Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“Well, then,” the murderer said, “we’ve got something in common.” He slid off his gardening glove and extended his right hand, wincing as if his shoulder hurt him. “Name’s Macfadden Eward,” he said, shaking Ellickson’s hand. It sounded like a made-up name. “Call me Mac.”

“Eric Ellickson.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Ellickson.”

“Oh, no. Make it Eric.”

“First names? Fine. You know, in Germany,” the old man said, hawking and then spitting to the side of his rosebush, “they spend a lot of time negotiating with each other about whether they’ll use their first names. Before that, it’s always ‘Herr Ellickson’ and ‘Herr Eward.’ They believe in the formalities. Did you know that?”

“No,” Ellickson said. “I can’t say that I did.”

“Interesting country, Germany,” he said, bending over to rub his knee. “They have themselves quite a history. Well, now, I’d invite you into my house except I gotta tell you that my place isn’t shipshape just yet. The boxes won’t unpack themselves, you know what I mean?” The old man leaned back and roared with humorless laughter. All this laughing made Ellickson uneasy. Then Macfadden Eward’s laughter suddenly stopped, and he gazed solemnly at Ellickson as he pointed his pruning shears at him. “So you can’t come in.”

“Well,” said Ellickson, feeling somewhat off balance himself, “I wasn’t looking for an invite from you. In fact,” he said, realizing before the words came out of his mouth that he would now have to invite the murderer over to his house, “I wanted to see if you’d like some iced tea or a cool drink.”

“That I would, that I would,” Macfadden Eward said, “but not just this minute. It’s very kind of you to invite me, Mr. Ellickson. Maybe later. Tomorrow or the day after that.” He cut off another dead part of the bush with the clippers. “So I’ll just take a rain check, if you don’t mind.”

“I can’t offer you a drink,” Ellickson said quickly, remembering what Lester had told him to say. “I’m on the wagon, you know.” He tried to smile. “Can’t touch the stuff.”

“I didn’t know, but that’s fine,” the old man said, with a horsey smile, displaying his teeth again. “There’s some things I don’t do myself. I can drink, but I can see now that you can’t. But that particular discussion’ll have to wait until next time.” He smiled again and waved in the direction of his house. “One of these days, you can come down to my basement, and I’ll show you the spaceship I’m building down there.”

“A spaceship?”

“Shh.” The old man put his finger to his lips. “Mum’s the word.” Then he jabbed Ellickson in the ribs. “Maybe I’m kidding! Maybe there’s no spaceship!”

Ellickson returned to his house, uncertain about the nature of the conversation he had just had.

For his daughter, Barbara, Ellickson had been putting together a dollhouse, and now, for his son, Alex, he was writing a letter. He hadn’t been able to get past “My dear son” despite many attempts. It was as if his heart had suffered a blockage, and the language of feeling that other parents drew upon effortlessly had been denied him. He loved his son, but to say so in so many words seemed unthinkable. If you just put it like that, with the love right out on the table, the words would lack force. They would sound fatuous. Nothing would stand behind such a statement, especially after a father’s drunken misbehavior, and besides, the kid might be spoiled if you said it flat-out like that.

Ellickson felt that he had had to earn every single bit of love that he himself had ever received, and that if he hadn’t tried to satisfy everyone’s expectations for him, he would have been promptly thrown out into the street to die in the gutter like a dog. He still might suffer that fate. He sat at his desk, pen in hand, staring out the window at his neighbor, who was now putting in a bed of petunias.

“Fourteen years ago,” Ellickson finally wrote to his son, “I met your mother at a rock concert. Maybe we told you this story. We were standing together in the aisle of this big converted bus terminal downtown that had been turned into a club, and then we both started to dance at almost the same time, and before long, we introduced ourselves.” The place had been thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of weed, and the band, Town Dump, had only an approximate sense of how they should be playing, but somehow, despite their ineptitude, or because of it, the musicians lit up the audience, and Ellickson had found himself dancing with this beautiful young woman who had appeared magically in front of him. “Your mother,” Ellickson wrote, “was wearing a speckled-green T-shirt with a little pin on it, and plain blue jeans, and she was the prettiest woman who had ever looked me in the eye and taken me by the hand.” This confession was not quite the appropriate history for him to be laying out for his son, he realized, but he couldn’t think of what else to write, or what other route to take toward an apology. “I started to fall in love with your mother right there,” Ellickson wrote. “We talked for hours that following week.”

Ellickson had had many girlfriends and one ex-wife by that time. He was ready for love to strike. On their first real date, when he had taken the girl he had met at the rock concert out for a spaghetti dinner and a movie, he knew this one, this Laura, would be serious. “And then what happened, what really did it for me, was that your mom took me over to where she lived and played the guitar for me and sang a song she had written herself.” She had had a sweet voice. The song was about how things pass and how you have to reach for the moment. Ellickson had always carried a torch for women who raised their voices in song.

“What I’m saying is that I’m not a bad person. My dad used to take me deer hunting in the woods up north,” Ellickson continued, in a new paragraph, not wanting to write about how everything had gone wrong with Laura. The letter to his son was growing a bit disconnected, he knew, but this wasn’t an English composition, this was a soul statement. “When you’re older, I’ll take you deer hunting if you want to go up to the woods with me. I haven’t really done any hunting since you were born. I don’t know why that is. Maybe there hasn’t been time. I’m a pretty good shot, and I can teach you how to kill and dress a deer. We should go fishing, too, up north. Have you ever pulled in a fighting trout? It’s a great experience. I would love to do that with you.”

Ellickson watched his neighbor water his petunias. When he glanced at his watch, he saw that several hours had passed. A miracle. He had almost made it through another day. The phone rang.

“How’d it go?” Lester asked. “With the murderer? Did you talk to him?”

“It went pretty well,” Ellickson said. “He’s a little strange, though.”

“Well, he’s a murderer.”

“No,” Ellickson said. “It’s not that. It’s like he’s a master of ceremonies of some TV show that no one’s watching. He told me he’s building a spaceship in his basement. Then he said maybe he was just kidding about the spaceship.”

“A spaceship, huh? I know the feeling,” Lester said. “Did you tell him you’re an alcoholic?”

“Yeah,” Ellickson said. “I did that.”

“Good,” Lester said. “Next time you’re over there, check out the spaceship and then report back to me.”

That night, Ellickson went to his sister’s house for dinner. She lived with her partner, a sizable Russian immigrant woman named Irena, in a ramshackle colonial on the better side of town. He continued to get invitations from them, he believed, because he performed small electrical and plumbing repairs whenever he visited and because he had offered to be the godfather if they ever had children. Also, his sister never asked him about how he was, so he never had to explain.