Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

He made an odd guttural noise. “Oh, no, not Somali,” he said. “ Extremely not. I am Ethiopian … very different,” he said. “We do not look the same, either,” he said crossly.

I complimented him on his excellent English. “Yes, yes,” he said impatiently, wanting to get back to the subject of Ethiopians and Somalis. “We Ethiopians went into their country, you know. Americans do not always realize this. The Somalis should have been grateful to us, but they were not. They never are. We made an effort to stop their civil war. But they like war, the Somalis. And they do not respect the law, so it is all war, to them. A Somali does not respect the law. He does not have it in him.”

I said that I didn’t know that.

“For who are those flowers?” he asked. “Your wife?”

“Yes,” I told him.

“They are pretty except for the lilies.” He drove onto the entry ramp on the freeway. The turn signal in the cab sounded like a heart monitor. “Myself, I do not care for lilies. Do you know what we say about Somalis, what we Ethiopians say? We say, ‘The Somali has nine hearts.’ This means: a Somali will not reveal his heart to you. He will reveal a false heart, not his true one. But you get past that, in time, and you get to the second heart. This heart is also and once again false. In repetition you will be shown and told the thing which is not. You will never get to the ninth heart, which is the true one, the door to the soul. The Somali keeps that heart to himself.”

“The thing which is not?” I asked him. Outside, the sun had set.

“You do not understand this?” He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “This very important matter?”

“Well, maybe I do,” I said. “You know, my wife works with Somali children.”

The cabdriver did not say anything, but he tugged at his ear.

“Somali children in Minneapolis have a very high rate of autism,” I said. “It’s strange. No one seems to knows why. Some say it’s the diet, some say that they don’t get enough sunlight. Anyway, my wife works with Somali children.”

“Trying to make them normal?” the cabdriver asked. “Oh, well. You are a good man, to give her flowers.” He gazed out at the night. “Look at this dark air,” he said. “It will snow soon.”

With my suitcase, my apple, and my flowers, I stood waiting on the front porch of our house. Instead of unlocking the door as I normally would have, I thought I would ring the bell just as a stranger might, someone hoping to be welcomed and taken in. I always enjoyed surprising Giulietta and the boys whenever I returned from trips, and with that male pride in homecoming from a battle, large or small, I was eager to tell them tales about where I had been and what I had done and whom I had defeated and the trophies with which I had returned. Standing on the welcome mat, I looked inside through the windows into the entryway and beyond into the living room, and I saw my son Jacob lying on the floor reading from his history textbook. His class had been studying the American Revolution. He ran his hand through his hair. He needed a haircut. He had a sweet, studious look on his face, and I felt proud of him beyond measure. I rang the bell. They would all rush to greet me.

The bell apparently wasn’t working, and Jacob didn’t move from his settled position. I would have to fix that bell. Again I rang and again no one answered. If it had made a noise, I couldn’t hear it. So I went around to the back, brushing past the hateful peonies, stepping over a broken sidewalk stone, and I took up a spot in the grassy yard, still carrying my spray of flowers. Behind me, I could smell a skunk, and I heard a car alarm in the distance. If I had been Brantford, all the yard animals would have approached me. But if I had been Brantford, I wouldn’t be living in this house. I wouldn’t be here.

Giulietta sat in the back den. I could see her through the windows. She was home-tutoring a little Somali girl along a floor balance beam, and when that task was finished, they began to toss a beanbag back and forth to each other, practicing midline exercises. Her parents sat on two chairs by the wall, watching her, the mother dressed in a flowing robe.

I felt the presence of my cousin next to me out there in the yard, and in that contagious silence I was reminded of my beautiful wife and children who were stubbornly not coming to the door in response to my little joke with the doorbell. So I rapped on the window, expecting to startle Giulietta, but when she looked up, I could not see through her dark glasses to where she was looking, nor could I tell whether she saw me.

I have loved this life so much. I was prepared to wait out there forever.

IN THE HILLS BORDERING Lake Superior’s northern shore, Krumholtz was lost. Behind the wheel, searching for a landmark, he had not seen a road sign or any other indication of a human presence for miles. The surface on which he had been driving had altered from asphalt pavement to rutted dirt, and the route appeared to be undecided about its direction. It had been headed north, but after a sharp curve, it had angled south again. The rotting telephone poles, without wires, had been listing down toward the ground and now had disappeared entirely, swallowed up by forest-matter.

Having advanced for the last half hour feeling that he had moved back into an era of primeval undergrowth, Krumholtz found himself in a thick wooded area of spruce and maple trees. They were edging closer to the road as one mile followed another. He had lost sight of the lake and was getting anxious about the time. He pulled his rental car over — there was no shoulder, just a patch of weedy grass — to consult his directions, which appeared to be contradictory. The rental car’s GPS system wasn’t working. Having little idea of where he was, exactly, he turned off the engine and got out of the car.

The sharp raw pine scent made him think of his childhood in rural Oregon. He noticed a hawk circling above him. Nearby to the right, a sumac bush displayed deep autumnal red leaves. When he looked at it, the leaves trembled, as if his gazing had caused the bush to shiver.

He took in a deep breath, then coughed. Slowly and with careful deliberation over word choices, he began cursing.

Krumholtz was a freelance journalist and had been assigned by Success magazine to interview the subject of February’s cover story. Just as Playboy always had a foldout, Success always had a Winner. The title always appeared in uppercase format. February’s Winner, James Mallard, lived back in this forest somewhere in a large compound of his own design, Krumholtz had been informed. His article on Mallard was to include a combination of background information and personal narrative — the rise to fortune, lifestyle choices, opinions, etc. — along with anecdotes about the winner’s current well-being. To deserve a place in Success , the subject had to have made a significant mark measured in dollars. These feature articles, celebratory but not effusive or craven, would have as their subtext an understanding of the complexity of achieving great wealth. Seasonings of wit and irony were acceptable if dropped knowingly here and there throughout the article, but even a hint of skepticism in the face of affluence would be ruthlessly blue-penciled. “ Vogue does not mock fashion, and we do not mock riches,” Krumholtz’s editor had told him. “The amassing of a large fortune is to the readers of our magazine a sweetly solemn thought.”

James Mallard, pronounced Mall ard , British style, accent on the second syllable, had been difficult to research. The biography was paltry. He was almost an unknown. The Wikipedia article on him was “under revision,” and several other Web articles on him had been withdrawn or were impossible to access. The print media had mostly ignored him. Mallard appeared to have lived and worked in the shadows. He “valued his privacy,” according to one source. Colleagues of his had been reluctant to discuss anything about him over the phone. Voices dropped melodramatically when Mallard’s name was mentioned. “I haven’t talked to you, and you haven’t made this call,” one of Krumholtz’s interviewees said to him.