Frederick Busch: Girls

I leaned down to my coffee and then sat up. I looked at his little eyes in his big face. He kept it deadpan when he worked. I said, “I guess I was looking for you. But it wasn’t to make you work. I was just looking for a no-stress breakfast.”

He laughed, a high, choppy sound I liked. “Like no cholesterol,” he said.

I tried to laugh with him.

He said, “Are you talking to Fanny any more than you’re talking to me?”

I shook my head. Then I said, “This morning. I tried again.”

“You sad motherfucker,” he said. “You tried talking English and she didn’t jump up and down, right? Remember what I said about you have to live communicating? Remember? All the time, not just when you get frightened?”

I said, “How’d you know about the frightened?”

There was sweat on his upper lip. He wiped at it.

“Archie,” I said.

He clasped his hands. I did the same, but my cup was in the way and I spilled it onto the table and jumped up.

He said, “It’s fine, Jack. It’s all right.”

Verna, bringing my filled thermos, came with a big yellow sponge. “Don’t you listen to him,” she said. “It’s not all right. And you didn’t eat nothing, neither.”

Archie said, “She wants a bigger tip.” She swatted at him with the sponge.

People went back to eating and talking and smoking, and Verna left. I stood beside the table, laying money on it and zipping my coat.

Archie asked, “You want to come by the office, Jack? Or the house?”

“I’ll see,” I said. “You know. Thank you.”

He looked sad. I couldn’t imagine what I looked like. He gave me half a wave, and I waved back like he was a hundred yards of snow and ice away from me. When I was outside the Blue Bird and looking back up at the window tables, I saw the poster, taped to the back of the storefront so people walking by could read it. That was the first one I remember.

I saw another one in the window of a pickup truck parked at the curb, and there was one in the window of the Radio Shack. When I got to the security building, there was a poster tacked to the door. The signs were eight and a half by eleven, in black and white. In large letters at the top was missing. Underneath was the face of a little girl — fourteen, according to the sign — with a sweet smile and white teeth and wide eyes. She weighed ninety-six pounds. She was five feet tall. She had gone from Sunday school to her house in one of the little towns south of the college, and she had never arrived. She looked happy and fragile. It was easy to think of a large man with his hands around her upper arms, compelling her into a car or truck or doorway. It became such a huge county, when you looked at the picture, in the hugeness of New York State, in such a big continent. You could cry, looking at her face.

It had bloomed overnight, and I saw it everyplace. Anthony Berberich had a poster taped to the window of his Jeep, and every building I had occasion to enter that morning had posters taped and tacked onto doors and bulletin boards and corridor walls. Her family was doing what they could, and I wished I knew them so I could tell them so. My throat ached at the thought of seeing their faces, or hearing them talk. I’d have given a lot to know, without having to ask them, what they did to erase from their minds the idea of the fear she must have felt. Of course, I didn’t have to ask. They didn’t erase it because they couldn’t. I wondered if Fanny had seen the posters at the hospital, and I nearly phoned. But she might have been able to sleep, I thought, and probably that was why I didn’t call.

I wanted not to see the picture of the missing child, but wherever I went, she was looking back. Her name was Janice Tanner. I knew a Tanner Hill in the vicinity, and I wondered if it was named after her family. On the way home once after work, I had driven up the road over Tanner Hill. It had looked pleasant and far from everyplace else, and I hadn’t seen a child in skirt and sweater and sneakers who was in jeopardy. I saw my English professor, but I pretended not to. I waved to a kid who was a friend of mine, Everett Stark, who’d come to school after four years in the navy. I once asked him how he was doing, and he said, “Man, ain’t nothin around here but white folks and cows.”

I had to park up behind a little tan Chevrolet import that kept rolling down the worst part of the classroom building hill. I stopped the Jeep in the middle of the road, with the bumper just touching the car, and I hit the roof light to keep student traffic off us. They raced up the hill to get to their illegal parking places and they believed that death and maiming were limited by law to people over twenty-two. Once I looked at the little car’s tires, I understood. They were almost bald. I walked around to the driver’s side and she looked at me the way I sometimes look at sheriff’s deputies filling their quota of speeding tickets.

“Morning,” I said.

“I’m late for class,” she said. Her voice was harsh, but in an interesting way. She had a big mouth and a beaky nose and hair sprouting all over the place from under her dark woolen cap.

“I can get out of your way and let you roll back down,” I said, “or I can try and push you up, or I can chock your wheels and drive you to class if it’s a real emergency, or we can hang around a little and you can be abusive.”

“I’m not being abusive,” she said.

“I know. I figured you were thinking about it.”

Her smile was very broad.

“You might get angry when I point out that your tires are shot. If I was a cop, I’d cite you for that.”

“But you’re not.”

I shook my head. “I’m a campus cop. Like an usher in the movies.”

“When did you ever go to a movie with an usher? You must be old.”

“You wouldn’t believe how old,” I said. “I’ll try and push you up. Let go your brake when you feel me behind you and give it just a little bit of power. I’ll do the rest.”

She blushed and looked away, then smiled the smile. “I assume that was not a double entendre.”

“Doobel what?”

“Never mind,” she said. “Forgive me. Yes. I’ll — what you said before.” She rolled her window up and, like a child, waved a small hand in a leather mitten.

Everyone was waving good-bye to me, I thought as I released my parking brake and put it in first and made contact with her car. She slid back down into me, but I held in four-wheel drive and we made it up to the social sciences parking lot. I put it back into two-wheel drive and pulled out before she could wave again.

I radioed in what I’d done so they could add it to the day’s log. The dispatcher told me that a professor was asking for me.

“Is that an emergency? Over.”

“Negative, Jack. Professor Strodemaster says when you can. Over.”

“So anytime I get what they like to call a spare minute? Over.”

“That’s a roger, Jack. Soon as you empty out somebody’s ashtray for them and, you know, spread the peanut butter on their sandwich, you can drop in. He’ll be there all day, he said to tell you. Over.”

I wondered if the vice president for administrative affairs had monitored our frequency. I figured class warfare was nothing new to him, but I thought I should tell the dispatcher we might tighten our procedures just a little. It never hurt to pretend you were a professional.

I saw one of the cars I thought came over the hill from Masonville, which was north and west from town, in the direction of Syracuse. The school there was an agricultural and technical two-year-degree college that I had heard was often the difference in the lives of local kids. They learned computer skills, or took degrees in cosmetology or nutrition or modern farming methods. Recently, it had begun to receive large numbers of kids from the New York City area. Their high school guidance counselors thought or hoped or made believe that the hundreds of miles from New York were a buffer. They weren’t, and the trade in weapons and pharmaceuticals was large.