Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

He blinked his high beams at me as I went. “You are not an unintelligent driver,” I said.

FANNY HAD LEFT ME a bowl of something made with sausages and sauerkraut and potatoes, and the dog hadn’t eaten too much more than his fair share. He watched me eat his leftovers and then make myself a king-sized drink composed of sourmash whiskey and ice. In our back room, which is on the northern end of the house, and cold for sitting in that close to dawn, I sat and watched the texture of the sky change. It was going to snow, and I wanted to see the storm come up the valley. I woke up that way, sitting in the rocker with its loose right arm, holding a watery drink, and thinking right away of the girl I’d convinced to go back inside. She’d been standing outside her dormitory, looking up at a window that was dark in the midst of all those lighted panes — they never turned a light off, and often let the faucets run half the night — crying onto her bathrobe. She was barefoot in shoe-pacs, the brown ones so many of them wore unlaced, and for all I know she was naked under the robe. She was beautiful, I thought, and she was somebody’s red-headed daughter, standing in a quadrangle how many miles from home and weeping.

“He doesn’t love anyone,” the kid told me. “He doesn’t love his wife — I mean his ex-wife. And he doesn’t love the ex-wife before that, or the one before that. And you know what? He doesn’t love me. I don’t know anyone who does !”

“It isn’t your fault if he isn’t smart enough to love you,” I said, steering her toward the truck.

She stopped. She turned. “You know him?”

I couldn’t help it. I hugged her hard, and she let me, and then she stepped back, and of course I let her go. “Don’t you touch me! Is this sexual harassment? Do you know the rules? Isn’t this sexual harassment?”

“I’m sorry,” I said at the door to the truck. “But I think I have to be able to give you a grade before it counts as harassment.”

She got in. I told her we were driving to the dean of students’ house. She smelled like marijuana and something very sweet, maybe one of those coffee-with-cream liqueurs you don’t buy unless you hate to drink.

As the heat of the truck struck her, she started going kind of clay-gray-green, and I reached across her to open the window.

“You touched my breast!” she said.

“It’s the smallest one I’ve touched all night, I’m afraid.”

She leaned out the window and gave her rendition of my dog.

But in my rocker, waking up, at whatever time in the morning in my silent house, I thought of her as someone’s child. Which made me think of ours, of course. I went for more ice, and I started on a wet breakfast. At the door of the dean of students’ house, she’d turned her chalky face to me and asked, “What grade would you give me, then?”

IT WAS A WEEK composed of two teachers locked out of their offices late at night, a Toyota with a flat and no spare, an attempted rape on a senior girl walking home from the library, a major fight outside a fraternity house (broken wrist and significant concussion), and variations on breaking-and-entering. I was scolded by the director of nonacademic services for embracing a student who was drunk; I told him to keep his job, but he called me back because I was right to hug her, he said, and also wrong, but what the hell, and he’d promised to admonish me, and now he had, and would I please stay. I thought of the fringe benefits — graduation in only sixteen years — so I went back to work.

My professor assigned a story called “A Rose for Emily,” and I wrote him a paper about the mechanics of corpse fucking, and how, since she clearly couldn’t screw her dead boyfriend, she was keeping his rotten body in bed because she truly loved him. I called the paper “True Love.” He gave me a B and wrote See me, pls . In his office after class, his feet up on his desk, he trimmed a cigar with a giant folding knife he kept in his drawer.

“You got to clean the hole out,” he said, “or they don’t draw.”

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

“Bad habit. Real habit , though. I started in smoking ’em in Georgia, in the service. My C.O. smoked ’em. We collaborated on a brothel inspection one time, and we ended up smoking these with a couple of women—” He waggled his eyebrows at me, now that his malehood was established.

“Were the women smoking them too?”

He snorted laughter through his nose while the greasy smoke came curling off his thin, dry lips. “They were pretty smoky, I’ll tell ya!” Then he propped his feet — he was wearing cowboy boots that day — and he sat forward. “It’s a little hard to explain. But — hell. You just don’t say fuck when you write an essay for a college prof. Okay?” Like a scoutmaster with a kid he’d caught in the outhouse jerking off: “All right? You don’t wanna do that.”

“Did it shock you?”

“Fuck, no, it didn’t shock me. I just told you. It violates certain proprieties.”

“But if I’m writing it to you, like a letter—”

“You’re writing it for posterity. For some mythical reader someplace, not just me. You’re making a statement .”

“Right. My statement said how hard it must be for a woman to fuck with a corpse.”

“And a point worth making. I said so. Here.”

“But you said I shouldn’t say it.”

“No. Listen. Just because you’re talking about fucking, you don’t have to say fuck . Does that make it any clearer?”

“No.”

“I wish you’d lied to me just now,” he said.

I nodded. I did too.

“Where’d you do your service?” he asked.

“Baltimore. Baltimore, Maryland.”

“What’s in Baltimore?”

“Railroads. I liaised on freight runs of army matériel. I killed a couple of bums on the rod with my bare hands, though.”

He snorted again, but I could see how disappointed he was. He’d been banking on my having been a murderer. Interesting guy in one of my classes, he must have told some terrific woman at an overpriced meal: I just know the guy was a rubout specialist in the Nam, he had to have said. I figured I should come to work wearing my fatigue jacket and a red bandanna tied around my head. Say “Man” to him a couple of times, hang a fist in the air for grief and solidarity, and look terribly worn, exhausted by experiences he was fairly certain that he envied me. His dungarees were ironed, I noticed.

ON SATURDAY WE went back to the campus because Fanny wanted to see a movie called The Seven Samurai . I fell asleep, and I’m afraid I snored. She let me sleep until the auditorium was almost empty. Then she kissed me awake. “Who was screaming in my dream?” I asked her.

“Kurosawa,” she said.

“Who?”

“Ask your professor friend.”

I looked around, but he wasn’t there. “Not an un-weird man,” I said.

We went home and cleaned up after the dog and put him out. We drank a little Spanish brandy and went upstairs and made love. I was fairly premature, you might say, but one way and another by the time we fell asleep we were glad to be there with each other, and glad that it was Sunday coming up the valley toward us, and nobody with it. The dog was howling at another dog someplace, or at the moon, or maybe just his moon-thrown shadow on the snow. I did not strangle him when I opened the back door and he limped happily past me and stumbled up the stairs. I followed him into our bedroom and groaned for just being satisfied as I got into bed. You’ll notice I didn’t say fuck.

HE STOPPED ME in the hall after class on a Thursday, and asked me How’s it goin, just one of the kickers drinking sour beer and eating pickled eggs and watching the tube in a country bar. How’s it goin. I nodded. I wanted a grade from the man, and I did want to learn about expressing myself. I nodded and made what I thought was a smile. He’d let his mustache grow out and his hair grow longer. He was starting to wear dark shirts with lighter ties. I thought he looked like someone in The Godfather . He still wore those light little loafers or his high-heeled cowboy boots. His corduroy pants looked baggy. I guess he wanted them to look that way. He motioned me to the wall of the hallway, and he looked up and said, “How about the Baltimore stuff?”