The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  He pushed me back, but held on to my shoulders. I didn’t look at his round white face, which I knew would be grinning while his dark little eyes studied me intently. I stared at his light brown sharkskin suit, the vest across which he always wore a gold chain that rose and fell according to his progress through dangerous diets. His tie, I remember, was maroon wool with small tan figures on it. I wonder if he was studying me the way I studied his tie. I couldn’t look at his face. I only remember it from other days, because I didn’t see it again.

  He said, “You want to forgive them.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t play stupid. You’re the brightest boy I ever knew. You know who I mean.”

  “Why should I forgive them? What for?”

  “For not being happy.”

  I pulled away, and he let my shoulders go. I was surprised, and nearly fell, but I stood my ground. I looked, still, at his turned-up cuffs, his narrow short shoes, polished to a gloss. I couldn’t look farther up, but I stayed where I was and said, “No.”

  “No, you won’t forgive them? Or no, they’re not unhappy?”

  “No!”

  “Sweetheart,” he said. He sighed. “Who am I to tell you? But I know something. Listen, when you’re naked you are naked. Understand? All you are is—naked.” He grunted as he moved his arms. I had closed my eyes by then. He said, “It’s eight fifteen. Lie down, listen to the radio, get yourself some sleep. By the morning, by half-past seven, you’re gonna feel wonderful about the world. I swear it!” His arms pulled me in toward him, but I resisted. I didn’t know why. I don’t. “You’ll feel great,” he said. He squeezed as much as his little arms allowed, and he went out. It is a law of brain development that you will, when grown, remember every departure by every person to whom you should have called goodbye, and whom you ought to have embraced, and on whose cheeks you could have dispensed a couple of the dammed-up tears you persist in hoarding. I heard him on the steps.

  Fed and sheltered, surrounded by what I had picked for my pleasure, and sullen because the people downstairs were getting along as best they could in their sad, short lives, I decided always to live alone when I grew up. And then I turned the radio on and listened to Henry Morgan’s show and laughed. At 7:30 in the morning, true to Rudy’s word, I woke. I looked through glowing green leaves at a Sunday sky under which a boy played stickball or he died. He didn’t. And he did grow up to learn how everyone, no matter who has loved him for good or for ill, no matter whom he loves, is faithful to that cruel and careless, easy childhood vow.

  DOG SONG

  HE ALWAYS THOUGHT of the dogs as the worst. The vet’s belly heaved above his jeans, and he cursed in words of one syllable every time a deputy tugged a dog to the hypodermic, or trotted to keep up as a different one strained on its chain for its fate, or when a dog stopped moving and went stiff, splayed, and then became a loose furry bag with bones inside. The deputies and the vet and the judge, who also did his part—he watched without moving—did it twenty-six times, in the yard behind the sheriff’s offices. The air stank of dirty fur and feces as though they were all locked in. The yelping and whining went on. When they were through, one deputy was weeping, and the vet’s red flannel shirt was wet with sweat from his breastbone to his belt. The deputies threw the dogs into the back of a van.

  They might be dangerous, Snuyder had decided. They might have been somehow perverted, trained to break some basic rules of how to live with men. So they had died. And Snuyder, doing his part, had watched them until the last lean mutt, shivering and funny-eyed, was dead. He thought, when he thought of the dogs, that their lips and tails and even their postures had signaled their devotion to the vet or to one of the deputies; they’d been waiting for a chance to give their love. And as the deputies flung them, the dogs’ tongues protruded and sometimes flopped. When their bodies flew, they looked ardent.

  The dogs in the yellow trailer had drawn the attention of the people in the white trailer across the unpaved rural road: their howling, their yapping, the whining that sometimes went on and on and on. Lloyd and Pris, the man and wife in the trailer with the dogs, came and went at curious hours, and that too attracted the attention of the neighbors, who had their own problems, but somehow found time—being good country Christians, they made time—to study the erratic behavior and possible social pathology of the couple in the bright yellow trailer edged in white, propped on cinder blocks, bolstered against upstate winters by haybales pushed between the plastic floor and the icy mud. The neighbors, one working as a janitress, the other as a part-time van driver for the county’s geriatric ferrying service, finally called the sheriff when there was a February thaw, and the mud all of a sudden looked awfully like manure, and an odor came up from the yellow trailer that, according to the janitress (a woman named Ivy), was too much like things long dead to be ignored by a citizen of conscience.

