Julia would not have hung around even if she knew I was going to build this wall so well. I knew that. And she had seen me at work before. I trusted that she remembered I could build with stone or stud up a house or put up wallboard so well you’d not find the seams. I knew that, and I knew that a sudden reminder would not sweep her back to me. Still, I did wish I could show her what I’d made. I thought of tracking her down by telephone by using a fudged pidgin Spanish, calling with the announcement that I had built another good wall. I thought of hearing, from behind her, around her, the wails of wounded children she was tending as the sniper fire sang off packed earthen streets outside the clinic. I propped the wheelbarrow, standing it on the nose of its wooden frame, against the wall. I collected the discarded stones in a mound. I had been preparing to do it, though I hadn’t suspected I was. I know it now. I had awakened with a sense of purpose and, though working on the wall had satisfied much of it, the need to cross the road remained strong.
So I went—across the road, and across the dead lawn, across the pebble walk, directly to Artie Arthur’s cabin. I knocked, too driven to be frightened, though I had no idea what to say or do when someone opened the door. But no one did. And the key, its oval tag hanging down from it, was in the lock. So I knew I could turn the knob and go inside, and I did.
I smelled something that reminded me of the milky, pyramidal bottle that Frank the barber would tip over my head when I was a kid. It helped keep my hair in place for a while, though, soon enough, it sprang back up. I realized that I was running my fingers through my hair. I sometimes did that when I was upset. I did it for all three months that Julia and I were together. “It’s like you’re petting an animal,” she had said, “except the animal is you.”
There weren’t any towels in the bathroom and there weren’t sheets on the large bed. Nor was there a television set, a radio, or a clock. The rug was covered with dried mud. An open bureau drawer was stuffed with plastic and cellophane and cardboard wrappers of snack food. Someone had eaten most of two pizzas and a little bit of Chinese food. The wrappers and the top of the bureau were sprinkled with mouse turds. Near the small window, on an oval table, I found burnt matches, perhaps from lighting the lantern by which he had done his homework. The matches were in a neat grouping in a stained, slimy-looking soapdish. The one piece of paper on the table, from a two-ring looseleaf notebook, had numbers written in an adult hand. Someone had added the same set of figures about a dozen times. They always started out with 39,000 of something and then concluded with a meticulous minus sign, and a final 1,100. On the other side of the page was handwriting practice, or practice in remembering a name: ARTIE ARTHUR ARTIE ARTHUR ARTIE ARTHUR ARTIE ARTHUR. The big characters filled up the page. He was there, but noplace else. Although there was one more place to look.
When I went outside, I walked around to the back of the cabin and saw the tracks of the long, charred car pressed into the wet soil. I was pleased to learn that the vehicle in Artie Arthur’s life was actual, and that I had truly seen it. But I was not pleased with where I had to look. I crossed the road and went back to their garage, walking along the side of the stone colonial house, and I fetched the long-handled rake, which I carried on my shoulder like a man a long time ago off to rake hay. It was damper and cooler in the field I cut through, and it was outright cold at the swamp. Little sun seemed to get through to warm the water, and it radiated cold like a freezer left open. I squatted at the edge, listening to ducks squabble, and then I straightened and walked to the water, took a breath, and went in up to my knees. The deep chill went up my legs and through my chest, and my head suddenly ached as if I’d eaten ice cream too quickly.
I cried out and the ducks, several dozen yards away, took off, making their wheezy noises. I waded further in, balancing myself with the rake, and then I began to look for the horrible news behind Artie Arthur’s story. I let the rake, which I held at the end on its haft, flop down, and then I pulled it back to me as if it were a rope, and most of the time something came with it: bath towels, horribly smeared, and then a big green towel such as you’d use at the beach, I thought, and then a shower curtain with figures of seagulls on it. I let the cloth eddy about me where I stood, and I went back with the rake to free whatever was trapped beneath the remaining clothes. The reds and oranges of T-shirts and underwear came up, and then fancy-looking pajamas that perhaps a small woman had worn. Up, too, came bubbles of gas, the broccoli smell of trapped vegetation, and the cheap white dress shirt of a man with unusually long arms.
