Charles Baxter: Saul and Patsy

Take the one you want and

put the money in the can.

Cleerance: $5.00 or best offer

Saul dutifully put a five-dollar bill in the coffee can (it was the only money there) and carried away the biggest pumpkin he could find from the pile of misshapen castoffs behind the stand. The one he chose was so large he could barely lift it, and when he tried to load it into the Chevy’s trunk, he was unable to turn the key in the keyhole and hold the pumpkin at the same time. After unlocking the trunk, he picked up his pumpkin from the gravel driveway and hoisted it inside. When he did, he heard an unpleasant sound from his back — he had lifted the huge pumpkin incorrectly, throwing out his spine somehow. The lid of the trunk would just barely close over the gigantic thing, and he was able to get the pumpkin in snugly only by flattening the stem down under the trunk lid.

Driving home, he listened to the Fifth Symphony of Joachim Raff on the NPR station — in the last movement, the devil-horses took the protagonist clip-clopping down into hellfire — and tried to pretend that Halloween, this Halloween, was a night like all other nights. The Czarniecki pumpkin muttered and rumbled from in back.

At home, he first removed his texts and classroom materials from the car to the house and deposited them on the floor of the upstairs study. Then he returned to the car and opened the trunk. The pumpkin looked at him and Saul looked back at the pumpkin. Once again he bent over, once again he heard popping noises from the region of his back, and with groans and grunts Saul wrested the outsized squash from its resting place into his arms, whereupon he staggered across the garage through the back door (he had remembered to leave the door open and the storm door propped), and, still holding the pumpkin in his embrace, he weaved his unsteady way through the mud room, past the hanging jackets and overshoes, into the kitchen. He was sweating now, his arms and his back ached, but he was not about to be defeated. He left the yellow-orange beast on the floor, retrieved some newspapers from the back hallway, and spread them around underneath it to catch the glop and the seeds.

He would need trash clothes for the next job. Saul went upstairs to his closet.

Gordy Himmelman’s shirts and trousers were there on the floor where he had left them. They were his physical, material legacy from the boy, and he had been unable to decide what to do with them. They didn’t seem to be the right size, and he didn’t imagine that they would fit him. Or that they could ever have fit him. Nevertheless, he took off the shirt that he had worn to school and tried on one of Gordy’s, a dingy red flannel imprinted with stinks and stains that fit Saul rather well, even though his arms went far past the cuffs. At least this shirt wasn’t the particular one Gordy had been wearing when he shot himself — that shirt went into the fire with Gordy at the crematory. Saul loosened his belt, took off his pants, and put on a pair of Gordy’s jeans. They were much too snug, but with some strategic breathing-in and struggles with the zipper, and with his shirts — his undershirt and the flannel shirt — hanging out, Gordy-style, rather than tucked in, Saul could manage it.

Saul looked at himself in the full-length mirror attached to the inside of Patsy’s closet door. There he was, his bearded affable face attempting to smile above the clothes smelling of dog and defeat (what dog? Gordy didn’t have a dog). As he was looking at him, he felt his mind cloud over, and Saul closed his eyes, lowered his head, and said a prayer for his brother. Whoever You are, preserve my little brother from his demons. Save him from himself and from this world. Save him, please. What can I give You in trade? What do I have that You want? Tell me.

Saul heard no answer coming back. Just then his wife and daughter pulled up in the driveway, and he had the abrupt impression that he had somehow found himself on the wrong side of the mirror.

He ran downstairs to greet them and managed to get into the kitchen before Patsy and Emmy entered. He heard Patsy call out, “Saaaauuul! We’re home!” as she carried Emmy to the front hallway and took off her daughter’s jacket and then took off her own. Saul could hear the noise of the coat hangers.

“In here!” Saul shouted, standing next to his pumpkin. “Ladies, we’re in here!”

Patsy had taken hold of Emmy’s hand. Emmy wanted to walk, apparently, and was doing so next to her mother when they both came into the kitchen. Saul stood proudly next to his pumpkin.

