Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

Around five o’clock on a Thursday afternoon — the bakery closed at four — Cooper was making beds near the front window when he heard a voice from behind him. “Hey,” the voice said. “I want to get in here.”

Cooper turned around. He saw the reddest person he had ever laid eyes on: the young man’s hair was red, his face flamed with sunburn and freckles, and, as if to accentuate his skin and hair tone, he was wearing a bright pink Roxy Music T-shirt. He was standing near the window, with the light behind him, and all Cooper could see of him was a still, flat expression and deeply watchful eyes. When he turned, he had the concentrated otherworldliness of figures in religious paintings.

Cooper told the young man about the shelter’s regulations and told him which bed he could have. The young man — he seemed almost a boy — stood listening, his right foot thumping against the floor and his right hand shaking in the air as if he were trying to get water off it. When the young man nodded, his head went up and down too fast, and Cooper thought he was being ironic. “Who are you?” he finally asked. “My name’s Cooper.”

“Billy Bell,” the young man said. “That’s a real weird name, isn’t it?” He shook his head but didn’t look at Cooper or wait for him to agree or disagree. “My mother threw me out last week. Why shouldn’t she? She thought I was doing drugs. I wasn’t doing drugs. Drugs are so boring. Look at those awful capitalist lizards using them and you’ll know what I mean. But I was a problem. She was right. She had to get on my case. She decided to throw me away for a while. Trash trash. So I’ve been sleeping in alleys and benches and I slept for a couple of nights in the Arboretum, but there are too many mosquitoes this time of year for that and I’ve got bites. I was living with a girl but all my desires left me. You live here, Cooper? You homeless yourself, or what?”

“I’m a volunteer,” he said. “I just work here. I’ve got a home.”

“I don’t,” Billy Bell said. “People should have homes. I don’t work now. I lost my job. I’m full of energy but I’m apathetic. Very little appeals to me. I guess I’m going to start some of those greasy minimum-wage things if I can stand them. I’m smart. I’m not a loser. I’m definitely not one of these messed-up ghouls who call this place home.”

Cooper stood up and walked toward the kitchen, knowing that the young man would follow him. “They aren’t ghouls,” he said. “Look around. They’re more normal than you are, probably. They’re down on their luck.”

“Of course they are, of course they are,” Billy said, his voice floating a few inches behind Cooper’s head. Cooper began to wipe off the kitchen counter, as the young man watched him. Then Billy began waving his right hand again. “My problem, Cooper, my problem is the problem of the month, which is pointlessness and the point of doing anything, which I can’t see most of the time. I want to heal people but I can’t do that. I’m stalled. What happened was, about a year ago, there was this day. I remember it was sunny, I mean the sun was out, and I heard these wings flapping over my head because I was out in the park with my girlfriend feeding Cheerios to the pigeons. Then this noise: flap flap flap . Wings, Cooper, big wings, taking my soul away. I didn’t want to look behind me because I was afraid they’d taken my shadow, too. It could happen, Cooper, it could happen to anybody. Anyhow, after that, what I knew was, I didn’t want what everybody else did, I mean I don’t have any desires for anything, and at some times of day I don’t cast a shadow. My desires just went away like that — poof, poor desires. I’m a saint now but I’m not enjoying it one bit. I can bless people but not heal them. Anybody could lose his soul the way I did. Now all I got is that sad robot feeling. You know, that five-o’clock feeling? But all day, with me.”

“You mentioned your mother,” Cooper said. He dropped some cleanser into the sink and began to scour. “What about your father?”

“Let me do that.” Billy nudged Cooper aside and started to clean the sink with agitated, almost frantic hand motions. “I’ve done a lot of this. My father died last year. I did a lot of housecleaning. I’m a man-maid. My father was in the hospital, but we took him out, and I was trying to be, I don’t know, a sophomore in college, which is a pretty dumb thing to aspire to, if you think about it. But I was also sitting by my father’s bed and taking care of him — he had pancreatic cancer — and I was reading Popular Mechanics to him, the home-improvement section, and feeding him when he could eat, and then when he died, the wings flew over me, though that was later, and there wasn’t much I wanted to do. What a sink.”

As he talked, Billy’s hand accelerated in its motions around the drain.

“Come on,” Cooper said. “I’m going to take you somewhere.”

His idea was to lift the young man’s spirits, but he didn’t know quite how to proceed. He took him to his car and drove him down the river road to a park, where Billy got out of the car, took his shoes off, and waded into the water. He bent down, and, as Cooper watched, cupped his hands in the river before splashing it over his face. Cooper thought his face had a strange expression, something between ecstasy and despair. He couldn’t think of a word in English for this expression but thought there might be a word in another language for it. German, for example. When Billy was finished washing his face, he looked up into the sky. Pigeons and killdeer were flying overhead. After he had settled back into the front seat of Cooper’s car, drops of water from his face dripping onto the seat, Billy said, “That’s a good feeling, Cooper. You should try it. You wash your face in the flowing water and then you hear the cries of the birds. I’d like to think it makes me a new man but I know it doesn’t. How old are you, Cooper?”

“I’m thirty-one.”

“Seven years older than me. And what did you say you did?”

“I’ll show you.”

He drove Billy to the bakery and parked in the back alley. It was getting close to twilight. After Cooper had unlocked the back door, Billy walked into the dark bakery kitchen and began to sniff. “I like this place,” he said. “I like it very much.” He shook some invisible water off his hand, then ran his finger along the bench. “What’s this made of?”

“Hardrock maple. It’s like the wood they use in bowling alleys. Hardest wood there is. You can’t dent it or break it. Look up.”

Billy twisted backward. “A skylight,” he said. “Cooper, your life is on the very top of the eggshell. You have grain from the earth and you have the sky overhead. Ever been broken into?”

“No.”

Cooper looked at Billy and saw, returning to him, a steady gaze made out of the watchful and flat expression he had first seen on the young man’s face when he had met him a few hours before. “No,” he repeated, “never have.” He felt, suddenly, that he had embarked all at once on a series of misjudgments. “What did your father do, Billy?”

“He was a surgeon,” Billy said. “He did surgery on people.”

They stood and studied each other in the dark bakery for a moment.

“We’ll go one more place,” Cooper said. “I’ll get you a beer. Then I have to take you back to the shelter.”

Cooper’s dog, Hugo, came out through the backyard and jumped up on him as he got out of his car. A load of wash, mostly Alexander’s shirts, flapped on the clothesline in the evening breeze. Cooper heard children calling from down the street.

“Here we are,” Cooper said. “We’ll go in through this door.”