  But only one of the dogs was dead, and it died after the deputies had kicked the door in, and after it had attacked and had been shot. It died defending a mobile home that was alive with excrement and garbage. Turds lay on the beds and on the higher surfaces, counter and sink. Madness crawled the walls. Lloyd, the husband, had written with dung his imprecations of a county and state and nation that established laws involving human intercourse with beasts. Twenty-six dogs were impounded, and the couple was heavily fined by the judge.

  The awful part, of course, had been the dogs’ dull eyes and duller coats, their stink, their eagerness to please, and then their fear, and then the way they had died. Later he decided that the nurse with her hair that was thinning and her arms puffed out around the short, tight sleeves of her hissing uniform was the worst part so far. The first sight Richard Snuyder had seen, when he fell awake like a baby rolling from its crib, had been a man on crutches at his door, peering. The man had sucked on an unlit filter cigarette, adjusted his armpits on the crutches, and said, “I heard you did one jam-jar of a job. Just thought I’d say so. I was raised to express my appreciation of the passing joys.”

  Snuyder, hours later, had thought that the man on crutches, apparently a connoisseur of catastrophe, was the worst. He wasn’t. The worst became the orderly who brought in a plate of mashed potatoes and open hot roast-beef sandwich in glutinous gravy, who was chased by the nurse who brought the doctor, whose odor of dark, aged sweat and stale clothing did little to dispel that of the roast beef, which lingered in the room as if the pale orderly had hurled it on the walls to punish Snuyder for being on a liquid diet.

  The doctor, who had mumbled and left, Snuyder thought for a while, was really the worst part of it: his dandruff, his caustic smell, his dirty knuckles that gave the lie to the large scraped moons of fingernail above the tortured cuticles. This is the worst, Snuyder had thought, though not for long.

  Because then the candy striper with her twitchy walk and bored pout had stood at his door, a clipboard in her hand and an idle finger at her ear, though carefully never in it, and had looked at him as though he weren’t open-eyed, blinking, panting with pain, clearly stunned and afraid and as lost while being still as dogs are that stand at the side of the road, about to be killed because they don’t know what else they should do.

  After the candy striper had left, the balding nurse with great arms, and no need for such forms of address as language spoken or mimed, came in to adjust something at his head and something at his leg. His neck didn’t roll, so he couldn’t follow her movements except with his eyes, which began to ache and then stream. Looking at his legs, she wiped his eyes and took the tissue away. He was about to ask her questions but couldn’t think of anything that didn’t embarrassingly begin with Where or How.

  He tried to move his legs. That was next, as soon as the nurse left. He worked at wiggling his toes and each foot and each leg. They moved, though they were restrained by something, and he called aloud—it was a relief, during the cry, to hear his own voice and to know that he knew it—because the right leg was pure pain, undifferentiated, and the left
, though more flexible, hurt only a little less. His legs, and the stiffness at the neck, his aching eyes and head, a burning on the skin of his face, the waking to no memory of how he had come there, or why, or when, or in what state: he was the worst so far. He suspected that little would happen to challenge this triumph. He’d been born someplace, of an unknown event, and every aspect of his arrival on this naked day could be measured against the uncomforting hypothesis that, among the local discomforts he knew, he himself was the worst.

