Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

My legs tensed with a boy’s thoughtless strength against a concrete court at Wingate Field. Looking at Duane, I thought: Up! Take it up! And I felt him yearn vertically.

But he stopped dribbling. He held the ball. He stared up at the old backboard and he gripped the ball as though it were almost too heavy to hold at his waist, much less toss through the air, ten feet of cold, resistant air, to the hoop.

LOUISE HEARD the liquid click of Gerry’s eyes beneath his shut lids. He lay on their living room sofa and rubbed as he talked about the cases of a long, sour day while she sat a dozen feet from him, watching his long broad fingers. Underneath them, he said, “I get them — this is the final difference in what we do — I get them at the end. They’re drooling down the barrels of their guns, or they swear they sometimes think they won’t be able to put on the brakes when they’re coming to a school crossing. Or a cattle crossing. They don’t care which, by then. Or they tremble all the time. Or keep on rubbing their eyes, heh heh. I get them, they’re just one dumb, needful statement, plus a coffin, short of a funeral. You get them, they’re lying down drunk in the halls, or getting knocked up by their uncle. But they’re kids. They’re starting out, you figure. You work with them, you keep on thinking it’s supposed to end up like Little Women or something.”

“But you know different,” she said.

“Don’t I, boy,” he said, sighing into his hands as, cupped along his face, they rubbed at the lids that always looked sore.

“And then you come home, and I make you forget your worries.”

He stopped rubbing. He turned on one arm, blinking, and looked at her. She ducked to sip her coffee. “Yes, Louise,” he said. “That’s what I do. And that’s what you do.”

She did not say anything. But she knew that she smiled gratefully. She knew that she had just poured too much scalding coffee into her smiling mouth because her gratitude for his assurance was as powerful as her need had been to hear it. He was the counselor for the Sheriff’s Department, and she was the counselor for the senior high. And every time he called it the final difference, Louise refused to cry.

One of Gerry’s patients, a man near retirement who drove a red and white sheriff’s car and who’d been said to talk to himself in public as much as he probably did inside the car out of sight, had arrested a high school junior for hanging from a pedestrian bridge near Sidney, New York while mooning. The deputy, enraged not by the boy’s risk to himself, or the thought of what his body, falling from eighteen feet, might do to windshields or the amazed people behind them, had hauled the boy up and beaten him, while he was still half naked, for his nudity. “Showing your ass like that,” the deputy had said, again and again, according to the boy. Louise had worked with the boy and his parents, while Gerry had worked with the deputy. During their only conference, she had heard Gerry whistling “Moon over Miami,” and she’d started to giggle.

“What?” he’d said.

In the bright room, with its smell of tobacco and something like turpentine, in the steel-colored light of the Chenango Valley in winter, she had told this man who looked as much like a deputy as his clients did — tall, thick, broad of neck, slightly stooped, as though he drove all day; handsome in the way that minor actors who end up playing clever villains must once, maybe in high school, have been called handsome—“You were whistling about a moon. It made me think of that bare bottom suspended in the air over the highway.”

Gerry had looked at her — had seemed to study her — as if he aimed his high forehead and big nose and little dark eyes. He moved his head as if his neck were sore, his shoulders stiff. He’d rubbed his eyes and then, the only male she’d seen do this since her second year at Oberlin, he blushed. His prominent nose and forehead made a beacon in the grim, small steel-colored room. He closed his eyes and rubbed at the lids, and she knew he was hiding.

“It’s such a wonderful expression,” he blurted, “mooning.” He laughed uncontrollably, she thought, letting his teeth show, then putting his hand to his lips as if he wished to cover them. The laughter came from his belly and his big chest so that his torso shook. He was probably a man of coarse appetites, she’d thought. She had understood, even as she’d risen to wrap her long winter coat around her and look at her watch and say excuses, that she was thinking less of this competent-looking vulnerable man than someone she had left in Rochester, a lover, dark and demanding and finally cruel, whose memory filled her with sadness about herself and what she strongly suspected, and maybe feared, was lust.

He had telephoned her that night, and she’d felt an obligation toward him, as forceful as if she’d betrayed him with the man in her memory. He had been apologetic, as if he’d gone too far. A kind of pleasant romantic duty, then, started them out, and now they had lived together, without a dog or cat or child, for almost two years, in a locked-log house on a river flat outside of Plymouth, New York. They went to work early, driving separately the twelve miles to the county seat to ply their trade; they came home late, cooked together, brought in food, and then they watched films on the VCR, or read and slept early. Louise had told him about her former lovers — a few she’d called boyfriends, and the other she had tried not to dwell on. He was the one about whom Gerry had asked the most gentle, pointed questions. She had put an end to them by telling him, “You use your mind like a penis, sometimes, you know that?”

“Sex is in the head,” he’d answered at once, his tone growing hard as he looked over at her from the sofa on which he lay with the Science supplement of the Times . “Isn’t that a tenet of the feminists?”

“I’m not a feminist,” she’d answered.

“Sure you are,” he’d said at once, in the new, grim voice.

“I’m me. I’m only me.”

“All right,” he’d said, looking at the papers, “that’s plenty good enough. Be you.”

They left off their lovers’ archaeology until, meeting for lunch at the Howard Johnson’s near the County Office Building, when Louise told Gerry about a girl who had sought her help in finding a doctor to abort her pregnancy, Gerry’s face had gone smooth and expressionless, then had turned bright red.

“Only a baby ,” Louise had been saying. “And having a baby. And needing to kill it.”

“Is she finding the decision difficult?”

“Oh, Gerry, she’s terrified. I have to talk to her some more. I’m worried about who the father is. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were her own—”

“The decision,” he’d said, his lips thin and pale against his flushed face. “Is it hard for her?”

“What?” Louise said. “What, Gerry?”

“You had your Mr. Wicked Desires. I — well, a woman, of course.” He gave an imitation of a smile. “I mean, there was somebody who I — whew.”

And she’d said, “Loved.”

Gerry was rubbing at his eyes. She had reached to hold his wrist and pull his hand away from his face, and he had held the arm rigid. He might be someone ferocious , she’d thought.

The waitress had come and left their iceberg lettuce, their processed turkey strips and cold French bread, and she had never seen her do it, Louise realized.

Gerry at last had let his arm fall down into her small hand, and he had looked at her to say, “The waitress thinks we’re fighting over the olives, I think. She had — not the waitress, you understand.” His face had lost some of its bright color, then, and his eyes had grown less reptilian. “The woman I’m referring to. Apparently I made her pregnant. I’m assuming that. I decided I’d stick with the assumption. Well, it hadn’t gone well, that’s all. Our being together. Our time together wasn’t going well. I think I’m not easy to live with. Do you?” He’d faked his helpless smile and laugh, and Louise had found herself rubbing at her own shut lids. “She aborted the baby, but she didn’t want to tell me. First she aborted, then she told me, then she put only a few of her clothes into a suitcase — two suitcases, actually, plus a carry-on bag. It was like she was escaping . Well, she was. She was very pale. She was sweating. I thought she’d gone infected, from the procedure. First she aborted, then she told me, then she packed, and then she left.”