Girls Read online

  “POWERFUL … EXHILARATING …

  Here is a writer of intelligence and tenderness, a rare combination in a cynical, doubting world.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “When a book is this successful, it’s impossible to detect any signs of artistic struggle. The narrative seems to unfold with a miraculous and thrilling ease. Jack is such an absorbing and sympathetic narrator, in fact, that it’s easy to overlook the real-life multifacetedness of the novel’s other characters, both major and minor. Its pitch-perfect dialogue, skillfully contrived plot, and authentically wintry atmosphere are all exceptional, but a great deal of its strength comes from the moral complexity of its characters.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Lyric … Memorable … Frederick Busch is such a fine writer. In his new novel Girls, he marries love and sorrow, memory and guilt in a story that will break your heart.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “Busch is a master and those who don’t know his name should.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “Powerful … Though the crime story is intriguing, it is Jack’s growing insight about his marriage, his town, and himself that transforms this page-turner about lost children into a tender and eloquent examination of the even greater mystery that is the human heart.”

  —Glamour

  “Girls is about as close to perfect as a novel gets. Its prose is clean and strong but never advertises its own quiet brilliance, its characters are sharply defined and irresistible, and its plot is suspenseful enough to keep you up until dawn.… Jack is a superb creation: troubled, desperate, angry, capable of violence, even more capable of kindness. Fanny is equally compelling, a quintessentially tough/tender American woman.… Girls is an achievement, powerful and true.”

  —Men’s Journal

  “A TOUR-DE-FORCE …

  This is the finest literary thriller since William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey.… It is a dark tale, but it’s told with an economical mastery and intensity that only a few current novelists can command.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “The novel’s social realism gives it the page-turning pace of a mystery. But Busch’s masterly pairing of dark wit and tender mercy is what makes Girls a great work.”

  —US Magazine

  “Combining the quick pace of a detective story with the bold poetics of a literary work, Frederick Busch’s taut new novel, Girls, is a dark, compulsively readable drama.”

  —Elle

  “Some writers get by on artifice. Other writers depend on something deeper and more difficult; when they core the apple of human behavior, they throw away the apple and keep the core. Frederick Busch is one such writer. Busch has proven himself an able and sometimes spectacular chronicler of the serious business of life. Short on gimmick and long on emotional truth … this novel finds him working at the top of his form.… A chilling story about the impossibility of preserving the innocence of childhood and the discomfort of embracing the guilt of adulthood.”

  —Time Out

  “A complex and disturbing vision of the world as a place filled with danger powers this fascinating novel, another blistering drama of family relations from one of our most productive and passionately serious writers.… It all works superbly as a conventional thriller, though the story’s most effective as a harrowing expression of the fragility of our defenses against loss and death, and a moving characterization of its memorable protagonist, a decent man who struggles against powerful odds to remain one. An impressive demonstration of Busch’s continuing mastery of realistic narrative.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Engrossing … Busch has a wonderful ear for dialogue and a remarkable talent for creating nuanced characters whose behavior rings painfully true.”

  BOOKS BY FREDERICK BUSCH

  Fiction

  North (2005)

  A Memory of War (2003)

  Don’t Tell Anyone (2000)

  The Night Inspector (1999)

  Girls (1997)

  The Children in the Woods (1994)

  Long Way from Home (1993)

  Closing Arguments (1991)

  Harry and Catherine (1990)

  War Babies (1989)

  Absent Friends (1989)

  Sometimes I Live in the Country (1986)

  Too Late American Boyhood Blues (1984)

  Invisible Mending (1984)

  Take This Man (1981)

  Rounds (1979)

  Hardwater Country (1979)

  The Mutual Friend (1978)

  Domestic Particulars (1976)

  Manual Labor (1974)

  Breathing Trouble (1973)

  I Wanted a Year Without Fall (1971)

  Nonfiction

  Letters to a Fiction Writer (2000)

  A Dangerous Profession (1999)

  When People Publish (1986)

  Hawkes (1973)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2006 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1997 by Frederick Busch

  Reading group guide copyright © 1998 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. READER’S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of Crown Publishers, Inc, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1997. Subsequently published with a reading group guide by Fawcett Books, an imprint of the Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1998.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. for permission to adapt “Ralph the Duck” (chapter 2, “Ralph”) from Absent Friends. Copyright © 1989 by Frederick Busch. Adapted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-97063

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79812-1

  www.thereaderscircle.com

  v3.1

  JUDY

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Flash

  Ralph

  Bloom

  Jelly

  Rx

  Maybe

  Testify

  Daughter

  Briefs

  Oracle

  Field

  A Reader’s Guide

  About the Author

  Excerpts from reviews of Frederick Busch’s Girls

  I intend to portray none of the too many families who search for their children. While writing this book, I wished that I were working on their behalf. But this is, of course, a novel, and it can speak at last only about these characters, all of whom I have invented.

  flash

  WE STARTED CLEARING the field with shovels and buckets and of course our cupped, gloved hands. The idea was to not break any frozen parts of her away. Then, when we had a broad hole in the top of the snow that covered the field and we were a foot or two of snow above where she might have been set down to wait for spring, we started using poles. Some of us used rake handles and the long hafts of shovels. One used a five-foot iron pry bar. He was a big man, and the bar weighed twenty-five pounds, anyway, but he used it gently, I remember, like a doctor with his hands in someone’s wound. We came together to try to find her and we did wha
t we needed to, and then we seemed to separate as quickly as we could.

