“Well, you. . you hate me, right? And didn’t you kill that deer?”
“Well, I dunno. Naw. It’s not like that.” He looked away. He looked at the sky. Nothing up there but sky. Wherever Gordy went, he created a cognitive fog, even in broad daylight.
“You don’t know? Okay. Then what are you doing here?”
“You mean right now?” He gave Saul a goofy how-dumb-do-you-think-I-am expression. “I’m talkin’ to you.”
“Yes. Of course. Certainly. But what I’m asking you is, why did you get on your bicycle and come over here? I really don’t get it. I’m missing something. You. . I thought you hated me. Don’t you? You and Bob Pawlak? I thought you couldn’t stand the sight of me. You called me a shitbird. That’s what you said. A shitbird. I don’t even know what a shitbird is. And then there were the hives. You ruined them. You owe me for them,” Saul said irritably.
“That was only in school. And the rest was just talk. Anyway I never said nothing about hating, not in that way. ’Cause it’s you who hate me. I can tell. Is that your car over there?” With his thumb, Gordy gestured toward Saul’s Chevy. He had been avoiding eye contact. The body shop had made the car look like new after Saul had rolled it all those many months ago.
“Yes.” Saul sighed. “Yes, it is.” He pointed a finger at the boy. “Gordy, if you can’t explain to me what you’re doing here, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Okay.” The boy nodded. “Okay.” How hard it was to argue with someone when that person didn’t listen to you! Or did listen, but didn’t act on it. It was like being married.
“Gordy, please go home. You’re trespassing. You have to get off my property right now.”
“Okay.” He did not move. “What year is it?” He motioned again at the car with his thumb.
“The car?” Saul felt flustered. “It’s two years old.”
“Still shiny, though. You wash it in soapsuds?”
“That’s not the point.”
Gordy grinned at Saul, the grin of the torturer. Some sort of discoloration had applied itself down through the years to the boy’s teeth. They were rotting in a premature manner. “You must of just washed it, for it to look that clean. You must be proud of it.”
“Hey, Gordy,” Saul said. “I have a great idea. Let’s go for a ride. What d’you say? Let’s go for a ride in my car.”
“Where?”
“Oh, who cares. Let’s just go for a ride.”
“Know what this is?” Gordy reached in under the back of his trousers and pulled out a small shiny handgun, a revolver of some sort, one of the common ones, maybe a.22-caliber. He held it in his palm for Saul’s inspection. He grinned. Saul backed up two steps. He felt prickles on his skin and a sudden animal heat. He wanted to shout aloud at Patsy, to hide herself and Mary Esther. But silence for now might be better, less crisis-making.
“Well, it looks a lot like a gun,” Saul said quietly. Behind him, Mary Esther’s crying had ceased as suddenly as if a conductor had cued it to stop. Calm. Be calm. Saul thought that Patsy must be nursing the baby in the rocking chair upstairs, and he was counting the number of steps to the house and calculating how long it would take him to get there: about twenty-four running strides, approximately fifty seconds, much more time than the little metal duck in the shooting gallery had in its perilous journey from the right-hand side to the left. Saul imagined himself with a target painted on his chest, the same as the duck’s. The rest of Saul’s mind had gone haphazardly bare. He would protect his wife and child. But for now, he would not move. His entire life job was to stop this young man from creating harm. “What kind is it? Is it loaded?”
“That’s right,” Gordy said, suddenly serious. Then he gave himself a little squirrel-shake. “That’s right, it’s a gun. But, no, it ain’t loaded.” He raised it up to the sky and pulled the trigger again and again and again and again and again. After he lowered his arm, he looked directly at Saul. “You wouldn’t like me if I came here with a loaded gun. But, hey. You can shoot the sky all you want, Mr. Bernstein. I just thought I’d show it to you. I thought you’d be interested. You want it? Want to shoot the sky?” His eyebrows went up. “You can pretend to aim at the sun — you know, shoot it out?” He smiled his discolored toothy smile. “Then the earth would go dark.”
“No. Not now. Whose is it?” Saul asked. Somehow, as a survival trick, he felt he should keep Gordy talking. But the question seemed to flummox the boy. So Saul tried another question. “Why did you think I wanted to see it?”
“’Cause everybody wants to see a gun,” Gordy intoned with certainty. “Nobody don’t want to see a gun. A thing can’t get more important than a gun.”
“I agree with you there,” Saul said. Monitoring himself, he noticed how expert he was, how exemplary, at pretending to be calm, when in fact all he really felt was a certain variety of domesticated and internalized cancerous emotional riot. Patsy. Mary Esther. “Hey, Gordy, let’s go for a ride in the car, okay?”
“Okay, I guess. Don’t you need shoes?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Saul said. “I can drive barefoot. I’ve done it before.”
“You sure have a lot of hair on your arms,” Gordy said. “Hairiest man I ever saw. Is that Jew hair?”
“Sure is. Gordy, how about if we get into the car now, right this minute?”
“I was just askin’,” Gordy said, as patient as a turtle. “Okay, let’s do that.”
Gordy pocketed the gun, picked up the rusty bicycle at his feet, and sauntered toward the car. He loaded the bike into the backseat, where it dripped rust over the upholstery. After Saul got in and twisted the key, challenging the car to start, they drove out onto Whitefeather Road. Down the road, three-quarters of a mile away, the old town dump was being filled in. They were going to put a housing development there. Where would the rats go? It was a problem. You couldn’t shoot them all. Even the rats needed somewhere to stay.
Within another mile of the landfill, the farmland quickly morphed into cement and asphalt parking lots outside the Wolverine Outlet Mall and the Happy Village CinePlex 25 and the Bruckner Buick-Honda MotorMart, dominated by the grinning giant white plasticene Bruckner polar bear, an attention-getting device two stories high with its pawful of green plastic cash, an offering to passing motorists, and, floating above the bear but still tethered to it, the Bruckner MotorMart blimp — really just an outsized helium balloon — unmoving in the infernal morning heat. On clear days, the blimp, floating above the trees, was visible from Saul and Patsy’s bedroom window, although both Saul and Patsy tried to avoid looking at it. Now, behind the wheel, with Gordy next to him viewing the sights, the gun pocketed somewhere, Saul felt richly overloaded with anger and bad nerves, but at least he had Gordy in the car, far enough away from the house and from Patsy and Mary Esther so that the kid could do them no harm. He switched on the air conditioner, then remembered that the compressor wasn’t working. The Chevy was a lemon, but Saul was too fatalistic to do anything about its various debilities; and, besides, he identified with the car and its failings. Any car he owned would eventually fall to pieces, simply because he owned it.
It was so hot the sky was almost more white than blue. The sun had some real anger behind it today, a distinctive solar rage.
After opening the window, he saw up ahead a group of middle school girls standing out on the side of the road, waving their arms toward a side drive and holding up signs that said FREE CARWASH! He knew those girls: it was a money-making scheme for the ninth grade, the pretty ones, the Eloi, standing out on the road to attract attention, while the homely ones, the Morlocks, washed the cars and begged for gratuities. It all felt posthumous to him, this morning spectacle, as if Gordy had loaded the pistol and shot him and Saul was driving toward the afterlife, which would be about fifteen miles out of town in a strip mall bordering a dairy farm.