Girls

by Frederick Busch

  She said, “I’m sorry.”

  I was lying very still, smacking my eyelashes against myself, trying to figure out not where I was, because I knew it when I woke up, but why I had let myself go there. I was in her house and in her bedroom and in her bed. I was on my back, and she had pulled the covers away. She was leaning on an arm.

  She said, “I wanted to look at you, and I woke you up.”

  “Not much to look at,” I said. “Bandages, balls, black-and-blue marks.”

  “It was the balls part,” she said. She cupped them in her small hand and moved her head, then hesitated, then went on and pushed her face gently into me. She said, “Mmm.”

  “You’re being daring, huh? What I mean is, you’re wonderful. But you worry about doing it.”

  She covered us both and lay very close to me, with her face on my arm.

  She said, “It shows?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do. It isn’t that I haven’t had some men. Ack! ‘Had some men.’ But I did. I had boyfriends in college and graduate school. I’ve been around.” I felt her lips move. I felt the warmth of her breathing on my arm. Her head shifted as she spoke. “And I can get feeling crazy and sexy. I can let myself get there. With you, for example. But something always gets me embarrassed. I don’t know what. Maybe I think I have to act embarrassed. I don’t know. When your father’s a cop, you grow up with a major superego thing. No matter what you do.”

  “I get embarrassed, too.”

  “Maybe you’re your own superego,” she said.

  I recognized the word, but I didn’t know it. I was so far over my head in so many ways. I said, “I have not had a lot of women friends in my life. I’ve lived with the same woman since the seventies. When you were born, right?”

  “No,” she said. “I was born in ’68. Your wife’s pretty. She’s sad. So are you. Aren’t you?”

  “That seems to be the effect she and I have on each other.”

  “Did I make you sad? Do I?”

  “Why would I be here if you did? I came banging into your house like an accident happening.”

  “No,” she said. “No accident. How are your ribs? Did we hurt you?”

  “It was like a feather on top of me. When you say ‘no accident,’ you mean you were expecting me?” I thought of Mrs. Tanner and her certainty that everything was planned. “Because I didn’t know I was coming here tonight. Of course, I didn’t know I was coming here the other day. I thought this time I was driving home. It was like—Jesus, I haven’t got your kind of words, Rosalie. It was like I was in the water and I just reached out and caught hold. I hope that isn’t insulting. I don’t want you to think I have some kind of tool—no, some kind of anything practical in mind. Jesus. The more I talk, the less I say. Rosalie,” I said. My eyes were shut. “I didn’t know it was possible for me to still … do, you know, it. And feel good.”

  “No?” she said. “Well, let me make it clear: You did do it. I felt you pump and pump.” She reached for me again. Then she moved her head again and said, “I wasn’t expecting you, either. I was hoping. I didn’t think for sure it would happen, though. Even after the other day. I almost raped you standing up. I knew you felt embarrassed about me being on the faculty here. I knew you were the kind of man who stood back a long time and considered things.”

  “There has to be a lot of social pressure on you, from inside of you, about this happening to us. To be perfectly honest, I feel some of it, too.”

  “But, hey,” she said, “tough shit, right? If it’s you and me, then that’s what it is.”

  When I shifted, I closed my eyes against what I felt.

  She said, “Do you want to ask me why I was hoping for you?”

  “Why were you—you know.”

  She put her teeth onto my upper arm and then slowly worked them up and down, like she was tasting my flesh. It felt warm and moist and in the darkness, like a baby feeding, but also there was the feel of her breast and side and groin and thigh against me. I felt myself grow and I forgot what we’d been saying.

  In a whisper, she said, “Because I knew you would taste like this. I knew you’d be tough and maybe even mean but you’d try and not show it. And you would taste this good.”

  She moved under the covers. I almost didn’t hear the muffled whisper when she said, “I’m not embarrassed when I can hide like this.” Then she said, “I knew you’d taste this good.”

  When I woke up again, she was sleeping, too, and it was one in the morning.

  I said, “Jesus!”

