Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

She raised her chin a little and she said, “What?”

“I don’t know quite what I should do next,” he said.

“Let’s get my Blazer started and drive to the hospital and donate the baby.”

“I think we have to get social services into it.”

“Orphanages,” Miss Duchesney said.

He said, “Well—”

A short, skinny woman with a pale face and cropped red hair and freckles on her nose came into the kitchen. She held the baby across her chest and she was smiling, the way a mother smiles when she presents her child.

Miss Duchesney said, “Frances, this is Ivanhoe Krisp. He’s all they had left at the station house, and he abandoned his post to come out here and rescue us from the baby someone left off in the dumpster. On the way, he wrecked his car. He forgot his pencil and paper, so he borrowed some. You can tell from the way his teacup shakes that he is somewhat fucked up. He was wondering what to do next.”

Frances didn’t speak. Her face reddened, and she smiled the widest smile he remembered seeing.

“Yes,” Miss Duchesney said. “It’s that wonderful.”

“The baby’s asleep,” he said.

“Or dead,” Muss Duchesney said.

“Aw, no.”

She said, “No.” She walked to him and patted his arm and moved him to the chair. When he was in it, she went to the sink and returned with a brown bowl filled with steaming water. She handed him a folded dish towel. “You might clean the blood away,” she said.

He looked into the bowl. He could see a dark shape that he thought might be his reflected face. Looking down, he said, “I found out my daughter, she’s a little over sixteen, she’s having sex with this boyfriend of hers.”

“She probably loves him dearly,” Miss Duchesney said.

“Is isn’t funny to me ,” he said.

“Of course not. You’re right. But that’s what we all of us said, is what I mean. You’re making a total mess of everything, and you naturally resort to blaming it on love. It’s been known to be the name of almost everything wrong,” she said, behind him.

Frances Leary said, “Cue the violins.”

“I hit her tonight,” he said without meaning to. “Before I went to work. I slapped her face.”

“And yours ends up bleeding,” Miss Duchesney said.

“It comes around three hundred and sixty-five degrees,” he said, nodding at the shape of the bowl.

“Sixty,” she said. “I told you, remember?”

“Right,” he said. “And supposed to be one-eighty.” She took the towel from him and dipped the end in the water. “My wife is very upset,” he said. Miss Duchesney worked the warm cloth on his chin and around his mouth. The baby began to cry, and he jumped. Miss Duchesney took hold of his face and kept working the cloth on it. He said, against the warm towel, “And now the baby’s crying.”

He saw himself, though he didn’t carry a weapon, holding one of the big, black Beretta 9mms that were issued to the deputies. He was kicking at the door of a scuffed white trailer on the side of Sheridan Hill Road. Against the cries of the baby he heard his own voice: “Sheriff’s department!” He saw the door swing in and he demanded to know if someone on the premises had driven to the Leary-Duchesney farmhouse to leave a baby off in the stink of garbage and the giggle of rats.

He said, “Should I go back and get the battery?”

“I think that’s what you ought to do next,” Miss Duchesney said.

Frances Leary said, “That’s a girl. That’s a girl.” From the sound of her voice, she was rocking the baby a little.

“Maybe some milk,” he said.

“I think they need formula,” Frances Leary said. “A special kind of formula. I don’t think they can tolerate milk right away.”

“You wouldn’t have any formula,” he said.

“No,” Miss Duchesney said, “we don’t use it. And, worse luck, neither of us is lactating tonight.”

“No, ma’am,” he said. Then he said, “Could I look at the baby?”

Miss Duchesney said, “You’ve been sitting there with your eyes closed.”

He opened them. He stood and leaned on the back of the chair. He felt as short as Chicken Man when Frances Leary bent toward him. He saw a crushed and furrowed face inside a harsh-looking gray woolen blanket. She was red, and dark with crying, and her blunt nose and her eyelids looked like they were made of wax. He saw her fists beside her face. He thought the miniature fingers were perfect.

“Everybody looks like that,” he said.

“You’re too sentimental for your work,” Frances Leary told him.

Miss Duchesney said, “How can you tell what he does? ”

He had something to ask. Before they fetched the cables and battery to start up her Blazer, and before he drove like hell to the hospital where he would summon social workers and doctors, if the hospital could find them, and call the sheriff at his Albany hotel and begin to lose his job, he had to ask someone his question.

He saw himself kicking in another door in a trailer half a mile down on Sheridan Hill Road. Miss Duchesney and Ms. Leary sat in the Blazer with the child, and he was kicking in the doors of trailers, of shake-shingled one-story houses, of shacks with no siding, of clapboard cabins with rusted tin roofs. Doors slammed in and he followed, assuming the shooter’s stance, legs planted wide and Beretta cupped in both hands before him, demanding the surrender of whoever had disposed of a baby.

“Who,” he needed to ask, “would throw a person away?”

He broke another lock with two powerful kicks and he was inside, menacing the doughy couple at their television set.

No, he wasn’t.

He made his eyes open. He stood in the kitchen of these women and he fastened his jacket. His knees were sore, and he must look, he thought, like a wounded rooster among his willful hens. He went toward the front door, and he didn’t speak. He was embarrassed by Miss Duchesney. She made him feel incompetent. She reminded him of his father, a little. And he was afraid that if he asked his question she would answer it.

IT MADE ME THINK OF FAIRY TALES — stories of children who drop from the sky or roll from the cupped petals of a silky flower — because he simply appeared one morning and was picked up by a yellow van, a small school bus, which meant that an actual adult had made arrangements for him, and that school authorities acknowledged his existence, and that he was an authentic child, not a product of my second-rate education or of what I considered then, with what I’ll now call theatrics, as my third-rate mind.

Wearing a blue hip-length jacket that was streaked with a faded white or yellow stain along both arms and down its back, from underneath the fleece-lined hood to its hem, he did this every day: walked out the door of the white wood motel cabin, pulled the door shut with both hands, then climbed down two steps and walked around to the side of the cabin that faced the direction from which the little bus came. He stood very still, always, as if his khaki knapsack were heavy and pinned him in place. When the bus appeared, he hiked with long, measured steps to the edge of the road, cutting across the ice and snow over the gravel drive that led to the closed offices of the shut-down motel. He arrived as the bus did, and he climbed into it as he had walked, with a nonchalance that seemed important to project.

He was gone until around four o’clock in the afternoon, when the bus paused to let him emerge, and he hiked to the cabin, climbed its steps, and, using a bright, brass-colored key attached to a long, oval tag — the sort you’re issued as you sign the register and show them a credit card or dare them to turn down cash — opened the door of the cabin, the one closest of all eight to the one with OFFICE on its door, and he went inside. He had been doing this for a week, since the February thaw had hardened back into mud frozen in twists and ruts and permanent pockmarks into which new snow had fallen in a thin, icy crust through which the mud glared up in weak sunlight like sewage.