Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

She said, “I’ll be the judge of that.” She looked into his face. He saw the hesitation at the corners of her mouth, and he smiled to signal that he’d laugh if she would, and they both began at once.

After a while he took a pull of his drink and raised his finger to ask for another. The boy looked at the clock, then slowly moved to the shelf of bottles.

“This isn’t Las Vegas, Nevada,” he told the woman.

“This here’s Oneida County,” she replied.

He said, “I’m Henry Borden.”

“Mine’s Lorna Wolf. One f —like the animal. The other inmate over there’s my brother. We’re going to Sayre, Pennsylvania. You know where it is?”

“I don’t even know where Oneida County is.”

“There’s a hospital there,” she said.

“Good luck in it, Lorna.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “We’re going there for him. There’s a bone guy there. My brother, Dickie, he has to have his arm reset. We did me, in Utica. Now we do him in Sayre. Then we come back and do me. What we do is we drive back and forth. He’s got a wonderfully comfortable car — I read a book, and Dickie drives. He’s excellent with just the one arm.”

He nodded.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Borden? I’ve heard of you.”

He shrugged.

“I heard you on the radio. Henry Borden.”

“Hank.”

“Hank. I heard you talking about — a crooked President? But which one? A general — was it Grant?”

“Restoring the tomb, yes. It was one of the morning—”

“Sure,” she said. “Isn’t that something. And we meet up here in the faux Las Vegas of upstate New York. Isn’t that something.”

She bent to the coffee. The boy poured a shot for Dickie. Lorna took a deep breath, and Hank heard her work to do it. He thought she was going to shout, and he turned to her. She said, looking at her cup, “Oh God , I hate decaffeinated coffee.” Her voice shook as she straightened to speak. She slowly blew air out between her lips, and it sounded to Hank like his father’s cigarette smoke. He sniffed, expecting to smell it.

Then she said, making an effort, letting her anger sink again, “The most powerful stimulant I’m allowed these days is the Prince Valiant cartoon on Sunday. Sometimes, on TV, that fat fascist, what’s his name, with the wardrobe. And the occasional cup of decaf.” She sipped. “God. So what’re you doing in Not Las Vegas?”

“Oh,” he said.

“A lecture? Something exciting? Though, if you don’t mind my pointing it out, you look — what’s the word? You look like you feel a little shady. What’s your story, Hank?”

He paid for the drink and her coffee. The boy emphatically snapped switches that shut off outside lights. “You can finish whenever you finish,” the boy said, “I don’t mind waiting. But I can’t sell you no more, ’cause we’re closed.”

“Closed is closed,” Lorna said. “It’s apparently twelve-thirty in here when it’s not quite midnight in the world.”

“This is Oneida County,” Hank said. Then he said, “I’m sorry, Lorna. I guess I don’t really have a story.”

“Well, that’s all right with me,” she said.

He saw his father, who had turned to instruct him about the trail of cairns or the weather, get struck by the wind, which slammed noisily into the mountainside. His father spread his arms for balance and opened his mouth. No sound came out, or the wind suppressed it. In the thick dirty white mist about them, his father, poncho taut with wind, was lifted into the air and taken from sight.

The wind died and the cloud eddied. Rain had made the stones slick and shiny black. A dozen or so feet from the ledge over which his father had flown, Hank had stood in place, his back against rock face. He remembered standing with his legs together, the heels of his boots touching, leaning forward under the weight of his rucksack, his arms folded across his chest for balance or warmth. The wind came up again, and he stood still in it, leaning into the icy rain and waiting.

He didn’t know — and he hadn’t known then, he was sure — what he might have waited for. But he stood in place and looked at the ledge. Now he wished that this woman, Lorna Wolf, knew about his waiting there. He’d have enjoyed asking her whether she thought he was waiting for instructions.

He suspected she might agree with him — that he was waiting with utterly no hope for his father to reappear and tell him what to do about his father’s disappearance. Hank would have stressed, if he’d told her, that he had no confidence at all his father might return. Now it sounded to him like some kind of allegory, and he was almost — almost — grateful that she didn’t know.

Slowly, his grinning father, bleeding along one temple and holding his body stiffly, climbed to his feet from the far side of the ledge. He had not been blown off the mountain, only over an apparently undangerous shelf of stone. Holding on to the rock now for balance, his father nodded. Hank wondered whether he had winked. And, walking alongside his son instead of before him, Hank’s father told him over and again, until Hank took his turn in telling him , how the winds had rolled him over rocks until he’d fetched up hard against some that had broken what would have turned into a fall.

“Only the fall got broken,” his father said. “Who’d believe it? Only the fall got broken.”

His father held Hank’s shoulder, though he didn’t lean his weight on him. At one point, they held each other’s hands, reaching automatically to balance themselves on a slippery, rounded face.

“I was afraid we’d have to bivouac here,” his father said, heaving soon for breath but talking, talking. “You can get benighted and end up frozen dead on this mountain. And this is the gradual part. But don’t you let anyone tell you it’s easy. We’ll come back here — I’ll get hold of ropes and axes and pitons and whatever else they use, and we’ll practice, and we’ll come up here another time and climb straight up a different trail. Route , they call it. But this is how you start. You start this way, and then you take the more dangerous route.”

A few minutes later, his father said, “And my glasses didn’t even break.”

Hank said, “Only the fall.”

His father pounded on his shoulder in response.

They went to the top. His father stopped to light a cigarette where sun broke through the cloud cover. Big athletic hut boys and boyish New England blondes like those he would pursue in college — like Leslie, in fact — worked outside the low wooden building he and his father would enter, making shy, effortful, casual conversation, like people used to adventure.

His mother would not be there to greet them, of course. They would eat and they would listen to a hut boy play the piano, and they would sleep in a dormitory for men. Then they would go home. His mother would have returned. He would become nine and ten and forty-four. And where, in the logs of a thousand centuries’ navigation through oceans of blood, would the tiny moment of a father’s lifting into the air be entered?

“No story, Lorna,” he said. “I wish there was.”

She patted his arm.

He thought how, when Leslie slept and he came late to bed, he patted her arm as he lay down. She said she knew in her sleep that he was there, so he did that. She slept with a leg protruding from the comforter, often in the coldest weather. Usually bare, her leg lay on top of the cover, its slender calf and extended foot an elegance he admired.

Lorna leaned over as if she were going to kiss him good night, and he held steady, hoping she would.

“Catch you later,” she said, in her hoarse, dark voice.