Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

Shelter

COOPER HAD STOPPED at a red light on his way to work and was adjusting the dial on his radio when he looked up and saw a man in a filthy brown corduroy suit and a three-day growth of beard staring in through the front windshield and picking with his fingernails at Cooper’s windshield wiper. Whenever Cooper had seen this man before, on various Ann Arbor street corners, he had felt a wave of uneasiness and unpleasant compassion. Rolling down the window and leaning out, Cooper said, “Wait a minute there. Just wait a minute. If you get out of this intersection and over to that sidewalk, I’ll be with you in a minute”—the man stared at him—“I’ll have something for you.”

Cooper parked his car at a meter two blocks up, and when he returned, the man in the corduroy suit was standing under a silver maple tree, rubbing his back against the bark.

“Didn’t think you’d come back,” the man said, glancing at Cooper. His hair fell over the top of his head in every direction.

“How do you do?” Cooper held his hand out, but the man — who seemed rather old, close up — didn’t take it. “I’m Cooper.” The man smelled of everything, a bit like a municipal dump. Cooper tried not to notice it.

“It doesn’t matter who I am,” the man said, standing unsteadily. “I don’t care who I am. It’s not worth anybody thinking about it.” He looked up at the sky and began to pick at his coat sleeve.

“What’s your name?” Cooper asked softly. “Tell me your name, please.”

The old man’s expression changed. He stared at the blue sky, perfectly empty of clouds, and after a moment said, “My mother used to call me James.”

“Good. Well, then, how do you do, James?” The man looked dubiously at his own hand, then reached over and shook. “Would you like something to eat?”

“I like sandwiches,” the man said.

“Well, then,” Cooper said, “that’s what we’ll get you.”

As they went down the sidewalk, the man stumbled into the side of a bench at a bus stop and almost tripped over a fire hydrant. He had a splay-footed walk, as if one of his legs had once been broken. Cooper began to pilot him by touching him on his back.

“Would you like to hear a bit of the Gospels?” the man asked.

“All right. Sure.”

He stopped and held on to a light pole. “This is the fourth book of the Gospels. Jesus is speaking. He says, ‘I will not leave you desolate; I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me; because I live, you will live also.’ That’s from John,” the man said. They were outside the Ann Arbor Diner, a neon-and-chrome Art Deco hamburger joint three blocks down from the university campus. “There’s more,” the old man said, “but I don’t remember it.”

“Wait here,” Cooper said. “I’m going to get you a sandwich.”

The man was looking uncertainly at his lapel, fingering a funguslike spot.

“James!” Cooper said loudly. “Promise me you won’t go away!”

The man nodded.

When Cooper came out again with a bag of french fries, a carton of milk, and a hamburger, the man had moved down the street and was leaning against the plate-glass window of a seafood restaurant with his hands covering his face. “James!” Cooper said. “Here’s your meal.” He held out the bag.

“Thank you.” When the man removed his hands from his face, Cooper saw in his eyes a moment of complete lucidity and sanity, a glance that took in the street and himself, made a judgment about them all, and quickly withdrew from any engagement with them. He took the hamburger out of its wrapping, studied it for a moment, and then bit into it. As he ate, he gazed toward the horizon.

“I have to go to work now,” Cooper said.

The man glanced at him, nodded again, and turned his face away.

“What are we going to do?” Cooper said to his wife. They were lying in bed at sunrise, when they liked to talk. His hand was on her thigh and was caressing it absently and familiarly. “What are we going to do about these characters? They’re on the street corners. Every month there are more of them. Kids, men, women, everybody. It’s a horde. They’re sleeping in the arcade, and they’re pushing those terrible grocery carts around with all their worldly belongings, and it makes me nuts to watch them. I don’t know what I’m going to do, Christine, but whatever it is, I have to do it.” With his other hand, he rubbed his eyes. “I dream about them.”

“You’re such a good person,” she said sleepily. Her hand brushed over him. “I’ve noticed that about you.”

