Girls

by Frederick Busch

  The dog escorted me and his fading triumph, and I thought of kitchens and rotten garbage, and I wondered again what Strodemaster kept beneath his sink. Probably it was a matter of how long he kept it more than what he kept. He was the kind of man whose wife had a long job description, I figured, and it included trash removal, pest control, and bathrobe cleaning. Now that his wife was gone, he couldn’t ask his girlfriends to shovel and sweep. Fanny had nothing but scorn for women like his wife who let themselves get run like appliances.

  I thought of how I’d lied to Fanny and then told the truth. I couldn’t stay angry at Archie, because he knew too much about us. And because he’d worked so hard, with such delicacy, to help me out. I left early, apologizing to the dog, as I always did, for locking him in the kitchen for the day. I realized that I wanted to get to the Blue Bird and have an early cup.

  His side of the window table was dusty with powdered sugar and crumbs and little crumpled sugar packages. He was wearing a huge, thick turtleneck sweater that had a collar that came almost up to his ears.

  “Jesus,” I said, “you look like one of those U-boat captains in a movie.”

  “I was told at home this morning that I look like Erich von Stroheim,” he said. “Have a pastry. They frosted them with maple this morning.”

  I handed my thermos to Verna and I burned my mouth on coffee. I said, “Your pal Randy Strodemaster asked me to help out with something.”

  “Something,” Archie said.

  “This missing girl, Janice Tanner, you son of a bitch.”

  “I take it that you don’t agree with me that talking with her parents would be beneficial.”

  “Periodic discussions about dead girls. Are Ex,” I said, making the sign for a prescription in some of his pastry crumbs and spilled sugar. “Hang around the parents of a dead girl and exchange little recognition signs about misery.”

  “So, then, you don’t appreciate the idea.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “But you said yes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  I said, “Why?”

  “Don’t stall,” he said. “Why’d you agree? I made the suggestion to Strodemaster. But I didn’t tell you to do it. I can’t make you take on chores. That part was your idea. Why?”

  “I felt like I had to, I guess. I don’t know. I—to tell you the truth, I was—something about it made me want to. I couldn’t stay away. I hated it. I hate it. The idea—it was like stopping someone’s death, if I could. I’m a goddamned nuthead, aren’t I?”

  “You sound pretty savvy to me,” he said. “If you’re not careful, you’ll sound healthy.”

  I said in almost a whisper, “Fanny asked me if I was your patient.”

  “What’d you tell her?”

  “I lied.”

  “Of course you did. But what did you say?”

  “I said I didn’t talk to you about her.”

  He stared at me hard, his beautiful piggy face dead serious, his little eyes focused. “You don’t,” he said at last. “You talk about you. A lot of you’s about Fanny. That’s all right. Because one of these days, you’re going to tell her, ‘We both need to talk to Archie,’ and because you ask her to, she will, and then you’ll have told her the truth.”

  “And this is ethical?”

  He ate a huge mouthful of something shaped like a cowpie filled with almond slivers and glistening raisins.

  “Don’t you fucking worry about ethics,” he said. “You worry about your wife and yourself and fuck your quibbles.” Crumbs flew as he spoke. He paused, he sipped a big bubbly mouthful of coffee and swallowed it. He waved his thick, short forefinger between us and he said, “Somebody comes in bleeding, Fanny does what?”

  “She calls the doctor.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Jack.”

  “Stops the bleeding,” I said.

  “That’s what we want to do. Then we can worry about correct behavior. Are you working?”

  “You mean with Fanny?”

  “Are you fucking at work on the little missing girl?”

  I nodded.

  “Tell me how you feel.”

  “It isn’t—”

  “Tell me.”

  “I need to go, Arch. I’m late.”

  “You piss artist.”

  “I know.”

  “You find me this week, the next couple of days, and you and I talk. Yes?”

  He was sweating, and I had ruined one more breakfast for him. I was no better than any recidivist. You arrest them, try them, send them up, parole them, and they’re back inside in a week, habitual offenders. Granted, Fanny and I had grappled a little with—let’s say with us. But we hadn’t addressed the event, and we wouldn’t. That was what, for the sake of some kind of honesty, some kind of friendship, I would have to tell Archie Halpern one day. I wanted his help, but I could never—and I never would—do what he would advise.

  When I came in, the dispatcher told me that Big Pete was in an interview room with a woman who had a complaint. I could hear her voice ranging low to high, then Pete’s even bass. His voice would enrage her. She’d think he was being calm on purpose, so she’d assume he thought she was being hysterical, and she’d be furious with him, and neither one would know why.

  I asked the dispatcher to request, on the intercom phone, that he come out and see me. When he did, rolling his eyes and loosening his necktie, I suggested that he take my campus loop while I talked to the student. Since he had to do what I suggested, he did.

  We had built two small interview rooms, each with chairs and a small table that was large enough for the student being interviewed not to feel like one of us was looming over. I left my coat hanging outside and when I went in, before I took the clipboard with the incident report from the shelf, I said, “Hi. I’m Jack. Who’re you?”

