I had to grind the rest of the way, from the cemetery, in four-wheel low, and in spite of the cold I was smoking my gearbox by the time I was close enough to the quarry—they really did take a lot of the rocks for the campus buildings from there—to see I’d have to make my way on foot to where she was. It was a kind of scooped-out shape, maybe four or five stories high, where she stood—well, wobbled is more like it. She was as chalky as she’d been the last time, and her red hair didn’t catch the light anymore. It just lay on her like something that had died on top of her head. She was in a white nightgown that was plastered to her body. She had her arms crossed as if she wanted to be warm. She swayed, kind of, in front of the big, dark, scooped-out rock face, where the trees and brush had been cleared for trucks and earthmovers. She looked tiny against all the darkness. From where I stood, I could see the snow driving down in front of the lights I’d left on, but I couldn’t see it near her. All it looked like around her was dark. She was shaking with the cold, and she was crying.
I had a blanket with me, and I shoved it down the front of my coat to keep it dry for her, and because I was so cold. I waved. I stood in the lights and I waved. I don’t know what she saw—a big shadow, maybe. I surely didn’t reassure her, because when she saw me she backed up, until she was near the face of the quarry. She couldn’t go any farther.
I called, “Hello! I brought a blanket. Are you cold? I thought you might want a blanket.”
Her roommates had told the operator about pills, so I didn’t bring her the coffee laced with mash. I figured I didn’t have all that much time, anyway, to get her down and pumped out. The booze with whatever pills she’d taken would made her die that much faster.
I hated that word. Die. It made me furious with her. I heard myself seething when I breathed. I pulled my scarf and collar up above my mouth. I didn’t want her to see how close I might come to wanting to kill her because she wanted to die.
I called, “Remember me?”
I was closer now. I could see the purple mottling of her skin. I didn’t know if it was cold or dying. It probably didn’t matter much to distinguish between them right now, I thought. That made me smile. I felt the smile, and I pulled the scarf down so she could look at it. She didn’t seem awfully reassured.
“You’re the sexual harassment guy,” she said. She said it very slowly. Her lips were clumsy. It was like looking at a ventriloquist’s dummy.
“I gave you an A,” I said.
“When?”
“It’s a joke,” I said. “You don’t want me making jokes. You want me to give you a nice warm blanket, though. And then you want me to take you home.”
She leaned against the rock face when I approached. I pulled the blanket out, then zipped my jacket back up. The snow had stopped, I realized, and that wasn’t really a very good sign. It felt like an arctic cold descending in its place. I held the blanket out to her, but she only looked at it.
“You’ll just have to turn me in,” I said. “I’m gonna hug you again.”
She screamed, “No more! I don’t want any more hugs!”
But she kept her arms on her chest, and I wrapped the blanket around her and stuffed a piece into each of her tight, small fists. I didn’t know what to do for her feet. Finally, I got down on my haunches in front of her. She crouched down too, protecting herself.
“No,” I said. “No. You’re fine.”
I took off the woolen mittens I’d been wearing. Mittens keep you warmer than gloves because they trap your hand’s heat around the fingers and palms at once. Fanny had knitted them for me. I put a mitten as far onto each of her feet as I could. She let me. She was going to collapse, I thought.
“Now, let’s go home,” I said. “Let’s get you better.”
With her funny, stiff lips, she said, “I’ve been very self-indulgent and weird and I’m sorry. But I’d really like to die.” She sounded so reasonable that I found myself nodding in agreement as she spoke.
“You can’t just die,” I said.
“Aren’t I dying already? I took all of them, and then”—she giggled like a child, which of course is what she was—“I borrowed different ones from other people’s rooms. See, this isn’t some teenage cry for like help. Understand? I’m seriously interested in death and I have to like stay out here a little longer and fall asleep. All right?”
“You can’t do that,” I said. “You ever hear of Vietnam?”
“I saw that movie,” she said. “With the opera in it? Apocalypse? Whatever.”
“I was there!” I said. “I killed people! I helped to kill them! And when they die, you see their bones later on. You dream about their bones and blood on the ends of the splintered ones, and this kind of mucous stuff coming out of their eyes. You probably heard of guys having dreams like that, didn’t you? Whacked-out Vietnam vets? That’s me, see? So I’m telling you, I know about dead people and their eyeballs and everything falling out. And people keep dreaming about the dead people they knew, see? You can’t make people dream about you like that! It isn’t fair!”
“You dream about me?” She was ready to go. She was ready to fall down, and I was going to lift her up and get her to the truck.
“I will,” I said. “If you die.”
“I want you to,” she said. Her lips were hardly moving now. Her eyes were closed. “I want you all to.”
I dropped my shoulder and put it into her waist and picked her up and carried her down to the Bronco. She was talking, but not a lot, and her voice leaked down my back. I jammed her into the truck and wrapped the blanket around her better and then put another one down around her feet. I strapped her in with the seat belt. She was shaking, and her eyes were closed and her mouth open. She was breathing. I checked that twice, once when I strapped her in, and then again when I strapped myself in and backed up hard into a sapling and took it down. I got us into first gear, held the clutch in, leaned over to listen for breathing, heard it—shallow panting, like a kid asleep on your lap for a nap—and then I put the gear in and howled down the hillside on what I thought might be the road.
