Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“No. But it’s complicated.” He looked young enough to have been his son, sometimes, and then, suddenly, he looked more like his father. I understood that the man I had thought of as my father looking like himself was no longer available. He was several new selves, and I would have to think of him that way.

“I’m just trying to get better,” he said.

“Daddy, do you hear from her?”

He went still. He held himself so that — in his camouflage outfit — he suggested a hunter waiting on something skittish, a wild turkey, say, said to be stupid and shy. “I don’t see the point of this,” he said. “Why not talk about you? That’s what fathers want to hear. About their kids. Why not talk about you?”

“All right,” I said. “Me. I went to Santa Fe. I had a show in a gallery in Taos, and then I drove down to Santa Fe and I hung out. I walked on the Santa Fe Trail. It goes along the streets there. I ate too much with too much chili in it, and I bought too many pots. Most of the people in the restaurants are important unknown Hollywood celebrities from outside Hollywood.”

“Did you sell any pictures?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you make a lot of money?”

“Some. You want any?”

“Because of how long it takes for your mother to cash my check and send a new one.”

“Are you allowed to not live at home and still get money from the state?”

“I think you’re supposed to stay at home,” he said.

“So she’s being illegal along with you? To help you out?”

He chewed on the last of his waffle. He nodded.

“Pretty good,” I said.

“She’s excellent to me.”

“Considering,” I said. “So how much money could you use?”

“Given the complications of the transmission process,” he said.

“Given that,” I said. “They sit outside the state office building, the Indians off the pueblos. They hate the people who come, but they all sit there all day long, showing you the silver and the pots all arranged on these beautiful blankets. I bought too much. But I felt embarrassed. One woman with a fly swatter, she kept spanking at the jewelry she was selling. She’d made it. She kept hitting it, and the earrings jumped on the blanket. The rings scattered, and she kept hitting away, pretending she was swatting flies, but she wasn’t. She was furious.”

“Displacement,” my father said.

“It’s just a story, Daddy.”

“But you told it.”

“Yes, but it didn’t have a message or anything.”

“What did it have?”

“In situ Native American displacement, and handmade jewelry. A tourist’s usual guilt. Me, on the road, looking around. Me, on my way northeast.”

“Did you drive?”

“I did.”

“All by yourself?”

“Like you, Daddy.”

“No,” he said, fitting his mouth to the trembling cup. “We’re both together here, so we aren’t alone now.”

“No.” I heard the splitting maul, and I imagined the concussion up his fingers and along his forearm, up through the shoulder and into the top of the spine. It would make your brain shake, I thought.

“A hundred or two?” he said.

“What? Dollars?”

“Is that too much?”

“No,” I said, “I have that.”

“Thanks, Baby.”

“But do you hear from her, Daddy?”

He slumped. He stared at the syrup on his plate. It looked like a pool of sewage where something had drowned.

He said, “Did I tell you I went to Maine?”

I shook my head and signaled for more coffee. When she brought it, I asked if I could smoke in the Natty Bumppo Room, and she said no. I lit a cigarette and when I was done, and had clicked the lighter shut, she took a deep breath of the smoke I exhaled and she grinned.

“What’s in Maine?” I asked him.

“Cabins. Very cheap cabins in a place on the coast that nobody knows about. I met a man in New Hampshire — Portsmouth, New Hampshire? He was on the road, like me. He was a former dentist of some special kind. We were very similar. Taking medication, putting the pieces back together, at cetera. And he told me about these cabins. A little smelly with mildew, a little unglamorous, but cheap, and heated if you need, and near the sea. I really wanted to get to the sea.”

“So you drove there, and what?”

“I slept for most of the week.”

“You still need to sleep a lot.”

“Always,” he said. “Consciousness,” he said, “is very hard work.”

“So you slept. You ate lobster.

“A lot.”

“And what did you do when you weren’t sleeping or eating lobsters or driving?”

“I counted girls in Jeeps.”

“There are that many?”

“All over New England,” he said, raising a cup that shook. “They’re blond, most of them, and they seem very attractive, but I think that’s because of the contrast — you know, the elegant, long-legged girl and the stubby, utilitarian vehicle. I found it quite exciting.”

“Exciting. Jesus, Daddy, you sound so adolescent. Exciting. Blondes in Jeeps. Well, you’re a single man, for the most part. What the hell. Why not. Did you date any?”

“Come on,” he said.

“You’re not ancient. You could have a date.”

“I’ve had them,” he said.

“That’s who I was asking you about. Do you hear from her?”

“I’m telling you about the girls in their Jeeps on the coast of Maine, and you keep asking—”

“About the woman you had an affair with who caused you to divorce my mother. Yes.”

“That’s wrong,” he said. “We separated. That’s all that I did — I moved away. It was your mother sued for divorce.”

“I recollect. But you do understand how she felt. There you were, shacking up with a praying mantis from Fort Lee, New Jersey, and not living at home for the better part of two years.”

“Do I have to talk about this?”

“Not for my two hundred bucks. We’re just having an on-the-road visit, and I’m leaving soon enough, and probably you are too.”

“I drift around. But that’s a little unkind about the money. And about the praying mantis thing. Really, to just bring it up.”

“Because all you want to do is feel better,” I said, lighting another cigarette. By this time, there were several other diners in the Natty Bumppo Room, and one of them was looking over the tops of her gray-tinted lenses to indicate to me her impending death from secondary smoke. Oh, I’m sorry! I mouthed to her. I held the cigarette as if I were going to crush it onto my saucer, then I raised it to my mouth and sucked in smoke.

I blew it out as I said to him, “She’s the one who led you into your nosedive. She’s the reason you crashed in flames when she left you.”

“This is not productive for me,” he said.

“You’re supposed to be productive for me, ” I said. I heard the echo of my voice and, speaking more calmly, I said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to shout. This still fucks me up, though.”

“Don’t use that kind of language,” he said, wiping his eyes.

“No.”

“I thought we were going to have a visit . A father-and-daughter reunion.”

“Well, we are,” I said.

“All right. Then tell me about yourself. Tell me what’s become of you.”

I was working hard to keep his face in focus. He kept looking like somebody else who was related to him, but he was not the him I had known. I was twenty-eight years old, of no fixed abode, and my father, also without his own address, was wearing camouflage clothing in an upstate town a long enough drive from the New York State Thruway to be nothing more than the home of old, rotting trees, a campus in the state’s junior college system, and the site of the James Fenimore Cooper Inn.