Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (25 page)

They had set up a series of highway detours around the shopping center, but we finally discovered how to get into the north parking lot. They’d produced the balloons, tents, and lights, but they hadn’t produced much of a crowd. They had a local TV personality dressed in a
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raincoat trying to get people to cheer. The idea was, you made a bet for your favorite clown and put your money in his fishbowl. If your clown won, you’d get a certificate for a free cola at a local restaurant. It wasn’t much of a prize, I thought; maybe it
was
charity, but I felt that they could do better than that.

Earl was clown number three. We’d brought three umbrellas and were standing off to the side when he came up to us and introduced himself to my wife and the boys. He was wearing an orange wig and a clown nose, and he had painted his face white, the way clowns do, and he was wearing Bozo shoes, the size eighteens, but one of his sleeves was rolled up, and you could see the tattoo of that impaled rose. The white paint was running off his face a bit in the rain, streaking, but he didn’t seem to mind. He shook hands with my children and Ann and me very formally. He had less natural ability as a clown than anyone else I’ve ever met. It would never occur to you to laugh at Earl dressed up in that suit. What you felt would be much more complicated. It was like watching a family member descend into a weakness like alcoholism. Earl caught the look on my face.

“What’s the matter, Warren?” he asked. “You okay?”

I shrugged. He had his hand in a big clown glove and was shaking my hand.

“It’s all for a good cause,” he said, waving his other hand at the four lanes they had painted on the parking lot for the races. “We’ve made a lot of money already. It’s all for the kids, kids who aren’t as lucky as ours.” He looked down at my boys. “You have to believe,” he said.

“You sound like Jaynee,” I told him. My wife was looking at Earl. I had tried to explain him to her, but I wasn’t sure I had succeeded.

“Believe what?” she asked.

“You’ve been married to this guy for too long,” he said, laughing his big clown laugh. “Maybe your kids can explain it to you, about what the world needs now.” There was a whistle. Earl turned around. “Gotta go,” he said. He flopped off in those big shoes.

“What’s he talking about?” my wife asked.

They lined up the four clowns, including Earl, at the chalk, and those of us who were spectators stood under the tent and registered our bets while the
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announcer from Channel 2 stood in front of the cameras and held up his starter’s gun. I stared for a long time at that gun. Then I placed my bet on Earl.

The other three clowns were all fat middle-aged guys, Shriners or Rotarians, and I thought Earl had a good chance. My gaze went from the gun down to the parking lot, where I saw Jaynee. She was standing in the rain and watching her old man. I heard the gun go off, but instead of watching Earl, I watched her.

Her hair was stuck to the sides of her head in that rain, and her cotton jacket was soaked through. She had her eyes fixed on her father. By God, she looked affectionate. If he wanted his daughter’s love, he had it. I watched her clench her fists and start to jump up and down, cheering him on. After twenty seconds I could tell by the way she raised her fist in the air that Earl had clumped his way to victory. Then I saw the new woman, Jody, standing behind Jaynee, her big glasses smeared with rain, grinning.

I looked around the parking lot and thought: Everyone here understands what’s going on better than I do. But then I remembered that I had fired shots at a nuclear reactor. All the desperate remedies. And I remembered my mother’s first sentence to me when we arrived in New York harbor when I was ten years old. She pointed down from the ship at the pier, at the crowds, and she said, “Warren, look at all those Americans.” I felt then that if I looked at that crowd for too long, something inside my body would explode, not metaphorically but literally: it would blow a hole through my skin, through my chest cavity. And it came back to me in that shopping center parking lot, full of those
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people, that feeling of pressure of American crowds and exuberance.

We collected our free cola certificates, and then I hustled my wife and kids back into the car. I’d had enough. We drove out of the Westland parking lot, then were directed by a detour sign into a service drive that circled the entire shopping center and reentered the lot on the north side, back at the clown races. I saw Jaynee again, still in the rain, hugging her American dad, and Jody holding on to his elbow, looking up at him, pressing her thigh against his. I took another exit out of the lot but somehow made the same mistake I had made before and, once again, found myself back in Westland. Every service drive seemed designed to bring us back to this same scene of father, daughter, and second wife. I gave them credit for who they were and what they were doing—I give them credit now—but I had to get out of there immediately. I don’t know how I managed to get out of that place, but on the fourth try I succeeded.

Shelter

COOPER HAD STOPPED
at a red light on his way to work and was adjusting the dial on his radio when he looked up and saw a man in a filthy brown corduroy suit and a three-day growth of beard staring in through the front windshield and picking with his fingernails at Cooper’s windshield wiper. Whenever Cooper had seen this man before, on various Ann Arbor street corners, he had felt a wave of uneasiness and unpleasant compassion. Rolling down the window and leaning out, Cooper said, “Wait a minute there. Just wait a minute. If you get out of this intersection and over to that sidewalk, I’ll be with you in a minute”—the man stared at him—“
I’ll have something for you.
”

Cooper parked his car at a meter two blocks up, and when he returned, the man in the corduroy suit was standing under a silver maple tree, rubbing his back against the bark.

“Didn’t think you’d come back,” the man said, glancing at Cooper. His hair fell over the top of his head in every direction.

“How do you do?” Cooper held his hand out, but the man—who seemed rather old, close up—didn’t take it. “I’m Cooper.” The man smelled of everything, a bit like a municipal dump. Cooper tried not to notice it.

“It doesn’t matter who I am,” the man said, standing unsteadily. “I don’t care who I am. It’s not worth anybody thinking about it.” He looked up at the sky and began to pick at his coat sleeve.

“What’s your name?” Cooper asked softly. “Tell me your name, please.”

