Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

“When you came out of that place, you were in a—”

  “Don’t say it,” the old man interrupted.

  “Diabetes?” A silence followed.

  “Well, maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t.” He made a rude noise with his mouth. “Let’s hear that letter. Otherwise, I’m going back home and I’ll go back to work on the spaceship.”

  “To hell with your spaceship,” Ellickson said. “Fly to the moon, for all I care.”

  “Just read me the letter. I need to hear it,” the murderer said. “I have to hear it right now.”

  “No,” Ellickson said. “It’s not for you. I told you this already. I explained. This letter is for my boy.”

  “All right, then,” the murderer said. “Tell me about your boy.”

  “His name’s Alex.”

  “Tell me about him. Be the proud poppa.”

  “I can’t do that,” Ellickson said. Everything, traveling at sixty miles an hour, was about to hit him.

  “Okay. Start with this: How old is he?”

  “He’s ten.”

  “Well, that’s a good age. Anyway, that’s what they tell me. Never had kids myself. Never was blessed with children.”

  “Would you please leave me alone?” Ellickson asked.

  “No. Tell me what’s going on. At least tell me what you did. Tell me why your family isn’t here with you.”

  Ellickson began to weep. “Why should I tell you?” he asked, enraged. “You’re nothing.” Dead trees and caverns yawned open for him, and the devils in bow ties stood ready, and he couldn’t stop himself. The sobs broke out of him in a storm. “I was drunk,” he said. “And I … was angry at him. At Alex. My kid. I can’t even remember the reason. It can’t have been anything. And I … I don’t know why, but … I hit him.”

  “You hit him,” the murderer repeated, sitting next to the gift apple pie. “What’s so bad about that? People sometimes hit their kids.”

  “Not if they love them,” Ellickson said, still weeping. “I hit him in the face. With a book.”

  The old man stood up, gazing at Ellickson. “Eric, you poor guy, you’re as bad off as I am,” he said. “Yes, after all. Thank you. I needed to hear that. I’ll be going now.”

  Ellickson stared at the murderer’s back. “Go back to your spaceship. But I’m still sober! Goddamn it, I’m sober now! Sober and proud!”

  “Look where it’s gotten you,” the old man said gently, letting the screen door slam.

  Two days later, Ellickson called his mother-in-law’s so that he could talk to his wife, and Laura answered. “Laura? Honey, babe?” he began, speaking with his eyes shut and his hands shaking. “Don’t hang up, please? It’s me. We have to talk. Really, we have to talk. You know I’m sober now—you know that, don’t you? These days? And the effort it’s costing me? It’s all for you. I know you want to hang up—”

  “I’m pregnant,” Laura said, interrupting him. “Can you believe that?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Ellickson said, “can’t you—”

  “We should talk soon. But not now.”

  She had broken the connection.

  Ellickson put down the receiver and walked into the kitchen, where he removed a carton of orange juice from the refrigerator and poured a small glass for himself. He swished the orange juice around in his mouth as if it were mouthwash; then he swallowed it. Opening the refrigerator again, he did an inventory of its contents: eggs, milk, salad greens, English muffins, spreadable butter, strawberry jam, leftover chili, salad dressing, yogurt, biryani paste, and a bottle of root beer. The contents constituted the most hopeless array of objects the world had presented to him in some time, and he shut the door against it with a shudder. One of Alex’s drawings of a dinosaur and a vampire was still stuck with magnets to the refrigerator door.

  He took two deep breaths before leaving the kitchen, exiting through the back, crossing the driveway, and knocking at the murderer’s front door. No one answered, Ellickson rang again, and still no one appeared. He tried the doorknob, and the door opened with a slight squeak. Ellickson entered the old man’s living room.

  “Macfadden?” he called out. “Are you here? Mac?”

  Ellickson walked into the kitchen. The phone was off the hook, as if the old man had gone to get something or had left in a hurry. Ellickson went down the back stairs to the basement. He wanted to see the spaceship.

  Macfadden Eward sat in a reading chair next to a lamp, the history of Robert E. Lee in his lap. He was listening to music through headphones. “Oh,” he said, taking the earphones out, “it’s you.”

