Frederick Busch - Girls

“I wouldn’t be you.”

“No, you can hit me all you want. I’m just tell—”

I used my left hand like a stiff board and I didn’t hit him all I wanted, maybe, but I hit him. I slapped his face. I was imagining how Mrs. Tanner would do it if she could. Left side, right side, left side, right side, left side, right. His face jolted. I was angry enough to do some damage.

“I don’t want to hear from you anymore how I’m your twin maniac brother. Because I am not a bad person. I am not, goddamn it. I am not a bad man.”

He had stumbled against the chalkboard, then moved forward to lean against the kitchen table. His feet were back in his vomit now. His smell had begun to rise. His face was bright red, with white spots on it from my palm and fingers and knuckles.

I said, “I want you to say now where she is. You can tell the state police about your love and then the terrible accident that happened when you were naked with but not meaning to fuck a fourteen-year-old girl who you killed without meaning to kill her. Your lawyer will tell you what to say so nobody believes you but you get off with time served and a free psychiatrist for life.”

“I wrapped her,” he said. “It was a sign of respect.” He turned toward the chalkboard but then faced me again. “I wound her in a sheet.”

“You buried her?”

“Of course.”

“Where?”

He pointed. The sleeve slid on his arm, and I saw strong muscles move. He was pointing toward the barn.

“In it?”

“Behind it.”

“In the ground?”

“In the snow above the ground. I’d have buried her properly, come spring.”

I saw her sad face come rising as the snow melted around her.

“You’ll have to show them.”

“I will.”

“First you have to walk to her mother’s house. Her mother and father’s house.”

“Not and talk to them.”

“Jesus, Professor, I hope I’m not making you uncomfortable or anything. I will not hesitate to fucking kill you. Putting your ass down would solve all kinds of problems, I want you to know. So just let’s do this.”

When we went down his back steps, we had his neighbors watching us. I guess they’d heard the shots. In little towns, they tell each other the news, and we had people in coats over bathrobes and nightgowns, pajamas or work clothes, on their porches or standing in their front walks when we covered the short distance to the Tanners’. Strodemaster was ahead of me, not wearing his glasses, wearing his dirty white T-shirt and holding his hands in his trouser pockets. He stumbled once because he stepped on his bootlace.

We went up their drive and I told him to stand in front of their back door. I reached around behind him and knocked. I wasn’t careful about keeping distance between us. I knew if he moved on me, I would hurt him. It would hurt me, too, but I didn’t care and I wanted to break him up and he knew it.

I only wanted the Reverend Tanner to open the storm door and hear me say, “Bring your wife.”

He moved. She came slowly to the door and her husband held her from the side and from behind.

She looked down the steps, and she looked. The feeling was of a focus being tightened and held. She finally said, “Oh God.” It took her a long time to say. What I hated most about that minute or two was that I couldn’t be in the kitchen and hold on to her.

I marched him back to his house and through his vomit. I was determined to step on his glasses and I did, dragging the frames along with his stink through the kitchen. I sat him at his table while I phoned.

I left a message at a number I had never called, the dean of faculty’s office. I said, “Please tell him that Associate Professor Randolph Strodemaster, with tenure for life, is about to be arrested for killing the girl he used to rape every night.”

When I hung up, I turned to him. I was going to say something smart about his not minding if I made some toll calls. He was sitting with his legs crossed, one smelly boot hanging beside his torn-up shin. His hands were folded in his lap, and he leaned back in his chair like a man waiting for breakfast. I smelled the vomit, the old food, the stink of his garbage, the new, dark smell of his urine.

“How could she crawl around with you?” I asked him.

“Are you jealous, Jack?”

I didn’t bother to threaten him. I’d become too tired. We were both so weak, I think we could have gone to sleep where we were.

He said, “I can be charming, I think is the answer. I know a lot.” His voice was leaking up now, like gas escaping. I thought I could even smell the process of his bowels inside him. “And I loved her. I’m a daughter’s father, don’t forget. I know how to love a girl.”

I was too dizzy to turn around to him again. I leaned on the wall beside his phone and called Elmo St. John’s office to leave a courtesy call. Then I phoned the state police barracks and asked for Bird. They told me he was supervising the execution of a warrant. I told them to get another warrant, this time for Professor Randolph Strodemaster, and to get here soon. He’d confess.

He said, “My attorney’s in Norwich. I’ll want him here before I say a word to the fuzz.”

I said into the phone, “Tell Bird I might shoot the professor before he gets here.”

Then I hooked a chair with my foot and pulled it over to the phone. That cost my ribs a bit. I probably made a noise, because Strodemaster looked sharply at me. “Never,” I said. “You’d have to murder me to get one yard away. I’d leave maybe a pint of all of you for them to arrest. You don’t understand. I want to kill you. Sit there and be quiet.”

I got Archie Halpern’s assistant. She was ordinarily a very patient woman, but she didn’t understand why I didn’t understand how when Archie was with a patient, we none of us were supposed to disturb him.

I told her it was a matter of life and death. She said it always was. I said I meant death for real. No more breathing, I said. She told me I had to be nuts. I reminded her what office she worked in.

After a few minutes’ wait, Archie came on and I said, “I found the guy who killed her.”

He said, “Did you hurt him?”

“Hardly at all.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Not yet.”

“Do you feel any better, Jack?”

“You know, I really don’t,” I said.

“After what you told me, I didn’t think you would. On the other hand, I didn’t think you’d catch him.”

“Why should you have?”

“It’s wonderful you did.”

“I suppose,” I said.

“Don’t do anything rash.”

I started to laugh, and I didn’t know how to stop. I giggled pretty stupidly, and then I was crying.

“Jack,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You should see him. ” That made me laugh again, so I hung up.

Someone brought a chair out for Mrs. Tanner. She lay back in it with her bright golden blanket around her, sitting on her throne like the queen of nothing.

Strodemaster and his lawyer talked to Bird. Strodemaster made marks on a topographical map the state police insisted on using. I didn’t try more than once to point out how on a map like that you need to see the shape of the land like you’re looking from above, and with all the snow, of course we couldn’t. The cops were in charge and all of us did what they said. And Mrs. Tanner watched us.

We waited two hours for a state roadworks bulldozer to be brought up on its tractor trailer. By then, local men had brought in wood by pickup truck, and they’d started a fire just behind Strodemaster’s barn to keep Mrs. Tanner and most of the rest of the hamlet warm. The dirty smoke blew back at them and up, but they sat in front of it, accepting the heat and watching us through the raggedy darkness of the early afternoon.