretch and I howled and a doctor put me under for a really wonderfully long time. Then I was awake and not enjoying it.

My nurse was named Virginia. She told me I couldn’t breathe because of the cracked ribs, the torn rib cartilage, and the hematomas to my thorax. I said I thought bugs had thoraxes. Not as bad as this one, she told me. I had a catheter because I’d been pissing blood. I told her I knew my kidneys were bad and she said, yes, a kidney was bruised and bleeding. The rest of it was cuts inside the mouth from my own teeth, and the swelling of the cheekbone and nose were bruises, not breaks. I had two splinted fingers and my hands were swollen. That pleased me. When you take a beating, it’s always good to have proof you gave a little back. On the whole, however, I was physically useless, and they had gotten the message across.

“They used the kid as a finger,” I told the audience. It was Elmo St. John, a trooper I didn’t know, and a plainclothes investigator from the sheriff’s office. “I heard him say something about ‘There he is,’ or ‘That’s him,’ something like that. I remember the noise, not the words. I knew he was telling them I was the guy who roughed him up.”

“And the reason again?” This was the trooper. He sat rigidly, he held his hat on his lap, and he all but lifted a poster into the air that told me how much the state police appreciated rental cops like me.

The sheriff’s investigator was a big, skinny man with a tan. He had long straw-colored hair that looked streaked, like a dye job or the kind of bleaching that happens in the sun on a beach eight hundred miles from us in a different season. He said, “He ran the kid for peddling drugs. He said that already.”

“No,” the trooper said, “he told us the kid sold drugs or delivered them. He didn’t tell us why he had to knock the kid around.”

I didn’t say anything because my mouth and throat and face and cock and balls and kidney and back and legs and hand and arms and ribs hurt a lot.

Elmo said, “I can understand the temptation to kick someone’s ass for that. If you’re supposed to be protecting these kids and someone’s bringing them marijuana and who knows what else.”

“Pills,” I whispered.

“Pills,” Elmo said.

“No,” the trooper said again. “I understand the temptation. I’m asking why do it.”

I didn’t have an answer for him. I was thinking of the coeds on campus when they came in complaining about the war against girls conducted by fellows full of beer and feeling extremely entitled. They’d be in a fraternity house or some kid’s apartment and everyone would get liquored up. The girls would half pass out and feel a little horny or stimulated or happy and they’d wake up in midscrew or wake up after it and realize they’d never quite consented to getting laid. And the officer in charge, one of my people, would act like it was their fault. Why were you there with him? What were you wearing? What did you say? All the wrong questions. I remember our being told by Archie Halpern: It isn’t her fault. Assume that. It isn’t her fault. Some of us got confused by that. But it was our rule. I was wishing somebody was here in this hot mint green hospital room to say that about me. I wasn’t going to. I wasn’t about to try to figure out what blew up inside me when I beat on William Franklin. I wasn’t about to drag my life out of me like a rope of intestines and tell this manly law-enforcement person, “Here.”

Elmo said, “What, Jack?”

I rolled my head a little to show him Nothing.

He nodded. He told them, “He’s tired. He hurts.”

The sheriff’s man said, “Yes.” Then he said, “Except for the way he had his hair, there wasn’t anything?”

“Gloves,” I said.

“Terrific,” the trooper said.

“Speed gloves. He’s maybe a fighter.”

They wrote it down, the sheriff’s man nodding.

Fanny came in. Her face was pale and pinched, her nostrils wide. She said very curtly, “Please come back later.”

“We’re almost done,” the trooper said.

“Wrong by an almost,” she told him. She moved between them and me, standing with her hip against the bed, facing them down, until I heard the half sigh, half wince Elmo always makes when he stands on his sore knees. He went to the door, and they followed.

I felt her lean her weight against the bed. Then she turned, looking at the tubes that ran to me and the IV drip, and then my face. She closed her eyes. Because I am a bad person, I thought of Rosalie Piri.

Opening them, she said, “What?”

“You okay?”

“You should have seen yourself, you bastard.”

“You were incredible.”

“Yeah? So were you. I thought you were dead when you came falling out of the truck like that.”

“I did, too.”

“Nothing like this ever happened in the war to you,” she said.

“I didn’t work alone. I carried a sidearm. And I was a mean motherfucker in the war, Fanny, because I wasn’t in combat. I arrested the kids who went into it and I stayed in an office in Saigon and drank real French coffee. Now I’m soft. I go around changing diapers. Well. You know.”

Her face shut down when I mentioned diapers.

I said, “You know.”

She went on staring at me. “Yes,” she said. “Except you aren’t that out of shape for a man your age.”

“A hundred.”

“And it was four men?”

“Mostly only three. I think the kid got in a couple of kicks to the body at the end.”

“Your poor ribs.”

“It only hurts when I—”

“Laugh.”

“No,” I said “Breathe. When I breathe or talk or yawn or fart.”

“You want the bedpan?”

“I will be dead and half a teaspoon of ashes before anyone in this building delivers or takes away a bedpan. You can announce that if you like.”

“You’re tough.”

“With doctors and nurses and amateurs, I am the toughest. I am a little less of a challenge to the semiprofessional ranks.”

“They were warning you to let them sell drugs?”

“I don’t think they were avenging the boy I pushed around. So, yes: I think it was a business memorandum. It didn’t, of course, have anything to do with Janice Tanner, and she’s the reason I rousted the kid. Someone in Chenango Flats said they saw a car that I thought might be his on the day Janice went missing. Ouch. Goddamn it.”

“It wasn’t about the drugs, then.”

“No.”

“The missing girls? You worry about a missing girl and they beat you up over drugs?”

“You worry a drug dealer about the missing girl, then yes. They decide it’s only the drugs part, and then you get this.”

“Idiot,” she said.

I tried to smirk, but my mouth hurt too much. I decided simply to lie there.

“Bastard idiot. Son of a bitch bastard idiot fool,” she said. She was crying, and I waited to hear the thump of a tail. “It’s because of Hannah.”

“You been talking to Archie?” I finally said.

“Bastard son of a bitch. If you die because of her, then it’s me and a dog left in the house.”

I reached to take her hand and I yipped. But I got hold of her, and I hung on. Her hand was hot and dry.

“Everything’s because of Hannah,” she said.

“We didn’t start out because of her,” I said. “We didn’t have her because of her.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I rolled my head on the flat pillow. I didn’t know.