Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  Cooper stood up and walked toward the kitchen, knowing that the young man would follow him. “They aren’t ghouls,” he said. “Look around. They’re more normal than you are, probably. They’re down on their luck.”

  “Of course they are, of course they are,” Billy said, his voice floating a few inches behind Cooper’s head. Cooper began to wipe off the kitchen counter, as the young man watched him. Then Billy began waving his right hand again. “My problem, Cooper, my problem is the problem of the month, which is pointlessness and the point of doing anything, which I can’t see most of the time. I want to heal people but I can’t do that. I’m stalled. What happened was, about a year ago, there was this day. I remember it was sunny, I mean the sun was out, and I heard these wings flapping over my head because I was out in the park with my girlfriend feeding Cheerios to the pigeons. Then this noise: flap flap flap. Wings, Cooper, big wings, taking my soul away. I didn’t want to look behind me because I was afraid they’d taken my shadow, too. It could happen, Cooper, it could happen to anybody. Anyhow, after that, what I knew was, I didn’t want what everybody else did, I mean I don’t have any desires for anything, and at some times of day I don’t cast a shadow. My desires just went away like that—poof, poor desires. I’m a saint now but I’m not enjoying it one bit. I can bless people but not heal them. Anybody could lose his soul the way I did. Now all I got is that sad robot feeling. You know, that five-o’clock feeling? But all day, with me.”

  “You mentioned your mother,” Cooper said. He dropped some cleanser into the sink and began to scour. “What about your father?”

  “Let me do that.” Billy nudged Cooper aside and started to clean the sink with agitated, almost frantic hand motions. “I’ve done a lot of this. My father died last year. I did a lot of housecleaning. I’m a man-maid. My father was in the hospital, but we took him out, and I was trying to be, I don’t know, a sophomore in college, which is a pretty dumb thing to aspire to, if you think about it. But I was also sitting by my father’s bed and taking care of him—he had pancreatic cancer—and I was reading Popular Mechanics to him, the home-improvement section, and feeding him when he could eat, and then when he died, the wings flew over me, though that was later, and there wasn’t much I wanted to do. What a sink.”

  As he talked, Billy’s hand accelerated in its motions around the drain.

  “Come on,” Cooper said. “I’m going to take you somewhere.”

  His idea was to lift the young man’s spirits, but he didn’t know quite how to proceed. He took him to his car and drove him down the river road to a park, where Billy got out of the car, took his shoes off, and waded into the water. He bent down, and, as Cooper watched, cupped his hands in the river before splashing it over his face. Cooper thought his face had a strange expression, something between ecstasy and despair. He couldn’t think of a word in English for this expression but thought there might be a word in another language for it. German, for example. When Billy was finished washing his face, he looked up into the sky. Pigeons and killdeer were flying overhead. After he had settled back into the front seat of Cooper’s car, drops of water from his face dripping onto the seat, Billy said, “That’s a good feeling, Cooper. You should try it. You wash your face in the flowing water and then you hear the cries of the birds. I’d like to think it makes me a new man but I know it doesn’t. How old are you, Cooper?”

  “I’m thirty-one.”

  “Seven years older than me. And what did you say you did?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  He drove Billy to the bakery and parked in the back alley. It was getting close to twilight. After Cooper had unlocked the back door, Billy walked into the dark bakery kitchen and began to sniff. “I like this place,” he said. “I like it very much.” He shook some invisible water off his hand, then ran his finger along the bench. “What’s this made of?”

  “Hardrock maple. It’s like the wood they use in bowling alleys. Hardest wood there is. You can’t dent it or break it. Look up.”

  Billy twisted backward. “A skylight,” he said. “Cooper, your life is on the very top of the eggshell. You have grain from the earth and you have the sky overhead. Ever been broken into?”

  “No.”

  Cooper looked at Billy and saw, returning to him, a steady gaze made out of the watchful and flat expression he had first seen on the young man’s face when he had met him a few hours before. “No,” he repeated, “never have.” He felt, suddenly, that he had embarked all at once on a series of misjudgments. “What did your father do, Billy?”

