Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

“I agree with you there,” Saul said. Monitoring himself, he noticed how expert he was, how exemplary, at pretending to be calm, when in fact all he really felt was a certain variety of domesticated and internalized cancerous emotional riot. Patsy. Mary Esther. “Hey, Gordy, let’s go for a ride in the car, okay?”

“Okay, I guess. Don’t you need shoes?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Saul said. “I can drive barefoot. I’ve done it before.”

“You sure have a lot of hair on your arms,” Gordy said. “Hairiest man I ever saw. Is that Jew hair?”

“Sure is. Gordy, how about if we get into the car now, right this minute?”

“I was just askin’,” Gordy said, as patient as a turtle. “Okay, let’s do that.”

Gordy pocketed the gun, picked up the rusty bicycle at his feet, and sauntered toward the car. He loaded the bike into the backseat, where it dripped rust over the upholstery. After Saul got in and twisted the key, challenging the car to start, they drove out onto Whitefeather Road. Down the road, three-quarters of a mile away, the old town dump was being filled in. They were going to put a housing development there. Where would the rats go? It was a problem. You couldn’t shoot them all. Even the rats needed somewhere to stay.

Within another mile of the landfill, the farmland quickly morphed into cement and asphalt parking lots outside the Wolverine Outlet Mall and the Happy Village CinePlex 25 and the Bruckner Buick-Honda MotorMart, dominated by the grinning giant white plasticene Bruckner polar bear, an attention-getting device two stories high with its pawful of green plastic cash, an offering to passing motorists, and, floating above the bear but still tethered to it, the Bruckner MotorMart blimp — really just an outsized helium balloon — unmoving in the infernal morning heat. On clear days, the blimp, floating above the trees, was visible from Saul and Patsy’s bedroom window, although both Saul and Patsy tried to avoid looking at it. Now, behind the wheel, with Gordy next to him viewing the sights, the gun pocketed somewhere, Saul felt richly overloaded with anger and bad nerves, but at least he had Gordy in the car, far enough away from the house and from Patsy and Mary Esther so that the kid could do them no harm. He switched on the air conditioner, then remembered that the compressor wasn’t working. The Chevy was a lemon, but Saul was too fatalistic to do anything about its various debilities; and, besides, he identified with the car and its failings. Any car he owned would eventually fall to pieces, simply because he owned it.

It was so hot the sky was almost more white than blue. The sun had some real anger behind it today, a distinctive solar rage.

After opening the window, he saw up ahead a group of middle school girls standing out on the side of the road, waving their arms toward a side drive and holding up signs that said FREE CARWASH! He knew those girls: it was a money-making scheme for the ninth grade, the pretty ones, the Eloi, standing out on the road to attract attention, while the homely ones, the Morlocks, washed the cars and begged for gratuities. It all felt posthumous to him, this morning spectacle, as if Gordy had loaded the pistol and shot him and Saul was driving toward the afterlife, which would be about fifteen miles out of town in a strip mall bordering a dairy farm.

“Look at them,” Gordy said. “Dumb girls. They just spit on the cars they wash.”

At least the gun wasn’t loaded. Two of the girls watched him drive past, with Gordy on the passenger side. They waved with feigned cheerfulness until they saw Gordy, when their expressions were downgraded to surprise and alarm.

Thinking of the gun, Saul considered the prospects following his death. His chances weren’t good. There would be no harps in the afterlife, but instead long moralistic debriefing sessions in classrooms, during which he would have to explain himself and his quirks at length to some querulous Christian saint wearing sandals and a business suit and holding a clipboard. It would be like a substance-abuse clinic, with slogans and checklists and chores and trivial corrections, and a big sign over the main gate: WE WON, YOU LOST. There would be no unconditional forgiveness. Everything would be on a contingency basis. God’s anger would have to be placated with sacrificial offerings, starting with Saul’s irony, which Saul would have to throw away on the eternal spiritual fire, along with his skepticism and his interest in baseball and his Charlie Parker LPs. It would all have to go. The population of souls in Saul’s afterlife would have smiles on their faces, evangelical tent-show grins. Angels would be displaying their navel-less midriffs and grooming their wings with giant pearl combs. They would be dabbing their feet in the river of light. Saul didn’t want to die because the possibility of his having to join the God cult, following the expiration of his body, unnerved him. Perhaps they’d toss him in Limbo, a place full of cubicles and malfunctioning coffeemakers intended to break everyone of the caffeine habit, and of every other habit, for that matter. He would have to take lessons in sanctity and sincerity. There would be odious piety. There would be sensitivity training. They’d start calling him “Paul” instead of “Saul” and he wouldn’t be able to stand it. In Limbo, though, he’d have plenty of company: almost all of the Jews would be there, analyzing the situation. And, then, Patsy would appear on the scene, eventually. She would know how to handle whatever came up.

Unless Heaven happened to be run by Arabs. Perhaps Allah was actually in charge. If so, Saul’s goose was cooked.

“Hey,” Gordy said. “You’re driving to my house. Can I turn on the radio?”

“The FM doesn’t work. Only the AM.”

“Hey,” Gordy said, “this is a real shitty car.” He squirmed in his seat. “Looks ain’t everything. How come you never fix any of it?”

“How come you knocked down my beehives?”

“How come when I ask you a question, you ask me a question?”

“Who wants to know?” Saul asked. Gordy slouched down and put his hand over his face. They drove on in silence.

Saul had motored past Gordy Himmelman’s house on Strewwelpeter Street many times before, so he knew where it was, in a low-rent neighborhood of dying and spindly oak trees behind the parking lot of the new WaldChem processing plant, where as their new sideline they made genetically engineered dehydrated fruit, and when he got to where Gordy lived, some woman was outside smoking a cigarette and hammering at the broken wooden steps leading up to the front door. She wasn’t Gordy’s mother — it was Brenda Bagley, Gordy’s aunt, the waitress who worked in the Fleetwood. She was wearing a faded cotton housedress and sneakers, and when she stood up, she looked like an undersea creature.

Her face was disfigured by years of hard work and stupendous ugliness: her hair hung around her pockmarked cheeks like seaweed around a clam. Her hooded eyes were fatigued and suspicious and sullen; nothing done by human beings could surprise or please her. Behind where she was standing, the house, a white prefab with corrugated steel sides — the kind of house sought out by tornadoes — rested somewhat precariously on concrete blocks, a huge spiderweb satellite TV dish planted next to it on the lawn.

Brenda Bagley watched as Gordy pulled his bicycle out of the back of Saul’s car. Gordy wheeled the bike across the street, and Saul started to wave just before he saw Gordy’s aunt, whose voice was muffled, lift her left hand, the one with the cigarette, across her forehead. After another exchange — Saul couldn’t hear what they were saying — she reversed her grip on the hammer and hit Gordy twice in the face, hard, with the hammer’s wooden handle. She did it so fast, Saul could hardly see her hand moving. She did it like a virtuoso, practiced and instinctual. She did it with considerable force. She hauled back and brought her hand down in a familiar swift arc.