Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

It was difficult to lift my feet from the floor of the swamp, and it was tricky to escape from its edge. But I finally stood in the field, a failure at rescue and disinterment. I was the robber of graves, and I was the rescuer, with nothing to show for the work and with no evidence of my good intentions except for the odor of rot that I wore.

I went back to their garage and replaced the rake. Rebecca was looking out their kitchen window and when she saw me — I figure I was green from the swamp and red with shame because of my failure — her eyebrows rose. I shrugged in reply. We had slept together a couple of dozen times. We knew each other, I guessed, but I thought then of my parents and I doubted I was right. I didn’t know whether to want to know someone or not. I had a suspicion that it was good for the loneliness, but maybe after that you knew in ways you’d rather not.

I went back to the trailer and used some bottled water for a sponge bath at my sink. Then I changed into khakis I ought to have washed some weeks before and a dark green sweatshirt that I rarely wore because it said, across the front, CAMP NOK-A-MIX-ON, which was where I’d worked as a waiter in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years. I put on sneakers and went out to continue at the wall. I kept seeing the door swing in at the motel cabin. I kept thinking of the little kid who wrote his name so many times. And of course I thought about the car. Someone had come to take care of him, I thought — I wished — who wasn’t always able to. They were broke and fleeing creditors, I thought. Or they were fleeing the Cosa Nostra, to which the driver of the car owed an allegiance he had violated. Or the father robbed banks. It really didn’t matter to me, except that they not be captured, and that Artie have somebody on the other side of his door as he went off to school and returned.

I hauled the stones and cleaned them and set them in. I could feel the cold of them as well as their weight through my rawhide work gloves, and I didn’t mind, because what I felt was the first reward of this kind of work. The second was that it stood and you had made it. I caught my breath and stood beside the wall when Rebecca came out to me, wearing her father’s coat open. I went back to work as she approached, and she stood there awhile. I felt suddenly very shy with her, and I focused on the wall and on the quality of my work. I was acutely conscious of her bright, crinkly hair, and of her small mouth, her large, smart eyes, and of her body too, hidden within the jeans and coat, but familiar to me — a hipbone I had held to, a breast at which I’d nuzzled. I admired the urgency with which she dived into bed, and with which she drank cocktails made of bourbon and sweet vermouth, and with which she pulled on her cigarettes, or drove the narrow roads, or argued about politics or the cost of hotels in Monopoly. She watched me admire her, and she gestured me up and onto my feet. She had a canvas bag with her, and it contained steaks and the makings of Manhattans. We had a long, drunken evening in the trailer, and we were so far gone, so fervent in pursuit of our anesthetic stupor, that I cannot remember much of what we said, or what we did together, but I remember our saying a lot, and doing a lot. If we were valedictory or sentimental, I have gratefully managed to forget.

A few days later, she moved away, returning irregularly on weekends, when she remained with her mother in the house. On a Saturday in April, when Rebecca hadn’t come home, I went over for my shower and my meal. Instead of her beans, Mrs. Peete served up casserole of potatoes and cheese.

I didn’t drink the glass of milk that came with it, and she said, “You hate that milk, huh?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said. “I never liked it, even when I was a kid.”

“You are still a kid,” she said, “but you should have told me. I wouldn’t have wasted good milk. It’s money down the drain, you understand.” She looked at me with a kind of softness I was unaccustomed to. Her face went into those three parts I rarely saw, and I understood that she was relenting. I wondered if Rebecca had put in a good word on my behalf. “You were trying to be polite,” she said.

I nodded, tried a smile, didn’t get one in return, and kept a serious face on.

“That is what I would call a good sign,” she said.

“Mrs. Peete”—I was flooded with courage, desperate with a need to escape, and very glad to feel, and to act on, the need—“would you say you’re pleased with what I’ve built around here? With the repairs I did?”

“You want wages,” she said. “They are not a part of our arrangement.”

“If you could lend me enough for a new battery,” I said, “and maybe a battery cable, I could be on the road. I’d mail you the money. Really, I would.”

“Leave?” she said. Her eyes were wet. “You are leaving too? But for where? Doing what?” She paused briefly for the answer I could not begin to give her, and then, moving as her daughter did, she turned to leave the room. I thought of taking a sip of milk to please her, but I couldn’t. She came back in with a large brown reptile-hide purse, and she searched in it for her wallet and counted out what I told her I thought a battery would cost.

She nodded in agreement. “Rebecca said about that much.”

“She knew I would ask you for this?”

“Oh,” she said, “David. You are not as much of a mystery as you would like to think.”

“YOUR FATHER SAYS you bought a gun. He says you bought a

surplus army gun.”

“We used the M16A2. This one, they call it AR15. It won’t fire auto.”

“What’s that, Patrick?”

“Automatic, Momma.” From the mattress where he sat, wearing camouflage trousers and a khaki T-shirt, his back bisected by the corner of the room, he said, “You know. Blam-blam-blam-blam-blam-blam-blam . That’s semiauto. You need to squeeze off one round at a time, but the rate of fire’s good enough. Anyway, I didn’t buy enough ammo to fire full auto for long. I don’t need that much.”

“For what, dearie? Why do you need a gun?”

“You talked to Pop?”

“He telephoned.” She took her raincoat off and set it on the back of a short wooden chair. “Les answered the phone and of course they jawed.”

“Jawed?”

“That’s what Les calls it. He says it’s like a couple of bull moose with their antlers locked and their forelegs set. All they can do is make noises.”

“Now, what would Les know about two mooses?”

“Oh, dearie, he’s a traveler. He’s been to places. He’s more like you.”

“Travel. Here to Hawaii, and then Kuwait, then fucking paradise. Goats and camels and sheep and sand. And then I never barely came home.”

“Dearie, yes. Yes, you did. Here you are .”

“Here I am,” he said. “That’s right.” Then he said, “That’s right.” His eyes were closed. She took one step nearer the mattress on the floor where he sat in his scuffed, sand-colored boots and his camouflage pants, his hands knotted around his knees, pulling them up against his chest.

He opened his eyes. What’s the ‘more like’ supposed to mean?” he asked her. “More like me than he’s like Pop? Except Pop’s your husband . Legally, he still is, right?”

“Yes.”

“But you want that part of it over,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Your life’s moving along,” he said.

“It is, yes.”

“Mine isn’t, anymore.”

“You’ve just come back from a terrible time,” she said. “You were in danger . You got hurt . You didn’t have a shower for weeks and weeks. Those moistened baby wipes — I must have sent you a hundred.”