Frederick Busch - Girls

I didn’t sit with her because I was afraid I’d end up with my head in her lap.

They said good morning, and I said it. They waited. The reverend, on his knees at the stove, sat on the three-inch brick fire floor like a little kid on the sidewalk, knees up near his face, his arms around his legs.

He finally said, “Oh dear.”

I said, “Did you know your daughter was having an affair? I don’t know if that’s the right word. I’m sorry for this. I think she was let’s say seeing someone. I figure she wouldn’t have bought expensive lacy underwear for a boy her age, right? They don’t do that. I figure the boys are so grateful, they don’t require anything like what I saw upstairs. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m going on one fact, one nonfact, one guess, and one lie. I’m figuring, to start, that a perfect girl who isn’t like any of the other girls in America wouldn’t get involved with seductive underwear unless it was something to do with sex and an older man. I’m sorry.”

“Whose lie?” Mrs. Tanner said. She had the blanket around her now, so I could hardly see her face. Her voice came out of the shadows it made, hooding her.

“Don’t you want to know the fact?” I was angry at them for not knowing, and I must have sounded it. “Wouldn’t a mom and dad want the fact first?”

She said, “All right, Jack. Please.”

“The sexy underwear in her bureau. Why didn’t you know about it?”

“I don’t pry,” she said. “ We don’t.”

I said, “Why not? I thought you took care of her. Couldn’t you have looked? And let’s one of these days ask someone in law enforcement why they could look, and see the underwear and not read the receipt and know she had two pairs of it. That meant she was seeing this person a lot, maybe. Or maybe thinking about it. Figuring, knowing her, she’d need to wash and dry the one while she wore the other. Right?”

Mrs. Tanner took the upper part of the blanket down. Her hair looked like it was made of something artificial. Her complexion was changing, from the orange with a darkness underneath it to something like the skin of a lemon going bad. Her husband had his face down on his knees.

“The nonfact,” I said, and I almost whispered it. My voice didn’t want to come. My throat didn’t want to let the air out. I said, “The nonfact is what you don’t know. Or the diary you saw and burned or hid or made yourselves forget about. Or the diary she didn’t write because she was too smart. Or the underwear you didn’t know about. It’s something like that. It’s what this family didn’t ever talk about. That could be a guess, too.

“Except I’m guessing about who the man is. So it can’t count as a guess and it has to be a nonfact.”

She said, “I know you’re as upset as we are, Jack.”

“Could be,” I said. “And just because I sound like I hate you, or me, or everybody, I don’t want you thinking that’s all of it that I feel. Understand? Can we have a deal on that?”

The reverend looked at her.

I said, “I want a deal on that.”

The reverend nodded. His wife said, very low, “Yes. Thank you, Jack.”

“You wanted to know the lie?”

They waited.

“I’m going to come back in here in a minute or two. Will you wait for me?”

I turned. I left the car where it was. I walked in the road because they didn’t have a sidewalk in that town, and I had the gun in my left hand. I couldn’t have held it in my right. I went up Strodemaster’s drive and I opened his back door. He was in the bathrobe, frying bacon. I smelled the sausage and onions from the night before. Under it, I smelled what had rotted in the room.

I put the pistol into my right hand, though it didn’t want to hold it. I didn’t feel very much about the power of it this time. I wasn’t howling inside about my primitive strength. I couldn’t have been happy for a price. Maybe if someone gave me back my life with Fanny and Hannah. But that wasn’t in the small, smelly kitchen that was crowded with two big men breathing like cross-country runners, one of them in unlaced boots and a bathrobe. I simply wanted to be sure I fired it with some accuracy. But I couldn’t. It seems I closed my eyes.

I stuck my hand out and cupped the bottom of my fist where it met with the bottom of the pistol grip. My eyes were shut. I squeezed the rounds off slowly. It felt like every shot was a word or as close as I could come to words.

After four of them, I opened my eyes. I had put a gray-blue puckering hole in the enamel of the stove. I had placed a round in the wall behind the stove. I’d heard a ricochet off the frying pan. And the last one had disappeared. I wondered if it had gone into the cork rim of the chalkboard or into Strodemaster. He was crouched in front of his burning breakfast, with his hands on his ears. We could line him up with me and Rosalie, our hands in front of our eyes, I thought, and make that joke about monkeys not doing something. I smelled the cordite as well as the garbage now, and of course the burnt bacon in the greasy pan. I smelled the stink of my sweat. He wasn’t moving, and I was still in the firing stance.

We’d been taught in the MPs to startle people in rooms we broke into by shouting in those up-from-the-navel sergeant voices to stand still, put your hands on your head, et cetera. I didn’t have any strength today. I needed the audiovisual effects, I told myself. I hadn’t known, walking through his door, what I would do. I think maybe I was trying to kill him. I pretended to myself it was all a part of my plan — the door kicked in, the shots fired, the attention he would give me now.

He was still crouched, standing up at the stove, and his face was really a series of funny faces. He looked like a man pretending to be a clown in a spattered blue bathrobe.

I said, “Turn it off. And close your slovenly bathrobe.”

He said, “Jack.”

My ears were still full of the shots. I could smell the used loads and I could smell his last night’s sausages. And I was certain I could smell the rot I had smelled here before. It was Janice. We were standing in her. I let the pistol come up and I squeezed off again. The solid sound of the round striking into the floor at his feet, the spray of wood and linoleum splinters, made a strong argument.

I said, “Tighten your fucking bathrobe, goddamn it. No. Wait. A man shouldn’t dress like a boy. Don’t tighten it. Take the fucker off.”

He slowly stood. He pushed his glasses back up on his nose. He took his bathrobe off and held it out. I pointed to a chair and he dumped it. In a voice that sounded tinny after the shots, he said, “What’s wrong, big guy? Why the gunplay? Why the anger? I understand I got you into a search you didn’t want to be part of—”

“You lied to me two or three — I think it was three times,” I said. “Archie got me into it, not you. You wanted me out of it. That must be a compliment. I don’t care. I heard it and I heard it, and then I used what’s left of my brain to think about it. You. Archie thought it would help me out if I did something about getting back a missing girl. You were talking to him, and he made the suggestion. You were supposed to be so eager to find her, you had to say yes. Jesus, what’s not to say yes to? A broken-down campus cop who takes a week to find his dick in the men’s room. Right? So you came to me and asked me and then as soon as you had an excuse, like when I stuck as much of my body as I could in front of a bunch of arms and legs, you came crying over to turn me free. That’s the part that’s the compliment, you fucker. That anything about me worried you. That you actually thought I could do anything. See anything. Hear anything.