Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

A light rain had started to fall. “What are you going to do with this thing?” I asked.

“Take it apart, I guess.” He glanced at the sky. “Warren, you want a beer?”

It was eleven o’clock in the morning. “Sure,” I said.

We sat in silence on his cluttered back porch. We sipped our beers and watched the rain fall over things in our line of sight. Neither of us was saying much. It was better being there than being at home, and my morning gloom was on its way out. It wasn’t lifting so much as converting into something else, as it does when you’re in someone else’s house. I didn’t want to move as long as I felt that way.

I had been in the zoo that morning because I had been reading the newspaper again, and this time I had read about a uranium plant here in Michigan whose employees were spraying pastureland with a fertilizer recycled from radioactive wastes. They called it treated raffinate. The paper said that in addition to trace amounts of radium and radioactive thorium, this fertilizer spray had at least eighteen poisonous heavy metals in it, including molybdenum, arsenic, and lead. It had been sprayed out into the pastures and was going into the food supply. I was supposed to get up from the table and go out and get the groceries, but I had gone to the zoo instead to stare at the animals. This had been happening more often lately. I couldn’t keep my mind on ordinary, daily things. I had come to believe that depression was the realism of the future, and phobias a sign of sanity. I was supposed to know better, but I didn’t.

I had felt crazy and helpless, but there, on Earl Lampson’s porch, I was feeling a little better. Calm strangers sometimes have that effect on you.

Jaynee came out just then. She’d been in the shower, and I could see why some kid might want to spend a night in the zoo with her. She was in a T-shirt and jeans, and the hot water had perked her up. I stood and excused myself. I couldn’t stand to see her just then, breaking my mood. Earl went to a standing position and shook my hand and said he appreciated what I had done for his daughter. I said it was nothing and started to leave when Earl, for no reason that I could see, suddenly said he’d be calling me during the week, if that was all right. I told him that I would be happy to hear from him.

Walking away from there, I decided, on the evidence so far, that Earl had a good heart and didn’t know what to do with it, just as he didn’t know what to do with that thing in his backyard. He just had it, and it was no use to him.

He called my office on Wednesday. I’d given him the number. There was something new in his voice, of someone wanting help. He repeated his daughter’s line about how I was a professional friend, and I said, yes, sometimes that was what I was. He asked me if I ever worked with “bad kids”—that was his phrase — and I said that sometimes I did. Then he asked me if I would help him take apart his daughter’s play structure on the following Saturday. He said there’d be plenty of beer. I could see what he was after: a bit of free counseling, but since I hadn’t prepared myself for his invitation, I didn’t have a good defense ready. I looked around my office cubicle, and I saw myself in Earl’s backyard, a screwdriver in one hand and a beer in the other. I said yes.

The day I came over, it was a fair morning, for Michigan. This state is like Holland. Cold, clammy mists mix with freezing rain in autumn, and hard rains in the spring are broken by tropical heat and tornadoes. It’s attack weather. The sky covers you with a metallic-blue, watercolor wash over tinfoil. But this day was all right. I worked out there with Earl, pulling the wood apart with our crowbars and screwdrivers, and we had an audience, Jaynee and Earl’s new woman. That was how she was introduced to me: Jody. She’s the new woman. She didn’t seem to have more than about eight or nine years on Jaynee, and she was nearsighted. She had those thick corrective lenses. But she was pretty in the details, and when she looked at Earl, the lenses enlarged those eyes, so that the love was large and naked and obvious.

I was pulling down a support bar for the north end of the structure and observing from time to time the neighboring backyards. My boys had gone off to a Scout meeting again, and my wife was busy, catching up on some office work. No one missed me. I was pulling at the wood, enjoying myself, talking to Earl and Jaynee and Jody about some of the techniques people in my profession use to resolve bad family quarrels; Jaynee and Jody were working at pulling down some of the wood, too. We already had two piles of scrap lumber.

I had heard a little of how Earl raised Jaynee. Her mother had taken off, the way they sometimes do, when Jaynee was three years old. He’d done the parental work. “You’ve been the dad, haven’t you, Earl?” Jody said, bumping her hip at him. She sat down to watch a sparrow. Her hair was in a ponytail, one of those feminine brooms. “Earl doesn’t know the first thing about being a woman, and he had to teach it all to Jaynee here.” Jody pointed her cigarette at Jaynee. “Well, she learned it from somewhere. There’s not much left she doesn’t know.”

“Where’s the mystery?” Jaynee asked. She was pounding a hammer absentmindedly into a piece of wood lying flat on the ground. “It’s easier being a woman than a girl. Men treat you better ’cause they want you.”

Earl stopped turning his wrench. “Only if you don’t go to the zoo anytime some punk asks you.”

“That was once,” she said.

Earl aimed himself at me. “I was strict with her. She knows about the laws I laid down. Fourteen laws. They’re framed in her bedroom. Nobody in this country knows what it is to be decent anymore, but I’m trying. It sure to hell isn’t easy.”

Jody smiled at me. “Earl restrained himself until I came along.” She laughed. Earl turned away so I wouldn’t see his face.

“I only spent the night in the zoo once, ” Jaynee repeated, as if no one had been listening. “And besides, I was protected.”

“Protected,” Earl repeated, staring at her.

“You know.” Jaynee pointed her index finger at her father with her thumb in the air and the other fingers pulled back, and she made an explosive sound in her mouth.

“You took that?” her father said. “You took that to the zoo?”

Jaynee shrugged. At this particular moment, Earl turned to me. “Warren, did you see it?”

I assumed he meant the gun. I looked over toward him from the bolt I was unscrewing, and I nodded. I was so involved in the work of this job that I didn’t want my peaceful laboring disturbed.

“You shouldn’t have said that,” Jody said to Jaynee. Earl had disappeared inside the house. “You know your father well enough by now to know that.” Jody stood up and walked to the yard’s back fence. “Your father thinks that women and guns are a terrible combination.”

“He always said I should watch out for myself,” Jaynee said, her back to us. She pulled a cookie out of her pocket and began to eat it.

“Not with a gun,” Jody said.

“He showed me how to use it,” the daughter said loudly. “I’m not ignorant about firearms.” She didn’t seem especially interested in the way the conversation was going.

“That was just information,” Jody said. “It wasn’t for you to use.” She was standing and waiting for Earl to reappear. I didn’t do work like this, and I didn’t hear conversations like this during the rest of the week, and so I was the only person still dismantling the play structure when Earl reappeared in the backyard with the revolver in his right hand. He had his shirtsleeve pulled back so anybody could see the tattoo of the rose run through with the saber on his forearm. Because I didn’t know what he was going to do with that gun, I thought I had just better continue to work.