Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“You don’t make it easy,” I said.

She shook her head. “Nope. I never did.”

When she looked at me again, I said, “You were always very nice to me, Cheryl. You were a pal.”

“A pal,” she said. She inspected the cord of the basketball net. “How’s the Dude doing on the team? JV, is it?”

“To tell you the truth, he wants to quit.”

“Are they sitting him down, or is he playing bad? You tell him for me that coming up to JV at his age is a tough transition. He might do better on the freshman team.”

“I don’t think he’d hear me if I told him.”

“He does sound like a teenaged boy. You won’t let him quit?”

“No.”

“No, you wouldn’t. It must be tough at home, though, after practice and all. After the games.”

“No more than any other undeclared war,” I said.

She looked at me angrily. “That boy isn’t in a war, and you know it. He’s in his life. And that’s worse, I don’t wonder.”

“Sure. It just makes some evenings very long.”

She slapped her order pad onto the carton in which the backboard came. Then she lined her pen up alongside it. She put her hands on her waist, and then she sighed. For an instant she was silent, and then she asked, “Who do you talk about it with? You know, at the office and all.”

“Nobody. You’d have guessed that.”

“Well, I did,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Yes, yourself.” She looked up, as if at the sun, or at a clock. She crossed her strong wrists in front of her and asked, “Would you like me to visit you guys sometimes?”

She was looking at me, and I couldn’t look anyplace else except her broad, cheerful, muscular face with its two horizontal lines scored onto her brow that told how hard she had to work, sometimes, to smile. “I’ll take the set,” I said to her. “Pole, backboard, hoop. Is that a collapsible hoop? With those pins that release the hoop from the backboard if you get caught on it dunking or something?”

She looked at me a little longer, then she said, “That’s right. What’d you do, get strong or something?”

I said, “Anything but that, and you know it.”

She was writing down the stock numbers of the display models. “You going to hire somebody with a backhoe to come on up after Christmas and plant that pole in the hard ground?”

“You use a pickax,” I said. “You keep hacking with it, and you sweat like hell, I guess, and you do it. The ground’s not really frozen yet.”

She looked into my eyes again. She said, “I can still make you blush.”

On Christmas morning, I woke up early. I always do. I went downstairs and made a pot of coffee. I lit the bulbs on the tree that I’d brought in on Christmas Eve to decorate alone. Duane had offered to help, and the cartons of balls and hangings, and our silence, had almost defeated me. I had forgotten how much we’d bought for Christmas, the silly spidery drawings that Duane had made in class to hang on the tree, and the little dolls from her childhood that Jackie had insisted, every year, we use. I omitted them. Duane remembered them and hung each one. On Christmas morning, I declared to the tree and the dolls, “I am getting better.” Then I lit the tree and called upstairs to Duane, and he came down with a sheepish expression. Anticipation, and childhood’s habitual Christmas Day gladness, the pleasure of greed fulfilled — all were eroding his set, stern face. He grinned at me, and I grinned back. “Merry Christmas, Duane,” I said. He stooped to lay his head near mine so I could kiss him. And from his bathrobe pocket, his gluey breath enveloping us, he took a little package and wordlessly bestowed it on me.

While I unwrapped the cassette of Linda Ronstadt singing blues songs — the card, in Duane’s stringy hand, said, For a horny old guy —he tore open the three cartons containing his pole and backboard and hoop, as well as his lesser gifts (a Stephen King horror story, a poster of Julius Erving, a sports watch it would take a technician to start, a sultry aftershave, a Genesis tape, a terry-cloth sweatband). I went up to him, and he straightened and regarded me. I hugged him hard. He didn’t hug me back, but he rested his hands on my hips and let me squeeze his ribs. “Duane, I love you,” I said. I said my prayer: “We’re gonna be all right.”

He nodded.

I said, “You want some breakfast?”

He shook his head. “I want to practice free throws,” he said. “Maybe he’ll play me if I get myself fouled a lot and make my free throws.”

Duane, then, was outside on his cold stone court, practicing basketball while wearing gloves and a heavy sweatshirt and a woolen watch cap, looking to me like someone else’s child, a stevedore, a boxer in training, some man , and not my former baby. I sat inside, sneaking glimpses of him from the kitchen window when I went to fill my coffee cup.

Up the packed dirt road from the south came a long white Trans Am with purple and black stripes that ran its length. It was the ultimate expression of tastelessness in cars. It went very slowly, and I could see, as it passed the house and went in the direction of our roadside barn, that Cheryl sat in the passenger seat, pointing.

The car pulled in at the side of the road, and Cheryl emerged. The driver sat behind the wheel, and I could almost feel the motor throb over the side lawn, the cold air. She removed a postholer and a pickax from the trunk. They looked too heavy for her, but she marched with a springy step. She wore a man’s oversized jacket that said Yankees across the back. She went up to Duane and tugged his head down to her. I watched him allow her to kiss him. Then she talked about her plans, I guess, pointing at the edge of the ramp, and Duane shrugged, then nodded. Cheryl swung the pickax, and it bit. The ground wasn’t solid yet, so I knew she’d get into the earth. She did. That chunky body swung and swung, regularly, evenly, with strength I knew well. When she’d pulverized the rocky soil, she used the scissor-handled postholer to scoop up dirt. I stood near the wood stove, in my bathrobe, and watched her work away.

Duane went to help her several times, but she shook him off and, after a while, he went to stand beneath his old hoop, holding the ball against his hip. She worked at wedging some heavy rocks from the hole with the postholer. Her boyfriend sat in his idling car, and I stood in my kitchen. After a while, she had a hole I could pour cement into, then stand the pole in, propping it in place with two-by-fours until it set.

Cheryl stood by her Christmas present, leaning the head of her pickax on the pile of earth she’d made. She panted and wiped at her brow with its parallel lines. She always did know how to sweat. She wore a dark stocking cap, and her bright hair stood out around it. Then she turned to Duane, who was watching her.

I said, in my kitchen, “Oh, Duane.”

As if she had said that to him, in the way I heard myself say it, he dropped his basketball, and he went to her, and he stopped to seize her clumsily by the waist, then wrap his arms around her back, then hug. He bent his face down and kissed her on the cheek. I would have bet that he closed his eyes. He stepped back. Cheryl reached up and rubbed at his cheek. He nodded, then stepped back farther. As she turned and walked toward the waiting car, Duane went to retrieve his ball. Cheryl turned her head to the kitchen window and she stared at me. I believe that she knew I’d be looking. She’d supplied the hole. I could supply the pole. “I can still make you blush.”

The Trans Am pulled away, and Duane watched it go. He bounced the ball once, hard, and he caught it on the rise. He dribbled slowly from the mound of dirt that Cheryl had left to the far end of the cattle ramp, where the old backboard was bolted to the barn. He stood beneath the basket, slowly bouncing the ball. I waited for him to lay it in, or step back and shoot.