“No, that’s wrong,” Cooper said. “This has nothing to do with good. Virtue doesn’t interest me. What this is about is not feeling crazy when I see those people.”

“So what’s your plan?”

He rose halfway out of bed and looked out the back window at the tree house he had started for Alexander, their seven-year-old. Dawn was breaking, and the light came in through the slats of the blinds and fell in strips over him.

When he didn’t say anything, she said, “I was just thinking. When I first met you, before you dropped out of law school, you always used to have your shirts laundered, with starch, and I remember the neat creases in your trouser legs, from somebody ironing them. You smelled of aftershave in those days. Sexually, you were ambitious. You took notes slowly. Fastidious penmanship. I like you better now.”

“I remember,” he said. “It was a lecture on proximate cause.”

“No,” she said. “It was contribution and indemnification.”

“Whatever.”

He took her hand and led her to the bathroom. Every morning Cooper and his wife showered together. He called it soul-showering. He had picked up the phrase from a previous girlfriend, though he had never told Christine that. Cooper had told his wife that by the time they were thirty they would probably not want to do this anymore, but they were both now thirty-one, and she still seemed to like it.

Under the sputter of the water, Christine brushed some soap out of her eyes and said, “Cooper, were you ever a street person?”

“No.”

“Smoke a lot of dope in high school?”

“No.”

“I bet you drank a lot once.” She was an assistant prosecutor in the district attorney’s office and sometimes brought her professional habits home. “You tapped kegs and lay out on the lawns and howled at the sorority girls.”

“Sometimes I did that,” he said. He was soaping her back. She had wide, flaring shoulders from all the swimming she had done, and the soap and water flowed down toward her waist in a pattern of V’s. “I did all those things,” he said, “but I never became that kind of person. What’s your point?”

She turned around and faced him, the full display of her smile. “I think you’re a latent vagrant,” she said.

“But I’m not,” he said. “I’m here. I have a job. This is where I am. I’m a father. How can you say that?”

“Do I love you?” she asked, water pouring over her face. “Stay with me.”

“Well, sure,” he said. “That’s my plan.”

The second one he decided to do something about was standing out of the hot summer sun in the shade of a large catalpa tree near a corner newsstand. This one was holding what seemed to be a laundry sack with the words AMERICAN LINEN SUPPLY stenciled on it. She was wearing light summer clothes — a Hawaiian shirt showing a palm tree against a bloody splash of sunset, and a pair of light cotton trousers, and red Converse tennis shoes — and she stood reading a paperback, beads of sweat falling off her face onto the pages.

This time Cooper went first to a fast-food restaurant, bought the hamburger, french fries, and milk, and then came back.

“I brought something for you,” Cooper said, walking to the reading woman. “I brought you some lunch.” He held out a bag. “I’ve seen you out here on the streets many times.”

“Thank you,” the woman said, taking the bag. She opened it, looked inside, and sniffed appreciatively.

“Are you homeless?” Cooper asked.

“They have a place where you can go,” the woman said. She put down the bag and looked at Cooper. “My name’s Estelle,” she said. “But we don’t have to talk.”

“Oh, that’s all right. If you want. Where’s this shelter?”

“Over there.” The woman gestured with a french fry she had picked out. She lifted the bag and began to eat. Cooper looked down at the book and saw that it was in a foreign language. The cover had fallen off. He asked her about it.

“Oh, that?” she said. She spoke with her mouth full of food, and Cooper felt a moment of superiority about her bad manners. “It’s about women — what happens to women in this world. It’s in French. I used to be Canadian. My mother taught me French.”

Cooper stood uncomfortably. He took a key ring out of his pocket and twirled it around his index finger. “So what happens to women in this world?”

“What doesn’t?” the woman said. “Everything happens. It’s terrible but sometimes it’s all right, and, besides, you get used to it.”

“You seem so normal,” Cooper said. “How come you’re out here?”

