Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

Ellickson nodded. “You could have shot the cop. I would have. By the way, where are we going?” he asked.

“Cops don’t like it when you kill their girlfriends. In prison,” the old man said, ignoring Ellickson’s question as if it were nonsensical, “I had time on my hands. The day stretches out. A week, ten weeks, who cares? A civilian can’t imagine. You just sit there. Your brain gets empty. You get empty. No one gives two fucks about you. And you have this big problem. The big problem is the days and hours you’re alone with your mind on idle. You don’t see the sky, and your mind races. You start to spook yourself up. Crazy stuff. You see the isles of madness, just over there. Ever seen them? The trees are all dead, and there’s caves. Archfiends wearing bow ties live in there. The mind is underemployed. It sits there and won’t quit. So I gave my mind a job.”

They were headed downtown, toward a seedy section. They passed a business called Toyland, with sex toys in the display window. “What job was that?” Ellickson asked.

“I needed to keep my dignity, you know? So I imagined a spaceship. Not like a movie spaceship, but something realistic, a real spaceship to take me away. Out of the world I was in. This world. See, the spaceship had to have rooms, it had to have hallways, it needed a shape . So I imagined the flight deck. I imagined the chairs and the seating, the exact kind of leather — Spanish, the best — then the compartments where people slept and ate. The dishes. The flatware. That sort of thing. I figured the materials, shape and quantity. This much aluminum, that much alloy. I designed the doorknobs. The computers, the readouts. I even imagined the jet engines, and I don’t know anything about jet engines, so I invented how it’d have to be done. I imagined a workable propulsion system. I had to. Everything required a design, even the bathrooms.” The murderer laughed his mirthless laugh. At that moment he did not seem to Ellickson ever to have been a kind man. All he had ever been was a maniac. “Those years I was behind bars, I built my spaceship in my mind, and more important, I built it in my heart.” He turned and looked directly at Ellickson, as he pulled into a parking space on the street. “When I was done, I named the spaceship.”

“What did you call it?” Ellickson asked.

“Yeah, I thought about the name for a long time. Finally I settled on one. I called it Queen Juliana. ” Macfadden Eward smiled at the memory. “It was the name of someone I knew. It was a tribute to her. Now that I’m an old man, I don’t name things anymore.”

“What are we doing here?” Ellickson asked.

“I gotta talk to my parole officer,” the old man said, getting out of the truck. “I’ll be back in two shakes.” He crossed the street and entered a side door of a brick building that might have once been a warehouse. Upstairs, one lightbulb burned behind a cracked wire-mesh window. Ellickson doubted that a parole officer would work in such a place.

He opened the door of the murderer’s truck and stepped down onto the sidewalk. At the end of the block was a business with bars across the front windows. A sign across the front said MONTE CARLO in neon, and then, in smaller letters, A GENTLEMAN’S CLUB. Ellickson did not see any gentlemen going in or out, and for relief from the sight of the shabby shadow-creatures he did see, he glanced down the length of First Avenue.

What had happened to the downtown area? The city seemed to have been abandoned and appeared to be as unloved and uncared-for as the begrimed men going into the Monte Carlo. He eyed a corner telephone pole and saw a video camera aimed in his general direction. Full of exuberant good humor, he gave it the finger. A young woman with green hair and a pierced lower lip, and carrying a large backpack, approached him on the sidewalk and walked past him, gazing at him fearfully as if he were one of the feral gentlemen going into the Monte Carlo. Had he, Ellickson, turned into a person whom others feared? He had once thought of himself as a handsome, genial man who frightened nobody and attracted companionable attention. Soon people would make the sign of the cross upon seeing him to ensure their own safety.

A customer about Ellickson’s age, glancing over his shoulder, slunk into the gentleman’s club wearing a leering owlish expression behind thick glasses. He was followed by another scowling man with the general appearance of a Hells Angel: wide face, long hair and beard, strong but portly, black leather regalia, an expression of perpetual hostile evaluation as he surveyed the sidewalk. Inside, they would present their money to the dancers and be given a carefully choreographed imitation of reciprocal desire. They wouldn’t get any favors, nor would they expect any.

Where was the murderer? What was his real mission? The midday sun beat down on Ellickson, and suddenly, in the midst of this despoliation and desolation, he felt happy for no reason.

Continuing his letter to his son, Ellickson imagined some words that he intended to write down eventually. “You got to be tough in this life. They’ll come at you from everywhere. My dad, your grandfather, would knock me around to toughen me up. We once took a car trip to Monument Valley, and when we arrived there, he was so excited that he punched me in the stomach.” Ellickson flinched involuntarily, remembering how he had fallen to the ground after his father had said, “Come here, Eric,” and had hit him. In his father, as in some other men, joy expressed itself in high-spirited violence. “I guess I disappointed him. On the high-school football team, I was a wide receiver. I spent quite a bit of time on the bench, and my dad nicknamed me ‘Second-stringer’ after that.” He thought for a moment. “ ‘Stringer,’ as a nickname. I had to bear it. It’s too bad he died of lung cancer before you could meet him, I guess. When he was sick, he said he would be glad to die. ‘I’ll be among the happy dead,’ he told the nurses, and the nurses told me, and then he died.”

The old man came staggering out of the building. He had a disordered appearance, and his eyes didn’t seem to be focusing anywhere. Ellickson crossed the street and took hold of him.

“I don’t care what they say,” Macfadden Eward muttered. “Men and women are incompatible.”

“Come on,” Ellickson said, holding on to him and piloting him across the street to the truck. When they got there, Ellickson asked, “Can you drive?”

“I cannot,” the old man said. His breath smelled of clam sauce.

“What did they do to you in there?” Ellickson asked, opening the passenger-side door of the truck and easing the murderer inside. “Where were you? Was that another entrance to the gentleman’s club?”

“No,” Macfadden Eward said. “There weren’t any gentlemen in there.”

Ellickson realized that he had been tricked. “That wasn’t your parole officer you were meeting,” Ellickson said. “You lied to me.”

Macfadden Eward leaned back on the passenger side. He did not engage in any conversational effort. Behind the wheel, Ellickson started the truck and drove down First Avenue, past the former bus station where he had first met the mother of his children and then south toward his own neighborhood. On the passenger side of the truck, the old man’s mouth hung open, and his eyes were half shut as if in repose. Whenever the truck turned a corner, his head tilted to the side. This guy is just another piece of human debris, Ellickson thought, and then another thought hit him: And he’s all I have .

“Was that a drug deal?” Ellickson asked.

Macfadden Eward did not answer, but his eyes opened slightly. He was nodding off.

“I’m very far away,” the old man said in a slur. “You’re unimportant to me.”