Girls (5 page)

“I didn’t think you’d be able to sleep after that,” Fanny said.

“I brought enough adrenaline home to run a football team.”

“But you can’t be a hero, huh? You can’t be discovered. You’re hiding in here because somebody’s going to call, or come over, and want to talk to you—her parents for shooting sure, sooner or later. Or is that supposed to be part of the service at the playground? Saving their suicidal daughters. Freeze to death finding them in the woods and driving too fast for
any
weather, much less what we had last night. Getting their babies home. The bastards.” She was crying. I could hear the soft sound of her lashes. She sniffed and I could feel her arm move as she pawed for the tissues on the coffee table.

“I have them over here,” I said. “On the windowsill.”

“Yes.” She blew her nose, and the dog thumped his tail. He seemed to think it one of Fanny’s finer tricks, and he had wagged for her for years whenever she’d wept or sniffed or blown her nose. “Well, you’re going to have to talk to them.”

“I will,” I said. “I will.” The sun was in our sky now, climbing. “I think that guy with the smile, my prof? She showed up a lot at his office the last few weeks. He called her ‘my advisee,’ you know? The way those guys sound about what they’re getting done by being just a little bit better than mortals? Well, she was his advisee, I bet. He was shoving home the old advice.”

“She’ll be okay,” Fanny said. “Her parents will take her home and love her up and get her some help.” She began to cry again. Then she stopped. She blew her nose, and the dog’s tail thumped. She said, “So tell me what you’ll tell a waiting world. How’d you talk her out?”

“Well, I didn’t, really. I got up close and picked her up and carried her.”

“You didn’t say
anything
?”

“Sure I did. Kid’s standing in the snow outside of a lot of pills, you’re gonna say something.”

“So what’d you say?”

“I told her some lies about the war. I ogred and howled. I don’t know, Fanny. I told her stories,” I said. “I did ‘Rhetoric and Persuasion.’ ”

A couple of weeks later, Fanny volunteered for the 11:00
P.M.
to 7:00
A.M.
shift. We saw each other when she was coming home and I was heading out. I timed my leaving for work so we’d say hello. “Good morning,” we’d say. We’d sing it, to prove we weren’t angry or embarrassed or scared. The dog got a little confused about who was supposed to feed him his breakfast. We’d talk about that in the blue-cold mornings at the cars outside the house, and then I’d drive to work and she’d go in. Of course, we’d be home together in the house at night, but she’d be trying to sleep when I came in or I’d be sleeping when she was getting ready to leave. You can make a routine out of it, and that’s what we did.

Here’s what I thought. I thought, Once upon a time.

And I was not a dishonorable student, I guess. At the end of the term, he gave me a C+ for the course.

I
WAS UP EARLY.
I’d been up a good deal of the night. I let the dog out, then fed him and thought about feeding myself. Instead, I watched the early news from Syracuse. It was the same news I’d seen at two in the morning. A plane had landed in a river. A deputy had confessed to crimes. Arson was suspected in a fire. The President was not a crook. I didn’t want to taste my own coffee. I put a little extra weatherproofing on my boots, took a thermos that might be clean, and went out to the car to warm it up. As I knew she would, Fanny settled her car into the icy ruts in the drive. She turned the engine off and did what she usually did: sat with her head back, not moving, like she’d fallen asleep. I opened her door and said, “Hey.”

“Hey,” she said, her eyes still closed.

“Lousy night?”

“Good one. Nobody died. Nothing got amputated. We had a blue baby, but he’s all right. The doctor’s scared to death because he gave him oxygen, but what could he do? Last time he did that, the kid went blind and he got sued for ten million bucks or something. Of course, they settled. It’s what you do. Kid doesn’t breathe, you flood him with it and you pray, and then you settle.”

“So you’re sitting here praying? Or settling?”

“I’m sitting here is all, Jack.”