  “He was a surgeon,” Billy said. “He did surgery on people.”

  They stood and studied each other in the dark bakery for a moment.

  “We’ll go one more place,” Cooper said. “I’ll get you a beer. Then I have to take you back to the shelter.”

  Cooper’s dog, Hugo, came out through the backyard and jumped up on him as he got out of his car. A load of wash, mostly Alexander’s shirts, flapped on the clothesline in the evening breeze. Cooper heard children calling from down the street.

  “Here we are,” Cooper said. “We’ll go in through this door.”

  Inside the house, Christine was sitting at the dining-room table with two legal pads set up in front of her and a briefcase down by the floor. Behind her, in the living room, Alexander was lying on the floor in front of the TV set, his chin cupped in his hands. He was watching a Detroit Tigers game. They both looked up when Cooper knocked on the kitchen doorframe and came into the hallway, followed by Billy, whose hands were in his pockets and who nodded as he walked.

  “Christine,” Cooper said. “This is Billy. I met him at the shelter.” Billy walked quickly around the table and shook Christine’s hand. “I brought him here for a beer.”

  Christine did not change her posture. Behind a smile, she gave Billy a hard look. “Hello,” she said. “And welcome, I guess.”

  “Thank you,” Billy said. Cooper went out to the kitchen, opened a beer, and brought it back to him. Billy looked at the bottle, then took a long swig from it. After wiping his mouth, he said, “Well, my goodness. I certainly never expected to be here in your home tonight.”

  “Well, we didn’t expect you, either, Mr.—?”

  “Bell,” Billy said. “Billy Bell.”

  “We didn’t expect you, either, Mr. Bell. You’re lucky. My husband never does this.” She looked now at Cooper. “He never never does this.”

  Cooper pointed toward the living room. “Billy, that’s Alexander over there. He’s in the Alan Trammell fan club. I guess you can tell.”

  Alexander turned around, looked at Billy, and said, “Hi,” waving quickly. Billy returned the greeting, but Alexander had already returned to the TV set, now showing a commercial for shaving cream.

  “So, Mr. Bell,” Christine said. “What brings you to Ann Arbor?”

  “Oh, I’ve always lived here,” Billy said. “Graduated from Pioneer High and everything.” He began a little jumping motion, then quelled it. “How about you?”

  “Oh, not me,” Christine said. “I’m from Dayton, Ohio. I came here to law school. That’s where I met Cooper.”

  “I thought he was a baker.”

  “He is now. He dropped out of law school.”

  “You didn’t drop out?” Billy glanced at Christine’s legal pads. “You became a lawyer?”

  “I became a prosecutor, yes, that’s right. In the district attorney’s office. That’s what I do.”

  “Do you like it?” Cooper thought Billy was about to explode in some way; he was getting redder and redder.

  “Oh, yes,” Christine said. “I like it very much.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” She touched her face and her smile faded. “I came from a family of bullies, Mr. Bell. Three brothers. They tied me up and played tricks on me, and they did this for years. Little-boy criminals. Every promise they made to me, they broke. Then I discovered the law, when I grew up. It’s about limits and enforced regulation and bin
ding agreements. It’s a net of words, Mr. Bell. Legal formulas for proscribing behavior. That’s what the law is. Now I have a career of putting promise-breakers behind bars. That makes me happy. What makes you happy, Mr. Bell?”

  Billy hopped once, then leaned against the counter. “I didn’t have any dreams until today,” he said, “but now I do, seeing your cute house and your cute family. Here’s what I’d like to do. I want to be just like all of you. I’d put on a chef’s hat and stand outside in my apron like one of those assholes you see in the Sunday magazine section with a spatula in his hand, and, like, I’ll be flipping hamburgers and telling my kids to keep their hands out of the chive dip and go run in the sprinkler or do some shit like that. I’ll belong to do-good groups like Save the Rainforests, and I’ll ask my wife how she likes her meat, rare or well done, and she’ll say well done with that pretty smile she has, and that’s how I’ll do it. A wonderful fucking barbecue, this is, with folding aluminum chairs and paper plates and ketchup all over the goddamn place. Oceans of vodka and floods of beer. Oh, and we’ve sprayed the yard with that big spray that kills anything that moves, and all the flies and mosquitoes and bunnies are dead at our feet. Talk about the good life. That has got to be it.”

