Gryphon

by Charles Baxter

  “Yes, I suppose I get it,” Krumholtz said. She was wearing a French perfume, which he recognized as one of the varieties of Plage de Soleil.

  “I’m good at what I do,” Lorraine said with a fixed smile. “I’m a spell-caster. An energizer. I’ve got Jimmy in my grip and he has me in his.”

  “And the wife?” Krumholtz asked. “Ellie?” This woman, Krumholtz thought, is trying to break my soul into little pieces just for fun. Out of sheer boredom.

  “If you only believed in angels, Mr. Krumholtz, you might be lifted up now and then out of your pathetic little life.” Lorraine had touched him gently on the cheek. “But, sadly, no.”

  From outside came the sound of a rifle shot.

  “No one knows how we live,” she said. “And no one’s going to.” She lifted her head and listened. “Now I wonder what Jimmy’s shooting at?” She stepped backward and dropped onto the fainting couch. Krumholtz saw that she was wearing a small ankle bracelet of brilliant gold. “You can go,” she said.

  Krumholtz returned to the corridor, again walking past the video of the midtown Miss Havisham, but he could not find the door out to the back terrace. He touched the thick glass in an effort to find the doorway. Night appeared to be descending on trembling batlike wings, and inside Mallardhof the music continued to float down from the invisible built-in speakers. At the moment, they were playing the first book of Debussy Préludes. Krumholtz had once been a pianist, playing keyboards in a rock band in high school, and had played in another band, Sweat Stain, in college, but had found no way of making a living from it and after majoring in music had gone into journalism, thinking that he might preserve some elements of artistic work in what he did. He had been a good enough pianist to work in a cocktail lounge to pay for his tuition, but greatness was far beyond him, and he knew it. You had to be a great musician to make a real living at it. He stopped to listen to the music. The sound was slightly smeary: an old recording: Walter Gieseking playing.

  Cathy would be sitting the girls down about now, for dinner. They would be gathered under the kitchen light, maybe eating spaghetti together. Cathy made a great sauce. Her spaghetti sauce was one of her little glories. Krumholtz went through a brief shudder of longing for his wife and daughters and home. He had never felt anything but love for Cathy from the moment he had met her. He thought of asking someone in this infernal Olympian household for a telephone, so he could call to check up on her, see how she was doing. Lately he had been a bit worried about her. She had appeared to be distracted and preoccupied and hardly listened to him when he was talking to her. The job at the agency, she had told him, had been getting her down.

  All at once he found the door out to the back terrace where Mallard had been chopping firewood. When he saw Mallard now, Krumholtz could make out that the man was covered with blood. He was bent over something with a knife in his hand and was cutting it lengthwise.

  “A deer, damn it,” Mallard said. “Somehow it got on the property. You know, they eat everything. There must be a hole in the fencing. They can be very aggressive. And destructive.” Mallard had in his hand a four-inch field knife and another tool Krumholtz didn’t recognize. “Have you ever done this?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he said, “Some hunters bleed the deer. They cut its throat. But that’s ridiculous, because after all the heart isn’t pumping, so you have to hang the damn thing with its head down so the blood drains out. Anyway, we don’t do that. So what you do is, you get the deer on its back. Maybe you know. You look like you may be a hunter.”

  “Yes, I can see what you’re doing,” Krumholtz said. Would this scene provide him with the opening of his article? “A winner not afraid of blood!”

  “And then what you do is, you put your gloves on and then cut with a gut hook—damn, the light should be better—from down here, the genitals, up to the sternum. But you don’t cut too deep because if you do, you’ll cut into the intestines, and then you’ve got a god-awful mess on your hands, and you’ll smell bad for a week. You cut out the bladder. You can skin the deer at this point, pulling the skin back from the meat. Some do, some don’t. I usually don’t.”

  “I see.”

