Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [180]
Another security guard had arrived, a red-faced fellow with a crew cut. He would put a stop to things. Together with the older security guard, he herded the two men toward the service area. So: that had happened. Now it was over. Estelle handed the baseball bat she was buying for Frederick to the checkout clerk, who scanned it and who then held out her palm for money.
“You don’t see that every day,” Estelle said to the clerk, who was frowning.
“Ain’t none of my business,” the clerk said with a shrug.
Estelle handed the bat to her grandson, who took hold of it in his left hand while keeping up his writing with his right.
“You’re giving this to me because why?” the boy asked, glancing up.
Estelle sighed. She no longer waited for thanks for anything from him. Gratitude was simply beyond his abilities.
“For your baseball games,” she said, over her shoulder.
“What baseball games? I don’t play baseball.”
“Thank you,” the checkout clerk said behind her, belatedly, as if prompting Frederick. He followed his grandmother, his eyes downward again, oblivious to her, to the partly cloudy sky outside the automatic doors, to the untied shoelace on his left foot, to his own waddling walk, to the folds of fat under his T-shirt, to the gift of the unthanked aluminum baseball bat. The poor child. He had been so beautiful once, years ago, with a smile to light up the world, and now—well, just look at him.
They drove across Minneapolis and stopped for a red light in front of the Basilica. At the corner traffic island stood a bearded panhandler with a cardboard sign that read: HOMELeSS VetERaN. ANYThING WILL HeLP. GoD BLeSS. The man’s face was wreathed in sunburned desolation, and she was reaching into her purse for a dollar when her grandson spoke up from the backseat.
“Grandma, don’t give him anything.”
“What? Why?” Estelle asked.
“He’s a pod,” the boy said.
“What?”
“You know. A pod. A replicant.”
Estelle looked in the rearview mirror and saw the boy scowling malevolently at the homeless man.
“No, I don’t know. Why do you say such things?”
“See, for starters, he’s in the stare-at-you army,” the boy said, with his eerie talent for metaphor. “They stare at you. That’s the pod game plan. I can always tell. I have radar. That guy is garbage.” Frederick laughed to himself. “He’s the lieutenant colonel of garbage.”
“No human is garbage,” his grandmother said defiantly, rolling down her window, “and I don’t want to hear you talking like that.”
“Okay, fine,” the boy said, “but I’m just saying … How come you like these creeps?”
But she had already reached through the car window and placed a dollar bill in the man’s palm, and when he said, “Thank you, and God bless you,” Estelle felt a small sensation of satisfaction and pride. He might be a bum, but he knew how to be thankful.
“I suppose you think he’s a zombie, too,” Estelle said, as she rolled the window back up.
“No,” the boy replied. “He’s a … replicant. Like I told you. He looks like a human being, but he isn’t. Just like this car we’re in now seems like a real car.” Frederick smiled at his grandmother, a private smile, but the smile seemed to be poisoned somehow by the baby fat on his twelve-year-old face and by the boy’s customary malice, a thin screen for his unhappiness. Often his face was unreadable—it was as if he had trained his facial expressions to be ungrammatical. The poor child: he even had a double chin, making him look like a preteen Rotarian. Curled into himself, having returned to his phone gadget, Frederick radiated waves of unsociability and ill will. His being hummed with animosity toward the world for having staged the enactment of his various miseries. His revulsion at life had a kind of purity, Estelle thought.
Really, all she wanted to do was to take him into her arms and hold him. But he was too old for that now. What had worked once, all that love