Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“No, he was plain damned killed. He bled out while he kept on moving his feet. Never stopped until, you know, he stopped . I was fire team leader and he was my SAW gunner and they just hollowed him out. I tried to stop the bleeding with my hand, but there wasn’t anyplace to put it. You’re supposed to apply pressure. Right. Apply pressure. But on what ?”

She knew that tears ran down her face. She wished that Patrick could cry, too, though she had her suspicions that crying might not do all the good she used to think. It did help you realize that you were miserable, she knew. Maybe that was useful information. But she wanted to stop crying because she didn’t know what tears might goad him to do. This was new between them, part of the so much unfamiliarity. That, she thought, was also something worth weeping about.

“Patrick, what’s the danger?”

He motioned with one hand, sweeping it before him. He smiled, but his dark eyes told her nothing.

“Really. You told your father there was danger lurking.”

“And he told you?”

“Well, we’re worried , dearie. Guns make people worry. And you came home troubled. So naturally we’d talk about that. As your parents. As — because we love you.”

“But you didn’t send Les,” he said, “your new next thing, with his travel experience, and knowing a lot about life.”

“This is about us,” she said, thinking that the words had come out in a whine.

Patrick said, “Wrong us. This is about reservist PFC Arthur M. Hopkins of Rome, New York. And rifleman Sweeney Sweeney of Madison, and PFC Danny Levine out of Gloversville, the ones who were not KIA. And me. I was the corporal let us get separated from the squad. I was the one directed our fire onto a little square sheep-shit hut, and I was the one got us shot to wet fucking rags. That’s the us.”

She said, “And that’s the danger? Why you needed to buy the gun?”

“Why not? It’s a reason. It’ll do. That better not be Les,” he said, his emptied face lifting as slow, heavy footfalls sounded on the raw lumber stairs.

But she knew the weight and pace of the sound of the steps, and she knew that Bernard would appear at the door, a little out of breath, a little wide-eyed because he stared so hard when he was worried — a tall, broad, decent man she had tried to live with after losing every reason except gratitude, regret, and this lean, sad man who was their boy once.

“Hi,” Bernard said. “I had to come. I couldn’t not come. Is that okay?”

She stood and went to the doorway and kissed his cheek. She knew that he’d close his eyes. “You smell nice,” she said.

“A different soap is all.”

“Well, good,” she said, patting his chest, then stepping back. “Patrick was talking about Falluja.”

“Terrible,” Bernard said.

“That’s because of the sweeps they had to send us on,” Patrick said. “House-to-house is terrible in any place. The hajis are good at ambush. You get your unit isolated, and you are pretty fast all fucked up. They smell how all alone you get to feel. Not PFC Hopkins. He just said, ‘Have a nice day, motherfucker,’ and he sent over one long burst of 5.56 and then he died, all scooped out, that kid.” Patrick lit a cigarette and said, “I wish I had another chair for all the parents that are here.”

“We’re good,” Bernard said.

She said, “It’s fine, dearie.”

“Okay,” Patrick said, “good and fine, then. But you don’t have to hover here, you know. I think I know what I must sound like. I think I sound like I’m blaming you for not being there, in Falluja. I’m not. Really. I wouldn’t want you there, all scared and doing your duty and shit. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. This is — I must be scary enough.” She heard his throat close down and she watched him blink and blink, his dark eyes suddenly as wide as his father’s.

Bernard said, “Is this the post-traumatic—”

“Private First Class Hopkins didn’t mention any open-sphincter stress syndrome while he was getting dead,” Patrick said, “so I would just as soon skip it, Pop. Nothing personal. I didn’t mean to insult you, right? You’re my man. Only…” He crushed the butt into the coffee cup with the other butts and he lit a new one. “I apologize, Pop.”

“No,” Bernard said, “I’m good.”

“And Momma’s fine. And I am good to go. What?”

Bernard had walked across to the veneer clothing cupboard. He squatted, and she heard his ligaments take the strain. “This is it,” he said. “I don’t see the clip. This does take a clip, am I right?”

“We call them magazines,” Patrick said. “Mags. I’ve got a couple.”

“It’s safety precautions, keeping them separate from the weapon,” Bernard told her.

“I don’t see anything safe about it,” she said. “It’s ugly. It’s frightening.”

“It’s efficient,” Patrick said. He drew in smoke, then said, “You’re thinking I’m going to open that window and set a pillow on the sill, then insert a mag and lean the weapon on the pillow and do some wild-ass-vet-on-a-rampage deal with people out there suddenly all falling down. But no way. Do you know where we are ? Greater downtown Earlville, New York, folks. There’s nobody out there.”

“But Patrick,” she said, “you wouldn’t do it anywhere. You wouldn’t do it anyway. It isn’t you .”

“No, Momma.”

“Patrick, boy,” Bernard said, “you bought it. You went someplace on purpose and you bought it for plenty of money that you had to set down onto some gun dealer’s table.”

“You’re right, Pop. I have to admit that.”

She remembered them standing side by side and looking up at Patrick as he leaned over a rifle that he aimed at them. They were in the side yard of their first place, a tall Victorian farmhouse on a half an acre of land in a little hamlet that wasn’t very far from Earlville. It was summer, and Patrick had been working for weeks on his fort. As an eleventh birthday gift, they had opened an account in his name at the lumberyard, and Patrick had purchased small lots of planking and studs, an expensive framing hammer, galvanized nails. He had built himself a fort in the crotch of a young sugar maple outside the dining room, and he was up in his safe place after dinner in June, she thought, or early July — the sun was still high, and no one ever talked about autumn coming on — and she and Bernard looked up at their son. He looked down over the sights of his wooden scale-model Garand M1 rifle.

“You didn’t see the ambush,” he’d said.

“No, we didn’t,” Bernard had answered.

“You don’t need to worry, though, on account of I won’t shoot.”

“You know, I knew you wouldn’t,” she remembered telling him. She remembered, now, in the old feed mill, looking at her grown and damaged, dangerous son, how disappointing to the boy her confidence had been.

“You knew?” he’d said.

“I mean I was hoping,” she’d told him.

“We hoped you wouldn’t shoot,” Bernard had said.

“Please don’t shoot,” she’d called to him in the shadows of his fort.

“No,” he’d said, “I won’t.”

Across the room from their boy who was now grown up, Bernard stood slowly. He leaned against the wall and put his hands in the pockets of his khakis. He always wore khakis and a blue button-down shirt under the white medical coat he put on when he was in his pharmacy, filling prescriptions. He said, “I’m worried about you. You can understand that.”

“And I’m sorry,” Patrick said. “I am. But now I think you need to go. You did what you could.” He’d gone onto one knee, his forearm leaning on the opposite thigh.