She was as tall as he was and a little heavy-thighed in tight, fade blue jeans. Her face was long and bony, though, and she had hollows at the eyes. She looked like she never slept enough. Her skin was dark, and it looked as though it would feel soft if you put your hand out gently and just touched it under the cheekbone or at the corner of the eye.
She said, “Yes?”
“I’m not a deputy, strictly speaking,” he said.
“What are you, strictly speaking?” She looked at his gray uniform, his black tie, and he knew she’d been hoping for someone a little more capable-looking. Maybe she’d settle for secretly competent, he thought. He knew he would. And he knew he wasn’t.
“Well, ma’am, I’m what you call the dispatcher.”
“Ivanhoe!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’re all they had left?”
“I’m the entire available people on call and in the station and on the air. It’s terrible night. There isn’t anyone. I’m not supposed to be here. I can’t be here. Because if I am, I’m not manning the telephone and radio. And I am. So I’m not. I’m in really terrible trouble.”
“And you racked the squad car up,” she said. “Your fender-bender.”
“Blew it off the road,” he said. “Might have cracked the block or an axle. It wasn’t really my fault,” he said, hearing his voice skid into the beginning of a whine. “The brake cylinder was leaking, and this guy was supposed—”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Strictly speaking, since I was at the wheel, I guess it was.”
“But it wasn’t. It also wasn’t.”
“No.”
“No,” she said. “It isn’t anybody’s fault. They just ran out of sheriffs and deputies and cars.”
He shrugged. “Where’s the baby, ma’am?”
She let him in. The heat in the house was high, and he thought he smelled tomatoes and peppery spices and the dampness of gypsum board and old wood. He was dizzy again, and he caught at her shoulder. She stepped away and he stumbled and then she stepped in again, holding his arm and easing him into a kitchen chair.
“Smells good,” he said.
“You got hurt, Ivanhoe.”
“No,” he said, “only my head and my brains.” He put his arms on the table and rested his forehead against them. “Just let me catch my whatever here a minute,” he told her.
“I sure can’t think of anyone else we can call who’d come out,” she said.
“Local services are stretched a little thin,” he said.
She said, “How nice to know they’re keeping busy. Can we—as soon as you get over your concussion and your fractured skull,” she said, “do you think we can load the baby into your arms and wave while you speed the little foundling child away on foot to get rescued? Is that how you see the shape of the evening?”
“Is there a car here, ma’am?” He said it into his hands or onto the tabletop.
“There is a car here,” she said. “There is a 1989 Chevrolet Blazer with about an eighth of a tank of gas and something wrong with the battery. As in dead.”
He decided that he had to sit up. He did it slowly and was horrified when tears filled his eyes. He blinked, looking away from her, and saw the bare ceiling joists they had pried the Sheetrock from. New sheets of it were stacked against a papered wall that someone had started to strip. “I can walk back to where I went off the road and take the battery out,” he said. “There’ll be jumper cables in my vehicle, and we can start your Blazer right up, if all it is is a weak cell in the battery or something.”
“Does that sound complicated to you too?” she asked. She ran water into a kettle and lit a burner on the stove.
“No, ma’am, it’s something I believe I can do.” Then he asked her, “Is there a young woman here, ma’am?”
“You’re thinking of me as old.”
He tried to shake his head. “Oh, no. But I meant somebody of child-bearing age.”
“I’m thirty-nine years old,” she said. “I have an ample pelvis and I still have my fallopian tubes and both my ovaries.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I could have had a baby and dumped it there.”
He thought it was time to be something like an officer of the law, so he made his head stay upright, and he felt in his pockets. “I wonder,” he said. “Have you got any pencil and paper I could borrow?”
She was making tea. She pointed at the telephone on the counter near the refrigerator. He found a pad beside it, and a ballpoint pen. She gave him the tea. It was very sweet and very hot. He leaned against the counter. “You told me your name,” he said, “but I forget.”