  She was Niva. She was in her third year. She had a crew cut almost as flat as Archie Halpern’s, and she wore a little golden ring through her nose. It was hard not to talk directly to the ring. Her scoop-necked sweater was a hazy kind of purple and her pants had once been black. There were various colors of paint on them. She wore high thick-soled leather boots. Her hands and feet were big, and the rest of her was very skinny. She was almost copper-colored, and her eyes had a coppery touch to them, too.

  The complaint was about a senior boy who no doubt called himself a man. His name was Roger Gambrelle. He shared studio space with Niva in a section of the arts building they let the kids use for what I guess was art.

  “He plays this heavy rap,” Niva said.

  “Too loud?”

  “He’s trying to fuck me, Jack.”

  “You mean—”

  Niva didn’t smile. I’d hoped she would. Her face had deep frown lines and it seemed to live in a kind of scowl.

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” she said.

  “Right,” I said. “I’m trying to figure it out for this report. My associate has written ‘To promote sexual intercourse.’ ”

  She smiled, but it went away too fast for me to enjoy it. She said, “That’s the fucking, Jack.”

  “So, Niva, are you complaining about the moves he’s putting on you, or—this seems to be about the music.”

  “He’s a stupid racist asshole. He thinks all people of color dig rap, and what you do, you want to get in one of us’s pants, you send the music up. Like perfume, understand? Like you’re laying flowers on a woman you want. This hyena is doing this mealy shit music can’t no one get into on account of it sours your mind, listening to it hour after hour. It’s antifemale, it’s violent, it brings us down, and I’m trying to move some paint on a surface to mean something. You understand.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do. It’s easy. I’m going to make sure Mr. Gambrelle turns the music down.” She shook her head. “Doesn’t play the music at all is going to be very tough. I can try for it, but I can get it turned down. Low. Next part’s a little hairy. If you want me to, if you ask, I can kind of hint
—I can’t do more than that—about how you would appreciate his laying off. But students don’t like anyone meddling in their lives, and some guy from security—”

  “You feel inadequate for the job?”

  “I’m pretty sure it isn’t my job,” I said. “Can you ask one of the student deans to talk to Mr. Gambrelle? Have you got a friend who can do it for you?”

  “You’re friendly,” she said.

  “Let me think about it. I’ll do the music. I’ll maybe drop the hint about the other. Is that all right?”

  She stood up. She was taller than I was. “That’s all right,” she said. The smile came and went, and then she left.

  “Watusi princess,” the dispatcher said.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t talk like that. We can’t talk like that in here.”

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  “Slow down,” I told her. “Don’t get mad. Just don’t talk like that. A favor to me, all right? Never mind it’s the rules, that we’re supposed to be courteous servants et cetera. Just as a favor to me, okay?”

  I believe her face turned into dough with coal bits for eyes and sticks for the mouth. Something wonderful and strange happened to it because the door opened in, and Sergeant Bird of the New York State Police walked into the office. She stared at his lustrous dark skin. He winked at her, and she turned away, like a dog when you look into his eyes.

  He shook my hand and gave me a very thin envelope. “Two photo-copied sheets,” he said. “A summary. There’s nothing else to give you.”

  “Can the parents know?”

  He sighed, buttoning his open coat and putting his gloves on. “If they have to.”

  “It’s their kid, Sergeant. Stop. Don’t give me the lecture. I apologize. I know you know it’s their kid. I retract it. Tell me what you want me to do or not do or what.”

  “Tell them what you think could possibly comfort them. I guess you’d want to do that. There isn’t much. There really isn’t.”

  “You holding anything back for later? I guess it wouldn’t be in here.”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  “I thought you trusted me.”

  “Well, I guess I do,” he said. “That doesn’t mean I have to count on you.”

  “No. I wouldn’t, either. You on your way someplace, or can I give you some coffee?”

  “Another crime scene.” He saw my face. “Not another girl,” he said. “This is a kid drove into his girlfriend’s house. I mean in.”

  “It’ll be pretty.”

  “And I look forward to it,” he said. “We’ll talk.”

  After he left, the dispatcher said, “You planned that, right?”

  “Timing is everything,” I said. I opened the envelope, but both our lines rang, and I reached for my coat.

  “Library,” she said. “My God. They said something about the Secret Service. Do we have spies?”

  I got my coat and I made a hushing sign, finger to lips, then suggested with motions that it wasn’t safe to talk. Often enough, it isn’t.

  At a college that size, the dean of faculty is also the provost, the head goose in the flock. The president was away in New York City, probably to beg money, so the dean was grim with his responsibility. He was tan all year, and handsome the way local Realtors are, a little pudgy but full of stories about how many K’s he almost ran. He was full of congratulations and powerful handshakes, and I didn’t trust him. The library people were there, and Professor Piri, and a jock who worked in Alumni Relations and had a law degree but no bar exam. He was there, apparently, in place of the college lawyer, who was flying back with the president. Everyone sat tall in his or her chair, except Piri, who couldn’t be tall, and who I kept thinking of as cute. You can lose a couple of inches of flesh for saying that word these days to a woman, especially if she looks like a girl.