  “After you’ve cut the diaphragm away, you get the knife up to cut the esophagus out. Once that’s cut—maybe you could get us a flashlight—you pull the lungs and the heart out, but that’s tricky because they’re attached with peritoneum, and if there’s anything left of the intestines they just go with them. The heart’s good. Always save the heart. You can eat the heart. We do. Skinning comes later. You can help with that. God damn it, the light’s bad. We’ll have to hang this thing up.” He turned around and stood, blood dripping down from his gloves. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m just watching.” He waited. “You said ‘we.’ Does your wife do this, too?”

  He turned around. “Another way to do it is, you get the cutting tool up past the rib cage and just sever the windpipe off as far up as you can. When you perform the action properly the heart and lungs will also just come dropping out. Also, there’s the blood, maybe you want to drain the animal. Blood, yes … blood. Sausage? If the thing is a male, you cut the reproductive organs and then you also—”

  Krumholtz couldn’t be sure that he was hearing James Mallard properly. The man’s words weren’t making any sense. The winner seemed to be slipping into a verbal salad, a garble of ejaculations and non sequiturs as he worked. “You push! Bloody the flashlight, slipcase the meat sauce, bloodstop the tenderloin—and offal! A whitetail—umph!—sealing intestines sausage blood wedding drool! A house marine edible brains! Venison salad pepper cake? Or not?”

  Perhaps he had misheard. He hadn’t had anything to eat after gulping down that drink in the airport lounge. His heartburn was acting up again. Feeling light-headed, Krumholtz backed away from Mallard and let himself into the house. In what appeared to be a sitting room close to the central hallway, he deposited himself onto a coal-black sofa. On the opposite wall another work of art had been installed, an enormous monochromatic study of what appeared to be human teeth reconsidered in a post-Cubist style, close-up, so that they resembled mountains. Krumholtz, turning his gaze away, looked down at the floor and noticed that he had tracked dirt in from the backyard through the hallway and onto the carpeting in the sitting room. He felt tired and hungry. For a moment, he closed his eyes.

  When he opened his eyes again, he saw Angus and Ping standing in front of him, staring at him. “What’s the matter with you?” the little boy asked. “You’re as white as a sheet.”

  “I felt faint.”

  “Sight of blood do that to you?” Ping asked. Who was she? The tutor? Yes, the tutor. She was also possibly, no, probably, another one of the mistresses.

  “Well, it’s just that I haven’t eaten since breakfast,” Krumholtz said.

  “You want something?” Angus asked. He was tossing a tennis ball up in the air and catching it with his right hand. “I could get you a cookie.” He didn’t move. “In Chinese, it’s bng gn, and in French it’s petit gâteau.”

  “Yeah,” Krumholtz said. “I know. Yes. Maybe something to eat.”

  “You’re the person who came to ask us questions. Ask me a question,” Angus said. Apparently he wasn’t about to get anything for Krumholtz after all. A request for a cookie meant nothing to this child.

  “Okay. Here’s a question for you. How come you get to be happy?”

  “How come? That’s a hard question,” the boy said. “I don’t know. I’ll go get Mom.” When he left the room, Ping went with him, smiling mysteriously. Perhaps she was amused by his question. You weren’t supposed to ask such questions of the rich. They would resent such inquiries and find the means to punish you. Krumholtz shut his eyes again, imagining his wife. When he opened them, both James and Ellie Mallard were standing in front of him. Wearing a crisply ironed pair of black slacks and a thick wool sweater, James Mallard was bending toward Krumholtz, a drink in his hand.

  “Scotch?” />
  “No, thanks, not just yet. What happened to all the blood? You were covered in blood, last I saw you.”

  “You’re sure you don’t want a scotch? It’ll warm you up. Single malt.”

  “No. That’s all right.” He took the glass and drank from it. “Thanks.”

  “His mind rejects it, but his hand accepts it,” Ellie Mallard said with delight. “Will you have dinner with us?”