“Hi, honey. How d’you like it? We’re ready to carve,” he said, and they both screamed, his wife and daughter, together. Emmy was staring at the pumpkin and Patsy was staring at Saul.

“What is this?” she finally managed to say, above her daughter’s sobs.

“Carving clothes,” Saul told her.

“But those are his clothes,” Patsy said, approaching Saul, the way she usually did every evening after they came home from work and saw each other, for a kiss, but then she seemed to think better of it and drew away from him. “That boy’s. I thought you had gotten rid of them. What that Bagley woman gave you.”

“No, I didn’t. They were in my closet. On the floor. Where I put them,” he added.

“I should go into your closet sometimes,” Patsy said. “Hush, sweetie,” she crooned, leaning over to pick up Emmy, who had been clutching her mother’s legs. Now Patsy kissed her on the cheeks, tranquilizing kisses. Calming in slow stages, Emmy then looked up at her father and began screaming again, truly hysterical, very much unlike herself.

“Maybe you should take her,” Patsy said.

“Okay.”

But Emmy squirmed out of Saul’s grasp, retreating back into her mother’s arms. She screamed louder when Saul put the knife into the top of the pumpkin, continued screaming as he carved around the stem, her screams growing shrill, all-purpose screams, until finally Patsy carried Emmy into the living room, where she sat down in the rocking chair with Emmy in her lap. Saul could hear Patsy talking quietly, singing to Mary Esther, calming her. After a few minutes, he heard Patsy carrying Mary Esther upstairs, not for a diaper change — Patsy would have changed her by now anyway — but to get her her music bear, a wind-up music box inside a teddy bear whose head swayed back and forth as the music played. Saul knew Patsy’s moves, as she knew his. He didn’t have to ask. Someone should start dinner, he thought. Someone should heat up food for Emmy.

Alone in the kitchen, Saul went to work on the pumpkin, clearing out its innards, dropping them on the sheets of newspaper he had spread around himself on the floor, before beginning on the face. He carved the eye holes, the nose, the mouth. How simple. He lit a candle and positioned it inside on a dish. He closed the lid back over the jack-o-lantern and carried it to the front door and out onto the front stoop. From inside, the flame continued to burn.

He switched on the front light.

Let them come.

From her upstairs room, Gina heard the distant sound of a car honking, so far away that if your ears weren’t perfectly tuned to it, you wouldn’t have heard it, but she did, she heard it, the way a bird hears the cry of its mate from clear across the bright green rainforest, its bright cry, its shrill distant mating call. Her mother was in the back den watching TV. She hadn’t put the front porch light on: no treat-or-tricksters for her, she didn’t do that scene anymore. Her little brother was somewhere in the house, not eligible for Halloween this year, thanks to his misbehavior.

“I’m going out for a while,” Gina called from the front door in her lowest voice, her boygirl voice, and her mother called back, “Going where?” but Gina was gone, was out, by the time an answer would have been expressed or implied, and both of them, her mother and her brother, would be into their after-dinner thing by now, anyway, her mother parental but glazed and half-asleep and not meaning to be indifferent but indifferent nevertheless, and smoking dazedly, and watching whatever show was on now, in the company of Bertie, their four eyes glued to the screen, unless Bertie was lost in the Game Boy. What could her mother do if Gina was going to go out? Gina’s mother was helpless against Gina, age against feckless youth, especially after dinner, when her mother was exhausted from work and from making dinner and from the full menu of life. That’s what she sometimes said when she was grim. I’m helpless against the full menu of life. Maybe if Gina’s dad still lived over here instead of over there he would be laying down the law, but he wasn’t here, this wasn’t his day for custody. Her mother, half-asleep and single-parenting tonight, was glued to the TV, attached to it bodily. Gina felt a trace of love for her hapless mother. How she tried! She just wasn’t up to it. Where were the mothers with hap? Nowhere. They were all hapless. Closing the front door behind her, Gina saw a TV screen in her mind’s eye with eyeballs glued to it.