She was at the stove again, across the room, with her back to him. “Carole Duchesney.” She spelled it, and he wrote it down. As he did, he saw how bloody his fingers were.
“Miz Duchesney.”
“Miss.”
“Oh,” he said, “I would have thought you might sooner call yourself Miz.”
“My partner calls herself Miz,” she said. “I call myself Miss. I’m an antiquarian.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He looked at the pad as if there were instructions on it. He reached for a cigarette, but stopped because he knew better. Finally, he heard his mouth say, “What’s her name, please? Your partner?”
“Frances. Frances Leary. She’s one of those redheaded, freckle-faced Learys. She’s only twenty-seven. With a hell of a pelvis and ovaries on her. It could have been her. That would be interesting as all get out.”
“Is she around, ma’am?”
“She is around. Upstairs. With the kid.”
“You said the baby isn’t healthy?”
“I did, but Frances said I was wrong. She said the little girl was just doing what the situation warranted. Crying really hard and turning red. Frances is from a large family.”
He was looking at her, at her tan chamois shirt and her jeans tucked into high black rubber farm boots, her small hands and round fingers, the dark skin of her throat and face. He was trying to see what was different about her.
She raised her chin a little and she said, “What?”
“I don’t know quite what I should do next,” he said.
“Let’s get my Blazer started and drive to the hospital and donate the baby.”
“I think we have to get social services into it.”
“Orphanages,” Miss Duchesney said.
He said, “Well—”
A short, skinny woman with a pale face and cropped red hair and freckles on her nose came into the kitchen. She held the baby across her chest and she was smiling, the way a mother smiles when she presents her child.
Miss Duchesney said, “Frances, this is Ivanhoe Krisp. He’s all they had left at the station house, and he abandoned his post to come out here and rescue us from the baby someone left off in the dumpster. On the way, he wrecked his car. He forgot his pencil and paper, so he borrowed some. You can tell from the way his teacup shakes that he is somewhat fucked up. He was wondering what to do next.”
Frances didn’t speak. Her face reddened, and she smiled the widest smile he remembered seeing.
“Yes,” Miss Duchesney said. “It’s that wonderful.”
“The baby’s asleep,” he said.
“Or dead,” Muss Duchesney said.
“Aw, no.”
She said, “No.” She walked to him and patted his arm and moved him to the chair. When he was in it, she went to the sink and returned with a brown bowl filled with steaming water. She handed him a folded dish towel. “You might clean the blood away,” she said.
He looked into the bowl. He could see a dark shape that he thought might be his reflected face. Looking down, he said, “I found out my daughter, she’s a little over sixteen, she’s having sex with this boyfriend of hers.”
“She probably loves him dearly,” Miss Duchesney said.
“Is isn’t funny to me,” he said.
“Of course not. You’re right. But that’s what
we all of us said, is what I mean. You’re making a total mess of everything, and you naturally resort to blaming it on love. It’s been known to be the name of almost everything wrong,” she said, behind him.
Frances Leary said, “Cue the violins.”
“I hit her tonight,” he said without meaning to. “Before I went to work. I slapped her face.”
“And yours ends up bleeding,” Miss Duchesney said.
“It comes around three hundred and sixty-five degrees,” he said, nodding at the shape of the bowl.
“Sixty,” she said. “I told you, remember?”
“Right,” he said. “And supposed to be one-eighty.” She took the towel from him and dipped the end in the water. “My wife is very upset,” he said. Miss Duchesney worked the warm cloth on his chin and around his mouth. The baby began to cry, and he jumped. Miss Duchesney took hold of his face and kept working the cloth on it. He said, against the warm towel, “And now the baby’s crying.”
He saw himself, though he didn’t carry a weapon, holding one of the big, black Beretta 9mms that were issued to the deputies. He was kicking at the door of a scuffed white trailer on the side of Sheridan Hill Road. Against the cries of the baby he heard his own voice: “Sheriff’s department!” He saw the door swing in and he demanded to know if someone on the premises had driven to the Leary-Duchesney farmhouse to leave a baby off in the stink of garbage and the giggle of rats.
He said, “Should I go back and get the battery?”
“I think that’s what you ought to do next,” Miss Duchesney said.
Frances Leary said, “That’s a girl. That’s a girl.” From the sound of her voice, she was rocking the baby a little.
“Maybe some milk,” he said.
“I think they need formula,” Frances Leary said. “A special kind of formula. I don’t think they can tolerate milk right away.”
“You wouldn’t have any formula,” he said.
“No,” Miss Duchesney said, “we don’t use it. And, worse luck, neither of us is lactating tonight.”
“No, ma’am,” he said. Then he said, “Could I look at the baby?”
Miss Duchesney said, “You’ve been sitting there with your eyes closed.”
He opened them. He stood and leaned on the back of the chair. He felt as short as Chicken Man when Frances Leary bent toward him. He saw a crushed and furrowed face inside a harsh-looking gray woolen blanket. She was red, and dark with crying, and her blunt nose and her eyelids looked like they were made of wax. He saw her fists beside her face. He thought the miniature fingers were perfect.
“Everybody looks like that,” he said.
“You’re too sentimental for your work,” Frances Leary told him.
Miss Duchesney said, “How can you tell what he does?”
He had something to ask. Before they fetched the cables and battery to start up her Blazer, and before he drove like hell to the hospital where he would summon social workers and doctors, if the hospital could find them, and call the sheriff at his Albany hotel and begin to lose his job, he had to ask someone his question.
He saw himself kicking in another door in a trailer half a mile down on Sheridan Hill Road. Miss Duchesney and Ms. Leary sat in the Blazer with the child, and he was kicking in the doors of trailers, of shake-shingled one-story houses, of shacks with no siding, of clapboard cabins with rusted tin roofs. Doors slammed in and he followed, assuming the shooter’s stance, legs planted wide and Beretta cupped in both hands before him, demanding the surrender of whoever had disposed of a baby.
“Who,” he needed to ask, “would throw a person away?”
He broke another lock with two powerful kicks and he was inside, menacing the doughy couple at their television set.
No, he wasn’t.
He made his eyes open. He stood in the kitchen of these women and he fastened his jacket. His knees were sore, and he must look, he thought, like a wounded rooster among his willful hens. He went toward the front door, and he didn’t speak. He was embarrassed by Miss Duchesney. She made him feel incompetent. She reminded him of his father, a little. And he was afraid that if he asked his question she would answer it.
DOMICILE
IT MADE ME THINK OF FAIRY TALES—stories of children who drop from the sky or roll from the cupped petals of a silky flower—because he simply appeared one morning and was picked up by a yellow van, a small school bus, which meant that an actual adult had made arrangements for him, and that school authorities acknowledged his existence, and that he was an authentic child, not a product of my second-rate education or of what I considered then, with what I’ll now call theatrics, as my third-rate mind.
Wearing a blue hip-length jacket that was streaked with a faded white or yellow stain along both arms and down its back, from underneath the fleece-lined hood to its hem, he did this every day: walked out the door of the white wood motel cabin, pulled the door shut with both hands, then climbed down two steps and walked around to the side of the cabin that faced the direction from which the little bus came. He stood very still, always, as if his khaki knapsack were heavy and pinned him in place. When the bus appeared, he hiked with long, measured steps to the edge of the road, cutting across the ice and snow over the gravel drive that led to the closed offices of the shut-down motel. He arrived as the bus did, and he climbed into it as he had walked, with a nonchalance that seemed important to project.
He was gone until around four o’clock in the afternoon, when the bus paused to let him emerge, and he hiked to the cabin, climbed its steps, and, using a bright, brass-colored key attached to a long, oval tag—the sort you’re issued as you sign the register and show them a credit card or dare them to turn down cash—opened the door of the cabin, the one closest of all eight to the one with OFFICE on its door, and he went inside. He had been doing this for a week, since the February thaw had hardened back into mud frozen in twists and ruts and permanent pockmarks into which new snow had fallen in a thin, icy crust through which the mud glared up in weak sunlight like sewage.