The woman straightened up and looked at him. “My mind’s not quite right,” she said, scratching an eyelid. “Mostly it is but sometimes it isn’t. They messed up my medication and one thing led to another and here I am. I’m not complaining. I don’t have a bad life.”

Cooper wanted to say that she did have a bad life, but stopped himself.

“If you want to help people,” the woman said, “you should go to the shelter. They need volunteers. People to clean up. You could get rid of your guilt over there, mopping the floors.”

“What guilt?” he asked.

“All men are guilty,” she said. She was chewing but had put her bag of food on the ground and was staring hard and directly into Cooper’s face. He turned toward the street. When he looked at the cars, everyone heading somewhere with a kind of fierce intentionality, braking hard at red lights and peeling rubber at the green, he felt as though he had been pushed out of his own life.

“You’re still here,” the woman said. “What do you want?”

“I was about to leave.” He was surprised by how rude she was.

“I don’t think you’ve ever seen the Rocky Mountains or even the Swiss Alps, for that matter,” the woman said, bending down to inspect something close to the sidewalk.

“No, you’re right. I haven’t traveled much.”

“We’re not going to kiss, if that’s what you think,” the woman said, still bent over. Now she straightened up again, glanced at him, and looked away.

“No,” Cooper said. “I just wanted to give you a meal.”

“Yes, thank you,” the woman said. “And now you have to go.”

“I was … I was going to go.”

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” the woman said. “It’s nothing against you personally, but talking to men just tires me out terribly and drains me of all my strength. Thank you very much, and good-bye.” She sat down again and opened up her paperback. She took some more french fries out of the sack and began to eat as she read.

“They’re polite,” Cooper said, lying next to his wife. “They’re polite, but they aren’t nice.”

“Nice? Nice? Jesus, Cooper, I prosecute rapists! Why should they be nice? They’d be crazy to be nice. Who cares about nice except you? This is the 1980s, Cooper. Get real.”

He rolled over in bed and put his hand on her hip. “All right,” he said.

They lay together for a while, listening to Alexander snoring in his bedroom across the hall.

“I can’t sleep, Cooper,” she said. “Tell me a story.”

“Which one tonight?” Cooper was a good improviser of stories to help his wife relax and doze off. “Hannah, the snoopy cleaning woman?”

“No,” Christine said. “I’m tired of Hannah.”

“The adventures of Roderick, insurance adjuster?”

“I’m sick of him, too.”

“How about another boring day in Paradise?”

“Yeah. Do that.”

For the next twenty minutes, Cooper described the beauty and tedium of Paradise — the perfect rainfalls, the parks with roped-off grassy areas, the sideshows and hot-air-balloon rides, the soufflés that never fell — and in twenty minutes, Christine was asleep, her fingers touching him. He was aroused. “Christine?” he whispered. But she was sleeping.

The next morning, as Cooper worked at his baker’s bench, rolling chocolate-almond croissants, he decided that he would check out the shelter in the afternoon to see if they needed any help. He looked up from his hands, with a trace of dough and sugar under the fingernails, over toward his boss, Gilbert, who was brewing coffee and humming along to some Coltrane coming out of his old radio perched on top of the mixer. Cooper loved the bakery where he worked. He loved the smell and everything they made there. He had noticed that bread made people unusually happy. Customers closed their eyes when they ate Cooper’s doughnuts and croissants and Danishes. He looked up toward the skylight and saw that the sky had turned from pale blue to dark blue, what the Crayola 64 box called blue-indigo. He could tell from the tint of the sky that it was seven o’clock, time to unlock the front doors to let in the first of the customers. After Gilbert turned the key and the mechanics from down the street shuffled in to get their morning doughnuts and coffee in Styrofoam cups, Cooper stood behind the counter in his whites and watched their faces, the slow private smiles that always registered when they first caught the scent of the baked dough and the sugared fruit.

