Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

The Old Murderer

AN OLD MAN, a murderer, had moved in next door to Ellickson. The murderer appeared to be a gardener and student of history. Prison had seemingly turned him into a reader. Putting out spring-loaded traps for the moles, Ellickson would sometimes glance over and see his neighbor, the murderer, sprawled out on a patio recliner as he made his way through a lengthy biography of General Robert E. Lee. At other times he saw the murderer spreading bone ash at the base of his backyard lilacs. The murderer’s uncombed gray hair stood up in sprouts at the back and the sides of his head, and he would wave from time to time at Ellickson, who had delayed introducing himself. Ellickson would wave back halfheartedly. The murderer did not seem to care that he was being snubbed. He kept busy. Bags of topsoil weighed down the back of his rusting yellow truck. He unloaded them and carried them over to the garden beds. Ellickson liked the idea of having a murderer on the same street where he himself lived. A paroled murderer’s problems put his own into perspective.

Ellickson had been sober for forty-three and a half days, but he still had the shakes. Just filling the coffeepot required maximum concentration. If his concentration lapsed, the coffee grounds sprayed themselves all over the kitchen floor and had to be cleaned up with a whisk broom and a dustpan. Everything, even the drinking of tap water, called for discipline and tenacity.

All day Ellickson endured. The sun rattled violently in the sky. After the passing hours had presented their trials by fire and ice, he would go to bed feeling that his skin was layered with sandpaper. The post-alcohol world contained no welcoming surfaces, and the interiors of things did not bear much looking into, either. Although God might have supplied a solution, He was in a permanent sulk. A determined Christian, Ellickson had put his faith in the Almighty to get him through this episode and through the rest of his life, but God had declined the honor so far and was keeping up a chilly silence.

The world was glass, and Ellickson felt himself skittering over its surface.

Ellickson, drunk, had lashed out at his family one night and done something unforgivable. Nightfall had always brought his devils out. His wife had therefore taken the two kids, Alex and Barbara, and had driven 150 miles to her mother’s. His family hated him now for good reason, and although he could live with his wife’s hatred — he was sort of used to it — he couldn’t bear the idea that he had become a monster to his children. Ellickson’s shame felt so intense that when he contemplated his actions, he groaned aloud.

Patiently and without hope, he went to the twelve-step meetings.

He had maintained the drinking for years in a careful program of adjustments and stealth. His job as a supervisor of hospital cleaning personnel had been so undemanding that he could work steadily under the influence and no one ever noticed. Drunk before breakfast, his mind regulated by alcohol, he’d been as steady as a bronze statue. The vodka had kept his breath clean and his hands strong. Now that he was sober, no one seemed to like him anymore, and his judgment flew away from him in little clouds. The real Ellickson, without the gleaming varnish of the booze, seemed to constitute an offense.

Desperate, unable to move, faced with the frightfulness and tedium of Saturday afternoon, he called his friend Lester, the ex-doctor.

“Lester,” he said, “I’m in trouble.”

“Hey, buddy. What sort of help d’you need? How’s the day so far?” Lester asked, blithely. The man’s usual speech was somewhat formal, but Lester was all right. He would cross a minefield without hesitation if you needed him to.

“I’m barely hanging on,” Ellickson said. “The sky’s falling again.”

“It does that. Yes?” He waited. “Go on.”

Ellickson tried to speak. But even speech seemed difficult. “It’s all creeping up, every bit of it. Do you know the word ‘heartsick’?” Ellickson waited for his next thought, and, on the other end of the line, Lester waited, too. “Boy, is that a good word. I’m glad we have that word. So, here’s the thing. I can’t do it anymore.” Ellickson knew that he did not have to define “it” to Lester. “I’m sitting in a chair and I can’t do it.”

“I can come over.” Lester had once been a surgeon — until drinking had led him ungently out of medicine. He couldn’t go back. Now he volunteered at a science museum, explaining the fossils to children. “Tell me what to do now. I can be over there in ten minutes. Say the word.”

“Maybe. No. It actually isn’t that. I just can’t live this way anymore.”

“No. That’s wrong, my friend. You can live any old way,” Lester said, “except drunk. We all can. Remember this will pass. Everything passes.” Then he said some of the usual admonitory phrases, complete with elaboration into belief and faith. They sounded correct but feeble at two thirty-six in the afternoon. “You can be proud of yourself. This is the hardest thing you’ve ever done in your life. We’re in this together, pal. People love you. Never doubt it.”

“Right, right. People. Ha. What people? The stars hate me. The moon hates me. The entire creation is opposed to my existence. What I need is a drink.”

“No, that’s what you don’t need. Ease up. What about the bus cure?”

The bus cure involved getting on a city bus and riding around until the urge to have a drink had passed. It only worked, however, if Ellickson took the number 13 route, which did not go down the streets where the bars were located. Also, he had to take a book or a newspaper along with him for the bus cure to work.

“I feel all the time as if …” Ellickson feared boring his friend and did not complete his sentence. “By the way. I haven’t told you: a murderer moved in next door.”

