Saul and Patsy

by Charles Baxter

  “How come you’re bent over like that?” the Himmel asked, evading Saul’s question.

  “Threw my back out picking up that pumpkin,” Saul said, nodding toward his jack-o-lantern, now on the lawn. All of them—bubble gum, the crow, Little Hans, the caterpillar, the wolf, the Himmel, and the garbage can—turned to look.

  “That’s a r-r-r-r-righteous pumpkin,” the wolf said. He had a stammer that involved swallowing and spitting up both vowels and consonants.

  The wolf’s stammer appeared to silence the crowd of creatures. Bubble gum looked through his/her dark glasses at the night sky. It was cold enough so that you could see everyone’s breath, but no one was shivering yet, though they would be shivering soon. The hanged woman moaned. How odd it was, that he should find himself in the company of these castoffs!

  “Everyone talks about you,” the crow said. “Everyone says you’re the one. They say it all the time.”

  “The one what?” Saul asked.

  “The one who started all this,” the hanged woman said. The garbage can nodded by shaking back and forth. Saul could not see through the eye holes to who or whatever was inside—he was more curious about the garbage can than he was about any of the others. “All this trouble with Gordy Himmelman and Sam Cole and things going wrong all the time!” The bush was mostly burnt by now, cracking down to ash, making sounds of expiration. “Everything going to shit. It’s your fault.”

  “It wouldn’t have happened if that kid hadn’t shot himself on your front lawn,” the Himmel said. “We need some payback.” The last phrase sounded like a sentence an adult would say, and the Himmel said it without enthusiasm or conviction.

  “And the sightings,” the crow said. “There wouldn’t be sightings if it wasn’t for you.”

  “Sightings?” Saul asked. “You kids have your nerve to talk about sightings.”

  “You know,” the crow said. He was not going to pronounce Gordy Himmelman’s name, either. The mothball-stinking crow obviously thought it brought on bad luck. God, what a hotbed of superstition, and gossip, and malice, and Dark Age reasoning these kids were—these middle schoolers and high schoolers, at least the outcasts among them. Magical thinking was all they had. The other kind had failed them.

  “So I bet you came here to throw things at the house, and scare us, and do all that, the pranks and troublemaking with the toilet paper and the eggs and the rocks and the slogans and the fire. Is that because I’m Jewish?” There was a long silence, and none of the creatures moved. “I bet it is.”

  “People say that you know th-th-th-th-things,” the wolf finally managed to say.

  “What do you want me to do?” Saul said. “With the things I know?”

  “Bring him back,” the crow announced to the crowd. He was a tough little crow. But he was improvising and not very clever. “Like you said you could.”

  “All right,” Saul said. “I’ll go get him.”

  The creatures stared at him. Saul had made of himself a master of resurrection. That was what Jews could do. All of them, including Little Hans, stepped away from him.

  “You can do that?” the Himmel asked.

  “Just watch,” Saul said.

  Five minutes later Saul came back, still bent over, with a small cardboard box. Inside the cardboard box was a cloisonné jar, and inside the jar— Saul showed the creatures this in the dark—were some ashes. The creatures drew back.

  “That’s him?” one of them asked.

  “That’s him,” Saul said. In his other hand, he held a shovel. “All of you, come on,” he said. He led them around the side of the house to the backyard, and then through the yard to a terrain of undergrowth and scrub and weeds beyond the lawn. Finally, reaching a small patch of ground between two bushes, he stopped. The trees and the night gave to the area a thick, profound darkness in which details—and the passage of time—were not discernible.

  “Have we got everybody?” he asked. Quickly he counted the small pillars of darkness. There were seven. “Where’s the bubble-gum boy?” Saul asked. Of course she was a girl, but he would call her a “boy” tonight.

  “She got cold,” the crow said. “I think she went back to the car.”

  “She was scared, man,” the garbage can said. “That’s all it was.”

  “She was crying, too,” the caterpillar told them. “I’m pretty sure. What a wuss.”

