Girls (23 page)

“Which means the furnace went off. Which means it won’t go on. You have to push the reset to make it go on again. Which means frozen pipes, maybe. It’s still cold?”

“Still cold,” she said. “Burst pipes for sure.”

“That’s upstate,” I said.

She nodded.

“I’ll be all right, Fanny. I’m sorry about this.”

“It’s the
this
,” she said. “It’s gotten to be so much of everything.”

I swallowed a few times and she saw I was dry, and she held a glass with a bent straw to my mouth. I swallowed too fast and began to cough and it became very interesting along the right side of my body. I watched her tighten her face until I was done and lying flat again.

The door opened in and Rosalie Piri said to Fanny, “Can I see him?”

Her smile was not as broad as usual, and she looked frightened, or maybe embarrassed. She certainly was flushed. Fanny stayed pale. I closed my eyes. “He’s tired,” Fanny said. Then she said, “You are …”

Instead of naming herself, Rosalie used a pugnacious tone I thought of as New York City, and she said, “Yes, I’m a little tired, too, thank you. Can I visit him?”

Fanny looked down at me. I looked back up. My eyes were so wide, they hurt. I made a little throat-clearing noise, and I said, “Professor Piri, this is my wife, Fanny. Fanny, this is Professor Piri.”

Fanny said, “How do you do.”

Rosalie nodded. She said, “Hello” in a hard, cold voice I hadn’t heard. Her face was as red as the head of a stick match.

Fanny said to me, “Bye, Jack.” She went out the door with a very stiff back.

Rosalie came to the side of the bed. “Oh, God,” she said. “I didn’t handle that well.” She smiled, she stopped smiling, and then she said, “Jack, is there anything to handle? Your wife’s remarkable. She’s so tall, she looks like a dancer.”

“Can’t dance,” I said.

“No, she looks, I don’t know, powerful. She has wonderful bones in her face.”

I thought, She has shadows in her face. I helped set them there. I did my share.

“I’m too short for you,” she said.

“No,” I said. I thought then that I was at least one word, that last one, into someplace I shouldn’t be.

“Your sad mouth,” she said, touching my lip. I hissed, and she drew her hand away. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“You’re making my catheter uncomfortable,” I said.

She blushed again. She shook her head. “This is insane,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I have to get out of here.”

“Yes.”

I waited for her to make me a promise, or to say something about her and me. She compressed her lips and took a breath. She said, “Right,” and she turned toward the door and walked out.

I waited for Fanny to march in and make comments. She didn’t
come. About half an hour later, Virginia brought a bedpan. All right, I thought, she sent a messenger instead.

My doctor, who was very fat and extremely careful about hurting me, told me I was going to be all right. The kidney was bruised, but the blood in my urine was diminished. They removed the catheter, they rebound my ribs, and they told me that I should take it easy. I was to stay there another night because, although my skull X rays were negative, I was probably mildly concussed, and anyway, most of the smaller county roads were unplowed. I could sit up, the doctor told me, smiling, if I could sit up.

I was in the room’s lounge chair, reading a Syracuse newspaper several days old and enjoying it. There was a lot of information about zoo animals and corruption in the county council. They didn’t bother you a lot with material about inept Presidents or endangered Vice Presidents or the Senate of the United States. There were a lot of comic strips, and a crossword puzzle even I could do. I was a not unintelligent crossword puzzler.

Strodemaster came in puffing. He was dressed in ski clothes of the sort I saw the students wear, very expensive stuff in black and iridescent yellow that looked like spangles were woven into the skintight cloth. His goggles hung around his neck.

“Jack!” he called. “You all right, man?”

I said, “Hi, Randy, did you ski all the way in?”

“Good exercise,” he said. “And I qot a lift from the snowplow for the last three miles. Jack, holy hat. This happened to you because of me, according to your wife.”

“My wife said that? How is she?”

“Been busy here for her, I guess. One big emergency.”

“One big emergency,” I said.

He walked back and forth too fast to call it pacing. I could see his leg muscles jumping in his tight outfit. He swung his arms and didn’t look at me. He moved back and forth, wall to wall, and he
looked straight ahead. I couldn’t figure out how he kept his hair so carefully combed under his ski hat. From the side, he looked a little bit like a movie star whose name I almost remembered. He walked, he swung his arms, and then he suddenly stopped. He faced the bed and looked at me like I was precious to him. It was something that went over his oaky-looking face.

“Listen,” he said, “I know I talked you into this. I got you involved in the first place when I went to Archie. I got you involved in the second place when I came to you. You aren’t a cop anymore. You don’t need this kind of shit, getting mugged by hoodlums. What kind of world is this?”

“You know, I have very little idea,” I said.

“I can tell you this much—it’s scary. When a good man gets hurt this much on account of some blabbermouth buttinsky like me … Well, we were just trying to help, weren’t we? Just trying to do a little good.”

I had the feeling I was missing what he wanted me to hear. I folded the newspaper and blinked a lot and focused hard.

He said, “You got me feeling guilty, man.”

“What are you guilty of, Randy?”

“Your whipped ass, Jack. I don’t ask you for help, you don’t get going into this stuff, and the hoodlums don’t hurt you. It couldn’t have been a fair fight.”

I said, “I don’t believe I know of any fair fights.”

“Really?” he said. “That’s a cruel, frightening Weltanschauung, Jack.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh. Point of view? I don’t know—view of the world, maybe. Way of looking at things?”

