Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“I told her the truth,” Jonas said. “I told her what I’ve come to believe. Hey: three strikes and you’re out. I swung three times, she swung three times, so we’re out. Everybody’s out. I said that. Even Norma knows it’s three swings and three misses and that’s that. I took her to a Mets game once. She fell asleep in the sun.”

“You instructed her about love,” Jay said.

“Love, we got. That’s what I told her. That’s not — with us, that isn’t the problem. I wanted her to know that. It’s— needs , Jay. It’s different needs, is all. Everything. But I wanted her, so she would remember it later, I wanted her to know the problem isn’t love.”

“So if love doesn’t matter, how come you put so much time in, telling me and your wife and Christ knows who else that love isn’t in short supply?”

Jonas stopped, wheeled, pointed a finger at Jay, who was panting behind him up the rise that enabled them to look at the meadow below, and then the forest surrounding the house and the clearing it hid within. “Hey, don’t crow about it. Don’t get swelled up like you’re teachin’ me something. Because I don’t see you with twelve kids and a sweet little wife or nothin’, anything. Anything. You know what I’m saying here, Jay? You’re the one almost never was married, and our mother goes around saying she hopes you’re not a fag.”

“She does?”

“Well, she doesn’t say it. She thinks it.”

“Maybe you’re the one who thinks it, Jonas.”

“Maybe I am.”

Jonas looked at his brother, and his brother looked back, and as it hadn’t done when they were kids, and as he hadn’t expected it now, at their age, or at this moment, Jay’s stomach lurched and hot phlegm crawled in his gullet, an instant’s awful taste that subsided, but that was part of a fact now. He had tasted it. And it was not because of what Jonas had said. Jonas lifted weights in health clubs. He played basketball several times a month with men who once were boys with him in the schoolyards of Flatbush. Jonas would worry about men who lived alone, and Jay had known that. But it was what he saw when he’d stared at his brother: the retreating but still heavy hairline, the broad nose that in profile was close to the face, the upper jaw’s overbite, the configuration of whiskers, the size of the very dark eyes. What he looked at every morning in the mirror, early, humming to himself while the water sent up steam and the utter cleanliness of the daily shave made him glad to be awake — that was what he’d seen in Jonas. He had looked at himself. He had seen how far and proximate, and both at once, they might be.

Would he, Jay, maybe married and with kids, living, say, with a beautiful dark woman who had not gone home to a Southern city, and never mind the cultural problem and the racial garbage and the neighborhood bastards who might sit on his children’s lives with deadweight buttocks — would he be gone from them by now? Would he have fled? Would he have traveled this far from them? And what if Nellie came there tonight and said to him: Yes. What if he then held his temper for enough years to permit Rachel to possibly grow tolerable? Would he, one day, be fleeing Nell as Nell had fled her former husband to come here and sell books to women with matching hats and gloves? Was everyone born to be separate? Was his baby brother here to tell him that?

He poured them each a drink, and they drank. They said nothing more. He poured them each a half of what was left in the jug. It was getting cold. It was dark. Jay said, “Cheers. Here’s to what you want.”

Jonas looked at Jay with Jay’s face; Jay looked back with Jonas’s. “To what I need ,” Jonas said.

“All right.”

And then they went back down the hill, and over the meadow, through marsh and firm field, and over the fence, and along the yard and inside. Jay made an olive oil and garlic sauce for spiral noodles. He left the garlic peelings on the stove and fetched a bottle of Barolo that one of his partners had given him. They ate and drank in silence, except for Jonas’s pronouncement that the food was good. They put the dishes in the sink, and Jay said that he might, at gunpoint, do them later.

In the livingroom, Jay played records — the Vaughan Williams London Symphony — and Jonas went upstairs, perhaps to telephone, Jay hoped. He didn’t know why he hoped it. Surely, he wanted it for Norma and Joe and Joanne. He wanted it also, and maybe he wanted it mostly, for himself.

At the door a few minutes later was Nellie. He had been nearly asleep, slumped in the armless rocker, and he’d heard the crushing of gravel stones beneath wheels. Looking out the window, he’d seen her Jeep. So he was up and shaking himself awake and moving to the door as the knock sounded. It was constant, and Nellie didn’t summon him that way. She knocked and knocked, was calling him for help, and he skipped along the floor in his stocking feet, wondering why she didn’t simply walk inside. Then, opening the door, he saw why. She was holding Rachel. She was carrying her across her chest, and she had knocked with an arm under strain. Rachel’s face was too white. Her eyes were open, the pupils dilated, and she looked almost shocky.

He held the door wide and Nellie staggered past, heading for the livingroom and its broad sofa. The bass of the big speaker was growling. Nell, panting, went to turn the record player off. Her eyes were huge when she came back, still gulping at the air, to stand above Rachel, who lay on the sofa with her knees curled up and her fist clenched, the right fist clenched, and dark spots on her cheek and forehead.

“Something happened,” Nell said. “I was — something happened.”

He turned on the lights at either end of the sofa and he kneeled to look at Rachel. He expected that Nellie would tell him what the matter was, and he waited, but she said nothing more. He smelled Rachel’s breath, which was steamy and fetid, weak, and he touched her face very carefully at the sides, and then he started to feel at her bones. The face was abraded and scratched, puffy in spots where the vessels were bruised against the bone. He knew that her left arm was broken. He stood, went for scissors and a quick wash of his hands, then came back to see Nell covering her to the waist with a comforter. “There’s nothing wrong with her legs?” he said. Nell shook her head. She kept blinking, he saw, and he was worried that she was going to faint. There was blood on Nell’s white shirt. She looked like a meat cutter or a surgeon, there was something familiar about the white garment and about looking on it for spatters of blood. Then he bent forward and down to see what Nell had done to her daughter.

He cut Rachel’s sleeve away. He wasn’t talking in his easy chant — he sometimes had to use it for injured children who were frightened — because Rachel wasn’t frightened. She wasn’t there. She watched him from somewhere back behind her eyes, she winced as he got the sleeve off, but she was pretending not to be there. He saw that the fracture was simple, a clean green snap and nothing puncturing the skin or major blood vessels. He went for tape and some old lath he’d saved for kindling. He splinted her and then, with a flashlight, looked once more at the bruises and scrapes, looked inside her mouth and nostrils and eyes, peering down into her secrets but not finding Rachel, just her blood. He telephoned the hospital — Jonas wasn’t on the line, he noted — to say that he’d need an orthopedist at the hospital in half an hour. He ordered the X-rays so there would be no delay. He got Rachel up. “We’ll take the Alfa,” he said. “It’s faster. You can take the Jeep if you want to come. There’s only room for two in the Alfa.”