The shelter was in a downtown furniture store that had gone out of business during the recession of ’79. To provide some privacy, the first volunteers had covered over the front plate-glass window with long strips of paper from giant rolls, with the result that during the daytime the light inside was colored an unusual tint, somewhere between orange and off-white. As soon as he volunteered, he was asked to do odd jobs. He first went to work in the evening ladling out food — stew, usually, with ice-cream-scoop mounds of mashed potatoes.

The director of the shelter was a brisk and slightly overweight woman named Marilyn Adams, who, though tough and efficient, seemed vaguely annoyed about everything. Cooper liked her officious irritability. He didn’t want any baths of feeling in this place.

Around five o’clock on a Thursday afternoon — the bakery closed at four — Cooper was making beds near the front window when he heard a voice from behind him. “Hey,” the voice said. “I want to get in here.”

Cooper turned around. He saw the reddest person he had ever laid eyes on: the young man’s hair was red, his face flamed with sunburn and freckles, and, as if to accentuate his skin and hair tone, he was wearing a bright pink Roxy Music T-shirt. He was standing near the window, with the light behind him, and all Cooper could see of him was a still, flat expression and deeply watchful eyes. When he turned, he had the concentrated otherworldliness of figures in religious paintings.

Cooper told the young man about the shelter’s regulations and told him which bed he could have. The young man — he seemed almost a boy — stood listening, his right foot thumping against the floor and his right hand shaking in the air as if he were trying to get water off it. When the young man nodded, his head went up and down too fast, and Cooper thought he was being ironic. “Who are you?” he finally asked. “My name’s Cooper.”

“Billy Bell,” the young man said. “That’s a real weird name, isn’t it?” He shook his head but didn’t look at Cooper or wait for him to agree or disagree. “My mother threw me out last week. Why shouldn’t she? She thought I was doing drugs. I wasn’t doing drugs. Drugs are so boring. Look at those awful capitalist lizards using them and you’ll know what I mean. But I was a problem. She was right. She had to get on my case. She decided to throw me away for a while. Trash trash. So I’ve been sleeping in alleys and benches and I slept for a couple of nights in the Arboretum, but there are too many mosquitoes this time of year for that and I’ve got bites. I was living with a girl but all my desires left me. You live here, Cooper? You homeless yourself, or what?”

“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 water from his face dripping onto the seat, Billy said, “That’s a good feeling, Cooper. You should try it. You wash your face in the flowing water and then you hear the cries of the birds. I’d like to think it makes me a new man but I know it doesn’t. How old are you, Cooper?”

“I’m thirty-one.”

“Seven years older than me. And what did you say you did?”

“I’ll show you.”

He drove Billy to the bakery and parked in the back alley. It was getting close to twilight. After Cooper had unlocked the back door, Billy walked into the dark bakery kitchen and began to sniff. “I like this place,” he said. “I like it very much.” He shook some invisible water off his hand, then ran his finger along the bench. “What’s this made of?”

“Hardrock maple. It’s like the wood they use in bowling alleys. Hardest wood there is. You can’t dent it or break it. Look up.”

Billy twisted backward. “A skylight,” he said. “Cooper, your life is on the very top of the eggshell. You have grain from the earth and you have the sky overhead. Ever been broken into?”

“No.”

Cooper looked at Billy and saw, returning to him, a steady gaze made out of the watchful and flat expression he had first seen on the young man’s face when he had met him a few hours before. “No,” he repeated, “never have.” He felt, suddenly, that he had embarked all at once on a series of misjudgments. “What did your father do, Billy?”

“He was a surgeon,” Billy said. “He did surgery on people.”

They stood and studied each other in the dark bakery for a moment.

“We’ll go one more place,” Cooper said. “I’ll get you a beer. Then I have to take you back to the shelter.”

Cooper’s dog, Hugo, came out through the backyard and jumped up on him as he got out of his car. A load of wash, mostly Alexander’s shirts, flapped on the clothesline in the evening breeze. Cooper heard children calling from down the street.

“Here we are,” Cooper said. “We’ll go in through this door.”

