Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“I’ll eat it,” she said, “but only if you buy it.”

I took her to a fast-food restaurant and sat her down and brought her one of their famous giant cheeseburgers. She held it in her hands familiarly as she watched the cars passing on Woodward Avenue. I let my gaze follow hers, and when I looked back, half the cheeseburger was gone. She wasn’t even chewing. She didn’t look at the food. She ate like a soldier in a foxhole. What was left of her food she gripped in her skinny fingers decorated with flaking pink nail polish. She was pretty in a raw and sloppy way.

“You’re looking at me.”

“Yes, I am,” I admitted.

“How come?”

“A person can look,” I said.

“Maybe.” Now she looked back. “Are you one of those creeps?”

“Which kind?”

“The kind of old man creep who picks up girls and drives them places, and, like, terrorizes them for days and then dumps them into fields.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not like that. And I’m not that old.”

“Maybe it’s the accent,” she said. “You don’t sound American.”

“I was born in England,” I told her, “but I’ve been in this country for thirty years. I’m an American citizen.”

“You’ve got to be born in this country to sound American,” she said, sucking at her chocolate shake through her straw. She was still gazing at the traffic. Looking at traffic seemed to restore her peace of mind. “I guess you’re okay,” she said distantly, “and I’m not worried anyhow, because, like I told you, I’ve got a gun.”

“Oh yeah,” I said.

“You’re not a real American because you don’t believe !” Then this child fumbled in her coat pocket and clunked down a small shiny handgun on the table, next to the plastic containers and the french fries. “So there,” she said.

“Put it back,” I told her. “Jesus, I hope the safety’s on.”

“I think so.” She wiped her hand on a napkin and dropped the thing back into her pocket. “So tell me your name, Mr. Samaritan.”

“Warren,” I said. “My name’s Warren. What’s yours?”

“I’m Jaynee. What do you do, Warren? You must do something. You look like someone who does something.”

I explained to her about governmental funding for social work and therapy, but her eyes glazed and she cut me off.

“Oh yeah,” she said, chewing her french fries with her mouth open so that you could see inside if you wanted to. “One of those professional friends. I’ve seen people like you.”

I drove her home. She admired the tape machine in the car and the carpeting on the floor. She gave me directions on how to get to her house in Westland, one of the suburbs. Detroit has four shopping centers at its cardinal points: Westland, Eastland, Southland, and Northland. A town grew up around Westland, a blue-collar area, and now Westland is the name of both the shopping center and the town.

She took me down fast-food alley and then through a series of right and left ninety-degree turns on streets with bungalows covered by aluminum siding. Few trees, not much green except the lawns, and the half-sun dropped onto those perpendicular lines with nothing to stop it or get in its way. The girl, Jaynee, picked at her knees and nodded, as if any one of the houses would do. The houses all looked exposed to me, with a straight shot at the elements out there on that flat grid.

I was going to drop her off at what she said was her driveway, but there was an old chrome-loaded Pontiac in the way, one of those vintage 1950s cars, its front end up on a hoist and some man working on his back on a rolling dolly underneath it. “That’s him,” the girl said. “You want to meet him?”

I parked the car and got out. The man pulled himself away from underneath the car and looked over at us. He stood up, wiping his hands on a rag, and scowled at his daughter. He wasn’t going to look at me right away. I think he was checking Jaynee for signs of damage.

“What’s this?” he asked. “What’s this about, Jaynee?”

“This is about nothing,” she said. “I spent the night in the zoo and this person found me and brought me home.”

“At the zoo. Jesus Christ. At the zoo. Is that what happened?” He was asking me.

“That’s where I saw her,” I told him. “She looked pretty cold.”

He dropped a screwdriver I hadn’t noticed he was holding. He was standing there in his driveway next to the Pontiac, looking at his daughter and me and then at the sky. I’d had those moments, too, when nothing made any sense and I didn’t know where my responsibilities lay. “Go inside,” he told his daughter. “Take a shower. I’m not talking to you here on the driveway. I know that.”

We both watched her go into the house. She looked like an overcoat with legs. I felt ashamed of myself for thinking of her that way, but there are some ideas you can’t prevent.

We were both watching her, and the man said, “You can’t go to the public library and find out how to raise a girl like that.” He said something else, but an airplane passed so low above us that I couldn’t hear him. We were about three miles from the airport. He ended his speech by saying, “I don’t know who’s right.”

“I don’t, either.”

“Earl Lampson.” He held out his hand. I shook it and took away a feel of bone and grease and flesh. I could see a fading tattoo on his forearm of a rose run through with a sword.

“Warren Banks,” I said. “I guess I’ll have to be going.”

“Wait a minute, Warren. Let me do two things. First, let me thank you for bringing my daughter home. Unhurt.” I nodded to show I understood. “Second. A question. You got any kids?”

“Two,” I said. “Both boys.”

“Then you know about it. You know what a child can do to you. I was awake last night. I didn’t know what had happened to her. I didn’t know if she had planned it. That was the worst. She makes plans. Jesus Christ. The zoo. The lions?”

I nodded.

“She’ll do anything. And it isn’t an act with her.” He looked up and down the street, as if he were waiting for something to appear, and I had the wild idea that I was going to see a float coming our way, with beauty queens on it, and little men dressed up in costumes.

I told him I had to leave. He shook his head.

“Stay a minute, Warren,” he said. “Come into the backyard. I want to show you something.”

He turned around and walked through the garage, past a pile of snow tires and two rusted-out bicycles. I followed him, thinking of my boys this morning at their Scout meeting, and of my wife, out shopping or maybe home by now and wondering vaguely where I was. I was supposed to be getting groceries. Here I was in this garage. She would look at the clock, do something else, then look back at the clock.

“Now, how about this?” Earl pointed an index finger toward a wooden construction that stood in the middle of his yard, running from one side to another: a play structure, with monkey bars and a swing set, a high perch like a ship’s crow’s nest, a set of tunnels to crawl through and climb on, and a little rope bridge between two towers. I had never seen anything like it, so much human effort expended on a backyard toy, this huge contraption.

I whistled. “It must have taken you years.”

“Eighteen months,” he said. “And she hasn’t played on it since she was twelve.” He shook his head. “I bought the wood and put it together piece by piece. She was only three years old when I did it, weekends when I wasn’t doing overtime at Ford’s. She was my assistant. She’d bring me nails. I told her to hold the hammer when I wasn’t using it, and she’d stand there, real serious, just holding the hammer. Of course, now she’s too old for it. I have the biggest backyard toy in Michigan and a daughter who goes off to the zoo and spends the night there and that’s her idea of a good time.”