Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

Kate, his sister, met him at the door, her hand at her forehead and her face flushed. The smoke alarm at the back of the house was shrieking. “We’ve had a little disaster in the kitchen,” Kate told him. “A sort of disaster-ette. I was on the phone to the goddamn airline and they put me on hold and I burned the chicken. Well, come in.” In the back, the smoke detector wailed on and on, and the dog, Ludmilla, was barking straight up at it.

“Where’s Irena?”

“H-h-h-here I am.” Irena’s h-sounds came out of her throat in the Russian manner. They sounded like gargling. She appeared very suddenly from the living room and, in the entryway, took Ellickson’s face in both hands and kissed him on the cheeks, first the left, then the right, as if he were about to go off to a firing squad. Irena’s passion for everything, including Ellickson’s sister and himself as Kate’s brother, was disconcerting. Family feeling was fine, but hers seemed a bit excessive for the American context. She stood an inch taller than Ellickson, and he was terribly fond of her — everything about her was outsized, close to bursting, including her emotions. She had russet hair, large dimpled hands, and her breath always smelled heavily of peppermints, as if she herself were a piece of candy. He could see why Kate and Irena were a couple; anyone could see their complementary mixture of similarities and differences. “We have burned you the chicken,” Irena said happily. “This will be dinner, which you can eat after repairing upstairs, where a faucet leaks.” She pointed toward the second floor. “I have bought faucet washer at hardware store. Tools are already up there. Please do this?”

“Irena,” Ellickson said, “it’s a simple job. I could teach you how.” The smoke alarm was still screaming, and Kate was cursing it.

“I do not agree,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “As human being, I am uninterested in plumbing.” She gave him another kiss, then retreated in her house slippers to the back hallway and lugged in a stepladder. Ellickson watched her climb it and then yank the battery brutally out of the smoke detector, which fell silent. Well, Ellickson thought, why should she be interested in plumbing? She taught mathematics at a local college; her theoretical interests were so complex, having to do with the bending of topological surfaces in different dimensions, that they could not be explained to ordinary people like himself.

After Ellickson had fixed the dripping faucet, Kate and Irena sat him down at the dinner table, where they ate the edible parts of the burned chicken, along with veggie-everything pizza, which had just been delivered as the second course. Bent over the pizza, Irena picked up each slice with both hands, rammed it into her mouth, and chewed with her mouth full while Kate daintily cut her pieces with a fork and knife. Following the dinner, they played cards for a penny a point, and Ellickson won two dollars. The conversation mostly dealt with the weather and current political conditions. Personal matters were discreetly avoided. As he was about to leave, Ellickson said, “You know, I love you girls.”

Irena nodded. Kate lowered her eyes. “ ‘Women,’ ” she reminded her brother. “We are women. ” This was their old familiar routine. “So.” She drew breath. “Has Laura called you?”

“No.”

“Have you called her?”

“I will. Just not yet.”

“Soon?”

“Not yet.” She looked at him. “Yes, I promise,” he said. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. A paroled murderer has moved in next door to me.”

“Is he nice?” Kate asked.

“I don’t know,” Ellickson told her. “I can’t tell yet. He works all day in his garden and then he disappears.”

“A murderer next door?” Irena said, putting away the deck of cards. “In Russia, this is not unusual.”

Eventually Macfadden Eward invited Ellickson into his house, where Ellickson found himself amid a welter of decaying furniture, chipped and dented Victorian relics, stained and soiled Salvation Army tables and chairs, lamps with three-masted schooners or seabirds painted on the lampshades. On the floor were odds and ends of kitchen gadgets, including a potato peeler and a coffee grinder still in their shipping boxes. Near the unwashed windows sat bookcases with sports memorabilia scattered on their shelves. Everything had been located and partitioned according to no visible plan in the living room and dining room. None of the dining-room chairs matched, and the big living-room easy chair sported dingy antimacassars and a red velvet cushion. The white lace curtains were clean but threadbare. A cheerful chaos dominated these interior spaces, a bachelor-apartment playroom clutter. His relatives had donated most of this stuff to him, the old man claimed. The rest of it he had bought secondhand.

That Saturday, he made Ellickson a lettuce-and-turkey sandwich and then put him to work helping him clean the gutters. It was a dirty job; goop stuck to Ellickson’s work gloves. The second time the old man invited him over, he asked Ellickson for aid in washing his pickup truck. “My back’s out today,” Macfadden Eward said. “So I can’t bend over with the hose and such.” Ellickson did the work and watched the soapsuds run toward the storm drain where, he imagined, they weren’t supposed to go. All over the city, the storm drains were painted with little outlines of fish, along with warnings: FLOWS TO RIVER. Well, what would the cops do? Revoke the old man’s parole because of soapsuds?

The third time he dropped by his neighbor’s house, Macfadden Eward told him that they had to go somewhere.

“Where?” Ellickson asked.

“That’s for me to know and for you to find out,” the old man said.

“Are you playing games with me?” Ellickson asked quietly. “Because if you’re playing games with me, go fuck yourself.” Along with the alcoholism, Ellickson had anger issues.

“Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean anything by it. My apologies.”

Ellickson got into the truck reluctantly. After starting the engine, the old man turned on the radio softly to the Twins baseball game. With the play-by-play serving as a soothing white-noise background, Macfadden Eward said, “How much you know about me? You know anything?”

“Not much,” Ellickson said. “Actually, no. Nothing.”

“Didn’t think so.” He opened his window and leaned his arm on the sill. “You’re okay, Ellickson. I like you all right. You don’t ask questions of me. I appreciate that. So let’s get one thing straight. I’ll tell you this once, but that’s it, and no details after I tell you because I don’t want to talk about it. All right?”

Ellickson shrugged.

“It’s part of my life I can’t get back.” He picked at his thumbnail. “It happened.”

Ellickson nodded.

“It was my wife, and it was twenty-five years ago, when I was still almost your age. Okay. She was younger than me. That’s a mistake, right there. She was a kid, real frisky, and she had a pretty face and a nice shape but a mean streak. She had a mouth on her. And she had the soul of a crocodile, that woman. She was reptilian. Reptiles shouldn’t drink, and we both liked to drink, speaking of alcohol. We’d go at it. No dignity about it whatsoever. We went to bars, and this one time on the way home she swerved and hit a tree. Cop comes to rescue us, EMI and what-have-you, and they do the breath tests, and on the spot my wife falls in love with the cop . Officer Wallace, a cop ! Can you imagine such a thing? Maybe it was the uniform, maybe it was the holster or how he carried himself or the … I don’t know what it was. After all these years, I can’t say that I care. I don’t think about it. So after we settle the DUI charge with the court, later, she starts calling the cop and then … you know. Hoopla. He wasn’t married, just a young buck in a blue uniform. She and I had been hitched for five years. No kids. Between my wife and me, whose fault was that? Not mine, I guarantee. But anyway, she starts stepping out on me with this guy, a brawny type, so I can’t exactly take him down in a fistfight. When I ask her, finally, about what the hell she’s doing, a married woman, with her loverboy cop, she says, ‘I want to feel his testosterone between my legs.’ That’s a direct quote! ‘I want to feel his testosterone between my legs.’ Spare me honesty like that. What you have to understand is, I loved her. I really loved her . If I hadn’t loved her, I wouldn’t have shot her. And,” he added, “if I had it to do over again, I’d still do it.”