Girls

by Frederick Busch

  I stood in the mess, my knees bent and my back strained, panting. “There,” I said. “A little dramatic. A little messy. A little destructive. But, Fanny, fucking there: The alcove is down. You have any further wishes for the room?”

  As I looked at her, as she rocked back and forth and looked at me, I thought I should have started by thanking her for stripping the rest of the wallpaper.

  What I said was, “You want me to find the same pattern of paper and put it back on the walls?”

  I put my head down as soon as I’d said it. I couldn’t any longer find satisfaction in a fight with her. We were both too beat up for this. I started to say it but found when I looked up that she had left the room. I followed her. That was how our fights had always gone, Fanny walking off and me following. We had done it in cities on the West Coast and in the Middle West and even in Manhattan, where I’d finished up my stateside rotation and mustered out. She’d stood at a cement wall in Battery Park, looking down into the dirty water. She’d been wearing an ugly bronze raincoat I’d always hated because it made her skin look gray. She’d move, and I’d move with her. We went that way along the embankment. Finally, at the navy monument, she said, “If you’d tell me how to get home, I could stalk away and you could follow me there and get this damned thing over with.” I’d shown her the right subway entrance, but by then she wanted me with her, and we went home together. Now we were home together, and no one knew where else to go.

  I went down the hall to the bathroom and listened at the door. I heard the shower. I banged on the door.

  She said, “What?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I banged again after I’d waited half a minute.

  “What?”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “I heard you.”

  “Fanny, are you sorry?”

  She said, “What do you think?”

  “Don’t cry,” I said.

  “So what should I do?”

  “Come out.”

  “In a while.”

  “Fanny, I’m lonely for you.”

  “What?”

  “I miss you. It’s like I’m in Tokyo or someplace and talking on the phone. I keep missing you.”

  Then she said, “I miss you, too.”

  I was sitting on the floor outside the bathroom, my back against the linen closet door, and I’d been sleeping. She had put a blanket over me. The dog was on the floor beside me, with his back wedged hard against my leg. We were littermates. When I moved again, I woke him, and he looked over his shoulder with a kind of stupid glare, and then he thumped his tail.

  “We missed again,” I said.

  He rolled to his feet and shook himself head to foot as if to throw off water, and he planted himself. He was ready. Good dog.

  The college was digging out after days of storm. Pickup trucks with plows in front and salt distributors in the bed worked the narrow lanes and paths while big trucks with highway plows cleared the larger roads. Grounds crew on ladders and a cherry picker crane worked to lever ice off the roofs before it melted enough to come down in avalanches. We’d had students buried under slides like that. The sky was bright and the sun, though it hadn’t any weight on your skin, was good to see, especially if you believed in winter ending, which I did not. From high up on the campus roads, you could look into neighboring counties. I was patrolling near the graveyard where they used to sell lots to the faculty. It was my suggestion, since my English professor’s girlfriend had hiked up here to try killing herself, that we include the cemetery and the quarry in our rounds. I wasn’t really patrolling. I sat in the idling car and looked over the campus, over the bright hills, and I stared without focusing.

  I was counting my credit hours. Since I wasn’t taking a course this semester, I was a little behind schedule. According to my calculations, the sun would get very, very old and explode, incinerating all the planets in the solar system, a year and a half before my degree was in hand. This was not a viable self-improvement program, and I was going to have to step up the pace. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine taking another course as long as I lived. I kept seeing myself as I used a yellow crayon to draw a picture of Ralph for Introduction to Art. I heard myself making up songs about Ralph for Music 101. I was too disgusted to think for long about my having written a paper and handing it in and letting myself be graded for what I had to say about a story I had told a baby girl about a duck.

  I was grateful when they called me on the radio and asked me to come in. My vice president for administrative services made me head of security. I was given a raise of a thousand dollars. I asked if I got any more courses free, and he regretfully reported that I got what everyone else got: one per term. I asked if I could work plainclothes and he said we could try that. I had come in early because I didn’t think Fanny ought to have to deal with me. I knew what was bad for her. I was sad because I knew, and probably that was what my vice president felt. He was a pleasant man with a taste for bold tweeds and what he had assured me were English neckties. He wore tinted glasses in dark plastic frames and looked like he ought to be a teacher.

  “Does this please you, Jack? You seem a little subdued.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I’m pleased. I’m grateful. I’m a little worried about the responsibility, but no, there’s nothing wrong. Thank you very much. And we can use the money.”

  He looked at the papers before him. “How’s Mrs.—how’s Fanny?” he asked.

  “Hanging in there,” I said.

  “All right, though,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. Fine.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” he said. “Congratulations, and, you know, fine. Stay in touch.”

  The dispatcher kissed me on the cheek, and the other three on patrol shook my hand. They were former policemen from villages in upstate New York, and they were envious of the money but had no desire to make out shift schedules and answer to angry students about their slack attitude toward date rape.

  The call came from the library, early, around half past eight, and I drove over.

