Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  “Oh yeah,” I said.

  “You’re not a real American because you don’t believe!” Then this child fumbled in her coat pocket and clunked down a small shiny handgun on the table, next to the plastic containers and the french fries. “So there,” she said.

  “Put it back,” I told her. “Jesus, I hope the safety’s on.”

  “I think so.” She wiped her hand on a napkin and dropped the thing back into her pocket. “So tell me your name, Mr. Samaritan.”

  “Warren,” I said. “My name’s Warren. What’s yours?”

  “I’m Jaynee. What do you do, Warren? You must do something. You look like someone who does something.”

  I explained to her about governmental funding for social work and therapy, but her eyes glazed and she cut me off.

  “Oh yeah,” she said, chewing her french fries with her mouth open so that you could see inside if you wanted to. “One of those professional friends. I’ve seen people like you.”

  I drove her home. She admired the tape machine in the car and the carpeting on the floor. She gave me directions on how to get to her house in Westland, one of the suburbs. Detroit has four shopping centers at its cardinal points: Westland, Eastland, Southland, and Northland. A town grew up around Westland, a blue-collar area, and now Westland is the name of both the shopping center and the town.

  She took me down fast-food alley and then through a series of right and left ninety-degree turns on streets with bungalows covered by aluminum siding. Few trees, not much green except the lawns, and the half-sun dropped onto those perpendicular lines with nothing to stop it or get in its way. The girl, Jaynee, picked at her knees and nodded, as if any one of the houses would do. The houses all looked exposed to me, with a straight shot at the elements out there on that flat grid.

  I was going to drop her off at what she said was her driveway, but there was an old chrome-loaded Pontiac in the way, one of those vintage 1950s cars, its front end up on a hoist and some man working on his back on a rolling dolly underneath it. “That’s him,” the girl said. “You want to meet him?”

  I parked the car and got out. The man pulled himself away from underneath the car and looked over at us. He stood up, wiping his hands on a rag, and scowled at his daughter. He wasn’t going to look at me right away. I think he was checking Jaynee for signs of damage.

  “What’s this?” he asked. “What’s this about, Jaynee?”

  “This is about nothing,” she said. “I spent the night in the zoo and this person found me and brought me home.”

  “At the zoo. Jesus Christ. At the zoo. Is that what happened?” He was asking me.

  “That’s where I saw her,” I told him. “She looked pretty cold.”

  He dropped a screwdriver I hadn’t noticed he was holding. He was standing there in his driveway next to the Pontiac, looking at his daughter and me and then at the sky. I’d had those moments, too, when nothing made any sense and I didn’t know where my responsibilities lay. “Go inside,” he told his daughter. “Take a shower. I’m not talking to you here on the driveway. I know that.”

  We both watched her go into the house. She looked like an overcoat with legs. I felt ashamed of myself for thinking of her that way, but there are some ideas you can’t prevent.

  We were both watching her, and the man said, “You can’t go to the public library and find out how to raise a girl like that.” He said something else, but an airplane passed so low above us that I couldn’t hear him. We were about three miles from the airport. He ended his speech by saying, “I don’t know who’s right.”

  “I don’t, either.”

  “Earl Lampson.” He held out his hand. I shook it and took away a feel of bone and grease and flesh. I could see a fading tattoo on his forearm of a rose run through with a sword.

  “Warren Banks,” I said. “I guess I’ll have to be going.”

  “Wait a minute, Warren. Let me do two things. First, let me thank you for bringing my daughter home. Unhurt.” I nodded to show I understood. “Second. A question. You got any kids?”

  “Two,” I said. “Both boys.”

  “Then you know about it. You know what a child can do to you. I was awake last night. I didn’t know what had happened to her. I didn’t know if she had planned it. That was the worst. She makes plans. Jesus Christ. The zoo. The lions?”

  I nodded.

  “She’ll do anything. And it isn’t an act with her.” He looked up and down the street, as if he were waiting for something to appear, and I had the wild idea that I was going to see a float coming our way, with beauty queens on it, and little men dressed up in costumes.

