Saul and Patsy

by Charles Baxter

  At the bottom of the ladder were the used paper towels scattered here and there. He gathered them up one by one and went inside, wiping his shoes first, before he dropped the towels into the garbage bag in the kitchen, the little perfect garbage can in the little perfect kitchen.

  He washed the dishes in the kitchen sink. The light seemed to be everywhere.

  His brother and sister-in-law had no idea how the world worked. They had no idea what people could do to you. And did do to you. One small misstep, one stumble, and the jackals were upon you. Protected and insular in their storybook house, his brother and sister-in-law eased themselves from day to day with no glimmer at all of the steady-state diminishments of everyday life—until the jackals had picked the body down to the bone and you were no longer able to cry out.

  He found the vacuum cleaner in a closet off the laundry room and did a quick once-over of the living-room carpet. Then he went upstairs. In the guest room, he stripped the bed. He took off his clothes and masturbated into a wad of Kleenex. The relief lasted for ten seconds, fifteen at the most. He clothed himself again. After folding the sheets and pillowcases into perfect squares, he bent down to where his suitcase was. He took out his wallet and stared at the picture of the woman—Lis—he had said he was engaged to.

  He didn’t know who this woman was. He could imagine, but that wasn’t quite the same thing. He had found the photograph in a camera store in San Francisco, just off the J Church line, which he would ride when he got tired of riding on BART. It had been inside a frame on sale for $17.99. The cost of the frame wasn’t too much to pay for a woman to be engaged to, even if you were broke. Standing there in the store, Howie had conjured up for himself the pleasantly surprised expressions that would appear on Saul and Patsy’s faces when he told them that he would be married within a matter of months. He had thought the pictured woman pretty, so he bought the frame, with her inside it. In this way, he had captured her. The clerk said that if he wished, he could keep the photograph, which was of a former employee of the shop.

  Howie looked around for a piece of paper. A pencil, a pen, the necessities.

  Dear Saul & Patsy,

  I made a call back home this morning and it turns out that I must return immediately. I know this seems terribly strange but it’s just the way things have developed. At least you now know about my engagement, and at least I got to see the beautiful Emmy. I’ll talk to you about the $2 mil later.

  Love, Howie

  ps: I did the dishes and cleaned your gutters and the windows.

  Howie put the note on Saul and Patsy’s bed. Outside he noticed that the sun had not moved for a couple of hours, nailed to its quadrant. A violent stillness inhabited the air, punctuated by an occasional striking sound of jug corks popping. He had had the strangest feeling last night that Saul and Patsy and Emmy were shadows on the wall, their shadow-voices echoing inside his own voices. Their shadows somehow exceeded his own and were stronger than his. They knew so little about what the world was coming to that they had become stronger than he was, thriving, as it were, on their own ignorance, the powerful bullying force of their innocence.

  He touched the quilt on his brother and sister-in-law’s bed and shouted quickly.

  The sound of his shouting roiled through the empty upstairs rooms. What you did alone, what you did by yourself when no one was looking or listening, was acceptable, because whatever you did unobserved . . . well, it hadn’t really happened, except to you, and was consequently unimaginable and meaningless to others, and would never be spoken of.

  He returned to the bedroom in which he had slept, closed up his suitcase, and started down the stairs. The lie about the two million dollars was harmless and beautiful, in its way, as some lies could be, fragrant and radiant: he had wanted to see their reactions—to be in charge of their reactions—and to make his brother and sister-in-law happy for a few days. What was the harm in that? Saul and Patsy, innocent and happy, like a married couple in a sentimental MGM Technicolor musical from the late 1940s directed by Vincente Minnelli, echoing his happiness for a few months, for a year or two, before all the money flew away again, like a great flock of migratory birds, and the happiness dispersed with it too, and the euphoria, as ephemeral in their departures as they had been in their arrivals. The money, utterly magical, half-imaginary, until you no longer had it, first congealed and then evaporated.

  There are a lot of me’s out there, he had said, and meant it.

  Strange, that Patsy hadn’t wanted what he had offered her. The money. Well, now she wouldn’t get it.

  He took his car keys from a table in the front hallway, put them into his right hand, holding his suitcase handle in his left hand. He thought of going through Saul and Patsy’s things—their drawers, their secret places—then thought better of it. They wouldn’t have any secret places, no corners, no crimes, no disfigurements, no open wounds, no abscesses. Secret places and open wounds—well, that was what he himself had. Secret places were his stock-in-trade, the living stash. He lived in them. But here, in Five Oaks, everything was out in the open under the admonitory glare of the sun.

  He carried the suitcase to the car and loaded it into the trunk. After getting in behind the wheel, he started the engine, which roared satisfyingly to life. He wondered where he would drive, how long his available money would hold out, and then the credit, how long the credit would hold out, how long people would believe him. Perhaps he would go back home, to bankruptcy court and the dates they had set, the settlements, the agreements, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. He tightened his hand on the steering wheel and thought of how he would call his brother in a month or so to announce, ever so sadly, the cancellation of his engagement to the beautiful Phyllis. Phyllis! Jesus, people were easy to fool, at least in the short term. Phyllis! It was a name like “Petunia” or “Esmeralda.” It stank of the whimsical-imaginary. Maybe Saul would ask about the two million, and then again maybe he wouldn’t. The subject just wouldn’t come up. Perhaps, instead, he would see the trees leafing out, see the flowers blooming and wilting in his front yard, and the grass growing and mowed down, growing and mowed down in his plot of ground, his little patch of American real estate. The great pageant of life here in the Midwest in its cycles of growth leading to the harvest, waxing and waning just like the moon, would present themselves to Saul and to his storybook family, and Saul would read those cycles as students of the classics might read an epic. In the distance Saul’s family might see Howie himself on the horizon waxing and waning like the moon. They might see the colossal mysteries of success and failure, and they would observe human beings, in passing, squashed by the marketplace, like bugs. More likely, however, they would see none of that. They would just trudge to work, to school, to day care, to the job, to retirement, to the cemetery, like little imaginary people on a little imaginary stage.

  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.

  Nineteen

  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.

  Twenty

  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:

  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 g
roans 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.