“What are you talking about?” Lester asked. “He’s murdering people now?” Lester laughed. Murder was easy compared to sobriety.

“No, no, he’s paroled or something. A lady up the street told me. I haven’t introduced myself to this guy yet.”

“Well, you should go do that.” Lester waited. “It’s Saturday afternoon. Go right over there. Tell the guy that you’re an alcoholic. Be up front about it. Provide a basis for friendship. He’s a murderer, and you’re a drunk. This friendship needs a basis to keep it solid, and you have one.”

“So okay. Maybe.”

“Not maybe,” Lester said firmly. “Definitely. Introduce yourself to the murderer.” He laughed at how upbeat the conversation had become. A murderer next door was good luck and great news. “Think of him,” Lester said, “as the next stop for your welcome wagon.”

Other murderers were probably somewhere in the city, but they weren’t in close proximity, at least that he knew about. Ellickson didn’t much care whether the murderer had paid his debt to society, because once you had committed a murder, you would always be a murderer. You would never be anything else. Nevertheless, Ellickson managed to get off the sofa. He went to the bathroom and combed his hair, hoping to look convivial. Then he strolled over to the murderer’s back patio, where his neighbor was pruning a rosebush with a pair of clippers.

“I was wondering when you’d get over here,” the old man said, straightening up and adjusting his glasses to take a look at Ellickson. “You’re not alarmed by my yardwork?” He laughed heartily, and his mouth showed uneven gray teeth with a prominent gap near the back. He wore a floppy blue hat, and a stained red handkerchief stuck out of his back pocket. “These roses are blighted.”

“No, I can’t say that I’m alarmed,” Ellickson said. “No, I can’t say that. Sorry I haven’t come over to introduce myself. I’ve just been through a spell of difficulties, that’s all.”

“Well, then,” the murderer said, “we’ve got something in common.” He slid off his gardening glove and extended his right hand, wincing as if his shoulder hurt him. “Name’s Macfadden Eward,” he said, shaking Ellickson’s hand. It sounded like a made-up name. “Call me Mac.”

“Eric Ellickson.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Ellickson.”

“Oh, no. Make it Eric.”

“First names? Fine. You know, in Germany,” the old man said, hawking and then spitting to the side of his rosebush, “they spend a lot of time negotiating with each other about whether they’ll use their first names. Before that, it’s always ‘Herr Ellickson’ and ‘Herr Eward.’ They believe in the formalities. Did you know that?”

“No,” Ellickson said. “I can’t say that I did.”

“Interesting country, Germany,” he said, bending over to rub his knee. “They have themselves quite a history. Well, now, I’d invite you into my house except I gotta tell you that my place isn’t shipshape just yet. The boxes won’t unpack themselves, you know what I mean?” The old man leaned back and roared with humorless laughter. All this laughing made Ellickson uneasy. Then Macfadden Eward’s laughter suddenly stopped, and he gazed solemnly at Ellickson as he pointed his pruning shears at him. “So you can’t come in.”

“Well,” said Ellickson, feeling somewhat off balance himself, “I wasn’t looking for an invite from you. In fact,” he said, realizing before the words came out of his mouth that he would now have to invite the murderer over to his house, “I wanted to see if you’d like some iced tea or a cool drink.”

“That I would, that I would,” Macfadden Eward said, “but not just this minute. It’s very kind of you to invite me, Mr. Ellickson. Maybe later. Tomorrow or the day after that.” He cut off another dead part of the bush with the clippers. “So I’ll just take a rain check, if you don’t mind.”

“I can’t offer you a drink,” Ellickson said quickly, remembering what Lester had told him to say. “I’m on the wagon, you know.” He tried to smile. “Can’t touch the stuff.”

“I didn’t know, but that’s fine,” the old man said, with a horsey smile, displaying his teeth again. “There’s some things I don’t do myself. I can drink, but I can see now that you can’t. But that particular discussion’ll have to wait until next time.” He smiled again and waved in the direction of his house. “One of these days, you can come down to my basement, and I’ll show you the spaceship I’m building down there.”

“A spaceship?”

“Shh.” The old man put his finger to his lips. “Mum’s the word.” Then he jabbed Ellickson in the ribs. “Maybe I’m kidding! Maybe there’s no spaceship!”

Ellickson returned to his house, uncertain about the nature of the conversation he had just had.

For his daughter, Barbara, Ellickson had been putting together a dollhouse, and now, for his son, Alex, he was writing a letter. He hadn’t been able to get past “My dear son” despite many attempts. It was as if his heart had suffered a blockage, and the language of feeling that other parents drew upon effortlessly had been denied him. He loved his son, but to say so in so many words seemed unthinkable. If you just put it like that, with the love right out on the table, the words would lack force. They would sound fatuous. Nothing would stand behind such a statement, especially after a father’s drunken misbehavior, and besides, the kid might be spoiled if you said it flat-out like that.

Ellickson felt that he had had to earn every single bit of love that he himself had ever received, and that if he hadn’t tried to satisfy everyone’s expectations for him, he would have been promptly thrown out into the street to die in the gutter like a dog. He still might suffer that fate. He sat at his desk, pen in hand, staring out the window at his neighbor, who was now putting in a bed of petunias.

