Gryphon by Charles Baxter

Author:Charles Baxter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307379566
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-01-11T10:00:00+00:00

THE HOUSE had an upstairs sleeping porch, and she first saw the young man from up there, limping through the alley and carrying a torn orange-and-yellow Chinese kite. He had a dog with him, and both the dog and the man had an air of scruffy unseriousness. From the look of it, no project these two got involved with could last longer than ten minutes. That was the first thing she liked about them.

Midmorning, midweek, midsummer: even teenagers were working, and in this flat July heat no one with any sense was trying to fly kites. No one but a fool would fly a kite in this weather.

The young man threw the ball of string and the ripped cloth into the alley’s trash bin while the dog watched him. Then the dog sat down and with an expression of pained concentration scratched violently behind its ear. It looked around for something else to be interested in, barked at a cat on a window ledge, then gave up the effort and scratched its ear again.

From the upstairs sleeping porch, the young man looked exactly like the fool in the tarot pack—shaggy and loose-limbed, a songster at the edge of cliffs—and the dog was the image of the fool’s dog, a frisky yellow mutt. Dogs tended to like fools. They had an affinity. Fools always gave dogs plenty to do. Considering this, the woman near the window felt her heart pound twice. Her heart was precise. It was like a doorbell.

She was unemployed. She had been out of college for a year, hadn’t been able to find a job she could tolerate for more than a few days, and with the last of her savings had rented the second floor of this house in Minneapolis, which included an old-fashioned sleeping porch facing east. She slept out here, and then in the mornings she sat in a hard-backed chair reading books from the library, drinking coffee, and listening to classical music on the public radio station. Right now they were playing the Goyescas of Enrique Granados. She was running out of money and trying to stay calm about it, and the music helped her. The music seemed to say that she could sit like this all morning, and no one would punish her. It was very Spanish.

She put on her shoes and threw her keys into the pocket of her jeans. She raised the slatted blinds. “Hey!” she yelled down into the alley.

“Hey, yourself,” the young man yelled back. He smiled at her and squinted. Apparently he couldn’t see her clearly. That was the second thing she liked about him.

“You can’t throw that kite in there,” she said. “That Dumpster’s only for people who live in this building.” She shaded her eyes against the sun to see him better. The guy’s dog was now standing and wagging its tail.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll take it out,” and when she told him not to and that she’d be down in a second and he should just wait there, she knew he would do what she asked.

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