Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [177]
“Guess so,” the boy replied in a quaver.
Macfadden Eward threw back his shoulders and walked forward. Ellickson followed him. “I’m headed homeward,” he slurred to anyone in the vicinity. Then he fell to his knees and gazed at the ground. Ellickson hoisted him up again and walked him back to his house. He took the old man upstairs and deposited him, clothes and all, in the tub and turned the cold shower water on him. Macfadden Eward began to sputter. “What’s this? What’s this?” he shouted. “Turn that off!”
Ellickson returned to his own house. What had just happened made him feel fitfully justified in his own eyes. His neighbor would live, but someday he might overdose, and everyone would feel contempt for him, and if he didn’t OD, there was a good chance he would end up in the gutter that beckoned toward all single men, the gutter that Ellickson believed in more strongly than he did in his God.
At his sister’s house a few days later, Ellickson was repairing an overhead light fixture while Irena steadied the ladder and handed him the electrical tape and aimed the flashlight at the wiring.
“Have you called Laura? Your wife?” Irena asked.
“No.”
“And why not is this?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not, I ask again?”
He looked down at her. “Shame.”
“No. Stoltz,” she said. “In German. Not shame, but pride. In Russia, everyone is like you. Everyone is a shameful drunk full of pride. But they … manage. You must call Laura. I shall bully you. Like sister-in-law. Bully bully bully.” She nodded. “I am relentless. I am dictator.” When Ellickson looked down at her, he saw her grimly smiling Asiatic face, like Stalin’s.
The following weekend, Macfadden Eward arrived at Ellickson’s front door carrying an apple pie. He appeared to be loaded down with rage and spite. “Here, take this,” the old man said, shoving the pie in Ellickson’s general direction without a trace of generosity.
“Did you bake it yourself?” Ellickson asked.
“Of course not,” Macfadden Eward said. “I just bought the goddamn thing.” His glance took in Ellickson’s living room. “So, can I come in? You’ve never invited me in, you cheap bastard. I’ve been the one who’s had to show all the hospitality.”
“All right,” Ellickson said. “But you’re interrupting me. I’ve been writing a letter to my son.”
“Let’s hear it,” the murderer said, forcing his way past Ellickson, through the foyer, and into the living room. He sat down on Ellickson’s sofa. “It’s kind of a mess in here,” the man said, pointing at a newspaper on the floor. “So. Read me the letter.”
“It’s not for you, it’s for my son.”
“Try it out on me.”
“Don’t be a damn fool,” Ellickson said. “This is private.”
“Are you kidding? Nothing is private anymore,” Macfadden Eward said. “Not when you parade a disabled old man with diabetes in the street in front of his neighbors. Here. Take this apple pie.” He plopped it down next to where he was sitting on the sofa.
“When you came out of that place, you were in a—”
“Don’t say it,” the old man interrupted.
“Diabetes?” A silence followed.
“Well, maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t.” He made a rude noise with his mouth. “Let’s hear that letter. Otherwise, I’m going back home and I’ll go back to work on the spaceship.”
“To hell with your spaceship,” Ellickson said. “Fly to the moon, for all I care.”
“Just read me the letter. I need to hear it,” the murderer said. “I have to hear it right now.”
“No,” Ellickson said. “It’s not for you. I told you this already. I explained. This letter is for my boy.”
“All right, then,” the murderer said. “Tell me about your boy.”
“His name’s Alex.”
“Tell me about him. Be the proud poppa.”
“I can’t do that,” Ellickson said. Everything, traveling at sixty miles an hour, was about