Frederick Busch - Girls

“Jack,” he said, “promise me.”

“What, Randy?”

“You’ll get out of it, the involvement with … with this whole awful Janice Tanner story.”

I thought, listening to him, what I’d thought when my English prof had carried on about something we’d read. It always sounded prepared, which was a silly reaction, since these guys got paid to come to class prepared. I guess it sounded insincere, what they thought they were supposed to say instead of what they felt. I don’t know. I remember thinking I wasn’t cut out to be listening to these people. And what they felt wasn’t supposed to be my business, anyway.

“This is my own fault, Randy. I handled a lot of stuff wrong. Remember what I told you — I haven’t been an investigator for an awfully long time.”

He said, “Yes, I remember. What I thought at the time was, What’s an investigator? He picks up data? I thought I could do it. I was trained. Investigators are like scientists. Scientists are investigators. I didn’t do Janice any good, did I?”

I said, “Maybe.”

“Maybe I did?”

“Maybe investigators are scientists. What I did, when I worked it seriously, I listened. I just tried to hear what they said. I did a lot of interrogations. I was good at it.”

“At listening,” he said, walking to the door and turning to walk back.

“At listening,” I said.

He said, “Listen, then, Jack. I’m the one at fault here, not you. You have broken ribs. The cartilage that binds two of them in place is torn away. You have two simple fractures in your fingers. Fanny told me you were pissing blood. Your face is puffed and black-and-blue. You look like you can’t move a lot of the rest of you. You’re out. I hired you, for a great big nothing, and now I need to fire you. Please. All right?”

“Randy,” I said, “relax. You professors. All of you. You talk and you talk. Relax.”

“Get outside and go for a run on the sticks.”

“What?”

“Go skiing. That’s what I should do more of. That’s what I’ll do. But no more — what shall we call it, detective work?”

“I think you call it getting beat up.”

“Good description,” he said. “Good man!”

“That’s me,” I said, wondering if Fanny would enter the room again.

She’d been on for four days, and by the time the roads were cleared and most of the area’s power restored, they sent her off for a couple of days’ break, and they sent me with her. Security would dig my Ford out and run it a little to charge the battery. My vice president for administration had interviewed and hired a temp to fill in until I came back. When I did, I could decide whether we would keep her. I was pleased he had listened to me about hiring a woman. All I needed now was for Fanny and me to be all right, and for the missing girls to appear unharmed in their homes.

Here’s what I thought. I thought about Ralph the Duck, who didn’t have any feathers. I thought, Once upon a time.

I truly wished, as Virginia wheeled me to the door and helped me into Fanny’s car, that I knew something about prayer. Mrs. Tanner did, I thought. Presumably, her husband did. Maybe Janice did and maybe it comforted her. I wished for that.

I knew that praying was more than wishing. It was more than talking loose and swearing careless oaths to what you wished would bail you out of the shit. When I was in the service and people fired on each other while I was working, two times I heard men scream to Jesus and God the Father, “Oh please please please don’t kill me God Jesus please.” I’d got in the habit, there, of using those names as messily as anyone else had, and I’d known at the time and I knew now that praying was something else.

I thought, as Fanny drove us home, that I could work as hard as I wished, bullying bad guys and giving up my rib cage and doing all the powerful listening I could, but that something else had to happen. I didn’t know what it was. I wasn’t thinking about God. I had no ideas about God. God worked His, Her, or Its side of the street, and I worked mine. It wasn’t what Mrs. Tanner would think of as God. But we all needed more than we were bringing to the situation, I thought.

We skidded out, but Fanny caught it.

“You all right?” I asked her.

“Fine.”

“Fanny, you’re so amazingly pissed off at me.”

“Why is it amazing?”

“Because I haven’t done anything bad except get my ass kicked is why.”

“And your little short professor — what’s her name? Your faculty friend?”

“I find this hard to believe,” I said.

“No,” she said, “you should believe it. Walking into your room and talking through me like I’m hired help. Excuse me, I’m sure, pro- fessor. Do you knock her off in some maintenance shack or something? Or is she what you do in your truck when you aren’t rescuing the daughters of the upper crust?”

“I don’t knock anyone off. You, of everyone in the world, should know that. You know who I am. You know how I’ve been. Come on, Fanny. And how could you suspect me of something like that?”

“Oh, it’s worse than suspecting you, Jack. It’s her I’m suspecting, too. All I needed was one fast look at her curly little mouth and her tight little body and the expression in her eyes when she looked at you. That girlish little blush? Dear mercy me, Jack, you can’t be that naïve. No one can. Which means you know what’s going on, whatever it is.”

“Which is nothing.”

“Whatever it is,” she said. “And you know. And I know. Maybe the registrar knows. Maybe she gives you a grade. And I believe that terminates this portion of the journey’s conversation, thank you very much.”

Fanny had apparently arranged to have us plowed out, and she was able to park close to the house. We went in together. She was near me, in case I slipped, but otherwise she was distant. The house smelled cold, and I headed for the cellar door and went down to hit the restart button on the oil-fired furnace. It started up. I walked the cellar, inspecting the water pipes. None down there had burst, and when I was back upstairs, I called up to Fanny to ask if anything on the second floor had burst and run.

From the head of the stairs, she said, “No.”

I made a fire in the woodstove and it didn’t take that long for the furnace to heat the water and circulate it to the radiators. The house began to warm and creak as wood and metal expanded, and it felt alive, though not as hearty as I’d have liked.

Fanny called down, “I was wrong. There’s no water running up here in the bathroom.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

All she said was, “Good.”

I fetched the heat gun and wedged myself into a corner of the mudroom. That was where the pipes ran vertically, along the wrong wall, the outside wall, to the upstairs. I set the heat gun on low because I didn’t want to fire up the lath inside the plaster walls, and I warmed the pipes up. If we were lucky, the problem was a kind of slush or light ice, and I could melt it.

Five minutes later, Fanny walked into the kitchen, around the corner from me, and said, “There’s water now.”

I turned the heat gun off and lay on my back on the mudroom floor where I’d crouched. My ribs felt worse than they had for a day. I was going to have to learn, I thought, about behaving differently. Maybe if I told Fanny I was hurt and was about to act better, she would forgive me.

I thought, Forgive you for which?

She said, “What are you doing?”

I said, “I’m resting a minute.”

“What’d you hurt?”

“Ribs.”