Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

I thought: The barrel of a gun .

I thought: I did hear him lunge inside the trailer when I called his name.

I told Arch Constantine, the deputy who arrived forty minutes later, and he wrote an incident report for me to sign.

He asked, moving his three-cell flashlight on the table, and studying his juvenile handwriting, “Did you feel menaced, Doc?”

“Menaced. Arch, you’re damned right I felt menaced. I was scared .”

“Scared’s fine, but menaced is what the law’s about. Menacing. Was he menacing you?”

“There’s a law against it?”

“There sure is. I believe we’ve had him on it before, this Lester Scott guy. The sheriff knows about him. A number of us do. He’s a head case. And you felt menaced, then.”

I nodded. I hesitated, but he smiled. He had a sweet smile for a man who was almost seven feet tall and perhaps as heavy as two of me. It was a crooked face, as if he’d been broken and put together again with some difficulty. “Menaced,” I said. “I ran.”

“I understand,” he said, tapping the report.

“I ran away, Arch. Like a kid.”

He said, “I’d just as soon you did, Doc. I’d like to keep you alive. You take care of two of my nephews and you’re the only fun we get down at the cells unless one of the prisoners gets a package of food. You let us deal with the perpetrators and you forget about them until we lock them up. That strike you as fair?” He smiled the smile I often enough used with the parents of my patients. I thought of the tiny clenched face of Roger Pettefoy in the ward and of his mother, who’d trembled when she spoke with me.

“Deal,” I said.

When he was gone, I fed Pooh and then walked around the house, waiting for word. I watered the plants, many of which looked sicker than the children I’d treated that week. I let Pooh out and called the hospital. I shouted at the Head of Shift because I hadn’t been called about Roger Pettefoy. She told me, stiffly, that no instructions to call had been left. I told her how wrong she was, that when Charlene Novak heard orders she wrote them into the chart. She told me how improved the baby was, and I gave her orders and insisted that she read them back. Then, of course, I apologized. I said, “My dog—” I was able to stop myself, so that when she asked me what I’d said I could reply, “It’s been a long day. Forgive me. Please call me if the child’s signs change.” I said, “Deal?”

She didn’t know what I meant, apparently, and she disconnected.

Pooh barked at Arch when he returned. He ducked as he came in and he refused to sit. There was no dog in the car and none beside him but Pooh. The deputy said, “I’ve dealt with him before. I was right. He’s crazy.”

“I believe it.”

“No,” he said. “He’s crazy . He thinks your name’s Howard.”

“I know that.”

“He thinks you work with the DEA.”

“Drugs?” I said.

“He thinks you followed him from someplace in Ohio, and before that from someplace down South, and he thinks you’re a spy for the DEA. You’re some kind of undercover agent. I thought he was going to shoot me, sure as shit. He hates law officers. He hates uniforms. Mostly, right now, he hates you . That’s why he’s got your dog.”

“He admitted it was mine?”

“Sure did. Dog came wagging to the trailer, and he just chained him there. Wants you to know it.”

“Why?” I tried not to let it sound like Why me?

“He’s not sure, he says. He says he thinks , maybe, he’d enjoy shooting you through the chest. He was particular about that, about the through the chest part. He says he’s got a load of guns and ammunition, and he would take great pleasure in killing you and any of your cop friends.”

“Jesus,” I said, “you were—”

That was when he did sit down and lean over his legs and look at the clouded blue linoleum of the kitchen floor. He nodded. Then he whispered, “I did think he was ready to put me down.”

“Jesus,” I said, “you can’t get killed because of a dog, Arch.”

He looked up, suddenly. He smiled his sweet smile. “Thank you,” he said. “I’d at least like a chance to talk it over with my sergeant and more than likely the sheriff. We can’t have him doing whatever he’s doing with guns, that’s for sure. And if he’s got your dog, we have to get it back. There’s the drug thing, besides. The marijuana. You’ve heard about it. Let me talk to people about warrants or whatever, and what to do next. You do me a favor?”

“You bet.”

“Don’t go back there. He will kill you.”

“That’s a deal,” I said.

Later, when I sat in the kitchen and wondered for some reason whether I smelled to my colleagues and nurses and patients like a sour old wooden house inhabited mostly by dogs, I thought of how noble I had been. Well, of course , we can’t have deputies murdered for the sake of a dog.

Well, of course, I thought.

I heard from the hospital, with a dutiful report on Roger Pettefoy bouncing back. In the morning, I woke on my sofa across from Pooh, who glared from his, and I heard the sound of an airplane flying low. It was just light, it was Sunday morning, and I would have to be in the hospital to check on the kids, but not until nine or ten. I had five hours on my own, and I knew how I would spend them. Pooh lay still, pretending not to be there, until I was in the kitchen, making coffee. I heard his groan as he half slid and half fell onto the floor.

By six I was in the car, parked at the intersection of Lester Scott’s road and mine. I walked through brush, keeping parallel to the road. I had my flashlight, but only used it with my hand cupped loosely over the lens. I wore a dark, heavy Irish sweater we had bought maybe fifteen years before in Clifden, and it almost fit. Putting it on, fighting my way up into its bulky sleeves, I had realized how little I’d been eating. I wore an old tan tweed cap, dark work gloves for no reason I could give, and I carried the heavy pocket knife I kept sharpened in case I had to do an emergency tracheotomy. I had carried it for years and never used it. I’d no idea why I brought it with me now. Maybe, if he shot me in the head, I would need to cut an airway in so I could breathe while dying.

Of course, I was panting. I sweated heavily, and I imagined myself as pale, as radiating my feeble heat and light through the woods like a beacon. The light plane gargled and buzzed not far above, a couple of hundred feet, maybe less. I progressed by staggering, by falling, by taking short, uneven steps, by gasping and muttering, by pulling myself ahead, this hand on that branch, this foot pushing off that unsteady rock I hadn’t, anyway, seen in time to not fall on, but for all of my inability and fear, I felt something I can only describe as health.

We’d heard the stories for years, and Arch Constantine had more or less repeated them, but with more detail. Although I live on shale, clay, and bony ridges, I also live on water. The high valley that runs along the spines of hills a thousand, two thousand, feet high has water that drains off it. These mountain streams continue as creeks and brooks and branches — so they’re named on the map — to the Chenango River and the Unadilla. These empty into the Susquehanna, and that runs as far as Chesapeake Bay, and there you are, from here — from this little nowhere anyone heard of — gone to everyplace else.

Farmers with moving water of any reasonable depth are attached to the rest of the world, in other words. You can bring a shallow-draft boat up into river-bottom country. What you load it with is the marijuana you’ve been growing half a mile back off the road, out of sight of troopers and deputies, accessible only to the harvesters, who work there while they’re screened off by the harvesting of soy or corn, or the spreading of manure. So the marijuana is grown behind the grass, then it’s ferried to deeper waters, and it’s taken farther by lazy-day fishermen in Boston whalers through a system of rivers as complicated as a network of human nerves, or by high school dropouts in fast, converted cars who use the Onondaga reservation as a distribution hub for shipments north to Canada, south down the thruway to New York.