Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

Howie pulled out of the driveway, looked at himself in the rearview mirror, nodded, snapped on the radio, and turned onto the first available road heading west.

Gina had been thinking for weeks of what her costume would be on Halloween, even if she didn’t wear it from door to door, even if she was too old for trick-or-treating per se. As you got older, Halloween night was for other, more complicated, mischief. After sneaking out the back, she would walk over the railroad tracks to the mall in full regalia and meet her friends. They would go out prowling together, kick-ass their way to a party somewhere, get wasted, have fun. Having almost drowned this past summer when Gordy Himmelman, the ghoul, had wanted to pull her under with him, the first of many such local sightings by sharp-eyed Five Oaks youth, she wasn’t going to dress up as Madonna or Britney Spears or the good fairy or Vampyra or Cinderella or Tinker Bell or Marilyn Monroe or any such girl-shit as that. That scene was all over with. She had her hair cut short a week ago (her mother had a total fit — rage and tears — but: the hair was her own hair, not her mom’s), had found a pair of cool dark glasses, a baseball cap that she wore with the visor in back, a FEAR THIS T-shirt, a pair of Doc Martens, raggedy blue jeans without a belt, and over the T-shirt a black leather jacket she had borrowed from Eddie Loquasto, her on-again boyfriend, who this week had a thing for her, and who had gotten it, the jacket, from somewhere else. It fit Eddie Loquasto and it fit her, too, since she and Eddie were about the same size, though he was way stronger, a muscular little dude. She had promised promised promised to give it back the next day.

As she was dressing, Eddie called her to say that he had obtained his dad’s car and would pick her up in thirty minutes. He’d be wearing something, too, but wouldn’t tell her what. She wouldn’t recognize him. Cool. They would go somewhere. Maybe they would find weapons of minor destruction. They would be dangerous. If they were too dangerous, they would end up in the dungeon together. Which wouldn’t be so bad, being dungeon-mates.

She looked down at her fingernails, bitten to the quick.

Unsatisfied by the appearance of her fingernails, she gazed into the mirror through her dark glasses. A totally fucked-up boy looked back at her. That was so perfect that it was scary. The boy kind of turned her on. Gina could feel her motor humming.

On this earth nothing was scarier than boys. And, as long as she could sneak out of the house, evading the unwatchful eyes of her exhausted, half-asleep, sorrow-drowned-in-beer mom and her little brother, Bertie, the original game boy who never paid attention, anyway, to the world, tonight she would be that creature she had always wanted to be — a boygirl, on a rampage.

All day, the thirty-first of October, Saul remained preoccupied with his brother’s appearance and disappearance two days before, but more than that, more than his brother or his imminent wedding to Lis, the beautiful woman with the strange photographic resemblance to Patsy, he was preoccupied with the promissory two million dollars. All right: it hadn’t actually appeared. All right: once he did have it, he still couldn’t spend it. All right: the money was invested in techno stocks, Howie claimed, and even now might be worthless. All right: maybe this wealth didn’t exist at all and had disappeared as quickly and as inexplicably as Howie had— called back to its origin, on business.

Still, real or not, whatever its status, the sum of two million dollars was an intoxicant. During homeroom period, talking to his sophomore students about Halloween safety, he mentally bought a boat (and a trailer, and, for good measure, a lake to put it in). During second-period American history — they were studying Federalism — he sold the boat and bought real estate, a place in the mountains. What mountains? The Rockies? No, in Vermont, near a ski resort of some sort close to Stowe. He had rarely been so distracted or had taught so absentmindedly, not even after Emmy was born. Saul forgot Ben Weber’s name, and he liked Ben Weber.

The trouble was, he didn’t ski, and neither did Patsy, so that particular fantasy was in the trash can by third period.

During third period, in the teacher’s lounge, he drank coffee and corrected quizzes and devoted the money to better causes, to altruism, which led to the construction of a teen recreational center in Five Oaks, the Bernstein Center for Youth, which would help stamp out Himmelism. Ten minutes later, he gave all the money to the Environmental Defense Fund. He was about to go into his next class, a modern European history AP class for seniors, when the cell phone in his sportcoat pocket rang. Saul thought he had turned off the ringer. He disapproved of cell phones but had one anyway, for emergencies.

“It’s me,” Patsy said. “I’m at the office. There’s something I have to tell you.”

“What?”

“Well, it’s your brother. Something about him gave me the willies this time. More than usual, I mean. So I called your mother this morning. Delia was home — it’s not one of her workdays.”

Saul waited. “Yes?”

“Saul, she never heard about this fiancée. She’d like to, but she hasn’t. She has her doubts.”

“Oh, Howie’s always been shy and secretive about his girlfriends.”

“Girlfriends. Yeah, right. There’s something else.”

“What?”

“It’s about the money.”

“What about the money?”

“Delia didn’t want to tell me. She put it off. She hemmed and she hawed.”

“Patsy, just say it.”

“Howie’s been borrowing money from her. From your mother.”

“ Borrowing? From my mother? How much?”

“It took a long time for me to squeeze that one out of her,” Patsy said.

“But she finally admitted it — and, after all, I do work for a bank. This is my bread and butter. She was sniffling as she told me. He borrowed about twenty thousand dollars from her, Saul. Delia’s been trying to keep all this news from us, of course, because she doesn’t want to seem to be playing favorites with her cash reserves. But, as I say, she’s been lending him money because he’s in such trouble.”

“Why?”

Her voice came out thickened with exasperation. “Well, obviously he didn’t tell us what’s going on with him. Obviously he couldn’t tell us. He declared bankruptcy four weeks ago. Hellhounds are on his trail.”

“Aw, jeez,” Saul said. “Aw, jeez.”

“Your brother has gone a little crazy, Saul.”

Saul made a noise, of outrage, and surprise, and sadness.

“I know,” she agreed. “Well, at least he didn’t ask us for money. Listen, on your way home, would you pick up a pumpkin? We need to carve up one of those babies for tonight. I’ll buy some candy after I’ve gotten Emmy. This is her first real Halloween, darling. And I have a feeling the trick-or-treaters are going to mainly be trickers this time, with us. If we got egged last night, they’ll have more in mind for tonight. Watch your step. We’re going to have every single damn light on in that house, to keep the monstrosities away.”

The last working farm that Saul knew about on the outskirts of Five Oaks, a place where they actually sold pumpkins, was on County Highway 6—the Czarnieckis’ place, north of the river on a hill overlooking the WaldChem plant in the distance, and though Saul would have preferred to get a pumpkin at the supermarket, the only ones they had left at the SuperSaver were small and rotten and mean, the size of coffee cups and bowling balls. He craved ownership over something larger, a gargoyle object, a monument that would scare the hobgoblins and hexies away. When he drove up to the Czarnieckis’ roadside stand, no one was in attendance. Underneath a coffee can with a plastic lid and a slot for money, someone had left a small handmade sign: