Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

The deputy, who’d come in with me, was carrying his magazine as he escorted me to the cell. I said, “Bobby, I didn’t know they were allowed to sell magazines like that.”

He said, “Oh, yeah. The first amendment covers crotches now.”

He opened the door and I went in. The smell of the disinfectant wasn’t unpleasant. I discovered that each time I was there. I put my briefcase on his bunk, and then I looked at him. I think my body was confused about drawing careful breath, lest I smell something awful, and looking through hooded eyes, lest I see something cruel. I winced when our eyes met. But he was just a boy, a very tall and muscular sixteen-year-old boy who should have been attending his junior year in high school but who waited trial for vandalism. He had broken into the high school computer room twice. He’d done damage. And we all agreed, after the counseling and the tests, after the generous leniency of the school board, and after my wife and I had posted bail the first time, for larcenous behavior and several varieties of felony, that this time, awaiting hearings, Charlie — Chilly to his friends — would spend the dozen days in jail.

He was larger than I, and his hand, when I pulled at it, seemed to weigh more than I remembered hands weighing. Everything about him was large, and too big for me to move easily. His face was the same clenched thickening face of a boy I remembered as pretty. He looked at me with sharp-eyed disgust.

But I asked it anyway. “Charlie, you okay?”

His expression remained. He gestured at the one-piece toilet and the bunk bed and the metal bureau built into the wall.

“Nine days to go,” I said.

He sat down on the bunk and looked away from me. I opened my coat and sat beside him. He wore a light gray one-piece boiler suit. It was unbuttoned almost to the belt line, and I saw how little hair he had on his chest, or on the arms I saw in his rolled-up sleeves, or on the smooth, hard face. I was sweating in the heat of the jail, but I wore my coat anyway. His skin looked dry.

“Mom’s—”

“I don’t want to talk about Mom, please.”

I nodded. I was going to say crazy or dying or praying , and none would have been right, and none would have been fair. She was doing what I was doing: hating the decision, hating its occasion, hating our life, and hating the government that had jailed our son. She was also, as I was, approving the decision, cooperating with the sheriff and the board of education, and we were hating us . While we mourned our living son, we ground our teeth while we slept and in the morning shared our nightmares about punishing him.

I put my hand on his long, heavy leg, and he twitched away. I said, as he must have known I would, and as I knew he loathed hearing, “We love you, Charlie.”

But he tamely nodded. So I pressed.

“You know that?”

He nodded again. He said, “Can I ever come home?”

I said, still looking ahead, “I think they want to bring it to trial.”

“Prison farm,” he said.

“For juveniles.”

“I don’t think it’s as little as that word.”

“No,” I said. “They’re tough bastards there. It’s a mean, bad place. We’re trying to keep you out.”

“The lawyer was here,” he said.

“I know. We talked to him afterward.”

“He must be expensive. His suit was very far out.”

“He’s got a closetful. Yes.”

“Does he think—”

“I don’t know, honey.” He looked up. I looked over. Neither of us had called him honey since he was small. Now, it seemed to me, in his long and heavy age, looking at his life taking shapes he had never imagined, he was small. “But we’ll do everything, everything , we can.”

“Except let me come home.”

I focused on my slush-dampened shoes.

“I know,” he said. “Reality.”

“I didn’t use that word with you, did I?”

“Isn’t that what this is supposed to be about?”

It’s what it is about, hon.”

“I know. But I wish I could come home again.”

“Honey, you’ll come home again. That isn’t—”

“Won’t they take me straight from here to the prison farm after the trial?”

I couldn’t look at him, because I couldn’t admit to him that I had never considered his not, eventually, being home. “Reality,” he’d said. I reached to throw the overcoat off my shoulders, but it felt too heavy for my hands. My chest and stomach were soaking through my shirt, but I wouldn’t have been surprised to shiver.

“Here,” he said. He stood, and I did too, and he went behind me and reached around, and he pulled the coat back and off.

“Thank you,” I said. “I don’t—”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what happens to me.”

“It does?”

“A lot. All the time. That’s all that happens here, except food and the bathroom, and the lights going off. TV.”

“It does?”

“You want to see my homework, Dad?”

“You did it?”

“I had the time.”

He handed me several sheets of the rough paper I had left with him. His handwriting, slanted acutely, yet rounded at the tops of looped letters, capitals especially, looked as it had looked when he was in the sixth or seventh grade. I was afraid to read his work. I was afraid that he had written about himself, or us. And I was afraid that he had not. “Great,” I said. “Should I read this at home? Why don’t I do that.”

Okay,” he said. “I don’t care. You can bring it tomorrow. You coming tomorrow?”

“Of course I am,” I said. “That’s what I do.”

“Okay. How about economics? The chapter quiz on inflation and unemployment, all of that.”

He took a sheet from the looseleaf notebook I’d left with him, and he examined it before passing it over. I opened his text to the end-of-chapter test, and I read the questions about lowered market demands for labor in an inflationary society. I kept looking at the graphs, and at the circles with their colored pie slices.

“You gonna grade it at home?”

I thought of sitting in our kitchen and drinking coffee and reading Charlie’s quiz. I could see myself checking his answers: DOWN. UP. MARKETPLACE. SPIRAL. I saw his answers as if pressed, with Leslie’s leadless pencil, onto Leslie’s Invisible Pad. I saw myself standing soon, as I would. I saw myself waving from the door of Charlie’s cell as I had waved to Myrna from the cab of my truck. Where we live is named for someplace else. How we live is named for something else. I saw myself, the traveling teacher, sitting in our kitchen with my pale wife. I would work at my exam. The question would ask me: Name the name for what we’re living now. LOVE U Leslie had written. BOLOGNA. Charlie said, “Dad?” Name the name.

DUANE AND I didn’t talk about how she killed herself or where. With us, it was as if anything to do with mothers or wives had begun two years ago. I had never told him in the first place that Jackie packed not only every suitcase she could find in the house, but cardboard boxes, brown paper bags, and plastic carryalls. It was as though we’d decided to move, and Jackie had left without me. In the bedroom was everything she’d owned — souvenir stones, creased postcards, old photo albums, discarded reading glasses, and out-of-date clothes she hadn’t worn for many years. There were thirty-five shoes. I looked for half an hour for a missing stack-heeled cordovan pump that would have slid onto Jackie’s left foot.

She had taken a room at the Howard Johnson’s, not ten minutes from where I worked. She had eaten enough complimentary capsules, spansules, and tablets, manufactured by my firm, and had washed them down with enough complimentary cough suppressant and her own dark rum, to do the job, and stop her heart.