Girls

by Frederick Busch

  It was when he said “fuzz” that I remembered. He’d been very active in the seventies, I’d heard, protesting against the war. I’d been told how he prided himself on getting arrested a couple of times for demonstrating against Richard Nixon. His glasses caught the light, his muscles moved heavily under the tight cotton shirt, and he smiled, like we shared a feeling.

  “I guess that’s it,” I said. “Everybody’s doing whatever you can do when a kid disappears. She looks like a sweet kid in the posters.”

  “She’s terrific. She’s like my own daughter, Jack. I’m wondering about one thing more. The pigs are grunting—no offense, all right?—and I think maybe they’ll get the FBI involved. After a while. But that’s mostly big-pigs stuff. And meanwhile, there’s this splendid family and their gorgeous little missing daughter, and the parents don’t understand law enforcement. They’re very simple people. Quite brilliant in certain ways. They’re religious, and I don’t understand religion, but I understand people. Teaching’s about people. Right? So’s your line of work, here on campus. We know about people, don’t we? You can imagine the agony they’re in.”

  I wanted to say that I did, but I heard myself say, “I can?”

  “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Jack. I know what you did when you went after that kid who walked up into the woods, all coked out or whatever, and she nearly died and you got her down. Archie said what you were was tender. You mind being called that? You think it damages your reputation? You’re a man called tender by a man who ought to know.”

  “My good friend Archie.”

  “This shit matters, Jack. It’s a little girl. They’re so frightened. They’re so thrown by this.”

  “The state guys are good,” I said. “They’re excellent.”

  “Can you explain that to the Tanners?”

  “Why do you need me to do that? Because I’m so tender?”

  “Because of your history.”

  I was standing then. “What’s that supposed to mean.”

  “I know about the child. Your child.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? And who told you about our life?”

  “Archie Halpern.”

  “He wants me involved in this?”

  “I talked to him before I talked to you.”

  “So he could leak my life to you.”

  “All he did was tell me a little about your service record and that you lost someone—a child. Because we need to help the Tanners find theirs. Now, given your history, and seeing your face now, I can understand your not wanting to get involved. You’re a human being, too, and it makes sense. You want to stay out, you stay out. You feel this way, I think you should. You sit it out because you need to, that’s what you do and you get my vote. All right? Hey. I’m your friend either way.”

  “I thought you needed me, because I’m so terribly tender and an ex-MP, to tell them how the state cops will work very hard to try to find her.”

  “Then that,” he said. “The point is, you can do that or not. You call it. What I don’t want is you hurting yourself over this. This is me and you, Jack.” He didn’t look like a smiling small-town Rotarian in training. He didn’t look like one of the goofier professors. He looked like a very serious man with a terrible headache and red-shot eyes and oily skin.

  I said, “No.”

  “You can say that and nobody respects you any the less.”

  “And I really don’t give a goddamn about what you can do about my job. I get fired, I get fired. So get this completely straight. Don’t you talk about me and my wife and our—our—Don’t talk about us like we’re some kind of story to tell when you and your friends drink sherry. Understand me?”

  “I hate sherry,” he said.

  “Not cute. Don’t. And don’t ever talk to me about it. All right? Go do your life and leave me in mine, and we’re finished. No more after now, starting now. We’re done.”

  He sat back and looked at his desk. He raised his hand. I knew what he was going to do. My day had been nothing but. He waved good-bye.

  It was beginning to snow when I got back in the Jeep and told the dispatcher I was patrolling. I went to the top of the campus and worked my route down, then drove to the dormitories and sports buildings that were adjacent to the campus. I wrote out tickets to two Saabs and a Toyota 4Runner, then ticketed some shabby old American cars to show that I would treat the professors the same as their students. I drove a kid with a busted leg from his classroom building to his dorm. He complained about the pressure of the crutches under his arms. Then I came back to the social sciences building to pick up a coed and her wheelchair and take her to her apartment. She made jokes about her legs that didn’t work, and she didn’t complain about the chair.