  I told him I had to leave. He shook his head.

  “Stay a minute, Warren,” he said. “Come into the backyard. I want to show you something.”

  He turned around and walked through the garage, past a pile of snow tires and two rusted-out bicycles. I followed him, thinking of my boys this morning at their Scout meeting, and of my wife, out shopping or maybe home by now and wondering vaguely where I was. I was supposed to be getting groceries. Here I was in this garage. She would look at the clock, do something else, then look back at the clock.

  “Now, how about this?” Earl pointed an index finger toward a wooden construction that stood in the middle of his yard, running from one side to another: a play structure, with monkey bars and a swing set, a high perch like a ship’s crow’s nest, a set of tunnels to crawl through and climb on, and a little rope bridge between two towers. I had never seen anything like it, so much human effort expended on a backyard toy, this huge contraption.

  I whistled. “It must have taken you years.”

  “Eighteen months,” he said. “And she hasn’t played on it since she was twelve.” He shook his head. “I bought the wood and put it together piece by piece. She was only three years old when I did it, weekends when I wasn’t doing overtime at Ford’s. She was my assistant. She’d bring me nails. I told her to hold the hammer when I wasn’t using it, and she’d stand there, real serious, just holding the hammer. Of course, now she’s too old for it. I have the biggest backyard toy in Michigan and a daughter who goes off to the zoo and spends the night there and that’s her idea of a good time.”

  A light rain had started to fall. “What are you going to do with this thing?” I asked.

  “Take it apart, I guess.” He glanced at the sky. “Warren, you want a beer?”

  It was eleven o’clock in the morning. “Sure,” I said.

  We sat in silence on his cluttered back porch. We sipped our beers and watched the rain fall over things in our line of sight. Neither of us was saying much. It was better being there than being at home, and my morning gloom was on its way out. It wasn’t lifting so much as converting into something else, as it does when you’re in someone else’s house. I didn’t want to move as long as I felt that way.

  I had been in the zoo that morning because I had been reading the newspaper again, and this time I had read about a uranium plant here in Michigan whose employees were spraying pastureland with a fertilizer recycled from radioactive wastes. They called it treated raffinate. The paper said that in addition to trace amounts of radium and radioactive thorium, this fertilizer spray had at least eighteen poisonous heavy metals in it, including molybdenum, arsenic, and lead. It had been sprayed out into the pastures and was going into the food supply. I was supposed to get up from the table and go out and get the groceries, but I had gone to the zoo instead to stare at the animals. This had been happening more often lately. I couldn’t keep my mind on ordinary, daily things. I had come to believe that depression was the realism of the future, and phobias a sign of sanity. I was supposed to know better, but I didn’t.

  I had felt crazy and helpless, but there, on Earl Lampson’s porch, I was feeling a little better. Calm strangers sometimes have that effect on you.

  Jaynee came out just then. She’d been in the shower, and I could see why some kid might want to spend a night in the zoo with her. She was in a T-sh
irt and jeans, and the hot water had perked her up. I stood and excused myself. I couldn’t stand to see her just then, breaking my mood. Earl went to a standing position and shook my hand and said he appreciated what I had done for his daughter. I said it was nothing and started to leave when Earl, for no reason that I could see, suddenly said he’d be calling me during the week, if that was all right. I told him that I would be happy to hear from him.

  Walking away from there, I decided, on the evidence so far, that Earl had a good heart and didn’t know what to do with it, just as he didn’t know what to do with that thing in his backyard. He just had it, and it was no use to him.

  He called my office on Wednesday. I’d given him the number. There was something new in his voice, of someone wanting help. He repeated his daughter’s line about how I was a professional friend, and I said, yes, sometimes that was what I was. He asked me if I ever worked with “bad kids”—that was his phrase—and I said that sometimes I did. Then he asked me if I would help him take apart his daughter’s play structure on the following Saturday. He said there’d be plenty of beer. I could see what he was after: a bit of free counseling, but since I hadn’t prepared myself for his invitation, I didn’t have a good defense ready. I looked around my office cubicle, and I saw myself in Earl’s backyard, a screwdriver in one hand and a beer in the other. I said yes.

