Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“I didn’t get them. I told you that.”

“I’m sorry, Patrick.”

“The mail was fucked. Everything was fucked.”

“Would you like to come over to my — to where I’m living?”

“With Les and the mooses?”

“You could sleep on a sofa bed on clean sheets. We’d leave you be. Maybe you’d feel safe there.”

“Oh, I’m safe, Momma. I’m safe. It’s other people in danger.” His face looked bony. He rubbed his cheek with the tips of four fingers of his left hand as if he wore a mitten. “I’m good to go.”

She sat on the chair where she’d put her coat. She watched him look at her legs the way men look at a woman’s legs. His etched, thin face was different, and so was his close-cropped hair. She realized that some of it was gray. He wasn’t twenty-five yet, and his hair had gray in it and he wore a stranger’s face, she thought. And he sized her up when he looked at her. She knew he wasn’t her baby anymore, but now she wondered whether he was still her son. Her husband, Bernard, had said, “He’s in trouble. I can’t get hold of him anymore. He’s out there. Have you seen him?”

She’d said, “You know how angry he got with me when he came back.”

“He’s loyal to me,” Bernard had said.

“If that’s the way you want to put it.”

“I don’t want to fight with you anymore. You’re out of my life, and I’m out of yours. We’re getting on with it. You wanted your freedom, you got your freedom, and now I’m — I’m shut of the whole damned thing.”

“Aren’t we all free,” she’d said. At that moment, she had felt inventive and full of effective words she had every right to call after her husband as he vanished from her life. “But here you are on the telephone,” she’d said. “You didn’t vanish, after all.”

“What vanish? What are you talking about? Patrick’s in an awful lot of trouble, and we need to be useful, or something. I don’t know what to do .”

“No,” she’d said, still feeling wiser than Bernard. “Tell me how to find his place.”

“It’s a slum,” he’d said. “I didn’t know they let people live in those places. Down where the Earlville feed mill used to be, where the train station was in the old days. Somebody bought up all the old buildings down there. I wonder did they even bother to look at the wiring.”

“I’ll get down there. It’ll take me an hour or two. I’ll go in the morning. Is he sick? Did he come home, I mean, with some kind of illness? A lot of them had fevers when they came back. A lot of them had dysentery.”

“‘Saddam’s Revenge,’ he said the troops called it.”

“And what did he say about the gun?”

“He said he felt the need of a weapon,” Bernard had said. “I asked him why he did, and he mocked me. He said, ‘Danger lurks.’”

“‘Danger lurks’?”

“It’s what he said. I can only tell you what I heard and that’s what I heard.” Then Bernard had said, “So, your new life’s agreeable to you.”

“It is, thank you. How are things for you?”

“Well, considering. My wife leaving me, and the lawyer’s bills, and of course I’ve got the sleep apnea thing. I keep waking myself up.”

“I remember it well.”

“Dr. Bittman says it can sometimes be fatal.”

“Let’s hope it isn’t.”

“You could sound a little concerned.”

“Well, I am a little concerned. I’m sorry you don’t like how it sounds. And this is about Patrick right now, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he’d said. She said sullenly to herself, and the description pleased her. She had felt, when they hung up, as if she had won a small contest. And then the fear for her son had poured in, like the sudden sound of the nurses laying out instruments when the orderly pushes your gurney through the OR doors.

Patrick lit another cigarette. He looked so much older than when he’d left. And she couldn’t find recognition in his eyes. She couldn’t find herself. Before she thought she’d speak, she was saying, “It’s me , dearie.”

He looked her over, the way a man looks over a strange woman, and he blew out smoke as he said, “Hi, Momma.”

Although his shoulders were wedged against the walls, she wanted to find a way to get her arms around him. But how could you protect a man this large and hard, in his terrible, dim room that smelled of rotted vegetation, when he looked like a stranger made of only angles and skull?

He smiled, and she saw how white his teeth were. She thought of trips to the dentist when he was eight or nine, of the coupon book for payments that the orthodontist had issued them when Patrick was thirteen. “We’re paying the son of a bitch to buy a goddamned boat ,” Bernard had said. Each month, as he tore out the coupon and wrote out the check, he had said, “Here’s for the goddamned boat.”

“I thought of you,” Patrick said. “I did. I thought about you and Les in your new house and you in your new job. I thought about Pop all alone. He’d be so bad at that, I thought. And I was right. He eats bologna on white bread with mayonnaise. That’s his dinner, some nights. With a can of light beer to wash it down in front of the TV.”

“He knows how to eat intelligently. He knows how to cook. I’m not his mother.”

“No. You’re mine.”

“Yes, I am.”

“And that’s why you’re here.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Because I own a Colt Arms AR15. If I didn’t own it, you wouldn’t be here, right?”

“I’d have waited until you invited me.”

“You’re always welcome, Momma.” He looked to her like someone else, and she wanted to cry out a warning to him, tell him that he was disappearing, that he needed to return. “Just like I should know I’m always welcome in your house in your new life with Les, who is such an experienced traveler and he knows about mooses.”

There was one window in the room, a beautiful twelve-over-twelve with crazed glass and mullions probably gone to pulp. She imagined that it would sell for more than a month’s rent if the wood, through some miracle, hadn’t completely rotted. The light that came in was like the water you look up through when you open your eyes at the bottom of the pond. She could see him by it, and, turning, she could see a knapsack and a duffel bag hung from nails spiked into the walls. Behind them and across the wide room was an old, dark veneer closet with no doors, and, in a corner of the closet, as she looked over her shoulder, she saw the weapon’s ugly mechanisms, dull but a little lit by what was left of the window light that spilled into her son’s room.

“Do they give you a bathroom here?”

“Downstairs, in the back corner. You want me to show you?”

She shook her head. “I’m all right.”

“Momma, you are always all right. You land on your feet.”

“Dearie, no, I didn’t fall. I just kept living my life is all.”

“Pop said you fell in love. That’s falling.”

“It wasn’t falling, though, so much — what I’m saying about the next thing? That’s what it was. That’s what it felt like. ‘Oh! We’re here now. We aren’t there anymore.’ It wasn’t about your father, all of a sudden. It was Les. I even tried to not let it be, but it was. And it couldn’t be Bernard. It couldn’t be your father. No matter how I wanted things to work.”

“Shit just happens and have a nice day. The kid used to say that, PFC Hopkins, the one that I lost. He used to say that when he fired his weapon or when they opened up on us. ‘Have a nice day, motherfucker.’ He was the boy that I lost in Falluja, doing house-to-house.”

“No, you didn’t lose him, dearie. They shot him. The officers told you what to do and you did it and he got wounded.”