  I’d never liked going there. It was built into the side of a hill, and you climbed a lot of stone steps with short risers and somehow you were always out of breath, going in the heavy glass doors past the electronic apparatus that wailed if you didn’t check a book out properly. It was full of angles and corners. You didn’t get a good look at a long vista you could inspect and become familiar with until you hit the reference room. Standing near the circulation desk in the entrance hall, breathing a little too hard, I always felt I had come into someone else’s house. I tried to make my breathing normal. I saw walls and angles and shelves of new books on display, and I heard the clattery, hollow, plastic sound of computer keys. The catalog was on computer, and almost every long table I saw had computers on it. I didn’t like to use them unless I was forced to. No matter how I made my way through the computers or in the stacks among the students, I knew I didn’t belong there.

  Through a glass wall with a door in it, near long tables with computers, I saw Rosalie Piri, who had bald tires, and a tall man and a taller woman. Professor Piri looked little between them. She saw me and lifted her chin and smiled. The others looked over, waved me in and then on. I followed them to an office on the far side of the reference room, where I was introduced to the circulation librarian, Donald Gombricz, and Irene Horstmuller, the head librarian. We sat around a conference table in Horstmuller’s office. There were pads, pencils, and a small book in a navy blue binding closer to where I’d been placed.

  The head librarian said, “Professor Piri borrowed a book. It contains some possibly distressing information. We’re calling the authorities. but Professor Piri suggested that strict procedure would involve your input first.”

  I looked at Piri. She looked at me and colored. She shrugged. “My father’s a cop,” she said. “He’s a New York cop. I learned the preferences of the Police Benevolent Association before I learned to read. You always talk to the local man.�
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  “I’m the local man,” I said.

  She said, “I know. That’s why you’re here.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Maybe. Somebody vandalized—what, defaced the book?”

  “No,” Horstmuller said. Her face was full and stern and tan, her long hair wound in a knot. She wore a necklace with red stones in a silver setting, and she was conscious of it, adjusting it while she spoke. “We don’t get hysterical about damaged books. We get angry and sad, but we don’t call for security over that.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “There’s a threat,” Gombricz said.

  Piri said, maybe noticing Horstmuller’s necklace, touching her own bare neck with the yoke of her small left hand, “You know about the Veep?”

  I shook my head. I thought they were talking about a book or an author or a computer program.

  “The Vice President,” she said.

  “He’s coming to talk. In the chapel. We’ve been working with the Secret Service.”

  “You will be plenty more, I guess,” Piri said, smiling. Her mouth was remarkably broad and kind of curly. “This book has some writing in the back.”

  She made a flexible, bending gesture with her wrist. In the hum of the fluorescent lights on the ceiling, squinting against the glare of the bright February sky coming in the office’s two large windows, I examined the book. It was called Indispensable Superfluity: A History of the Vice Presidency in the United States. A piece of gummed memorandum paper led me to open to the back cover, and on what Piri referred to as an endpaper, I read:

  The veep will weep

  And then he’ll sleep

  He’ll never wake up

  Till called by St. Pete.

  I said, “Would that be considered a legitimate rhyme?”

  Piri laughed. Gombricz frowned. Horstmuller said, pretending that I wasn’t a thorough pain in the ass, but talking like I was mildly retarded, “I believe the ‘Pete/sleep’ would be called slant rhyme. But of course we’re concerned about the threat.”

  I said, “You consider this a threat?”

  She said, “Yes, I consider it a threat. He’s predicting the death of a Vice President in a book borrowed from the library of a college that the Vice President is going to visit. I telephoned the Secret Service. I faxed them a photocopy, and I can tell you that they consider it a threat. They arrive this afternoon.”

  “I can’t believe they’re at work this early,” I said.

  “My call was relayed to the office in New York City. They had someone at a night desk.”

  “Good operation,” I said.

  Piri, the cop’s daughter, nodded.

  “So,” I said to her, “you found this?”

  “I had the book out, and I noticed the little poem. I called Irene here”—the head librarian looked at me with very large light blue eyes—“and she set things in motion.”

  “So now we’re in motion,” I said. “Where are we going?”

  Professor Piri said, “I guess you’ll want to be here when the Secret Service arrives.”

  “I can get Elmo St. John—he’s the local cop. He and I can have the person waiting for them. Look up who had this book out before the professor and we can go get him. It’s someone either on the faculty or administration or in town, right?”

  Gombricz, who had very little hair on top of his slender head but who wore a very carefully trimmed fringe of beard that followed the lines of his manly jaw, folded his hands and said in a deep and resonant voice, “Not doable.”

  I thought I ought to forgive the “doable” once. I’d have bet he sang in a community choir. He probably took the starring roles when the little civic theater association did musicals. I looked at him so he would understand the need to explain. He waited, though, to make me ask.

  I dutifully said, “Why?”

  “Federal statutes passed, after extensive lobbying by the ALA, and subscribed to by the CLA, dictate that a library cannot disclose, without violating the constitutional right to privacy, who has taken out what book. Period.”

  Horstmuller nodded. I waited until Piri nodded, and then I believed it.

  “Jesus,” I said. “So we know who this person is.”

  Horstmuller nodded. “We can know,” she said.

  “And we can’t tell the Secret Service?”

  “And we won’t,” Gombricz sang.