  We sat in a long, narrow room with windows that faced the hill-side behind the library. I felt like I’d been here before or someplace similar. Winds took snow off the hill and the windows shook. I felt the light shrink as clouds dropped into place. We sat in a dimness that suggested being underwater. The Secret Service men came in, and fluorescent light flared at the door, and then darkness rolled over us.

  I don’t remember their names. I was introduced and my job was named, and I stood so they could nod, and then I sat. The others didn’t stand. The men from Secret Service acknowledged them, and we all leaned forward in our chairs. The dean was master of ceremonies. Everyone was praised, our concern for the safety of the Vice President was described.

  It was the light. That was why the room felt familiar. I had been in light so much like this before that my nerves and brain and spine were thinking for me. My skin, which had been underneath this light before, was remembering it.

  Head librarian Horstmuller: “The dilemma is, we can’t examine any records that might say who—student, teacher, guest on the campus, friend of the school—borrowed the book.”

  The Secret Service agent with slightly long hair: “If only we could, you see, since it is, after all, the life of the second in command, then we could walk the dog, as we say, backward through the list and clear them one by one until we’ve interviewed them all and know—we will know—who made this threat and lock them away.”

  “We could get a subpoena for the records”: more conventional-looking agent.

  “It wouldn’t hold up” : Professor Piri.

  Fanny, at thirty-nine, a feisty scrub nurse, pregnant for, it felt like, a year and a half, swollen and damp all over and hating her body but loving its one pregnancy, said by a doctor to be impossible, swearing at her friends in Obstetrics, “Wait just a goddamned minute! Nobody told me virgin birth hurt!” They laughed at that until one of them cried, but I knew she was crying with gladness because Fanny and I, who had tried so long to beat the odds of uterus tilt and husbandly sperm count, were going to have our child.

  “Give me the fucking anesthetic,” she bellowed. They didn’t. They wouldn’t. It wasn’t time, they said, but the doctor was on his way in and she could talk to him.

  “I don’t have time to learn a foreign language,” she said.

  They laughed some more, and I tried to smile while I gripped her sweaty, strong hand and pretended there was a use for me.

  “There’s a judge right now, in Syracuse, waiting for the phone call. We can get the subpoena” : short-haired agent.

  “I won’t honor it” : head librarian.

  “Fanny,” I told her, “you’re a genius. You’re a hero. Look at you. You’re a hero.”

  “Jack,” she said, “I thought these sluts were my friends. They’re trying to kill me.”

  “We want Jack’s body,” one of them said.

  “You give me the gas, I’ll let you have him for a week every month,” she said. Her hair was pasted to her forehead. I wiped her face with a washcloth.

  “Once we serve you, there isn’t a choice. I’ll have a technician into your records and you in a federal prison cell if you like. So don’t you threaten the United States government” : longer-haired agent.

  “Yeah, well, I am the United States government” : Piri.

  The clouds were sealing in the dim green light. The windows had gone dark. Darkness had Iain against the windows of our house months later, when we’d come home with our child and I had told her again, after the hours of labor, “You’re such a hero, Fanny. Look at you. Look at what you did.”

  We were home with our sick, unhappy child. Our baby had to return to the hospital, and then stay in a larger one, because she was jaundiced. But then we brought her home again. She was small, she was undersized, but she was going to thrive, Fanny said. Her eyes were never merry. That was what I expected, merry eyes like Fanny’s when she laughed or when we made love and she rode on top of me and looked down, waiting for me to open my eyes and come out. Our baby’s eyes were either sad or steady, like she looked me over and sized me up. She studied us. She was judging the odds, I thought later on.

/>   She seemed allergic to her mother’s milk. “It happens,” Fanny said. So we fed her formula together. We sat in the night and at dawn with the warm white bottle, and we fed her. She lay in Fanny’s lap and drank. Or she lay along my arm, her head in my palm, her feet leaning up against my bicep and shoulder, and she pulled at the nipple, sometimes looking into my face. She was thinking it over, and sometimes, when she did that, I wanted to cry.

  At first, I tried props—the stuffed bear, the rubber duck. And then I made up the story about the yellow duck named Ralph. She seemed to like it, and I told it again and again. She looked at my lips as I recited it, and I looked at hers.

  And then when she was five or six months old, she wouldn’t sleep. She started to not sleep, and we used the tricks our friends taught us and we followed the advice of nurses and doctors, and she didn’t sleep. We were hung over from wakefulness, from the sawing on our nerves of her thin, high, constant raging. She wanted something and she couldn’t tell us what. “She wouldn’t tell us,” Fanny once said to me. We played cassettes of singing with no accompaniment, of music with no voices, of men singing, of women singing, of guitars alone, of solo piano, of storytellers narrating Winnie-the-Pooh, of Mr. Rogers talking about darkness, of an English woman giving advice to children worried about being alone. I told and I told and I told about Ralph and the missing feathers and the cold winds blowing and the mother’s downy wings.