Frederick Busch - Girls

She said, “I have to go.”

“What shift is this?”

“I didn’t go home,” she said. “Nobody went home. It’s all right — I called the farm and they sent two of the kids over on a snowmobile. They brought him home and fed him and they’ll keep him until we get there.”

“I bet you he liked the ride.”

“We have outages,” she said. “Trees went down; power lines are broken.”

“Which means the furnace went off. Which means it won’t go on. You have to push the reset to make it go on again. Which means frozen pipes, maybe. It’s still cold?”

“Still cold,” she said. “Burst pipes for sure.”

“That’s upstate,” I said.

She nodded.

“I’ll be all right, Fanny. I’m sorry about this.”

“It’s the this ,” she said. “It’s gotten to be so much of everything.”

I swallowed a few times and she saw I was dry, and she held a glass with a bent straw to my mouth. I swallowed too fast and began to cough and it became very interesting along the right side of my body. I watched her tighten her face until I was done and lying flat again.

The door opened in and Rosalie Piri said to Fanny, “Can I see him?”

Her smile was not as broad as usual, and she looked frightened, or maybe embarrassed. She certainly was flushed. Fanny stayed pale. I closed my eyes. “He’s tired,” Fanny said. Then she said, “You are …”

Instead of naming herself, Rosalie used a pugnacious tone I thought of as New York City, and she said, “Yes, I’m a little tired, too, thank you. Can I visit him?”

Fanny looked down at me. I looked back up. My eyes were so wide, they hurt. I made a little throat-clearing noise, and I said, “Professor Piri, this is my wife, Fanny. Fanny, this is Professor Piri.”

Fanny said, “How do you do.”

Rosalie nodded. She said, “Hello” in a hard, cold voice I hadn’t heard. Her face was as red as the head of a stick match.

Fanny said to me, “Bye, Jack.” She went out the door with a very stiff back.

Rosalie came to the side of the bed. “Oh, God,” she said. “I didn’t handle that well.” She smiled, she stopped smiling, and then she said, “Jack, is there anything to handle? Your wife’s remarkable. She’s so tall, she looks like a dancer.”

“Can’t dance,” I said.

“No, she looks, I don’t know, powerful. She has wonderful bones in her face.”

I thought, She has shadows in her face. I helped set them there. I did my share.

“I’m too short for you,” she said.

“No,” I said. I thought then that I was at least one word, that last one, into someplace I shouldn’t be.

“Your sad mouth,” she said, touching my lip. I hissed, and she drew her hand away. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“You’re making my catheter uncomfortable,” I said.

She blushed again. She shook her head. “This is insane,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I have to get out of here.”

“Yes.”

I waited for her to make me a promise, or to say something about her and me. She compressed her lips and took a breath. She said, “Right,” and she turned toward the door and walked out.

I waited for Fanny to march in and make comments. She didn’t come. About half an hour later, Virginia brought a bedpan. All right, I thought, she sent a messenger instead.

My doctor, who was very fat and extremely careful about hurting me, told me I was going to be all right. The kidney was bruised, but the blood in my urine was diminished. They removed the catheter, they rebound my ribs, and they told me that I should take it easy. I was to stay there another night because, although my skull X rays were negative, I was probably mildly concussed, and anyway, most of the smaller county roads were unplowed. I could sit up, the doctor told me, smiling, if I could sit up.

I was in the room’s lounge chair, reading a Syracuse newspaper several days old and enjoying it. There was a lot of information about zoo animals and corruption in the county council. They didn’t bother you a lot with material about inept Presidents or endangered Vice Presidents or the Senate of the United States. There were a lot of comic strips, and a crossword puzzle even I could do. I was a not unintelligent crossword puzzler.

Strodemaster came in puffing. He was dressed in ski clothes of the sort I saw the students wear, very expensive stuff in black and iridescent yellow that looked like spangles were woven into the skintight cloth. His goggles hung around his neck.

“Jack!” he called. “You all right, man?”

I said, “Hi, Randy, did you ski all the way in?”

“Good exercise,” he said. “And I qot a lift from the snowplow for the last three miles. Jack, holy hat. This happened to you because of me, according to your wife.”

“My wife said that? How is she?”

“Been busy here for her, I guess. One big emergency.”

“One big emergency,” I said.

He walked back and forth too fast to call it pacing. I could see his leg muscles jumping in his tight outfit. He swung his arms and didn’t look at me. He moved back and forth, wall to wall, and he looked straight ahead. I couldn’t figure out how he kept his hair so carefully combed under his ski hat. From the side, he looked a little bit like a movie star whose name I almost remembered. He walked, he swung his arms, and then he suddenly stopped. He faced the bed and looked at me like I was precious to him. It was something that went over his oaky-looking face.

“Listen,” he said, “I know I talked you into this. I got you involved in the first place when I went to Archie. I got you involved in the second place when I came to you. You aren’t a cop anymore. You don’t need this kind of shit, getting mugged by hoodlums. What kind of world is this?”

“You know, I have very little idea,” I said.

“I can tell you this much — it’s scary. When a good man gets hurt this much on account of some blabbermouth buttinsky like me … Well, we were just trying to help, weren’t we? Just trying to do a little good.”

I had the feeling I was missing what he wanted me to hear. I folded the newspaper and blinked a lot and focused hard.

He said, “You got me feeling guilty, man.”

“What are you guilty of, Randy?”

“Your whipped ass, Jack. I don’t ask you for help, you don’t get going into this stuff, and the hoodlums don’t hurt you. It couldn’t have been a fair fight.”

I said, “I don’t believe I know of any fair fights.”

“Really?” he said. “That’s a cruel, frightening Weltanschauung, Jack.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh. Point of view? I don’t know — view of the world, maybe. Way of looking at things?”

“Oh.”

“It’s German.”

“It’s a German way of looking?”

“It’s a German word.”

“Sounds it,” I said.

He was walking back and forth again. There wasn’t much of anyplace to walk. It was a two-person room, and the only reason there was space for the chair was that Virginia had pushed the empty other bed against the wall. But he paced. He looked sweaty and less healthy than when he’d begun. I thought of him out there in Chenango Flats with his girlfriends and his garbage and his devotion to poor yellowing Mrs. Tanner. I tried to see him in graduate school and then his early days at the college with a wife who loved him. I could only see him alone. I couldn’t imagine him with a wife or with the girlfriends he was said to bring home. I could only see him in the bathrobe with its stained front. I remembered the smell of his kitchen. I was confused by his language and his shiny-faced energy. I was disturbed by how much he wanted me to like him.