Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [174]
Ellickson nodded.
“It was my wife, and it was twenty-five years ago, when I was still almost your age. Okay. She was younger than me. That’s a mistake, right there. She was a kid, real frisky, and she had a pretty face and a nice shape but a mean streak. She had a mouth on her. And she had the soul of a crocodile, that woman. She was reptilian. Reptiles shouldn’t drink, and we both liked to drink, speaking of alcohol. We’d go at it. No dignity about it whatsoever. We went to bars, and this one time on the way home she swerved and hit a tree. Cop comes to rescue us, EMI and what-have-you, and they do the breath tests, and on the spot my wife falls in love with the cop. Officer Wallace, a cop! Can you imagine such a thing? Maybe it was the uniform, maybe it was the holster or how he carried himself or the … I don’t know what it was. After all these years, I can’t say that I care. I don’t think about it. So after we settle the DUI charge with the court, later, she starts calling the cop and then … you know. Hoopla. He wasn’t married, just a young buck in a blue uniform. She and I had been hitched for five years. No kids. Between my wife and me, whose fault was that? Not mine, I guarantee. But anyway, she starts stepping out on me with this guy, a brawny type, so I can’t exactly take him down in a fistfight. When I ask her, finally, about what the hell she’s doing, a married woman, with her loverboy cop, she says, ‘I want to feel his testosterone between my legs.’ That’s a direct quote! ‘I want to feel his testosterone between my legs.’ Spare me honesty like that. What you have to understand is, I loved her. I really loved her. If I hadn’t loved her, I wouldn’t have shot her. And,” he added, “if I had it to do over again, I’d still do it.”
Ellickson nodded. “You could have shot the cop. I would have. By the way, where are we going?” he asked.
“Cops don’t like it when you kill their girlfriends. In prison,” the old man said, ignoring Ellickson’s question as if it were nonsensical, “I had time on my hands. The day stretches out. A week, ten weeks, who cares? A civilian can’t imagine. You just sit there. Your brain gets empty. You get empty. No one gives two fucks about you. And you have this big problem. The big problem is the days and hours you’re alone with your mind on idle. You don’t see the sky, and your mind races. You start to spook yourself up. Crazy stuff. You see the isles of madness, just over there. Ever seen them? The trees are all dead, and there’s caves. Archfiends wearing bow ties live in there. The mind is underemployed. It sits there and won’t quit. So I gave my mind a job.”
They were headed downtown, toward a seedy section. They passed a business called Toyland, with sex toys in the display window. “What job was that?” Ellickson asked.
“I needed to keep my dignity, you know? So I imagined a spaceship. Not like a movie spaceship, but something realistic, a real spaceship to take me away. Out of the world I was in. This world. See, the spaceship had to have rooms, it had to have hallways, it needed a shape. So I imagined the flight deck. I imagined the chairs and the seating, the exact kind of leather—Spanish, the best—then the compartments where people slept and ate. The dishes. The flatware. That sort of thing. I figured the materials, shape and quantity. This much aluminum, that much alloy. I designed the doorknobs. The computers, the readouts. I even imagined the jet engines, and I don’t know anything about jet engines, so I invented how it’d have to be done. I imagined a workable propulsion system. I had to. Everything required a design, even the bathrooms.” The murderer laughed his mirthless laugh. At that moment he did not seem to Ellickson ever to have been a kind man. All he had ever been was a maniac. “Those years I was behind bars, I built my spaceship in my mind, and more important, I built it in my heart.” He turned and looked directly at Ellickson, as he pulled into a parking space on the street. “When I was done, I named the spaceship.