The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  “The team?”

  He nodded.

  “Why?”

  “It isn’t any fun anymore.”

  I drove us up into the hills. The sun was down, the sky was low and dirty-looking. It would snow, and the snow would stick, and in the morning we would have to dig the car out.

  “We’ll need firewood brought in tonight,” I said.

  “Will you let me?”

  “Quit the team?”

  “Yeah.”

  He was big and handsome, my gaunt boy. His hair grew low on his forehead, and it was curly, and he hated it. He was always plucking at it, as if he could force it to straighten. I noticed him doing that on the court one night, before he told me not to come anymore. I saw that the worse he failed to set a screen or pass the ball off, the more he smoothed the hair on his neck, or pushed it alongside his temples, or repeatedly pulled at the ripples of his curls. Cheryl, who was ten years younger than I, and maybe ten years tougher, had said, “He’s as pretty as your wife must have been. He’s got a woo-woo body like you, but he’s as pretty as you are plain. Matter of fact, when I compare him to you, I wonder what it is you do have. You got legs,” she’d said. And when I’d looked down at my feet, Cheryl had said, “I mean legs. You keep on going. You last. You aren’t flashy, but you last. You know?”

  I didn’t, because I hadn’t. She’d gone too, and I had heard she lived with the manager of a big sporting goods store. He drove a car that was famous among the younger chemists and junior executives at the firm because it was as tastelessly painted as any car they’d seen. Cheryl was almost stocky, but not fat, and she loved clothes too tight for her powerful thighs and thick waist. Her hair was bright blond, and she’d look you in the eye and talk to you hard, but rarely mean. She had made me feel optimistic. She had left because the feeling was a lie. “I just hate sitting around being pale,” she said, “you know?”

  I said to Duane in the car as the first flakes fell on the windshield, “No. You stay. You fight it.”

  “Fight what?”

  “Whatever’s getting at you. Was practice bad?”

  “The two minutes I scrimmaged weren’t bad.”

  “Are you convincing him you lost it, or did he think so in the first place?”

  “I didn’t lose it.”

  “You can play basketball?”

  He nodded his head.

  “So go play basketball. You don’t quit.”

  “How can I play basketball on the bench?”

  “Sit up extra straight.”

  I insisted that we eat together that night, and I forced him to help me cook. He carefully planted his elbows on the table and let his mouth grow slack. I heard his food grow pulpy in his teeth. I refused to react. In Brooklyn, we had called it a game face: the stony eyes and unexpressive mouth with which you showed your opponent on the court that you knew no fear, could run forever without panting, and hadn’t worried about anything for over a year. Duane wore his, and I wore mine. We choked down our overcooked hamburgers in silence, and I washed the same six dishes over slowly, until he went up to his homework.

  It was, for an instant that night, as if Jackie were away but in reach. I wanted to call her and ask what she would do if she lived with a troubled son as so many mothers do. I wanted to ask her what we, as parents, really thought. I’d often not known until she’d told me. Cheryl always had an opinion, and Duane had always known it, resented it, fought it, but had always been impressed. When I’d admitted to him, one weekend, that Cheryl and I were apart, he’d said, “Now you’ll have to figure out my curfew on your own.”

  I went upstairs now to his room and I knocked. He mumbled something, and I opened his door into the hot, heavy air of caged adolescent. U-2 sang songs of social concern he played loudly, and a lifetime of underwear and long-legged jeans lay on the rug. I thought of photographs of airplane crash sites. He was on his bed, looking at a textbook page covered with diagrams. Then, as if he were timing himself, he slowly turned his head and raised his brows.

  I didn’t throw his jeans at him or shriek about attitudes or the impossibility of studying with such music on. I spoke softly, and he turned the tape player down and asked me to repeat myself. I did. “I said I wanted to apologize for that crack about sitting up straight. You can’t play ball while you’re on the bench and it feels lousy. I’m sorry you’re not playing a lot. I think you’re tensing up, psyching yourself out. I think it’s your mother, maybe me. You can play yourself out of that, I think. You can get your form back. You want me to talk to your coach?”

  “No.”

