Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

At first it looked as if the silver-blue skin of the water had grown tumorous. Then he saw, just under the surface, tangled trees, woven vines, and bushes locked into one another, small logs and larger ones, pieces of siding, detergent boxes, green garbage, bones. All were holding the river high, though a million gallons flowed past him as Ben watched. He closed his eyes and opened them, lost the peculiar focus he’d found, and saw simply a silvery blue skin that writhed.

He went on to the bridge, from which children in summer fished and where Ben had stood to watch Ethan and some friends wade on the sun-heated slippery rocks. Now they would, as soon as a foot went into the water, be seized and beaten, pulled away, spinning, to surface half a mile downstream, under the railroad trestle, features erased by rocks and trees, bloody tubes of meat digested and released.

Ben reached toward a stump and knocked on it three times. He said, “Please.”

THEY ATE DINNER in the living room, in front of the Franklin stove. The third time Ethan smacked his lips while chewing hamburger Stroganoff, Marge made good on her threat and marched Ethan into the kitchen, where he sat in the yellow light of one lamp and finished his meal alone. Ben and Marge, in the living room, said nothing; they ate and looked at the bright flare of fire visible where the stove doors met. Ethan’s chair scraped, something creaked, and then there was a silence. “Where’s he going?” Ben whispered.

“Maybe his room.”

“I didn’t hear him on the steps.”

“Well, there’s noplace else to go. He has to go past us to get to the TV—”

“Yeah,” Ben said, standing, “but he doesn’t have to go past us to go out .”

“Ethan takes care,” Marge said. “He wouldn’t want to get soaked — oh, come on , Ben, he is not going to the river.”

Ben said, “If the sump pump starts in now, to punctuate all this dread and criminality, I’ll disconnect it.” The sump pump started in, they heard it grinding downstairs. Ben said, “I can’t disconnect it or the cellar will flood and the furnace’ll go out.”

“What dread?” Marge said. “What criminality?”

“No, it’s just, with the river rising, with the goddamn cellar rising, I don’t like it that we aren’t together. Happy.”

“Ben,” she said, “do you know how unhappy he would be if there weren’t consequences? Discipline? Rules he has to follow?”

“Yeah, but he can’t follow them.”

“He will. It’s called learning.”

Ben put another log into the stove and sat down again, then stood up. The sump pump was on. “But what if he does go to the river?”

“He won’t. Go look for him if you’re worried. It isn’t such a big house, you know. Go look.”

Ben sipped coffee and rubbed the back of his neck. “Do you understand that when you talk to me like that, when you patronize me, even if it’s Ethan , I can’t go do what I think is right?”

“You asked me and I told you.”

“Bitch,” Ben said. He put his coffee on the table in front of the sofa and went around it, clumsily and blushing. He leaned over, one knee on the cushion, to kiss her on the cheek chastely. “I forgive you your transgressions,” he said.

Marge said, “Asshole.” She held his head and struck her tongue out slowly, and slowly licked his lips from side to side. Ben sat down beside her, moved in closer, and kissed her mouth.

“That’s right,” he said when they’d stopped.

“That’s right,” she said.

“Yes. As usual,” he said.

“Yes.”

As if to hold her trophy up, while Ben breathed deeply on the sofa beside her, Marge called, “Ethan!”

When there was no answer, Ben shook his head. She called again.

Ben shouted, as if in rage, “ Ethan !”

The high small voice came back from far away: “Yes?”

“Where is he?” Ben said.

“Yes?”

Ben said, “Is that from outside? He is outside.”