  The snow grew denser, and I worried about how bad it would be for Fanny on our road. They often didn’t plow it in heavy snows because very few people lived on it. She was a competent woman, an emergency room head nurse who could handle any sort of disaster I’d heard of. She was tall and square-shouldered and had level, bushy eyebrows that were the same dark brown as her hair. She wore her hair up at work, and when she came home, she let it drop, saying, “Ahhh.” I used to watch her do it, and I’d feel my muscles let go, knowing we were home, both of us together, and now it was all right. She was a terrible driver, though, especially in snow, because she was so used to being in control. When you drive on ice and snow, you have to know there are certain kinds—the loose-packed, wet, slick-surfaced snow—that can kill you. You have to know how the dense stuff will let you control a lot of the motion of your car. But, whatever kind it is, you have to be able to let go just a little, stop steering at certain kinds of slide, stop overcontrolling because it looks treacherous, and simply permit the weight of the car, plus its momentum, plus a tiny adjustment of the wheel, plus accelerator, not brake, to take you through the turn. But Fanny was used to controlling situations. It was her job. I’d pulled her out of snowdrifts, embankments, roadside ditches filled with slush. She’d telephoned from strangers’ farmhouses and from public phones in the center of town. I worried as much about the strangers in the farmhouses as I did about the skids.

  I wondered what degree of sleeplessness she’d have to reach before it affected her work and a doctor would report her. But who’d they report her to? You don’t find good nurses from good programs very easily in upstate New York. They couldn’t afford to lose her, so they might leave her alone and she might commit some terrible mistake. And driving home, with so little sleep, after the constant push of the ER, what might she drive into, given an unlighted country road and her hands squeezed too tight on the wheel? I saw her leaning forward, steering with tired, jerky motions. I saw the car, on a slithery hill, going into a long, fast loop.

  We were going to have to talk. Archie was right. But he’d sold me to Strodemaster. Well, not completely, not really. He told the guy I’d had some experience in the loss of children. It wasn’t a secret, really. We just didn’t talk about it. Strodemaster wanted the girl found, and that was all right. Archie thought I could help because he trusted me. All right. And what he had told me, again and again, casually, as casually as a round-faced, sweating man who looked like a hog in love could be casual, was that Fanny and I needed to talk all the time, not just when it exploded in us.

  About our child.

  So we would have to talk. So that Fanny wouldn’t turn her knuckles white against the steering wheel and come off the road and pitch through her windshield. I couldn’t help seeing what the glass of a windshield looks like after someone has gone into it in a collision. There’s always so much blood, and it ends up in the starred but not shattered off-white sections. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle joined with blood.

  I parked outside the humanities building and started in the basement, trying doors, making a note of who was working in an isolated corner of the building as late afternoon got dark and the snow intensified. It was too early, really, to be checking the building, but I needed to be out of the car and
out of the thoughts about Fanny that hung inside it like someone’s cigarette smoke. The posters about Janice Tanner were on the walls and many office doors. Her smile had a downward tug to it, like she might be someone who would easily cry. But it was a bright smile, and her dark eyes seemed to be smiling, too. She was very small and fragile-looking. After a while, after seeing the smiles, and the eyes, and the word missing, I couldn’t look at her. When I saw one of the posters, and its promise of a reward for information, I had to look away.

  I went back to the Jeep and answered a call about a disturbance at one of the fraternities. The row of them, very large houses, very well kempt, lined the street across from the bottom of the campus and its hill. The disturbance was a fight. By the time I arrived, it was a fight that was over. One boy was on his hands and knees, bleeding from the nose and mouth into the snow. The boy who had apparently put him down stood with his arms at his sides, his shirt torn open, and he wailed. He was like a dog, with his head pointed up, and with shrill yipping noises coming from his face.