Inside the house, Christine was sitting at the dining-room table with two legal pads set up in front of her and a briefcase down by the floor. Behind her, in the living room, Alexander was lying on the floor in front of the TV set, his chin cupped in his hands. He was watching a Detroit Tigers game. They both looked up when Cooper knocked on the kitchen doorframe and came into the hallway, followed by Billy, whose hands were in his pockets and who nodded as he walked.

“Christine,” Cooper said. “This is Billy. I met him at the shelter.” Billy walked quickly around the table and shook Christine’s hand. “I brought him here for a beer.”

Christine did not change her posture. Behind a smile, she gave Billy a hard look. “Hello,” she said. “And welcome, I guess.”

“Thank you,” Billy said. Cooper went out to the kitchen, opened a beer, and brought it back to him. Billy looked at the bottle, then took a long swig from it. After wiping his mouth, he said, “Well, my goodness. I certainly never expected to be here in your home tonight.”

“Well, we didn’t expect you, either, Mr. — ?”

“Bell,” Billy said. “Billy Bell.”

“We didn’t expect you, either, Mr. Bell. You’re lucky. My husband never does this.” She looked now at Cooper. “He never never does this.”

Cooper pointed toward the living room. “Billy, that’s Alexander over there. He’s in the Alan Trammell fan club. I guess you can tell.”

Alexander turned around, looked at Billy, and said, “Hi,” waving quickly. Billy returned the greeting, but Alexander had already returned to the TV set, now showing a commercial for shaving cream.

“So, Mr. Bell,” Christine said. “What brings you to Ann Arbor?”

“Oh, I’ve always lived here,” Billy said. “Graduated from Pioneer High and everything.” He began a little jumping motion, then quelled it. “How about you?”

“Oh, not me,” Christine said. “I’m from Dayton, Ohio. I came here to law school. That’s where I met Cooper.”

“I thought he was a baker.”

“He is now. He dropped out of law school.”

“You didn’t drop out?” Billy glanced at Christine’s legal pads. “You became a lawyer?”

“I became a prosecutor, yes, that’s right. In the district attorney’s office. That’s what I do.”

“Do you like it?” Cooper thought Billy was about to explode in some way; he was getting redder and redder.

“Oh, yes,” Christine said. “I like it very much.”

“Why?”

“Why?” She touched her face and her smile faded. “I came from a family of bullies, Mr. Bell. Three brothers. They tied me up and played tricks on me, and they did this for years. Little-boy criminals. Every promise they made to me, they broke. Then I discovered the law, when I grew up. It’s about limits and enforced regulation and binding agreements. It’s a net of words, Mr. Bell. Legal formulas for proscribing behavior. That’s what the law is. Now I have a career of putting promise-breakers behind bars. That makes me happy. What makes you happy, Mr. Bell?”

Billy hopped once, then leaned against the counter. “I didn’t have any dreams until today,” he said, “but now I do, seeing your cute house and your cute family. Here’s what I’d like to do. I want to be just like all of you. I’d put on a chef’s hat and stand outside in my apron like one of those assholes you see in the Sunday magazine section with a spatula in his hand, and, like, I’ll be flipping hamburgers and telling my kids to keep their hands out of the chive dip and go run in the sprinkler or do some shit like that. I’ll belong to do-good groups like Save the Rainforests, and I’ll ask my wife how she likes her meat, rare or well done, and she’ll say well done with that pretty smile she has, and that’s how I’ll do it. A wonderful fucking barbecue, this is, with folding aluminum chairs and paper plates and ketchup all over the goddamn place. Oceans of vodka and floods of beer. Oh, and we’ve sprayed the yard with that big spray that kills anything that moves, and all the flies and mosquitoes and bunnies are dead at our feet. Talk about the good life. That has got to be it.”

Alexander had turned around and was staring at Billy, and Christine’s face had become masklike and rigid. “Finish your beer, Mr. Bell,” she said. “I think you absolutely have to go now. Don’t let’s waste another minute. Finish the beer and back you go.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding and grinning.

