Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“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 b ng g n , 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.”