Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

He sped on call, a public servant responding to the public’s need, by trundling on his banged-up legs so fast his belly wobbled and his chest ached. He couldn’t quite catch his breath, and he had to stop and open his coat to bend over, heaving for air. This will be the way we do it in the new restructuring, he thought: chubby men with funny names would go out on foot to answer calls for assistance. They could carry whistles, and every time they panted they could blow the whistle so vehicular traffic would know to pull over and wait on the side of the road until they were past. You call them, and you could lose a family member, convert to a new religion, develop a hobby, move to another county and leave the empty house for sale before the sheriff’s department showed up, he thought. He stopped and caught his breath, or some of it, and lit a cigarette, and coughed so hard on the first hard hook of smoke into his lungs he almost threw up. That’s government, he thought.

It was almost two by the time he reached the house. It was a low farmhouse with yellow aluminum siding and a dark green dumpster, one of the long ones, outside on the side of the road, hard against the front of the garage. The outside lights on the house and garage lit the road up, along with the pale blue of the moon. Lights were on in the house. He waited at the door to wipe his face and catch his breath. He listened for the cries of an infant.

The woman who came to the door said, “My God, what happened to your face, Deputy?”

He looked at the blood on his hands. “I had a little fender-bender a ways down there, toward County 29? Cracked my chin on the wheel, and it might not have stopped yet.”

“I’d say not,” she said.

“Chins and foreheads,” he said. “They look worse than they feel. Though I have to admit it feels terrible.”

She was as tall as he was and a little heavy-thighed in tight, fade blue jeans. Her face was long and bony, though, and she had hollows at the eyes. She looked like she never slept enough. Her skin was dark, and it looked as though it would feel soft if you put your hand out gently and just touched it under the cheekbone or at the corner of the eye.

She said, “Yes?”

“I’m not a deputy, strictly speaking,” he said.

“What are you, strictly speaking?” She looked at his gray uniform, his black tie, and he knew she’d been hoping for someone a little more capable-looking. Maybe she’d settle for secretly competent, he thought. He knew he would. And he knew he wasn’t.

“Well, ma’am, I’m what you call the dispatcher.”

“Ivanhoe!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You’re all they had left?”

“I’m the entire available people on call and in the station and on the air. It’s terrible night. There isn’t anyone. I’m not supposed to be here. I can’t be here. Because if I am, I’m not manning the telephone and radio. And I am. So I’m not. I’m in really terrible trouble.”

“And you racked the squad car up,” she said. “Your fender-bender.”

“Blew it off the road,” he said. “Might have cracked the block or an axle. It wasn’t really my fault,” he said, hearing his voice skid into the beginning of a whine. “The brake cylinder was leaking, and this guy was supposed—”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Strictly speaking, since I was at the wheel, I guess it was.”

“But it wasn’t. It also wasn’t.”

“No.”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t anybody’s fault. They just ran out of sheriffs and deputies and cars.”

He shrugged. “Where’s the baby, ma’am?”

She let him in. The heat in the house was high, and he thought he smelled tomatoes and peppery spices and the dampness of gypsum board and old wood. He was dizzy again, and he caught at her shoulder. She stepped away and he stumbled and then she stepped in again, holding his arm and easing him into a kitchen chair.

“Smells good,” he said.

“You got hurt, Ivanhoe.”

“No,” he said, “only my head and my brains.” He put his arms on the table and rested his forehead against them. “Just let me catch my whatever here a minute,” he told her.

“I sure can’t think of anyone else we can call who’d come out,” she said.

“Local services are stretched a little thin,” he said.

She said, “How nice to know they’re keeping busy. Can we — as soon as you get over your concussion and your fractured skull,” she said, “do you think we can load the baby into your arms and wave while you speed the little foundling child away on foot to get rescued? Is that how you see the shape of the evening?”

“Is there a car here, ma’am?” He said it into his hands or onto the tabletop.

“There is a car here,” she said. “There is a 1989 Chevrolet Blazer with about an eighth of a tank of gas and something wrong with the battery. As in dead.”

He decided that he had to sit up. He did it slowly and was horrified when tears filled his eyes. He blinked, looking away from her, and saw the bare ceiling joists they had pried the Sheetrock from. New sheets of it were stacked against a papered wall that someone had started to strip. “I can walk back to where I went off the road and take the battery out,” he said. “There’ll be jumper cables in my vehicle, and we can start your Blazer right up, if all it is is a weak cell in the battery or something.”

“Does that sound complicated to you too?” she asked. She ran water into a kettle and lit a burner on the stove.

“No, ma’am, it’s something I believe I can do.” Then he asked her, “Is there a young woman here, ma’am?”

“You’re thinking of me as old.”

He tried to shake his head. “Oh, no. But I meant somebody of child-bearing age.”

“I’m thirty-nine years old,” she said. “I have an ample pelvis and I still have my fallopian tubes and both my ovaries.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I could have had a baby and dumped it there.”

He thought it was time to be something like an officer of the law, so he made his head stay upright, and he felt in his pockets. “I wonder,” he said. “Have you got any pencil and paper I could borrow?”

She was making tea. She pointed at the telephone on the counter near the refrigerator. He found a pad beside it, and a ballpoint pen. She gave him the tea. It was very sweet and very hot. He leaned against the counter. “You told me your name,” he said, “but I forget.”

She was at the stove again, across the room, with her back to him. “Carole Duchesney.” She spelled it, and he wrote it down. As he did, he saw how bloody his fingers were.

“Miz Duchesney.”

“Miss.”

“Oh,” he said, “I would have thought you might sooner call yourself Miz.”

“My partner calls herself Miz,” she said. “I call myself Miss. I’m an antiquarian.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He looked at the pad as if there were instructions on it. He reached for a cigarette, but stopped because he knew better. Finally, he heard his mouth say, “What’s her name, please? Your partner?”

“Frances. Frances Leary. She’s one of those redheaded, freckle-faced Learys. She’s only twenty-seven. With a hell of a pelvis and ovaries on her. It could have been her. That would be interesting as all get out.”

“Is she around, ma’am?”

“She is around. Upstairs. With the kid.”

“You said the baby isn’t healthy?”

“I did, but Frances said I was wrong. She said the little girl was just doing what the situation warranted. Crying really hard and turning red. Frances is from a large family.”

He was looking at her, at her tan chamois shirt and her jeans tucked into high black rubber farm boots, her small hands and round fingers, the dark skin of her throat and face. He was trying to see what was different about her.