Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“Zombies like discount stores,” the boy, whose name was Frederick, said patiently, as if he had to explain everything. He still wasn’t looking at the two men. “They eat plastic when they can’t get brains.” The boy glanced up, showing his grandmother his bright blue eyes. “Just look around if you don’t believe me,” he said. “This junk? It’s all theirs. ” The fight between the two men seemed to bore him, before the fact. Almost everything bored him.

Another security guard had arrived, a red-faced fellow with a crew cut. He would put a stop to things. Together with the older security guard, he herded the two men toward the service area. So: that had happened. Now it was over. Estelle handed the baseball bat she was buying for Frederick to the checkout clerk, who scanned it and who then held out her palm for money.

“You don’t see that every day,” Estelle said to the clerk, who was frowning.

“Ain’t none of my business,” the clerk said with a shrug.

Estelle handed the bat to her grandson, who took hold of it in his left hand while keeping up his writing with his right.

“You’re giving this to me because why ?” the boy asked, glancing up.

Estelle sighed. She no longer waited for thanks for anything from him. Gratitude was simply beyond his abilities.

“For your baseball games,” she said, over her shoulder.

“What baseball games? I don’t play baseball.”

“ Thank you,” the checkout clerk said behind her, belatedly, as if prompting Frederick. He followed his grandmother, his eyes downward again, oblivious to her, to the partly cloudy sky outside the automatic doors, to the untied shoelace on his left foot, to his own waddling walk, to the folds of fat under his T-shirt, to the gift of the unthanked aluminum baseball bat. The poor child. He had been so beautiful once, years ago, with a smile to light up the world, and now — well, just look at him.

They drove across Minneapolis and stopped for a red light in front of the Basilica. At the corner traffic island stood a bearded panhandler with a cardboard sign that read: HOMELeSS VetERaN. ANYThING WILL HeLP. GoD BLeSS. The man’s face was wreathed in sunburned desolation, and she was reaching into her purse for a dollar when her grandson spoke up from the backseat.

“Grandma, don’t give him anything.”

“What? Why?” Estelle asked.

“He’s a pod,” the boy said.

“What?”

“ You know. A pod . A replicant.”

Estelle looked in the rearview mirror and saw the boy scowling malevolently at the homeless man.

“No, I don’t know. Why do you say such things?”

“See, for starters, he’s in the stare-at-you army,” the boy said, with his eerie talent for metaphor. “They stare at you. That’s the pod game plan. I can always tell. I have radar . That guy is garbage.” Frederick laughed to himself. “He’s the lieutenant colonel of garbage.”

“No human is garbage,” his grandmother said defiantly, rolling down her window, “and I don’t want to hear you talking like that.”

“Okay, fine,” the boy said, “but I’m just saying … How come you like these creeps?”

But she had already reached through the car window and placed a dollar bill in the man’s palm, and when he said, “Thank you, and God bless you,” Estelle felt a small sensation of satisfaction and pride. He might be a bum, but he knew how to be thankful.

“I suppose you think he’s a zombie, too,” Estelle said, as she rolled the window back up.

“ No, ” the boy replied. “He’s a … replicant . Like I told you. He looks like a human being, but he isn’t. Just like this car we’re in now seems like a real car.” Frederick smiled at his grandmother, a private smile, but the smile seemed to be poisoned somehow by the baby fat on his twelve-year-old face and by the boy’s customary malice, a thin screen for his unhappiness. Often his face was unreadable — it was as if he had trained his facial expressions to be ungrammatical. The poor child: he even had a double chin, making him look like a preteen Rotarian. Curled into himself, having returned to his phone gadget, Frederick radiated waves of unsociability and ill will. His being hummed with animosity toward the world for having staged the enactment of his various miseries. His revulsion at life had a kind of purity, Estelle thought.

Really, all she wanted to do was to take him into her arms and hold him. But he was too old for that now. What had worked once, all that love she had given him, no longer did.

“Mass times force equals velocity,” the boy said, just before his grandmother dropped him off at Community day camp. “It’s true. Did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t. But actually, Freddie, that doesn’t sound quite right.”

“Well, it’s true. Absolutely . I’ve been studying physics. And mass times force equals velocity. That’s why a baseball travels faster if you hit it hard. You’re forcing the ball to, like, accelerate.” He waited for his words to sink in. “To escape inertia. You want to hear something else? This is even more amazing. Gravity equals weight times voltage . That’s Yardley’s Theorem.”

“Yes. Well, okay. We’re here,” Estelle said, pulling to a stop in front of the Community day camp building, a grim yellow concrete-block affair with a flagpole hoisting a limp flag just inside the turning circle. During the winter, the building served as a community center. During the summer, they offered activities for kids from ages eight to twelve, with trips to spots of local interest. Last week the boys and girls had visited an institution for assisted living, giving each old person a gift of their own devising. Frederick had given his own old person an African violet. The day camp counselors also staged sports activities on the playground in back. Frederick hated all of it and performed his sullen silence with great majesty whenever Estelle picked him up.

“Do I have to go in there?” the boy asked, once she had stopped.

“Well, I did drive you over here. Kiddo, give it the old college try.”

“I’ve done that all summer.”

“So do it again.”

“They all hate me,” Frederick said. “They throw their lunch food at me.”

“Throw it back.”

“Yeah, that’ll work. They throw sandwiches. Which explode. ”

“Well, can’t you—”

“I got a cupcake in my hair yesterday.”

“Make an effort—”

“All right, all right, ” he said.

“To go in there—”

“I said all right .”

There was a brief air pocket of dead silence.

“See you in a few hours,” Estelle muttered, as her grandson heaved himself out of the car. He was still writing something on his phone. He also had words penned on his arm.

“Don’t bother coming back. Just call the coroner,” the boy shouted, closing the car door and causing the baseball bat to roll again on the floor.

Her husband, Randall, down on his knees in the garden, waved to Estelle absentmindedly with his trowel as she pulled up on the driveway. “Not enough fertilizer for the pansies,” he said to her once she was out of the car and behind him, leaning on him. Using his customary tone of comic despair, he said, “And I’ve been overwatering the snaps, damn it. Look at them.” He stood up, shaking his head before turning and giving Estelle a quick kiss on the lips. When he did, the brim of his sun hat poked against her forehead. “Drop him off okay?” Randall asked.

“So I bought him a baseball bat,” Estelle said, putting her hand on her husband’s shoulder. “It was a hopeful gesture.” She straightened her husband and dusted him off. “But he stayed grumpy. Oh, and this is interesting: there was a fight in the checkout line at the discount store.”