One night in early June, Patsy was headed upstairs, looking for the Snugli, which she thought she had forgotten in Mary Esther’s room, when she heard Saul’s voice coming from behind the door. She stopped on the landing, her hand on the banister. At first she thought he might be singing to the baby, but, no, Saul was not singing. He was sitting in there — well, he was probably sitting, Saul didn’t like to stand when he spoke — talking to his daughter, and Patsy heard him finishing a sentence: “. . was never very happy.”
Patsy moved closer to the door.
“Who explains?” Saul was saying, apparently to his daughter. “No one does.”
Saul went on talking to Mary Esther, filling her in on his mother and several other mysterious phenomena. What did he think he was doing, discussing this ephemera with an infant? “I should sing you a song,” he announced, interrupting his train of thought. “That’s what parents do. It’s in all the books. Maybe I’ll do Zorastro’s aria. Or ‘Pigeons on the Grass, Alas.’ You might like that.”
To get away from Saul’s sitcom vocalizing, Patsy retreated to the window for a breath of air. Looking out, she saw someone standing on the front lawn, bathed in moonlight, staring in the direction of the house. He was thin and ugly and scruffy, and he looked a bit like a shadowy clod, but a dangerous shadowy clod, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
“Saul,” she said. Then, more loudly, “Saul, there’s someone out on the lawn.”
He joined her at the window. “I can’t see him,” he said. “Oh, yeah, there.” He shouted, “Hello? Can I help you?”
The boy turned around. He got on a bike and raced away down the driveway and onto Whitefeather Road.
Saul did not move, his hands planted on the windowsill. “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s Gordy Himmelman,” he groaned. “That little bastard has come onto our property. I’m getting on the phone.”
“Saul, why’d he come here? What’d you do to him?” She held her arms against her chest. “What does he have against us?”
“I was his teacher. And we’re Jewish,” Saul said. “And to top it all off, we’re parents. He never had any. I showed those kids the baby pictures and he had a psychotic break. Big mistake. He’s not used to being psychotic. Somebody must have found Gordy in a barrel of brine. He was not of woman born.” He tried to smile. “I’m kidding, sort of.”
“Do you think he’ll be back?” she asked.
“Oh, yes.” Saul wiped his forehead. “They always come back, those kind. And I’ll be ready when he does.”
It had been a spring and summer of violent weather, and Saul had been reading the Old Testament again, looking for clues. On Thursday, around four in the afternoon, he had finished mowing the front lawn and was sitting on the porch, drinking the last, the final, bottle of Mad Dog’s no-brand beer when he looked to the west and felt a sudden cooling of the air, a shunting of atmosphere from higher to lower. Just above the horizon a mass of clouds began boiling. Clouds that looked like breasts and hand tools — he couldn’t help thinking the way he thought— advanced over him, with other clouds hanging down, pendulous. The wind picked up.
“Patsy,” he called. “Hey, Patsy.”
Something calamitous was happening in the atmosphere. In a moment a voice could easily emerge from the whirlwind. The pressure was dropping so fast that Saul could feel it in his elbows and knees.
“Patsy!” he shouted.
From upstairs he heard her calling back: “What, Saul?”
“Go to the basement,” he said. “Close the upstairs window and take Mary Esther down there. Take a flashlight. Something’s coming. We’re going to get a huge storm.”
Rushing through the house, Saul closed windows and switched off lights, and when he returned to the front door to close it, he saw the tall and emaciated apparition of his student Gordy Himmelman out in the yard, standing fixedly like an emanation from the dirt and stone of the fields. He had returned. Toward Saul he aimed his vacant stare. Flies buzzed around his head. Saul, who could not stop thinking even in moments of critical emergency, was struck into stillness by Gordy’s presence, his authoritative malevolence — or whatever it was — standing there in the just-mown grass. For the first time the thought entered Saul’s mind that he was responsible for Gordy somehow, that he had had a small but important part in his creation, that he had been the minor lab-coated assistant in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, attaching the wires behind the Tesla coils. But they’d all collaborated: the volatile ambitious sky and the forlorn backwardness of the fields had together given rise to this human disaster, who, even as Saul watched, yelled toward the house, “Hey, Mr. Bernstein. It’s a storm.” Or maybe he said, “I’m a storm.” Saul didn’t quite hear. Then the boy said, “Go take a look at your bees, shitbird.” In slow motion, he smiled.
Feeling like a commando, Saul, in whom necessity had created the illusion of speed, caught up to Gordy, who was pumping away on his broken and rusted bicycle, and pulled him off. He threw and kicked the junk Schwinn into the ditch. In the rain that had just started, Saul grabbed Gordy by the shoulders and shook him back and forth. He pressed his thumbs hard enough to bruise. Gordy, violently stinking, smelled of neglect and seepage, and Saul nearly gagged. But he could not stop shaking him; it was like the release of a terrible pressure, a shaking cure. Violence was a sort of joy after all. But he himself was shaking, too. With violent, rapid, horizontal jerking motions, the boy’s head was whipped. His face was level with Saul’s. They were the same height.
Saul wanted to see his eyes. But the eyes were as empty as mirrors.
“Hey, stop it,” Gordy said. “It hurts. You’re hurting. You’re hurting him.”
“Hurting who?” Saul asked. Thunder rolled toward him. He saw himself reflected in Gordy Himmelman’s eyes, a tiny figure backed by lightning. Who, me?
“Stop it, don’t hurt him.” Patsy’s voice, repeating Gordy’s words, snaked into his ear, and he felt her hand on his arm, restraining him. She was there, out in the rain, less frightened of the rain than she was of Saul. The boy had started to sag, seeing the two of them there, his scarecrow arms raised to protect himself, having assumed, probably, that he was about to be killed. There he squatted, the child of attention deficit, at Saul’s feet.
“Stay there,” Saul mumbled. “Stay right there.” Through the rain he began walking, then running, toward his bees. The storm, empty of content, tucked itself toward the east and was being replaced — one patch of firmament after another — by one of those insincere midwestern blue skies.
Mary Esther began to cry and wail as Patsy jogged toward Saul. Gordy Himmelman followed along behind her.
When she was within a hundred feet of Saul’s beehives, Patsy saw that the frames had been knocked over, scattered. Saul lay, face down, where they once stood. He was touching his tongue to the earth momentarily, for a taste.
When he rose, he saw Patsy. “All the bees swarmed,” he said. “They’ve left. They’re gone.”
She held Mary Esther tightly and examined Saul’s face. “How come they didn’t attack him? Didn’t they sting him?”
“Who knows?” Saul spread his arms. “They just didn’t.”
Gordy Himmelman watched them from a hundred yards away, and with his empty gaze he made Patsy think of the albino deer, the one with the arrow in it — half blind, wandering these fields day after day without direction.
“Look,” Saul said, pointed at Mary Esther, who had stopped crying when she saw her father. “Her shoe is untied.” He wiped his face with his sleeve and shook off the dirt from his jeans. Approaching Patsy, he gave off a smell of soil and honey and sweat. Distracted, he tied Mary Esther’s shoe.