Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

I hated that word. Die. It made me furious with her. I heard myself seething when I breathed. I pulled my scarf and collar up above my mouth. I didn’t want her to see how close I might come to wanting to kill her because she wanted to die.

I called, “Remember me?”

I was closer now. I could see the purple mottling of her skin. I didn’t know if it was cold or dying. It probably didn’t matter much to distinguish between them right now, I thought. That made me smile. I felt the smile, and I pulled the scarf down so she could look at it. She didn’t seem awfully reassured.

“You’re the sexual harassment guy,” she said. She said it very slowly. Her lips were clumsy. It was like looking at a ventriloquist’s dummy.

“I gave you an A,” I said.

“When?”

“It’s a joke,” I said. “You don’t want me making jokes. You want me to give you a nice warm blanket, though. And then you want me to take you home.”

She leaned against the rock face when I approached. I pulled the blanket out, then zipped my jacket back up. The snow had stopped, I realized, and that wasn’t really a very good sign. It felt like an arctic cold descending in its place. I held the blanket out to her, but she only looked at it.

“You’ll just have to turn me in,” I said. “I’m gonna hug you again.”

She screamed, “No more! I don’t want any more hugs!”

But she kept her arms on her chest, and I wrapped the blanket around her and stuffed a piece into each of her tight, small fists. I didn’t know what to do for her feet. Finally, I got down on my haunches in front of her. She crouched down too, protecting herself.

“No,” I said. “No. You’re fine.”

I took off the woolen mittens I’d been wearing. Mittens keep you warmer than gloves because they trap your hand’s heat around the fingers and palms at once. Fanny had knitted them for me. I put a mitten as far onto each of her feet as I could. She let me. She was going to collapse, I thought.

“Now, let’s go home,” I said. “Let’s get you better.”

With her funny, stiff lips, she said, “I’ve been very self-indulgent and weird and I’m sorry. But I’d really like to die.” She sounded so reasonable that I found myself nodding in agreement as she spoke.

“You can’t just die,” I said.

“Aren’t I dying already? I took all of them, and then”—she giggled like a child, which of course is what she was—“I borrowed different ones from other people’s rooms. See, this isn’t some teenage cry for like help . Understand? I’m seriously interested in death and I have to like stay out here a little longer and fall asleep. All right?”

“You can’t do that,” I said. “You ever hear of Vietnam?”

“I saw that movie,” she said. “With the opera in it? Apocalypse? Whatever.”

“I was there!” I said. “I killed people! I helped to kill them! And when they die, you see their bones later on. You dream about their bones and blood on the ends of the splintered ones, and this kind of mucous stuff coming out of their eyes. You probably heard of guys having dreams like that, didn’t you? Whacked-out Vietnam vets? That’s me, see? So I’m telling you, I know about dead people and their eyeballs and everything falling out. And people keep dreaming about the dead people they knew, see? You can’t make people dream about you like that! It isn’t fair!”

“You dream about me?” She was ready to go. She was ready to fall down, and I was going to lift her up and get her to the truck.

“I will,” I said. “If you die.”

“I want you to,” she said. Her lips were hardly moving now. Her eyes were closed. “I want you all to.”

I dropped my shoulder and put it into her waist and picked her up and carried her down to the Bronco. She was talking, but not a lot, and her voice leaked down my back. I jammed her into the truck and wrapped the blanket around her better and then put another one down around her feet. I strapped her in with the seat belt. She was shaking, and her eyes were closed and her mouth open. She was breathing. I checked that twice, once when I strapped her in, and then again when I strapped myself in and backed up hard into a sapling and took it down. I got us into first gear, held the clutch in, leaned over to listen for breathing, heard it — shallow panting, like a kid asleep on your lap for a nap — and then I put the gear in and howled down the hillside on what I thought might be the road.

We passed the cemetery. I told her that was a good sign. She didn’t respond. I found myself panting too, as if we were breathing for each other. It made me dizzy, but I couldn’t stop. We passed the highest dorm, and I dropped the truck into four-wheel high. The cab smelled like burnt oil and hot metal. We were past the chapel now, and the observatory, the president’s house, then the bookstore. I had the blue light winking and the V-6 roaring, and I drove on the edge of out-of-control, sensing the skids just before I slid into them, and getting back out of them as I needed to. I took a little fender off once, and a bit of the corner of a classroom building, but I worked us back on course, and all I needed to do now was negotiate the sharp left turn around the Administration Building past the library, then floor it for the straight run to the town’s main street and then the hospital.

I was panting into the mike, and the operator kept saying, “Say again?”

I made myself slow down some, and I said we’d need stomach pumping, and to get the names of the pills from her friends in the dorm, and I’d be there in less than five or we were crumpled up someplace and dead.

“Roger,” the radio said. “Roger all that.” My throat tightened and tears came into my eyes. They were helping us, they’d told me: Roger.

I said to the girl, whose head was slumped and whose face looked too blue all through its whiteness, “You know, I had a girl once. My wife, Fanny. She and I had a small girl one time.”

I reached over and touched her cheek. It was cold. The truck swerved, and I got my hands on the wheel. I’d made the turn past the Ad Building using just my left. “I can do it in the dark,” I sang to no tune I’d ever learned. “I can do it with one hand.” I said to her, “We had a girl child, very small. Now, I do not want you dying.”

I came to the campus gates doing fifty on the ice and snow, smoking the engine, grinding the clutch, and I bounced off a wrought iron fence to give me the curve going left that I needed. On a pool table, it would have been a bank shot worth applause. The town cop picked me up and got out ahead of me and let the street have all the lights and noise it could want. We banged up to the emergency room entrance and I was out and at the other door before the cop on duty, Elmo St. John, could loosen his seat belt. I loosened hers, and I carried her into the lobby of the ER. They had a gurney, and doctors, and they took her away from me. I tried to talk to them, but they made me sit down and do my shaking on a dirty sofa decorated with drawings of little spinning wheels. Somebody brought me hot coffee, I think it was Elmo, but I couldn’t hold it.

“They won’t,” he kept saying to me. “They won’t.”

“What?”

“You just been sitting there for a minute and a half like St. Vitus dancing, telling me, ‘Don’t let her die. Don’t let her die.’”

“Oh.”

“You all right ?”

“How about the kid?”

“They’ll tell us soon.”

“She better be all right.”

“That’s right.”

“She — somebody’s gonna have to tell me plenty if she isn’t.”

“That’s right.”

“She better not die this time,” I guess I said.