Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Fed and sheltered, surrounded by what I had picked for my pleasure, and sullen because the people downstairs were getting along as best they could in their sad, short lives, I decided always to live alone when I grew up. And then I turned the radio on and listened to Henry Morgan’s show and laughed. At 7:30 in the morning, true to Rudy’s word, I woke. I looked through glowing green leaves at a Sunday sky under which a boy played stickball or he died . He didn’t. And he did grow up to learn how everyone, no matter who has loved him for good or for ill, no matter whom he loves, is faithful to that cruel and careless, easy childhood vow.

HE ALWAYS THOUGHT of the dogs as the worst. The vet’s belly heaved above his jeans, and he cursed in words of one syllable every time a deputy tugged a dog to the hypodermic, or trotted to keep up as a different one strained on its chain for its fate, or when a dog stopped moving and went stiff, splayed, and then became a loose furry bag with bones inside. The deputies and the vet and the judge, who also did his part — he watched without moving — did it twenty-six times, in the yard behind the sheriff’s offices. The air stank of dirty fur and feces as though they were all locked in. The yelping and whining went on. When they were through, one deputy was weeping, and the vet’s red flannel shirt was wet with sweat from his breastbone to his belt. The deputies threw the dogs into the back of a van.

They might be dangerous, Snuyder had decided. They might have been somehow perverted, trained to break some basic rules of how to live with men. So they had died. And Snuyder, doing his part, had watched them until the last lean mutt, shivering and funny-eyed, was dead. He thought, when he thought of the dogs, that their lips and tails and even their postures had signaled their devotion to the vet or to one of the deputies; they’d been waiting for a chance to give their love. And as the deputies flung them, the dogs’ tongues protruded and sometimes flopped. When their bodies flew, they looked ardent.

The dogs in the yellow trailer had drawn the attention of the people in the white trailer across the unpaved rural road: their howling, their yapping, the whining that sometimes went on and on and on. Lloyd and Pris, the man and wife in the trailer with the dogs, came and went at curious hours, and that too attracted the attention of the neighbors, who had their own problems, but somehow found time — being good country Christians, they made time — to study the erratic behavior and possible social pathology of the couple in the bright yellow trailer edged in white, propped on cinder blocks, bolstered against upstate winters by haybales pushed between the plastic floor and the icy mud. The neighbors, one working as a janitress, the other as a part-time van driver for the county’s geriatric ferrying service, finally called the sheriff when there was a February thaw, and the mud all of a sudden looked awfully like manure, and an odor came up from the yellow trailer that, according to the janitress (a woman named Ivy), was too much like things long dead to be ignored by a citizen of conscience.

But only one of the dogs was dead, and it died after the deputies had kicked the door in, and after it had attacked and had been shot. It died defending a mobile home that was alive with excrement and garbage. Turds lay on the beds and on the higher surfaces, counter and sink. Madness crawled the walls. Lloyd, the husband, had written with dung his imprecations of a county and state and nation that established laws involving human intercourse with beasts. Twenty-six dogs were impounded, and the couple was heavily fined by the judge.

The awful part, of course, had been the dogs’ dull eyes and duller coats, their stink, their eagerness to please, and then their fear, and then the way they had died. Later he decided that the nurse with her hair that was thinning and her arms puffed out around the short, tight sleeves of her hissing uniform was the worst part so far. The first sight Richard Snuyder had seen, when he fell awake like a baby rolling from its crib, had been a man on crutches at his door, peering. The man had sucked on an unlit filter cigarette, adjusted his armpits on the crutches, and said, “I heard you did one jam -jar of a job. Just thought I’d say so. I was raised to express my appreciation of the passing joys.”

Snuyder, hours later, had thought that the man on crutches, apparently a connoisseur of catastrophe, was the worst. He wasn’t. The worst became the orderly who brought in a plate of mashed potatoes and open hot roast-beef sandwich in glutinous gravy, who was chased by the nurse who brought the doctor, whose odor of dark, aged sweat and stale clothing did little to dispel that of the roast beef, which lingered in the room as if the pale orderly had hurled it on the walls to punish Snuyder for being on a liquid diet.

The doctor, who had mumbled and left, Snuyder thought for a while, was really the worst part of it: his dandruff, his caustic smell, his dirty knuckles that gave the lie to the large scraped moons of fingernail above the tortured cuticles. This is the worst, Snuyder had thought, though not for long.

Because then the candy striper with her twitchy walk and bored pout had stood at his door, a clipboard in her hand and an idle finger at her ear, though carefully never in it, and had looked at him as though he weren’t open-eyed, blinking, panting with pain, clearly stunned and afraid and as lost while being still as dogs are that stand at the side of the road, about to be killed because they don’t know what else they should do.

After the candy striper had left, the balding nurse with great arms, and no need for such forms of address as language spoken or mimed, came in to adjust something at his head and something at his leg. His neck didn’t roll, so he couldn’t follow her movements except with his eyes, which began to ache and then stream. Looking at his legs, she wiped his eyes and took the tissue away. He was about to ask her questions but couldn’t think of anything that didn’t embarrassingly begin with Where or How .

He tried to move his legs. That was next, as soon as the nurse left. He worked at wiggling his toes and each foot and each leg. They moved, though they were restrained by something, and he called aloud — it was a relief, during the cry, to hear his own voice and to know that he knew it — because the right leg was pure pain, undifferentiated, and the left, though more flexible, hurt only a little less. His legs, and the stiffness at the neck, his aching eyes and head, a burning on the skin of his face, the waking to no memory of how he had come there, or why, or when, or in what state: he was the worst so far. He suspected that little would happen to challenge this triumph. He’d been born someplace, of an unknown event, and every aspect of his arrival on this naked day could be measured against the uncomforting hypothesis that, among the local discomforts he knew, he himself was the worst.

His legs could not be moved, he could not be persuaded to move them again, and he lay with all his attention on his torso, thinking I will be just chest and balls, I will not be legs or ankles or toes . He panicked and felt for his legs, then moved an ankle — he yelped — in response to his fear: he did have his legs, and they would move at his command, he wasn’t only a chest. And balls? He groaned his fear, and groaned for the pain in his legs, and then he groaned with deep contentment: he had found them under his hospital gown, both of them, and everything else, including the dreadful catheter. So all he needed to know now was when he would stop hurting over most of his body, and why and how he was here. All right. First things first. You have legs, your balls are where you left them, and a little panic is worth a handful of testes during times of trial.