Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“So far. But it’s really contagious.”

“Son of a bitch!” Ben said.

Marge said, “I’d rather have locusts than lice.”

“You’re right,” Ben said at the top of the stairs. “There’s a better tone to locusts than lice.”

“And it seems more suitable to floods, anyway,” Marge said.

Ethan was waiting in the kitchen. “I thought you said there wasn’t any flood, Mom.”

She sat on the floor, thin, with long arms, looking like a child as she took her black boots off. She said, “There isn’t.”

“Didn’t you and Dad just talk about one?”

“It’s a flood for grown-ups,” Ben said. “It isn’t a flood for kids.”

“Nitwit,” Ethan said.

And Ben roared, “What?”

Marge said, “It’s a joke, Ben. It’s a joke Ethan and I were having. Ethan, why don’t you go upstairs and change your clothes?”

“I just did. Remember?”

“Why don’t you go upstairs and read John Sevier, Pioneer Boy ?”

“I finished it last night. Mom, would you and Dad like some privacy? I can go upstairs and work on my carrier.”

Marge told Ben, “It’s an atomic supercarrier which is capable of holding a hundred and ten assorted fighters and long-range patrol planes, plus surface-to-air missiles. One inch to forty feet. Good-bye, Ethan. I love you.”

THEY WERE SITTING in the kitchen with whiskey and ice, and Ben was telling Marge about an issue of the pharmaceuticals firm’s company magazine he was putting together, for which he was not only editor but photographer and writer. He said, “Substitute teaching may just be the worst work in the world, and I wouldn’t do it. I don’t blame you for hating it. I’m saying, for me , right now, even though I did worse work in New York, this one is an ugly boring stupid horrible job. I mean, I think I’m running out of sick leave from calling in with phony flus every other day.”

“And you don’t get paid enough,” she said.

“Nope.”

“And neither do I, when I do get work.”

“Nope.”

“And we’re out seventeen bucks for plastic pipe.”

“Thank you,” he said, “for recollecting that. For diving deep into your memory to retrieve that data.”

“Datum.”

Ben said, “Do I need another drink or do you?”

“Why don’t we both do that, and skip the fight we don’t even feel like having, and discuss what to have for dinner.”

“Let’s go out for pizza,” Ben said. “Ethan loves it.”

“Because it’ll cost more money.”

“Which we haven’t got.”

“Almost. We almost haven’t got it, you’re right.”

Wind threw rainwater, as if it were solid, at the backdoor window, and Ben said, “Fucking rain.”

Marge stood, poured more whiskey over fresh ice for them, pulled at the hem of her sweater, and remained standing as she said, “I would like us to consider having another child.”

Ben said nothing, drank a large swallow, stared at her. He offered a smile, the sort you use in case a bearer of bad news might be joking, then he withdrew it. The pump went on and off, then on again, then off. “It always sounds like it’s grinding something,” Ben said.

Marge said, “I realize this isn’t the best time to broach the subject. But it’s not a complete surprise.”

“No. I was just hoping I could evade it for a while. Maybe until the rain stops?”

“Well, the rain keeps making me think about babies. It’s the threat . Do you know what I mean? What if something, I keep thinking, what if something happens.”

“You mean to Ethan?”

Marge’s eyes filled and instantly were red at the rims. She nodded.

“We won’t let anything happen to him,” Ben said, as if he were accused of neglect.

“We can’t stop the lice,” she said. “We can’t stop the rain.”

“We’re old , Marge. Aren’t we pretty old to be having kids?”

“We’re poor, and it’s a nuisance, taking care of a baby again. But a thirty-five-year-old woman can deliver a child safely, a normal child, without risking her health.”

“Not without risk.”

“Without risking that much .”

“Is that true?”

She drank some whiskey. She said, “I can find out.”

IN A KHAKI SLICKER and rubber boots, wearing a tweed hat, Ben walked the river. Behind him, the cabbage field went slightly uphill and then descended to their yard and the backyards of seven other small box-shaped hundred-and-fifty-year-old farmhouses that had rank-smelling cellars and sodden lintels and rotting beams. In the late summer, when the cabbages were young and small, aquamarine, not stinking, thousands of small white cabbage butterflies hovered in the field, invisible until one of them caught the sun and then drew attention to the others, and what had seemed to be hundreds of rows of blue-green vegetables set into rock-studded light brown soil suddenly would seem an ocean of little butterflies that surged around the houses and their small yards. Now the cabbages were bulbous and dark, part of the muddy field that, despite its slope, could not keep the water table from rising through stone toward a furnace’s fuel jet.

Ben broke through a natural fence of brush, some red poisonous berries still glistening but most fruit gone, and the vegetation a tangle of blackthorn and exploded milkweed and powdering log, pulped fungus. He sank in down to his calves and had to work himself loose. His boots freed with slow-motion sucking sounds, and there was a released smell of gases from the rotted roots and weed. He went downhill the last few yards, a steep muddy incline leading to the river’s edge — higher than it ever had been — where sinuous dying elms stood on both sides of the river, which roared like machines. Debris floated past, chunks of log, plastic milk bottles, a bran-colored kitten, turning. The surface was like a skin, for although it sped, there was an undercurrent, other water, deeper, moving more quickly. The surface was Prussian blue and silver, bright, dangerous-looking, like a reptile’s skin. The water below was muddy and poisoned by cesspools rising with the flood.

It was deeper than ever, and faster, high enough to cover a tall man, swift enough to drown him as it had the kitten. Ben threw a heavy rounded chalky rock into the water. It made no ripple or splash, but disappeared. Slowly, as if he balanced at great heights, Ben walked along the river toward the red iron bridge at the south end of town. He passed behind the homes of two widows, and the only man he knew who was always glad — Henry Quail, seventy, fat, smelling of chewing tobacco and sweat and Irish whiskey. Because of his cleft palate, Henry was hard to understand, and few people asked him to speak. Henry patrolled the roads in his long green pickup truck, answered fire alarms in his red reflecting vest and yellow hardhat, helped repair tractors, collected his Social Security, made large and undeclared sums for cutting the horns off cattle, and was always bright-faced drunk.

In the large backyard of the second widow, water had collected six inches deep at least. A pyramid of logs, waiting to be split — probably by Henry Quail — had fallen, and some of the logs were submerged in the pool. Then the field between the river and the hamlet climbed again, steeply, and there was no cabbage; at first there were rows of corn stubble which, as the snows melted, the deer might come to crop at dusk, and then there was only tangled brush and high weed as the land rose to close Ben in at the river’s turning.

The elms were bare above him, close together, soon to die and fall. Some willow flourished there, the empty branches hanging like awful hair, suddenly shuddering as the wind picked up. The temperature was dropping as darkness fell, and a mist hung above the water, higher than a man could reach, thick and smelling of cabbage and silt and old plants. The fog looked yellow in the dusk light. The roar of the river grew as Ben went on and arrived at the dam.