“Fourteen years ago,” Ellickson finally wrote to his son, “I met your mother at a rock concert. Maybe we told you this story. We were standing together in the aisle of this big converted bus terminal downtown that had been turned into a club, and then we both started to dance at almost the same time, and before long, we introduced ourselves.” The place had been thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of weed, and the band, Town Dump, had only an approximate sense of how they should be playing, but somehow, despite their ineptitude, or because of it, the musicians lit up the audience, and Ellickson had found himself dancing with this beautiful young woman who had appeared magically in front of him. “Your mother,” Ellickson wrote, “was wearing a speckled-green T-shirt with a little pin on it, and plain blue jeans, and she was the prettiest woman who had ever looked me in the eye and taken me by the hand.” This confession was not quite the appropriate history for him to be laying out for his son, he realized, but he couldn’t think of what else to write, or what other route to take toward an apology. “I started to fall in love with your mother right there,” Ellickson wrote. “We talked for hours that following week.”

Ellickson had had many girlfriends and one ex-wife by that time. He was ready for love to strike. On their first real date, when he had taken the girl he had met at the rock concert out for a spaghetti dinner and a movie, he knew this one, this Laura, would be serious. “And then what happened, what really did it for me, was that your mom took me over to where she lived and played the guitar for me and sang a song she had written herself.” She had had a sweet voice. The song was about how things pass and how you have to reach for the moment. Ellickson had always carried a torch for women who raised their voices in song.

“What I’m saying is that I’m not a bad person. My dad used to take me deer hunting in the woods up north,” Ellickson continued, in a new paragraph, not wanting to write about how everything had gone wrong with Laura. The letter to his son was growing a bit disconnected, he knew, but this wasn’t an English composition, this was a soul statement. “When you’re older, I’ll take you deer hunting if you want to go up to the woods with me. I haven’t really done any hunting since you were born. I don’t know why that is. Maybe there hasn’t been time. I’m a pretty good shot, and I can teach you how to kill and dress a deer. We should go fishing, too, up north. Have you ever pulled in a fighting trout? It’s a great experience. I would love to do that with you.”

Ellickson watched his neighbor water his petunias. When he glanced at his watch, he saw that several hours had passed. A miracle. He had almost made it through another day. The phone rang.

“How’d it go?” Lester asked. “With the murderer? Did you talk to him?”

“It went pretty well,” Ellickson said. “He’s a little strange, though.”

“Well, he’s a murderer.”

“No,” Ellickson said. “It’s not that. It’s like he’s a master of ceremonies of some TV show that no one’s watching. He told me he’s building a spaceship in his basement. Then he said maybe he was just kidding about the spaceship.”

“A spaceship, huh? I know the feeling,” Lester said. “Did you tell him you’re an alcoholic?”

“Yeah,” Ellickson said. “I did that.”

“Good,” Lester said. “Next time you’re over there, check out the spaceship and then report back to me.”

That night, Ellickson went to his sister’s house for dinner. She lived with her partner, a sizable Russian immigrant woman named Irena, in a ramshackle colonial on the better side of town. He continued to get invitations from them, he believed, because he performed small electrical and plumbing repairs whenever he visited and because he had offered to be the godfather if they ever had children. Also, his sister never asked him about how he was, so he never had to explain.

Kate, his sister, met him at the door, her hand at her forehead and her face flushed. The smoke alarm at the back of the house was shrieking. “We’ve had a little disaster in the kitchen,” Kate told him. “A sort of disaster-ette. I was on the phone to the goddamn airline and they put me on hold and I burned the chicken. Well, come in.” In the back, the smoke detector wailed on and on, and the dog, Ludmilla, was barking straight up at it.

“Where’s Irena?”

“H-h-h-here I am.” Irena’s h-sounds came out of her throat in the Russian manner. They sounded like gargling. She appeared very suddenly from the living room and, in the entryway, took Ellickson’s face in both hands and kissed him on the cheeks, first the left, then the right, as if he were about to go off to a firing squad. Irena’s passion for everything, including Ellickson’s sister and himself as Kate’s brother, was disconcerting. Family feeling was fine, but hers seemed a bit excessive for the American context. She stood an inch taller than Ellickson, and he was terribly fond of her — everything about her was outsized, close to bursting, including her emotions. She had russet hair, large dimpled hands, and her breath always smelled heavily of peppermints, as if she herself were a piece of candy. He could see why Kate and Irena were a couple; anyone could see their complementary mixture of similarities and differences. “We have burned you the chicken,” Irena said happily. “This will be dinner, which you can eat after repairing upstairs, where a faucet leaks.” She pointed toward the second floor. “I have bought faucet washer at hardware store. Tools are already up there. Please do this?”

“Irena,” Ellickson said, “it’s a simple job. I could teach you how.” The smoke alarm was still screaming, and Kate was cursing it.

