Frederick Busch: Girls

I intend to portray none of the too many families who search for their children. While writing this book, I wished that I were working on their behalf. But this is, of course, a novel, and it can speak at last only about these characters, all of whom I have invented .

WE STARTED CLEARING the field with shovels and buckets and of course our cupped, gloved hands. The idea was to not break any frozen parts of her away. Then, when we had a broad hole in the top of the snow that covered the field and we were a foot or two of snow above where she might have been set down to wait for spring, we started using poles. Some of us used rake handles and the long hafts of shovels. One used a five-foot iron pry bar. He was a big man, and the bar weighed twenty-five pounds, anyway, but he used it gently, I remember, like a doctor with his hands in someone’s wound. We came together to try to find her and we did what we needed to, and then we seemed to separate as quickly as we could.

At Mrs. Tanner’s funeral, they sang “Shall We Gather at the River,” and I sang, too. It was like that in the field. Everyone gathered, and it was something to see. Then we all came apart. Fanny went where she needed to, and Rosalie Piri did, and Archie Halpern. I did, too. Most of them, I think, remained within a few miles of the field.

The dog and I live where it doesn’t snow. I can’t look at snow and stay calm. Sometimes it gets so warm, I wear navy blue uniform shorts with a reinforced long pocket down the left hip for the radio. I patrol on foot and sometimes on a white motor scooter, and it’s hard for me to believe, a cop on a scooter in shorts. But someone who enforces the law, laws, somebody’s laws, falls down like that. Whether it’s because he drinks or takes money or swallows amphetamines or has to be powerful, or he’s one of those people who is always scared, or because he’s me, that’s how he goes — state or federal agency or a big-city police force, down to working large towns or the dead little cities underneath the Great Lakes, say, then down to smaller towns, then maybe a campus, maybe a mall, or a hotel that used to be fine.

I’ve moved a few times, changing my job but trying to stay on a kind of level vocationally. I would like not to sink very much more. And she traces me, and she calls. The first time, I was surprised. I was south and west, looking at a map while lying on a bed in the Arroyo Motel, where they gave good residential rates and didn’t care what species your roommate was. The dog was in the bathroom, lying against the coolness of the tub and panting, and I was reading the map of New York State. At one time, I marked the areas with a felt-tip pen where girls had disappeared. Most of them were under the snow and ice up there, I figured, and I didn’t know why I had to look at months-old guesses about burial sites. I distrusted this kind of recreation.

It was my third week on the new job, and I continued not to know where to go or what to do for what might be thought of as pleasure. I was supposed to have fun or relax, the duty sergeant made clear, because I had been reported for menacing a citizen and obviously I needed some time to get right.

“Gritting your teeth isn’t menacing,” I told him.

“In your face,” he said, “it is.” Then he told me, “Jack, go and get unfucked.”

So I was off duty and getting unfucked with a daydream I often had about her. Facedown on my chest was a map marked with places where someone took people’s daughters and killed them.

I am talking here about being lost or found. You can be a small child and get lost, and maybe I will find you. God knows, I’ll try. Or you can be a large and ordinary man and get lost in everything usual about your life. Maybe you will try to find yourself, and so might someone else. It ends up being about the ordinary days you are hidden inside of, whether or not you want to hide.

I didn’t flinch when the phone rang, and I didn’t run to pick it up. On the fifth ring, I said, “All right.” On the seventh or eighth, I answered it. The dog, I noticed, had moved from between the toilet and the tub to lie with his nose at the threshold of the bathroom door.

She said, “I knew I’d get you. There you are.”

All I could think to say was, “Aren’t you something.”

“Given my family connection to the finding-people profession, no. I wouldn’t expect any less of me. Neither should you.”

“No. I think I won’t.”

She said, “I prepared a list of remarks to fall back on in case I couldn’t think of anything to say that would keep you on the line.”

I could hear the hum and hiss of the open connection, but I couldn’t hear anything of her. Then she came back and I felt her on the line. A piece of paper rattled, and then she recited, the way you do when you read something out loud, “Are you eating well? Are you sleeping well? Are you, in general, looking after yourself?”

I said, “Are you all right?”

“No. Are you?”

“Sure.”

“Really?”

“No. I guess, really, no.”

“Good,” she said. “In a way. You come back here, Jack. Will you come back?” She gave me a little time to answer, and then she said, “Never mind. You wouldn’t. Maybe I can get there. Wherever in the world it really is. Jack, it’s so far away.”

“I believe that’s why I came here.”

“Yes. Except you had to leave me behind when you did that.”

“You couldn’t have come with me. The dog could barely stand it. I could barely stand it. I haven’t been really friendly, these days.”

“But you’re some kind of a fugitive , Jack. From me . Consider that. You and your dog, in the middle of the night, you drive away in the world’s oldest station wagon to—”

“Daylight. I left in daylight. But I know what you mean. And the Torino did finally die. Get this: outside of Buffalo, New York. I never even got it out of the state.”

“I can’t imagine you driving anything else,” she said.

“I drive a Subaru DL, 1980. I had to pay extra for a rearview mirror you can tilt against the headlights behind you. You have to replace the struts every few miles, but the engine’s good and the body only shifts on the frame when you turn a corner or pull out to pass.”

She said, with a kind of a wobble, “Is there room for the dog?”

“He gets the backseat.”

“You and him.”

“Me and him,” I said. By then, I think, I was messed up, too, and my voice must have showed it, because the dog banged his tail on the floor. It was a trick he used to do with my wife. Now he was promiscuous, and he would slam his tail against the floor if anyone gave the slightest signal of distress. Apparently, I was signaling, and he was signaling back.

Thinking about the way we came apart, all of us, Fanny and Rosalie and Archie and me and the Tanners and their daughter and every man and woman who worked in the field between the houses and the river, was like watching something explode, but slowed down.

I saw it on the job, early in my rotation, when my work consisted of rousting disorderly American teenaged boys in uniform in Phu Lam when they overacted their role as savior. I was giving directions to a somewhat shit-faced marine just back from Operation Utah in I Corps. He was so chiseled down and locked tight, I would not have challenged him to a bet on a ball game. I was pointing, I remember, when a car bomb took down a hotel across the street. I kept seeing it afterward. Traumatic flashback, a doctor taught me to call it.