  “I really should get back into town. It’s time to go. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “You’ll get lost!” He noticed that she was very exclamatory. “You’ll never get back. Weeks later, searchers will find you. Oh, but where are you staying?” Ellie sat down opposite him on a love seat, and James Mallard sat down beside her. She raised her legs so that they were crossed on her husband’s lap. He began to massage her feet.

  “In D———,” Krumholtz said. “I have a reservation at a hotel there.”

  “You’ll never get back. A hotel! Those smoky rooms! Those TV sets!” She pretended to shudder. “Oh, stay with us,” Ellie said. “Never go away!”

  “Yes,” Mallard said, agreeing with his wife, though unsmilingly. “Ask us the questions that you want to have the answers to, and maybe, just maybe,” he said, with the ghost of an ironic smile, “we’ll answer them someday.”

  Krumholtz took another slug of the scotch. “All right,” he said. “Here’s my question.” He took out his digital recorder and pretended to turn it on.

  “Shoot,” Ellie Mallard said pleasantly. As her husband massaged her feet, she closed her eyes in bliss.

  “Why do you get to be happy?” Krumholtz asked. “I asked your boy Angus this very same question a minute ago, and he was stumped.”

  “Why do we get to be happy?” Mallard repeated. “What an absurd question. But I’ll tell you. We have a lot of money. Geld macht frei. We worked for it, we worked very hard, long days and long nights, and then, of course, we were lucky.”

  “The royal ‘we’ again?” Krumholtz muttered to himself. More loudly, he said, “Yes, it’s the luck I’m interested in. About that ‘luck.’ The reason I asked is that other people, little people, work long days and long nights, very long days, days that go on for longer than twenty-four hours, days that go for weeks at a time.” He felt a sudden lift-over into either joy or rage. “That kind of day, you know, a working day that lasts for weeks. And they’re not happy, and, well, maybe that’s because they’re not lucky. Also, they have to live with neighbors, you know, that Rear Window situation? Just surrounded by mere people with every sort of problem. And I wondered what you thought about that.”

  Krumholtz heard what sounded like a grandfather clock ticking somewhere down the hallway to his left. In front of him, the teeth opened ever so slightly.

  “Is there a question in there somewhere?” Ellie Mallard asked, still not opening her eyes.

  “You take me, for example,” Krumholtz said, feeling some crucial disconnection. “We, that is, my wife and I, have neighbors. And the two of us, we … well, I was once a musician, and she wanted to be a social worker, and she was a social worker for a while before they cut the state and federal funding, which they never restored, and then, well, this thing happened to us, and this, what I’m about to tell you, this was about eighteen months after we were married, and she became pregnant. And immediately she had complications.” He took another swig of the scotch, emptying the glass. “For the last four months of the pregnancy, she was spotting, so they kept her in bed. But she got through it. The baby—it was a breech, so they had to perform a Cesarean, and they didn’t give my wife, Cathy, enough anesthetic, so the whole procedure took a bad toll on her, she was in terrible pain there for a while, but our son was born, Michael, and it seemed as if everything would be all right. And we would recover.”

  Mallard had stopped massaging his wife’s feet, and both he and his wife were staring at Krumholtz, their attention fixed on him. Mallard lightly dropped his wife’s legs on the floor, rose, and took Krumholtz’s glass, refilling it, and then returned it to him. Krumholtz could not stop himself. Where had this story come from? It wasn’t untrue, exactly, even though it hadn’t happened.

  “And Michael seemed to be all right for a while, and he thrived, and by the time he reached his fifth birthday, we thought we were out of the woods. But then, and I wouldn’t be telling you this if it weren’t the end of the day and I weren’t tired out—”

  “Go right ahead,” Ellie Mallard said. “Disunburden yourself.”

