Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

The plane came back over. Why Mr. Lester Scott decided I was working for some antidrug agency couldn’t have had much to do with what he saw. I was a scrawny, middle-aged man who hung around with dogs. I never carried a shotgun or a rifle, never paid attention (I was told) to anyone nearby. I couldn’t have the look of a narc. I felt myself smile. I was flattered.

I was also winded. I was also near the trailer. A yellow light lay around the doorway and the top outside step. I heard the jingle of the chain as Bear moved away from the trailer. I heard the click as Scott locked himself back in. Commando-Doc peering through the brush on the subject’s perimeter, I needed only cork blacking to look like an unmuscular joke about films. His small lot was perfectly rectangular, I thought; all the corners were right angles. A small shed — garbage and tools, no doubt — was plumb in its relation to the trailer. His woodpile was neat, and what he’d split of the mound of round sections was piled in face cords between studs he’d spiked into the ground. Moving around the lot, I saw at the back of the trailer a single cinder block step beneath the rear door. From it, I could see a trail. It probably went to his marijuana crop. I could follow the path, set his crop on fire, then steal back Bear while Scott was distracted. Since I didn’t smoke, however, and since my emergency rescue kit consisted of Agway reinforced gloves and the tracheotomy knife, I needed another plan.

I stepped out onto the back of his lot. I would like to say I glided, but in my rubber-bottomed winter boots I thumped. I walked alongside the trailer and, at the corner that would take me around to the side of his wooden front steps, I paused. I hissed. I gave the low, coded whistle that would bring my dog and, if they held him back, the steps and trailer too. He paused, I whistled again, and then he bent again to lick his loins. So much for Lassie, so much for Lad and Rin-Tin-Tin.

As I bit on my lips and tongue and cheeks, and worried what I could reach of my head for a practical thought, I found myself stepping around the corner and walking to my dog. I whispered, “Bear, goddammit.” Probably, the goddammit did the trick. He looked and stiffened, he leaned forward — they are all myopic until they’re blind — and then he galloped, ass high, tail corkscrewing, big jaws open in what everyone who owns a dog will call a smile.

The chain scraped as it tightened at the step, and Bear winced, a step or two short of me. Scott had put him in a choker meant for a smaller dog. I could see the furrow in his fur as it bit. I pushed into him, and back, so that the pressure eased. He burrowed into me, put his paws on my shoulders as he tried to swallow my face, and knocked me over. So there I was, one hand hooked inside a binding choker chain, flat on my back with my black dog standing on my chest, inhaling my nose and mouth.

I heard the trailer door open and a flat, thin voice: “Get away from Buddy. Get off of my land.”

I lay back. Bear had gone stiff. I closed my eyes and I said, “Fuck you.”

“I did grant you the sporting chance,” he said.

I heard a soft sound, the closing of a little metal latch. I heard the grate of some other metal mechanism, and I opened my mouth and eyes at once. I was on my feet, and I don’t remember standing. I kneeled at Bear and worked to loosen the choker. He had retreated as far as he could from the porch, so he’d tightened it, and the only way I could set him free was to push him toward his captor. There was some kind of important Zen semiautomatic large-magazine coveting-of-property message in that action, I think I thought. Scott put six, seven, eight rounds into the earth around me. Bear growled low, but also drooped with fear. He shivered, and so did I, but without the growl. I finally somehow pulled the collar off, tearing away some of Bear’s ear. He screamed, and they later found a chunk ripped open where the ear meets the head.

The plane flew low above us, and I heard other engines and so did Scott. A yellow power company truck was almost out of view where it idled, to the left of his house. I couldn’t see its cherry-picker crane, but as the yellow light inside his doorway vanished, I knew they were cutting his power off. A big ambulance slid up, and so did two navy blue state police cars, and then the red and white sheriff’s cars, one after another, maybe half a dozen, and then several unmarked cars pulled in. By then, I was holding Bear against my chest with his paws folded in against my arms.

I said, “I’ll tell them you could have killed me and you didn’t. I’ll tell them how you fired into the ground.”

He looked up at the plane as it returned. He raised the rifle and he fired. He said, as he shot, “A man gets a vote in this country. A man still gets a vote. Man good as niggers and DEA sneakthief undercover lawyers, keeping him from what’s his due and guaranteed Constitution rights. Spics in Talladega get the vote, and so do I.” He squeezed off round after round. I heard the cops calling, as if to warn, by sheer power of their cries, the unprotected pilot in his plane. I turned my back to Scott because I was afraid he was going to shoot us, and I didn’t want the dog to be my shield. I couldn’t move my feet. I knew I had wet my trousers, and then I felt the warm trickle as Bear took my cue. He didn’t feel heavy, though he must have weighed close to eighty pounds. It wasn’t his weight. It was my legs. They wouldn’t move. So I crouched with my back to Lester Scott as the plane came back — this time I heard the troopers and deputies cursing the pilot — and flew in, slow and low and large above us.

Scott fired a round a second, it sounded like, and though I thought I was deafened by the noise of his rifle, I heard one of the lawmen call Down! at the same time that I heard Lester Scott say in his flat, uninflected voice, “I know you. I know you. I know who you are.” He fired twice again, and then the rescuers fired. They must have posted snipers with military rifles because two shots, which boomed and echoed in the forest, struck him at once. Imagine swatting a side of beef with a breadboard. I heard the bullets go in. I was on my knees by then, unable to breathe. The right side of my back was numb, and I figured out, at about the time that I registered the second volley of shots — lower in register, tinnier — from everyone else firing, that one of the troopers or deputies had shot me. I figured it was a mistake, though you never know how angry someone in that situation might become at a civilian fouling their rural drug bust.

It was a high adrenaline morning, all right, with men screaming commands through bullhorns, the airplane roaring back and forth, lower and lower, it sounded to me, and everything in my body pumping head to toe and side to side. I lay on top of Bear, unable to move. The numbness on my back had been replaced by a very deep and profoundly disabling pain. I didn’t think I could breathe anymore. I hadn’t the breathe to tell them. I knew the Bear, beneath me, hadn’t moved. So I didn’t, anyway, want them to pick me up. I lay as still as I could, shaking and feeling wet all over and breathing very shallowly. I heard them gabbling and laughing and commanding one another to perform all sorts of actions.

Someone said, “Most of the motherfucker’s plastered onto the trailer, and the rest of the trailer is halfway shot to shit. I believe we have lowered the resale value for his motherfucking estate.” They laughed high up in their throats, and the smell of cigarette smoke poured over us.

I was going to croak a brave and wounded doctor’s joke about smoking and its toll on one’s health. I remember that. I remember opening my mouth, timing myself against the pulses inside my ribs and under my lungs, but I couldn’t shape the big, hissing syllable I’d need to start with. The spotter plane went over, and then someone turned me. I gagged and started to cry, I’m afraid.