Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Jonas stood in the center of his big brother’s countryside with a glass in his hand and dusk upon them, and he wept like a very young boy. He didn’t speak of Jay’s cruel relish in the telling of the story. And he didn’t claim that Jay had dispossessed him of a portion of his past. He simply wept. And Jay stood a few paces from him, and then moved in to touch his brother’s shoulder, hot beneath the dirty shirt. Each moved back at the contact. Jonas continued to cry, while he smiled and shook his head. Jay nodded, as if to agree with Jonas that it couldn’t be helped.

TUESDAY WAS USUAL, in that no new diseases were presented in the practice, and no fevers spiked so high in the ward that children’s brains were damaged, and everyone was going to get better. He stopped the aspirin for a child with stomach irritation, though he thought that the real source of irritation was the parent who dispensed the aspirin. He prescribed a seasickness medicine for the young woman who kept falling down; although he explained it as an inner-ear infection that interfered with balance, he could not persuade the child’s father that she didn’t suffer epilepsy, and he therefore prescribed Valium for the father, but not out loud.

To make up for the work shunted to his partners the day before, he came to his clinic early and worked without a break, and he treated plantar’s wart, and he gave children allergy shots, and he tested their urine, and he swabbed at crimson throats. He stared down over tongues and under uvulae to ferret where diseases hid. The kids looked up and he looked down and, while they gagged over his tongue depressor, he made gagging noises back at them so that they watered at the eyes and retched and giggled at once. He was happy all day.

Because he’d started early, he finished early — it was too bright and pretty a day for parents to make the trek to the clinic; on a nasty day, with nothing better to do, they’d show up, he knew — so Jay decided that it was time for a drive to Spruce Plains. He needed something to read, Jay decided. He knew a bookstore, and he went there. Outside, parked in his red car, in a day so brilliantly lighted that even afternoon felt more like a start than a finish, he listed to himself what he must do. A quick joke with Rachel, if she was there, and no protracted teasing: she grew sour under scrutiny or with attention — be avuncular, but also be quiet. Be reserved. Hold back. Make no more jokes with Nell about marriage. Say: Nell, you are a secret person. I know more about the hidden places inside children’s throats than I know about you. I understand that you’re hiding. I respect this. I hide too — look at my high hill, my dusty road, my house of many rooms, surrounded by so much forest and field. I don’t presume to say you need my comfort or that I can give it.

“Hi, Rachel.”

“Nellie! Jay’s here! Hi, Jay.”

“I thought you were calling her Mom from now on.”

The girl with large eyes and pale skin and a curly permanent — she looked to Jay like a high-fashion dog with human features — shook her head with, probably, pity. It came off as bitchiness, and all at once he felt the fatigue of his day. “That was probably what you wanted,” she said. “Mom and I have a different relationship. We try to communicate our feelings. I have this need to be her peer. I think it has to do with my father and everything.”

Jay nodded. He wondered what it would be like to give this girl an allowance and smell her shampoo and watch her sneak off to beer parties. He wondered what it would be like to become Rachel’s peer.

“Oh, yes,” Rachel said, snapping her fingers theatrically enough for Jay to see — he was supposed to see — the posturing. “I forgot. Mom’s at the market.”

“Which one? I’ll catch up with her,” Jay said.

“The one in Millerton. You’d probably pass her on the road. Sorry I didn’t remember, Jay.”

“You’re close to peerless, Rachel. Thank you for thinking of it finally.”

“Would you like to buy a book, Jay? Or did you come to talk to Nellie? Or whatever you do to her, ha ha.” She showed her long white teeth, and Jay decided that he’d been reminded of terriers, Scottish terriers. He turned a paperback rack around too loudly on his way out: another victory for the dogs.

Driving home, he had two thoughts that rotated in his head like the twin propellers on a pinwheel, around and around, so that neither went anyplace, and everything else got spun away. He thought that parents needn’t be villains to make whacky kids, and then he wondered who ought to take the blame, and whether blame had purpose here. And then he thought that children never should be villains because their throats were so tender and, in infants, the thighs and forearms so innocent and made to be kissed; and yet they so often were villainous, he went on as the pinwheel spun, raping women in parking lots and running amok in subways in New York and sitting in someone’s rural bookstore with twenty-one-year-old eyes and the face of a cunning small dog and the tongue of an asp. Around and around they went, and nothing came of Jay’s unwisdoms, and soon he was home, and there — parent and child, villain and victim — was Jonas to greet him.

Jonas was beginning to smell bad. He was starting to rot, Jay thought. He wore no socks. He had left his scuffed loafers, wet from high grass, at the side door, and Jay could see that his feet were rimmed with dirt and had dark long nails. The anklebones showed dark patches too. His thoroughly wrinkled and matted seersucker pants carried staleness through the air, and his same blue oxford cloth shirt was stained under the arms and reminded Jay of what a high school gym locker had smelled like. Jonas had shaved on his first day there, but not today, and his dark jowls and bruised eyes, the slackness of the skin around his mouth, were challenged only by his great round heavy golden watch on its wide golden band: it proved that he wasn’t a bum, that he was a prosperous man of business whose life had fallen down to stink and disarray.

They had drinks in the field again, because Jonas liked the sense of a lot of room around him, he said. This time, they carried a vacuum jug of vodka martinis, and as they strolled, like two old men in the neighborhood, they drank with the freedom of those who know there’s more. Pollen blew around them, and seeds floated. The breeze that carried them carried also the smell of cows and the algae on still water and the lavender that was planted at the edge of the lawn behind the house — a combination of perfume and decay, like the merging of colors on the bushes themselves, the bright light purple in feathery clusters melting into dull brown mush. The wind took all the smells away, too, and sometimes they walked as if sheltered from the sensual world, although it lay about them, breathing.

“How was your day?” Jonas asked. But he didn’t wait for Jay to tell him. He said, at once, “I feel like a housewife, asking that. Did you have a hard day at the office, dear?”

Jay nodded and sipped and kept walking. The ground was spongy here, and he wanted to get to a higher, firmer place.

Jonas also said nothing. They walked, and sometimes one or the other would sigh loudly and sniff, as if to tell his brother how fine the air felt going up the nose and past the hidden organs of taste and smell.

Finally, Jonas said, “I called home.”

“Did you talk?”

“Yeah.”

“Was she glad?”

“That I wasn’t dead or anything. Yeah. And that I thought to call. You don’t leave somebody worrying you’re dead or something.”

“Did you talk more, or is that the way it was?”

“We talked more.”

“Good.”

“Not good, Jay.”

“You mean you talked tough. You told her all about the facts of life, is that what you mean?”