We passed the cemetery. I told her that was a good sign. She didn’t respond. I found myself panting too, as if we were breathing for each other. It made me dizzy, but I couldn’t stop. We passed the highest dorm, and I dropped the truck into four-wheel high. The cab smelled like burnt oil and hot metal. We were past the chapel now, and the observatory, the president’s house, then the bookstore. I had the blue light winking and the V-6 roaring, and I drove on the edge of out-of-control, sensing the skids just before I slid into them, and getting back out of them as I needed to. I took a little fender off once, and a bit of the corner of a classroom building, but I worked us back on course, and all I needed to do now was negotiate the sharp left turn around the Administration Building past the library, then floor it for the straight run to the town’s main street and then the hospital.
I was panting into the mike, and the operator kept saying, “Say again?”
I made myself slow down some, and I said we’d need stomach pumping, and to get the names of the pills from her friends in the dorm, and I’d be there in less than five or we were crumpled up someplace and dead.
“Roger,” the radio said. “Roger all that.” My throat tightened and tears came into my eyes. They were helping us, they’d told me: Roger.
I said to the girl, whose head was slumped and whose face looked too blue all through its whiteness, “You know, I had a girl once. My wife, Fanny. She and I had a small girl one time.”
I reached over and touched her cheek. It was cold. The truck swerved, and I got my hands on the wheel. I’d made the turn past the Ad Building using just my left. “I can do it in the dark,” I sang to no tune I’d ever learned. “I can do it with one hand.” I said to her, “We had a girl child, very small. Now, I do not want you dying.”
I came to the campus gates doing fifty on the ice and snow, smoking the engine, grinding the clutch, and I bounced off a wrought iron fence to give me
the curve going left that I needed. On a pool table, it would have been a bank shot worth applause. The town cop picked me up and got out ahead of me and let the street have all the lights and noise it could want. We banged up to the emergency room entrance and I was out and at the other door before the cop on duty, Elmo St. John, could loosen his seat belt. I loosened hers, and I carried her into the lobby of the ER. They had a gurney, and doctors, and they took her away from me. I tried to talk to them, but they made me sit down and do my shaking on a dirty sofa decorated with drawings of little spinning wheels. Somebody brought me hot coffee, I think it was Elmo, but I couldn’t hold it.
“They won’t,” he kept saying to me. “They won’t.”
“What?”
“You just been sitting there for a minute and a half like St. Vitus dancing, telling me, ‘Don’t let her die. Don’t let her die.’”
“Oh.”
“You all right?”
“How about the kid?”
“They’ll tell us soon.”
“She better be all right.”
“That’s right.”
“She—somebody’s gonna have to tell me plenty if she isn’t.”
“That’s right.”
“She better not die this time,” I guess I said.
FANNY CAME DOWNSTAIRS to look for me. I was at the northern windows, looking through the mullions down the valley to the faint red line along the mounds and little peaks of the ridge beyond the valley. The sun was going to come up, and I was looking for it.
Fanny stood behind me. I could hear her. I could smell her hair and the sleep on her. The crimson line widened, and I squinted at it. I heard the dog limp in behind her, catching up. He panted and I knew why his panting sounded familiar. She put her hands on my shoulders and arms. I made muscles to impress her with, and then I let them go, and let my head drop down until my chin was on my chest.
“I didn’t think you’d be able to sleep after that,” Fanny said.
“I brought enough adrenaline home to run a football team.”
“But you hate being a hero, huh? You’re hiding in here because somebody’s going to call, or come over, and want to talk to you—her parents for shooting sure, sooner or later. Or is that supposed to be part of the service up at the playground? Saving their suicidal daughters. Almost dying to find them in the woods and driving too fast for any weather, much less what we had last night. Getting their babies home. The bastards.” She was crying. I knew she would be, sooner or later. I could hear the soft sound of her lashes. She sniffed and I could feel her arm move as she felt for the tissues on the coffee table.
“I have them over here,” I said. “On the windowsill.”
“Yes.” She blew her nose, and the dog thumped his tail. He seemed to think it one of Fanny’s finer tricks, and he had wagged for her for thirteen years whenever she’d done it. “Well, you’re going to have to talk to them.”
“I will,” I said. “I will.” The sun was in our sky now, climbing. We had built the room so we could watch it climb. “I think that jackass with the smile, my prof? She showed up a lot at his office, the last few weeks. He called her ‘my advisee,’ you know? The way those guys sound about what they’re achieving by getting up and shaving and going to work and saying the same thing every day? Every year? Well, she was his advisee, I bet. He was shoving home the old advice.”
“She’ll be okay,” Fanny said. “Her parents will take her home and love her up and get her some help.” She began to cry again, then she stopped. She blew her nose, and the dog’s tail thumped. She kept a hand between my shoulder and my neck. “So tell me what you’ll tell a waiting world. How’d you talk her out?”
“Well, I didn’t, really. I got up close and picked her up and carried her is all.”