  The day I came over, it was a fair morning, for Michigan. This state is like Holland. Cold, clammy mists mix with freezing rain in autumn, and hard rains in the spring are broken by tropical heat and tornadoes. It’s attack weather. The sky covers you with a metallic-blue, watercolor wash over tinfoil. But this day was all right. I worked out there with Earl, pulling the wood apart with our crowbars and screwdrivers, and we had an audience, Jaynee and Earl’s new woman. That was how she was introduced to me: Jody. She’s the new woman. She didn’t seem to have more than about eight or nine years on Jaynee, and she was nearsighted. She had those thick corrective lenses. But she was pretty in the details, and when she looked at Earl, the lenses enlarged those eyes, so that the love was large and naked and obvious.

  I was pulling down a support bar for the north end of the structure and observing from time to time the neighboring backyards. My boys had gone off to a Scout meeting again, and my wife was busy, catching up on some office work. No one missed me. I was pulling at the wood, enjoying myself, talking to Earl and Jaynee and Jody about some of the techniques people in my profession use to resolve bad family quarrels; Jaynee and Jody were working at pulling down some of the wood, too. We already had two piles of scrap lumber.

  I had heard a little of how Earl raised Jaynee. Her mother had taken off, the way they sometimes do, when Jaynee was three years old. He’d done the parental work. “You’ve been the dad, haven’t you, Earl?” Jody said, bumping her hip at him. She sat down to watch a sparrow. Her hair was in a ponytail, one of those feminine brooms. “Earl doesn’t know the first thing about being a woman, and he had to teach it all to Jaynee here.” Jody pointed her cigarette at Jaynee. “Well, she learned it from somewhere. There’s not much left she doesn’t know.”

  “Where’s the mystery?” Jaynee asked. She was pounding a hammer absentmindedly into a piece of wood lying flat on the ground. “It’s easier being a woman than a girl. Men treat you better ’cause they want you.”

  Earl stopped turning his wrench. “Only if you don’t go to the zoo anytime some punk asks you.”

  “That was once,” she said.

  Earl aimed himself at me. “I was strict with her. She knows about the laws I laid down. Fourteen laws. They’re framed in her bedroom. Nobody in this country knows what it is to be decent anymore, but I’m trying. It sure to hell isn’t easy.”

  Jody smiled at me. “Earl restrained himself until I came along.” She laughed. Earl turned away so I wouldn’t see his face.

  “I only spent the night in the zoo once,” Jaynee repeated, as if no one had been listening. “And besides, I was protected.”

  “Protected,” Earl repeated, staring at her.

  “You know.” Jaynee pointed her index finger at her father with her thumb in the air and the other fingers pulled back, and she made an explosive sound in her mouth.

  “You took that?” her father said. “You took that to the zoo?”

  Jaynee shrugged. At this particular moment, Earl turned to me. “Warren, did you see it?”

  I assumed he meant the gun. I looked over toward him from the bolt I was unscrewing, and I nodded. I was so involved in the work of this job that I didn’t want my peaceful laboring disturbed.

  “You shouldn’t have said that,” Jody said to Jaynee. Earl had disappeared inside the house. “You know your father well enough by now to know that.” Jody stood up and walked to the yard’s back fence. “Your father thinks that women and guns are a terrible combination.”

  “He always said I should watch out for myself,” Jaynee said, her back to us. She pulled a cookie out of her pocket and began to eat it.

  “Not with a gun,” Jody said.

  “He showed me how to use it,” the daughter said loudly. “I’m not ignorant about firearms.” She didn’t seem especially interested in the way the conversation was going.

  “That was just information,” Jody said. “It wasn’t for you to use.” She was standing and waiting for Earl to reappear. I didn’t do work like this, and I didn’t hear conversations like this during the rest of the week, and so I was the only person still dismantling the play structure when Earl reappeared in the backyard with the revolver in his right hand. He had his shirtsleeve pulled back so anybody could see the tattoo of the rose run through with the saber on his forearm. Because I didn’t know what he was going to do with that gun, I thought I had just better continue to work.