  “I rang the bell.”

  “Well, I didn’t hear it.” He waited. “I’m sorry. My hearing’s not so good.”

  “The phone was off the hook.”

  “Yes,” the old man said. “I don’t like to be bothered when I’m down here.”

  “Where’s the spaceship?” Ellickson asked. “I don’t see any spaceship down here.”

  “That’s because you’re not looking. I tell you what it is, Eric,” the murderer said, “and you should listen to me. When you’re in prison, you get used to prison. When you’re in the desert, you get used to the desert. You get interested in cactus, you know what I mean? And what I’m saying to you is, inside those four walls, I got used to the four walls. Sometimes I just can’t stand being upstairs and the daylight and everything that goes with daylight.” The ghost of a smile appeared on his face. “And that’s why I’m down here.”

  “And the spaceship?”

  “You’re in it,” Macfadden Eward said.

  An hour later, Ellickson found himself back on the phone to his friend Lester. “Lester,” he said, “I think you need to come over here. Pronto. I’m in trouble again. I talked to my wife and I’m in serious trouble.”

  “All right,” Lester said. “But I’m in the middle of something.”

  “And could I ask you for a favor?” Ellickson asked. “Would you please bring your stethoscope?”

  “It’s pretty rusty,” Lester told him. “I don’t practice medicine now, as you know.”

  “Bring it anyway,” Ellickson said.

  Fifteen minutes later, Lester pulled up in the driveway in his Buick. He came into Ellickson’s living room without knocking or ringing the bell, with his stethoscope flapping against his chest. He was a small compact man, with a full and slightly unruly head of hair, and a face on which great intelligence and comical sadness were usually visible—the expression of quizzical wit seemed to animate everything. But Lester also had a distinctive overbite, the attribute of a character actor who will always be left out at the end of the show.

  He rushed forward and shook Ellickson’s hand, pulling him forward into a tentative hug. “So. What’s happened?”

  “Lester,” Ellickson said, “my chest feels like it’s going to explode.”

  “Pain? Chest pain?”

  “No, it’s more like a weight.”

  “Well, you know, we should get you to an emergency room. I’m not really a practicing M.D. anymore.”

  “I want you to examine me. Please.”

  Lester gazed at Ellickson with his comically sad chipmunk expression. “Me? Okay,” he said. “Take off your shirt. I want to listen to your heart.”

  Ellickson did as he was told. Lester put the earpieces in and pressed the stethoscope against Ellickson’s chest.

  “Lester, my wife’s pregnant.”

  “Shh.”

  “She won’t let me talk to Alex.”

  “Shh. I’m listening to your heart.”

  “The guy next door is a murderer who lives in a spaceship. And all I want in this life is to have a drink.”

  “Would you please shut up?”

  Finally Lester lowered the stethoscope. Outside the screen door, a cardinal sang in the linden. The air smelled of moisture, of a thunderstorm brewing just out of sight underneath the line of the horizon, and despite the sunlight, Ellickson thought he heard the rumble of thunder. “Well,” Lester said, smiling. “Th
ere’s good news and bad news.”

  “Tell me the bad news first,” Ellickson said.

  “You’re still alive,” the doctor told him.

  “And what’s the good news?” Ellickson asked.

  Lester shrugged. “Same thing,” he said.

  Mr. Scary

  FOR RICHARD BAUSCH

  THERE WAS SOME SORT of commotion at the end of the checkout line. Words had been exchanged, and now two men, one tall and wide-shouldered, the other squat and beefy, were squaring off against each other and raising their voices. Their shoes squeaked on the linoleum. The short one, who had hair from his back sprouting up underneath his shirt collar, was saying a four-letter word. The other man, the tall one, shook his head angrily and raised his fist. An elderly security guard was rushing toward them. He didn’t seem up to the task, Estelle thought. He was just a minimum-wage retiree they had hired for show.

  “Good God,” Estelle said to her grandson, “there’s going to be a fistfight.”

  The boy didn’t glance up from his phone gadget. He held it in his palm and was rapidly clicking the letters. “They’re just zombies,” the boy said quietly and dismissively after a glance.