“You didn’t say anything?”
“Sure I did. Kid’s standing in the snow outside of a lot of pills, you’re gonna say something.”
“So what’d you say?”
“I told her stories,” I said. “I did Rhetoric and Persuasion.”
Fanny said, “Then you go in early on Thursday, you go in half an hour early, and you get that guy to jack up your grade.”
ORBITS
IS VISITING old parents like visiting old friends? Ginger and Charlie were talking about her mother and father while hot, wet wind poured into the car and took the sound of their voices away from one another. They kept calling, “What?” The radio was playing Haydn. They were driving up a hill and were at last in the shade for a while, were dropping into tired silence, when the station changed. Ginger looked at Charlie, but his hands were on the wheel and not the tuner. It was something in the air—radio waves or great explosions on the surface of the sun—or a secret hand in a secret place turning the dial invisibly from Haydn to an instant of rock and roll and to a voice that spat cruel syllables and then back to Haydn again, but with hissings, electrical squeaks.
Ginger said, “I’m turning it off.”
They drove without speaking. Charlie waited for the radiator or the battery or all of the tires to explode. Nothing happened. He took the proper turns, and they were there when they’d said they would be.
Charlie had for twenty-five years thought of Ginger’s mother as someone who strode. Now she walked slowly, with a kind of sideways hitch in her pace. She had broken a leg two years before, and though she was recovered, she also wasn’t. While she had moved about, she’d been safe, he thought. But because she’d been pinned to a chair for some months, whatever it was that one fled had caught her. Her thin lips twisted as if the leg, or her sense of what Charlie was seeing, gave her pain. Ginger’s father, once a tall, athletic man, now was curving at the shoulders and walked with uncertainty, as if his balance were afflicted. The hardening arteries that isolated his heart were also affecting his feet: a man filled with blood could still not get enough where it was needed, and he walked as if his feet were tender, bruised. It seemed as though a wind were blowing at him, at both of them, and that each time it gusted they were almost knocked down.
They all hugged. Ginger and Charlie reported on their daughters; one was in a dance camp for the summer, the other was a waitress at a bar near Provincetown. Ginger’s father said, in his deepest professional voice—he had been a labor negotiator—that he still didn’t like the idea of Sue Ellen’s working in a saloon.
“It’s a respectable resort, Daddy,” Ginger said when they sat on the porch and drank tall drinks. Insects buzzed at the screen. The leaves hung limp on the maples. Her father opened the collar of his dark knitted sports shirt. He rubbed at the V of his pale chest as if to wipe away the heat. Charlie knew that batteries in a pacemaker underneath the chest were beating this man’s heart.
Ginger’s mother said, “He thinks Sue Ellen’s twelve years old.”
“Add seven,” Charlie said. “Actually, add about twenty-five. I’m not thinking about anything. I’m trusting her. She’s a great kid. Trust is—”
“I can’t wait for it,” Ginger said.
“Overrated,” Charlie said.
“I always trusted Ginger,” her mother said.
“Yes,” Charlie said, “but you learned your lesson, didn’t you?”
They were laughing now, at what wasn’t funny, at what was only another way of naming what scared them, and they were not talking about her parents’ health or their growing burden: this large Colonial house and its twenty acres; the garden, which demanded tending; the lawn, which Charlie would mow in the morning—the general maintenance, kept up only by hiring strangers, at whose mercy they more and more were. They drank their drinks, they told each other news. Ginger and her mother left, refusing offers to help with making dinner. Ginger’s father watched Charlie pour more gin, and he accepted soda water with lemon, and they sat and listened to catbirds shriek. They talked about Aida, the younger girl, who did tap, ballet, modern, and even ballroom dancing at the camp in the Berkshires. Charlie spoke of missing Aida but also of his pleasure at being alone with Ginger
for a summer. Ginger’s father, in turn, spoke of how they still sometimes realized all over again that Ginger didn’t live with them. He said it gently, then shook his head, as if to signal how absurd he thought himself to be.
“Fathers,” Charlie said.
“The softest, most demanding species of man,” his wife’s father said. “Nothing’s worse.” He adjusted a cushion at his back. Charlie watched his father-in-law’s biceps and forearms under the pale skin. There was good muscle, but the skin was softening. He looked at its scabs and bruises, moles and spots and furrows, puckers.
“You did a good job,” Charlie said.
“You’re kind to say it. I did try to shut up a great deal.”
“I wish I could learn to do that.”
“Well, you will. The girls won’t listen to you, and Ginger’ll grow weary of hearing you say what nobody needs to hear, and you’ll become a quiet man. Surprise. People will talk about how quiet you’ve become.”
“You know,” Charlie said, “nothing’s wrong. I’m loving how they’re growing up. Ginger and I are fine. There isn’t anything really wrong.”
Her father, who had more hair on top of his head than Charlie did, smoothed it over, pushed it into place, and folded his hands in his lap. The lap disappears, too, Charlie noticed: you become a stick figure drawn by a kid. Her father said, “Don’t worry about it, Charlie. I’m making you nervous. Old people seem to have that effect, sometimes.”
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 13