Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

I read small glossy-jacketed books, little type on crumbling wartime paper, with some line drawings, about Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless and the plight of the always-kidnapped Dale. I read about death rays and rockets that went to Mars from Venus as quickly as they had to for the sake of mild creatures with six arms who were victimized by Ming’s high greed. Dale and the other women had very pointed breasts and often said, “Oh, Flash, do you really think so?”

And there was Captain Marvel, whose curling forelock was so much like Superman’s, but whom I preferred because I thought we looked alike and because he never had to bother to change his clothes to get mighty: he said Shazam! and a lightning bolt made him muscular and capable of rescuing women with long legs. I read of Superboy, whose folks in Smallville were so proud of him. Littler worlds, manageable by me, and on my behalf by people who could change, whether in phone booths or storerooms or explosions of light, into what they needed to be: Aqua-Man, Spider Man, the Green Lantern, wide-nostriled Wonder Woman in her glass airplane, and always Flash and Dale, “Oh, Flash, do you really think so?”

For a while, Paula sat behind me, cross-legged on her bed, reading fan magazines and murmuring of Gary Cooper’s wardrobe and the number of people Victor Mature could lift into the air. When she went out, she spoke and I answered, but I don’t remember what we said. I leaned forward in the darkness, squinting and forgetting to worry that I had to screw my face around my eyes in order to see, and I stayed where I was, which was away.

They had a radio, and we listened to it for a while after dinner, and then Molly showed me, in a room off the kitchen, board after board on which dead moths were stiffly pegged. I squinted at them and said “Wow,” and while Paula and Molly sat in sweaters on the porch and talked, I squatted in the closet’s mouth, under weak yellow light, and started Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Chessmen of Mars . When Paula entered to change into nightclothes, I was lured from the cruel pursuit of Dejah Thoris by Gahan of Gathol, for the whisper of cloth over skin was a new music. But I went back with relief to “The dazzling sunlight of Barsoom clothed Manator in an aureole of splendor as the girl and her captors rode into the city through the Gate of Enemies.”

When Paula warned me that the lights were going off, I stumbled toward my cot, and when they were out I undressed and went to sleep, telling myself stories. And next day, after breakfast and a halfhearted attempt to follow her through chores, I walked over the blurred field to the rank shade of Paula’s room, and I sat in the closet doorway, reading of Martian prisons, and heroes who hacked and slew, unaware that I had neither sniffed nor stared at her, and worried only that I might not finish the book and start another before my father and Bill returned. They didn’t, and we ate roast beef hash and pulpy carrots, and Molly worked in the shed on the motor of their kitchen blender while Paula listened to “Henry Aldrich” and I attended to rescues performed by the Warlord of Mars.

It was the next afternoon when my father and Bill returned in the truck. They were dirty and tired and beaming, and they smelled like woodsmoke. My father hugged me and kissed me so hard that he hurt me with his unshaved cheeks. He swatted my bottom and rubbed my shoulders with his big hands. Bill presented Molly with a dirty little moth and she clapped her hands and trilled. Paula smoked cigarettes and sat on the porch between Bill and my father, listening, as if she actually cared, to Bill’s description of how well my father had done to follow him up Abel’s Slide, where the chunks of stone were like steps too high to walk, too short and smooth to climb, and up which you had to spring, my father broke in to say, “Like a goat in a competition. I thought my stomach would burst, following this — this kid . That’s you, Bill, part mountain goat and part boy. I don’t know how you stayed young for so long. You were the oldest man in the outfit, and what you did was you stayed where you were and I got ancient.”

“Nah. Frank, you’re in pretty good shape. For someone who makes his living by sitting on his backside. I’ll tell you that. You did swell.”

“Well, you did better. How’s that?”

Bill swallowed beer and nodded. “I’d say that’s right.”

And they both laughed hard, in a way the rest of us could only smile at and watch.

“Damn,” my father said, smiling so wide. “Damn!”

My head felt hot and the skin of my face was too tight for whatever beat beneath it. They were shimmering shapes in the afternoon light, and I rubbed my eyes to make them work in some other way. But what I saw was as through a membrane. Perhaps it was Paula’s cool hand on my face that did it, and the surge of smells, the distant mystery of her older skin and knowledge which I suddenly remembered to be mastered by. Perhaps it was the distance my father had traveled over and from which, as I learned from the privacies of his laughter, he still had not returned. Perhaps it was Molly, sitting on the porch steps next to Bill, her hand on his thigh. Or perhaps it was the bird I couldn’t see which hung over Jefferson, Maine, drifting to dive. I pushed my face against Paula’s hard hand and I rubbed at my eyes and I started to weep long coughing noises which frightened me as much as they must have startled the others.

My father’s hobbed climbing boots banged on the porch as he hurried to hold me, but I didn’t see him because I knew that if I opened my eyes I would know how far the blindness had progressed. I didn’t want to know anything more. He carried me inside while I wailed like a hysterical child — which is what I was, and what I’m sure I felt relieved to be. I listened to their voices when they’d stilled my weeping and asked me questions about pain. I swallowed aspirin with Kool-Aid and heard my father discover the comics and the books I’d read while on my separate vacation. And the relief in his voice, and the smile I heard riding on his breath, served to clench my jaw and lock my hands above my eyes. Because he knew, and they knew, and I still didn’t, though I now suspected, because I always trusted him, that I wouldn’t die and probably wouldn’t go blind.

“Just think of your mother’s glasses, love,” he whispered while the others walked from the room. He sat on the bed and stroked my face around my fists, which still stayed on my eyes. “Mother has weak eyes, and these things can be passed along — the kids can get them from their parents.”

“You mean I caught it from her?”

The bed I was in, Paula’s bed — I smelled her on the pillow and the sheets — shook as he nodded and continued to stroke my face. “ Like that. Just about, yes. I bet when we go home, and we go to the eye doctor, he’ll put a chart up for you to read. Did you have these tests in school? He’ll ask you to read the letters, and he’ll say you didn’t see them too clearly, and he’ll tell us to get you some glasses. And that’s all . I promise. It isn’t meningitis, it isn’t polio—”

“Polio?” I said. “ Polio? ”

“No,” he said. “No. No, it isn’t a sickness . I’m sorry I said that. I was worried for a minute, but now I’m not, I promise. You hear? I’m promising you. Your eyes are weak. Your head’ll feel better from the aspirin — it’s just eyestrain, love. It’s nothing more.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Some dumb vacation. I should have gone with Mommy.”

I lay in a woman’s bed, and in the warmth of her secrets, and in the rich smell of what was coming to me. And my father sat there as his large hands gentled my face. His hands never left me. I dropped my fists, though I kept my eyes closed tight. I felt his strong fingers, roughened by rocks, as they ran along my eyebrows, touched my cheeks, my hairline, my forehead, then eyebrows again, over and over, until, with great gentleness, they dropped upon the locked lids, and he said, “No, no, this is where you should be.” So I hid beneath my father’s hands, and I rested awhile.