by John Irving
"She was not old enough to be Boy or Girl yet," Garp wrote. "Only in the pudginess around her nipples was there anything faintly girlish. There was certainly no visible sex about her hairless pudenda, and she had a child's sexless hands. Perhaps there was something sensual about her mouth--her lips were puffy--but she had not done that to herself."
Garp began to cry. The sky was gray, dead leaves were all around them, and when Garp began to wail aloud, the girl picked up his T-shirt and covered herself with it. They were in this queer position to each other--the child crouched under Garp's T-shirt, cringing at Garp's feet with Garp crying over her--when the mounted park police, a twosome, rode up the bridle path and spotted the apparent child molester with his victim. Garp wrote that one of the policemen split the girl and Garp apart by steering his horse between them, "nearly trampling the girl." The other policeman brought his billy down on Garp's collarbone; one side of his body, he wrote, felt paralyzed--"but not the other." With "the other," Garp unseated the policeman and tipped him from the saddle. "It's not me, you son of a bitch!" Garp howled. "I just found her, just here--just a minute ago."
The policeman, sprawled in the leaves, held his drawn gun very still. The other policeman, mounted and prancing, shouted to the girl. "Is it him?" he yelled. The child seemed terrified of the horses. She stared back and forth from the horses to Garp. She probably isn't sure what happened, Garp thought--much less who. But the girl, violently, shook her head. "Where'd he go?" said the policeman on his horse. But the girl still looked at Garp. She tugged her chin and rubbed her cheeks--she tried to talk to him with her hands. Apparently, her words were gone; or her tongue, Garp thought, recalling Ellen James.
"It's the beard," said the cop in the leaves; he had gotten to his feet but he had not holstered his gun. "She's telling us there was a beard." Garp had a beard then.
"It was someone with a beard," said Garp. "Like mine?" he asked the girl, stroking his dark, round beard, glossy with sweat. But she shook her head and ran her fingers over her sore upper lip.
"A mustache!" cried Garp, and the girl nodded.
She pointed back the way Garp had come, but Garp remembered seeing no one near the entrance to the park. The policeman hunched on his horse and through the thrown leaves he rode away from them. The other policeman was calming his horse, but he had not remounted. "Cover her, or find her clothes," Garp said to him; he started to run down the bridle path after the first policeman; he knew there were things you could see from ground level that you couldn't see on a horse. Also, Garp was such a fool about his running that he imagined he could outlast, if not outrun, any horse.
"Hey, you better wait here!" the policeman called after him, but Garp was in stride and clearly not stopping.
He followed the great rents in the ground that the horse had made. He had not gone even half a mile back along the path before he saw the bent figure of a man, maybe twenty-five yards off the path and almost hidden by the trees. Garp yelled at the figure, an elderly gentleman with a white mustache, who looked over his shoulder at Garp with an expression so surprised and ashamed that Garp was sure he'd found the child molester. He thundered through the vines and small, whiplike trees to the man, who had been peeing and was hastening to fold himself back into his trousers. He looked very much like a man caught doing something he shouldn't have done.
"I was just..." the man began, but Garp was upon him and thrust his stiff, cropped beard into the man's face. Garp sniffed him over like a hound.
"If it's you, you bastard, I can smell it on you!" Garp said. The man flinched away from this half-naked brute, but Garp seized both the man's wrists and snapped the man's hands up under his nose. He sniffed again, and the man cried out as if he feared Garp was going to bite him. "Hold still!" Garp said. "Did you do it? Where are the child's clothes?"
"Please!" the man piped. "I was just going to the bathroom." He had not had time to close his fly and Garp eyed his crotch suspiciously.
"There is no smell like sex," Garp wrote. "You cannot disguise it. It is as rich and clear as spilled beer."
So Garp dropped to his knees in the woods and unbuckled the man's belt and tore open the man's pants and yanked the man's undershorts straight down to the man's ankles; he stared at the man's frightened equipment.
