Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“Another night,” he said, “please.”

“All right,” she said. “Yes. But we’re freezing here.”

“We are,” he said. But he was thinking of the nighttime heat in which they gathered at Checkpoint Eight One, the smell of the driver rising through the chemical stink of the rubber and plastic of the burning truck. His legs and loins cooked in the cab while the upper segment lay before them. The driver’s remaining eye was wide as if in speculation about these Americans who shuffled closer and closer to the torn torso and its wrecked head.

Ada bent forward, suddenly, and she gathered her hair in a fist, reaching for a barrette that had been torn away by the sea. She stayed bent over, then looked up to see him watch her hair whip backward as she straightened and said, “I’m going up, I’m building a fire in the fireplace, and I’m making tea to pour brandy in. We’ll deal with your hand, which looks a little lousy, I’m afraid. And I’m smoking plenty of cigarettes.”

She turned from Mason to get herself past pitted, bleached-out boards and hanks of snapped rope that lay among the stones she climbed toward the house. Murphy went slowly ahead of her. Holding his beating right hand in his left, and knowing that he risked a fall on the slippery, yellow-green rockweed and the slimy bottoms of tidal pools, Mason followed them up.