Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“No. You have to prime it.”

“Prime it?”

“I’ll show you, Mr. Samuels. First, you better let me look. Right?”

“Sorry. Sorry. Do you mind if I stay here, though?” He smiled. He blushed under his whiskers. “I really have to learn something about how — this whole thing.” He waved his arms around him and then covered up.

I said, “You can stay, sure. Stay.”

I started to work a wrench on the heavy casing bolts, and when I’d got the motor apart from the casing, water began to run to the floor from the discharge pipe over the galvanized tank.

He said, “Should I…”

“Excuse me?”

“There’s water coming down. Should I do anything about it?”

I said, “No, thank you. No. You just watch, thank you.”

After a while the trickle slowed, and I pulled the halves apart. I took the rubber diaphragm off, put the flashlight on the motor, poked with a screwdriver, found nothing. I expected nothing. It had to be in the jet. I put the light on that and looked in and saw it, nodded, waited for him to ask.

He said, “You found it?”

“Yessir. The jet’s blocked. That’s what it sounded like when you called. Wouldn’t let the pressure build up, so the gauge wouldn’t know when to stop. It’s set at forty pounds, and the block wouldn’t let it up past — oh, twenty-eight or thirty, I’d say. Am I right?”

“Uh, I don’t know. I don’t know any thing about these things.”

I said, “When this needle hits forty, it’s what you should be getting. Forty pounds of pressure per square inch. If you’d read the gauge you’d have seen it to be about thirty, I calculate. That would’ve told you the whole thing.”

“I thought the gauge was broken.”

“They generally don’t break. Generally, these things work. Usually it’s something simpler than machines when you can’t get water up.”

He pushed his glasses and covered up, said, “God, what I don’t know.”

I said, “It’s hard to live in a house, isn’t it? But you’ll learn.”

“Jesus, I hope so. I don’t know. I hope so. We never lived in a house before.”

“What’d you live in? Apartment houses?”

“Yeah — where you call the janitor downstairs and he comes up while you’re at work and you never see him. Like magic. It’s just all better by the time you get home.”

“Well, we’ll get this better for you.”

He frowned and nodded very seriously. “I’ll bet you will,” he said. It was a gift he gave me, a bribe.

I said, “So why don’t you go on up and ask the missus for about three inches of aluminum foil. Would you do that? And a coat hanger, if you don’t mind.”

“Coat hanger?”

“Yessir. If you don’t mind.”

He walked across the floor to the wooden steps that went upstairs above the furnace; he tried to hide the sway and bounce of his body in the way that he walked, the boy coming down the outside concrete steps as the father went up the inside ones. “Do you need any help?” the boy said.

I said, “Mac, you old helper. Hello.”

“Do you need any help?”

“I had a boy like you.”

“A little bit big, like me?”

“Little bit big. Except now he’s almost a daddy too.”

He said, “Is he your daddy now?”

I said, “Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“Not for a while.”

“Oh. Well, then what happened to him?”

“He just got big. He grew up.”

“Does he go to the college?”

“He’s bigger than that, even.”

Mac smiled and showed his hand, fingers held together. “ That big? So big?”

“Bigger,” I said.

Mac said, “That’s a big boy you have.”

SAMUELS HANDED ME the foil and coat hanger. I rolled the foil around a cigar until it was a cylinder, and I stuck it in the well side of the nozzle. I opened the hanger and straightened her out.

Mac said, “What’s he doing, Daddy?”

Samuels said, “I don’t know. I don’t know, Mac. Why don’t you go outside? I don’t know.”

I said, “Mr. Samuels, I wonder if you would hold that foil firmly in there and cup your hand under it while I give her a shove.”

He held. Mac watched him. I pushed at the other side of the jet, felt it, pushed again, and it rolled down the aluminum foil to his palm: a flat wet pebble half the size of the nail on his little finger. He said, “That’s it? That’s all it is? This is what ruined my life for two days?”

I said, “That’s all it ever takes, Mr. Samuels. It came up with the water — you have to have gravel where there’s water — and it lodged in the jet, kept the pressure from building up. If it happens again, I’ll put a screen in at the check valve. May never happen again. If it does, we’ll know what to do, won’t we?”

Samuels said, “I wonder when I’ll ever know what to do around here.”

I said, “You’ll learn.”

I fastened the halves of the pump together, then went out for my jeep can, still half full from the widow’s house. I came back in and I unscrewed the pipe plug at the top of the pump and poured the water in, put the plug back on, connected the pump to the switch.

Mac jumped, then stood still, holding to his father’s leg.

The pump chirred, caught on the water from the widow’s well, drew, and we all watched the pressure climb to forty, heard the motor cut out, heard the water climb in the copper pipes to the rest of the house as I opened the valve.

I was putting away tools when I heard Samuels say, “Now keep away from there!” I heard the whack of his hand on Mac’s flesh, and heard the weeping start, in the back of the boy’s throat, and then the wail. Samuels said, “That’s filthy in there — Christ knows what you’ve dragged up. And I told you not to mess with things you don’t know anything about. Dammit!”

Mac wailed louder. I watched his face clench and grow red, ugly. He put his left sleeve in his mouth and chewed on it, backed away to the stone steps, fumbled with his feet and stepped backwards up one step. “But Dad -dy,” he said. “But Dad -dy.” Then he stood on the steps and chewed his sleeve and cried.

Samuels said, “God, look at that.”

I said, “There’s that smell you’ve been smelling, Mr. Samuels. Mouse. He must’ve fallen into the sump and starved to death and rotted there. That’s what you’ve been smelling.”

“God. Mac — go up and wash your hands. Mac! Go upstairs and wash your hands. I mean now !”

The small brown lump of paws and tail and teeth, its stomach swollen, the rest looking almost dissolved, lay in its puddle on the floor beside the sump. The stink of its death was everywhere. The pump cut in and built the pressure up again. Mac stood on the cellar steps and cried. His father pushed his glasses up and looked at the corpse of the rotted mouse and hugged his arms around himself and looked at his son. I walked past Samuels, turned away from the weeping boy, and pushed up at the lever that the float, if he had left it there, would have released on the sump pump. Nothing happened, and I stayed where I was, waiting, until I remembered to plug the sump pump in. I pushed the lever again, its motor started, the filthy reeking water dropped, the wide black rubber pipe it passed through on the ceiling swung like something alive as all that dying passed along it and out.

I picked the mouse up by its tail after the pump had stopped and Samuels, waiting for my approval, watching my face, had pulled out the plug. I carried my tools under my arm and the jeep can in my hand. I nodded to Samuels and he was going to speak, then didn’t, just nodded back. I walked past Mac on the steps, not crying anymore, but wet-faced and stunned. I bent down as I passed him. I whispered, “What shall we do with your Daddy?” and went on, not smiling.