Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

Gordy cried out. Then he fell to his knees and put his hands to his head at the scalp just above the ear. The woman reached back again with the hammer and then seemed to think better of striking the boy a third time. She leaned down, withdrew the gun from Gordy’s back pocket, and lumbered into the house with it. When she came out again, Gordy was making his way up to his feet, and the woman began to shout at him, and Gordy shouted back. They did it casually, as if they were used to the dailiness of violent quarreling.

Saul steered the Chevy over to the shoulder of the road, killed the engine, and hurriedly got out. He jogged across the street and approached the woman, who had by now returned to her work. Gordy was bleeding, a small rivulet of blood trickling down from a bruise near his left ear across his cheek, and he was wiping it with his dirty hand. More blood came oozing out from his scalp, soaking his hair. Then his cursing stopped. As Saul neared them, both the woman and Gordy stared at him, the woman still hammering as she stared, though Gordy had retreated backward toward the house, against which he leaned, holding the side of his bleeding head. Saul had no idea what he himself would say. He hadn’t been invited to this particular gathering. But there was always something to say if you could only think of it.

“Hello,” Saul said.

“You’re the teacher,” the woman said. From inside the home came the sound of a TV set singing and selling. Straightening up, she reached into the pocket of her dress, pulled out an unfiltered cigarette, and lit it. “The reading teacher. I remember you. We met. I sure heard enough about you from him. He says you don’t like him.”

“Saul Bernstein,” he said. “Yes, that’s right. I’m Gordy’s teacher. You and I have had a conference about him.” He paused, thinking about his role in all this. “Ms. Bagley, I was always available for more conferences if you wanted to talk to me. Anyway, he bicycled over to my house this morning, and so I just brought him back.”

“Oh, uh-huh,” the woman said. “Well, like I say, I’ve heard about you lately. Gordy’s been talking about you, now and then.” Saul waited for secondhand praise, but it did not come.

“I couldn’t help but notice. What did you hit him for just now?” Saul asked, nodding in Gordy’s direction. He felt it was best not to ask her how, as the boy’s aunt, she figured she had hitting rights over Gordy. He didn’t know how to do this sort of interview. He didn’t know how to talk to her.

“He needed hitting,” Brenda Bagley said, relying, like one of Tolstoy’s peasants, on simplicity and truth. “He can be a bad boy when he gets an idea into his head. Straw that broke the camel’s back and all that, with me being the camel, y’know.” She smiled briefly at Saul, not a camel but a lobster smile, all teeth and skull. It was horrifying. “I mean, do you think he should be carrying a gun around?”

“I would never hit a child,” Saul told her.

“Oh, you wouldn’t? That’s interesting. What I heard was, you shook him so hard last week, his head just about come off, and his teeth out of his head. He had a headache afterwards.”

“Gordy was on my property. He had knocked my beehives over,” Saul said, in explanation, and his forehead broke out in a sweat. “He’d been prowling and trespassing.” It sounded lame to him even as he said the words. His inadequacy in argumentation startled him.

“Could have been the storm did it. We had terrible winds around here, flung things all over the yard, as you can see.” Saul didn’t dare take his eyes off her. She had some sort of birthmark on her neck, a discoloration in the shape of a tiny football, and the smoke from her cigarette, when she exhaled, surrounded her head like an insulating aura. It was as if her head was smoldering, a peat bog of a head. She tossed the cigarette off into the bushes. “He came over to your house this morning again? Well, he was supposed to stay here,” she said.

“That’s why you hit him?”

“Nope. I hit him because he took my gun with him, stole it out of the house, and headed up on his bicycle to where you live. And even if it wasn’t loaded, which it wasn’t, it scared the death out of me just now that he had done that, that he would think of doing that. He’s got a thick skull, Gordy has. You have to hit him pretty hard to make a single thing register on him.”

“All he wanted to do was show me the gun. That’s really all it was,” Saul said, not certain that it was the whole truth, or that he should bother to excuse this inexcusable boy. “Well,” Saul said, “I guess I had better be going.”

“That’s a good idea.” She nodded. “I like your explanation for it, that he wanted to show you that gun. Well, you can think what you like. I certainly won’t stop you. I’d invite you in for coffee, but you’re not wearing shoes,” the woman said, pointing at Saul’s bare feet. She scowled at his appearance.

“Should we talk again about this? We need to talk about Gordy’s future.”

“That’s a good one,” the woman said, starting to laugh. She reached into her mouth and picked a shred of tobacco off her tongue. “His future.” She laughed with feeling. “Well, I got work to do here, so if you’ll excuse me,” she said, and leaned down to finish the job she had started.

When Saul got back to the house, his barber-friend, Harold, was sitting in the kitchen with Patsy, the two of them drinking coffee, Mary Esther fussing in Patsy’s arms. Harold had come over to steal Saul away to play basketball for an hour; he was dressed in his T-shirt, shorts, and expensive name-brand athletic shoes. Mad Dog and Karla would join them— Karla was a better player than Mad Dog anyway. It was a Saturday-morning ritual. Harold stared at Saul. “What happened to you?” he asked. “You look all messed up.”

Patsy stared at him, too. Saul realized that he must be a sight. “Honey, where’d you go?” she asked, as she lightly bounced Mary Esther twice. “You were out here in the kitchen, and then you were gone, and you didn’t leave a note or anything. I was a little worried.” Her hair filigreed back from her forehead. There was a tiny stain on her blouse from her lactation. Her beauty tore through him like an electric shock, and he felt himself stirring. For a moment, he didn’t even want Harold looking at her. At that moment, she handed the baby to Harold.

Recovering himself, Saul explained about Gordy, about the gun, and the hammer handle to the head. “Funny that she broke the skin,” Harold observed. “Usually you just get a lump raised with a hammer handle.” Both Patsy and Saul examined Harold in the moment that followed, and Harold shrugged. When Saul mentioned Gordy Himmelman’s gun, Patsy inhaled so suddenly that the baby started to wail. Harold passed the baby back to Saul.

“We have to report this to somebody,” she said.

“Report what? To whom? And for what? Possessing a concealed weapon? Trespassing? You can hit your kid all you want in this country. It’s fully legal,” Saul said, bouncing Mary Esther until she quieted. “People do it just to get their excess energy out. Anyway, it wasn’t loaded, and this whole state is sympathetic to concealed weapons.”

“Oh, you don’t want to get mixed up with Brenda Bagley, anyway, that whole crew,” Harold said, scratching himself and standing up to provide a certain inflection to his sentences. As he stood and stretched, he said, “That woman you saw is Gordy’s aunt, as you know. Gordy was the son of common-law Mrs. Himmelman number one, that woman’s sister, that woman you talked to being Brenda, and as for the man of the house, he’s been gone for a couple of years. I knew him — now there was a piece of work. Rufus, his name was, and dumb as a box of rocks, but he did always have girlfriends, and he liked to hurt people. She — Brenda — got custody of the boy, I don’t know, a year ago, at least, long after Rufus disappeared into the depths of Wyoming. It’s complicated. It’s always complicated with people like that.”