  “Are we all right?” she said.

  “The dog. I have to feed the dog. He’s used to eating around five, five-thirty. He’ll think he’s dead of starvation.”

  “You’re leaving me for a dog? Not your wife and not your children—you didn’t talk about children.” Her voice was soft and sullen. She sounded like a teenage girl.

  I didn’t think I could put my socks on because my side was too stiff. I stuck my legs through my trousers, my bare feet into my boots, and I balled my socks and underpants and stuffed them in pockets. I got my shirt on and then Rosalie stood in front of me, wearing my sweater pulled down over her arms and hips. I wanted to stay awhile and peel it up very slowly. I also wanted to make her promise to give it back. I thought of Fanny recognizing it someplace, and in the darkness of her bedroom, I closed my eyes. I remembered how on an earlier afternoon she had covered her eyes like a child, and now I was doing it, too. When I opened my eyes, she was closer to me, and on her toes, leaning against me, kissing the bottom of my chin.

  “Bend down and kiss me for real,” she said.

  Her arms were on me, and my head was coming down. She chewed on the side of my jaw, that little wet nibbling pressure of her teeth.

  I drove through town at fifty, and I didn’t care if I was stopped. I got up to sixty-five on the snowy two-lane highway, and back down to forty-five on the ice-packed road that went to our house. The roads and snowbanks and fields looked blue under the moon, as blue as the room in my imagination where Rosalie and I had made love. In fact, though, her bedroom was mostly creams and tans and ambers, with a little deep red in some of the stuff on the wall. I tried to see her stretched out, as I’d imagined her, but instead I saw myself stretched out, and Rosalie nibbling with little teeth on me. She looked like a child, but she acted like a veteran in bed. I got as excited as I was scared, and something was wrong with that. Something, of course, was wrong with me leaving like a kid past his curfew, and something was wrong when a man left a small, exciting woman in her bed. Something was also wrong with the way I thought of her, the tiny breasts and narrow hips, the little belly. There was something not right about her looking in my mind like a child.

  I pulled in too quickly and skidded. It didn’t matter. Fanny’s car wasn’t there to slam against. I’d been speeding home like when she lived with me in the old days, before she put herself on the late shift and before she moved to the room she let from Virginia. Fanny wasn’t home, and it didn’t matter, I realized, if I came home half-dressed from someone’s house. She thought I did that anyway.

  The dog danced designs on the floor, and I let him out, then had to come out with him and pee into the snow to persuade him to finish relieving himself before he charged past me at the door. I let him in and put down food and fresh water. I ran some water for myself and took my tablets for the pain.

  I thought of Rosalie Piri telling me her father was a cop.

  He probably kept a service revolver in his bedroom, I thought, but with the shells locked away someplace else because there were children in the house. I heard her say, “You didn’t talk about children.” I let the dog out for a run, and I went upstairs. I was moving slowly because I had done a little damage to the ribs. I couldn’t begin to think what else I had done some damage to.

  I kept the pistol wrapped in a greasy fatigue T-shirt in our closet. The shirt stank of gun oil. It was in a cardboard box, in which a pair of women’s white sof
t walking shoes, size nine, had come to our house in a United Parcel Service truck. I carried it downstairs. I let the dog in, gave him a biscuit, and then I poured myself a drink. I’d been careful about using whiskey for a while because I thought I might be able to dive into a bottle one night and not come up. I put some sour mash over ice cubes in a tall glass, and I put the bottle away. I spread newspaper on the kitchen table, and then I put the revolver on top of it.

  Taking the brushes and the oil from the shoe box, I saw the dog watching very carefully. He seemed to be. His head was aimed at me. I saw his nostrils work in and out.

  “I’m just cleaning it,” I told him.

  He moved his tail in almost a wag, and then he lay down. His groan told me he had suffered a terrible day and please don’t make it worse.