“I do not agree,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “As human being, I am uninterested in plumbing.” She gave him another kiss, then retreated in her house slippers to the back hallway and lugged in a stepladder. Ellickson watched her climb it and then yank the battery brutally out of the smoke detector, which fell silent. Well, Ellickson thought, why should she be interested in plumbing? She taught mathematics at a local college; her theoretical interests were so complex, having to do with the bending of topological surfaces in different dimensions, that they could not be explained to ordinary people like himself.

After Ellickson had fixed the dripping faucet, Kate and Irena sat him down at the dinner table, where they ate the edible parts of the burned chicken, along with veggie-everything pizza, which had just been delivered as the second course. Bent over the pizza, Irena picked up each slice with both hands, rammed it into her mouth, and chewed with her mouth full while Kate daintily cut her pieces with a fork and knife. Following the dinner, they played cards for a penny a point, and Ellickson won two dollars. The conversation mostly dealt with the weather and current political conditions. Personal matters were discreetly avoided. As he was about to leave, Ellickson said, “You know, I love you girls.”

Irena nodded. Kate lowered her eyes. “ ‘Women,’ ” she reminded her brother. “We are women.” This was their old familiar routine. “So.” She drew breath. “Has Laura called you?”

“No.”

“Have you called her?”

“I will. Just not yet.”

“Soon?”

“Not yet.” She looked at him. “Yes, I promise,” he said. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. A paroled murderer has moved in next door to me.”

“Is he nice?” Kate asked.

“I don’t know,” Ellickson told her. “I can’t tell yet. He works all day in his garden and then he disappears.”

“A murderer next door?” Irena said, putting away the deck of cards. “In Russia, this is not unusual.”

Eventually Macfadden Eward invited Ellickson into his house, where Ellickson found himself amid a welter of decaying furniture, chipped and dented Victorian relics, stained and soiled Salvation Army tables and chairs, lamps with three-masted schooners or seabirds painted on the lampshades. On the floor were odds and ends of kitchen gadgets, including a potato peeler and a coffee grinder still in their shipping boxes. Near the unwashed windows sat bookcases with sports memorabilia scattered on their shelves. Everything had been located and partitioned according to no visible plan in the living room and dining room. None of the dining-room chairs matched, and the big living-room easy chair sported dingy antimacassars and a red velvet cushion. The white lace curtains were clean but threadbare. A cheerful chaos dominated these interior spaces, a bachelor-apartment playroom clutter. His relatives had donated most of this stuff to him, the old man claimed. The rest of it he had bought secondhand.

That Saturday, he made Ellickson a lettuce-and-turkey sandwich and then put him to work helping him clean the gutters. It was a dirty job; goop stuck to Ellickson’s work gloves. The second time the old man invited him over, he asked Ellickson for aid in washing his pickup truck. “My back’s out today,” Macfadden Eward said. “So I can’t bend over with the hose and such.” Ellickson did the work and watched the soapsuds run toward the storm drain where, he imagined, they weren’t supposed to go. All over the city, the storm drains were painted with little outlines of fish, along with warnings: FLOWS TO RIVER. Well, what would the cops do? Revoke the old man’s parole because of soapsuds?

The third time he dropped by his neighbor’s house, Macfadden Eward told him that they had to go somewhere.

“Where?” Ellickson asked.

“That’s for me to know and for you to find out,” the old man said.

“Are you playing games with me?” Ellickson asked quietly. “Because if you’re playing games with me, go fuck yourself.” Along with the alcoholism, Ellickson had anger issues.

“Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean anything by it. My apologies.”

Ellickson got into the truck reluctantly. After starting the engine, the old man turned on the radio softly to the Twins baseball game. With the play-by-play serving as a soothing white-noise background, Macfadden Eward said, “How much you know about me? You know anything?”

“Not much,” Ellickson said. “Actually, no. Nothing.”

“Didn’t think so.” He opened his window and leaned his arm on the sill. “You’re okay, Ellickson. I like you all right. You don’t ask questions of me. I appreciate that. So let’s get one thing straight. I’ll tell you this once, but that’s it, and no details after I tell you because I don’t want to talk about it. All right?”

Ellickson shrugged.

“It’s part of my life I can’t get back.” He picked at his thumbnail. “It happened.”

Ellickson nodded.

“It was my wife, and it was twenty-five years ago, when I was still almost your age. Okay. She was younger than me. That’s a mistake, right there. She was a kid, real frisky, and she had a pretty face and a nice shape but a mean streak. She had a mouth on her. And she had the soul of a crocodile, that woman. She was reptilian. Reptiles shouldn’t drink, and we both liked to drink, speaking of alcohol. We’d go at it. No dignity about it whatsoever. We went to bars, and this one time on the way home she swerved and hit a tree. Cop comes to rescue us, EMI and what-have-you, and they do the breath tests, and on the spot my wife falls in love with the cop. Officer Wallace, a cop! Can you imagine such a thing? Maybe it was the uniform, maybe it was the holster or how he carried himself or the … I don’t know what it was. After all these years, I can’t say that I care. I don’t think about it. So after we settle the DUI charge with the court, later, she starts calling the cop and then … you know. Hoopla. He wasn’t married, just a young buck in a blue uniform. She and I had been hitched for five years. No kids. Between my wife and me, whose fault was that? Not mine, I guarantee. But anyway, she starts stepping out on me with this guy, a brawny type, so I can’t exactly take him down in a fistfight. When I ask her, finally, about what the hell she’s doing, a married woman, with her loverboy cop, she says, ‘I want to feel his testosterone between my legs.’ That’s a direct quote! ‘I want to feel his testosterone between my legs.’ Spare me honesty like that. What you have to understand is, I loved her. I really loved her. If I hadn’t loved her, I wouldn’t have shot her. And,” he added, “if I had it to do over again, I’d still do it.”