  “Well, anyway,” Saul said. He held out the shovel. “All right. Here’s the deal. These are Gordy’s ashes. We have to bury him. He’s been undead. When the ashes aren’t buried, you get the undead thing happening. You get the hauntings. So who among you wants to dig?”

  “I can’t,” the garbage can said. “I don’t have arms.”

  “Give me that.” Little Hans had finally spoken up. He didn’t sound like a high school student, but maybe he was; maybe he was really Henry Olschanski. He might have been anything. Saul handed him the shovel, and Little Hans began digging with it, his motions reflecting strength and fury. He was obviously practiced with shovels and knew how to use them. He was wearing heavy black leather boots, and he pitched the sharp blade of the shovel into the topsoil, which he lifted and cast off into the distance—the creatures were standing behind him—before arriving at the dirt beneath it, and then the clay. He hit a rock, and he scraped the shovel head around it, then threw the shovel onto the ground and dropped down on his hands and knees and scrabbled with his fingers around until he had a grasp of it, whereupon he lifted it out and heaved it on the dirt pile in front of him.

  “I’m glad we brought him along,” the Himmel said. “He’s a force.”

  Little Hans picked up the shovel again and resumed digging. “Anyone else want to do this?” he asked in a deep bass voice, between breaths, while he dug, but none of the creatures replied.

  “Mr. Bernstein,” the crow asked. “It’s your turn.”

  “It’s okay,” Saul told him. “Little Hans is doing a fine job.” Standing there, amid the creatures, Saul reached up and touched his nose, confirming that it was, in fact, broken.

  Working in what still seemed to be a total, life-defining rage, Little Hans continued to shovel until the hole was large enough for the jar, and then spacious enough for the box, and then, five minutes later, much larger than it needed to be for their purposes, as if he had been unable to stop, as if the shoveling was a kind of maniacal nightmare gravedigger assignment, tunneling down to the dark he met up with every night, not just this one. Finally, with the smell of sweat in the cold air drifting off of him, he rested.

  “Is that deep enough?” he asked. He glanced around.

  “Deeper than it needs to be,” Saul said. “Deep enough for everybody.”

  “This is creepy,” the crow said with distinct pleasure in his voice.

  “Who wants to lower him in?” Saul asked, glancing around at where the group appeared to be, all of them half-unseeable, obscure. He held the box out. None of the creatures took it.

  “You need to do it,” the caterpillar said. “Where’s your wife? Maybe she should, too.”

  “She’s not here,” Saul said. “She’s not here.” He waited. “Anyone want to touch the box before I put it into the ground?” The caterpillar reached out, and then the crow raised a wing, and the Himmel touched it, but the rest drew back. It was just too much for them.

  “How come you didn’t bury it sooner?” the wolf asked.

  “You don’t always bury the ashes,” Saul said. “Sometimes you keep them around. That was my mistake. That’s how come we had zombies around town.” With as much tenderness as he could summon, Saul, still bent over, carried the box to the hole that Little Hans had dug, and he lowered it until it rested there, on its deep layer of clay. He stood up again, as straight as he could make himself go with his back out, and he waited, looking at the pitch-black assembly. There was an expressive air pocket of silence. Off in the distance, very faintly, he could hear a jet in the night sky, and, also in the background, freeway noise. The music from
The Day the Earth Stood Still was no longer audible, but the truck was still playing AC/DC.

  “We need a blessing,” Saul said.

  “What the fuck. What blessing?” the crow asked. “What kinda shit is that? He was a total loser. An asshole. Besides, he’s dead.”

  “He won’t leave you alone unless you give him a blessing,” Saul said. “That’s why you’re here.”

  The creatures were silent.

  “This isn’t going to work unless someone says a blessing over him. That’s how it’s done. Either bless him or leave. That’s how it’s done.” His back was causing him excruciating pain now.

  “This is America,” the garbage can said. “We don’t do that here.”

  “Bullshit,” Saul said, and the creatures seemed surprised that he knew the word.