But Marge was already up, walking toward the kitchen and the cellar door, and she was on the steps before Ben had stood to follow her. Downstairs, in the light of the one bulb at the far end of the cellar, in the grinding chatter of the pump, Ethan swept water from the drain that Ben had uselessly capped. The water rolled with a loud hush across the gray floor and spilled over into the sump and was pumped out to seep back in again. There was a new smell downstairs, among the smells of wet wood and soaked stone and hot motor — the sharp tang of mildew. Ethan, in Marge’s high black boots, continued to sweep. Marge in her fur-lined slippers, Ben in his still soaked boots, both with wet feet, stood watching him — the long pale intelligent face, the slender arms and legs, big hands. In Marge’s boots, in the weak cellar light, in the pool of black water, Ethan looked very small.

“Hi,” he said. Then he smiled, and his ill-brushed teeth shone beige.

Ben cleared his throat. “We thought you went out, honey.”

Marge reached back to slap Ben’s buttocks, to warn him into silence.

“How’s it going?” she said.

Ethan said, “I don’t think I’m making any progress. But you guys were so upset about the water, I thought maybe I could, you know, do something.”

“No,” Ben said, “you’re doing fine.”

“Really fine,” Marge said. “You’re a helper, all right.”

Ben rubbed the back of his neck and stepped away so that Marge couldn’t reach him. “Ethan,” he said, “you know where babies come from?”

Ethan said, “Mom told me. You could check with her if you want to.”

The boy swept more water into the sump, and the pump went on again.

“Okay,” Ben said, “I will.”

Marge turned and walked to the foot of the steps. Ben stood, watching Ethan sweep. Then he turned too and followed his wife. When Marge was in the kitchen, and Ben was halfway there, Ethan called, “Hey, Dad? Dad?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell me what she says, okay?”

THAT NIGHT THE skies shook and darkness was total: no moon, no stars, no road lights visible from the bedroom window, the bedroom itself extinguished, and their eyes squeezed shut. They did not touch; when they rolled on the mattress or tugged at blankets or pushed a pillow flat, they grunted as if hurt. They slept finally, then awakened to hear field mice running in the eaves and between the walls at the head of the bed. It was the dry scraping sound of panic. It rhymed with the grinding chirr of the pump in the lath and beams and floorboard between them and the flooded cellar. Marge turned her bedside lamp on, and the walls jumped in toward them. Ben whispered, “Don’t read. Just lie there. If you say you’re awake, you won’t be able to sleep at all.”

Wearing Ben’s undershirt and squinting from the blackened eyes of an exhausted athlete, Marge reached up to turn off the light.

“You look nice,” he whispered.

“You always like me to wear your clothes.”

“So I can own you.”

“So you can protect me.”

“Probably that too.”

Marge said, “If the mice desert it, and come in here, does that mean the world is sinking?”

Ben said into his pillow, “The world will be fine.”

After a minute, after another minute, with the darkness humid around them and expanding into the darkness of the flooded world outside, Marge said, “Can you promise me that? Can you promise ?”

“I promise,” Ben said.

“You better mean that.”

“I do. But no babies. No more babies.”

She prayed at him: “Then you better mean it, Ben.”

He wanted it to end with his praying back I do , but he lay still and saw the yellow school bus, Ethan on board, rolling off the rain-slicked road. Ben opened his eyes so as not to see the children bouncing in the bus, pips in a fat collapsing gourd. He saw the darkness. He closed his eyes and against his will he looked closer, supplying details, squeezing his eyes. He saw the battered heads of bleeding children, and black hair, yellow hair, brown hair, hair cut short and hair tied in thin bright ribbon, all of it pasty with blood and teeming with lice, the lice jumping in blood and tracking it tinily on the wrinkled brown lunch bags that lay on cracked seats and in muddy aisles. He heard Ethan cry, not in the house with them now, but in his dream, in the future, in the world that possessed more of him than Ben thought it right to have to yield, and he pushed himself from the pillow. He almost said I do . But he turned — Marge said, “Ben?”—and in the darkness, with the pump going on and off, with mice hurtling furiously between the walls, he wrestled her, tore at the shared shirt, buried his mouth in her neck and labored with his lips and teeth, dropping upon her with no question and no answer, hearing nothing for the first time that night, making what you might as well call love.