  “The ninth law in your bedroom,” Earl announced, “says you use violence only in self-defense.” He stepped to the fence, then held his arm straight up into the air and fired once. That sound, that shattering, made me drop my wrench. It hit the ground with a clank, three inches from my right foot. Through all the backyards of Westland I heard the blast echoing. The neighborhood dogs set up a barking chain; front and back doors slammed.

  Earl was breathing hard and staring at his daughter. We were in a valley, I thought, of distinct silence. “That’s all the bullets I own for that weapon,” he said. He put the gun on the doorstep. Then he made his way over to where his daughter was sitting. There’s a kind of walk, a little stiff, where you know every step has been thought about, every step is a decision. This was like that.

  Jaynee was munching the last of her cookie. Her father grabbed her by the shoulders and began to shake her. It was like what you see in movies, someone waking up a sleepwalker. Back and forth her head tossed. “Never never never never never,” he said. I started to laugh, but it was too crazed and despairing to be funny. He stopped. I could see he wanted to make a parental speech: his face was tightening up, his flesh stiff, but he didn’t know how to start it, the right choice for the first word, and his daughter pushed him away and ran into the house. In that run, something happened to me, and I knew I had to get out of there.

  I glanced at Jody, the new woman. She stood with her hands in her blue jeans. She looked bored. She had lived here all her life. What had just happened was a disturbance in the morning’s activities. Meanwhile, Earl had picked up a board and was tentatively beating the ground with it. He was staring at the revolver on the steps. “I got to take that gun and throw it into Ford Lake,” he said. “First thing I do this afternoon.”

  “Have to go, Earl,” I said. Everything about me was getting just a little bit out of control, and I thought I had better get home.

  “You’re going?” Earl said, trying to concentrate on me for a moment. “You’re going now? You’re sure you don’t want another beer?”

  I said I was sure. The new woman, Jody, went over to Earl and whispered something to him. I couldn’t see why, right now, out loud, she couldn’t say what she wanted to say.
Christ, we were all adults, after all.

  “She wants you to take that .22 and throw it,” Earl said. He went over to the steps, picked up the gun, and returned to where I was standing. He dropped it into my hand. The barrel was warm, and the whole apparatus smelled of cordite.

  “Okay, Earl,” I said. I held this heavy object in my hand, and I had the insane idea that my life was just beginning. “You have any particular preference about where I should dispose of it?”

  He looked at me, his right eyebrow going up. This kind of diction he hadn’t heard from me before. “Particular preference?” He laughed without smiling. “Last I heard,” he said, “when you throw a gun out, it doesn’t matter where it goes so long as it’s gone.”

  “Gotcha,” I said. I was going around to the front of the house. “Be in touch, right?”

  Those two were back to themselves again, talking. They would be interested in saying good-bye to me about two hours from now, when they noticed that I wasn’t there.

  In the story that would end here, I go out to Belle Isle in the city of Detroit and drop Earl’s revolver off the Belle Isle Bridge at the exact moment when no one is looking. But this story has a ways to go. That’s not what I did. To start with, I drove around with that gun in my car, underneath the front seat, like half the other residents of this area. I drove to work and at the end of the day I drove home, a model bureaucrat, and each time I sat in the car and turned on the ignition, I felt better than I should have because that gun was on the floor. After about a week, the only problem I had was not that the gun was there but that it wasn’t loaded. So I went to the ammo store—it’s actually called the Michigan Rod and Gun Club—about two miles away from my house and bought some bullets for it. This was all very easy. In fact, the various details were getting easier and easier. I hadn’t foreseen this. I’ve read Freud and Heinz Kohut and D. W. Winnicott, and I can talk to you about psychotic breaks and object-relations and fixation on oedipal grandiosity characterized by the admixture of strong object cathexes and the implicitly disguised presence of castration fears, and, by virtue of my being able to talk about those conditions, I have had some trouble getting into gear and moving when the occasion called for it. But now, with the magic wand under the front seat, I was getting ready for some kind of adventure.