  At Mrs. Tanner’s funeral, they sang “Shall We Gather at the River,” and I sang, too. It was like that in the field. Everyone gathered, and it was something to see. Then we all came apart. Fanny went where she needed to, and Rosalie Piri did, and Archie Halpern. I did, too. Most of them, I think, remained within a few miles of the field.

  The dog and I live where it doesn’t snow. I can’t look at snow and stay calm. Sometimes it gets so warm, I wear navy blue uniform shorts with a reinforced long pocket down the left hip for the radio. I patrol on foot and sometimes on a white motor scooter, and it’s hard for me to believe, a cop on a scooter in shorts. But someone who enforces the law, laws, somebody’s laws, falls down like that. Whether it’s because he drinks or takes money or swallows amphetamines or has to be powerful, or he’s one of those people who is always scared, or because he’s me, that’s how he goes—state or federal agency or a big-city police force, down to working large towns or the dead little cities underneath the Great Lakes, say, then down to smaller towns, then maybe a campus, maybe a mall, or a hotel that used to be fine.

  I’ve moved a few times, changing my job but trying to stay on a kind of level vocationally. I would like not to sink very much more. And she traces me, and she calls. The first time, I was surprised. I was south and west, looking at a map while lying on a bed in the Arroyo Motel, where they gave good residential rates and didn’t care what species your roommate was. The dog was in the bathroom, lying against the coolness of the tub and panting, and I was reading the map of New York State. At one time, I marked the areas with a felt-tip pen where girls had disappeared. Most of them were under the snow and ice up there, I figured, and I didn’t know why I had to look at months-old guesses about burial sites. I distrusted this kind of recreation.

  It was my third week on the new job, and I continued not to know where to go or what to do for what might be thought of as pleasure. I was supposed to have fun or relax, the duty sergeant made clear, because I had been reported for menacing a citizen and obviously I needed some time to get right.

  “Gritting your teeth isn’t menacing,” I told him.

  “In your face,” he said, “it is.” Then he told me, “Jack, go and get unfucked.”

  So I was off duty and getting unfucked with a daydream I often had about her. Facedown on my chest was a map marked with places where someone took people’s daughters and killed them.

  I am talking here about being lost or found. You can be a small child and get lost, and maybe I will find you. God knows, I’ll try. Or you can be a large and ordinary man and get lost in everything usual about your life. Maybe you will try to find yourself, and so might someone else. It ends up being about the ordinary days you are hidden inside of, whether or not you want to hide.

  I didn’t flinch when the phone rang, and I didn’t run to pick it up. On the fifth ring, I said, “All right.” On the seventh or eighth, I answered it. The dog, I noticed, had moved from between the toilet and the tub to lie with his nose at the threshold of the bathroom door.

  She said, “I knew I’d get you. There you are.”

  All I could think to say was, “Aren’t you something.”

  “Given my family connection to the finding-people profession, no. I wouldn’t expect any less of me. Neither should you.”

  “No. I think I won’t.”

  She said, “I prepared a list of remarks to fall back on in case I couldn’t think of anything to say that would keep you on the line.”

  I could hear the hum and hiss of the open connection, but I couldn’t hear anything of her. Then she came back and I felt her on the line. A piece of paper rattled, and then she recited, the way you do when you read something out loud, “Are you eating well? Are you sleeping well? Are you, in general, looking after yourself?”

  I said, “Are you all right?”

  “No. Are you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Really?”

  “No. I guess, really, no.”

  “Good,” she said. “In a way. You come back here, Jack. Will you come back?” She gave me a little time to answer, and then she said, “Never mind. You wouldn’t. Maybe I can get there. Wherever in the world it really is. Jack, it’s so far away.”

  “I believe that’s why I came here.”

  “Yes. Except you had to leave me behind when you did that.”

  “You couldn’t have come with me. The dog could barely stand it. I could barely stand it. I haven’t been really friendly, these days.”

  “But you’re some kind of a fugitive, Jack. From me. Consider that. You and your dog, in the middle of the night, you drive away in the world’s oldest station wagon to—”

  “Daylight. I left in daylight. But I know what you mean. And the Torino did finally die. Get this: outside of Buffalo, New York. I never even got it out of the state.”

  “I can’t imagine you driving anything else,” she said.

  “I drive a Subaru DL, 1980. I had to pay extra for a rearview mirror you can tilt against the headlights behind you. You have to replace the struts every few miles, but the engine’s good and the body only shifts on the frame when you turn a corner or pull out to pass.”