  I got the boy who was down to sit on my running board, and I stopped the bleeding from his nose. I used his shirt to stanch it, then wrapped him in a blanket. I took his name and told him to stay put. I talked to the one who was making all the noise. I took his name and told him to stay where he was. According to the president of the house, a big handsome kid who looked like he could have taken either of them, and who seemed more upset than either of them, they had fought over a girl. “A woman,” they called her. I made them shake hands. They embraced and wept together. I heard one of them say, “Fuckin’ bitch,” so I knew American manhood was defended again. I took the bloodied one to the college infirmary. His assailant insisted on coming. I wrapped him in a second blanket. I had thought of taking them to the hospital. I thought I might see Fanny in case she was in before her shift for some reason. But the infirmary was closer, and it was open, and I followed the rules. I wrote a report while I waited, and then I took them back.

  The snow was very, very bad now, and I thought seriously about calling Fanny or stopping at the hospital. She hated it when I said she drove badly, because she insisted on doing everything well. So I finished the rest of my paperwork at the security building and I started home. The worst of our weather was in February and March. It dawned at twenty below, often enough, and often enough it didn’t reach zero. On February afternoons, I drove home in purple-blue darkness, the headlights making the ice sparkle. This afternoon, it was black, and the snow was thick, and I couldn’t see with the lights on their high beam. I kept the headlights low, made sure the cocoa doormat was squarely over the hole through which exhaust as well as cold air leaked in, and I did a steady twenty miles per hour off the campus and north, instead of south toward home. There was a small, shabby lumberyard I knew, endangered by the hardware chains that also sold wood, and I gave them my business in the name of general revenge. I had to estimate the dimensions and quantities of drywall and studs, nails and drywall screws and joint compound. I should have known it by heart, since Fanny and I had talked off and on for months about almost making the decision to do the room.

  Lumber with a red flag stapled to the end of a stud protruded through the open back window. Freezing air and carbon monoxide were sucked in, mixing with what was coming through the floor. I kept the full blast of warm air blowing onto the windshield, I kept the wipers clacking, and I drove slowly, hoping for the best. I got home. Every mile closer to it, I thought I ought to go back for Fanny. She didn’t want me to. I knew that. I thought I should. She knew that.

  How good that we knew what we knew.

  Our road was getting axle-high in snow, and I thought the town crews would decide to stay in until the snow stopped. Why plow twice?

  I answered: Because of Fanny coming home.

  I let the dog out, and we stayed outside awhile, tossing snowballs and talking about the day. He butted me in the thigh a few times and dashed around the yard in the snow, then went up on the side porch because it was time to get fed. I poured out his kibble, and after he inhaled it, I let him out again to roam. Then I propped the door open and unloaded the wagon, carrying the materials directly upstairs so I wouldn’t change my mind. It took me quite a few trips. Then I closed the car up, got the mail from the roadside box, brought the dog in, and turned on the porch lights in case Fanny came home early. I turned up the heat so she would be warm.

  The studs and firring strips for cleats and pine one-by-tens for shelves were on the hallway floor outside the room, and the plasterboard and compound and drywall tape and sacks of nails and screws were leaning against the hallway door. Inside, there was the closet, the little writing table, the small bed, the shelf unit. We had given the toys and books away. The plan had evolved to this: We would build bookshelves along the long outer wall, we would build a unit of storage shelves along the opposite wall next to the closet, and the room would become a kind of office. Fanny could keep professional records here, and we would do the bills together, she sitting at a desk and I in a rocker. The idea was to make us stop feeling what wasn’t in the room. In our bedroom, or carrying woolens in plastic bags filled with mothballs to store in the big closet at the end of the hall, we felt it. It was like a bruise. If you hurt your arm, you could run your hand along it and then you’d suddenly wince. It was a part of our house that made us wince.

