“Look at them,” Gordy said. “Dumb girls. They just spit on the cars they wash.”
At least the gun wasn’t loaded. Two of the girls watched him drive past, with Gordy on the passenger side. They waved with feigned cheerfulness until they saw Gordy, when their expressions were downgraded to surprise and alarm.
Thinking of the gun, Saul considered the prospects following his death. His chances weren’t good. There would be no harps in the afterlife, but instead long moralistic debriefing sessions in classrooms, during which he would have to explain himself and his quirks at length to some querulous Christian saint wearing sandals and a business suit and holding a clipboard. It would be like a substance-abuse clinic, with slogans and checklists and chores and trivial corrections, and a big sign over the main gate: WE WON, YOU LOST. There would be no unconditional forgiveness. Everything would be on a contingency basis. God’s anger would have to be placated with sacrificial offerings, starting with Saul’s irony, which Saul would have to throw away on the eternal spiritual fire, along with his skepticism and his interest in baseball and his Charlie Parker LPs. It would all have to go. The population of souls in Saul’s afterlife would have smiles on their faces, evangelical tent-show grins. Angels would be displaying their navel-less midriffs and grooming their wings with giant pearl combs. They would be dabbing their feet in the river of light. Saul didn’t want to die because the possibility of his having to join the God cult, following the expiration of his body, unnerved him. Perhaps they’d toss him in Limbo, a place full of cubicles and malfunctioning coffeemakers intended to break everyone of the caffeine habit, and of every other habit, for that matter. He would have to take lessons in sanctity and sincerity. There would be odious piety. There would be sensitivity training. They’d start calling him “Paul” instead of “Saul” and he wouldn’t be able to stand it. In Limbo, though, he’d have plenty of company: almost all of the Jews would be there, analyzing the situation. And, then, Patsy would appear on the scene, eventually. She would know how to handle whatever came up.
Unless Heaven happened to be run by Arabs. Perhaps Allah was actually in charge. If so, Saul’s goose was cooked.
“Hey,” Gordy said. “You’re driving to my house. Can I turn on the radio?”
“The FM doesn’t work. Only the AM.”
“Hey,” Gordy said, “this is a real shitty car.” He squirmed in his seat. “Looks ain’t everything. How come you never fix any of it?”
“How come you knocked down my beehives?”
“How come when I ask you a question, you ask me a question?”
“Who wants to know?” Saul asked. Gordy slouched down and put his hand over his face. They drove on in silence.
Saul had motored past Gordy Himmelman’s house on Strewwelpeter Street many times before, so he knew where it was, in a low-rent neighborhood of dying and spindly oak trees behind the parking lot of the new WaldChem processing plant, where as their new sideline they made genetically engineered dehydrated fruit, and when he got to where Gordy lived, some woman was outside smoking a cigarette and hammering at the broken wooden steps leading up to the front door. She wasn’t Gordy’s mother — it was Brenda Bagley, Gordy’s aunt, the waitress who worked in the Fleetwood. She was wearing a faded cotton housedress and sneakers, and when she stood up, she looked like an undersea creature.
Her face was disfigured by years of hard work and stupendous ugliness: her hair hung around her pockmarked cheeks like seaweed around a clam. Her hooded eyes were fatigued and suspicious and sullen; nothing done by human beings could surprise or please her. Behind where she was standing, the house, a white prefab with corrugated steel sides — the kind of house sought out by tornadoes — rested somewhat precariously on concrete blocks, a huge spiderweb satellite TV dish planted next to it on the lawn.
Brenda Bagley watched as Gordy pulled his bicycle out of the back of Saul’s car. Gordy wheeled the bike across the street, and Saul started to wave just before he saw Gordy’s aunt, whose voice was muffled, lift her left hand, the one with the cigarette, across her forehead. After another exchange — Saul couldn’t hear what they were saying — she reversed her grip on the hammer and hit Gordy twice in the face, hard, with the hammer’s wooden handle. She did it so fast, Saul could hardly see her hand moving. She did it like a virtuoso, practiced and instinctual. She did it with considerable force. She hauled back and brought her hand down in a familiar swift arc.
Gordy cried out. Then he fell to his knees and put his hands to his head at the scalp just above the ear. The woman reached back again with the hammer and then seemed to think better of striking the boy a third time. She leaned down, withdrew the gun from Gordy’s back pocket, and lumbered into the house with it. When she came out again, Gordy was making his way up to his feet, and the woman began to shout at him, and Gordy shouted back. They did it casually, as if they were used to the dailiness of violent quarreling.
Saul steered the Chevy over to the shoulder of the road, killed the engine, and hurriedly got out. He jogged across the street and approached the woman, who had by now returned to her work. Gordy was bleeding, a small rivulet of blood trickling down from a bruise near his left ear across his cheek, and he was wiping it with his dirty hand. More blood came oozing out from his scalp, soaking his hair. Then his cursing stopped. As Saul neared them, both the woman and Gordy stared at him, the woman still hammering as she stared, though Gordy had retreated backward toward the house, against which he leaned, holding the side of his bleeding head. Saul had no idea what he himself would say. He hadn’t been invited to this particular gathering. But there was always something to say if you could only think of it.
“Hello,” Saul said.
“You’re the teacher,” the woman said. From inside the home came the sound of a TV set singing and selling. Straightening up, she reached into the pocket of her dress, pulled out an unfiltered cigarette, and lit it. “The reading teacher. I remember you. We met. I sure heard enough about you from him. He says you don’t like him.”
“Saul Bernstein,” he said. “Yes, that’s right. I’m Gordy’s teacher. You and I have had a conference about him.” He paused, thinking about his role in all this. “Ms. Bagley, I was always available for more conferences if you wanted to talk to me. Anyway, he bicycled over to my house this morning, and so I just brought him back.”
“Oh, uh-huh,” the woman said. “Well, like I say, I’ve heard about you lately. Gordy’s been talking about you, now and then.” Saul waited for secondhand praise, but it did not come.
“I couldn’t help but notice. What did you hit him for just now?” Saul asked, nodding in Gordy’s direction. He felt it was best not to ask her how, as the boy’s aunt, she figured she had hitting rights over Gordy. He didn’t know how to do this sort of interview. He didn’t know how to talk to her.
“He needed hitting,” Brenda Bagley said, relying, like one of Tolstoy’s peasants, on simplicity and truth. “He can be a bad boy when he gets an idea into his head. Straw that broke the camel’s back and all that, with me being the camel, y’know.” She smiled briefly at Saul, not a camel but a lobster smile, all teeth and skull. It was horrifying. “I mean, do you think he should be carrying a gun around?”