  “You have to do it,” the wolf said. “You were his teacher.”

  “I can’t,” Saul said. “I never went to services. My mother never took me to a temple or a synagogue. She didn’t believe in that. She still doesn’t. Nobody taught me blessings. And I don’t do them either, except for this, this time, now.” Saul tried to look at them all, but it was so dark he couldn’t quite see them. They had to do it; he could not. “Doesn’t anyone here know a blessing? Doesn’t anyone here know how to be human? Somebody here must. Doesn’t anyone here go to church? Or a temple? Or to an anything where they do blessings?”

  “We do,” the wolf said. “Me and my sister and our parents.” The other creatures nodded. “I just wish we had a flashlight.”

  “Well, say something,” Saul told him. “Say what they say. We don’t need a flashlight for that. This is what you all came for. I swear to you, if the wolf comes up with something . . .” He left the sentence unfinished, and the darkness around him seemed to shift inwardly.

  “L-l-l-l-l-l-lord, help help help hellllllp,” the wolf said, before giving up.

  “That’s okay,” Saul told him. “Try some more.”

  “Amen amen amen amen,” the wolf stuttered. “Please thou please thou let-t-t-t-t-t us depart in please. Peas.” There was a long silence. “I c-c-c-c-c-can’t do it,” the wolf admitted.

  “Yes, you can,” Saul said.

  “A-a-a-a-awake and mourn, ye heirs of h-h-h-hell,” the wolf said.

  “No, that’s a curse,” Saul said. “Try again.”

  The wolf began again tentatively, as if by rote, and then seemed to find his voice. “Many many many many. M-m-m-may the Lord may the Lord may the Lord may the Lord bless you and k-k-k-k-keep you,” he said, giving the foreign-sounding words a hallucinated, studied attention, as if he were dredging them up from his memory, and then, because he was half-singing, his voice rose in conviction, its pitch deepening with intensity. “May the Lord be g-g-g-g-g-gracious unto you,” he said, no longer intimidated by the words, since he wasn’t stumbling over them so badly now. “May the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace both this day and forevermore,” the wolf concluded, reciting the final phrase in a high, steady, clear voice, as if the meaning of the words had come home to him and he was now their bearer. The hanged woman started to say “Amen,” then stopped herself. The crow appeared to be angrily agitated and shifted his weight from one claw to another. A fragment of the moon appeared from behind a cloud, and Saul saw the crow more clearly, saw how agitated he had become, how he hated the blessing: he was nearly in a fighter’s stance.

  “There,” Saul said, keeping his voice authoritative and steady. “That was good.” He handed the shovel to the caterpillar. “Here,” he said. “You have to drop some dirt down there.”

  Slowly and reluctantly, the caterpillar took the shovel and flung dirt into the hole. The shovel went around the group, all except for the malign, armless garbage can, until the hole was nearly covered up. At last the shovel returned to Saul, and he filled in the rest of the dirt. He tried to straighten up, could not, but at least knew what he wanted to say.

  “Go home, children,” he instructed them. “Go home.”

  The group of creatures trudged back across his backyard, around the house, into the front yard, one of them, the Himmel, picking up the gasoline can and the matches, and then they made their way toward the truck and the car. Among them, only Little Hans stood up perfectly straight. The others walked with the errant slouch of defeat.

  “See ya,” the crow said, making the words sound like a threat. The garbage can had already positioned itself in the backseat. The crow got in behind the wheel of the Plymouth, next to the bubble-gum boygirl, put the car into gear, and with a spinning of wheels and a screeching, drove away, followed by the truck, whose radio was now playing Rush.

  Carrying his shovel, with a last glance at the burning rosebush, now sputtering out, Saul, his own face burning with pain, limped toward the house, with its one broken window, its wife and child still safe inside, upstairs, for the moment, this one night.