  I put down some blue plastic tarpaulins to protect the floor. I brought in extension cords and my circular saw. I made sure the battery in the drill was charged. I looked at the wallpaper that Fanny had put up. She was good with wallpaper. I had forgotten paint. I would have to use the heat gun and a putty knife and take the wallpaper down, because you can’t pay bills and balance your checkbook in any hardheaded way with Bambi smiling at you from the wall.

  So I sat on a ladder and, with the heat gun roaring, taking care not to cook the walls or the studs behind them, I took Bambi down, a square at a time. When I let the heat gun focus too long and the wallpaper began to smoke, the smell made me hungry and I remembered I hadn’t eaten dinner or lunch. I thought about Archie Halpern at the Blue Bird and remembered I hadn’t had breakfast, either. I thought I’d start to drool and drip on the heat gun and electrocute myself. The dog waited in the hall, and he escorted me to the refrigerator. There was a plastic-wrapped bowl of noodles with some kind of green peas and cheese and bacon in them. There was another bowl, this one filled with Fanny’s winter vegetable soup. I looked at the cheese in its wrap. I looked at eggs and at pickles in a jar. I took a glass of orange juice and went back upstairs to eliminate Bambi.

  I woke up when the heat gun fell out of my hand.

  “Okay,” I said. Outside, in the hallway, the dog thumped his tail. I said, “You’re right. It’s a sign. You fall asleep, you know it’s a signal to get a little sleep.” The dog banged back. I unplugged the heat gun, ran my hand along the wall to make sure it was cool. I had taken most of the long wall down; it was a good night’s work. I went down-stairs and sat in the back room with the lights off. I heard the snow hitting the windows, the wind gusting, the tikkety-tak of a dog’s nails on the wooden floor.

  I told him, “Come lie down.” He hit the floor beside the sofa. I lay down on it and said, “I’ll get you out to pee later on. You let me know if I forget.” His tail thumped twice. I closed my eyes and felt the day.

  Days.

  Longer than that.

  I let my breath go out and out and out. I said, my mouth so tired that I barely moved it, “Thank you, God, for all this shit you’ve given us, you son of a bitch.” I waited. I waited a minute more as my arms and legs got heavy while my brain filled like a sail with what I was thinking. “You son of a bitch,” I said. I got up, went to the side door, and let the dog out. I made myself some toast and, when I couldn’t decide what to spread on it, I ate it dry. When the dog came in, I went back up and worked on stripping the walls.

  jelly

  I HEARD A ROARING sound in the road and I woke up on the floor of the ro
om. The dog was beside me, waiting. At the window, I saw the wrecker drive off, yellow lights whirling. He had left Fanny’s car outside our little drive. The road was unplowed and so was the drive. When the town plows did come, they’d have to detour her car, but they would, and there we were, both of us home and nobody killed. I heard her walk slowly through the house. I went into the bathroom, and by the time I came out, the dog had found her and had been released to go outside.

  I made coffee while she changed from her uniform. I called in sick.

  She came back downstairs while I was doing that, and she said, “What?”

  I told the dispatcher, “Tomorrow. Guaranteed.”

  Fanny waited. She was wearing jeans and a thick black turtleneck and wool-lined moccasins over woolen socks. She kept rubbing her hands together like she was cold. Her eyebrows were up over her pale face, and her lips looked bitten. Her green eyes were wide. She was waiting to hear bad news.

  “I just got too tired,” I said. “It isn’t anything. I got tired.”

  “Depression makes you tired,” she said.

  “Then everybody I know is tired.”

  She smiled a little and nodded.

  “Coffee’s up pretty soon,” I said. She sat at the table and folded her hands. “Was it rough?”

  “No,” she said. “A lot of car wrecks, nothing too terrible. Did you hear the tow truck?”

  “You didn’t get hurt.”

  “No,” she said, “no. I’m fine. I came down Potter Road and I wasn’t thinking, I was half back in ER and halfway home, I guess. I did what I always do. I hit the brakes at the last minute, and I sailed through the T junction and into where the plows dropped off these huge loads of snow they were moving. I couldn’t back out.”