Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

The sound of the gun made the baby startle: her arms flew up to the sides of her face, and she pulled her mouth away from her mother’s breast before looking up into her mother’s eyes for an explanation. A trace of breast milk remained on her lower lip.

The day had been beautiful with clear, dry air — though the sun was penetrating in a late-June sort of way — but now no wind or breeze blew through the yard while the various officials swarmed over the front lawn. The air felt still, or stillborn. Saul, in shock, thought that the patrol cars’ flashing red lights gave the driveway the look of a movie set, or a television docudrama. Something, he wasn’t sure what, didn’t seem real about it. He himself felt less solid — unconcretized — than he had for years. Too much more de-realization, he thought, and he would fade right out.

The county medical examiner came to collect the body, and to pry into the bark of the tree for skull fragments. They took the gun out of Gordy’s hand and placed it in an evidence bag. Then Gordy’s body was loaded, one man reaching underneath the skinny shoulders and another at the ankles and feet in their scruffy, unlaced high-tops, onto a coroner’s gurney. They covered all of it with a white sheet. Having loaded it— him — they took the body away to be examined in closer detail, for drugs in particular. They had explained all this. Three men sauntered toward Saul and Patsy for questions, two regular cops and one investigating detective, and Saul and Patsy offered them coffee that they declined to drink.

They had checked the scene for a suicide note, they said. But there was no evidence of one, and Saul told them it wasn’t likely that such a note would ever show up. They asked why. Saul said that Gordy could barely write at all. A suicide note was pretty much beyond him.

Outside in the sunlight, and then in the kitchen for the sake of the shade, first Saul and then Patsy explained about Gordy’s previous trips out to their houses, this one and the one they’d rented. Inexplicable, but with a vague, lost-in-space purpose. Saul explained about the remedial language-arts class, the anti-Semitic scrawlings, the beehives. Gordy didn’t really know much of anything about Jews, Saul claimed. They were a convenience. It was like Israel for the Arabs, he said, briefly losing his cool. When Saul mentioned the notes, the cops became interested again. So he could write, after all. They had caught him in a contradiction. Had Saul saved them, these notes? No, he had not. One of the men went out with Saul to check the exact location where Gordy had been standing.

While they were gone, Mary Esther gazed from her mother’s elbow at the two remaining men and then, once Saul returned, from her father’s arms. She seemed interested in their hats and held out her hands as if to grab them by their wide brims.

The men from the sheriff ’s office were particularly intrigued with Gordy’s obsessive fascination with Saul and Patsy’s houses. Why had he stared at them? What had he wanted from them? Why this strange attention-deficit persistence? Had he threatened the family in any way?

No, not exactly. They claimed not to know why he kept coming out to see them, but that answer was unsatisfactory; it answered nothing. Finally Patsy said, “He was a slow student. He was in Saul’s remedial class, of course, and he didn’t do well. I think he wanted us to teach him how to read. He wanted us to pay attention to him. Or to teach him. . how to do something. ”

Saul shook his head. “No. That’s not it. It’s more complicated. He was trying to get us to adopt him. He was like. .” Sitting at the kitchen table, his fingers knitted together, Saul was about to say that Gordy was like Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s orphaned creature, made out of spare human parts, wandering around looking for love and wanting someone to notice him grunting and groaning, threatening to become a monster and then becoming an actual monster, but, strategically, he made himself go silent. After all, he himself had not known what to do with him. Finally he said, “He was like a lot of boys.”

Then, to give them a story, if not the story, Saul told them about Gordy’s visit from a year ago, when Gordy had waved the gun around in the front yard of their rented house and Saul had taken him and his bicycle and the gun back home. Gordy had been threatening, without actually threatening anything or anyone specifically, in detail. He had just wanted to be generically threatening, adolescent boy stuff, white rural gangsta midwestern skull-and-crossbones Fear This and Don’t Fuck With Me sort of stuff. He was a messed-up kid; that was maybe the entire story. “He didn’t think about things,” Saul said. “He probably shot himself without thinking about it. Maybe he would’ve shot one of us without thinking about it. He had a weird kind of spontaneity.”

They nodded, but their nodding did not indicate agreement. They wrote it all down. Then they went outside again, to confer.

Half an hour later, Gordy’s aunt Brenda arrived. Saul and Patsy went outside to meet her. As she removed herself from her vehicle, a rusting Ford pickup, she expertly finger-flicked her cigarette out onto the lawn. She was still dressed in her waitress clothes, with a pink barrette in her hair, an application of lipstick and perfume, and — Saul was at first surprised, and then not surprised at all — she smiled automatically at the two cops standing near the front door of the house. She was accustomed to cops, Saul realized. For her, a waitress in a diner, cops were familiar and friendly customers, people she saw every day. But the smile was completely insincere — never had a face been built that conveyed less benevolence and good humor than this one. Her somber unattractiveness, her worn-down sorrowfulness, had no appeal.

She walked up first to Saul, who was standing by the tree where Gordy had shot himself. “Hi,” she said. She shook his hand. Her face was a conglomeration of pockmarks and scars, perhaps the worst complexion he had ever seen on a woman. The perfume and the barrette and the lipstick did nothing to mitigate her appearance. They magnified the effect of helplessness. “Oh that boy. What a terrible situation here. That poor crazy clueless kid.” She glanced around. She sobbed once. “What did they do with his body? I got to see it. This is such a waste,” she said, the phrase coming out of her mouth tonelessly. She didn’t seem surprised, despite her spasmodic grief — the zombie affect apparently ran in the family. It was the most peculiar response to a death that Saul had ever witnessed, though it occurred to him that it might be a form of working-class stoicism. If she had any grief, she would not give it away to the likes of Saul and Patsy.

Or what — he thought — what if she had been expecting this?

Any parent, any guardian would inevitably, Saul thought, be crying and making a scene. That was the standard expectation. But she seemed to be in steady though perhaps uncertain control of herself, standing there in her unattractive dignity. Saul wished he could think of some other category besides ugliness when he looked at her. But that word was inescapable with Brenda Bagley. She made you think about her looks the way a professional beauty would; she commanded your attention. Just being around her, you fell down a notch or two, you became less than you were, because you couldn’t help but notice her shortcomings. Against Brenda’s deficiencies, the gods themselves would have struggled in vain. He also wished he had some consolation to give her, but he did not. The correct words and phrases flew away from him, were gone. Calmly, still gazing down, inconsolable, she said, “Oh, my lord, I wish I knew where Gordy’s father got himself to. He went out to Wyoming looking for work a couple years ago, and I haven’t heard from him since, and here his son is gone for good and ever. And he doesn’t even know. There’s something else I don’t get.”