Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Yes, I admitted that night, while I admitted that the screen didn’t work and that I dreamed the dreams and saw the sights — the whites of the eyes of a puppy in terror, the dry protruding tongue of a dog as he died of poisoned bait, the hiss on leaves of the blood that pumped from his wounds. Yes. All right, I thought, another triumph for lovers of realism everywhere. Yes. It was like mourning again. All right?

Before I left for work the next day, after I drank coffee and turned the radio on and then off, I fetched from the back pantry, from its cubby among field guides and travel books, our gazetteer of New York State with its precise topographical drawings. I looked down at the often unconcentric indications of the sloughs and rivers. There were so many roads and hillsides above them, too many forests and steep, thicketed fields.

I picked up our newspaper on my way to the hospital and I read the ad. She had rearranged my incoherent phrases well enough. It was placed at the top of a column containing three other notices of missing dogs. I visited my patients, three of whom were improving and one, Roger Pettefoy, an infant, who was dehydrated from diarrhea. We had caught his bacterial infection, but the antibiotics, I thought, had given him diarrhea. I asked Charlene Novak to throw some electrolytes into him and asked to be telephoned late that afternoon about his progress. On the way home, I shopped. Two women who had known us asked if they could help me. I smiled at one and moved on. She let me go. The other, who fell on me in an unsteady manner, all yellowing teeth and loose flesh, was not satisfied with my thanks, and she pursued me. I stopped and turned, wheeling my cart as if it were a shield. She retreated several paces with her own cart. She wore a fur coat over what looked like pajamas, and she smelled of gin. The idea of a martini became interesting. I said, “Ms. Wiermeyer? Widdemeyer . Forgive me. You’re being kind, I know. But I really remember, if barely, how to buy short-grain rice. My hesitation, here in aisle five, is because the store seems to carry only long-grain rice. I’d intended to make myself a spinach risotto for dinner. Hence the desirability of short grains, as I’m certain you know. So I’m considering my choice, which lies between long-grain and processed. I’m only fucked up, Ms. Widdemeyer, not stupid.”

That afternoon, a boy rode up on a bicycle, rare enough on our stretch of road. Pooh let him know by yelping at the bike, even after the boy climbed off it. Pooh’s rich growling bark had turned to something of a yap. A lesson for us all, I thought, as I went out the front. The boy was fourteen, probably, pimpled over a pallor he owed to canned gravies on dehydrated mashed potatoes and plenty of sweet sodas. I smelled his cigarettes and unwashed skin.

He said, not looking at my face, “You the man advertising the reward?”

“For a dog,” I said stupidly.

“Dog,” he said, patting Pooh’s head. “Black puppy, it says, except he’s pretty damned big for a puppy.”

“Kind of dopey-looking ears and a little white spot on his chest?”

“Yupper,” he said, breaking the word into two syllables and landing heavily on the second. “Kind of cute.”

“Did you call him by his name?”

“Bear,” he said. “Pretty near tore the damned chain off of him.”

“Chain,” I said, taking my wallet out and counting to a hundred.

He described the trailer off the road and its short gravel driveway, the long chain fastened to its riserless wooden steps and the black dog held by a collar that looked to be made of chain as well.

“A choker, maybe,” I said. “It tightens up the more the dog pulls on it.”

He nodded. “Could have been,” he said. But I knew that he’d agree, now, to anything because he saw more money in the wallet.

“When you go home,” I said, “be sure and keep one of those twenties to yourself, if you know what I mean.”

“Yupper,” he said, mounting the bike and looking like all these big country boys caught between handlebars and steering wheels — too long and lean for the squat kids’ bicycle, and a little bit angry, as if he knew how he looked.

I checked Pooh’s water dish, then locked him in and drove to the trailer. I had paused at the door of my house, wanting to heft something. This was an emergency, and it might require equipment. I thought about flashlight, ax, splitting maul, garden spade, a serrated bread slicer, or one of the French cooking knives. Finally, I took my medical bag. I wanted to know what I was doing, no matter what I had to do, and my professional tools seemed best.

I turned up a road I rarely traveled because it was not only seasonal — unplowed during the winter — but because it was unpaved and seemed to be made of potholes linked by rocks. I went slowly, rehearsing my conversation with whoever had Bear. I would have to pay another reward. I would have to have a discussion, I supposed. I would have to perhaps undergo a berating for carelessness and maybe listen to complaints about scattered garbage or the scratched-up walls of a shed or the stain on a rug. The trailer was at the edge of a state hardwood plantation. Once a year, those who’d been chosen in a lottery were permitted to log firewood. For a few weeks, the forest screamed and trees fell and pickups tottered back and forth under heavy loads. Then these woods felt dark again when I drove past the road that went through them, and there was a good silence from them — unless you had driven there to call the name of a missing dog.

I’d noticed the trailer before, its trim fence taut on pressure-treated four-by-fours, but I hadn’t thought about the posts in the gravel drive, nor the very large links of chain that hung between them, nor the sign that said, in high, childish letters, KEEP OUT . I saw a thinner, brighter chain that was looped around the steps in front of the darkened trailer in the darkening woods. I didn’t see Bear.

I was breathing too quickly for the effort involved in parking a car and walking from it to step over a thick chain and go up the little hillside to climb four steps and knock on the aluminum door of a white metal and plastic trailer with blue trim that was maybe twenty feet long. I raised my hand to rap at the storm door when someone opened the interior door a crack and said, “Get off of my property.”

“Give me back my dog, and I will,” My voice was so high, I hardly recognized it.

“There isn’t any dog here. Get out.”

“I know my damned dog’s here. I want him back.”

“He’s mine.”

“Bear!” I called.

“You stay right there, Buddy,” the man’s voice said. It had a flat dullness to it that seemed strange, since it also sounded angry. “His name’s Buddy,” the man said, “and my brother bought him for me over in New York. Now, you get the hell off my property.”

“I guess you want to talk to the cops,” I said.

He said, “I knew it was you. I knew it was you. I knew it was you. Goddamned Howard, huh? All the way over from Ohio, huh? Big undercover motherfucker Howard, huh? I knew it was you!”

The door opened a little wider, and I called, “Bear!”

The barrel of a rifle came out. I remember staring at the sight because it seemed to stand so high. I heard a metal sound, and I jumped off the porch and ran down the gravel drive, falling near the bottom and letting myself roll under the chain. I ran around to the far side of my car and crouched there. I thought I saw the trailer door close. I sat on the ground and shook. Everything shook. When I finally inched myself into the car and turned it around, driving almost too low in the seat to see, and when I was back in my own driveway, I thought that I could use some of my professional gear once I pulled the gravel out of the cuts and washed my hands.