Girls: A Novel by Frederick Busch

Author:Frederick Busch
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction.Suspense & Thriller
ISBN: 9780307798121
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2011-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

testify

WE HAD THE USUAL upstate January thaw so late in the season, it was two days away from March when temperatures went toward twenty, and people new to the region talked about early spring. Students forsook heavy coats, and some professors came to work in sport jackets with sweaters underneath and, of course, the long scarf wrapped around the neck and trailing down the back.

The dog got down to another level of dead creatures in the forest, and he came back on the second morning of the thaw with a bunch of loose but connected half-defrosted blue-brown flesh that he rolled on in the side yard. He tossed it in the air and chased it, dancing rigidly over it, back and forth, like an old brown rocking chair. Then he aimed his back at it and rolled around, his paws in the air, his back writhing. Occasionally, he took licks at it, then bites. When he came back in, I smelled him and sent him out.

So, before work, on a day when you could see, if not feel, the sun, I rubbed the old dog down with shampoo and then rinsed him off with snow. I didn’t want him soaked so the lanolin ran out of his coat. I also didn’t want to smell the secrets he’d uncovered. But he’d had a happy morning, and I was glad.

When I got to campus, the sun was paler, and it fell with even less weight than it had a couple of hours before. I cranked the window down and stuck my head out to look up. Clouds were massing, dirty and serrated and thick. Our thaw was about to be rescinded.

I had thought about making an appointment for Fanny and me with Archie Halpern. I had thought about it for several nights and days. I didn’t drive to the Blue Bird, though, and I didn’t phone his office on campus or call him at home. I read reports from the night men and I looked through the mail. The president promised us all, students, faculty, and staff (as they called us): He would move heaven and earth, he would use all powers at his disposal, he would bring to bear every resource possessed by the college, to set free Irene Horstmuller. I thought she was wrong and also a goddamned hero and I loved what she did. Archie would call this being in conflict. Apparently, no one was telling the Secret Service or the FBI or anyone in the courts that the records she was sent to jail for protecting didn’t exist. This much of it, I quite enjoyed. In being guilty as charged, she was also innocent, since what she protected by going to jail wasn’t on the surface of the earth or in it. Still, I worried about the Vice President.

In a sealed campus-mail envelope was a letter for me on departmental letterhead. It said:

And?

It wasn’t signed with a name, only an initial: R. I thought it was pretty bold stuff, really.

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