Charles Baxter: Saul and Patsy

Eddie Loquasto’s father’s Plymouth pulled up in front of the house. Another vehicle trailed it. Gina ran over to the passenger-side door of the first vehicle and climbed in. The driver kept the engine running. A crow was behind the wheel.

“Hey,” the crow said. The crow had Eddie Loquasto’s voice, but that was about it.

“Hey,” Gina said.

“You look sort of extremely weird,” the crow said, shaking its head.

“Thanks. You, too.” Gina twisted around. There was a garbage can with legs sitting in the backseat. The garbage can had two eye holes but no arms. Its lid was attached to the can with duct tape. “Who’re you?” Gina asked.

“I’m garbage,” the garbage can informed her. She couldn’t tell who it was: the can did strange things to the voice of who or whatever was inside. “Who’re you ?” the garbage can asked irritably.

“I’m a boy. I’m fucked up,” Gina told it.

“You said it,” the garbage can muttered. It was very ill-tempered. “That’s the royal truth.”

Gina was not liking the garbage can, but she said, “Cool,” to mollify it. She wanted to say, “You’re just a goddamn garbage can, who’re you to be telling me anything?” but it was one of those nights when you didn’t want to insult anybody or anything too quickly. You could be hurt in strange ways. Curses and shit could fall like rain over you. Soon your life would be worth nothing. It would enter the zero column and stay there. She settled into the front seat and put her hands in the pockets of the leather jacket. Little demons ran around on the sidewalk, holding their bags of worthless candy. Her nail-bitten boygirl fingers touched some gum inside the jacket pocket, fresh bubble gum, and she unwrapped it and put it into her mouth and started chewing. “Where’re we goin’?”

“Hey, that’s my gum. We’re going to that Mr. Bernstein’s house,” the crow said. “Us and that truck behind us.” The crow nodded at the rearview mirror to indicate a Ford pickup behind them. “We’ve got something for him.”

“What?”

“Wait and see. Tricks instead of treats.”

“Yeah,” the garbage can said, affirming the crow’s position. “Fucking A.”

Gina saw that next to the garbage can on the backseat were some rolls of toilet paper, firecrackers, a paint can and a paintbrush, a few rocks, a box of matches, a can of gasoline, and an odd assortment of rotting vegetables. She wondered if somebody had also brought a gun.

“Are we going to use those?” the boygirl asked.

“If we have to,” the crow informed her. “Are you in? Or not?”

“Blow me,” the boygirl said belligerently, as if she ever wasn’t, because, after all, she was on a rampage and would do rampage-things.

“You wish,” said the garbage can.

Saul discovered, as he dispensed candy to the goblins and fairies and Jedi knights and Osama bin Ladens and little ghosts in their white-sheet outfits, that he really had done something to his back picking up that damnable oversized pumpkin: he could not straighten himself but instead stood half bent over in a crouching position, his face in a clouded grimace. He groaned inwardly. Everyone who came to his door seemed to assume that the bent-over posture and the facial expression were part of his costume, and if he only would stuff a loaf of bread inside his shirt, right behind the shoulders, he would be doing a fair Quasimodo.

“An ogre!” one precocious little girl said, catching her first glimpse of Saul. She was dressed up as a pizza, with sponges glued to cardboard to look like cheese. “Where’s your teeth?”

Saul exposed his teeth, and the pizza screamed and retreated.

But the posture, and the huge glowering jack-o-lantern on the stoop, and the music — Saul had put Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack for The Day the Earth Stood Still on the audio system and was pumping it out onto the street — had, so far, kept away the worst trouble that the night might offer. Herrmann’s theremins were charms against violence, Saul figured — Eine kleine Walpurgisnachtmusik. While Patsy had calmed Mary Esther with songs and her music, an opposing sort of nocturne — nursery rhymes — Saul had made them dinner, a quick spaghetti and a salad. They had all eaten in haste, Mary Esther calmer now but still wary of her father. Then Patsy and Emmy had gone upstairs and shut the bedroom door.

Standing just inside the foyer, Saul was counting the candy bars left in the bowl when an old Plymouth pulled up in front of his house, followed by a truck that parked directly behind it. The motors in both vehicles were kept running as the drivers’-side doors opened at the curb. The truck’s radio was playing AC/DC, full blast. From the car came, first, a crow, who had been behind the wheel, and then, after the crow, an androgynous boy blowing bubble gum, and, from the backseat rear door, and with some apparent difficulty in movement, a garbage can on legs. From their height, Saul guessed that they were high schoolers. He saw that inside the car they had packed tools of destruction, including a gasoline can. The truck disgorged a wolf, a hanged woman with a noose around her neck, and a girl or a boy — it was sometimes impossible to discern genders here — dressed up as a caterpillar. A Himmel, looking like Kurt Cobain, jumped down from the truck bed and sauntered across the lawn. Saul did a quick count: seven in all. So this was it. He brought the bowl of candy bars out front and closed the front door of his house behind him.

“Good evening,” Saul said, holding out the bowl. He knew candy was no good with these characters, or good manners either. A hanged woman with a broken neck does not want a candy bar. Anyone knows that.

“Yeah,” the crow said, nodding its head. From the bed of the truck another character appeared — it jumped out and joined the group. It walked like a man. This one was particularly unsettling: he was the size of a football player, with wide shoulders and thick muscles, and was wearing a football helmet with a plastic shield over the eyes so that you couldn’t see the face. The words LITTLE HANS were written with Magic Marker on the helmet just above the shielded eyes. The same words were written in amateurish gothic script in back. Eight of them in all. Little Hans was probably the enforcer. His large, meaty hands were in fists.

“Want some candy?” Saul asked.

“Shut up,” the crow said. “Just shut the fuck up.” He walked away from Saul, and the others followed him like soldiers, regimented somehow, all of them directed toward the front door of the house. The largest one, Little Hans, served as the rear guard. Saul began to run, hoping to reach the door before they did — he couldn’t remember whether the lock had snapped when he’d shut it — but before he had passed the wolf and the Himmel, something tripped him, and he fell to the lawn, and the bowl of candy fell with him, scattering its contents across the grass.

He heard several of them laughing, a scratching infernal sound. They were probably drunk, these creatures. They were keeping one another company, and that gave them courage, the courage of the mob — that, and the alcohol. And now they had had their first success.

Saul had fallen so that his nose bumped into the ground; he would have been able to break the fall better if he hadn’t been holding the bowl of treats. His hands had freed themselves too late; he felt suddenly that his accidents tonight would not be lucky ones. Lifting himself up quickly, he made an effort to run toward the front of his house again, but hands, or paws, held him back. The exterior light to his house seemed suddenly a fragile and ineffective guard against these adolescents. It was more like a lighthouse that invited the storm. Saul, struggling against what he could see now was the caterpillar, and who, judging from his strength, was a young man, had forgotten how strong high schoolers could sometimes be, how implacable. In a fury to match his own, their sweat had a rancid animal odor, and their sounds of struggle emerged from them in bestial grunts. At the same time, he heard, from behind him, two of the party of creatures scuttling around in the truck bed, and he turned in time to see them — it was Little Hans and the hanged woman — pulling out another can of gasoline, along with a box of kitchen matches.