Saul and Patsy

by Charles Baxter

  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.

  Twenty-one

  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.

  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.

  Twenty-two

  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.

  With all the strength he had, Saul fought off the caterpillar arms holding him. The wolf and the crow picked up the pumpkin easily, and then, as if all this had been rehearsed, carried it around to the side of the house.

  Saul continued to fight, jabbing and kicking, as he watched the wolf and the crow swing the pumpkin to get some momentum before throwing it at a window. The arc of the pumpkin’s flight reached the glass and broke it, but the pumpkin was too large, too sizable, too generous, to make its way inside the house. The window was just too small. But the sound of glass breaking would at least alert Patsy. The pumpkin fell back to the ground but did not shatter. Behind him, he heard the characteristic glug of gasoline being poured from a fuel container. He turned, desperately, in time to see Little Hans setting fire to the rosebush that he and Patsy had planted. The gasoline caught with a satisfied whooshing sound, a broken in-suck of breath.

  Now, in front of him, he saw the wolf and the crow picking up the pumpkin again and moving toward another window. Little bush-league terrorists in training: all they wanted to do was break the damn windows. Or maybe that was for starters. The sound of breaking glass pleased them, gave them a rush. They were from that timeless sector of the disadvantaged that broke windows wherever they found them. This was all that was left of the revolutions of 1848. Hapless, still Saul fought, and he had almost freed himself when he felt himself being taken in hand by Little Hans, whose giant arms pinned Saul’s arms behind his back and who put a thick pillar of a leg in front of him; it was as if, physically, there would be no more argumentation. The wolf and the crow were about to heave the pumpkin at the second window when Saul shouted. “Stop. He’s here.”

  The crow turned its beak toward him, and the pumpkin dropped to the ground.

  “Who’s here?” he asked.

  Saul heard the bush burning behind him. Little Hans smelled of gasoline, as the god Vulcan probably did. He himself had the characteristic Gordy-odor, of dog.

  “Gordy,” Saul said. “Isn’t he what you came for?” There would be no fighting them off physically; they were too strong, and they were legion. He would have to try something else. He looked up quickly and saw Patsy pulling the curtains and then lowering the shades. He didn’t think the other creatures had seen her.

  “The fucker’s dead,” the crow said, apparently the spokesperson for the group. “You killed him.”

  “He shot himself,” Saul yelled. �
�Let go of me, Henry,” Saul said, guessing that the kid inside the Little Hans suit was probably Henry Olschanski, a guard on the football team. As if by magic, the arms released him. No—tonight’s accidents might in fact be lucky ones.

  The wolf turned in Saul’s direction. “Where is he h-h-h-h-here?”

  “You want Gordy?” Saul asked. “I’ll go get him.”

  The creatures appeared to be stunned.

  “But you have to promise,” Saul said, gathering his wits, “to stay where you are. Otherwise you get nothing.”

  “He’s just going inside to hide,” the garbage can said. “He’s afraid.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Saul asked the garbage can. Some of these beings had to have been his students. Perhaps he would recognize their voices.

  “I’m garbage!” the garbage can announced angrily.

  “Well, listen, garbage,” Saul said. “One thing I’m not, is afraid. And if you wait right there, I’ll go get what you want.”

  “He’ll call the police,” the boygirl said. “That’s what he’s going to do.” Still, behind him, the bush continued to burn. When he turned to see it momentarily, it looked like someone’s backside, with a crease down the middle.

  “If I did that,” Saul said, “all of you would come back here, and do this again. I know you,” he said, gaining his advantage. “I know all of you.”

  “W-w-w-w-what do you know?” the wolf asked.

  “I know what you want,” Saul said. “I know everything you want. I know your thoughts before you have them. You want to see him again. Don’t you want to see him?” His nose felt as if it had been broken in his fall—it was screaming with pain, but Saul felt suddenly calm. He recognized that, indeed, he was not afraid of them, and that his hatred of them was tempered, illogically, with curiosity. He had made up his mind that they were all children, and, within limits, he was going to give them what they wanted. Or needed, maybe without knowing. So far, they were amateurs at destruction and terror. Looking at them, he decided to adopt them as his own, such as they were, monsters of neglect and loneliness. It made more sense than being afraid of them. Somebody had to be a parent around here; someone had to have some feeling for what was hidden under the disguises. He, too, was disguised: he was wearing Gordy’s clothes. The creatures walked toward Saul, surrounding him. All their movements seemed ironical.