Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  That Saturday, he made Ellickson a lettuce-and-turkey sandwich and then put him to work helping him clean the gutters. It was a dirty job; goop stuck to Ellickson’s work gloves. The second time the old man invited him over, he asked Ellickson for aid in washing his pickup truck. “My back’s out today,” Macfadden Eward said. “So I can’t bend over with the hose and such.” Ellickson did the work and watched the soapsuds run toward the storm drain where, he imagined, they weren’t supposed to go. All over the city, the storm drains were painted with little outlines of fish, along with warnings: FLOWS TO RIVER. Well, what would the cops do? Revoke the old man’s parole because of soapsuds?

  The third time he dropped by his neighbor’s house, Macfadden Eward told him that they had to go somewhere.

  “Where?” Ellickson asked.

  “That’s for me to know and for you to find out,” the old man said.

  “Are you playing games with me?” Ellickson asked quietly. “Because if you’re playing games with me, go fuck yourself.” Along with the alcoholism, Ellickson had anger issues.

  “Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean anything by it. My apologies.”

  Ellickson got into the truck reluctantly. After starting the engine, the old man turned on the radio softly to the Twins baseball game. With the play-by-play serving as a soothing white-noise background, Macfadden Eward said, “How much you know about me? You know anything?”

  “Not much,” Ellickson said. “Actually, no. Nothing.”

  “Didn’t think so.” He opened his window and leaned his arm on the sill. “You’re okay, Ellickson. I like you all right. You don’t ask questions of me. I appreciate that. So let’s get one thing straight. I’ll tell you this once, but that’s it, and no details after I tell you because I don’t want to talk about it. All right?”

  Ellickson shrugged.

  “It’s part of my life I can’t get back.” He picked at his thumbnail. “It happened.”

  Ellickson nodded.

  “It was my wife, and it was twenty-five years ago, when I was still almost your age. Okay. She was younger than me. That’s a mistake, right there. She was a kid, real frisky, and she had a pretty face and a nice shape but a mean streak. She had a mouth on her. And she had the soul of a crocodile, that woman. She was reptilian. Reptiles shouldn’t drink, and we both liked to drink, speaking of alcohol. We’d go at it. No dignity about it whatsoever. We went to bars, and this one time on the way home she swerved and hit a tree. Cop comes to rescue us, EMI and what-have-you, and they do the breath tests, and on the spot my wife falls in love with the cop. Officer Wallace, a cop! Can you imagine such a thing? Maybe it was the uniform, maybe it was the holster or how he carried himself or the … I don’t know what it was. After all these years, I can’t say that I care. I don’t think about it. So after we settle the DUI charge with the court, later, she starts calling the cop and then … you know. Hoopla. He wasn’t married, just a young buck in a blue uniform. She and I had been hitched for five years. No kids. Between my wife and me, whose fault was that? Not mine, I guarantee. But anyway, she starts stepping out on me with this guy, a brawny type, so I can’t exactly take him down in a fistfight. When I ask her, finally, about what the hell she’s doing, a married woman, with her loverboy cop, she says, ‘I want to feel his testosterone between my legs.’ That’s a direct quote! ‘I want to feel his testosterone between my legs.’ Spare me honesty like that. What you have to understand is, I loved her. I really loved her. If I hadn’t loved her, I wouldn’t have shot her. And,” he added, “if I had it to do over again, I’d still do it.”

  Ellickson nodded. “You could have shot the cop. I would have. By the way, where are we going?” he asked.

  “Cops don’t like it when you kill their girlfriends. In prison,” the old man said, ignoring Ellickson’s question as if it were nonsensical, “I had time on my hands. The day stretches out. A week, ten weeks, who cares? A civilian can’t imagine. You just sit there. Your brain gets empty. You get empty. No one gives two fucks about you. And you have this big problem. The big problem is the days and hours you’re alone with your mind on idle. You don’t see the sky, and your mind races. You start to spook yourself up. Crazy stuff. You see the isles of madness, just over there. Ever seen them? The trees are all dead, and there’s caves. Archfiends wearing bow ties live in there. The mind is underemployed. It sits there and won’t quit. So I gave my mind a job.”

