Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Snuyder listened. The pain made him blink in disbelief. He looked at the ceiling panels and waited for Hilary to return. She didn’t. The balding nurse, this time in a long-sleeved dress, came in with a sedative shot. He was so grateful, he felt embarrassed. His orthopedic surgeon, a tall and slender man who not only didn’t smile, but who made clear both his disapproval of the patient and of having to explain to him, explained to him what he would do inside of Snuyder’s hip and leg. Pins. Something about pins that would staple him together again, he remembered, after the surgeon was gone and the ceiling had dropped a few feet, and then the orderlies came to roll him away to be pinned into shape.

There was something about dogs, and their terrible odor, and somebody riding one around a muddy country lot. He said No! And, knowing that he dreamed while he dreamed, he awaited the dream that would tell him who had sat in the front with him while the police car chased him and he drove — by accident, he insisted to the unseen audience his dream included — into the slow breaking up of his bones. The dogs whined and whined, as if steadily, increasingly, wounded by someone patient and cruel.

The intensive care unit was dark and silent and Snuyder was in very deep pain. His hip burned, and his stomach, and the groin he ached too much to reach for. He kept seeing the skin slide open as the angry surgeon sliced. He yelped for assistance and then shuddered to show the nurse that it was he who needed her promptest sympathies. He was hooked to a drip and a monitor, she explained. Soon he would be taken back to his room. He was fine. The procedure had seemed to be effective, and now his job was to sleep. He slept, but the burning followed him, and he dreamed again of dogs whose fur was stiff with filth, whose eyes dripped mucus, and whose droppings were alive with long white worms. He heard the dogs’ howling and he hated Lloyd and Pris. The television set was low, and a curtain divided him from Manwarren, but he knew, waking later, that he was back in his room, and still burning, and all right, alive, not dreaming anymore. The world was in color on the other side of the curtain where a voice electric with triumph told someone named Cecelia that the car she’d won had bucket seats. She screamed.

The woman in the car with him had screamed.

TONY ARIZONA, his senior clerk, was there in the morning to discuss adjustments of his trial calendar. He brought a cheap glass vase filled with blue flowers that Snuyder couldn’t name, and a fifth of Powers’ Irish Whiskey. He showed Snuyder how his cases had been distributed among the other sitting judges and that certain others — very few of them — had been postponed. Snuyder said, “No. You gave the boys with the dogs to Levinson.”

“He wanted it. He hates queers.”

“He is queer. I want that one, Tony. Hold it over as long as you can before you give it up. And try not to give it to Levinson. He’ll be corn-holing them in chambers by the end of the first hour. Oh, boy.”

“They cut you up some, I understand.”

“Not to mention I cut me up.”

“Judge. Dick. I have to give the dog people to Levinson. State wants your calendar cleared. You understand? I’m sorry.”

“The suicide thing?”

“They think they might want to look into it.”

“Tony. You think I tried to kill myself?”

“I think you bent your car around a telephone pole. For what it’s worth, I don’t care — I mean, I care , but only about you. You did it, you didn’t do it, you’ll work it out and the accident’s over, that’s that. It’s not the suicide thing. It’s the woman.”

Snuyder heard himself sigh. He could see the letters coming out of his mouth and into a comic-strip bubble: Ahhhh. He waited for Arizona to tell him who she was, and whether he was in love as much as he thought he remembered he once had been.

Arizona said, “They have to do it. I don’t know anything. And nobody else is gonna say word one. I expect a superficial investigation, announced vindication, and a prompt resumption of jurisprudence as usual.”

“And then there’s the matter of the law,” Richard said.

Arizona, handsome and intelligent, with great brown eyes and a fondness for dark striped shirts such as the maroon one he wore, smiled a broad smile. “Absolutely,” he said. “There is always the law, and the public trust, Your Honor.”

Manwarren called over the curtain, “You guys believe this? They want me to believe this bimbo just won a trip around the world for two, all expenses paid, by telling grease ball over there with the microphone that Columbus didn’t discover America?” The muted shrieks of the victor poured around Manwarren’s voice.

The woman in the car had screamed. Arizona poured Powers’ into Snuyder’s glass with its plastic straw, then he held the straw low, near Snuyder’s pillow, so the judge could suck it up. He emptied the glass. Arizona might know her, he thought. But he couldn’t be asked. Snuyder was ashamed to remember his wife and his children, his work even down to the specifics of the cases he had tried months and years ago, when he could barely remember the presence, much less identity or necessary intimate facts, of a woman he had carried with him toward jail for certain, and possibly (if Hilary was right) toward death. But she wasn’t dead. The nurse had told him that no one was dead. He thought of someone with no face who sat in a wheelchair, paralyzed. He saw her — she was like a burglar in a stocking mask, terrifying because faceless, unnatural — lying in an iron lung, crushed in a fetal sleep forever, staring through a window and drooling, staggering like a monster with hands like claws at her waist, serving the judge’s sentence and locked away from his mind.

Arizona slid the Powers’ into the drawer of the bedside table when he left. The pain pills and the Powers’ combined, and Snuyder flinched. The doctors would have to cut and cut before they found out what was wrong with such a man as he, he told himself. He closed his eyes against the undeniable blade, as if they were cutting, as if they were at the flaccid organs and slimy bone, searching for what was the matter. For him.

It was Hilary who woke him when she sat in the visitor’s chair with some effort, swearing as she fell back into the deep seat. After a silence — she breathed as if she had a cold — she said, “How’s your catheter, Judge?”

“Hil. Do you know who she is?”

Manwarren turned the volume down.

Snuyder whispered: “The woman in the car?” He took a breath and then shouted, “Manwarren! Turn the sound up! Mind your own business!” He felt as though he’d been running. “Bastard,” he said. He shouted it: “Bastard!”

The sound came up slightly, but Snuyder knew that Manwarren was unchastened.

Hilary said, “Why, who would that be, Your Honor? How is your catheter, by the way?”

“I hurt all over. Okay? I’m in a lot of pain. I’m humiliated. I’m under investigation, Hilary. They’re looking into my comportment on and off the bench.”

“I didn’t know you’d done it on the bench. And you can’t really blame them. A suicide is not always the most stable interpreter of the law, never mind his other little quirks and foibles.”

“It’s apparently because of the woman. That was all I could get from Arizona.”

Hilary said, “I wish I could get more from Tony. He’s really a piece.”

“Please don’t talk like that.”

“Do I really need to tell you about the hypocrisy of this discussion?”

“No.”

“You know I’m disgusted with you. That’s an easy one. Disgust is easy and seeing it’s easy. But what kills me—”