“I suppose you think what you just said was funny,” Cooper said, from where he was standing in the back of the kitchen.

“No,” Billy said. “I can’t be funny. I’ve tried often. It doesn’t work. No gift for that.”

“Have you been in prison, Mr. Bell?” Christine asked, looking down at her legal pad and writing something there.

“No,” Billy said. “I have not.”

“Oh good,” Christine said. “I was afraid maybe you had been.”

“Do you think that’s what will become of me?” Billy asked. His voice had lowered from its previous manic delivery and become soft.

“Oh, who knows?” Christine said, running her hand through her hair. “It could happen, or maybe not.”

“Because I think my life is out of my hands,” Billy said. “I just don’t think I have control over it any longer.”

“Back you go,” Christine said. “Good-bye. Fare thee well.”

“Thank you,” Billy said. “That was a nice blessing. And thank you for the beer. Good-bye, Alexander. It was nice meeting you.”

“Nice to meet you,” the boy said from the floor.

“Let’s go,” Cooper said, picking at Billy’s elbow.

“Back I go,” Billy said. “Fare thee well, Billy, good-bye and Godspeed. So long, Mr. Human Garbage. Okay, all right, yes, now I’m gone.” He did a quick walk through the kitchen and let the screen door slam behind him. Christine gave Cooper a look, which he knew meant that she was preparing a speech for him, and then he followed Billy out to the car.

On the way to the shelter, Billy slouched down on the passenger side. He said nothing for five minutes. Then he said, “I noticed something about your house, Cooper. I noticed that in the kitchen there were all these glasses and cups and jars out on the counter, and the jars weren’t labeled, not the way they usually label them, and so I looked inside one of them, one of those jars, and you know what I saw? I suppose you must know, because it’s your kitchen.”

“What?” Cooper asked.

“Pain,” Billy said, looking straight ahead and nodding. “That jar was full of pain. I had to close the lid over it immediately. Now tell me something, because I don’t have the answer to it. Why does a man like you, a baker, have a jar full of pain in his kitchen? Can you explain that?”

Out through the front windows, Cooper saw the reassuring lights of the city, the lamplights shining out through the front windows, and the streetlights beginning to go on. A few children were playing on the sidewalks, hopscotch and tag, and in the sky a vapor trail from a jet was beginning to dissolve into orange wisps. What was the price one paid for loving one’s own life? He felt a tenderness toward existence and toward his own life, and felt guilty for that.

At the shelter, he let Billy out without saying good night. He watched the young man do his hop-and-skip walk toward the front door; then he put the car into gear and drove home. As he expected, Christine was waiting up for him and gave him a lecture, in bed, about guilty liberalism and bringing the slime element into your own home.

“That’s an exaggeration,” Cooper said. He was lying on his side of the bed, his hip touching hers. “That’s not what he was. I’m not wrong. I’m not.” He felt her lips descending over him and remembered how she always thought that his failures in judgment made him sensual.

Two days later he arrived at work before dawn and found Gilbert standing motionless in front of Cooper’s own baker’s bench. Cooper closed the door behind him and said, “Hey, Gilbert.”

“It’s all right,” Gilbert said. “I already called the cops.”

“What?”

Gilbert pointed. On the wood table were hundreds of pieces of broken glass from the scattered skylight in a slice-of-pie pattern, and, over the glass, a circle of dried blood the width of a teacup. Smaller dots of blood, like afterthoughts, were scattered around the bench and led across the floor to the cash register, which had been jimmied open. Cooper felt himself looking up. A bird of a type he couldn’t identify was perched on the broken skylight.

“Two hundred dollars,” Gilbert said, overpronouncing the words. “Somewhere somebody’s all cut up for a lousy two hundred dollars. I’d give the son of a bitch a hundred not to break in, if he’d asked. But you know what I really mind?”

“The blood,” Cooper said.