I was prepared, or I thought I was, for little Artie, blue and open-eyed, to come rocking up. And I suspected that his mother or aunt might be down there with him. It would be a sudden surfacing, I thought, and then the vandalized body would arrive to float before me, and I would have to figure a way of getting it on shore. But no one came up from exile back to the world. I was surrounded by cheap clothing and filthy towels. I heard his wings before I saw him as the heron clumsily angled for the top of the tree across the swamp. He saw or heard me, then, and he curved off and out of sight. Wading in further, so that the water was above my waist, balancing myself with the rake, I tried once more, but I drew up only weeds and a bit of rotted tree that caught between the tines of the rake.
It was difficult to lift my feet from the floor of the swamp, and it was tricky to escape from its edge. But I finally stood in the field, a failure at rescue and disinterment. I was the robber of graves, and I was the rescuer, with nothing to show for the work and with no evidence of my good intentions except for the odor of rot that I wore.
I went back to their garage and replaced the rake. Rebecca was looking out their kitchen window and when she saw me—I figure I was green from the swamp and red with shame because of my failure—her eyebrows rose. I shrugged in reply. We had slept together a couple of dozen times. We knew each other, I guessed, but I thought then of my parents and I doubted I was right. I didn’t know whether to want to know someone or not. I had a suspicion that it was good for the loneliness, but maybe after that you knew in ways you’d rather not.
I went back to the trailer and used some bottled water for a sponge bath at my sink. Then I changed into khakis I ought to have washed some weeks before and a dark green sweatshirt that I rarely wore because it said, across the front, CAMP NOK-A-MIX-ON, which was where I’d worked as a waiter in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years. I put on sneakers and went out to continue at the wall. I kept seeing the door swing in at the motel cabin. I kept thinking of the little kid who wrote his name so many times. And of course I thought about the car. Someone had come to take care of him, I thought—I wished—who wasn’t always able to. They were broke and fleeing creditors, I thought. Or they were fleeing the Cosa Nostra, to which the driver of the car owed an allegiance he had violated. Or the father robbed banks. It really didn’t matter to me, except that they not be captured, and that Artie have somebody on the other side of his door as he went off to school and returned.
I hauled the stones and cleaned them and set them in. I could feel the cold of them as well as their weight through my rawhide work gloves, and I didn’t mind, because what I felt was the first reward of this kind of work. The second was that it stood and you had made it. I caught my breath and stood beside the wall when Rebecca came out to me, wearing her father’s coat open. I went back to work as she approached, and she stood there awhile. I felt suddenly very shy with her, and I focused on the wall and on the quality of my work. I was acutely conscious of her bright, crinkly hair, and of her small mouth, her large, smart eyes, and of her body too, hidden within the jeans and coat, but familiar to me—a hipbone I had held to, a breast at which I’d nuzzled. I admired the urgency with which she dived into bed, and with which she drank cocktails made of bourbon and sweet vermouth, and with which she pulled on her cigarettes, or drove the narrow roads, or argued about politics or the cost of hotels in Monopoly. She watched me admire her, and she gestured me up and onto my feet. She had a canvas bag wit
h her, and it contained steaks and the makings of Manhattans. We had a long, drunken evening in the trailer, and we were so far gone, so fervent in pursuit of our anesthetic stupor, that I cannot remember much of what we said, or what we did together, but I remember our saying a lot, and doing a lot. If we were valedictory or sentimental, I have gratefully managed to forget.
A few days later, she moved away, returning irregularly on weekends, when she remained with her mother in the house. On a Saturday in April, when Rebecca hadn’t come home, I went over for my shower and my meal. Instead of her beans, Mrs. Peete served up casserole of potatoes and cheese.