Ellickson nodded. “You could have shot the cop. I would have. By the way, where are we going?” he asked.

“Cops don’t like it when you kill their girlfriends. In prison,” the old man said, ignoring Ellickson’s question as if it were nonsensical, “I had time on my hands. The day stretches out. A week, ten weeks, who cares? A civilian can’t imagine. You just sit there. Your brain gets empty. You get empty. No one gives two fucks about you. And you have this big problem. The big problem is the days and hours you’re alone with your mind on idle. You don’t see the sky, and your mind races. You start to spook yourself up. Crazy stuff. You see the isles of madness, just over there. Ever seen them? The trees are all dead, and there’s caves. Archfiends wearing bow ties live in there. The mind is underemployed. It sits there and won’t quit. So I gave my mind a job.”

They were headed downtown, toward a seedy section. They passed a business called Toyland, with sex toys in the display window. “What job was that?” Ellickson asked.

“I needed to keep my dignity, you know? So I imagined a spaceship. Not like a movie spaceship, but something realistic, a real spaceship to take me away. Out of the world I was in. This world. See, the spaceship had to have rooms, it had to have hallways, it needed a shape. So I imagined the flight deck. I imagined the chairs and the seating, the exact kind of leather — Spanish, the best — then the compartments where people slept and ate. The dishes. The flatware. That sort of thing. I figured the materials, shape and quantity. This much aluminum, that much alloy. I designed the doorknobs. The computers, the readouts. I even imagined the jet engines, and I don’t know anything about jet engines, so I invented how it’d have to be done. I imagined a workable propulsion system. I had to. Everything required a design, even the bathrooms.” The murderer laughed his mirthless laugh. At that moment he did not seem to Ellickson ever to have been a kind man. All he had ever been was a maniac. “Those years I was behind bars, I built my spaceship in my mind, and more important, I built it in my heart.” He turned and looked directly at Ellickson, as he pulled into a parking space on the street. “When I was done, I named the spaceship.”

“What did you call it?” Ellickson asked.

“Yeah, I thought about the name for a long time. Finally I settled on one. I called it Queen Juliana.” Macfadden Eward smiled at the memory. “It was the name of someone I knew. It was a tribute to her. Now that I’m an old man, I don’t name things anymore.”

“What are we doing here?” Ellickson asked.

“I gotta talk to my parole officer,” the old man said, getting out of the truck. “I’ll be back in two shakes.” He crossed the street and entered a side door of a brick building that might have once been a warehouse. Upstairs, one lightbulb burned behind a cracked wire-mesh window. Ellickson doubted that a parole officer would work in such a place.

He opened the door of the murderer’s truck and stepped down onto the sidewalk. At the end of the block was a business with bars across the front windows. A sign across the front said MONTE CARLO in neon, and then, in smaller letters, A GENTLEMAN’S CLUB. Ellickson did not see any gentlemen going in or out, and for relief from the sight of the shabby shadow-creatures he did see, he glanced down the length of First Avenue.

What had happened to the downtown area? The city seemed to have been abandoned and appeared to be as unloved and uncared-for as the begrimed men going into the Monte Carlo. He eyed a corner telephone pole and saw a video camera aimed in his general direction. Full of exuberant good humor, he gave it the finger. A young woman with green hair and a pierced lower lip, and carrying a large backpack, approached him on the sidewalk and walked past him, gazing at him fearfully as if he were one of the feral gentlemen going into the Monte Carlo. Had he, Ellickson, turned into a person whom others feared? He had once thought of himself as a handsome, genial man who frightened nobody and attracted companionable attention. Soon people would make the sign of the cross upon seeing him to ensure their own safety.

A customer about Ellickson’s age, glancing over his shoulder, slunk into the gentleman’s club wearing a leering owlish expression behind thick glasses. He was followed by another scowling man with the general appearance of a Hells Angel: wide face, long hair and beard, strong but portly, black leather regalia, an expression of perpetual hostile evaluation as he surveyed the sidewalk. Inside, they would present their money to the dancers and be given a carefully choreographed imitation of reciprocal desire. They wouldn’t get any favors, nor would they expect any.

Where was the murderer? What was his real mission? The midday sun beat down on Ellickson, and suddenly, in the midst of this despoliation and desolation, he felt happy for no reason.