  Alexander had turned around and was staring at Billy, and Christine’s face had become masklike and rigid. “Finish your beer, Mr. Bell,” she said. “I think you absolutely have to go now. Don’t let’s waste another minute. Finish the beer and back you go.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding and grinning.

  “I suppose you think what you just said was funny,” Cooper said, from where he was standing in the back of the kitchen.

  “No,” Billy said. “I can’t be funny. I’ve tried often. It doesn’t work. No gift for that.”

  “Have you been in prison, Mr. Bell?” Christine asked, looking down at her legal pad and writing something there.

  “No,” Billy said. “I have not.”

  “Oh good,” Christine said. “I was afraid maybe you had been.”

  “Do you think that’s what will become of me?” Billy asked. His voice had lowered from its previous manic delivery and become soft.

  “Oh, who knows?” Christine said, running her hand through her hair. “It could happen, or maybe not.”

  “Because I think my life is out of my hands,” Billy said. “I just don’t think I have control over it any longer.”

  “Back you go,” Christine said. “Good-bye. Fare thee well.”

  “Thank you,” Billy said. “That was a nice blessing. And thank you for the beer. Good-bye, Alexander. It was nice meeting you.”

  “Nice to meet you,” the boy said from the floor.

  “Let’s go,” Cooper said, picking at Billy’s elbow.

  “Back I go,” Billy said. “Fare thee well, Billy, good-bye and Godspeed. So long, Mr. Human Garbage. Okay, all right, yes, now I’m gone.” He did a quick walk through the kitchen and let the screen door slam behind him. Christine gave Cooper a look, which he knew meant that she was preparing a speech for him, and then he followed Billy out to the car.

  On the way to the shelter, Billy slouched down on the passenger side. He said nothing for five minutes. Then he said, “I noticed something about your house, Cooper. I noticed that in the kitchen there were all these glasses and cups and jars out on the counter, and the jars weren’t labeled, not the way they usually label them, and so I looked inside one of them, one of those jars, and you know what I saw? I suppose you must know, because it’s your kitchen.”

  “What?” Cooper asked.

  “Pain,” Billy said, looking straight ahead and nodding. “That jar was full of pain. I had to close the lid over it immediately. Now tell me something, because I don’t have the answer to it. Why does a man like you, a baker, have a jar full of pain in his kitchen? Can you explain that?”

  Out through the front windows, Cooper saw the reassuring lights of the city, the lamplights shining out through the front windows, and the streetlights beginning to go on. A few children were playing on the sidewalks, hopscotch and tag, and in the sky a vapor trail from a jet was beginning to dissolve into orange wisps. What was the price one paid for loving one’s own life? He felt a tenderness toward existence and toward his own life, and felt guilty for that.

  At the shelter, he let Billy out without saying good night. He watched the young man do his hop-and-skip walk toward the front door; then he put the car into gear and drove home. As he expected, Christine was waiting up for him and gave him a lecture, in bed, about guilty liberalism and bringing the slime element into your own home.

  “That’s an exaggeration,” Cooper said. He was lying on his side of the bed, his hip touching hers. “That’s not what he was. I’m not wrong. I’m not.” He felt her lips descending over him and remembered how she always thought that his failures in judgment made him sensual.

  Two days later he arrived at work before dawn and found Gilbert standing motionless in front of Cooper’s own baker’s bench. Cooper closed the door behind him and said, “Hey, Gilbert.”

  “It’s all right,” Gilbert said. “I already called the cops.”

  “What?”