  They were headed downtown, toward a seedy section. They passed a business called Toyland, with sex toys in the display window. “What job was that?” Ellickson asked.

  “I needed to keep my dignity, you know? So I imagined a spaceship. Not like a movie spaceship, but something realistic, a real spaceship to take me away. Out of the world I was in. This world. See, the spaceship had to have rooms, it had to have hallways, it needed a shape. So I imagined the flight deck. I imagined the chairs and the seating, the exact kind of leather—Spanish, the best—then the compartments where people slept and ate. The dishes. The flatware. That sort of thing. I figured the materials, shape and quantity. This much aluminum, that much alloy. I designed the doorknobs. The computers, the readouts. I even imagined the jet engines, and I don’t know anything about jet engines, so I invented how it’d have to be done. I imagined a workable propulsion system. I had to. Everything required a design, even the bathrooms.” The murderer laughed his mirthless laugh. At that moment he did not seem to Ellickson ever to have been a kind man. All he had ever been was a maniac. “Those years I was behind bars, I built my spaceship in my mind, and more important, I built it in my heart.” He turned and looked directly at Ellickson, as he pulled into a parking space on the street. “When I was done, I named the spaceship.”

  “What did you call it?” Ellickson asked.

  “Yeah, I thought about the name for a long time. Finally I settled on one. I called it Queen Juliana.” Macfadden Eward smiled at the memory. “It was the name of someone I knew. It was a tribute to her. Now that I’m an old man, I don’t name things anymore.”

  “What are we doing here?” Ellickson asked.

  “I gotta talk to my parole officer,” the old man said, getting out of the truck. “I’ll be back in two shakes.” He crossed the street and entered a side door of a brick building that might have once been a warehouse. Upstairs, one lightbulb burned behind a cracked wire-mesh window. Ellickson doubted that a parole officer would work in such a place.

  He opened the door of the murderer’s truck and stepped down onto the sidewalk. At the end of the block was a business with bars across the front windows. A sign across the front said MONTE CARLO in neon, and then, in smaller letters, A GENTLEMAN’S CLUB. Ellickson did not see any gentlemen going in or out, and for relief from the sight of the shabby shadow-creatures he did see, he glanced down the length of First Avenue.

  What had happened to the downtown area? The city seemed to have been abandoned and appeared to be as unloved and uncared-for as the begrimed men going into the Monte Carlo. He eyed a corner telephone pole and saw a video camera aimed in his general direction. Full of exuberant good humor, he gave it the finger. A young woman with green hair and a pierced lower lip, and carrying a large backpack, approached him on the sidewalk and walked past him, gazing at him fearfully as if he were one of the feral gentlemen going into the Monte Carlo. Had he, Ellickson, turned into a person whom others feared? He had once thought of himself as a handsome, genial man who frightened nobody and attracted companionable attention. Soon people would make the sign of the cross upon seeing him to ensure their own safety.

  A customer about Ellickson’s age, glancing over his shoulder, slunk into the gentleman’s club wearing a leering owlish expression behind thick glasses. He was followed by another scowling man with the general appearance of a Hells Angel: wide face, long hair and beard, strong but portly, black leather regalia, an expression of perpetual hostile evaluation as he surveyed the sidewalk. Inside, they would present their money to the dancers and be given a carefully choreogr
aphed imitation of reciprocal desire. They wouldn’t get any favors, nor would they expect any.

  Where was the murderer? What was his real mission? The midday sun beat down on Ellickson, and suddenly, in the midst of this despoliation and desolation, he felt happy for no reason.

