Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [175]
“What did you call it?” Ellickson asked.
“Yeah, I thought about the name for a long time. Finally I settled on one. I called it Queen Juliana.” Macfadden Eward smiled at the memory. “It was the name of someone I knew. It was a tribute to her. Now that I’m an old man, I don’t name things anymore.”
“What are we doing here?” Ellickson asked.
“I gotta talk to my parole officer,” the old man said, getting out of the truck. “I’ll be back in two shakes.” He crossed the street and entered a side door of a brick building that might have once been a warehouse. Upstairs, one lightbulb burned behind a cracked wire-mesh window. Ellickson doubted that a parole officer would work in such a place.
He opened the door of the murderer’s truck and stepped down onto the sidewalk. At the end of the block was a business with bars across the front windows. A sign across the front said MONTE CARLO in neon, and then, in smaller letters, A GENTLEMAN’S CLUB. Ellickson did not see any gentlemen going in or out, and for relief from the sight of the shabby shadow-creatures he did see, he glanced down the length of First Avenue.
What had happened to the downtown area? The city seemed to have been abandoned and appeared to be as unloved and uncared-for as the begrimed men going into the Monte Carlo. He eyed a corner telephone pole and saw a video camera aimed in his general direction. Full of exuberant good humor, he gave it the finger. A young woman with green hair and a pierced lower lip, and carrying a large backpack, approached him on the sidewalk and walked past him, gazing at him fearfully as if he were one of the feral gentlemen going into the Monte Carlo. Had he, Ellickson, turned into a person whom others feared? He had once thought of himself as a handsome, genial man who frightened nobody and attracted companionable attention. Soon people would make the sign of the cross upon seeing him to ensure their own safety.
A customer about Ellickson’s age, glancing over his shoulder, slunk into the gentleman’s club wearing a leering owlish expression behind thick glasses. He was followed by another scowling man with the general appearance of a Hells Angel: wide face, long hair and beard, strong but portly, black leather regalia, an expression of perpetual hostile evaluation as he surveyed the sidewalk. Inside, they would present their money to the dancers and be given a carefully choreographed imitation of reciprocal desire. They wouldn’t get any favors, nor would they expect any.
Where was the murderer? What was his real mission? The midday sun beat down on Ellickson, and suddenly, in the midst of this despoliation and desolation, he felt happy for no reason.
Continuing his letter to his son, Ellickson imagined some words that he intended to write down eventually. “You got to be tough in this life. They’ll come at you from everywhere. My dad, your grandfather, would knock me around to toughen me up. We once took a car trip to Monument Valley, and when we arrived there, he was so excited that he punched me in the stomach.” Ellickson flinched involuntarily, remembering how he had fallen to the ground after his father had said, “Come here, Eric,” and had hit him. In his father, as in some other men, joy expressed itself in high-spirited violence. “I guess I disappointed him. On the high-school football team, I was a wide receiver. I spent quite a bit of time on the bench, and my dad nicknamed me ‘Second-stringer’ after that.” He thought for a moment. “ ‘Stringer,’ as a nickname. I had to bear it. It’s too bad he died of lung cancer before you could meet him, I guess. When he was sick, he said he would be glad to die. ‘I’ll be among the happy dead,’ he told the nurses, and the nurses told me, and then he died.”
The old man came staggering out of the building. He had a disordered appearance, and his eyes didn’t seem to be focusing anywhere. Ellickson crossed the street and took hold of him.
“I don’t care what they say,” Macfadden Eward muttered. “Men and women are incompatible.”
“Come on,” Ellickson said, holding on to him and piloting him across