Continuing his letter to his son, Ellickson imagined some words that he intended to write down eventually. “You got to be tough in this life. They’ll come at you from everywhere. My dad, your grandfather, would knock me around to toughen me up. We once took a car trip to Monument Valley, and when we arrived there, he was so excited that he punched me in the stomach.” Ellickson flinched involuntarily, remembering how he had fallen to the ground after his father had said, “Come here, Eric,” and had hit him. In his father, as in some other men, joy expressed itself in high-spirited violence. “I guess I disappointed him. On the high-school football team, I was a wide receiver. I spent quite a bit of time on the bench, and my dad nicknamed me ‘Second-stringer’ after that.” He thought for a moment. “ ‘Stringer,’ as a nickname. I had to bear it. It’s too bad he died of lung cancer before you could meet him, I guess. When he was sick, he said he would be glad to die. ‘I’ll be among the happy dead,’ he told the nurses, and the nurses told me, and then he died.”

The old man came staggering out of the building. He had a disordered appearance, and his eyes didn’t seem to be focusing anywhere. Ellickson crossed the street and took hold of him.

“I don’t care what they say,” Macfadden Eward muttered. “Men and women are incompatible.”

“Come on,” Ellickson said, holding on to him and piloting him across the street to the truck. When they got there, Ellickson asked, “Can you drive?”

“I cannot,” the old man said. His breath smelled of clam sauce.

“What did they do to you in there?” Ellickson asked, opening the passenger-side door of the truck and easing the murderer inside. “Where were you? Was that another entrance to the gentleman’s club?”

“No,” Macfadden Eward said. “There weren’t any gentlemen in there.”

Ellickson realized that he had been tricked. “That wasn’t your parole officer you were meeting,” Ellickson said. “You lied to me.”

Macfadden Eward leaned back on the passenger side. He did not engage in any conversational effort. Behind the wheel, Ellickson started the truck and drove down First Avenue, past the former bus station where he had first met the mother of his children and then south toward his own neighborhood. On the passenger side of the truck, the old man’s mouth hung open, and his eyes were half shut as if in repose. Whenever the truck turned a corner, his head tilted to the side. This guy is just another piece of human debris, Ellickson thought, and then another thought hit him: And he’s all I have.

“Was that a drug deal?” Ellickson asked.

Macfadden Eward did not answer, but his eyes opened slightly. He was nodding off.

“I’m very far away,” the old man said in a slur. “You’re unimportant to me.”

“Come on,” Ellickson said. “Don’t bullshit me. I’m driving your truck. Was that a drug deal? A fix?”

“I … wouldn’t … describe … it … that … way.”

“How would you describe it?”

“Over and out,” the old man said. He shut his eyes, and his head lolled back.

When they reached the murderer’s house, Ellickson parked the man’s truck in his driveway, and, hurriedly, he opened the door on the passenger side and took the old man’s arm and threw it around his own neck in a fireman’s carry. Macfadden Eward grunted, and Ellickson took this as a good sign. He removed the old man from the truck and walked Eward down his own driveway out onto the sidewalk. The old man’s feet stumbled and shuffled beside Ellickson’s while his breath came in and went out in punchy oldster bursts. Ellickson headed down the street, the old man clinging to him, and he turned the corner to walk around the block, parading past the houses of all the neighbors.

“What’re we doin’?” the old man asked, waking up slightly from his nod.

“We’re walking it off,” Ellickson said. “In front of the neighbors.” They passed a house with a large front porch with a swing suspended from the ceiling; Ellickson thought of it as “the little girls’ house” because two little girls lived there with their parents, Republicans who put out lawn signs, and, sure enough, both girls were out on the porch with their rag dolls, their mother sitting in the swing reading a book, as Ellickson and the old man walked by. The girls looked at the two men, and Ellickson heard one of them asking her mother a question, and her mother answering in a low, lawyerly tone. They walked past the house of a widow, Mrs. Sherman, said to be a skinflint, who had told Ellickson about the murderer in the first place. They advanced in front of a duplex with a sharp peaked roof. Two young married couples lived there. Ellickson didn’t know who resided in the stucco Tudor beyond, but at the corner they turned again, and Ellickson and the old man stumbled past 1769 Caroline Street, where a boy was out front selling lemonade at a lemonade stand.

“I’d like some lemonade,” Ellickson said, fishing in his left pocket for some change.

The boy did not say anything. He looked frightened at the sorry spectacle that Ellickson and the old man, hanging on to Ellickson in a fireman’s carry, presented.

“Here,” Ellickson said, handing the boy two quarters. “We’d like some lemonade.” He waited for a moment. “My friend here is a little sleepy.” The boy poured pink lemonade with a shaky hand into a Dixie cup and handed it to Ellickson.

“This is for you, old-timer,” Ellickson said, reaching over and putting the paper cup to his lips.

“Stop that,” Macfadden Eward said with sudden lucid clarity, straightening up slightly and coming out of his stupor. He reached for the cup and took a drink with his left hand. When he had completed the task, he took his right arm from around Ellickson’s neck. He stood a bit unsteadily, then handed the Dixie cup back to the boy, who had still said nothing and whose eyebrow was trembling. “Nice day,” the old man said. “Can’t beat it with a stick.”