"Help!" the old gentleman screamed. Garp took a deep sniff and the man collapsed in the young trees; staggering like a puppet strung under the arms, he thrashed in a thicket of slender trunks and branches too dense to allow him to fall. "Help, God!" he cried, but Garp was already running back out to the bridle path, his legs digging through the leaves, his arms pummeling the air, his struck collarbone throbbing.
At the entrance to the park the mounted policeman clattered about the parking lot, peering in parked cars, circling the squat brick hut where the rest rooms were. A few people watched him, sensing his eagerness. "No mustaches," the policeman called to Garp.
"If he got back here before you did, he could have driven away," Garp said.
"Go look in the men's room," the policeman said, riding toward a woman with a baby carriage piled high with blankets.
Every men's room made Garp remember every W.C.; at the door to this sour place, Garp passed a young man who was just leaving. He was clean-shaven, his upper lip so smooth that it almost shone; he looked like a college kid. Garp entered the men's room like a dog with his hair standing up on the back of his neck and his hackles curling. He checked for feet under the crapper-stall doors; he would not have been surprised to see a pair of hands--or a bear. He looked for backs turned toward him at the long urinal--or for anyone at the dirty brown sinks, peering into the pitted mirrors. But there was no one in the men's room. Garp sniffed. He had worn a full but trimmed beard for a long time and the smell of shaving cream was not instantly recognizable to him. He just knew he smelled something foreign to this dank place. Then he looked in the nearest sink: he saw the gobs of lather, he saw the whiskers rimming the bowl.
The young, clean-shaven man who looked like a college kid was crossing the parking lot, quickly but calmly, when Garp came out the men's room door. "It's him!" Garp hollered. The mounted cop looked at the young molester, puzzled.
"He doesn't have a mustache," the policeman said.
"He just shaved it off!" Garp cried; he ran across the lot, straight at the kid, who began to run toward the maze of paths lacing the park. A litter of things flew out from under his jacket as he ran: Garp saw the scissors, a razor, a shaving cream can, and then came the little batches of clothes--the girl's, of course. Her jeans with a ladybug sewn at the hip, a jersey with the beaming face of a frog on the breast. Of course there was no bra; there was no need. It was her panties that got to Garp. They were simply cotton, and a simple blue; stitched at the waistband was a blue flower, sniffed at by a blue bunny.
The mounted policeman simply rode over the kid who was running away. The chest of the horse pounded the kid face forward into the cinder entry path and one rear hoof took a U-shaped bite of flesh out of the kid's calf; he curled, fetal, on the ground, holding his leg. Garp came up then, the girl's blue-bunny panties in his hand; he gave them to the mounted cop. Other people--the woman with the blanketed carriage, two boys on bikes, a thin man carrying a newspaper--approached them. They brought the cop the other things the kid had dropped. The razor, the rest of the girl's clothes. Nobody spoke. Garp wrote later that at that moment he saw the short history of the young child molester spread out at the horse's hooves: the scissors, the shaving cream can. Of course! The kid would grow a mustache, attack a child, shave the mustache (which would be all most children would remember).
"Have you done this before?" Garp asked the kid.
"You're not supposed to ask him anything," the policeman said.
But the kid grinned stupidly at Garp. "I've never been caught before," he told him, cockily. When he smiled, Garp saw that the young man had no upper front teeth; the horse had kicked them out. There was just a bleeding flap of gum. Garp realized that somethi
ng had probably happened to this kid so that he didn't feel very much--not much pain, not much of anything else.
