Frederick Busch: Girls

I wrote “Ralph the Duck.”

Once upon a time, there was a duck named Ralph who didn’t have any feathers on his wings. So when the cold wind blew, Ralph said, Brr, and he shivered and shook.

What’s the matter? Ralph’s mommy asked.

I’m cold , Ralph said.

Oh, the mommy said. Here. I’ll keep you warm.

So she spread her big, feathery wings, and hugged Ralph tight, and when the cold wind blew, Ralph was warm and snuggly, and he fell fast asleep.

The next Thursday, he was wearing canvas pants and hiking boots. He mentioned kind of casually to some of the girls in the class how whenever there was a storm, he wore his Lake District walking outfit. He had a big hairy sweater on. I kept waiting for him to make a noise like a mountain goat. But the girls seemed to like it. His boots made a creaky squeak on the linoleum of the hall when he caught up with me after class.

“As I told you,” he said, “it isn’t unappealing. It’s just — not a college theme.”

“Right,” I said. “Okay. You want me to do it over?”

“No,” he said. “Not at all. The D will remain your grade. But I’ll read something else if you want to write it.”

“This’ll be fine,” I said.

“Did you understand the assignment?”

“Write something to influence someone—‘Rhetoric and Persuasion.’ ”

We were at his office door and the redheaded kid who got sick in my truck was waiting for him. She looked at me as if one of us was in the wrong place, which struck me as accurate enough. He was interested in getting into his office with the redhead, but he remembered to turn around and flash me a grin he seemed to think he was known for.

Instead of going on shift a few hours after class, the way I’m supposed to, I told the dispatcher I was sick, and I went home. Fanny was frightened when I came in, because I don’t get sick and I don’t miss work. She looked at my face and got sad. I went upstairs to change. When I was a kid, I always changed my clothes as soon as I came home from school. I put on jeans and a flannel shirt and thick wool socks, and I made myself a dark drink of sour mash. Fanny poured herself some wine and came into the cold northern room a few minutes later. I was sitting in the rocker, looking over the valley. The wind was lining up a lot of rows of cloud, so the sky looked like a baked trout when you lift the skin off. “It’ll snow,” I said to her.

She sat on the old sofa and waited. After a while, she said, “I wonder why they always call it a mackerel sky?”

“Good eating, mackerel,” I said.

Fanny said, “Shit! You’re never that laconic unless you feel crazy. What’s wrong? Who’d you punch out at the playground?”

“We had to write a composition,” I said.

“Did he like it?”

“He gave me a D.”

“Well, you’re familiar enough with D’s. I never saw you get low about a grade.”

“I wrote about Ralph the Duck.”

She said, “You did?” She said, “Honey.” She came over and stood beside the rocker and leaned into me and hugged my head and neck. “Honey,” she said. “Honey.”

It was a terrible storm, the worst of the long, terrible winter so far. That afternoon, they closed the college, which they almost never do. But the roads were jammed with snow over ice, and now it was freezing rain on top of that, and the only people working at the school that night were the dispatcher and Anthony Berberich in the other truck and me. Everyone else had gone home except the students, and most of them were inside. The ones who weren’t were drunk, and I kept on sending them in and telling them to act like grown-ups. A number of them said they were, and I really couldn’t argue. I had the bright beams on, the defroster set high, the little blue light winking, and a thermos of sour mash and hot coffee that I sipped from every time I had to get out of the truck or every time I realized how cold all that wetness was.

About eight o’clock, when the rain was turning back to snow and the cold was worse and the road was impossible, just when I was done helping a county sander on the edge of the campus pull a panel truck out of a snowbank, I got the emergency call from the dispatcher. We had a student missing. The roommates thought the girl was headed for the quarry. This meant I had to get the Jeep up on a narrow road above the campus, above the old cemetery, into all kinds of woods and rough track that I figured would be choked with ice and snow. Any kid up there would really have to want to be there, and I couldn’t go in on foot, because you’d only want to be there on account of drugs, booze, or craziness, and either way I’d be needing blankets and heat, and then a fast ride down to the hospital. So I dropped into four-wheel drive to get me up the hill above the campus, bucking snow and sliding on ice, putting all the heater’s warmth up on the windshield because I couldn’t see much more than swarming snow. My feet were still cold from the tow job, and it didn’t seem to matter that I had on heavy socks and insulated boots I’d coated with waterproofing. I shivered, and I thought of Ralph the Duck.

I had to grind the rest of the way, from the cemetery, in four-wheel low, and in spite of the cold, I was smoking my gearbox by the time I was close enough to the quarry to see I’d have to make my way on foot to where she was. It was a kind of hollowed-out shape, maybe four or five stories high, where she stood, wobbling. She was as chalky as she’d been the last time, and her red hair didn’t catch the light anymore. It just lay on her like something that had died on top of her head. She was in a white nightgown that looked like her sloughing skin. She had her arms crossed like she wanted to be warm. She swayed, kind of, in front of the big, dark, scooped-out rock face, where the trees and brush had been cleared for trucks and earthmovers. She looked tiny against all the darkness. From where I stood, I could see the snow driving down in front of the lights I’d left on, but I couldn’t see it near her. All it looked like around her was dark. She was shaking with the cold, and she was crying.

I had a blanket with me, and I shoved it down the front of my coat to keep it dry for her, and because I was so cold. I waved. I stood in the lights and waved. I don’t know what she saw — a big shadow, maybe. I surely didn’t reassure her, because when she saw me, she backed up, until she was near the face of the quarry. She couldn’t go any farther.

I called, “Hello! I brought a blanket. Are you cold? I thought you might want a blanket.”

Her roommates had told the dispatcher about pills, so I didn’t bring her the coffee laced with mash. I figured I didn’t have all that much time, anyway, to get her down and pumped out. The booze with whatever pills she’d taken would make her die that much faster.

I hated that word. Die. It made me furious with her. I heard myself seething when I breathed. I pulled my scarf and collar up above my mouth. I didn’t want her to see how angry I was because she wanted to die.

I called, “Remember me?”

I was closer now. I could see the purple mottling of her skin. I didn’t know if it was cold or dying. It probably didn’t matter much to distinguish between them right now, I thought. That made me smile. I felt the smile, and I pulled the scarf down so she could look at it. She didn’t seem awfully reassured.

“You’re the sexual harassment guy,” she said. She said it very slowly. Her lips were clumsy. It was like looking at a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“I gave you an A,” I said.

“When?”

“It’s a joke,” I said. “You don’t want me making jokes. You want me to give you a nice warm blanket, though. And then you want me to take you home.”