Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [200]
The sharp raw pine scent made him think of his childhood in rural Oregon. He noticed a hawk circling above him. Nearby to the right, a sumac bush displayed deep autumnal red leaves. When he looked at it, the leaves trembled, as if his gazing had caused the bush to shiver.
He took in a deep breath, then coughed. Slowly and with careful deliberation over word choices, he began cursing.
Krumholtz was a freelance journalist and had been assigned by Success magazine to interview the subject of February’s cover story. Just as Playboy always had a foldout, Success always had a Winner. The title always appeared in uppercase format. February’s Winner, James Mallard, lived back in this forest somewhere in a large compound of his own design, Krumholtz had been informed. His article on Mallard was to include a combination of background information and personal narrative—the rise to fortune, lifestyle choices, opinions, etc.—along with anecdotes about the winner’s current well-being. To deserve a place in Success, the subject had to have made a significant mark measured in dollars. These feature articles, celebratory but not effusive or craven, would have as their subtext an understanding of the complexity of achieving great wealth. Seasonings of wit and irony were acceptable if dropped knowingly here and there throughout the article, but even a hint of skepticism in the face of affluence would be ruthlessly blue-penciled. “Vogue does not mock fashion, and we do not mock riches,” Krumholtz’s editor had told him. “The amassing of a large fortune is to the readers of our magazine a sweetly solemn thought.”
James Mallard, pronounced Mallard, British style, accent on the second syllable, had been difficult to research. The biography was paltry. He was almost an unknown. The Wikipedia article on him was “under revision,” and several other Web articles on him had been withdrawn or were impossible to access. The print media had mostly ignored him. Mallard appeared to have lived and worked in the shadows. He “valued his privacy,” according to one source. Colleagues of his had been reluctant to discuss anything about him over the phone. Voices dropped melodramatically when Mallard’s name was mentioned. “I haven’t talked to you, and you haven’t made this call,” one of Krumholtz’s interviewees said to him.
A photographer, a stringer, would supposedly be sent out to do portraits-and-poolsides a few days after Krumholtz’s interview, but that prospect now seemed unlikely, even preposterous, given the remoteness and isolation of Mallard’s compound.
Krumholtz had never heard of Mallard before getting his assignment but was glad to have the work. Given the current economic climate, feature-article jobs like this one were drying up, as subscription levels plunged and newsstand sales declined. Even Success itself had experienced its first red-ink quarter, as if the act of reading about fortunes had become too laborious for the average would-be winner to master.
He checked his watch: two thirty. The hawk was still circling above him, and from the west a breeze touched his face. He heard a distant songbird, a melancholy warbling. He felt as if the song might be directed to him or against him.
According to the bits and pieces of information that Krumholtz had cobbled together, his subject, James Mallard, had been born on a farm in Iowa. The young man had lettered in football and had quarterbacked the hometown team in his senior year to a conference championship. He had been named prom king and class valedictorian before attending Dartmouth on a full scholarship, where he had participated in intramural sports including water polo and rugby. He had graduated cum laude with honors in economics. His nicknames had been “Duck” and “the Duckster.” After having dropped