  “Well, how do you know that?” the grandmother asked, trying for conversation. “I’ve never met a zombie.” The men seemed to have calmed down a bit. They were just rumbling at each other now.

  “Zombies like discount stores,” the boy, whose name was Frederick, said patiently, as if he had to explain everything. He still wasn’t looking at the two men. “They eat plastic when they can’t get brains.” The boy glanced up, showing his grandmother his bright blue eyes. “Just look around if you don’t believe me,” he said. “This junk? It’s all theirs.” The fight between the two men seemed to bore him, before the fact. Almost everything bored him.

  Another security guard had arrived, a red-faced fellow with a crew cut. He would put a stop to things. Together with the older security guard, he herded the two men toward the service area. So: that had happened. Now it was over. Estelle handed the baseball bat she was buying for Frederick to the checkout clerk, who scanned it and who then held out her palm for money.

  “You don’t see that every day,” Estelle said to the clerk, who was frowning.

  “Ain’t none of my business,” the clerk said with a shrug.

  Estelle handed the bat to her grandson, who took hold of it in his left hand while keeping up his writing with his right.

  “You’re giving this to me because why?” the boy asked, glancing up.

  Estelle sighed. She no longer waited for thanks for anything from him. Gratitude was simply beyond his abilities.

  “For your baseball games,” she said, over her shoulder.

  “What baseball games? I don’t play baseball.”

  “Thank you,” the checkout clerk said behind her, belatedly, as if prompting Frederick. He followed his grandmother, his eyes downward again, oblivious to her, to the partly cloudy sky outside the automatic doors, to the untied shoelace on his left foot, to his own waddling walk, to the folds of fat under his T-shirt, to the gift of the unthanked aluminum baseball bat. The poor child. He had been so beautiful once, years ago, with a smile to light up the world, and now—well, just look at him.

  They drove across Minneapolis and stopped for a red light in front of the Basilica. At the corner traffic island stood a bearded panhandler with a cardboard sign that read: HOMELeSS VetERaN. ANYThING WILL HeLP. GoD BLeSS. The man’s face was wreathed in sunburned desolation, and she was reaching into her purse for a dollar when her grandson spoke up from the backseat.

  “Grandma, don’t give him anything.”

  “What? Why?” Estelle asked.

  “He’s a pod,” the boy said.

  “What?”

  “You know. A pod. A replicant.”

  Estelle looked in the rearview mirror and saw the boy scowling malevolently at the homeless man.

  “No, I don’t know. Why do you say such things?”

  “See, for starters, he’s in the stare-at-you army,” the boy said, with his eerie talent for metaphor. “They stare at you. That’s the pod game plan. I can always tell. I have radar. That guy is garbage.” Frederick laughed to himself. “He’s the lieutenant colonel of garbage.”

  “No human is garbage,” his grandmother said defiantly, rolling down her window, “and I don’t want to hear you talking like that.”

  “Okay, fine,” the boy said, “but I’m just saying … How come you like these creeps?”

  But she had already reached through the car window and placed a dollar bill in the man’s palm, and when he said, “Thank you, and God bless you,” Estelle felt a small sensation of satisfaction and pride. He might be a bum, but he knew how to be thankful.

  “I suppose you think he’s a zombie, too,” Estelle said, as she rolled the window back up.

  “No,” the boy replied. “He’s a … replicant. Like I told you. He looks like a human being, but he isn’t. Just like this car we’re in now seems like a real car.” Frederick smiled at his grandmother, a private smile, but the smile seemed to be poisoned somehow by the baby fat on his twelve-year-old face and by the boy’s customary malice, a thin screen for his unhappiness. Often his face was unreadable—it was as if he had trained his facial expressions to be ungrammatical. The poor child: he even had a double chin, making him look like a preteen Rotarian. Curled into himself, having returned to his phone gadget, Frederick radiated waves of unsociability and ill will. His being hummed with animosity toward the world for having staged the enactment of his various miseries. His revulsion at life had a kind of purity, Estelle thought.

  Really, all she wanted to do was to take him into her arms and hold him. But he was too old for that now. What had worked once, all that love she had given him, no longer did.