  “Because I will, Duane. I’ll do—”

  “No, thanks.”

  “—anything I can.”

  “No thanks.”

  I stood there and I nodded my head a lot. I said, “Well,” and nodded again. He had gone back to looking at the page. His hand reached out for the volume control and I did not speak of it. I backed up, and the door swung shut, as if his thoughts had gently closed it with a slow motion, a single click.

  Downstairs, I did what I always do when I have a problem to solve: I forced it into words. On a legal pad I took from my briefcase, I wrote his name at the top in capitals: DUANE. Then, beneath it, along the left-hand margin ruled in two red vertical lines, I wrote, in my finest, firmest hand:

  DRUGS?

  ILLNESS?

  JACKIE?

  CHERYL?

  ME?

  TEAMMATES?

  BEING 15?

  SEX?

  COACHING?

  CLASSMATES?

  LIFE.

  I balled the list and I fed it to the wood stove. And so much for words.

  Cheryl had said, “You’re my first boyfriend who always wears a suit to work. Some guys wear sports jackets, you know, some kind of tweed or corduroy. But they can decide to wear a crewneck, or a sleeveless pullover. But you wear a whole suit, every day. I’m gonna be measuring people’s wardrobes against you from now on.”

  A year before, we’d been lying in bed, wearing my pajamas. Jackie had given them to me—navy blue with red piping, shipped upstate by Brooks Brothers. Duane had gone for the weekend to a friend’s house, probably to watch R-rated movies on the VCR. And Cheryl and I were drinking the wine she had brought and were talking about her favorite topic: Cheryl’s future. “I’m just gathering myself,” she loved to say. On the little TV screen in the bedroom, a late Friday night basketball game from L.A. was showing, and the slow motion replay of James Worthy exploding into a killer jam for two points plus the foul shot prompted Cheryl to point a stubby white finger at the black man panthering the ball. “I’m like him,” she’d said. “I’m gathering myself for something like that. One of these days, brother, wham!” I all but tore my pajama coat off her after that. And we were together for a strong, friendly several months.

  “I can’t be anybody’s medicine,” Cheryl had finally said.

  “Maybe you’re mine, though,” I’d told her.

  “Then maybe I don’t want to be. I don’t like sickness.”

  So I couldn’t call Jackie, and I couldn’t call Cheryl, and what I’d called to Duane hadn’t worked. It left me with myself, one-on-one.

  I quit work at midday, canceling a lunch date and a conference about the new German contraceptive foam we were marketing. I asked my assistant to deliver the Christmas issue of our magazine to the printer, and I went shopping. Past ski costumes and NFL shirts, in the back, near cardiac fitness machines and free-weight rigs, I found the backboard, basket, and pole I was looking for.

  Cheryl was there. I had known she would be. I told her, “I didn’t come in here to pester you, Cheryl.”

  She shook her head and her long hair swung. “I know that. You see? You’re putting yourself down. Still.”

  “I don’t mean to.”

  “I guess you don’t. But you do it. You’re so fuckin sad, dammit. Now you, suppose you tell me what you want and I’ll see if I can sell it to you and let’s us not have this discussion e
ver again in our lives. All right?”

  “A backboard and hoop to go on a metal pole,” I said.

  She pointed. “This one you were looking at already. You losing weight?”

  “Nope.”

  “My sweet ass you’re not. Are you sick? Are you in love?”

  She was wearing a black turtleneck, black shorts over black tights, low, soft white boots. I didn’t want to look like a man looking over a woman. So I studied the metal frame of the outdoor backboard, and I said, “No. No more love these days, Cheryl.”

  “You old bore. This one’s got fiberglass on one side, metal on the other. It goes on this two-piece pole, which is the full ten feet, Duane’ll love it for Christmas, and he deserves it, so you buy it for him. Is your life all right?”

  “I hear that yours is.”

  “Oh, Dave? We’re doing some kind of collision trip. He thinks we’re heading for marriage, and I know we aren’t, and he’s gonna bang smack into what’s what, and what’s not, and then we’ll be through.”

  “You don’t make it easy,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Nope. I never did.”

