Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

A squirrel squatted in the birdbath. Another squirrel was hanging by its claws onto the birdfeeder. The girl, looking out her bedroom window at the backyard, cleaned her fingernails halfheartedly with the nail file and thought of the end of the world, and then she wondered why, if there was a word “ruthless” that was often applied to enemies of the U.S.A., then what happened to its opposite, its lost positive, “ruth,” which would have to mean “kindness” but didn’t mean anything because no one used it? We had ruthless enemies but no ruthful friends.

If some people were “unruly,” then who was “ruly”? Nobody. When her room was messy, her mother said it was “unkempt,” but when it was clean, it was never “kempt” because the word didn’t exist. Disgruntled postal workers were everywhere. Where were the gruntled ones? Everybody had a word for the wrong thing, but silence prevailed for the right.

Early in the morning just after the sun was up, the squirrels looked like boys, somehow, she couldn’t say why. Maybe because of the way they moved, skittering and chasing each other, twitching. Or maybe it was the fur. Something.

Her name was Gina, she was sixteen years old, and it was Sunday, Family Day. After staring at the squirrels, she remembered to feed her guinea pig his breakfast food pellets. Wilbur squeaked and squealed softly as she dropped the pellets down the cage bars into the red plastic tray. It didn’t take much to make him happy.

On the other side of her room was a picture of Switzerland her mom had put up years ago. The picture had a lake in it, which was ruthlessly blue. Gina felt funny when she looked at this picture, so she didn’t look at it very often. She couldn’t take it down because her mom had given it to her.

Family Day. The plan was, her dad would show up and take them— her brother, her mom, herself — to the beach. Gina threw on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. She grabbed her flute and went into the basement to practice for the school marching band, of which she was a member.

Ten minutes later she heard the thud of the morning newspaper flung against the front screen door. Gina put her flute on top of her dad’s workbench (he had never bothered to move it to his apartment after he moved out) and went upstairs to read the headlines. The news consisted of Iraq (bombs), Cuba (jails), Ireland (more bombs), and then there was something about Gordy Himmelman.

Gordy Himmelman! He had shot himself. To death. It was permanent. Why hadn’t anyone called her about it?

She had been in classes with Gordy Himmelman since kindergarten, but he was in a class by himself, and she hadn’t seen much of him since he’d dropped out. He muttered and swore and blew his nose on notebook paper, and he talked to himself in long strings of garble and never had any friends you could show in public. You could feel sorry for him, but he would never notice how sorry you felt, and he wouldn’t care. Pity was lost on him. It was a total waste of time. In third grade he had brought a pen-light battery into school and, standing next to the monkey bars, he had swallowed it during recess to attract attention to himself. The battery was only a double-A, but even so. He had black-and-blue marks all over him most days. His breath smelled of dill pickles that had gone unfresh. You couldn’t even talk to him about the weather because he never noticed it — it didn’t make any difference to him what the sky was doing or how it was doing it. He had this human-junkyard-don’t-mess-with-me look on his face and would kick anyone who got in his way, though he did have one comic routine: slugging himself in the face so hard that his head jerked backward. He had bicycled to that teacher, Mr. Bernstein’s house, where he had blown his brains out in the yard, in front of a tree, in the morning, a matinee suicide. On the front page of the paper was a picture of the tree. It was a color picture, and you could sort of see the blood if you looked closely.

There hadn’t been a suicide note. A suicide note would have been like a writing assignment. Way too hard. He would have had to get his aunt to write it for him.

Gina felt something stirring inside her. She was kind of interested in death. Gordy was the first person she’d ever known who had entered it. He had gone from being Mr. Nothing to being Mr. Something Else: a temporarily interesting person. She sat at the kitchen counter eating her strawberry Pop-Tart, wondering whether Gordy was lying on a bed surrounded by virgins, or eternal fire, or what.

It was sort of cool, him doing that. Maybe the smartest thing he’d ever done. Adventuresome and courageous.

If you didn’t have a life, maybe you got one by being dead.

Her dad was late. Finally he showed up at eleven-thirty in his red Durango, saying, “Ha ha, I’m late.” He and Gina’s mom were divorced, but they were still “friends,” and her dad had never really committed himself to the divorce, in Gina’s opinion. He was halfhearted about it, a romantic sad sack. They had cooked up this Family Day scheme two years ago. Every weekend he’d come to pick up Gina and Bertie, her little brother, and their mom — Gina envied most divorced kids who went from their moms to their dads, without the cheesiness of Family Day — and then they’d do bowling-type activities for the sake of togetherness and friendliness, which of course was a total fraud, since they weren’t together or friendly at all. Usually Saturday was Family Day but sometimes Sunday was. Today they were going to the beach. Wild excitement. She had meant to bring a magazine.

In the car, Gina studied her father’s face. She had wanted to drive, but no one trusted her behind the wheel. For once she had been allowed to sit up front: semi-adult, now that she had filled out, so they gave her front-seat privileges sometimes, occasional woman privileges. Her mom and Bertie were in the back, Bertie playing with his Game Boy, her mom with her earphones on, listening to music so she wouldn’t have to hear the plinks and plunks of the Game Boy, or talk to her ex, Gina’s dad, the driver, half-committed to his divorce, an undecided single man, driving the car. He would fully commit to the divorce when he found a girlfriend he really liked, which he hadn’t, yet. Gina had met one of the girlfriends whom he had only half-liked, a woman who tried way too hard to be nice, and who looked like a minor character on a soap opera who would eventually be hit by a rampaging bus.

Gina had mentioned Gordy Himmelman to her dad, and her dad had said yeah, it was way too bad.

She was interested in her father’s face. Because it was her father’s, she didn’t know if he was handsome or plain. You couldn’t always tell when they were your parents, though with her friend Gretchen Mullen you sure could, since Gretchen’s father looked like a hobgoblin. At first she thought her own father had a sort of no-brand, standard-issue father face; now she wasn’t so sure.

He was possibly handsome. There was no way of knowing. Her dad was a master plumber. Therefore his hands often had cuts or grease under the fingernails. Very large hands, made big by genetic fate. His hair was short and brown, cut so it bristled, and near his temples you could see a change in color, salty. On his right cheek her dad had a crease, as if his skin had been cut by a knife or a sharp piece of paper, but it was only a wrinkle, a wrinkle getting started, the first canal in a network of creases-to-come, his face turning slowly but surely into Mars, the Red Planet. His teeth were very white and even, the most Rock Star thing about him. His eyes were brown and spaced wide apart, not narrow the way teenaged boys’ eyes are usually narrow, and they drilled into you so that sometimes you had to turn away so you wouldn’t be injured by the Father Look. Her father’s beard line was so distinct and straight it looked put in with a ruler, and was so heavy that even if he shaved in the morning, he usually needed another shave around dinnertime, an interestingly bearlike feature of the masculine father type. His nose was exciting. His breath had a latent smell of cigarettes, which he smoked in private. You couldn’t find the boy in him anymore. It wasn’t there. He was growing a belly from the beer he drank nights and weekends, and most of the time he seemed comfortable with it, though it seemed to tire him out also. He didn’t smile much and only when he had to. He had once told Gina, “Life is serious.”