Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

He heard himself pause because, he knew, what he said next would matter tonight, later on, and tomorrow, when it would be just him and Nell and what they needed to say, and what they ought to be doing. Then he saw his brother in his rotting clothes at the livingroom doorway. His brother Jonas was watching him, but with Jay’s own face. Jonas looked at the battered child, but with Jay’s face, except that Jonas was smiling now: a great wide smile had twitched over his mouth from right to left, like a carpet being unrolled. So Jay knew how pleased his brother was about being right.

And Jay, no better than anyone, turned his back to the cruel and frightening face that he recognized, and he said to Nell, “And I’m not sure that I give a good goddamn whether you get there finally or not.”

Nell didn’t answer. She was looking at his hands. They were balled into fists. He held them cocked across his chest. He realized that she expected him to punch her, just as she had punched and torn at her child. He wondered how much she wanted him to, and he wondered how far he’d be tempted to start in swiping at her frozen face. He banged his hands against his chest while his mouth made a shape he hadn’t determined. Her face collapsed into its pallor, and she stiffened as if struck, hard, with a hard hand.

He saw her eyes and then he turned from her. Rachel was gray-white with pain. He put the blanket around her carefully and he leaned above her to shepherd her out, past Jonas’s grin, to his car. He buckled her lap-belt carefully, and he settled the blanket about her as if she lay in bed. Nell watched them, and then she climbed up into the cab of the Jeep. Jay started the Alfa and put it in gear without waiting for the oil to heat, and they went down his road, Jay and the girl he detested.

He hadn’t intended to stop his car, but he did. He said to Rachel, “A minute. Just a minute.” He walked back to the Jeep that was idling with a high roar on the steep decline of his road. When he walked past the brilliance of her headlights, the air at the side of the cab seemed densely dark. He said to Nell, “Let me see your hand.”

“What?”

“The hand you hit her with. Let me see your hand.”

“The — what did you say?”

“I want to see if your hand’s hurt. You can break bones, hitting someone like that. Your hand has twenty-seven bones. Most people don’t get to meet most of their bones. Is it swollen? Does it hurt?”

“I didn’t hit her,” Nell said.

“You didn’t?”

She looked down her headlights. They converged on the little red car, and the still shoulders and head of her daughter. “You think you know about this,” she said. “You think you know all about it.”

He said, “I’ll see you there.”

He went back to his car and when he sat behind the wheel, he saw that Rachel was crooked in the seat, her head along her own shoulder, her flesh gone clammy, her breath a kind of snuffle and wheeze. She looked like a broken stuffed dog. He drove very quickly down the rest of the hill, descending alone with what needed him, and when he raised his face to look in the rearview mirror, the great high sneering grille of the Jeep was close behind.

I WOKE UP at 5:25 because the dog was vomiting. I carried seventy-five pounds of heaving golden retriever to the door and poured him onto the silver, moonlit snow. “Good boy,” I said because he’d done his only trick. Outside he retched, and I went back up, passing the sofa on which Fanny lay. I tiptoed with enough weight on my toes to let her know how considerate I was while she was deserting me. She blinked her eyes. I swear I heard her blink her eyes. Whenever I tell her that I hear her blink her eyes, she tells me I’m lying; but I can hear the damp slap of lash after I have made her weep.

In bed and warm again, noting the red digital numbers (5:29) and certain that I wouldn’t sleep, I didn’t. I read a book about men who kill each other for pay or for their honor. I forget which, and so did they. It was 5:45, the alarm would buzz at 6:00, and I would make a pot of coffee and start the wood stove; I would call Fanny and pour her coffee into her mug; I would apologize because I always did, and then she would forgive me if I hadn’t been too awful — I didn’t think I’d been that bad — and we would stagger through the day, exhausted but pretty sure we were all right, and we’d sleep that night, probably after sex, and then we’d waken in the same bed to the alarm at 6:00, or the dog, if he’d returned to the frozen deer carcass he’d been eating in the forest on our land. He loved what made him sick. The alarm went off, I got into jeans and woolen socks and a sweatshirt, and I went downstairs to let the dog in. He’d be hungry, of course.

I WAS THE OLDEST college student in America, I thought. But of course I wasn’t. There were always ancient women with parchment for skin who graduated at seventy-nine from places like Barnard and the University of Georgia. I was only forty-two, and I hardly qualified as a student. I patrolled the college at night in a Bronco with a leaky exhaust system, and I went from room to room in the classroom buildings, kicking out students who were studying or humping in chairs — they’d do it anywhere —and answering emergency calls with my little blue light winking on top of the truck. I didn’t carry a gun or a billy, but I had a flashlight that took six batteries and I’d used it twice on some of my over-privileged northeastern-playboy part-time classmates. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I would waken at 6:00 with my wife, and I’d do my homework, and work around the house, and go to school at 11:30 to sit there for an hour and a half while thirty-five stomachs growled with hunger and boredom, and this guy gave instruction about books. Because I was on the staff, the college let me take a course for nothing every term. I was getting educated, in a kind of slow-motion way — it would have taken me something like fifteen or sixteen years to graduate, and I would no doubt get an F in gym and have to repeat — and there were times when I respected myself for it. Fanny often did, and that was fair incentive.

I am not unintelligent. You are not an unintelligent writer , my professor wrote on my paper about Nathaniel Hawthorne. We had to read short stories, I and the other students, and then we had to write little essays about them. I told how I saw Kafka and Hawthorne in a similar light, and I was not unintelligent, he said. He ran into me at dusk one time, when I answered a call about a dead battery and found out it was him. I jumped his Buick from the Bronco’s battery, and he was looking me over, I could tell, while I clamped onto the terminals and cranked it up. He was a tall, handsome guy who never wore a suit. He wore khakis and sweaters, loafers or sneaks, and he was always talking to the female students with the brightest hair and best builds. But he couldn’t get a Buick going on an ice-cold night, and he didn’t know enough to look for cells going bad. I told him he was going to need a new battery and he looked me over the way men sometimes do with other men who fix their cars for them.

“Vietnam?”

I said, “Too old.”

“Not at the beginning. Not if you were an adviser. So-called. Or one of the Phoenix Project fellas?”

I was wearing a watch cap made of navy wool and an old Marine fatigue jacket. Slick characters like my professor like it if you’re a killer or at least a onetime middleweight fighter. I smiled like I knew something. “Take it easy,” I said, and I went back to the truck to swing around the cemetery at the top of the campus. They’d been known to screw in down-filled sleeping bags on horizontal stones up there, and the dean of students didn’t want anybody dying of frostbite while joined at the hip to a matriculating fellow resident of our northeastern camp for the overindulged.