Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

She looked up with a concentration that struck him as ferocious. Then a pleasure seemed to come over her, and she said, “Come on, all right? Come here.”

He held a finger up. It was supposed to say that he would be there soon, though from a different direction. She looked away, as if disappointed, and then she returned to plucking. Mason headed back twenty yards or more, then climbed down a more gradual decline of rocks nearer the house. He made his way along low stone outcroppings that gradually circled toward the curve of the point, where he thought she would be.

He couldn’t hear Murphy now. Mason held on to the rock, chopping his fingers on bright white little shells that adhered to it, prodding for the beard hairs of mussels. The pail he held was floating on the tide, and the icy water was soon above his knees as he foraged where the rocks declined. He had worked two small mussels loose, with great effort, and tossed them into the bucket. Now the freezing sea was at his waist. He came around the point to see Ada, tall, spread-legged, and at her ease, with one hand through the wire handle of her pail to hold the rock face, and the other hand working to her right, tearing mussels loose and dumping them. When she saw him, she gave him a look of inspection and then smiled as if all at once, after a time of confusion, she understood him.

He held on to the rock against the bucking of the sea. He was watching the small Labrador attack one of the foamed plastic buoys painted white on top and red on the bottom and fastened to a lobster trap that held to the floor of the sea.

Ada cocked her head as dogs do when they’re puzzled. “Murphy!” she called. “Murph! Come here!”

The dog made as if to swim to her, but then he stayed where he was, with his jaws clamped around the buoy. He made paddling motions but didn’t come away.

“Get his ass shot up by a pissed-off lobsterman or the conservation patrol,” she said, “and nobody would question it. Murphy, damn it!”

“Ada,” Mason said.

“Murph!”

“Ada, he’s stuck. Isn’t he? He can’t get his teeth out of it.”

“He can’t? Oh, he can’t . Murphy!”

They started at the same time. Ada let go of her bucket and pushed off from the rock face to swim a long-stroked crawl. Mason tried to think of himself as doing the same, though he knew that what he really did was make a little yipping noise, push his head down into the water, and, spitting ocean out, set forward with the only stroke he could swim — if, he thought, you could really call this swimming — a despairing sidestroke that sent him in slants not quite straight at what he alleged to be heading for. He stroked, looked about, corrected his direction, then stroked some more. He had no real breathing rhythm, but he did have strong arms and legs, so he swam in the sea the way a crab scuttles on sand, and he made a little headway. Ada, meanwhile, was almost there. Mason found himself thinking about the great distance that lay between the dark green surface, chopped into patches of white by the wind, and the slithery, teeming ocean floor.

She was trying to support the dog’s belly, it appeared, when Mason reached them. The whites of Murphy’s eyes seemed enormous. As if to demonstrate his situation, his lips were drawn back so that the pink and black gums and yellow-white teeth were visible, the fangs clamped deep into the soft plastic of the buoy. Murphy twisted his head to release himself, but the teeth were firmly stuck.

“I’ve got you, little Murph,” Ada said, breathing harshly. “I’ve got his tail and his gut, a little bit,” she told Mason. “Can you—”

He tried to say, “Piece of cake.” It came out as a wet warble. He did what he considered the treading of water, really a flailing kick — the bottom seemed so far below — that shook his torso and head. He didn’t try to speak again. He worked his fingers into Murphy’s mouth and made the noises, though not the shaped words themselves, of Here we go, boy. Here we go, boy. Here we go. His own head slid beneath the surface several times, but he worked at the teeth and then had them unfastened. He surfaced just as Murphy, in the jaws of panic, clamped his own jaws down again, this time on Mason’s left hand. Mason howled shrilly and Murphy, with Mason’s fingers in his mouth, turned with great interest toward the noise. Using his right hand, he persuaded the muzzle open and removed his fingers. Ada pushed Murphy off toward shore, and the dog swam eagerly. Mason tried to shift from his flailing into his crooked sidestroke, but he was down to the single hand that would cup against water and he merely rolled a little before his head went under.

He felt her hand in his hair, tugging, and then he was on his back. He tried to protest, but water poured into his mouth, and he could only gurgle. Her hand cupped his chin, pulling back, so that now the ocean stayed out of his mouth and he could breathe whenever he wished. What gifts to give a man, he thought: the fruits of her watchfulness, as well as a choice of when to breathe. She towed him as if he were a blunt, unseaworthy barge and she a gallant tug. She swam what he knew was an actual and very effective sidestroke that resembled his sideways jerk only in the way you said its name.

Although he was kept the length of a bent arm away from her, he was intimately aware of her body. He heard her breath go out on the water. He felt the strength of her fingers as they held his throat and chin. Sometimes her legs, when they scissored, brushed his buttock or the small of his back. His arms trailed, and he sensed that if he moved them up a little he might touch her, and he wanted to, though he kept them at his sides. His eyes were closed. The day had begun that way, he remembered: him on his back with his eyes forced shut. She surged, then relaxed, surged and then relaxed, and he could feel her purpose, the power of her long muscles, and none of the sorrow that bowed her shoulders when she stood on the shore.

Something brushed his trailing forearm, and he squinted to his right to see one of the mussel buckets, right-side up and slowly spinning out toward open sea. He shut his eyes again and thought it possible that, half drowning, his mangled hand a pulse that beat in syncopation to the rhythm of the progress of her stroke, he might actually fall asleep in the waters of this cold Atlantic cove. But she halted them. He could feel her tread water with a different kind of strength from that of her sidestroke. Then she swam him a little farther, paused again, and then began to walk with him still floating on his back, towing him through the shallows. Murphy had made it back, and he lay on a tilted, vast, refrigerator-shaped stone, looking down toward them while he panted at a ferocious pace, his tongue exhaustedly stiffened and stuck straight out. It was time to stand up, Mason knew, and he reluctantly climbed to his feet by holding with his unbitten hand on to Ada, who stood above him with the ocean pouring between her thighs.

“You’re all right,” she said, “aren’t you?” She’d begun to shake.

He let go of her hand and stood before her on his own. He trembled, partly because of the cold. “Thank you,” he said.

“No, that was a great rescue,” she said. “Thank you from Murphy and thank you from me.”

“And you,” he said, breathing as fast as if he had pulled someone large through the ocean against currents, gravity, dog bite, and fear. “You saved my life , Ada.”

“But we won’t have mussels for dinner tonight. And I’m sorry. It would have been fun to give you that.” He watched her head droop a little as her shoulders bent toward the sea.

Murphy shifted his demented glare from one of them to the other as he panted from above. Mason wanted to examine his hand to see whether the dog had only torn his fingers apart or had also broken a few, but he held it at his side with what he hoped was nonchalance.