  When she looked at me again, I said, “You were always very nice to me, Cheryl. You were a pal.”

  “A pal,” she said. She inspected the cord of the basketball net. “How’s the Dude doing on the team? JV, is it?”

  “To tell you the truth, he wants to quit.”

  “Are they sitting him down, or is he playing bad? You tell him for me that coming up to JV at his age is a tough transition. He might do better on the freshman team.”

  “I don’t think he’d hear me if I told him.”

  “He does sound like a teenaged boy. You won’t let him quit?”

  “No.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. It must be tough at home, though, after practice and all. After the games.”

  “No more than any other undeclared war,” I said.

  She looked at me angrily. “That boy isn’t in a war, and you know it. He’s in his life. And that’s worse, I don’t wonder.”

  “Sure. It just makes some evenings very long.”

  She slapped her order pad onto the carton in which the backboard came. Then she lined her pen up alongside it. She put her hands on her waist, and then she sighed. For an instant she was silent, and then she asked, “Who do you talk about it with? You know, at the office and all.”

  “Nobody. You’d have guessed that.”

  “Well, I did,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, yourself.” She looked up, as if at the sun, or at a clock. She crossed her strong wrists in front of her and asked, “Would you like me to visit you guys sometimes?”

  She was looking at me, and I couldn’t look anyplace else except her broad, cheerful, muscular face with its two horizontal lines scored onto her brow that told how hard she had to work, sometimes, to smile. “I’ll take the set,” I said to her. “Pole, backboard, hoop. Is that a collapsible hoop? With those pins that release the hoop from the backboard if you get caught on it dunking or something?”

  She looked at me a little longer, then she said, “That’s right. What’d you do, get strong or something?”

  I said, “Anything but that, and you know it.”

  She was writing down the stock numbers of the display models. “You going to hire somebody with a backhoe to come on up after Christmas and plant that pole in the hard ground?”

  “You use a pickax,” I said. “You keep hacking with it, and you sweat like hell, I guess, and you do it. The ground’s not really frozen yet.”

  She looked into my eyes again. She said, “I can still make you blush.”

  On Christmas morning, I woke up early. I always do. I went downstairs and made a pot of coffee. I lit the bulbs on the tree that I’d brought in on Christmas Eve to decorate alone. Duane had offered to help, and the cartons of balls and hangings, and our silence, had almost defeated me. I had forgotten how much we’d bought for Christmas, the silly spidery drawings that Duane had made in class to hang on the tree, and the little dolls from her childhood that Jackie had insisted, every year, we use. I omitted them. Duane remembered them and hung each one. On Christmas morning, I declared to the tree and the dolls, “I am getting better.” Then I lit the tree and called upstairs to Duane, and he came down with a sheepish expression. Anticipation, and childhood’s habitual Christmas Day gladness, the pleasure of greed fulfilled—all were eroding his set, stern face. He grinned at me, and I grinned back. “Merry Christmas, Duane,” I said. He stooped to lay his head near mine so I could kiss him. And from his bathrobe pocket, his gluey breath enveloping us, he took a little package and wordlessly bestowed it on me.

  While I unwrapped the cassette of Linda Ronstadt singing blues songs—the card, in Duane’s stringy hand, said, For a horny old guy—he tore open the three cartons containing his pole and backboard and hoop, as well as his lesser gifts (a Stephen King horror story, a poster of Julius Erving, a sports watch it would take a technician to start, a sultry aftershave, a Genesis tape, a terry-cloth sweatband). I went up to him, and he straightened and regarded me. I hugged him hard. He didn’t hug me back, but he rested his hands on my hips and let me squeeze his ribs. “Duane, I love you,” I said. I said my prayer: “We’re gonna be all right.”

  He nodded.

  I said, “You want some breakfast?”

  He shook his head. “I want to practice free throws,” he said. “Maybe he’ll play me if I get myself fouled a lot and make my free throws.”

  Duane, then, was outside on his cold stone court, practicing basketball while wearing gloves and a heavy sweatshirt and a woolen watch cap, looking to me like someone else’s child, a stevedore, a boxer in training, some man, and not my former baby. I sat inside, sneaking glimpses of him from the kitchen window when I went to fill my coffee cup.

  Up the packed dirt road from the south came a long white Trans Am with purple and black stripes that ran its length. It was the ultimate expression of tastelessness in cars. It went very slowly, and I could see, as it passed the house and went in the direction of our roadside barn, that Cheryl sat in the passenger seat, pointing.

  The car pulled in at the side of the road, and Cheryl emerged. The driver sat behind the wheel, and I could almost feel the motor throb over the side lawn, the cold air. She removed a postholer and a pickax from the trunk. They looked too heavy for her, but she marched with a springy step. She wore a man’s oversized jacket that said Yankees across the back. She went up to Duane and tugged his head down to her. I watched him allow her to kiss him. Then she talked about her plans, I guess, pointing at the edge of the ramp, and Duane shrugged, then nodded. Cheryl swung the pickax, and it bit. The ground wasn’t solid yet, so I knew she’d get into the earth. She did. That chunky body swung and swung, regularly, evenly, with strength I knew well. When she’d pulverized the rocky soil, she used the scissor-handled postholer to scoop up dirt. I stood near the wood stove, in my bathrobe, and watched her work away.

  Duane went to help her several times, but she shook him off and, after a while, he went to stand beneath his old hoop, holding the ball against his hip. She worked at wedging some heavy rocks from the hole with the postholer. Her boyfriend sat in his idling car, and I stood in my kitchen. After a while, she had a hole I could pour cement into, then stand the pole in, propping it in place with two-by-fours until it set.

  Cheryl stood by her Christmas present, leaning the head of her pickax on the pile of earth she’d made. She panted and wiped at her brow with its parallel lines. She always did know how to sweat. She wore a dark stocking cap, and her bright hair stood out around it. Then she turned to Duane, who was watching her.

  I said, in my kitchen, “Oh, Duane.”

  As if she had said that to him, in the way I heard myself say it, he dropped his basketball, and he went to her, and he stopped to seize her clumsily by the waist, then wrap his arms around her back, then hug. He bent his face down and kissed her on the cheek. I would hav
e bet that he closed his eyes. He stepped back. Cheryl reached up and rubbed at his cheek. He nodded, then stepped back farther. As she turned and walked toward the waiting car, Duane went to retrieve his ball. Cheryl turned her head to the kitchen window and she stared at me. I believe that she knew I’d be looking. She’d supplied the hole. I could supply the pole. “I can still make you blush.”

  The Trans Am pulled away, and Duane watched it go. He bounced the ball once, hard, and he caught it on the rise. He dribbled slowly from the mound of dirt that Cheryl had left to the far end of the cattle ramp, where the old backboard was bolted to the barn. He stood beneath the basket, slowly bouncing the ball. I waited for him to lay it in, or step back and shoot.

  My legs tensed with a boy’s thoughtless strength against a concrete court at Wingate Field. Looking at Duane, I thought: Up! Take it up! And I felt him yearn vertically.

  But he stopped dribbling. He held the ball. He stared up at the old backboard and he gripped the ball as though it were almost too heavy to hold at his waist, much less toss through the air, ten feet of cold, resistant air, to the hoop.

  THE CHILDREN IN THE WOODS

  DREAM ABUSE

  LOUISE HEARD the liquid click of Gerry’s eyes beneath his shut lids. He lay on their living room sofa and rubbed as he talked about the cases of a long, sour day while she sat a dozen feet from him, watching his long broad fingers. Underneath them, he said, “I get them—this is the final difference in what we do—I get them at the end. They’re drooling down the barrels of their guns, or they swear they sometimes think they won’t be able to put on the brakes when they’re coming to a school crossing. Or a cattle crossing. They don’t care which, by then. Or they tremble all the time. Or keep on rubbing their eyes, heh heh. I get them, they’re just one dumb, needful statement, plus a coffin, short of a funeral. You get them, they’re lying down drunk in the halls, or getting knocked up by their uncle. But they’re kids. They’re starting out, you figure. You work with them, you keep on thinking it’s supposed to end up like Little Women or something.”