Frederick Busch - Girls

Taking the brushes and the oil from the shoe box, I saw the dog watching very carefully. He seemed to be. His head was aimed at me. I saw his nostrils work in and out.

“I’m just cleaning it,” I told him.

He moved his tail in almost a wag, and then he lay down. His groan told me he had suffered a terrible day and please don’t make it worse.

I took the empty cylinder off and worked the extractor spring with the tip of an oiled brush. Sometimes they rusted in there, especially when you haven’t looked at the piece in years, much less used it or cleaned it. I took off the butt plate and worked the coil spring to the hammer mechanism. I cleaned each chamber of the cylinder and inserted six Fed 85 JHP cartridges, which the man in Utica had sold me. I remember he wanted me to buy 85-grain wad cutters and I’d said no without understanding the difference. He’d enjoyed it too much and I was interested in fear, not fun. It was a.32, useless for anything but close-in work unless you were a good marksman. I wasn’t. I took it away from a kid who broke apart about a week before the end of my tour. Somehow, he had been able to take it with him, from the day he reported to the bus station in Houston until the night in a room above a place called Gaspard he impaled the foot of a fifteen-year-old girl to the wood at the end of her bed with a Finnish folding knife and her screaming brought the pimp, and the pimp laid out the soldier with a wooden hammer used for tenderizing meat and then sent word for me. I got the whore cared for, I arrested the boy, I impounded the knife, and when I found the gun on him, I said nothing and kept it. He said nothing, too, because the gun would have worsened the charges. I brought it home with me because I was enough of a cop to like the idea of an anonymous weapon that no one could trace to me. I didn’t have intentions. I was simply being thoughtful. I’d have bet our mortgage that Sergeant Bird had one and that Elmo St. John didn’t.

It was a Taurus, a.32 Magnum Taurus 741 with a big front sight that made it clumsy. For a little gun, it was large. They called it a “banker’s gun.” They used to call it a “belly gun.” It was cleaned and loaded now. The dog was looking at me under his eyebrows, winking. You’ll hear the cops in movies call it a “throw-down piece.” I never heard it called that on the job. I thought, Men go nuts with a gun, and all of a sudden they shoot the family dog. I thought, They shoot everything and then they shoot themselves.

I had forgotten to drink the sour mash. I tasted some. It was almost three in the morning. I drank the rest and shuddered it down. I decided not to put on underwear or socks. I emptied the clothing from my pockets and left it on the table next to the cleaning apparatus and the box of shells. I told the dog, “This time, you get to ride in the car.”

He danced in a circle, took off for the door, then came back and ran around me. When I took out the car keys for confirmation, he circled again and ran to the door. We went out together onto the blue snow, and he worked his way back and forth between the front and back seats a few times while I waited for the defroster to warm up. Then we went, and he settled for the front seat, as I had known he would, and he sat with his nose against the window I had opened a little so he could get some cold air.

“They sometimes shoot the shit out of the house,” I told him. “Blow up the cat and the dog and the fish tank and then they do the wife. When they see how dead she is, they get filled with sadness. The poor little kids, how am I gonna tell them what I did to Mommy? So they do the kids. Then, they either do themselves or they go on TV.”

The highway branches a few miles outside of town, to the north, and you can either take the lefthand fork and go to school or the hospital or, say, Virginia’s house or you can take the right and go a dozen miles to the little farm road that dips west and takes you into the river end of Chenango Flats. I didn’t know until we came to the fork which way I would go. I went to the right, away from Fanny, away from school. I went toward where the Tanners slept.

But they didn’t, or they didn’t appear to. Lights were on downstairs, and I thought I saw a shadow move on a wall of their living room, which looked onto the shallow front lawn that ran to the road. I drove past and looked at Strodemaster’s: no lights, no motion, a sleeping house. I was envious, and I thought I might stop the car and lie in the backseat a while. But I realized I was tired, not sleepy, and I didn’t think a nap had anything to do with my kind of fatigue. I drove on to the church and made a U-turn and parked in front of it.

“Sometimes,” I said, “they go into churches and shoot up God and recite poetry and then they surrender themselves. It takes them maybe thirty seconds to figure out the God they had in mind didn’t notice.”

I started up again and turned on my lights. I drove very slowly toward the Tanners’ and I saw their lights were off. I pictured Mrs. Tanner coming downstairs, or the Reverend Tanner rushing downstairs, to get her medicine. I thought of her face in its pain. I backed up very slowly and looked over toward Strodemaster’s. His house was dark, too, and now the Tanners’ was dark, and the only lighted house I could think of where someone might want to talk about girls gone missing was my own. I drove home to talk myself to sleep.

IN THE HOSPITAL parking lot, the dog sat with his nose out the window while I drowsed behind the wheel. I hadn’t slept much, what with my driving around to shut-down towns and my sipping more sour mash, and I’d made myself waken early because I wanted to be here when Fanny came off shift.

“Sometimes,” I told him, “they go after their estranged wife and they shoot up the hospital, the parking lot, the family dog, and then themselves. You sure you should be here?”

He ignored me. He knew we were waiting for something, and he didn’t want to miss it. He kept his nose out the window, flaring at whatever was on the wind. I saw her first because he was so near-sighted. She was walking directly to her car, behind which I happened to be parked. The sky was gray-yellow, and I found myself hoping for snow, since I’d been predicting that it never would end. Then he saw her, and his tail began to go, and then he bounded into the backseat, over it, and back to the tailgate, and then he came back to half-stand on the seat beside me, winding his hind end into his tail.

She saw us. She slowed, then picked up her pace and went to her car. She held on to its door handle and then she came over. I rolled my window down. He came across me, leaned in fast to be sure and dent a rib, and then he was outside and up and down beside her. They do look like they’re smiling, and she was smiling back. I got out of the Ford and stood beside it, not sure whether I ought to approach her. But nurses look it in the face and they act. She walked to the passenger’s side and got in. I took a breath and got behind the wheel.

“Good morning,” she said. She was looking me over. I waited. She leaned in and sniffed. “You’re a little disheveled, Jack.”

“I had sour mash for dessert last night.”

“You’d been staying away from it for some time, too. That’s a shame.”

“A couple of months, I think. But it tasted good.”

“Well, good, I guess. I hope you didn’t do anything dumb.”

“Oh, I probably did, Fanny. How’s work?”

“Jack, it’s been two days.”

“It seems longer.”

“I’m a tough habit to break, huh?”

I nodded. “You like the room?”

“I think of it as an apartment. That way, it doesn’t feel as small.”