The bus, then, would move from view, and so would the kid. Except for the usual squirrels and the usual birds, and the usual March winds that came up the Hudson Valley bearing moisture, all that was left on the one-lane blacktop county road was me, moving snow and ice off stones with a stiff brown whisk broom and my canvas-gloved fingers, sorting the ones I would use to repair the roadside wall which, among other chores, provided me with cramped shelter and, sometimes, food. I was in a good deal of trouble that year, and I knew it, though I didn’t worry. I think that I did not. I was fit, and too stupid to be frightened for long, and more concerned about the kid of eight or nine who lived at the nameless motel—its square sign was missing from a rusted roadside frame on top of two scuffed four-by-fours—than I was about the long-range prospect. I actually didn’t have one, I now believe. I had decided, as I remember it, to think a couple of hours ahead—the next few pages of a book I tried to read, the next few lines of a sketch I tried to make, the next meal of the day.
I had broken my last dollar to buy a can of supermarket-brand creamed corn, and when I wasn’t speculating about the kid, as I built my pile of fieldstones, I was tantalizing myself with alternate visions of dinner cooked on the two-burner gas stove in the trailer: corn chowder made with water and some frozen potatoes I had found in their garden, or plain creamed corn spooned hot onto slices of stiff but not yet moldy Wonder Bread, and with potatoes reserved for the next night’s meal.
The light in the window of the cabin across the road was a yellow that verged on palest amber, and it wavered almost as a candle would. I’d have bet that he was using kerosene, and I worried for him, thinking of the fumes, thinking of the flame. I had seen a car there once, its long, scarred hood half hidden behind the cabin, but I had never seen who drove it, nor had I never witnessed an adult who waved him goodbye or who greeted him. There he was at his place, and there I was at mine—a graduated senior who had spent an extra semester making up credits, living in
a trailer I had to hunch in unless I sat in my canvas director’s chair of glossy red wood and black cloth that I had salvaged from behind a dorm. I could of course lie in the built-in bed too short for me. The toilet wasn’t hooked up to a septic system, though my landladies had assured me that flushing would come with spring. I cooked with bottled water they supplied, and I took showers at the main house. I used the pine forest behind the trailer for my john unless I made it to town and the burger palace bathrooms. The battery in my Datsun was absolutely dead now, so I stayed at home and I shat in the woods like a bear.
I probably looked like one. I had a lot of dark hair in those days, and no mirror. I shaved and combed myself in the fugitive reflections of the few framed pictures I owned, one of them—an etching of a woman’s footprint, long and narrow and perfect (you could tell) in its arch, pressed into bright sand—by a person named Julia, the owner of the foot, who had left the area and me and who had not looked, nor written, nor telephoned, back. I had no phone, but the landladies did, and they’d have come for me if she had called the house. She knew where it was, and where the trailer was. She had wakened in it with me, had answered its small door when one of them—the mother, Mrs. Peete—had knocked, on an autumn morning, with a chore for me. Julia was now in Central America, and she wasn’t alone, while I was here, cutting knobby, icy potatoes into an aluminum saucepan, slashing in some onion to fry with them, opening a can of creamed corn, pouring in water, and pronouncing myself competent as I bent in the trailer, shuffled in my crouch, and worried about the temperature—it was diving again—and about my landladies, and about the boy across the road.
Not a night to be a kid and living alone, I thought.
It did not take a genius like Julia to make the point. I knew which kid I was feeling sorrier for. And the night would get worse. It was the night I broke my policy and, as my father had asked me to, I did, on a trial basis, consider the future. I stood at the stove and fanned my fingers out, one at a time, to indicate to myself that I was being concrete and realistic.
No Julia now, nor tomorrow, nor ever: one.
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 38