  She said, with a kind of a wobble, “Is there room for the dog?”

  “He gets the backseat.”

  “You and him.”

  “Me and him,” I said. By then, I think, I was messed up, too, and my voice must have showed it, because the dog banged his tail on the floor. It was a trick he used to do with my wife. Now he was promiscuous, and he would slam his tail against the floor if anyone gave the slightest signal of distress. Apparently, I was signaling, and he was signaling back.

  Thinking about the way we came apart, all of us, Fanny and Rosalie and Archie and me and the Tanners and their daughter and every man and woman who worked in the field between the houses and the river, was like watching something explode, but slowed down.

  I saw it on the job, early in my rotation, when my work consisted of rousting disorderly American teenaged boys in uniform in Phu Lam when they overacted their role as savior. I was giving directions to a somewhat shit-faced marine just back from Operation Utah in I Corps. He was so chiseled down and locked tight, I would not have challenged him to a bet on a ball game. I was pointing, I remember, when a car bomb took down a hotel across the street. I kept seeing it afterward. Traumatic flashback, a doctor taught me to call it.

  But that day, directly after the explosion, I didn’t know its name, and I sat on the curb and I kept watching the hotel go out and up. The marine, who got very sober very fast, squatted behind me where I sat. I was wondering out loud for him whether what we might be thinking of as oil or gasoline that pooled beneath my legs in the street could actually be the blood of whores and janitors and cleaning ladies. He patted my shoulder over and over, and he kept saying, “Uh-huh,” and “That’s right,” and “You got it.” After a while, I didn’t see blood, but I did keep seeing the slow coming apart of the back end of the little gray Fiat, and then the stick-by-stick dismantling of the two-story hotel, slat by gallery banister, window mullion by floorboard, everything coming toward us from the inside out.

  “Uh-huh,” the marine said, patting me, “you saying hello to Flash.”

  She said, “Jack.”

  “The chances weren’t terrific, you know,” I told her.

  “For what?”

  “Well, what you’re calling about.”

  “You and me. That’s what I’m calling about.”

  The dog was pounding away with his tail. He sounded like the drummer on an antique recording of a slow, surrendering song.

  “But you were hoping they’d get better,” she said. “Weren’t you?”

  I said, “Not at first.”

  ralph

  YOU CAN’T SAY ONCE upon a time to tell the story of how we got to where we are. You have to say winter. Once, in winter, you say, because winter was our only season, and it
felt like we would live in winter all our lives.

  I was awake in the darkness and the sound of wind against the house when the dog began to retch at 5:25. I hustled ninety pounds of heaving chocolate Lab to the door and rolled him onto the snow that looked silver in the fading moonlight.

  “Good boy,” I said, because he’d done his only trick.

  Outside he vomited, and I went back up, passing the sofa Fanny lay on. I tiptoed with enough weight on my toes to let her know how considerate I was. She blinked her eyes. I know I heard her blink her eyes. Whenever I told her I could hear her blink her eyes, she said I was lying. But I could hear the damp slap of lash after I made her cry.

  I got into bed to get warm again. I saw the red digital numbers, 5:29, and I knew I wouldn’t fall asleep. I didn’t. I read a book about men who kill one another for pay or for their honor. I forget which, and so did they. It was 5:45, the alarm would buzz at 6:00, and I would make a pot of coffee and start the woodstove. I would call Fanny and pour her coffee into her mug. I would apologize because I always did. Then she would forgive me. We would stagger through the day, exhausted but pretty sure we were more or less all right. We would probably sleep that night. We would probably wake in the same bed to the alarm at 6:00, or to the dog, if he’d returned to the frozen deer carcass he’d been eating in the forest on our land. He loved what made him sick. The alarm went off, I got into jeans and woolen socks and a sweatshirt, and I went downstairs to let the dog in. He’d be hungry, of course.

  I was the oldest college student in America, I sometimes said. But of course I wasn’t. There were always ancient women with parchment skin who graduated at seventy-nine from places like Barnard and the University of Alabama. I was only forty-four, and I hardly qualified as a student. I patrolled the college at night in a Jeep with a leaky exhaust system, and I went from room to room in the classroom buildings, kicking out students who were studying or humping in chairs—they do it anywhere—and answering emergency calls, with my little blue light winking on top of the roof. I didn’t carry a gun or a billy, but I had a heavy black flashlight that took three batteries, and I’d used it twice on some of my overprivileged northeastern-playboy part-time classmates. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would waken at 6:00 with my wife, and I’d do my homework, and then patrol at school and go to class at 11:30, to sit there for an hour and a half while thirty-five stomachs growled and this guy gave instruction about books. Because I was on the staff, the college let me take a course for nothing every term. I was getting educated, in a kind of slow-motion way. It was going to take me something like fifteen or sixteen years to graduate. I predicted to Fanny I would no doubt get an F in gym in my last semester and have to repeat. There were times when I respected myself for going to school. Fanny often did, and that had served as fair incentive.