The Stories of Frederick Busch Read online

  It was deeper than ever, and faster, high enough to cover a tall man, swift enough to drown him as it had the kitten. Ben threw a heavy rounded chalky rock into the water. It made no ripple or splash, but disappeared. Slowly, as if he balanced at great heights, Ben walked along the river toward the red iron bridge at the south end of town. He passed behind the homes of two widows, and the only man he knew who was always glad—Henry Quail, seventy, fat, smelling of chewing tobacco and sweat and Irish whiskey. Because of his cleft palate, Henry was hard to understand, and few people asked him to speak. Henry patrolled the roads in his long green pickup truck, answered fire alarms in his red reflecting vest and yellow hardhat, helped repair tractors, collected his Social Security, made large and undeclared sums for cutting the horns off cattle, and was always bright-faced drunk.

  In the large backyard of the second widow, water had collected six inches deep at least. A pyramid of logs, waiting to be split—probably by Henry Quail—had fallen, and some of the logs were submerged in the pool. Then the field between the river and the hamlet climbed again, steeply, and there was no cabbage; at first there were rows of corn stubble which, as the snows melted, the deer might come to crop at dusk, and then there was only tangled brush and high weed as the land rose to close Ben in at the river’s turning.

  The elms were bare above him, close together, soon to die and fall. Some willow flourished there, the empty branches hanging like awful hair, suddenly shuddering as the wind picked up. The temperature was dropping as darkness fell, and a mist hung above the water, higher than a man could reach, thick and smelling of cabbage and silt and old plants. The fog looked yellow in the dusk light. The roar of the river grew as Ben went on and arrived at the dam.

  At first it looked as if the silver-blue skin of the water had grown tumorous. Then he saw, just under the surface, tangled trees, woven vines, and bushes locked into one another, small logs and larger ones, pieces of siding, detergent boxes, green garbage, bones. All were holding the river high, though a million gallons flowed past him as Ben watched. He closed his eyes and opened them, lost the peculiar focus he’d found, and saw simply a silvery blue skin that writhed.

  He went on to the bridge, from which children in summer fished and where Ben had stood to watch Ethan and some friends wade on the sun-heated slippery rocks. Now they would, as soon as a foot went into the water, be seized and beaten, pulled away, spinning, to surface half a mile downstream, under the railroad trestle, features erased by rocks and trees, bloody tubes of meat digested and released.

  Ben reached toward a stump and knocked on it three times. He said, “Please.”

  THEY ATE DINNER in the living room, in front of the Franklin stove. The third time Ethan smacked his lips while chewing hamburger Stroganoff, Marge made good on her threat and marched Ethan into the kitchen, where he sat in the yellow light of one lamp and finished his meal alone. Ben and Marge, in the living room, said nothing; they ate and looked at the bright flare of fire visible where the stove doors met. Ethan’s chair scraped, something creaked, and then there was a silence. “Where’s he going?” Ben whispered.

  “Maybe his room.”

  “I didn’t hear him on the steps.”

  “Well, there’s noplace else to go. He has to go past us to get to the TV—”

  “Yeah,” Ben said, standing, “but he doesn’t have to go past us to go out.”

  “Ethan takes care,” Marge said. “He wouldn’t want to get soaked—oh, come on, Ben, he is not going to the river.”

  Ben said, “If the sump pump starts in now, to punctuate all this dread and criminality, I’ll disconnect it.” The sump pump started in, they heard it grinding downstairs. Ben said, “I can’t disconnect it or the cellar will flood and the furnace’ll go out.”

  “What dread?” Marge said. “What criminality?”

  “No, it’s just, with the river rising, with the goddamn cellar rising, I don’t like it that we aren’t together. Happy.”

  “Ben,” she said, “do you know how unhappy he would be if there weren’t consequences? Discipline? Rules he has to follow?”

  “Yeah, but he can’t follow them.”

  “He will. It’s called learning.”

  Ben put another log into the stove and sat down again, then stood up. The sump pump was on. “But what if he does go to the river?”

  “He won’t. Go look for him if you’re worried. It isn’t such a big house, you know. Go look.”

