Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“It took us a while,” my father said.

“Didn’t it now?”

Bill went inside and returned with a bottle and glasses. He sat down next to my father, and I heard the gurgle, then a smacking of lips and, from my father, a low groan of pleasure, of uncontrol, which I hadn’t heard before. New information was promised by that sound, and I folded my arms across my chest for warmth and settled in to learn, from the invisibility darkness offered, and from the rhythm of the rattle of bottle and glass.

I was jealous that Paula wanted boys in Colorado when I was there, and I was resigned — it was like fighting gravity, I knew — to not bulking sizably enough. Their voices seemed to sink into the cold black air and the smell of Paula’s cigarettes, and I heard few whole words — nothing, surely, about my vanished mother, or about my father and me — and what I knew next was the stubbly friction of my father’s cheek as he kissed me goodbye and whispered that he’d see me soon. I though that we were home and that he was putting me to bed. Then, when I heard the coarse noise of Bill’s truck, I opened my eyes and saw that I was on the canvas cot in Paula’s room in a bright morning in Maine. I was certain that he was leaving me there to grow up as a farmer, and I almost said aloud the first words that occurred to me: “What about school? Do I go to school here ?” School meant breakfast, meant wearing clothes taken from the oak highboy in the room in Stony Brook, Long Island, meant coming downstairs to see my father making coffee while my mother rattled at The Times . The enormity of such stranding drove me in several directions as I came from the cot, “What about school?” still held, like scalding soup, behind my teeth and on my wounded tongue.

Paula, at the doorway, shaking a blouse down over her brassiere — I could not move my eyes from the awful power of her underwear — called through the cloth, “Don’t you be frightened. You fell asleep and you slept deep. Frank and Daddy’re climbing, is all. Remember?” Though the cotton finally fell to hide her chest and stomach, I stared there, at strong hidden matters. We ate eggs fried in butter on a wood-fired stove while Molly drank coffee and talked about a dull moth which lived on Katahdin and which Bill might bring home. I stared at Paula’s lips as they closed around corners of toast and yellow runny yolks.

We shoveled manure into the wheelbarrow Paula let me push, and we fed their dozen cows. One of them she’d named Bobo, and I held straw to Bobo’s wet mouth and pretended to enjoy how her nose dripped. I listened to the running-water noises of their stomachs, and I looked at the long stringy muscles in Paula’s tanned bare arms. Her face, long like her mother’s, but with high cheekbones and wide light eyes, was always in repose, as if she dreamed as she worked while naming for me the nature of her chores and the functions of equipment. I watched the sweat that glistened under her arms and on her broad forehead, and she sounded then like my father, when he took me to his office on a school holiday: I was told about the surfaces of everything I saw, but not of his relation to them, and therefore their relation to me. In Jefferson, Maine, as on East Fifty-second Street in Manhattan, as in Stony Brook, New York, the world was puzzling and seductive, and I couldn’t put my hands on it, and hold.

We went across a blurred meadow that vibrated with black flies and tiny white butterflies that rose and fell like tides. On the crest of a little hill, under gray trees with wide branches and no leaves or fruit, Paula lay flat, groaning as if she were old, and stared up through bug-clouds and barren limbs and harsh sun. “Here,” she said, patting the sparse fine grass beside her. “Look.”

I lay down next to her as tentatively as I might lie now beside a woman whom I’d know I finally couldn’t hold. Her arm was almost touching mine, and I thought I could feel its heat. Then the arm rose to point, and I smelled her sweat. “Look,” she said again. “He looks like he’s resting awhile, but he’s hanging onto the air. That’s work. He’s drifting for food. He’ll see a mole from there and strike it too.”

Squint as hard as I might, there was nothing for me but bright spots the sun made inside my eyes. I tried to change the focus, as if I looked through my mother’s binoculars, but I saw only a branch above us, and it was blurry too. I blinked again; nothing looked right.

“I guess I saw enough birds in my life,” I told her.

“That’s right, isn’t it? Your mother’s a bird-watcher. In Colorado, too. I guess there’s trouble there .”

“They’re taking separate vacations this year.”

“They sure are. That’s what I mean about trouble. Man and wife live together. That’s why they get married. They watch birds together, if that’s what they do, and they climb up mountains together, and they sleep together in the same bed. Do Frank and Angie sleep in the same bed?”

I was rigid lest our arms touch, and the question made me stiffer. “I don’t see your mother climbing any mountains,” I said.

“Well, she’s too fat, honey. Otherwise she would. And if this wasn’t a trip for your father and mine to take alone, a kind of special treat for them, you can bet me and Momma would be there, living out of a little canvas tent and cooking for when Daddy came back down, bug-bit and chewed up by rocks. And you won’t find but one bed for the two of them. I still hear them sometimes at night. You know. Do you?”

“Oh, sure. I hear my mom and dad too.” That was true: I heard them talking in the living room, or washing dishes after a party, or playing music on the Victrola. “Sure,” I said, suspecting that I was soon to learn things terrible and delicious, and worried not only because I was ashamed of what I didn’t hear, but because, if I did hear them, I wouldn’t know what they meant. The tree limb was blurred, still, and I moved to rub my eyes.

Then that girl of smells — her cigarette smoke lay over the odor of the arm she’d raised — and of fleshy swellings and mysterious belly and the awesome mechanics of brassieres, the girl who knew about me and my frights, about my parents and their now-profound deficiencies, said gently, “Come on back to my room. I’ll show you something.”

When she stood, she took my hand; hers was rough and dry and strong. She pulled me back over field and fences, and I thrilled to the feel of flesh as much as I hated the maternity with which she towed me. But I thought, too, that something alarming was about to be disclosed. I couldn’t wait to be told, though I was scared.

Molly was putting clothes through a mangle near the rain barrel, and she waved as we passed. We went through cool shadows into the room Paula had decorated with Dick Powell’s picture, and Gable’s, and on the far wall a blurred someone with a moustache wore tights and feathered hat and held a sword.

“My library,” she said, opening the closet. “Here.” And on shelves, stacked, and in shaggy feathering heaps on the closet floor, were little yellowing books and bright comics and magazines that told the truth about the life of Claudette Colbert and Cary Grant. I doubt that she knew what I needed, for she was mostly a teenage kid on a little farm in Maine. She wasn’t magical, except to me in her skin, although she was smarter than I about the life I nearly knew I led. But something made her take me from the swarm of sun and insects, the high-hanging invisible bird of prey — that place where, she possibly knew, I sensed how much of my life was a secret to me — and she installed me on the dirty floor of a dirty house, in deepening afternoon, half-inside a closet where, squinting, I fell away from the world and into pictures, words.