Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [84]
“I’m a volunteer,” he said. “I just work here. I’ve got a home.”
“I don’t,” Billy Bell said. “People should have homes. I don’t work now. I lost my job. I’m full of energy but I’m apathetic. Very little appeals to me. I guess I’m going to start some of those greasy minimum-wage things if I can stand them. I’m smart. I’m not a loser. I’m definitely not one of these messed-up ghouls who call this place home.”
Cooper stood up and walked toward the kitchen, knowing that the young man would follow him. “They aren’t ghouls,” he said. “Look around. They’re more normal than you are, probably. They’re down on their luck.”
“Of course they are, of course they are,” Billy said, his voice floating a few inches behind Cooper’s head. Cooper began to wipe off the kitchen counter, as the young man watched him. Then Billy began waving his right hand again. “My problem, Cooper, my problem is the problem of the month, which is pointlessness and the point of doing anything, which I can’t see most of the time. I want to heal people but I can’t do that. I’m stalled. What happened was, about a year ago, there was this day. I remember it was sunny, I mean the sun was out, and I heard these wings flapping over my head because I was out in the park with my girlfriend feeding Cheerios to the pigeons. Then this noise: flap flap flap. Wings, Cooper, big wings, taking my soul away. I didn’t want to look behind me because I was afraid they’d taken my shadow, too. It could happen, Cooper, it could happen to anybody. Anyhow, after that, what I knew was, I didn’t want what everybody else did, I mean I don’t have any desires for anything, and at some times of day I don’t cast a shadow. My desires just went away like that—poof, poor desires. I’m a saint now but I’m not enjoying it one bit. I can bless people but not heal them. Anybody could lose his soul the way I did. Now all I got is that sad robot feeling. You know, that five-o’clock feeling? But all day, with me.”
“You mentioned your mother,” Cooper said. He dropped some cleanser into the sink and began to scour. “What about your father?”
“Let me do that.” Billy nudged Cooper aside and started to clean the sink with agitated, almost frantic hand motions. “I’ve done a lot of this. My father died last year. I did a lot of housecleaning. I’m a man-maid. My father was in the hospital, but we took him out, and I was trying to be, I don’t know, a sophomore in college, which is a pretty dumb thing to aspire to, if you think about it. But I was also sitting by my father’s bed and taking care of him—he had pancreatic cancer—and I was reading Popular Mechanics to him, the home-improvement section, and feeding him when he could eat, and then when he died, the wings flew over me, though that was later, and there wasn’t much I wanted to do. What a sink.”
As he talked, Billy’s hand accelerated in its motions around the drain.
“Come on,” Cooper said. “I’m going to take you somewhere.”
His idea was to lift the young man’s spirits, but he didn’t know quite how to proceed. He took him to his car and drove him down the river road to a park, where Billy got out of the car, took his shoes off, and waded into the water. He bent down, and, as Cooper watched, cupped his hands in the river before splashing it over his face. Cooper thought his face had a strange expression, something between ecstasy and despair. He couldn’t think of a word in English for this expression but thought there might be a word in another language for it. German, for example. When Billy was finished washing his face, he looked up into the sky. Pigeons and killdeer were flying overhead. After he had settled back into the front seat of Cooper’s car, drops of