  Ben sipped coffee and rubbed the back of his neck. “Do you understand that when you talk to me like that, when you patronize me, even if it’s Ethan, I can’t go do what I think is right?”

  “You asked me and I told you.”

  “Bitch,” Ben said. He put his coffee on the table in front of the sofa and went around it, clumsily and blushing. He leaned over, one knee on the cushion, to kiss her on the cheek chastely. “I forgive you your transgressions,” he said.

  Marge said, “Asshole.” She held his head and struck her tongue out slowly, and slowly licked his lips from side to side. Ben sat down beside her, moved in closer, and kissed her mouth.

  “That’s right,” he said when they’d stopped.

  “That’s right,” she said.

  “Yes. As usual,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  As if to hold her trophy up, while Ben breathed deeply on the sofa beside her, Marge called, “Ethan!”

  When there was no answer, Ben shook his head. She called again.

  Ben shouted, as if in rage, “Ethan!”

  The high small voice came back from far away: “Yes?”

  “Where is he?” Ben said.

  “Yes?”

  Ben said, “Is that from outside? He is outside.”

  But Marge was already up, walking toward the kitchen and the cellar door, and she was on the steps before Ben had stood to follow her. Downstairs, in the light of the one bulb at the far end of the cellar, in the grinding chatter of the pump, Ethan swept water from the drain that Ben had uselessly capped. The water rolled with a loud hush across the gray floor and spilled over into the sump and was pumped out to seep back in again. There was a new smell downstairs, among the smells of wet wood and soaked stone and hot motor—the sharp tang of mildew. Ethan, in Marge’s high black boots, continued to sweep. Marge in her fur-lined slippers, Ben in his still soaked boots, both with wet feet, stood watching him—the long pale intelligent face, the slender arms and legs, big hands. In Marge’s boots, in the weak cellar light, in the pool of black water, Ethan looked very small.

  “Hi,” he said. Then he smiled, and his ill-brushed teeth shone beige.

  Ben cleared his throat. “We thought you went out, honey.”

  Marge reached back to slap Ben’s buttocks, to warn him into silence.

  “How’s it going?” she said.

  Ethan said, “I don’t think I’m making any progress. But you guys were so upset about the water, I thought maybe I could, you know, do something.”

  “No,” Ben said, “you’re doing fine.”

  “Really fine,” Marge said. “You’re a helper, all right.”

  Ben rubbed the back of his neck and stepped away so that Marge couldn’t reach him. “Ethan,” he said, “you know where babies come from?”

  Ethan said, “Mom told me. You could check with her if you want to.”

  The boy swept more water into the sump, and the pump went on again.

  “Okay,” Ben said, “I will.”

  Marge turned and walked to the foot of the steps. Ben stood, watching Ethan sweep. Then he turned too and followed his wife. When Marge was in the kitchen, and Ben was halfway there, Ethan called, “Hey, Dad? Dad?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell me what she says, okay?”

  THAT NIGHT THE skies shook and darkness was total: no moon, no stars, no road lights visible from the bedroom window, the bedroom itself extinguished, and their eyes squeezed shut. They did not touch; when they rolled on the mattress or tugged at blankets or push
ed a pillow flat, they grunted as if hurt. They slept finally, then awakened to hear field mice running in the eaves and between the walls at the head of the bed. It was the dry scraping sound of panic. It rhymed with the grinding chirr of the pump in the lath and beams and floorboard between them and the flooded cellar. Marge turned her bedside lamp on, and the walls jumped in toward them. Ben whispered, “Don’t read. Just lie there. If you say you’re awake, you won’t be able to sleep at all.”

  Wearing Ben’s undershirt and squinting from the blackened eyes of an exhausted athlete, Marge reached up to turn off the light.

  “You look nice,” he whispered.

  “You always like me to wear your clothes.”

  “So I can own you.”

  “So you can protect me.”

  “Probably that too.”

  Marge said, “If the mice desert it, and come in here, does that mean the world is sinking?”

  Ben said into his pillow, “The world will be fine.”

  After a minute, after another minute, with the darkness humid around them and expanding into the darkness of the flooded world outside, Marge said, “Can you promise me that? Can you promise?”

  “I promise,” Ben said.

  “You better mean that.”

  “I do. But no babies. No more babies.”