Out of the woods at the end of the bridle path the second policeman came walking his horse--the child in the saddle, covered by the policeman's coat. She clutched Garp's T-shirt in her hands. She did not seem to recognize anybody. The policeman led her right up to where the molester lay on the ground, but she didn't really look at him. The first policeman dismounted; he went to the molester and tilted his bleeding face up toward the child. "Him?" he asked her. She stared at the young man, blankly. The molester gave a short laugh, spat out a mouthful of blood; the child made no response. Then Garp gently touched his finger to the molester's mouth; with the blood on his finger, Garp lightly smeared a mustache on the young man's upper lip. The child began to scream and scream. The horses needed quieting. The child kept screaming until the second policeman took the molester away. Then she stopped screaming and gave Garp back his T-shirt. She kept patting the thick ridge of black hair on the back of the horse's neck as if she had never been on a horse before.
Garp thought it must have hurt her to sit on horseback, but suddenly she asked, "Can I have another ride?" Garp was at least glad to hear that she had a tongue.
It was then that Garp saw the nattily dressed, elderly gentleman whose mustache had been innocent; he was making his meek way out of the park, coming cautiously into the parking lot, looking anxiously about for the madman who'd so savagely snatched his pants down and sniffed him like some dangerous omnivore. When the man saw Garp standing beside the policeman, he seemed relieved--he assumed Garp had been apprehended--and he more boldly walked toward them. Garp contemplated running--to avoid the confusion, the explanation--but just then the policeman said, "I have to get your name. And what it is that you do. Besides run in the park." He laughed.
"I'm a writer," Garp told him. The policeman was apologetic that he hadn't heard of Garp, but at the time Garp hadn't published anything except "The Pension Grillparzer"; there was very little the policeman could have read. This seemed to puzzle the policeman.
"An unpublished writer?" he asked. Garp was rather glum about it. "Then what do you do for a living?" the policeman said.
"My wife and my mother support me," Garp admitted.
"Well, I have to ask you what they do," the policeman said. "For the record, we like to know how everyone makes a living."
The offended gentleman with the white mustache, who had overheard only the last bits of this interrogation, said, "Just as I would have thought! A vagrant, a despicable bum!"
The policeman stared at him. In his early, unpublished years Garp felt angry whenever he was forced to admit how he had enough to live on; he felt more like inviting confusion at this moment than he felt moved to clear things up.
"I'm glad to see you've caught him, anyway," the old gentleman said. "This used to be a nice park, but the people who get in here these days--you ought to patrol it more closely," he told the policeman, who guessed that the old man was referring to the child molester. The cop didn't want the business discussed in front of the child, so he rolled his eyes up toward her--she sat rigid in the saddle--and tried to indicate to the old gentleman why he shouldn't continue.
"Oh no, he didn't do it to that child!" the man cried, as if he'd just noticed her, mounted beside him, or just noticed she was not dressed under the policeman's coat--her small clothes hugged in her arms. "How vile!" he cried, glaring at Garp. "How disgusting! You'll want my name, of course?" he asked the policeman.
"What for?" the policeman said. Garp had to smile.
"Look at him smirking there!" the old man cried. "Why, as a witness, of course--I'd tell my story to any court in the country, if it could condemn such a man as that!"
"But what were you a witness to?" the policeman said.
"Why, he did that...thing...to me, too!" the man said.
The policeman looked at Garp; Garp rolled his eyes. The policeman still clung to the sanity that the old gentleman was referring to the child molester, but he didn't understand why Garp was being treated with such abuse. "Well, sure," the policeman said, to humor the old fool. He took his name and address.
Months later Garp was buying a package of three prophylactics when this same old gentleman walked into the drugstore.
"What?! It's you!" the old man shouted. "They let you out already, did they? I thought they'd put you away for years!"
It took Garp a moment to recognize the person. The druggist assumed that the old codger was a lunatic. The gentleman in his trimmed, white mustache advanced cautiously on Garp.
"What's the law coming to?" he asked. "I suppose you're out on good behavior? No old men or young girls to sniff in prison, I suppose! Or some lawyer got you off on some slick technicality? That poor child traumatized for all her years and you're free to roam the parks!"
"You've made a mistake," Garp told him.
