Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

The bus, then, would move from view, and so would the kid. Except for the usual squirrels and the usual birds, and the usual March winds that came up the Hudson Valley bearing moisture, all that was left on the one-lane blacktop county road was me, moving snow and ice off stones with a stiff brown whisk broom and my canvas-gloved fingers, sorting the ones I would use to repair the roadside wall which, among other chores, provided me with cramped shelter and, sometimes, food. I was in a good deal of trouble that year, and I knew it, though I didn’t worry. I think that I did not. I was fit, and too stupid to be frightened for long, and more concerned about the kid of eight or nine who lived at the nameless motel — its square sign was missing from a rusted roadside frame on top of two scuffed four-by-fours — than I was about the long-range prospect. I actually didn’t have one, I now believe. I had decided, as I remember it, to think a couple of hours ahead — the next few pages of a book I tried to read, the next few lines of a sketch I tried to make, the next meal of the day.

I had broken my last dollar to buy a can of supermarket-brand creamed corn, and when I wasn’t speculating about the kid, as I built my pile of fieldstones, I was tantalizing myself with alternate visions of dinner cooked on the two-burner gas stove in the trailer: corn chowder made with water and some frozen potatoes I had found in their garden, or plain creamed corn spooned hot onto slices of stiff but not yet moldy Wonder Bread, and with potatoes reserved for the next night’s meal.

The light in the window of the cabin across the road was a yellow that verged on palest amber, and it wavered almost as a candle would. I’d have bet that he was using kerosene, and I worried for him, thinking of the fumes, thinking of the flame. I had seen a car there once, its long, scarred hood half hidden behind the cabin, but I had never seen who drove it, nor had I never witnessed an adult who waved him goodbye or who greeted him. There he was at his place, and there I was at mine — a graduated senior who had spent an extra semester making up credits, living in a trailer I had to hunch in unless I sat in my canvas director’s chair of glossy red wood and black cloth that I had salvaged from behind a dorm. I could of course lie in the built-in bed too short for me. The toilet wasn’t hooked up to a septic system, though my landladies had assured me that flushing would come with spring. I cooked with bottled water they supplied, and I took showers at the main house. I used the pine forest behind the trailer for my john unless I made it to town and the burger palace bathrooms. The battery in my Datsun was absolutely dead now, so I stayed at home and I shat in the woods like a bear.

I probably looked like one. I had a lot of dark hair in those days, and no mirror. I shaved and combed myself in the fugitive reflections of the few framed pictures I owned, one of them — an etching of a woman’s footprint, long and narrow and perfect (you could tell) in its arch, pressed into bright sand — by a person named Julia, the owner of the foot, who had left the area and me and who had not looked, nor written, nor telephoned, back. I had no phone, but the landladies did, and they’d have come for me if she had called the house. She knew where it was, and where the trailer was. She had wakened in it with me, had answered its small door when one of them — the mother, Mrs. Peete — had knocked, on an autumn morning, with a chore for me. Julia was now in Central America, and she wasn’t alone, while I was here, cutting knobby, icy potatoes into an aluminum saucepan, slashing in some onion to fry with them, opening a can of creamed corn, pouring in water, and pronouncing myself competent as I bent in the trailer, shuffled in my crouch, and worried about the temperature — it was diving again — and about my landladies, and about the boy across the road.

Not a night to be a kid and living alone, I thought.

It did not take a genius like Julia to make the point. I knew which kid I was feeling sorrier for. And the night would get worse. It was the night I broke my policy and, as my father had asked me to, I did, on a trial basis, consider the future. I stood at the stove and fanned my fingers out, one at a time, to indicate to myself that I was being concrete and realistic.

No Julia now, nor tomorrow, nor ever: one.

Given my academic record, no vocation-with-coat-and-tie plus prospects of a sleek-apartment-in-a-bigtime-city: two.

Noplace to live except here, in trade for too much work, or at home, in exchange for enduring desperate lessons about life plus the long, silent evenings of a faltering marriage that ought to have died some time ago: three.

Present prospects had dimmed for me with the rise, you would have to say, in immediate pleasures — landlady problems, you could call them: four.

I apparently could not paint a picture unless I worked in a bright, heated studio, supplied like a locker room for the gifted and talented children of the managerial class, by a high-tuition college, and that was a kind of truth you had to face, I was beginning to think, or you might end up teaching design in community colleges and overdosing on whatever it was you could — now that you had some kind of salary — afford: five.

She knocked five times, it seemed to me, and I am not kidding. I knew who it was, and I was spooked because she was there and because it felt as though she was reading my mind.

She came in, as I expected her to, and, as I expected her to, she said, “Oh, Jesus Christ. How can we let you live like this?” I wasn’t surprised that she was a little tipsy.

She wore a red wool mackinaw with black designs, the kind of hunting coat somebody would have used twenty-five years before. She wore a long-billed red woolen hat with earflaps, and old black woolen gloves. Her face was shiny and flushed, her crinkly, bright brown hair had bits of ice in it, and her eyes were wide and light. When she took the hat off and beat it against the side of her leg, ice flew up into the light and disappeared, and her hair sprang out, giving her face a wild look, as if she reacted with shock to something nobody else could see. I smelled the sweetness of the Manhattans she drank, and the smoke from their kitchen woodstove and from her cigarettes.

“You mind if I drop in?” she said, unbuttoning the coat.

“Want some soup?”

“Is that what that is.”

“I dug the potatoes up in your garden,” I said, staring into the pot. “You don’t mind, right?”

“You must be strong as an ox to get to them. Well, you are. The ground’s so damned hard, David. You know, we’d have given you potatoes. And — whatever. Soup. Dinner whenever you want it. I keep telling you that.”

I nodded. “Would you like some?”

She kept her coat on. “It’s awfully damned cold in here.”

“There isn’t any heat.”

“We’ll get electric baseboard heating installed. Come spring. The land will sell by then. Property sells better in the spring. We’ll have some money, and we’ll make you comfortable. We promised that.”

I nodded.

“But you’ll have left by then, you’re saying.”

I said, “You know, Rebecca, I don’t have any idea. I don’t have plans for anything except the wall, and maybe building you some raised beds for the garden.”

She was standing closer, then, directly behind me, and then she was leaning in on me, first against my back and then against the rest, holding on from behind with an arm around my waist. It made me uncomfortable that a woman who once had been married and who wore an antique coat like that would feel the need to hug me. I guess you would say I felt unworthy.

“Tell me more about raised beds. They sound fascinating,” she said, running her hand up under my shirt. I felt her cold nose at the back of my neck and I felt the words against my nape as she said them. “Whatever they are,” she said, “you build us some.”