  She prayed at him: “Then you better mean it, Ben.”

  He wanted it to end with his praying back I do, but he lay still and saw the yellow school bus, Ethan on board, rolling off the rain-slicked road. Ben opened his eyes so as not to see the children bouncing in the bus, pips in a fat collapsing gourd. He saw the darkness. He closed his eyes and against his will he looked closer, supplying details, squeezing his eyes. He saw the battered heads of bleeding children, and black hair, yellow hair, brown hair, hair cut short and hair tied in thin bright ribbon, all of it pasty with blood and teeming with lice, the lice jumping in blood and tracking it tinily on the wrinkled brown lunch bags that lay on cracked seats and in muddy aisles. He heard Ethan cry, not in the house with them now, but in his dream, in the future, in the world that possessed more of him than Ben thought it right to have to yield, and he pushed himself from the pillow. He almost said I do. But he turned—Marge said, “Ben?”—and in the darkness, with the pump going on and off, with mice hurtling furiously between the walls, he wrestled her, tore at the shared shirt, buried his mouth in her neck and labored with his lips and teeth, dropping upon her with no question and no answer, hearing nothing for the first time that night, making what you might as well call love.

  TOO LATE AMERICAN BOYHOOD BLUES

  THE SETTLEMENT OF MARS

  IT BEGAN FOR ME in a woman’s bed, and my father was there though she wasn’t. I was nine years old, and starting to age. “Separate vacations,” then, meant only adventure to me. My bespectacled mother would travel west to attend a conference about birds; she would stare through heavy binoculars at what was distant and nameable. My father and I would drive through Massachusetts and New Hampshire into Maine, where he and Bill Brown, a friend from the army, would climb Mount Katahdin and I would stay behind at the Brown family’s farm.

  And it was adventure—in the days away from New York, and in the drive alone with my father in the light-green ’49 Chevrolet, and in my mother’s absence. For she seemed to be usually angry at someone, and my father struck me as usually pleased with the world, and surely with me. And though I knew enough to understand that his life was something of a secret he didn’t tell me, I also knew enough at nine to accept his silence as a gift: peace, which my mother withheld by offering the truth, in codes I couldn’t crack, of her discontent.

  I remember the dreamy, slow progress of the car on heat-shimmered highways, and my elbow—this never was permitted when we all drove together on Long Island—permanently stuck from the high window. We slept one night in a motel that smelled like iodine, we ate lobster rolls and hot dogs, I discussed the probable settlement of Mars, and my father nodded gravely toward my knowledge of the future.

  He gave me close escapes—the long, gray Hudson which almost hit us, because my father looked only ahead when he drove, never to the side or rear, as we pulled out of a service station; the time we had a flat and the jack collapsed twice, the car crashing onto the wheel hub, my father swearing—“Goddamn it!”—for the first time in my hearing; and the time he let the car drift into a ditch at the side of the road, pitching us nose-down, rear left-side wheel in the air, shaken and stranded until a farmer on a high tractor towed us out and sent us smiling together on our way. My father bared his teeth to say, “It’s a lucky thing Mother isn’t here,” while I regretted the decorum I had learned from him—I was not to speak without respect of the woman with binoculars who had journeyed from us.

  I thought of those binoculars as we approached the vague shapes of weathered gray buildings, wished that I could stare ahead through them and see what my life, for the next little while, might offer. But the black Zeiss 12 × 50s were thousands of miles from us, and really further than that: they were in my memory of silent bruised field trips, when my father’s interest would be in covering ground, and my mother’s would be expressed in the spraddle-legged stiffness with which she stared at birds up a slope I knew my father wanted to be climbing.

  Bill Brown was short and mild in silver-rimmed glasses. He wore a striped engineer’s cap with a long bill, and he smiled at everything my father said. Molly Brown was taller than Bill, and was enormously fat, with wobbling arm flesh and shaking jowls and perpetual streaked flushes on her soft round cheeks. Their daughter, Paula, was fourteen and tall and lean and beautiful. She had breasts. Sweat, such an intimate fact to me, stained the underarms of her sleeveless shirt. She wore dungarees that clung to her buttocks. She rolled the cuffs to just below her knees, and I saw the dusk sun light up golden hairs on her shins. She had been assigned to babysit me for the visit. I could not imagine being babysat by so much of everything I had heard rumored, and was beginning to notice in playgrounds, secrets of the other world.