  His legs could not be moved, he could not be persuaded to move them again, and he lay with all his attention on his torso, thinking I will be just chest and balls, I will not be legs or ankles or toes. He panicked and felt for his legs, then moved an ankle—he yelped—in response to his fear: he did have his legs, and they would move at his command, he wasn’t only a chest. And balls? He groaned his fear, and groaned for the pain in his legs, and then he groaned with deep contentment: he had found them under his hospital gown, both of them, and everything else, including the dreadful catheter. So all he needed to know now was when he would stop hurting over most of his body, and why and how he was here. All right. First things first. You have legs, your balls are where you left them, and a little panic is worth a handful of testes during times of trial.

  I have not gone berserk with worry for my wife, he thought.

  Do I have a wife?

  How do I know my name, if I don’t know whether I’m married? How did I know about balls? Are you born with a full knowledge of the scrotum? So that even during amnesia, you still—

  I don’t want amnesia.

  I don’t want to be a pendulum in a ward, swinging on crutches and sucking on cold cigarettes and laughing at people forever and never remembering.

  What about my kids, if I do have kids?

  The same nurse, with thin dark hair and wide white arms, was at the head of his bed, looking into his eyes this time as she wiped them. She had the voice of a twelve-year-old girl, and the teeth of someone long dead. She said, “Mr. Snuyder? Do you remember you’re Mr. Snuyder?”

  He tried to nod. The pain made him hiss.

  “We’ll give you something for pain after we X-ray your head again. But could you tell me if you know your name?”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Yes. And your name?”

  “Woke up knowing it was Snuyder.”

  “Good boy!”

  “Woke up. Found out I had my scrotum, and I never knew if I had any children or a wife.” He was crying. He hated it.

  “You’ll remember,” she said. “You’ll probably remember. You did take out a telephone pole and a good I say at least half of a Great American Markets rig. Worcestershire sauce and mustard and beerwurst smeared over two lanes for a quarter of a mile. If you don’t mind glass, you could make a hell of a sandwich out there, they said.”

  “Kill anybody? Did I kill anybody?”

  “Not unless you die on us. The truck was parked. Trucker was—how do you want to put it?—banging the lady of the house? You must of pulled a stupendous skid. The troopers’ll be by to talk about it.”

  “Did you look in my wallet?”

  “Doctor’ll be by too. I’m off-duty now.”

  “You don’t want to tell me about my family? There wasn’t anybody with me, was there?”

  “You’re supposed to remember on your own. There wasn’t anybody killed. You take care now.”

  “Won’t dance with anyone else.”

  “Good boy.”

  “Wait,” he said. “Wait a minute.” He winced. He lay back. He heard himself breathe.

  She said, “That’s right. You lie down and be good. Good boy.”

  HE WOKE AGAIN, with a thump, waiting for the nurse to speak. He saw that she was gone, the room dark, the door closed. He couldn’t remember waking, ever before in his life, so abruptly, and with so much pain. And that wasn’t all he couldn’t remember. He thought baby, baby, baby to himself, as if in a rapture, and he tried to think of a lover or wife. Was he divorced? What about kids? He thought a gentler baby and looked within his closed eyes for children. He thought of maps—blank. He thought of cars and couldn’t see the one he’d driven. He remembered that the nurse had evaded the question of who had been with him. But at least she wasn’t dead.

  And how had he known that his passenger was a woman? And how could he know he was right?

  He was tired of questions and tired of hurting. He remembered, then, how they had rolled him through the halls for a CAT-scan and how, when he’d been rolled back, they had looked at him like magic people who could make him fall asleep, and he had fallen. He wanted more magic. He wanted to sleep some more and wake again and know one thing more. A woman in the car with him. Should she have been with him in the car? Should she have come with him to this room?

  And he woke again, one more question not answered, to see a light that sliced at his eyeballs and to hear a general commotion that suggested daytime and what he had doubtless once referred to as everyday life. The door opened in, and Hilary was inside with him, and through dry lips he said, “I remember you!”

  She said, “Can you see how little I’m cheered by that?”

  No: she started to; he finished her statement in his mind, fed by memory, and he smiled so triumphantly, his face hurt. In fact, Hilary said, “Can you see—”

  And he said, “Hilary. Hil.”