“Guess so,” the boy replied in a quaver.

Macfadden Eward threw back his shoulders and walked forward. Ellickson followed him. “I’m headed homeward,” he slurred to anyone in the vicinity. Then he fell to his knees and gazed at the ground. Ellickson hoisted him up again and walked him back to his house. He took the old man upstairs and deposited him, clothes and all, in the tub and turned the cold shower water on him. Macfadden Eward began to sputter. “What’s this? What’s this?” he shouted. “Turn that off!”

Ellickson returned to his own house. What had just happened made him feel fitfully justified in his own eyes. His neighbor would live, but someday he might overdose, and everyone would feel contempt for him, and if he didn’t OD, there was a good chance he would end up in the gutter that beckoned toward all single men, the gutter that Ellickson believed in more strongly than he did in his God.

At his sister’s house a few days later, Ellickson was repairing an overhead light fixture while Irena steadied the ladder and handed him the electrical tape and aimed the flashlight at the wiring.

“Have you called Laura? Your wife?” Irena asked.

“No.”

“And why not is this?”

“I can’t.”

“Why not, I ask again?”

He looked down at her. “Shame.”

“No. Stoltz,” she said. “In German. Not shame, but pride. In Russia, everyone is like you. Everyone is a shameful drunk full of pride. But they … manage. You must call Laura. I shall bully you. Like sister-in-law. Bully bully bully.” She nodded. “I am relentless. I am dictator.” When Ellickson looked down at her, he saw her grimly smiling Asiatic face, like Stalin’s.

The following weekend, Macfadden Eward arrived at Ellickson’s front door carrying an apple pie. He appeared to be loaded down with rage and spite. “Here, take this,” the old man said, shoving the pie in Ellickson’s general direction without a trace of generosity.

“Did you bake it yourself?” Ellickson asked.

“Of course not,” Macfadden Eward said. “I just bought the goddamn thing.” His glance took in Ellickson’s living room. “So, can I come in? You’ve never invited me in, you cheap bastard. I’ve been the one who’s had to show all the hospitality.”

“All right,” Ellickson said. “But you’re interrupting me. I’ve been writing a letter to my son.”

“Let’s hear it,” the murderer said, forcing his way past Ellickson, through the foyer, and into the living room. He sat down on Ellickson’s sofa. “It’s kind of a mess in here,” the man said, pointing at a newspaper on the floor. “So. Read me the letter.”

“It’s not for you, it’s for my son.”

“Try it out on me.”

“Don’t be a damn fool,” Ellickson said. “This is private.”

“Are you kidding? Nothing is private anymore,” Macfadden Eward said. “Not when you parade a disabled old man with diabetes in the street in front of his neighbors. Here. Take this apple pie.” He plopped it down next to where he was sitting on the sofa.

“When you came out of that place, you were in a—”

“Don’t say it,” the old man interrupted.

“Diabetes?” A silence followed.

“Well, maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t.” He made a rude noise with his mouth. “Let’s hear that letter. Otherwise, I’m going back home and I’ll go back to work on the spaceship.”

“To hell with your spaceship,” Ellickson said. “Fly to the moon, for all I care.”

“Just read me the letter. I need to hear it,” the murderer said. “I have to hear it right now.”

“No,” Ellickson said. “It’s not for you. I told you this already. I explained. This letter is for my boy.”

“All right, then,” the murderer said. “Tell me about your boy.”

“His name’s Alex.”

“Tell me about him. Be the proud poppa.”

“I can’t do that,” Ellickson said. Everything, traveling at sixty miles an hour, was about to hit him.

“Okay. Start with this: How old is he?”

“He’s ten.”

“Well, that’s a good age. Anyway, that’s what they tell me. Never had kids myself. Never was blessed with children.”

“Would you please leave me alone?” Ellickson asked.

“No. Tell me what’s going on. At least tell me what you did. Tell me why your family isn’t here with you.”

Ellickson began to weep. “Why should I tell you?” he asked, enraged. “You’re nothing.” Dead trees and caverns yawned open for him, and the devils in bow ties stood ready, and he couldn’t stop himself. The sobs broke out of him in a storm. “I was drunk,” he said. “And I … was angry at him. At Alex. My kid. I can’t even remember the reason. It can’t have been anything. And I … I don’t know why, but … I hit him.”

“You hit him,” the murderer repeated, sitting next to the gift apple pie. “What’s so bad about that? People sometimes hit their kids.”

“Not if they love them,” Ellickson said, still weeping. “I hit him in the face. With a book.”

The old man stood up, gazing at Ellickson. “Eric, you poor guy, you’re as bad off as I am,” he said. “Yes, after all. Thank you. I needed to hear that. I’ll be going now.”

Ellickson stared at the murderer’s back. “Go back to your spaceship. But I’m still sober! Goddamn it, I’m sober now! Sober and proud!”

“Look where it’s gotten you,” the old man said gently, letting the screen door slam.