I didn’t drink the glass of milk that came with it, and she said, “You hate that milk, huh?”
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “I never liked it, even when I was a kid.”
“You are still a kid,” she said, “but you should have told me. I wouldn’t have wasted good milk. It’s money down the drain, you understand.” She looked at me with a kind of softness I was unaccustomed to. Her face went into those three parts I rarely saw, and I understood that she was relenting. I wondered if Rebecca had put in a good word on my behalf. “You were trying to be polite,” she said.
I nodded, tried a smile, didn’t get one in return, and kept a serious face on.
“That is what I would call a good sign,” she said.
“Mrs. Peete”—I was flooded with courage, desperate with a need to escape, and very glad to feel, and to act on, the need—“would you say you’re pleased with what I’ve built around here? With the repairs I did?”
“You want wages,” she said. “They are not a part of our arrangement.”
“If you could lend me enough for a new battery,” I said, “and maybe a battery cable, I could be on the road. I’d mail you the money. Really, I would.”
“Leave?” she said. Her eyes were wet. “You are leaving too? But for where? Doing what?” She paused briefly for the answer I could not begin to give her, and then, moving as her daughter did, she turned to leave the room. I thought of taking a sip of milk to please her, but I couldn’t. She came back in with a large brown reptile-hide purse, and she searched in it for her wallet and counted out what I told her I thought a battery would cost.
She nodded in agreement. “Rebecca said about that much.”
“She knew I would ask you for this?”
“Oh,” she said, “David. You are not as much of a mystery as you would like to think.”
RESCUE MISSIONS
GOOD TO GO
“YOUR FATHER SAYS you bought a gun. He says you bought a
surplus army gun.”
“We used the M16A2. This one, they call it AR15. It won’t fire auto.”
“What’s that, Patrick?”
“Automatic, Momma.” From the mattress where he sat, wearing camouflage trousers and a khaki T-shirt, his back bisected by the corner of the room, he said, “You know. Blam-blam-blam-blam-blam-blam-blam. That’s semiauto. You need to squeeze off one round at a time, but the rate of fire’s good enough. Anyway, I didn’t buy enough ammo to fire full auto for long. I don’t need that much.”
“For what, dearie? Why do you need a gun?”
“You talked to Pop?”
“He telephoned.” She took her raincoat off and set it on the back of a short wooden chair. “Les answered the phone and of course they jawed.”
“Jawed?”
“That’s what Les calls it. He says it’s like a couple of bull moose with their antlers locked and their forelegs set. All they can do is make noises.”
“Now, what would Les know about two mooses?”
“Oh, dearie, he’s a traveler. He’s been to places. He’s more like you.”
“Travel. Here to Hawaii, and then Kuwait, then fucking paradise. Goats and camels and sheep and sand. And then I never barely came home.”
“Dearie, yes. Yes, you did. Here you are.”
“Here I am,” he said. “That’s right.” Then he said, “That’s right.” His eyes were closed. She took one step nearer the mattress on the floor where he sat in his scuffed, sand-colored boots and his camouflage pants, his hands knotted around his knees, pulling them up against his chest.
He opened his eyes. What’s the ‘more like’ supposed to mean?” he asked her. “More like me than he’s like Pop? Except Pop’s your husband. Legally, he still is, right?”
“Yes.”
“But you want that part of it over,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Your life’s moving along,” he said.
“It is, yes.”
“Mine isn’t, anymore.”
“You’ve just come back from a terrible time,” she said. “You were in danger. You got hurt. You didn’t have a shower for weeks and weeks. Those moistened baby wipes—I must have sent you a hundred.”
“I didn’t get them. I told you that.”
“I’m sorry, Patrick.”
“The mail was fucked. Everything was fucked.”
“Would you like to come over to my—to where I’m living?”
“With Les and the mooses?”
“You could sleep on a sofa bed on clean sheets. We’d leave you be. Maybe you’d feel safe there.”