  I took the empty cylinder off and worked the extractor spring with the tip of an oiled brush. Sometimes they rusted in there, especially when you haven’t looked at the piece in years, much less used it or cleaned it. I took off the butt plate and worked the coil spring to the hammer mechanism. I cleaned each chamber of the cylinder and inserted six Fed 85 JHP cartridges, which the man in Utica had sold me. I remember he wanted me to buy 85-grain wad cutters and I’d said no without understanding the difference. He’d enjoyed it too much and I was interested in fear, not fun. It was a .32, useless for anything but close-in work unless you were a good marksman. I wasn’t. I took it away from a kid who broke apart about a week before the end of my tour. Somehow, he had been able to take it with him, from the day he reported to the bus station in Houston until the night in a room above a place called Gaspard he impaled the foot of a fifteen-year-old girl to the wood at the end of her bed with a Finnish folding knife and her screaming brought the pimp, and the pimp laid out the soldier with a wooden hammer used for tenderizing meat and then sent word for me. I got the whore cared for, I arrested the boy, I impounded the knife, and when I found the gun on him, I said nothing and kept it. He said nothing, too, because the gun would have worsened the charges. I brought it home with me because I was enough of a cop to like the idea of an anonymous weapon that no one could trace to me. I didn’t have intentions. I was simply being thoughtful. I’d have bet our mortgage that Sergeant Bird had one and that Elmo St. John didn’t.

  It was a Taurus, a .32 Magnum Taurus 741 with a big front sight that made it clumsy. For a little gun, it was large. They called it a “banker’s gun.” They used to call it a “belly gun.” It was cleaned and loaded now. The dog was looking at me under his eyebrows, winking. You’ll hear the cops in movies call it a “throw-down piece.” I never heard it called that on the job. I thought, Men go nuts with a gun, and all of a sudden they shoot the family dog. I thought, They shoot everything and then they shoot themselves.

  I had forgotten to drink the sour mash. I tasted some. It was almost three in the morning. I drank the rest and shuddered it down. I decided not to put on underwear or socks. I emptied the clothing from my pockets and left it on the table next to the cleaning apparatus and the box of shells. I told the dog, “This time, you get to ride in the car.”

  He danced in a circle, took off for the door, then came back and ran around me. When I took out the car keys for confirmation, he circled again and ran to the door. We went out together onto the blue snow, and he worked his way back and forth between the front and back seats a few times while I waited for the defroster to warm up. Then we went, and he settled for the front seat, as I had known he would, and he sat with his nose against the window I had opened a little so he could get some cold air.

  “They sometimes shoot the shit out of the house,” I told him. “Blow up the cat and the dog and the fish tank and then they do the wife. When they see how dead she is, they get filled with sadness. The poor little kids, how am I gonna tell them what I did to Mommy? So they do the kids. Then, they either do themselves or they go on TV.”

  The highway branches a few miles outside of town, to the north, and you can either take the lefthand fork and go to school or the hospital or, say, Virginia’s house or you can take the right and go a dozen miles to the little farm road that dips west and takes you into the river end of Chenango Flats. I didn’t know until we came to the fork which way I would go. I went to the right, away from Fanny, away from school. I went toward where the Tanners slept.

  But they didn’t, or they didn’t appear to. Lights were on downstairs, and I thought I saw a shadow move on a wall of their living room, which looked onto the shallow front lawn that ran to the road. I drove past and looked at Strodemaster’s: no lights, no motion, a sleeping house. I was envious, and I thought I might stop the car and lie in the backseat a while. But I realized I was tired, not sleepy, and I didn’t think a nap had anything to do with my kind of fatigue. I drove on to the church and made a U-turn and parked in front of it.

  “Sometimes,” I said, “they go into churches and shoot up God and recite poetry and then they surrender themselves. It takes them maybe thirty seconds to figure out the God they had in mind didn’t notice.”