  We ate mashed potatoes and a roast that seemed to heat the kitchen, which, like the other rooms in the house, smelled of unwashed bodies and damp earth. I slept that first night on a cot in Paula’s room, and I was too tired even to be embarrassed, much less thrilled, by the proximity; I slept in purest fatigue, as if I had journeyed on foot for weeks to another country, in which the air was thin. Next day, we walked the Brown’s land—I could not take my eyes from Paula’s spiny back and strong thighs as we climbed fences, as she helped me, her child-assignment, up and over and down—and we ate too much hot food, and drank Kool-Aid (forbidden, because too sugary, at home), and we sat around a lot. I rejoiced in such purposelessness, and I suspected that my father enjoyed it too, for our weekend days at home were slanted toward mission; starting each Saturday morning, we tumbled down the long tilted surfaces of the day into weeding and pruning and sweeping and traveling in the silent car to far-off fields to see if something my mother knew to be special was fluttering over marshes in New Jersey or forests in upstate New York.

  My father, who made radio advertisements, spoke a little about his work, and Bill Brown said in his pleased soft voice that he had heard my father’s ads. But when Bill said, “Where do you get those crazy ideas, Frank?” my father turned the conversation to potato farming, and the moth collection which Bill and Molly kept together, and the maintenance of trucks. I knew that my father understood nothing about engines. He was being generous again, and he was hiding again while someone else talked of nothing that mattered to the private man who had taught me how to throw a baseball, and how to pack a knapsack, and how—I know this now—to shelter inside other people’s words. And there was Paula, too, smoking cigarettes without reprimand, swinging beside me on the high-backed wooden bench that was fastened by chains to the ceiling of their porch. I breathed her smoke as now I’d breathe in perfume on smooth, heated skin.

  In reply to a question, my father said, “Angie’s in Colorado.

>   “All the way out there,” Molly said.

  Bill said, “Well.”

  “Yes, she had a fine opportunity,” my father said. “They gave her a scholarship to this conference about bird migration, I guess it is, and she just couldn’t say no.”

  “I’d like to go there sometime,” Paula said, sighing smoke out.

  “Wouldn’t you, though?” Molly growled in her rich voice. “Meet some Colorado boys and such, I suspect?”

  “Give them a chance to meet a State of Maine girl, don’t forget,” Paula said. “Uncle Frank, didn’t you want to go to Colorado?”

  My father’s deep voice rumbled softly. “Not when I can meet a State of Maine girl right here, hon. And don’t forget, your father and I already spent some time in Colorado.”

  “Amen that it’s over,” Bill said.

  “I saw your father learn his manners from a mule out there, didn’t I, Bill?”

  “Son of a bitch stepped so hard on my foot, he broke every damned bone inside it. Just squatted there, Frank, you remember? Son of a bitch didn’t have the sense to get off once he’d crushed it. It took Frank jumping up and down and kicking him just to make him wake and look down and notice he already done his worst and he could move along. Leisurely, as I remember. He must have been thinking or something. I still get the bowlegged limps in wet weather. I wouldn’t cook a mule and eat one if I was starved to death.”

  “Well, didn’t she—” Paula said.

  “Angie,” I said. I felt my father look at me across the dark porch.

  “Didn’t Angie want to come up here and meet us?” Paula asked.

  Molly said, “Couldn’t you think of any personal questions you would like for Frank to answer for you?”

  “Well, I guess I’m sorry, then.”

  “That’s right,” Molly said.

  “It was one hell of a basic training,” Bill said. He said it in a rush. “They had us with this new mountain division they were starting up. Taught us every goddamned thing you could want to know about carrying howitzers up onto mountains by muleback. How to get killed while skiing. All of it. Then, they take about three hundred of us or so and send us by boat over to some hot jungle. Ship all our gear with us too, of course. So we land there in the Philippine Islands with snowshoes, skis, camouflage parkas, light machine guns in white canvas covers, for gosh-sakes, and they ask us if we’d win the war for them.”