Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

“He was a strange boy,” Brenda Bagley said.

Patsy changed Mary Esther’s diaper in the car, in the front seat, throwing the old diaper into a baggie and tying it closed. Then she put her daughter into the child seat in the back, and after starting the car, she turned on the radio and headed home. Because the radio was broken, no sounds came out of it.

How was it? You weren’t in there for very long.

Well, Patsy thought, under her breath, you know how it was, you have your nerve, you lived there.

I was just kinda wondering what you thought of it.

It bothered me, Patsy thought. I couldn’t breathe in there, the big TV and the cigarette smoke and everything.

I couldn’t breathe in there, either. How’d you like the

walls? Didja like the pictures I put up?

They were okay. You must’ve read a lot of comic books. But I was surprised: no computers. No computer games. I guess your aunt could never afford one. Gordy, why did you kill yourself with that gun? In our yard? While we were looking? Would you just please explain that to me? I really, really need to know the answers to those questions. If you’re going to hang around with us, you could at least do me the favor of telling me why you did all that. To yourself. And to us.

But no new words descended into her brain, emerging from the backseat, where it was now very quiet, with Mary Esther sleeping. The car advanced through pool after pool of buttery light cast from the lamp posts, and Patsy took a route circling the downtown area. She felt a vague movement in her uterus and also noticed that she was feeling distinct emotions, as if they were hands slipping out of the gloves that usually held them. She passed by a green sign on the outskirts announcing Five Oaks as a sister city of Nikone, Japan, and of Tübingen, Germany. But those cities were ancient and historically identifiable, and this one had almost no history at all and very few identifying marks. It was on the map, but in no other respect was it on the map. Patsy tightened her hold on the steering wheel. The local pride in anonymity ate away at everything. It devoured lives and turned the inhabitants into ghosts both before and then after their deaths. Resignation was the great local spiritual specialty, resignation and a fleeting recklessness, a feverishly hypnotic and prideful death-in-life. All the Himmel kids were acute cultural critics, she decided. They had a point. If the city of Five Oaks had any true siblings, they wouldn’t have names like Rheims or Pisa. They would be the close relatives with names like Terre Haute or Duluth or Flint or Grand Forks or Davenport or Burlington or Scranton or Kenosha — cities you had heard of but couldn’t quite picture, cities that called nothing in particular to mind except for an eagerness to be larger and more prosperous than they were, and an all-consuming late-stage boosterism that was mostly insecurity and worry masked by bluster. The wolves were never far from the door in cities like these, and sometimes the wolves got in. The churches tried, with varying success, to keep people calm when the members of the congregation felt like screaming. Five Oaks would always be the sort of place you had to apologize for whenever visitors from out of town — from larger towns, real cities — arrived at the airport on their little turboprop commuter planes, shaken up and curious about what had brought them there.

Or else: you lived here for years and you found you liked it, and you stopped apologizing, and visitors noticed that, too.

They had to get out before they were destroyed. She would not let her son be born in a place like this. Plans were being hatched to turn Saul into a scapegoat. She would get Theo and Emmy out of here before desperation took hold of them, desperation and alligator malice, meanness and the liquefaction of the soul.

Sooner or later, wandering is done.

When she arrived at the house, she carried the sleeping Emmy over one shoulder and the diaper-bag over the other into the foyer. She noticed a black BMW parked in front. What was it doing here? Her arms and shoulders were getting muscular and her biceps in particular were swelling from the effort of carrying Emmy and the stroller around. The minute she came inside, she said, “Saul! The scapegoating has started! We have to move! We have to move out of this place!” She smiled at herself as she prepared herself to sing — what was it? — the Animals, a tragically hip band before it was tragically hip to be tragically hip, but softly, so as not to wake Emmy. “We gotta get out of this place! If it’s the last thing we ever do!”

From the kitchen came Saul, accompanied by the most handsome man she had ever seen in real life, Saul’s brother, Howie, who gave Patsy a raised-eyebrow greeting and an all-purpose wave that was more a shrug than a genuine wave. Being beautiful, he could be a minimalist in his gestures. Big hugs were too much trouble, too much strain on the equipment, and were uncool, besides, especially with a lady carrying a toddler. A surprise visit! Well, that was Howie’s style, to appear without an invitation and to leave at about the time you had become used to him and felt a bit of warmth toward him. You fell for him, and he’d be out of there. He had had a ban on intimacy — well, maybe he had changed. But this was his way of enforcing the ban, these surprises, as if he lived across town and could drop in for coffee now and then.

Howie was wearing a perfectly tailored shirt and trousers, rather colorless, so that he appeared to mimic the monotextured heroes in 1940s films — the young John Garfield, only better-looking in the post-humanist style. He had left his shoes at the door, and for some reason Patsy noticed the high arch of his foot inside the sock.

The brothers walked together in a similar style of locomotion, and though Howie was the handsome one with jaw-dropping good looks, Saul was the more lovable, the man with whom you’d want to spend your life. For Howie’s beauty you would pay the price of a lifetime of sorrow, and all the varieties of rage. Eventually you would have to go to church to get rid of him.

“Oh, Howie,” she said, and kissed him. “So that was your BMW. What a nice surprise. Sorry you caught me singing.”

“Patsy.” He kissed her back. Cool professional lips. A slight, low-voltage tingling. “Love, you can sing anytime.”

Saul had been working at his desk, correcting student assignments and watching the sky for signs of the four horsemen of the apocalypse when a black BMW pulled into the driveway. Its headlights went dark; the smooth, muffled engine quieted. Saul did not move, and the driver did not get out of the car. Observing the bug-spattered headlights and grille, and the stationary, immobilized driver, half-hidden behind the tinted windows in the gathering dusk, Saul made a mental checklist:

The unannounced visitor was certainly Howie, his brother. In one of his previous phone calls, Howie had proudly mentioned his black BMW, which he called “The Avenger.” No one around here had a car like that, and certainly not with (Saul now noticed) California plates.

Howie hadn’t called ahead, nor had he in any way intimated that he would be dropping in. He had always favored surprise visits. For this one, he would have had to drive about 1,700 miles, give or take a few hundred here or there, from Palo Alto to Five Oaks. Such a trip was a feat of determination and willpower in the service of a strange, perhaps insanely prolonged, spontaneity. The distance and the effort involved in crossing it did not mean that Howie’s stay would be a lengthy one. He might be gone by tomorrow afternoon.

He would, no doubt, surprise in other ways as well. Howie always had multiple astonishments ready for whatever audience he could command. He liked lifting people up and then keeping them off balance, using his charm as a weapon, part of his latter-day Gatsbyish acrobat approach to things.