  Continuing his letter to his son, Ellickson imagined some words that he intended to write down eventually. “You got to be tough in this life. They’ll come at you from everywhere. My dad, your grandfather, would knock me around to toughen me up. We once took a car trip to Monument Valley, and when we arrived there, he was so excited that he punched me in the stomach.” Ellickson flinched involuntarily, remembering how he had fallen to the ground after his father had said, “Come here, Eric,” and had hit him. In his father, as in some other men, joy expressed itself in high-spirited violence. “I guess I disappointed him. On the high-school football team, I was a wide receiver. I spent quite a bit of time on the bench, and my dad nicknamed me ‘Second-stringer’ after that.” He thought for a moment. “ ‘Stringer,’ as a nickname. I had to bear it. It’s too bad he died of lung cancer before you could meet him, I guess. When he was sick, he said he would be glad to die. ‘I’ll be among the happy dead,’ he told the nurses, and the nurses told me, and then he died.”

  The old man came staggering out of the building. He had a disordered appearance, and his eyes didn’t seem to be focusing anywhere. Ellickson crossed the street and took hold of him.

  “I don’t care what they say,” Macfadden Eward muttered. “Men and women are incompatible.”

  “Come on,” Ellickson said, holding on to him and piloting him across the street to the truck. When they got there, Ellickson asked, “Can you drive?”

  “I cannot,” the old man said. His breath smelled of clam sauce.

  “What did they do to you in there?” Ellickson asked, opening the passenger-side door of the truck and easing the murderer inside. “Where were you? Was that another entrance to the gentleman’s club?”

  “No,” Macfadden Eward said. “There weren’t any gentlemen in there.”

  Ellickson realized that he had been tricked. “That wasn’t your parole officer you were meeting,” Ellickson said. “You lied to me.”

  Macfadden Eward leaned back on the passenger side. He did not engage in any conversational effort. Behind the wheel, Ellickson started the truck and drove down First Avenue, past the former bus station where he had first met the mother of his children and then south toward his own neighborhood. On the passenger side of the truck, the old man’s mouth hung open, and his eyes were half shut as if in repose. Whenever the truck turned a corner, his head tilted to the side. This guy is just another piece of human debris, Ellickson thought, and then another thought hit him: And he’s all I have.

  “Was that a drug deal?” Ellickson asked.

  Macfadden Eward did not answer, but his eyes opened slightly. He was nodding off.

  “I’m very far away,” the old man said in a slur. “You’re unimportant to me.”

  “Come on,” Ellickson said. “Don’t bullshit me. I’m driving your truck. Was that a drug deal? A fix?”

  “I … wouldn’t … describe … it … that … way.”

  “How would you describe it?”

  “Over and out,” the old man said. He shut his eyes, and his head lolled back.

  When they reached the murderer’s house, Ellickson parked the man’s truck in his driveway, and, hurriedly, he opened the door on the passenger side and took the old man’s arm and threw it around his own neck in a fireman’s carry. Macfadden Eward grunted, and Ellickson took this as a good sign. He removed the old man from the truck and walked Eward down his own driveway out onto the sidewalk. The old man’s feet stumbled and shuffled beside Ellickson’s while his breath came in and went out in punchy oldster bursts. Ellickson headed down the street, the old man clinging to him, and he turned the corner to walk around the block, parading past the houses of all the neighbors.

  “What’re we doin’?” the old man asked, waking up slightly from his nod.

  “We’re walking it off,” Ellickson said. “In front of the neighbors.” They passed a house with a large front porch with a swing suspended from the ceiling; Ellickson thought of it as “the little girls’ house” because two little girls lived there with their parents, Republicans who put out lawn signs, and, sure enough, both girls were out on the porch with their rag dolls, their mother sitting in the swing reading a book, as Ellickson and the old man walked by. The girls looked at the two men, and Ellickson heard one of them asking her mother a question, and her mother answering in a low, lawyerly tone. They walked past the house of a widow, Mrs. Sherman, said to be a skinflint, who had told Ellickson about the murderer in the first place. They advanced in front of a duplex with a sharp peaked roof. Two young married couples lived there. Ellickson didn’t know who resided in the stucco Tudor beyond, but at the corner they turned again, and Ellickson and the old man stumbled past 1769 Caroline Street, where a boy was out front selling lemonade at a lemonade stand.