“Oh, I’m safe, Momma. I’m safe. It’s other people in danger.” His face looked bony. He rubbed his cheek with the tips of four fingers of his left hand as if he wore a mitten. “I’m good to go.”
She sat on the chair where she’d put her coat. She watched him look at her legs the way men look at a woman’s legs. His etched, thin face was different, and so was his close-cropped hair. She realized that some of it was gray. He wasn’t twenty-five yet, and his hair had gray in it and he wore a stranger’s face, she thought. And he sized her up when he looked at her. She knew he wasn’t her baby anymore, but now she wondered whether he was still her son. Her husband, Bernard, had said, “He’s in trouble. I can’t get hold of him anymore. He’s out there. Have you seen him?”
She’d said, “You know how angry he got with me when he came back.”
“He’s loyal to me,” Bernard had said.
“If that’s the way you want to put it.”
“I don’t want to fight with you anymore. You’re out of my life, and I’m out of yours. We’re getting on with it. You wanted your freedom, you got your freedom, and now I’m—I’m shut of the whole damned thing.”
“Aren’t we all free,” she’d said. At that moment, she had felt inventive and full of effective words she had every right to call after her husband as he vanished from her life. “But here you are on the telephone,” she’d said. “You didn’t vanish, after all.”
“What vanish? What are you talking about? Patrick’s in an awful lot of trouble, and we need to be useful, or something. I don’t know what to do.”
“No,” she’d said, still feeling wiser than Bernard. “Tell me how to find his place.”
“It’s a slum,” he’d said. “I didn’t know they let people live in those places. Down where the Earlville feed mill used to be, where the train station was in the old days. Somebody bought up all the old buildings down there. I wonder did they even bother to look at the wiring.”
“I’ll get down there. It’ll take me an hour or two. I’ll go in the morning. Is he sick? Did he come home, I mean, with some kind of illness? A lot of them had fevers when they came back. A lot of them had dysentery.”
“‘Saddam’s Revenge,’ he said the troops called it.”
“And what did he say about the gun?”
“He said he felt the need of a weapon,” Bernard had said. “I asked him why he did, and he mocked me. He said, ‘Danger lurks.’”
“‘Danger lurks’?”
“It’s what he said. I can only tell you what I heard and that’s what I heard.” Then Bernard had said, “So, your new life’s agreeable to you.”
“It is, thank you. How are things for you?”
“Well, considering. My wife leaving me, and the lawyer’s bills, and of course I’ve g
ot the sleep apnea thing. I keep waking myself up.”
“I remember it well.”
“Dr. Bittman says it can sometimes be fatal.”
“Let’s hope it isn’t.”
“You could sound a little concerned.”
“Well, I am a little concerned. I’m sorry you don’t like how it sounds. And this is about Patrick right now, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he’d said. She said sullenly to herself, and the description pleased her. She had felt, when they hung up, as if she had won a small contest. And then the fear for her son had poured in, like the sudden sound of the nurses laying out instruments when the orderly pushes your gurney through the OR doors.
Patrick lit another cigarette. He looked so much older than when he’d left. And she couldn’t find recognition in his eyes. She couldn’t find herself. Before she thought she’d speak, she was saying, “It’s me, dearie.”
He looked her over, the way a man looks over a strange woman, and he blew out smoke as he said, “Hi, Momma.”
Although his shoulders were wedged against the walls, she wanted to find a way to get her arms around him. But how could you protect a man this large and hard, in his terrible, dim room that smelled of rotted vegetation, when he looked like a stranger made of only angles and skull?
He smiled, and she saw how white his teeth were. She thought of trips to the dentist when he was eight or nine, of the coupon book for payments that the orthodontist had issued them when Patrick was thirteen. “We’re paying the son of a bitch to buy a goddamned boat,” Bernard had said. Each month, as he tore out the coupon and wrote out the check, he had said, “Here’s for the goddamned boat.”
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 41