The sun was rising on the other side of the house, but the skies were overcast and it still felt like nighttime. I said, “The dog’s fed. I don’t remember whether I turned the heat up or not.”

“I’ll figure it out,” she said. “If I’m cold, I’ll turn it up.”

Her face was pale, and her eyelids looked dark, like her eyes were sore. “I better go,” I said.

She nodded.

I said, “I’ll see you later.”

She nodded. She said, “Bye, Jack.” With her eyes still closed, she raised a hand in its mitten and waved.

I said, “Bye.”

The car I drove to work was possibly the last surviving Gran Torino station wagon manufactured by Ford in 1974. It was chocolate brown and rusted nearly through at a number of key points. At each of those points, where metal that simulated wood for an old-fashioned station wagon appearance was hanging off, I had laid on silvery duct tape. There was nearly nothing duct tape wouldn’t hold together. Among the exceptions would be people, I suppose. The car was heavy enough to get me over our unpaved and usually unplowed road. I could see ice glinting on the road through the floorboards on the passenger’s side of the front. While I slithered and slid, I leaned over and pushed the cocoa fiber doormat back into place over the hole. My breath hung around me in a cold cloud, so I felt like I was driving in the outside weather while I was staring through my private weather inside the car. I kept the high beams on for the outside stuff, and hoped for the best with what was in.

I stopped at the Blue Bird to fill up with coffee for the day. Two broad streets met at the top of town, and the Blue Bird looked out on them both. Local contractors and snowplow drivers and nurses coming on and off shift and the old people, who didn’t sleep a lot, came into the Bird and drank the oily coffee and ate yeasty cakes and slippery eggs. There was a no smoking section in the back, and because it consisted of only two booths, most of the college people went
to another joint, where they had less fun but better air. I sat at the counter and asked skinny Verna with her high voice and wattled throat for a cup of coffee and a full thermos, and I looked for Archie Halpern. He was the gentlest of them. He was the best of them.

When I saw him in a window seat, I took my coffee and went over.

He moved around the pepper and salt, the napkin holder, the menu, and a dirty spoon.

“I started out trying to make room for you,” he said, “but you’re really
not
going to sit on the table, are you?”

I shook my head and sat down.

He had a very short crew cut and a sloppy shave, so his round head looked fuller than usual. He ran his thick hand over his head and his smile looked embarrassed. “I swore I’d cut my hair off if the hockey team made it to the tournament.”

“Who’d you promise?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“A counselor deal,” I said.

“A kid’s doing his best to fuck his life up, and I’ve been doing some work with him.”

“You’re good at it.”

He shrugged. He said, “I’m not sure I’m that good. I wouldn’t call
you
too well-adjusted, you taciturn son of a bitch. Is that face for me or the coffee?”

“Both.”

“How’s Fanny?”

I nodded.

He said, “Yeah?”

“Yeah what?”

“Yeah, what in fuck are we talking about is what,” he said.

He began to sweat. At first, I used to think it was a trick. I learned after a while that when he began to concentrate, his metabolism speeded up. Often enough, by the end of an hour or so, his clothes would be wet. I said, “You don’t need to go to work on me, Archie.”

“Fine.”

“I didn’t come over here to freeload a little psychological health.”

“Jack,” he said, “I couldn’t do it for you with a wheelbarrow and shovel, you’re so fucked up.”

I nodded.

“I was joking,” he said.

“No, you weren’t.” I shrugged to show him how I didn’t care.

“Jack,” he said pleasantly and low, “you’re so full of shit. You look like you got run over before you got out of bed.”

I leaned down to my coffee and then sat up. I looked at his little eyes in his big face. He kept it deadpan when he worked. I said, “I guess I was looking for you. But it wasn’t to make you work. I was just looking for a no-stress breakfast.”

He laughed, a high, choppy sound I liked. “Like no cholesterol,” he said.

I tried to laugh with him.

He said, “Are you talking to Fanny any more than you’re talking to me?”

