Free Girls by Frederick Busch Page B

seemed content to pause before the next episode of our mission. I wanted to be like that. I wanted to know that orders were coming and that I’d soon perform them, and then the job would be done, and I would dive slowly into the curving path made by my flanks while I circled and circled, as if I was clearing away a nest, and lie down and sleep.
    My feet were numb and my hands were cold. The winds drove past the collar of my parka and up my sleeves. My nose and cheeks hurt and even my eyeballs felt cold. It was time to turn around. The milkiness of the broad hill before us and around us was getting darker, which meant more weather coming on. It was time to fill his aluminum water dish and lock the dog in the kitchen and go to work. I tried to turn around, and my feet were slow to move. I had difficulty lifting them and wasn’t surprised when I fell. He was over and at my face, licking me, delighted with our new game. I lay where I was and closed my eyes. He shoved his muzzle into my face and I felt his paw on my chest.
    “Good game, huh?”
    I heard myself breathe out noisily, then take in icy air with less pleasure. I listened to that for a while, and the little snorts of the dog.
    I said, “Okay.”
    He left off, because he knew the tone. It meant
not
okay. He was waiting nearby, and I ought to be standing by now, in motion. Of course, a man doesn’t walk away from his house through a field ofdeep snow one morning in February just before work and lie down until the winds cover him with blown snow and then die.
    “I didn’t say anything about dying,” I said. My mouth wasn’t working right, or I didn’t want it to be. That was it. I sounded like someone trying hard to be drunk. I didn’t like that sound, and I rolled onto my side and, when the dog returned, because he suspected action, I leaned a little of my weight on his shoulders and I got to my knees and then stood.
    “Good trick,” I told us. “Good.” I took my glove off and found the biscuits in the pocket of my coat, and I gave him one.
    “Aren’t we clever,” I said.
    Fanny’s car was in the drive, which had been plowed twice since she’d been stuck. The winter was the worst I could remember for snow, and for getting up to fight through the cold and ice and balky motors and the difficulty of simply walking between two points, a feeling in the air of not enough oxygen. Drivers on campus were cranky and less and less thoughtful. The snowplows seemed to come less frequently, though we needed them more. Fanny still drove, I was certain, with her knuckles white and her mind not focused on the surface of the road. I was glad to see her car, to know she’d made it home. But I was also a little sneaky in my approach to the side porch, because I had a need to come and go unnoticed.
    She was in the kitchen, though, waiting, still in her uniform, with a heavy white sweater tied by its sleeves around her shoulders.
    “You look terrible,” she said. “What happened?”
    “I took him for a walk,” I said. “I haven’t been very good, the last few days, about exercise and stuff.”
    “And stuff,” she said.
    I said, “Stuff.” I saw that she’d made coffee, and I went for a cup. “How was work?”
    “Quiet.”
    “Good.”
    “Dr. Kalubia’s wife came to the ambulatory clinic and announced that her husband was a frequenter of whores and a carrier of diseases. He gave her venereal warts, apparently.”
    “That doesn’t sound terribly quiet.”
    “Warts are
very
quiet. You wake up quietly one morning and you have them. No noise.”
    “But
she
wasn’t quiet.”
    Fanny shook her head and smiled her tired smile. “But she got done pretty quickly,” she said.
    “What’d Kalubia say?”
    “He asked if I would like, some night, to meet him at the Red Roof Inn and have a drink.”
    “Warts and all.”
    “It takes a lot of energy and will to be a doctor, I guess.”
    The dog lay on his round bed, panting, looking pleased to have extended himself