Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“A little boy?”

She looked pale now, and I understood how much of an effort she was making to be civil, much less give her knowledge away to the hired man. I was stealing her magic and, because of her daughter, she was abetting the theft.

“A man,” she said.

“The motel owner?”

She said, “Enough. Enough. Shower, lunch, the guided tour… enough. Have a nice week.”

“Just — do you remember his name, Mrs. Peete?”

But she had closed the door as I stepped across the threshold. My mouth tasted gluey, and I smelled the heavy, sour smell of milk drifting up my face as I sang the song about leaving while I walked. Before I forced myself back into the trailer, I went around to the front and looked across the road at the motel: eight cabins, empty sign frame, and no charred car.

Inside the trailer, I took my jacket off and put a sweater on. It might have been close to spring, but it was very cold, and I was quite sorry for myself.

“Give us a smile, ducky,” I said, looking at my reflection on the glass that sealed in Julia’s print. “Oh, I see. You’re just not gonna smile, are you?” I said to the bushy, shape.

“Eat my ass,” the shape replied. I did hate cheerleaders. I also hated my poverty and almost any exchange with Mrs. Peete. I detested my insistence on living here the way I did. In addition, I was violently allergic to feeling that I had no choice. And I was down to only one, which I despised: go to my parents’ home, watch my mother weep, listen to my father, sounding like a badly played slide trombone, perform his solo from The Lost Time But Lesson Learned Don’t Stray Again Now Get Back Prodigal Blues.

Fortunately, the beans began to have their effect, and I was driven from my profitless metaphysics to considerations of the actual: the state of my digestive system, and the cold winds in the woods. I lay down on the little bed and closed my eyes and, every once in a while, sent up a hiss of gastric distress. I actually fell asleep. It was the only other place I knew to go, this side of suicide or military service. I woke with a little stirring of pleasure, for I had come to realize that I had three choices instead of one. Though in truth I could not imagine myself shouting in unison with a bunch of eighteen-year-olds and then running in step for miles to the cadences called by a drill instructor. I think it never occurred to me that I might try to be an officer. Officer Bear. So, I thought, waking, beginning to lose what had passed, an instant before, as an insight, there is always suicide. But maybe this is suicide, I thought. It seemed pretty likely. On the other hand, I thought, if you aren’t killing yourself tonight, you had better head for the woods.

So I put my jacket on, took toilet paper and flashlight, and went from the trailer in what was now a porous darkness, and I walked into the woods. The winds had died, and I could hear creatures in the underbrush — voles and mice and rats, I thought — and stirrings in the high branches of trees — maybe owls beginning to hunt. I also heard a car gear down, then crunch its way along the gravel of their drive. I cut toward the house and got closer, then stopped behind a Norway maple to listen to Rebecca in the dark. I heard her turn the radio off, and saw the lights go out, before she turned off the motor, which meant that she was sober. When she was drunk enough, she’d leave the Saab in the driveway, engine running, radio loud, and all lit up. I backed away and headed for a far corner of the pine plantation, where I was as useful as I’d been for weeks. Rebecca would eat supper with her mother, and her mother would doubtless describe my provocations. Rebecca would smile her nervous smile — it came and went, like a tic — and I would crouch in the trailer, as I was doing at that moment, and, rather than try to make a sketch or read a book, I would lie in my clothing on the bed, waiting to sleep and, as usual, waking the next day with a kind of alarm as I noted that I had slept the deep, easy sleep of a man possessed of reason who was weary from his many accomplishments.

I was out and working on the wall by seven on Sunday morning, hauling stones, cleaning them off, setting them in. I used the back of a hatchet I had found in their garage for chipping off lumps so the stones would fit together. I whistled a medley of tunes from musicals that had flopped. I was working my way through Anyone Can Whistle , which was about crazy people being the only ones who are sane. The sun wasn’t strong, but I could feel it, and I sensed the turning of the seasons as, all of a sudden, a fact. I was getting ready. I was going to make a move. I had no idea what it would be, but a move, I would have sworn to you, was forthcoming. I got pretty loud and sparky as I chirped a number that Harry Guardino had bellowed, and then the toes of Rebecca’s tan work shoes were between me and the rocks at which I worked.

“Well,” I said. “You caught me.”

“Working?”

“Whistling.”

“Working and whistling,” she said. “Isn’t this where Sneezy and Dopey and Sleepy come in?”

I did a few bars of “Whistle While You Work” and then stood up. She was hatless, but she wore her father’s old mackinaw. I reached for the part where the lapels crossed and I looked inside.

“You have clothes on,” I said.

She went red. “Sorry,” she said.

“For having, or for not having had?”

She shook her head, looked away, into the sunlight, then back to me. “I need to leave here,” she said.

“Me too, Rebecca.”

“I can’t live with my mother.”

“I’m pretty sure that no one can live with your mother. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Nobody can,” she said, “you’re right. Anyway, I can’t. I’m signing a lease on a place in Hudson. It’s just off the main drag, near all those antique stores. I figure my mother and I might know each other longer if we don’t live in the same house. But I am —” She closed her mouth and pressed her lips together before she said, “I was about to make one of those miss-your-good-company declamations,” she said, looking away again, then looking back. “But I am. What’s your thinking on it — about missing me and all?”

I stood there with her, feeling shaggier, and dirtier, and less than familiar with English-language conversations, apprehensive, light-headed, proud as well as embarrassed.

“I will guaranteed be missing you,” I said.

She nodded. She looked across at the motel, she looked down the road, as if she thought of crossing it. “So come along,” she said.

“To Hudson?”

“To my place in Hudson.”

I mustered an “Oh!”

“It wouldn’t be the same as, you know, moving in with me,” she said, as the first car of the day passed, an immense Land Rover inhabited by three yellow Labradors and their driver. “You could rent a room from me,” she said. “I have a guest bedroom. You could rent it, or you could have it for nothing. You could also use the nonguest bedroom. You know I’m a good copywriter. You know that I write okay ad copy for the third-rate news shows up here. And you know that I’m the voice of upstate HMO. I can afford it. I don’t need to take money from you.”

“You and your mother need every dime for this place,” I said. “You can’t even afford to keep it up, much less renovate. And I’d be uncomfortable, staying home while you went to work.”

“You could get a job,” she said, spreading her legs as if to set herself for warding off my excuses. Her frizzy hair was lit from behind by the sun, and she looked as if she glowed.

“Let’s see,” I said. “A job, an apartment. Rebecca, I’d be a — excuse me for this. I’d be a husband, wouldn’t I?”