  I started up again and turned on my lights. I drove very slowly toward the Tanners’ and I saw their lights were off. I pictured Mrs. Tanner coming downstairs, or the Reverend Tanner rushing downstairs, to get her medicine. I thought of her face in its pain. I backed up very slowly and looked over toward Strodemaster’s. His house was dark, too, and now the Tanners’ was dark, and the only lighted house I could think of where someone might want to talk about girls gone missing was my own. I drove home to talk myself to sleep.

  briefs

  IN THE HOSPITAL parking lot, the dog sat with his nose out the window while I drowsed behind the wheel. I hadn’t slept much, what with my driving around to shut-down towns and my sipping more sour mash, and I’d made myself waken early because I wanted to be here when Fanny came off shift.

  “Sometimes,” I told him, “they go after their estranged wife and they shoot up the hospital, the parking lot, the family dog, and then themselves. You sure you should be here?”

  He ignored me. He knew we were waiting for something, and he didn’t want to miss it. He kept his nose out the window, flaring at whatever was on the wind. I saw her first because he was so near-sighted. She was walking directly to her car, behind which I happened to be parked. The sky was gray-yellow, and I found myself hoping for snow, since I’d been predicting that it never would end. Then he saw her, and his tail began to go, and then he bounded into the backseat, over it, and back to the tailgate, and then he came back to half-stand on the seat beside me, winding his hind end into his tail.

  She saw us. She slowed, then picked up her pace and went to her car. She held on to its door handle and then she came over. I rolled my window down. He came across me, leaned in fast to be sure and dent a rib, and then he was outside and up and down beside her. They do look like they’re smiling, and she was smiling back. I got out of the Ford and stood beside it, not sure whether I ought to approach her. But nurses look it in the face and they act. She walked to the passenger’s side and got in. I took a breath and got behind the wheel.

  “Good morning,” she said. She was looking me over. I waited. She leaned in and sniffed. “You’re a little disheveled, Jack.”

  “I had sour mash for dessert last night.”

  “You’d been staying away from it for some time, too. That’s a shame.”

  “A couple of months, I think. But it tasted good.”

  “Well, good, I guess. I hope you didn’t do anything dumb.”

  “Oh, I probably did, Fanny. How’s work?”

  “Jack, it’s been two days.”

  “It seems longer.”

  “I’m a tough habit to break, huh?”

  I nodded. “You like the room?”

  “I think of it as an apartment. That way, it doesn’t feel as small.”

  “It’s small?”

  “If I had a pet, say a gerbil or a parakeet, we’d have to take turns sleeping there.”

  “Good thing you don’t have a pet, the
n.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “it worked out. I see you’re driving with a partner these days.”

  “Jesus, Fanny, I got so screwed up on campus what with one thing and another, I didn’t get home until so late last night, he must have thought he was abandoned.”

  “One thing and another,” she said. “You’re still keeping the peace and finding the child.”

  “Janice Tanner.”

  “I know her name, Jack.” She yawned and folded her arms across her chest and let her eyes close. “She’s what screwed you up on campus? The kid who never set foot there? God. You’re so fucking transparent. You do something you feel bad about, and you tell me inside of hours. I mean, it’s twenty years, Jack. I know you. What’d you do that you had to come and confess about?”

  The dog, I think, took this line of questioning as an example of interrogator’s art, and he banged his tail against the backseat, where he sat watching Fanny.

  I said, “I wanted to see you, that’s all.”

  She stared ahead, as though we were moving.

  “There’s plenty of space at the house, Fanny. I don’t have any boarders or anything.”

  I was thinking of Fanny alone in a room and me coming up the stairs in my socks. I was thinking of the echo of her cry in my head as I ran. I was so late getting there. I knew it on the way. I was running underwater, like somebody was dreaming it and I was in their dream. And then I got down the hall and to the door and pulled myself around and through the doorway to find them.

  I said, “What?”

  Fanny, beside me in the car, sat looking at me. She seemed very tired, and her face was defenseless.

  “I didn’t say anything,” she said.

  “I thought I heard you say something.”

  “You were over the left-field wall,” she said. “You were far away. Where was that?”

  I shook my head. Then I said, “Couldn’t you come home? I don’t think we’ll get it done this way.”