“Oh.”

“It’s German.”

“It’s a German way of looking?”

“It’s a German word.”

“Sounds it,” I said.

He was walking back and forth again. There wasn’t much of
anyplace to walk. It was a two-person room, and the only reason there was space for the chair was that Virginia had pushed the empty other bed against the wall. But he paced. He looked sweaty and less healthy than when he’d begun. I thought of him out there in Chenango Flats with his girlfriends and his garbage and his devotion to poor yellowing Mrs. Tanner. I tried to see him in graduate school and then his early days at the college with a wife who loved him. I could only see him alone. I couldn’t imagine him with a wife or with the girlfriends he was said to bring home. I could only see him in the bathrobe with its stained front. I remembered the smell of his kitchen. I was confused by his language and his shiny-faced energy. I was disturbed by how much he wanted me to like him.

“Jack,” he said, “promise me.”

“What, Randy?”

“You’ll get out of it, the involvement with … with this whole awful Janice Tanner story.”

I thought, listening to him, what I’d thought when my English prof had carried on about something we’d read. It always sounded prepared, which was a silly reaction, since these guys got
paid
to come to class prepared. I guess it sounded insincere, what they thought they were supposed to say instead of what they felt. I don’t know. I remember thinking I wasn’t cut out to be listening to these people. And what they felt wasn’t supposed to be my business, anyway.

“This is my own fault, Randy. I handled a lot of stuff wrong. Remember what I told you—I haven’t been an investigator for an awfully long time.”

He said, “Yes, I remember. What I thought at the time was, What’s an investigator? He picks up data? I thought
I
could do it. I was trained. Investigators are like scientists. Scientists are investigators. I didn’t do Janice any good, did I?”

I said, “Maybe.”

“Maybe I did?”

“Maybe investigators are scientists. What I did, when I worked it seriously, I listened. I just tried to hear what they said. I did a lot of interrogations. I was good at it.”

“At listening,” he said, walking to the door and turning to walk back.

“At listening,” I said.

He said, “Listen, then, Jack. I’m the one at fault here, not you. You have broken ribs. The cartilage that binds two of them in place is torn away. You have two simple fractures in your fingers. Fanny told me you were pissing blood. Your face is puffed and black-and-blue. You look like you can’t move a lot of the rest of you. You’re
out.
I hired you, for a great big nothing, and now I need to fire you. Please. All right?”

“Randy,” I said, “relax. You professors. All of you. You talk and you talk. Relax.”

“Get outside and go for a run on the sticks.”

“What?”

“Go skiing. That’s what I should do more of. That’s what I’ll do. But no more—what shall we call it, detective work?”

“I think you call it getting beat up.”

“Good description,” he said. “Good man!”

“That’s me,” I said, wondering if Fanny would enter the room again.

She’d been on for four days, and by the time the roads were cleared and most of the area’s power restored, they sent her off for a couple of days’ break, and they sent me with her. Security would dig my Ford out and run it a little to charge the battery. My vice president for administration had interviewed and hired a temp to fill in until I came back. When I did, I could decide whether we would keep her. I was pleased he had listened to me about hiring a woman. All I needed now was for Fanny and me to be all right, and for the missing girls to appear unharmed in their homes.

Here’s what I thought. I thought about Ralph the Duck, who didn’t have any feathers. I thought, Once upon a time.

I truly wished, as Virginia wheeled me to the door and helped me
into Fanny’s car, that I knew something about prayer. Mrs. Tanner did, I thought. Presumably, her husband did. Maybe Janice did and maybe it comforted her. I wished for that.

I knew that praying was more than wishing. It was more than talking loose and swearing careless oaths to what you wished would bail you out of the shit. When I was in the service and people fired on each other while I was working, two times I heard men scream to Jesus and God the Father, “Oh please please please don’t kill me God Jesus please.” I’d got in the habit, there, of using those names as messily as anyone else had, and I’d known at the time and I knew now that praying was something else.

I thought, as Fanny drove us home, that I could work as hard as I wished, bullying bad guys and giving up my rib cage and doing all the powerful listening I could, but that something else had to happen. I didn’t know what it was. I wasn’t thinking about God. I had no ideas about God. God worked His, Her, or Its side of the street, and I worked mine. It wasn’t what Mrs. Tanner would think of as God. But we all needed more than we were bringing to the situation, I thought.

We skidded out, but Fanny caught it.

“You all right?” I asked her.

“Fine.”

“Fanny, you’re so amazingly pissed off at me.”

“Why is it amazing?”

“Because I haven’t done anything bad except get my ass kicked is why.”

“And your little short professor—what’s her name? Your faculty friend?”

“I find this hard to believe,” I said.

“No,” she said, “you should believe it. Walking into your room and talking through me like I’m hired help. Excuse me, I’m sure, pro-
fessor.
Do you knock her off in some maintenance shack or something? Or is she what you do in your truck when you aren’t rescuing the daughters of the upper crust?”

“I don’t knock anyone off. You, of everyone in the world, should
know that. You know who I am. You know how I’ve been. Come on, Fanny. And how could you suspect me of something like that?”

“Oh, it’s worse than suspecting you, Jack. It’s
her
I’m suspecting, too. All I needed was one fast look at her curly little mouth and her tight little body and the expression in her eyes when she looked at you. That girlish little blush? Dear mercy me, Jack, you can’t be that naïve. No one can. Which means you know what’s going on, whatever it is.”