  “Mass times force equals velocity,” the boy said, just before his grandmother dropped him off at Community day camp. “It’s true. Did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t. But actually, Freddie, that doesn’t sound quite right.”

  “Well, it’s true. Absolutely. I’ve been studying physics. And mass times force equals velocity. That’s why a baseball travels faster if you hit it hard. You’re forcing the ball to, like, accelerate.” He waited for his words to sink in. “To escape inertia. You want to hear something else? This is even more amazing. Gravity equals weight times voltage. That’s Yardley’s Theorem.”

  “Yes. Well, okay. We’re here,” Estelle said, pulling to a stop in front of the Community day camp building, a grim yellow concrete-block affair with a flagpole hoisting a limp flag just inside the turning circle. During the winter, the building served as a community center. During the summer, they offered activities for kids from ages eight to twelve, with trips to spots of local interest. Last week the boys and girls had visited an institution for assisted living, giving each old person a gift of their own devising. Frederick had given his own old person an African violet. The day camp counselors also staged sports activities on the playground in back. Frederick hated all of it and performed his sullen silence with great majesty whenever Estelle picked him up.

  “Do I have to go in there?” the boy asked, once she had stopped.

  “Well, I did drive you over here. Kiddo, give it the old college try.”

  “I’ve done that all summer.”

  “So do it again.”

  “They all hate me,” Frederick said. “They throw their lunch food at me.”

  “Throw it back.”

  “Yeah, that’ll work. They throw sandwiches. Which explode.”

  “Well, can’t you—”

  “I got a cupcake in my hair yesterday.”

  “Make an effort—”

  “All right, all right,” he said.

  “To go in there—”

  “I said all right.”

  There was a brief air pocket of dead silence.

  “See you in a few hours,” Estelle muttered, as her grandson heaved himself out of the
car. He was still writing something on his phone. He also had words penned on his arm.

  “Don’t bother coming back. Just call the coroner,” the boy shouted, closing the car door and causing the baseball bat to roll again on the floor.

  Her husband, Randall, down on his knees in the garden, waved to Estelle absentmindedly with his trowel as she pulled up on the driveway. “Not enough fertilizer for the pansies,” he said to her once she was out of the car and behind him, leaning on him. Using his customary tone of comic despair, he said, “And I’ve been overwatering the snaps, damn it. Look at them.” He stood up, shaking his head before turning and giving Estelle a quick kiss on the lips. When he did, the brim of his sun hat poked against her forehead. “Drop him off okay?” Randall asked.

  “So I bought him a baseball bat,” Estelle said, putting her hand on her husband’s shoulder. “It was a hopeful gesture.” She straightened her husband and dusted him off. “But he stayed grumpy. Oh, and this is interesting: there was a fight in the checkout line at the discount store.”

  Randall nodded, gazing at her carefully. “Sure. Of course there was,” he said. As always, she was taken aback by his capacity for understanding her, for knowing her least little mood. “Stel,” he said, “I’ve made some lemonade, and … Freddie’s disposition isn’t your fault, you know.”

  “I know,” she said. “I know.” She whistled to the dog, who regarded her with indifference from his shade under the crab apple tree. “I just wish sometimes that Freddie were, oh, I don’t know, more … normal, and I hate myself for wanting that. Who wants normal?”

  “You do,” he said. “Well, let’s have a softball game on the vacant lot when he gets home. Us and a few normal neighbors. With his new baseball bat.”

  “A softball game?”

  “Yes. With Freddie. Or maybe we should just let him be.” He gave her hand another squeeze and preceded her into the house, holding the door open behind him. How considerate! Randall had always been considerate: he was one of those easygoing people—affable, graceful, thoughtful—on whom the sturdy world depended, and although her little secret was that she was fatigued with him and felt almost no passion for him, she still needed to have his calm presence around. He was like a preservative, and she would fight to keep him if she had to. He played poker once a week with his chums; he drank one beer per evening; he was semi-retired from his veterinarian practice; he never raised his voice. He was even a graceful and attentive lover. What a paragon of virtue Randall was! Nothing to excess, this husband. But he had never been wild, and Estelle couldn’t help herself: she was bored by people like him. Secretly, men who started fistfights attracted her. They had sap. But it was boredom that had the staying power.