  Gilbert pointed. On the wood table were hundreds of pieces of broken glass from the scattered skylight in a slice-of-pie pattern, and, over the glass, a circle of dried blood the width of a teacup. Smaller dots of blood, like afterthoughts, were scattered around the bench and led across the floor to the cash register, which had been jimmied open. Cooper felt himself looking up. A bird of a type he couldn’t identify was perched on the broken skylight.

  “Two hundred dollars,” Gilbert said, overpronouncing the words. “Somewhere somebody’s all cut up for a lousy two hundred dollars. I’d give the son of a bitch a hundred not to break in, if he’d asked. But you know what I really mind?”

  “The blood,” Cooper said.

  “Bingo.” Gilbert nodded, as he coughed. “I hate the idea of this guy’s blood in my kitchen, on the floor, on the table and over there in the mixing pans. I really hate it. A bakery. What a fucking stupid place to break into.”

  “I told you so,” Christine said, washing Cooper’s face. Then she turned him around and ran the soapy washcloth down his back and over his buttocks.

  August. Three days before Christine’s birthday. Cooper and his son were walking down Main Street toward a store called the Peaceable Kingdom to get Christine a present, a small stuffed pheasant that Alexander had had his eye on for many months. Alexander’s hand was in Cooper’s as they crossed at the corner, after waiting for the WALK sign to go on. Alexander had been asking Cooper for an exact definition of trolls, and how they differ from ghouls. And what, he wanted to know, what exactly is a goblin, and how are they born? In forests? Can they be born anywhere, like trolls?

  Up ahead, squatting against the window of a sporting-goods store, was the man perpetually dressed in the filthy brown corduroy suit: James. His hands were woven together at his forehead, thumbs at temples, to shade his eyes against the sun. As Cooper and his son passed by, James spoke up. He did not ask for money. He said, “Hello, Cooper.”

  “Hello, James,” Cooper said.

  “Is this your boy?” He pulled his hands apart and pointed at Alexander.

  “Yes.”

  “Daddy,” Alexander said, tugging at his father’s hand.

  “A fine boy,” James said, squinting. “Looks a bit like you.” The old man smelled as he had before: like a city dump, like everything.

  “Thank you,” Cooper said, beaming. “He’s a handsome boy, isn’t he?”

  “Indeed,” James said. “Would you like to hear a bit of the Gospels?”

  “No, thank you, James,” Cooper said. “We’re on our way to get this young man’s mother a birthday present.”

  “Well, I won’t keep you,” the old man said.

  As Cooper reached for his wallet, Alexander suddenly spoke: “Daddy, don’t.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t give him any money,�
� the boy said.

  “Why not?”

  Alexander couldn’t say. He began to shake his head, looking at James, then at his father. He backed away, down the sidewalk, his lower lip beginning to stick out and his eyes starting to grow wet.

  “Here, James,” Cooper said, watching his son, who had retreated down the block and was hiding in the doorway of a hardware store. He handed the old man five dollars.

  “Bless you,” James said. “And bless Jesus.” He put the money in his pocket, then placed his hands together in front of his chest, lowered himself to his knees, and began to pray.

  “Good-bye, James,” Cooper said. With his eyes closed, James nodded. Cooper ran down the block to catch up with his son.

  After Alexander had finished crying, he told his father that he was afraid—afraid that he was going to bring that dirty man home, the way he did with the red-haired guy, and let him stay, maybe in the basement, in the extra room.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Cooper said. “Really. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” his wife asked, that night, in bed. “Wouldn’t you? I think you might.”

  “No. Not home. Not again.”

  But he had been accused, and he rose up and walked down the hall to his son’s room. The house was theirs, no one else’s; his footsteps were the only audible ones. In Alexander’s room, in the dim illumination spread by the Swiss-chalet night-light, Cooper saw his son’s model airplanes and the posters of his baseball heroes, but in looking around the room, he felt that something was missing. He glanced again at his son’s dresser. The piggy bank, stuffed with pennies, was gone.

  He’s frightened of my charity, Cooper thought, looking under the bed and seeing the piggy bank there, next to Alexander’s favorite softball.

  Cooper returned to bed. “He’s hidden his money from me,” he said.