“Bingo.” Gilbert nodded, as he coughed. “I hate the idea of this guy’s blood in my kitchen, on the floor, on the table and over there in the mixing pans. I really hate it. A bakery. What a fucking stupid place to break into.”

“I told you so,” Christine said, washing Cooper’s face. Then she turned him around and ran the soapy washcloth down his back and over his buttocks.

August. Three days before Christine’s birthday. Cooper and his son were walking down Main Street toward a store called the Peaceable Kingdom to get Christine a present, a small stuffed pheasant that Alexander had had his eye on for many months. Alexander’s hand was in Cooper’s as they crossed at the corner, after waiting for the WALK sign to go on. Alexander had been asking Cooper for an exact definition of trolls, and how they differ from ghouls. And what, he wanted to know, what exactly is a goblin, and how are they born? In forests? Can they be born anywhere, like trolls?

Up ahead, squatting against the window of a sporting-goods store, was the man perpetually dressed in the filthy brown corduroy suit: James. His hands were woven together at his forehead, thumbs at temples, to shade his eyes against the sun. As Cooper and his son passed by, James spoke up. He did not ask for money. He said, “Hello, Cooper.”

“Hello, James,” Cooper said.

“Is this your boy?” He pulled his hands apart and pointed at Alexander.

“Yes.”

“Daddy,” Alexander said, tugging at his father’s hand.

“A fine boy,” James said, squinting. “Looks a bit like you.” The old man smelled as he had before: like a city dump, like everything.

“Thank you,” Cooper said, beaming. “He’s a handsome boy, isn’t he?”

“Indeed,” James said. “Would you like to hear a bit of the Gospels?”

“No, thank you, James,” Cooper said. “We’re on our way to get this young man’s mother a birthday present.”

“Well, I won’t keep you,” the old man said.

As Cooper reached for his wallet, Alexander suddenly spoke: “Daddy, don’t.”

“What?”

“Don’t give him any money,” the boy said.

“Why not?”

Alexander couldn’t say. He began to shake his head, looking at James, then at his father. He backed away, down the sidewalk, his lower lip beginning to stick out and his eyes starting to grow wet.

“Here, James,” Cooper said, watching his son, who had retreated down the block and was hiding in the doorway of a hardware store. He handed the old man five dollars.

“Bless you,” James said. “And bless Jesus.” He put the money in his pocket, then placed his hands together in front of his chest, lowered himself to his knees, and began to pray.

“Good-bye, James,” Cooper said. With his eyes closed, James nodded. Cooper ran down the block to catch up with his son.

After Alexander had finished crying, he told his father that he was afraid — afraid that he was going to bring that dirty man home, the way he did with the red-haired guy, and let him stay, maybe in the basement, in the extra room.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Cooper said. “Really. I wouldn’t do that.”

“Wouldn’t you?” his wife asked, that night, in bed. “Wouldn’t you? I think you might.”

“No. Not home. Not again.”

But he had been accused, and he rose up and walked down the hall to his son’s room. The house was theirs, no one else’s; his footsteps were the only audible ones. In Alexander’s room, in the dim illumination spread by the Swiss-chalet night-light, Cooper saw his son’s model airplanes and the posters of his baseball heroes, but in looking around the room, he felt that something was missing. He glanced again at his son’s dresser. The piggy bank, stuffed with pennies, was gone.

He’s frightened of my charity, Cooper thought, looking under the bed and seeing the piggy bank there, next to Alexander’s favorite softball.

Cooper returned to bed. “He’s hidden his money from me,” he said.

“They do that, you know,” Christine said. “And they go on doing that.”

“You can’t sleep,” Cooper said, touching his wife.

“No,” she said. “But it’s all right.”

“I can’t tell you about Paradise,” Cooper told her. “I gave you all the stories I knew.”

“Well, what do you want?” she asked.

He put his hands over hers. “Shelter me,” he said.

“Oh, Cooper,” she said. “Which way this time? Which way?”

To answer her, he rolled over, and, as quietly as he could, so as not to wake their son in the next room, he took her into his arms and held her there.