Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Pumping the brakes with not much hope because the pedal was almost on the floor to begin with, he remembered the Suburban was in the garage because of a master cylinder leak. So he was going to die, probably burning, when the truck went off the road into trees or those big rocks at the entrance to the snowmobile trail at the mouth of the state forest when the brakes failed and he rolled, and sprayed gas onto the manifold, and exploded.

He didn’t pretend that he knew what was happening to the county or his job in it or the world. But he knew nothing much worked right, and on his night shift, often alone at the station, he smoked so much that his tongue felt burned and his chest ached and he recognized he was scared as much as he’d ever been in his life, including his months on patrol in South Korea with an Army platoon of psychopaths, illiterates, and whore dogs.

The rear end of the Suburban swung out as the county road dropped into the valley that ran up to Sheridan Hill Road, where he thought he had to turn. He considered trying to reach someone on the radio. He grabbed the transmitter, then pushed it back hard into its clamp. There wasn’t anyone to reach. He was the dispatcher. His chair was empty. His illegal public work place cigarette was probably just going out, his coffee maybe wasn’t quite ice-cold. He had left a note in the station logbook. He had traced over his letters several times with the county ballpoint pen, darkening the words until he’d torn through the page, so there would be no mistaking the emergency that had sent him away from his post. He blinked when he remembered what he had written: Baby in box . That was because he couldn’t remember whether you spell dumpster with a p and it embarrassed him to look uneducated. He snorted and almost blew his nose onto his uniform. He was always finding something, his father pointed out, to get embarrassed by. “You might be better off not thinking,” his father had said, making the face he made when he swallowed some of his drink.

“I could follow in your footsteps,” he hadn’t answered his father.

So they were down to four patrols at night, with the backup emergency vehicle still without a transmission because of course the chicken-legged white-faced son of a bitch was a liar as well as incompetent and he could no sooner change a timing belt than do a hip joint transplant.

And there was no one on overtime clerical work at night to help them catch up because they were cut down on clerical help during days as it was. And the sheriff himself was in Albany with a dozen other sheriffs to lobby against the new budget cuts. And the state police were all on call in Oxford, where the deputies had also gone, because a maintenance man laid off by the sheriff’s department had been turned down by Wal-Mart for a clerking job and had purchased a rifle at Wal-Mart’s excellent discount and had taken hostage several hundred thousand square feet filled with appliances, bright-colored dishes, pet food, plastic toys, and cheap clothes.

“We’re biting our tails here,” he’d said to the woman on the phone. “We’re turned around in a complete circle, three hundred and sixty-five degrees, and we’re shooting each other in Oxford, lady. I don’t have anyone to send .”

“Who is this?” Like she had a right to know and maybe she was going to dock him two weeks’ pay or something. “What’s your name?”

“My name is not the point, ma’am.” He tried to be polite because everything you said on the line was recorded.

She said, “It’s three hundred and sixty degrees. You got it mixed up with three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Anyway, it’s really a hundred and eighty degrees, if that’s what you mean.”

“If what’s what I mean, ma’am?”

“The turning-around thing. Look. We found a baby in the dumpster and you have to send somebody. A nurse. EMTs and the ambulance—”

“You found a baby in a dumpster, you say.”

“I don’t say . I mean, we really found it. We heard it crying.”

“Jesus,” he had said.

“Amen,” she said.

“What I’m telling you, there isn’t anybody here .”

“How can there not be anybody there? Isn’t the sheriff’s department one of those places there is somebody there? Isn’t that — what’s it called — government?”

“Restructuring, ma’am. The new budget thing, the contract, I believe they’ve been calling it?”

“We’re doing that here? In this county? Tonight? ”

“I believe we are, ma’am. We can’t even use the copier without permission now.”

“This is a very small baby and she doesn’t seem to be healthy. Of course, a little time in a dumpster in November can cure you of being healthy.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he had said. Now, as he turned off, and the Suburban wobbled, and he headed uphill toward where he thought their house might be, he wondered whose baby it could be, and how you threw one away. Did you pitch it up and into the dumpster on the run? Would you climb inside the dumpster’s high walls and lay it there? What did you say when the time came to climb back over it and get out and onto the road?

He had said to her, “I’ll find you someone.”

“I knew you would,” she’d said.

“How come?”

“You sounded slightly human is why.”

So there he was, slightly human and slightly in control of a huge Suburban that was slightly losing brake fluid and slightly on the way to rescuing a baby that a person had put in a dumpster filled with maybe green garbage and cat vomit or, say, furring strips with nails sticking out and busted Sheetrock and old insulation with mouse turds all over it like raisins in a cake.

He finally did switch the radio on and turn it to the tactical band. He heard the state cops in Oxford and a voice he thought he recognized as the day shift supervisor for the sheriff’s department. No one was asleep, and they were all about forty miles south and more than busy. And he was here. They would talk about him failing to man his position. They would talk about the calls coming in that he was not there to answer. Maybe one of the off-duty clerks would decide to come by. Maybe Chicken Man would walk stiff-legged in his sleep and come take the calls. Maybe no one would call.

“My name — you asked me for my name,” he’d said.

“All right,” she’d said, “but that was when I was going to try and get you fired.”

“It’s Ivan. It’s Ivanhoe, but I don’t use it. Ivan Krisp.”

“But really Ivanhoe,” she’d said. “It’s a very unusual name. Do you spell the crispy part with a c? ”

HE RAN OFF the road about half a mile away from her house. He’d been driving fast on Sheridan Hill Road when the surface curved and dipped at once. He’d seen moonlight on wet shale and had pushed the brake pedal down to the floor, figuring he wouldn’t get much pressure because of the leak. It had been perfectly amateur maneuvering, and he’d slewed right and gone nose down a few dozen yards past the shoulder into a young stand of hardwood, taking some trees down and whacking his chin on the wheel.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re not hurt.”

His knees did hurt, though, and he was afraid he was going to walk like Chicken Man for the rest of his life. His head was beating, and his chin was bleeding, his hands were wet with his own blood from cupping his face and rubbing it. Probably he looked like somebody shot in the brains. Good way to be sure of keeping Ivan Krisp alive, he thought, is you shoot him in the brains.

Bigger-bellied than when he was young, if you said it kindly, and lard-assed and gut-hung if you talked like a sheriff’s deputy commenting on the department night dispatcher’s physique, he fought his way out of the door and up, on his hands and very sore knees, to Sheridan Hill Road. He continued to answer a sheriff’s department emergency call by responding, as it happened, at one. A.M. of a very bright night in November, on foot. He called out Whoooooo! Which was his rendition of a siren, but it hurt his face and he shut up.