Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

When I looked up from the second barrow load, the kid was on the Peetes’ side of the county road, and he was watching me.

“I guess you’re allowed to cross the road,” I said. “Your mother lets you do that? Your father?”

He said, “Traffic here is surprisingly light.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Surprisingly light.”

“Yes. There isn’t very much of it at all.”

“No,” he said, moving his arms, “and you don’t see a great deal of commercial traffic, do you? I would say it’s mostly residential.”

“That’s what I would say too,” I said. I was on my knees, and they were growing cold, but I was afraid that I would startle him if I rose. “So how’s school?”

“School is a responsibility,” he said. “Some things — you just soldier on. Do you know that expression?”

“I think I’ve heard it used,” I said. “And that’s what you do on schooldays? You soldier on?”

He nodded.

“You don’t like it, though.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” he said. “It’s what I’m supposed to do, so I do it. School’s all right. Are you a college student?”

“No,” I said, “but I used to be.”

“What exactly are you?”

“I’m the handyman,” I said. “I do the chores for Mrs. Peete.”

“Like building a fence,” he said.

“This is going to be a wall, actually. You can use it as a fence, but it’s a wall.”

“How do you know the difference?”

“Well, I know because I’m building it. You’ll know because I told you.”

“And I might tell someone else,” he said. “So they would know.” His lips looked swollen, his skin seemed almost blue beneath its pallor. His hands were broad, with long fingers, and he kept returning them to the pockets of his coat. “So if it keeps a person out, it acts like a fence. But it’s a wall.”

“This baby is nothing but wall,” I said. “So I told you, right? And I told you my name?”

“David.”

“So now you can tell me yours.”

“All right.” He looked at the ground before him, and I wondered if he was making one up. Finally, he said, “Artie.”

“Artie what?”

“Artie Arthur.”

“Glad to meet you, Artie.”

He said, “Hi.”

“I hope you don’t mind my noticing,” I said, “but I really couldn’t help it. There being so little traffic around here to look at. I’ve seen you leave for school.”

“Bus 26.”

“And I’ve seen you come home on it.”

“Well, it’s my bus,” he said. “Number 26.”

“Yeah. No, I was wondering, when you get home from school is there anyone around to say hello? Or goodbye when you, you know, start to soldier on?”

His face was almost purple, the blush coming in over that milky skin with blue beneath it. “Nobody’s neglecting me,” he said.

“No,” I said, “I didn’t think so. Absolutely not. I don’t need to hear anything ,” I said. “Zero is good enough for me.”

“Zero probability,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“Zero as a base.”

“All right.” But he had nothing more to say except, after a while, “I have to go.”

“I’ll cross you,” I said.

“The traffic here is surprisingly light,” he said, “so there’s no need to bother.”

“Surprisingly light,” I said. “Catch you later.”

He removed his right hand from his pocket and he waved it as an infant would, holding it before him and opening and closing his fist.

“Bye-bye,” I said.

He looked to his right, then to his left, and he dashed for the motel grounds and his cabin, admitting himself with the brass key on the oval tag. At the door, he turned to look across the road. “Domicile,” he called, sweeping his arm about him, and then he went in.

I arranged a few more barrow loads, and Mrs. Peete drove past as I worked, her face set and her eyes wide with panic. She would not have agreed with Artie Arthur about the traffic on our road. Even the memory of traffic was enough to undo her. And my presence didn’t help. I worked for a while longer, then got myself away from the vicinity of the house, now that Mrs. Peete was gone. If I didn’t, I would drift up the driveway and finally I would knock at the door, hoping that Rebecca would be in. And then I would have to admit to myself what I had done, and I would be forced to guess why, and then I would be stuck with my answer, either making up lies to contradict it, or agreeing with myself about my needs. At that time of my life, I was bent on the conquest of many of my needs, among them the falling into anything, even, sometimes, what Rebecca referred to as the flesh. It was what I had decided to aim for — speaking of fences and walls — after Julia secured her passport and cried the night before she left, and didn’t cry in the morning, and then was gone.

I took myself down the road, away from their house, and into the hummocky field, through which I walked to the swamp behind it. Hundreds of trees had come down over the years, leaving only dozens standing, and most of them dying or dead. Everything there was a kind of icy gray — the surface of the water, the vegetation on top of and around it; even the gigantic flying dinosaur, the blue heron who roosted in one of the trees, was gray. The air coming over the water was steady and cold. I had never been to Central America, but when I thought of Julia living with some kind of not-quite-royal person who was dedicated to aiding the orphans of war-torn states, I thought of this kind of damp wind and this kind of desolate countryside. She would be brave and beautiful in it, and he would be earnest, and at night they would drink some kind of brandy and list their good deeds and then devour each other’s body in some bullet-pocked hotel room. The heron was at the far side of the swamp now, in the top limbs of a dead aspen. He looked to be about a million years old.

I went a little closer to the swamp, ducking under evergreen branches and the leafless branches of oaks. Closer, I could see something green in the water, and I wondered if spring was really so close. I was very tired, I realized, of clenching myself against the cold. It was not vegetation, though I thought I could smell some. It seemed to be cloth. I went as close as I could, with the toes of my boots almost in water, and I saw that the cloth was in layers, green and bright blue, red and white stripes, a good deal of white. Near a tamarack still without needles, but with black-green buds on it, I saw a large oblong green garbage pail. I squatted at the edge and studied the cloth. It might be clothing. It might be someone wearing it. I thought, of course, about Artie Arthur and whoever he might no longer live with. I thought, too, of the burnt car that had parked near his cabin. Julia would lead me to the cabin and knock on the door and make inquiries. Rebecca would insist on our conferring in bed, or at least in a clinch. I would have done either, I suspected, with either of them.

I squatted there, looking at the cloth, most of which was underwater, though some of it lay along the surface. I saw myself returning to the Peetes’ garage and fetching a long square-headed rake and returning to the swamp. I saw myself dragging at the offshore cloth, pulling it in to me, and then seeing how, very slowly, the corpse beneath it rolled over and came to the surface to bob there, swollen and eaten away, with maybe no nose or lips or fingers.

Of course I was seeing only cloth, no corpse, and even if there were a corpse it did not have to be Artie Arthur’s mother, or some young aunt, his mother’s kid sister, say, who had tried to rescue him or who had been the only relative left in the world to take care of him on a daily basis. I had no idea why he might require rescuing, or why he had ended up in the mortgage-vortex motel. And I could not account, bloated body in the swamp or none, for the car behind his cabin this morning or its absence on the other mornings.