The old man’s expression changed. He stared at the blue sky, perfectly empty of clouds, and after a moment said, “My mother used to call me James.”

“Good. Well, then, how do you do, James?” The man looked dubiously at his own hand, then reached over and shook. “Would you like something to eat?”

“I like sandwiches,” the man said.

“Well, then,” Cooper said, “that’s what we’ll get you.”

As they went down the sidewalk, the man stumbled into the side of a bench at a bus stop and almost tripped over a fire hydrant. He had a splay-footed walk, as if one of his legs had once been broken. Cooper began to pilot him by touching him on his back.

“Would you like to hear a bit of the Gospels?” the man asked.

“All right. Sure.”

He stopped and held on to a light pole. “This is the fourth book of the Gospels. Jesus is speaking. He says, ‘I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me; because I live, you will live also.’ That’s from John,” the man said. They were outside the Ann Arbor Diner, a neon-and-chrome Art Deco hamburger joint three blocks down from the university campus. “There’s more,” the old man said, “but I don’t remember it.”

“Wait here,” Cooper said. “I’m going to get you a sandwich.”

The man was looking uncertainly at his lapel, fingering a funguslike spot.

“James!” Cooper said loudly. “Promise me you won’t go away!”

The man nodded.

When Cooper came out again with a bag of french fries, a carton of milk, and a hamburger, the man had moved down the street and was leaning against the plate-glass window of a seafood restaurant with his hands covering his face. “James!” Cooper said. “Here’s your meal.” He held out the bag.

“Thank you.” When the man removed his hands from his face, Cooper saw in his eyes a moment of complete lucidity and sanity, a glance that took in the street and himself, made a judgment about them all, and quickly withdrew from any engagement with them. He took the hamburger out of its wrapping, studied it for a moment, and then bit into it. As he ate, he gazed toward the horizon.

“I have to go to work now,” Cooper said.

The man glanced at him, nodded again, and turned his face away.

“What are we going to do?” Cooper said to his wife. They were lying in bed at sunrise, when they liked to talk. His hand was on her thigh and was caressing it absently and familiarly. “What are we going to do about
these characters? They’re on the street corners. Every month there are more of them. Kids, men, women, everybody. It’s a horde. They’re sleeping in the arcade, and they’re pushing those terrible grocery carts around with all their worldly belongings, and it makes me nuts to watch them. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Christine, but whatever it is, I have to do it.” With his other hand, he rubbed his eyes. “I dream about them.”

“You’re such a good person,” she said sleepily. Her hand brushed over him. “I’ve noticed that about you.”

“No, that’s wrong,” Cooper said. “This has nothing to do with good. Virtue doesn’t interest me. What this is about is not feeling crazy when I see those people.”

“So what’s your plan?”

He rose halfway out of bed and looked out the back window at the tree house he had started for Alexander, their seven-year-old. Dawn was breaking, and the light came in through the slats of the blinds and fell in strips over him.

When he didn’t say anything, she said, “I was just thinking. When I first met you, before you dropped out of law school, you always used to have your shirts laundered, with starch, and I remember the neat creases in your trouser legs, from somebody ironing them. You smelled of aftershave in those days. Sexually, you were ambitious. You took notes slowly. Fastidious penmanship. I like you better now.”

“I remember,” he said. “It was a lecture on proximate cause.”

“No,” she said. “It was contribution and indemnification.”

“Whatever.”

He took her hand and led her to the bathroom. Every morning Cooper and his wife showered together. He called it soul-showering. He had picked up the phrase from a previous girlfriend, though he had never told Christine that. Cooper had told his wife that by the time they were thirty they would probably not want to do this anymore, but they were both now thirty-one, and she still seemed to like it.

Under the sputter of the water, Christine brushed some soap out of her eyes and said, “Cooper, were you ever a street person?”

“No.”

“Smoke a lot of dope in high school?”

“No.”

“I bet you drank a lot once.” She was an assistant prosecutor in the district attorney’s office and sometimes brought her professional habits
home. “You tapped kegs and lay out on the lawns and howled at the sorority girls.”

“Sometimes I did that,” he said. He was soaping her back. She had wide, flaring shoulders from all the swimming she had done, and the soap and water flowed down toward her waist in a pattern of V’s. “I did all those things,” he said, “but I never became that kind of person. What’s your point?”

She turned around and faced him, the full display of her smile. “I think you’re a latent vagrant,” she said.

“But I’m not,” he said. “I’m here. I have a job.
This
is where I am. I’m a father. How can you say that?”

“Do I love you?” she asked, water pouring over her face. “Stay with me.”

“Well, sure,” he said. “That’s my plan.”

The second one he decided to do something about was standing out of the hot summer sun in the shade of a large catalpa tree near a corner newsstand. This one was holding what seemed to be a laundry sack with the words
AMERICAN LINEN SUPPLY
stenciled on it. She was wearing light summer clothes—a Hawaiian shirt showing a palm tree against a bloody splash of sunset, and a pair of light cotton trousers, and red Converse tennis shoes—and she stood reading a paperback, beads of sweat falling off her face onto the pages.

This time Cooper went first to a fast-food restaurant, bought the hamburger, french fries, and milk, and then came back.

“I brought something for you,” Cooper said, walking to the reading woman. “I brought you some lunch.” He held out a bag. “I’ve seen you out here on the streets many times.”

“Thank you,” the woman said, taking the bag. She opened it, looked inside, and sniffed appreciatively.

“Are you homeless?” Cooper asked.

“They have a place where you can go,” the woman said. She put down the bag and looked at Cooper. “My name’s Estelle,” she said. “But we don’t have to talk.”