I shook my head. Then I said, “This morning. I tried again.”

“You sad motherfucker,” he said. “You tried talking English and she didn’t jump up and down, right? Remember what I said about you have to
live
communicating? Remember? All the time, not just when you get frightened?”

I said, “How’d you know about the frightened?”

There was sweat on his upper lip. He wiped at it.

“Archie,” I said.

He clasped his hands. I did the same, but my cup was in the way and I spilled it onto the table and jumped up.

He said, “It’s fine, Jack. It’s all right.”

Verna, bringing my filled thermos, came with a big yellow sponge. “Don’t you listen to him,” she said. “It’s not all right. And you didn’t eat nothing, neither.”

Archie said, “She wants a bigger tip.” She swatted at him with the sponge.

People went back to eating and talking and smoking, and Verna left. I stood beside the table, laying money on it and zipping my coat.

Archie asked, “You want to come by the office, Jack? Or the house?”

“I’ll see,” I said. “You know. Thank you.”

He looked sad. I couldn’t imagine what I looked like. He gave me half a wave, and I waved back like he was a hundred yards of snow and ice away from me. When I was outside the Blue Bird and looking back up at the window tables, I saw the poster, taped to the back of the storefront so people walking by could read it. That was the first one I remember.

I saw another one in the window of a pickup truck parked at the curb, and there was one in the window of the Radio Shack. When I got to the security building, there was a poster tacked to the door. The signs were eight and a half by eleven, in black and white. In large letters at the top was missing. Underneath was the face of a little girl—fourteen, according to the sign—with a sweet smile and white teeth and wide eyes. She weighed ninety-six pounds. She was five feet tall. She had gone from Sunday school to her house in one of the little towns south of the college, and she had never arrived. She looked happy and fragile. It was easy to think of a large man with his hands around her upper arms, compelling her into a car or truck or doorway. It became such a huge county, when you looked at the picture, in the hugeness of New York State, in such a big continent. You could cry, looking at her face.

It had bloomed overnight, and I saw it everyplace. Anthony Berberich had a poster taped to the window of his Jeep, and every building I had occasion to enter that morning had posters taped and tacked onto doors and bulletin boards and corridor walls. Her family was doing what they could, and I wished I knew them so I could tell them so. My throat ached at the thought of seeing their faces, or hearing them talk. I’d have given a lot to know, without having to ask them, what they did to erase from their minds the idea of the fear she must have felt. Of course, I didn’t have to ask. They didn’t erase
it because they couldn’t. I wondered if Fanny had seen the posters at the hospital, and I nearly phoned. But she might have been able to sleep, I thought, and probably that was why I didn’t call.

I wanted not to see the picture of the missing child, but wherever I went, she was looking back. Her name was Janice Tanner. I knew a Tanner Hill in the vicinity, and I wondered if it was named after her family. On the way home once after work, I had driven up the road over Tanner Hill. It had looked pleasant and far from everyplace else, and I hadn’t seen a child in skirt and sweater and sneakers who was in jeopardy. I saw my English professor, but I pretended not to. I waved to a kid who was a friend of mine, Everett Stark, who’d come to school after four years in the navy. I once asked him how he was doing, and he said, “Man, ain’t nothin around here but white folks and cows.”

I had to park up behind a little tan Chevrolet import that kept rolling down the worst part of the classroom building hill. I stopped the Jeep in the middle of the road, with the bumper just touching the car, and I hit the roof light to keep student traffic off us. They raced up the hill to get to their illegal parking places and they believed that death and maiming were limited by law to people over twenty-two. Once I looked at the little car’s tires, I understood. They were almost bald. I walked around to the driver’s side and she looked at me the way I sometimes look at sheriff’s deputies filling their quota of speeding tickets.

“Morning,” I said.

“I’m late for class,” she said. Her voice was harsh, but in an interesting way. She had a big mouth and a beaky nose and hair sprouting all over the place from under her dark woolen cap.