Two days later, Ellickson called his mother-in-law’s so that he could talk to his wife, and Laura answered. “Laura? Honey, babe?” he began, speaking with his eyes shut and his hands shaking. “Don’t hang up, please? It’s me. We have to talk. Really, we have to talk. You know I’m sober now — you know that, don’t you? These days? And the effort it’s costing me? It’s all for you. I know you want to hang up—”

“I’m pregnant,” Laura said, interrupting him. “Can you believe that?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Ellickson said, “can’t you—”

“We should talk soon. But not now.”

She had broken the connection.

Ellickson put down the receiver and walked into the kitchen, where he removed a carton of orange juice from the refrigerator and poured a small glass for himself. He swished the orange juice around in his mouth as if it were mouthwash; then he swallowed it. Opening the refrigerator again, he did an inventory of its contents: eggs, milk, salad greens, English muffins, spreadable butter, strawberry jam, leftover chili, salad dressing, yogurt, biryani paste, and a bottle of root beer. The contents constituted the most hopeless array of objects the world had presented to him in some time, and he shut the door against it with a shudder. One of Alex’s drawings of a dinosaur and a vampire was still stuck with magnets to the refrigerator door.

He took two deep breaths before leaving the kitchen, exiting through the back, crossing the driveway, and knocking at the murderer’s front door. No one answered, Ellickson rang again, and still no one appeared. He tried the doorknob, and the door opened with a slight squeak. Ellickson entered the old man’s living room.

“Macfadden?” he called out. “Are you here? Mac?”

Ellickson walked into the kitchen. The phone was off the hook, as if the old man had gone to get something or had left in a hurry. Ellickson went down the back stairs to the basement. He wanted to see the spaceship.

Macfadden Eward sat in a reading chair next to a lamp, the history of Robert E. Lee in his lap. He was listening to music through headphones. “Oh,” he said, taking the earphones out, “it’s you.”

“I rang the bell.”

“Well, I didn’t hear it.” He waited. “I’m sorry. My hearing’s not so good.”

“The phone was off the hook.”

“Yes,” the old man said. “I don’t like to be bothered when I’m down here.”

“Where’s the spaceship?” Ellickson asked. “I don’t see any spaceship down here.”

“That’s because you’re not looking. I tell you what it is, Eric,” the murderer said, “and you should listen to me. When you’re in prison, you get used to prison. When you’re in the desert, you get used to the desert. You get interested in cactus, you know what I mean? And what I’m saying to you is, inside those four walls, I got used to the four walls. Sometimes I just can’t stand being upstairs and the daylight and everything that goes with daylight.” The ghost of a smile appeared on his face. “And that’s why I’m down here.”

“And the spaceship?”

“You’re in it,” Macfadden Eward said.

An hour later, Ellickson found himself back on the phone to his friend Lester. “Lester,” he said, “I think you need to come over here. Pronto. I’m in trouble again. I talked to my wife and I’m in serious trouble.”

“All right,” Lester said. “But I’m in the middle of something.”

“And could I ask you for a favor?” Ellickson asked. “Would you please bring your stethoscope?”

“It’s pretty rusty,” Lester told him. “I don’t practice medicine now, as you know.”

“Bring it anyway,” Ellickson said.

Fifteen minutes later, Lester pulled up in the driveway in his Buick. He came into Ellickson’s living room without knocking or ringing the bell, with his stethoscope flapping against his chest. He was a small compact man, with a full and slightly unruly head of hair, and a face on which great intelligence and comical sadness were usually visible — the expression of quizzical wit seemed to animate everything. But Lester also had a distinctive overbite, the attribute of a character actor who will always be left out at the end of the show.

He rushed forward and shook Ellickson’s hand, pulling him forward into a tentative hug. “So. What’s happened?”

“Lester,” Ellickson said, “my chest feels like it’s going to explode.”

“Pain? Chest pain?”

“No, it’s more like a weight.”

“Well, you know, we should get you to an emergency room. I’m not really a practicing M.D. anymore.”

“I want you to examine me. Please.”

Lester gazed at Ellickson with his comically sad chipmunk expression. “Me? Okay,” he said. “Take off your shirt. I want to listen to your heart.”

Ellickson did as he was told. Lester put the earpieces in and pressed the stethoscope against Ellickson’s chest.

“Lester, my wife’s pregnant.”

“Shh.”

“She won’t let me talk to Alex.”

“Shh. I’m listening to your heart.”

“The guy next door is a murderer who lives in a spaceship. And all I want in this life is to have a drink.”

“Would you please shut up?”

Finally Lester lowered the stethoscope. Outside the screen door, a cardinal sang in the linden. The air smelled of moisture, of a thunderstorm brewing just out of sight underneath the line of the horizon, and despite the sunlight, Ellickson thought he heard the rumble of thunder. “Well,” Lester said, smiling. “There’s good news and bad news.”

“Tell me the bad news first,” Ellickson said.

“You’re still alive,” the doctor told him.

“And what’s the good news?” Ellickson asked.

Lester shrugged. “Same thing,” he said.