Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Hank certainly didn’t know, but he had shrugged, imitating his father, and he had nodded. When he read the word in college, sitting in the torpor of the library late at night, he had looked up, wide-eyed, feeling in his stomach some of that day: the presence of his father, and his mother’s absence.

They ate a sandwich lunch at the small, open hut with its sleeping shelf lined with evergreen branches, and then his father had moved them along, before they could grow too stiff. In the bright, hot mid-day light, hills below them were black-green under the shadows of clouds that began to mass as they walked. After a couple of hours, as his father complained about the time of day and the changing sky, Hank saw how much darker the hills were, and how clouds thickened above them. Now they were over the timberline. High cairns of rock marked the trail because there were no trees. His father kept the map, in its glassine case, in his hand.

Every January his father solemnly presented him with a wrapped gift, which he in turn gave his mother for her birthday. Every year, she added the scented oil to her bath and presented herself, in her blue silk bathrobe. Hank was aware of the heat of the water and of its perfume. He smelled it through the canvas and dust and wind. He had begun to wonder, as they labored more slowly against the pitch and the difficult, stony footing that made his calves and ankles ache, whether she might greet them, as a surprise, as a reward, when they reached the end of their climb. She came from the bathroom to find him, each year, and she presented herself, smiling, her skin a little damp. “Want a smell, sweetheart?” she would ask.

Hank remembered as he drove how his father made them stop and put on their ponchos, which were very long and which covered their packs and fastened with snaps beneath their arms. His father tugged Hank’s into place and then Hank, feeling uneasy, as if he were buttoning his father’s shirt, pulled the poncho over his father’s rucksack.

Cold winds, then colder winds, drove at them. The field of boulders and cairns and scree, and sudden declines, lay all about him. He couldn’t see Mount Washington. Ice-cold mist grew heavier, and the clouds, his father told him, were surrounding them. He thought in the car of his recollection of the night before they climbed — of his father, surrounded by smoke.

Hours into his drive, he saw a sign for Westmoreland. The name of a general whom he associated with the madness of the Vietnam War seemed significant, so he aimed himself there, yawning now and thinking not of a place to call from, or where he might turn around, but of someplace he could sleep.

There were the blue-gray boulders vanishing into the descending clouds, there was the invisible mountain they were partway up, there was timberline below them, and there was his father before him, breathing hard and urging Hank to keep up. “You keep me in sight,” his father said, turning clumsily as his poncho was flailed by wind against the hump of his rucksack. “You see me, right?”

Hank, in the car, was going to say, “Right.” He rubbed his lips and didn’t. He drove the two-lane highway onto which he’d exited from the Thruway. He knew from roadside signs that he wasn’t terribly far from where the battle of Oriskany had been fought. With a satisfaction he distrusted, he told himself that he was driving into a footnote.

The Oriskany Falls Hotel was closed, and he drove on for fifteen or twenty miles to Route 20, where he found a motel with an open bar, and with three other cars outside of rooms. The kid who took the imprint of his credit card and gave him a key told him he could get a sandwich and a drink in the bar until half past midnight.

“You close it at twelve-thirty?”

“This here’s Oneida County,” the crew-cut, harelipped boy of something like twenty intoned, “not Las Vegas, Nevada.”

“Damn,” Hank said, “I wanted it to be Las Vegas, Nevada.”

“But it ain’t,” the boy said, already looking away.

“It’s Oneida County,” Hank said. “Am I right?”

The boy didn’t answer and Hank didn’t blame him.

In the bar, at eleven-fifteen, served — of course — by the harelipped boy, Hank drank bar whiskey and ate two undercooked hot dogs, garnished with yellow mustard, which the boy had purported to roast in a microwave oven on the short counter of the small room. Hank sat at the end of the counter. The red plastic-covered stool to his right was empty, and so was the next one. On the one after that, a man wearing a dirty sling over his suit jacket drank shots with beer. On the stool beside him, a woman with a black hat that was like a turban drank coffee.

He was looking at the hat or at her head, and he didn’t know why. Then he did. She was bald, he realized, and she was disguising it with the turban. She looked up, past the man’s shoulder, and caught him studying her. She stared back and slowly adjusted her hat, letting it shift enough to confirm her hairlessness. He felt as though she had taken off her shirt.

“Sorry,” he had to say.

“Dickie,” she said, “I’m going to discuss my life with this man over here, all right?”

The man beside her looked Hank over and shrugged. That says it all, Hank thought: dismissed by a man in a sling who is getting drunk on boilermakers at the outskirts of a footnote.

She was very, very thin, and she was jaundiced-looking. Her mouth, which was broad with a full lower lip, had a jaunty curve despite her pursing it, maybe in pain. She looked like a supporting actress — the one who isn’t pursued by Franchot Tone in a movie that Leslie might watch after he had fallen asleep. Hank often woke to find that she’d turned the bedroom TV set low and was sitting on the floor before it, wrapped in a blanket. She reminded him of his father, smoking at the window, studying the White Mountains. Or perhaps he had fashioned the memory of his father after Leslie, he thought. Maybe none of it was true, whatever true meant.

She said, “You were looking at me like you knew me.” She adjusted her wrinkled ecru shirt in the waistband of her loose cotton slacks, as if expecting him to study her. “But we don’t know each other, do we?”

“No, we don’t.”

“And you’re not the kind of man to be rude.”

“Not on purpose, usually,” he said.

“So you must have been transfixed by my hairdo.”

Her eyes were the kind of clear blue that was almost gray. They were large, and so, he realized, was her nose. She was a woman whose bold features could probably compete with even her smooth, broad head for your attention, he thought. He wished he could tell her so.

“I apologize,” he said.

She sat beside him. When she leaned closer, he could smell her coffee and a kind of sweetness that he later realized was the corruption in her body. He had come to know that smell in his father, not so many years before. “You’re a gentleman, then?” Her voice was low and tired. A couple of hundred miles from home and almost forty-five, he had met someone who made him feel young, someone older than his young wife. He smiled.

“Yeah,” she said, accepting the coffee passed over by the boy, “you’re a gentleman. You have a gentleman’s smile. You’re the kind of man who thinks the world is tougher than he is. And you’re right. And you smile so maybe it’ll be easy on you. Why not?”

“It’s my birthday. Thank you. You—”

“What’d I do for you that you’re so grateful for? I’m giving you me with cancer so you can enjoy your life while you haven’t got it? The cancer, I mean. I don’t know if you’ve got your life. Have you?”

“Like a very, very bad cold,” he said.

She shrugged.

He was emboldened to say, “I know. It beats cancer.”