  “Thank you. He … he became sick. It began with coughing, and he lost his appetite, and he was pale, and he never had any energy, which you’re not expecting in a child that age, they’re animals really, or they should be, running and shouting all the time, that’s what nature intended, I mean, but instead he, I mean Michael, would sit in a chair morning until night, listlessly, you know, and usually television was all he could do, and we at least gave thanks for that.… Well, we couldn’t get a diagnosis from the pediatrician, and of course, it was understandable. Who knows how to look? Or where? We did one blood test after another, I mean, they did, they did one blood test after another, beyond what our insurance could pay for, those ghouls, though I suppose I shouldn’t say that, they mean well, those medical professionals, and each time, each time we went in, Michael would start crying before they had even taken the blood, which tore at my heart. He’d just see the exterior office door, which was painted this bright terrible frightening red, not comforting at all, and he’d start howling. How can you get used to the suffering of a child? I mean, you can’t. You can’t get used to it. Or you shouldn’t. There’s nothing there in that situation you should ever accept. And he was bleeding from the nose all the time, and sometimes from his mouth, for no reasons that we knew, and then finally we got a diagnosis.”

  “What was it?” Ellie Mallard asked in a whisper.

  “Chronic thrombocytopenic purpura,” Krumholtz said. He had once written an article about the disease and knew something about it. “And there’s no cure for it and no treatment and invariably it’s fatal. So … well, we had a certain amount of time. There was this question we were facing. What should we do? What should we do with the time we had left with our little boy? It’s such a terrible decision. I mean, no one can make a decision like that. Of course we asked Michael what he wanted to do, we had to ask him, what he wanted to do more than anything else in the world. He didn’t want to go to any of those destination places. He said he wanted to sit by the window.”

  Krumholtz took another swig of the scotch.

  “Michael sat by the window, and he would narrate what he saw, almost as if he could imagine what his adulthood might have been like. People going to work in the morning, people coming home in the evening, laboring at their jobs. And the sun, traveling across the sky. And the street. And the birds. And squirrels. There was one particular bird, a sparrow that came by for the bread crumbs that Michael put out on his windowsill. And then, when Michael died, the sparrow came by waiting for him, for the food he had put out there. The bird would hop out on the sill and chirp. Then one night we heard a terrible thump against Michael’s window. The next morning we found the sparrow on the lawn. It seemed to have flung itself against his window. When I bent down to pick it up, I discovered that its heart had stopped.”

  Well, he had his triumph: the winner and his wife were in tears. The damn tears: against the riches of the world, they changed almost nothing. But now Krumholtz felt a power surging through him. No one would dare to move him from his comfortable position on the sofa. He took another swig. “Oh, stop,” Ellie Mallard said, touching a hankie to her face. But he wasn’t finished. The boy, Angus, had come into the room and was staring wide-eyed at his mother. And now here was Gretel, dressed just like her brother, in the doorway, listening intently, and alarmed by the parental weeping. Krumholz did not intend to budge: he would sit there, with his audience in front of him, elaborating this story of suffering and terror for as long as he pleased
. He had just gotten started.

  About the Author

  Charles Baxter is the author of nine previous works of fiction, including five novels, The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), The Soul Thief, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, and First Light, and four previous collections of stories: Believers, A Relative Stranger, Through the Safety Net, and Harmony of the World. He lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.: Excerpts from “Gimme Shelter,” words and music by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, copyright © 1968 (renewed) by ABKCO Music, Inc., 85 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc.

  European American Music Distributors LLC: Excerpt from Harmonie der Welt by Paul Hindemith, copyright © 1952 by Schott Music, Mainz, Germany. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Music, Mainz, Germany.

  The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare: Excerpt from “Alice Rodd” and excerpt from “Ann Poverty” from Ding Dong Bell by Walter de la Mare. Reprinted by permission of The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare and the Society of Authors as their representative.

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: “The Disappeared,” “Fenstad’s Mother,” “Shelter,” “Snow,” and “Westland” from A Relative Stranger by Charles Baxter, copyright © 1990 by Charles Baxter. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.