  “And the Vice President’s life, you figure, is in danger. What if it was the President?”

  “The same scenario,” Horstmuller said.

  “Does the Secret Service buy this?”

  Horstmuller said, “It doesn’t matter if they don’t.”

  “It’s probably a crank. A prank. Whatever that is. It probably isn’t true.”

  Piri smiled and shrugged. Horstmuller gave no opinion. Gombricz chanted, “We’ve no way of knowing.”

  “It isn’t your field,” I said. “Okay. It isn’t mine, either. I’ll come over when the federales get here, if you like. I can pistol-whip them when they start abusing you, which I imagine they will.”

  “I didn’t know campus security carried guns,” Gombricz said.

  “Maybe I’ll let you touch my pistol,” I told him. Piri, grinning, ducked her head. Horstmuller pretended not to have heard. “Call me when they kick in the door,” I said. I left then because I knew I wouldn’t have a better exit line in a week of being clever.

  As I drove the campus, I tried to imagine the long white chapel and its hard benches occupied by students, some there because they were interested, the majority of them driven in by their history and political science teachers. Rosalie Piri would be there, I thought. She was a woman who showed respect when she felt it. And I thought of the Vice President’s attractive face and less appealing voice, and the nervous Secret Service men in front of the podium as he leaned into the lectern and kept leaning, slumping over it and falling forward on top of it, the report disappearing into the plain high ceiling of the old Baptist church.

  It would be a pity, I thought, performing the literary criticism in which I’d been trained on this very campus, to lose a good Vice President to a poem as bad as the one in the back of that book.

  I drove through the parking lot behind the humanities building and I ticketed some cars. One of them wouldn’t turn over, and after I wrote the student a ticket, he asked me for a jump start. It was one of the services they required us to give, so I helped him roll it away from the building he’d nosed against, and then I connected the cables. I signaled him to crank it, he did, his engine started, and, as I removed the cables and carried them back to the Jeep, he honked his horn. I looked over and saw him tearing the ticket into halves, then quarters, and throwing them over his shoulder into the back of his car. It was when I looked at the back of his car that I came away from the Jeep, the cables still in my hands. I pointed at him as if drawing a bead, and I said, “You wait.”

  He was puzzled, and perhaps frightened. They always are when you act like they aren’t quite as far beyond your reach as they think their money takes them. I went over, but not to his window. I wanted the window behind it.

  I said, “Stay.”

  I leaned on the roof and read the poster. It was light blue, maybe a kind of lavender. It said REWARD OFFERED, and under it was a photograph, but not of Janice Tanner. This was a smaller girl. She was nine years old, the poster said. Under her photograph were the words In Jeopardy. It didn’t tell how a child that small could be allowed to get there. It described her, height and weight and clothing she’d last been in, and it said Please Help Us.

  “Where’d you get the poster?” I asked the kid. He was the usual: tall, sandy-haired, healthy, Caucasian, dressed from one of the better catalogs.

  “A lady taped it on.”

  “Today?”

  “Yesterday. Hey, I didn’t mean that, about the ticket.”

  “No? Why not? It’s your right to behave like an overprivileged candy-ass. Stop shaking. I’m supposed to pretend to show you respect
. You can go.”

  I left him and stowed the jumper cables. I knew what I’d be finding on the campus today. Another face would have grown overnight on the walls and doors. On the corkboard wall of the student union, where kids advertised their need for lifts to important social centers of the Northeast, there would be this new face, these new eyes I wouldn’t be able to meet.

  I thought, as I got back in and put the Jeep in gear, of how Professor Piri had looked at me when she’d said her father was a New York cop. She had looked like someone surrendering.

  And how do you mean surrender?

  The little girl was from Onondaga County, miles away. There was nothing to do here except look for someone shifty with a little girl. And I wouldn’t see them together, I thought, because the child was probably dead. As Janice Tanner probably was.

  I thought of the yellow-gray of her mother’s skin, and I thought of her belief that our lives’ events are orderly, somehow part of a pattern. I also thought I had promised to make an effort.

  But how did you mean surrender?

  And why not, starting now, name the efforts you can make?

  I made my list. Elmo St. John had left word that the investigator for the state police was a sergeant named Bird. I didn’t know him, but I could call, and we could play phone tag for a few days and then maybe talk a little. I knew what he’d tell me. It would add up to being very watchful. There was no physical evidence, but the posters were everywhere, and they would help keep some pressure on. I had called the Tanners and suggested they call the Syracuse, Utica, and Binghamton papers and TV. Mr. Tanner had sounded strangely glad when I asked if he minded doing some recorded messages for the local radio stations to play. I knew there wasn’t a lot that Bird could do, and I was afraid I had done my best in a few phone calls. Still, I hated the druggies in Masonville, and I wouldn’t mind driving there again and this time leaning on some people, especially if Bird gave me his blessing. I doubted he would, but I could ask. Though the last thing the drugheads would want was a girl as young as Janice Tanner. Sex was secondary to most of them. Money came first and last and mostly in between. Drugs filled the hollows. Kids traded energetic, expert sex for drugs when they had to, and when the trade was—I thought of the circulation librarian and his fine tenor voice—doable.