"Yes, this is Mr. Garp," the druggist said. He didn't add, "the writer." If he'd considered adding anything, Garp knew, it would have been "the hero," because the druggist had seen the ludicrous newspaper headlines about the crime and capture in the park.
UNSUCCESSFUL WRITER NO FAILURE AS HERO!
CITIZEN CATCHES PARK PERVERT;
SON OF FAMOUS FEMINIST HAS KNACK FOR HELPING GIRLS...
Garp was unable to write for months because of it, but the article impressed all the locals who knew Garp only from the supermarket, the gymnasium, the drugstore. In the meantime, Procrastination had been published--but almost no one seemed to know. For weeks, clerks and salespeople would introduce him to other customers: "Here's Mr. Garp, the one who nabbed that molester in the park."
"What molester?"
"That one in city park. The Mustache Kid. He went after little girls."
"Children?"
"Well, Mr. Garp here is the one who got him."
"Well, actually," Garp would say, "it was the policeman on his horse."
"Knocked all his teeth down his throat, too!" they would crow with delight--the druggist and the clerk and the salespeople here and there.
"Well, that was actually the horse," Garp admitted, modestly.
And sometimes someone would ask, "And what is it you do, Mister Garp?"
The following silence would pain Garp, as he stood thinking that it was probably best to say that he ran--for a living. He cruised the parks, a molester-nabber by profession. He hung around phone booths, like that man in the cape--waiting for disasters. Any of this would make more sense to them than what he really did.
"I write," Garp would finally admit. Disappointment--even suspicion--all over their once-admiring faces.
In the drugstore--to make matters worse--Garp dropped the package of three prophylactics.
"A-ha!" the old man cried. "Look there! What's he up to with those?"
Garp wondered what options there were for what he could be up to with those.
"A pervert on the loose," the old man assured the druggist. "Looking for innocence to violate and defile!"
The old geezer's self-righteousness was irritating to the point that Garp had no desire to settle the misunderstanding; in fact, he rather enjoyed the memory of unpantsing the old bird in the park and he was not in the least sorry for the accident.
It was some time later when Garp realized that the old gentleman had no monopoly on self-righteousness. Garp took Duncan to a high school basketball game and was appalled that the ticket-taker was none other than the Mustache Kid--the real molester, the attacker of that helpless child in the city park.
"You're out," Garp said, amazed. The pervert smiled openly at Duncan.
"One adult, one kiddy," he said, tearing off tickets.
"How'd you ever get free?" Garp asked; he felt himself tremble with violence.
"Nobody proved nothing," the kid said, haughtily. "That dumb girl wouldn't even talk." Garp thought again of Ellen James with her tongue cut off at eleven.
He felt a sudden sympathy for the madness of the old man
he had so unpleasantly unpantsed. He felt such a terrible sense of injustice that he could even imagine some very unhappy woman despairing enough to cut off her own tongue. He knew that he wanted to hurt the Mustache Kid, on the spot--in front of Duncan. He wished he could arrange a maiming as a kind of moral lesson.
But there was a crowd wanting basketball tickets; Garp was holding things up.
"Move along, hair pie," the kid said to Garp. In the kid's expression, Garp thought he recognized the leer of the world. On the kid's upper lip was the insipid evidence that he was growing another mustache.
It was years later when he saw the child, a girl grown up; it was only because she recognized him that he recognized her. He was coming out of a movie theater in another town; she was in the line waiting to come in. Some of her friends were with her.
"Hello, how are you?" Garp asked. He was glad to see she had friends. That meant, to Garp, that she was normal.
"Is it a good movie?" the girl asked.
"You've certainly grown!" Garp said; the girl blushed and Garp realized what a stupid thing he'd said. "Well, I mean it's been a long time--and it was a time well worth forgetting!" he added, heartily. Her friends were moving inside the movie theater and the girl gave a quick look after them to make sure she was really alone with Garp.
"Yes, I'm graduating this month," she said.