  “I’d like some lemonade,” Ellickson said, fishing in his left pocket for some change.

  The boy did not say anything. He looked frightened at the sorry spectacle that Ellickson and the old man, hanging on to Ellickson in a fireman’s carry, presented.

  “Here,” Ellickson said, handing the boy two quarters. “We’d like some lemonade.” He waited for a moment. “My friend here is a little sleepy.” The boy poured pink lemonade with a shaky hand into a Dixie cup and handed it to Ellickson.

  “This is for you, old-timer,” Ellickson said, reaching over and putting the paper cup to his lips.

  “Stop that,” Macfadden Eward said with sudden lucid clarity, straightening up slightly and coming out of his stupor. He reached for the cup and took a drink with his left hand. When he had completed the task, he took his right arm from around Ellickson’s neck. He stood a bit unsteadily, then handed the Dixie cup back to the boy, who had still said nothing and whose eyebrow was trembling. “Nice day,” the old man said. “Can’t beat it with a stick.”

  “Guess so,” the boy replied in a quaver.

  Macfadden Eward threw back his shoulders and walked forward. Ellickson followed him. “I’m headed homeward,” he slurred to anyone in the vicinity. Then he fell to his knees and gazed at the ground. Ellickson hoisted him up again and walked him back to his house. He took the old man upstairs and deposited him, clothes and all, in the tub and turned the cold shower water on him. Macfadden Eward began to sputter. “What’s this? What’s this?” he shouted. “Turn that off!”

  Ellickson returned to his own house. What had just happened made him feel fitfully justified in his own eyes. His neighbor would live, but someday he might overdose, and everyone would feel contempt for him, and if he didn’t OD, there was a good chance he would end up in the gutter that beckoned toward all single men, the gutter that Ellickson believed in more strongly than he did in his God.

  At his sister’s house a few days later, Ellickson was repairing an overhead light fixture while Irena steadied the ladder and handed him the electrical tape and aimed the flashlight at the wiring.

  “Have you called Laura? Your wife?” Irena asked.

  “No.”

  “And why not is this?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not, I ask again?”

  He looked down at her. “Shame.”

  “No. Stoltz,” she said. “In German. Not shame, but pride. In Russia, everyone is like you. Everyone is a shameful drunk full of pride. But they … manage. You must call Laura. I shall bully you. Like sister-in-law. Bully bully bully.” She nodded. “I am relentless. I am dictator.” When Ellickson looked down at her, he saw her grimly smiling Asiatic face, like Stalin’s.

  The following weekend, Macfadden Eward arrived at Ellickson’s front door carrying an apple pie. He appeared to be loaded down with rage and spite. “Here, take this,” the old man said, shoving the pie in Ellickson’s general direction with
out a trace of generosity.

  “Did you bake it yourself?” Ellickson asked.

  “Of course not,” Macfadden Eward said. “I just bought the goddamn thing.” His glance took in Ellickson’s living room. “So, can I come in? You’ve never invited me in, you cheap bastard. I’ve been the one who’s had to show all the hospitality.”

  “All right,” Ellickson said. “But you’re interrupting me. I’ve been writing a letter to my son.”

  “Let’s hear it,” the murderer said, forcing his way past Ellickson, through the foyer, and into the living room. He sat down on Ellickson’s sofa. “It’s kind of a mess in here,” the man said, pointing at a newspaper on the floor. “So. Read me the letter.”

  “It’s not for you, it’s for my son.”

  “Try it out on me.”

  “Don’t be a damn fool,” Ellickson said. “This is private.”

  “Are you kidding? Nothing is private anymore,” Macfadden Eward said. “Not when you parade a disabled old man with diabetes in the street in front of his neighbors. Here. Take this apple pie.” He plopped it down next to where he was sitting on the sofa.