  Twenty-three

  “You thought you were so tough,” the crow said to the boygirl. “You just chickened out. Just like a little girl.” He cackled. “The girl came out all over you. You have to have balls to be a boy, didn’t anyone tell you? Maybe you should have dressed yourself up as a chicken.” The crow was thinking that the evening was now totally and completely whacked: he had been planning on doing some serious hilarious damage and asking the boygirl to give him a blowjob later, when the fun was almost over, when the house was burning. Not that she’d do it, but it would be worth asking her just to see the look on her face lit by the flames. Now he didn’t feel like drinking, or fucking, or fighting—he didn’t feel like doing anything enjoyable. He was completely bummed out, and the feeling was conclusive.

  “The air was cold,” the boygirl said. “Besides, I chickened out? What’s all that stuff in the backseat? Rocks, paint, paintbrushes, gasoline, dynamite? You could’ve, like, just set fire to his house if you had the nerve, like you were planning to.”

  “Oh, right. Like you weren’t scared. Anyway, I didn’t go running and crying back to the car when he brought those ashes outside,” the crow said.

  “Okay, then what are you going to do with all that?” The boygirl pointed to the paraphernalia of pranksterism and terror on the backseat next to the garbage can.

  “I don’t know,” the crow muttered. “Keep it for later.”

  “What later? This is later. To use on who?”

  “There’s always people to use it on.” The crow laughed and reached under the seat and opened another can of beer. “Innocent bystanders and people like that.”

  “That’s not very nice,” the boygirl said. “Opening a beer and not offering me any. Where’d you steal it from?”

  “Sorrrrrry, bitch,” the crow said. “You want a beer?”

  “Don’t you call me that. Don’t you call me a bitch.”

  “Oh yeah?” the crow asked. He shook the beer can with his finger plugged over the opening and then aimed the spray at the passenger side, wetting down her face and her shirt and the leather jacket. Then he laughed. “There’s your beer.”

  “You dickhead,” the boygirl said. “Take me home, you piece of shit. At least it’s your leather jacket you’re ruining.” The boygirl put her hands on the wheel to turn it. The car weaved unsteadily down the residential street, narrowly missing a parked car.

  “Children, children,” the garbage can said, laughing.

  The crow’s mood had changed. Now he would have to clean the car, thanks to what she had made him do. He would have to deodorize the Plymouth’s interior. His jacket could smell of beer just fine. Thinking about all this work in store for him, the crow recognized that his rage was her fault. Now he did feel like doing something: taking the boygirl by force if he had to, the bitch, with the garbage can watching—and the image of how he would do it settled down on him the way the robin settles down on the worm. He would take her out there into the dirt and the dark and pull her apart if he had to, just open her up and brute-fuck her to death. And when he was finishe
d with her, he would leave her out in the middle of nowhere to find her own way home, that is, if she could still walk, bloody and seeping. He drank down the rest of the beer. At last: here it was: some serious damage.

  The car accelerated, and the night, kept at bay till now by the neighborhood streetlights, gradually enveloped them as they hurried on toward the outskirts of the city and the fields of farmland beyond it.

  Twenty-four

  “It won’t work,” Patsy said. “You can’t import religion and ritual like that, not as a local anesthetic. It only works when the whole community believes in it. A ritual engaged in by part of the community is just schmaltz, just window dressing. If they’re going to make us outcasts of God, Saul, that’s it. We’re going to be outcasts of God forever.”

  “Hmmm.” He was falling asleep. “I love you, Patsy,” he said. “It did work.”

  “You’re going to have to go see a doctor tomorrow about your nose and your back, Saul.”

  “Hmm.” He was lying in bed in a fetal position.

  “Not that I don’t admire you, Saul, for trying to help those kids out.”

  “Hmmm. Love you.”

  “The baby’s been moving a little tonight. Guess I can’t blame him,” Patsy said.

  “Hmm.” He was almost asleep by now.

  “As for you, I love you more than you will ever know. By the way, Saul, what did you bury back there? What did you use for those ashes? The ones you said were Gordy’s? What were they?”