  She shook her head as if winged insects were at her, and then she wept into her wide, strong hands, walking slowly toward him, a child at a hiding game. But she was not a child and there were no children—not here, anyway, because the boys were at school, of course, and he and Hilary, Richard and Hilary Snuyder, were alone, they were each forty-seven years old, and they were working at being alone together while Warren and Hank went to school in other states. The states were other because this one was New York. Hilary was tall, and she wore her pea jacket, so it must be autumn, and her upper lip came down on the lower one as if she wanted to make love. Richard did, then, and his hand went down to grip himself in celebration where it had earlier prodded for loss. “Hilary,” he said. The catheter guarded his loins, and his hand retreated.

  She wiped at her eyes and sat on the chair beside the bed.

  “Come sit on the bed,” he said.

  She sat back. She crossed her legs and he looked with a sideways glance to see her jeans and Wallabees. His eyes stung, so he looked up. He sniffed, expecting to smell perfume or soap. He smelled only gravy and the finger-chewing doctor. And Hilary said, “How could you decide on—going away like that?” She said, “How could you do that? No matter what?”

  “Hil, I’m having a hell of a time remembering things. I didn’t remember you until you came in, the boys and you and—would you tell me stuff? You know, to kind of wake me up some more? I don’t remember going anyplace. They said I smacked the car up.”

  Hilary stood, and something on her sweet, pale face made him move. The motion made him whimper, and she smiled with genuine pleasure. Her long hand, suspended above him, was trembling. He felt her anger. His penis burned. He closed his eyes but opened them at once. He was afraid of her hand descending to seize him as if in love or recollected lust, but then to squeeze, to crush the catheter and leave him coughing up his pain and bleeding up into the blanket. He saw her playing the piano with strong bloody hands, leaving a trail of blood on the keys.

  She said, “I have to go outside until I calm down. I’ll go outside and then I’ll be back. Because unlike you I do not run out on the people I love. Loved. But I’ll leave you a clue. You want to remember things? You want a little trail of bread crumbs you can follow back into your life? How about this, Richard: you drove our fucking car as hard as you could into a telephone pole so you could die. Is that a little crust of some usefulness? So you could leave me forever on purpose. Have I helped?”

  THE AWFUL DOCTOR came back again, adding the insult of his breath to the injury of his armpits. He was thick, with a drooping heavy chest and sh
oulders that came down at a very sharp angle, so that his thick neck looked long. His fingers were large, and the knuckles looked dirtier now—this morning, tonight, whenever it was that the doctor stood at the bed, telling Richard where the orthopedic surgeon was going to insert pins of assorted sizes and alloys into the hip and femur, which the instrument panel had cracked in an interesting way. The neck was all right. The back was all right. The head seemed all right, though you never can tell with the brain. A little rancid laugh, a flicker of motion across the big jowls and their five o’clock shadow. And the ribs, of course, although CAT pictures showed no danger to the lungs. “You’ll be bound.”

  “I’m a judge,” Snuyder said.

  “Good man.”

  “I’m a district judge with a house in the suburbs and a wife and two kids and two cars. Three cars. We have an old Volvo my son Hank fixed up. A ’67 Volvo. It runs pretty well, but it’s rusted out. Bound over—you say that when—”

  “Yes, you’re a judge. Good man. I was talking about a restraint for the ribs, is all. Two ribs. You’re lucky.”

  “Of course, I’m lucky. And I didn’t aim to hit some telephone pole.”

  “You remember what happened?”

  “No. But I wouldn’t have. People with a—people like me don’t do that.”

  The doctor looked bitter and weary. “No,” he said. “I can call the rescue squad, if you like, and ask them to take you back and drop you off at your car. I’d have to call the garage and tell them that it isn’t telescoped. Totaled. All but small enough to use for a Matchbox toy if the grandchildren come over. Of course, you’ll probably benefit by using less gas in it from now on.”

  Richard blushed. He couldn’t shut up, though. He said, “I meant suicide.”

  “I know.”