The World According to Garp

razor, a shaving cream can, and then came the little batches of clothes—the girl's, of course. Her jeans with a ladybug sewn at the hip, a jersey with the beaming face of a frog on the breast. Of course there was no bra; there was no need. It was her panties that got to Garp. They were simply cotton, and a simple blue, stitched at the waistband was a blue flower, sniffed at by a blue bunny.

The mounted policeman simply rode over the kid who was running away. The chest of the horse pounded the kid face forward into the cinder entry path and one rear hoof took a U-shaped bite of flesh out of the kid's calf; he curled, fetal, on the ground, holding his leg. Garp came up then, the girl's blue-bunny panties in his hand; he gave them to the mounted cop. Other people—the woman with the blanketed carriage, two boys on bikes, a thin man carrying a newspaper—approached them. They brought the cop the other things the kid had dropped. The razor, the rest of the girl's clothes. Nobody spoke, Garp wrote later that at that moment he saw the short history of the young child molester spread out at the horse's hooves: the scissors, the shaving cream can. Of course! The kid would grow a mustache, attack a child, shave the mustache (which would be all most children would remember).

“Have you done this before?” Garp asked the kid. ”

You're not supposed to ask him anything,” the policeman said. But the kid grinned stupidly at Garp. “I've never been caught before,” he told him, cockily. When he smiled, Garp saw that the young man had no upper front teeth: the horse had kicked them out. There was just a bleeding flap of gum. Garp realized that something had probably happened to this kid so that he didn't feel very much—not much pain, not much of anything else.

Out of the woods at the end of the bridle path the second policeman came walking his horse—the child in the saddle, covered by the policeman's coat. She clutched Garp's T-shirt in her hands. She did not seem to recognize anybody. The policeman led her right up to where the molester lay on the ground, but she didn't really look at him. The first policeman dismounted; he went to the molester and tilted his bleeding face up toward the child. “Him?” he asked her. She stared at the young man, blankly. The molester gave a short laugh, spat out a mouthful of blood; the child made no response. Then Garp gently touched his finger to the molester's mouth; with the blood on his finger, Garp lightly smeared a mustache on the young man's upper lip, tbe child began to scream and scream. The horses needed quieting. The child kept screaming until the second policeman took the molester away. Then she stopped screaming and gave Garp back his T-shirt. She kept patting the thick ridge of black hair on the back of the horse's neck as if she had never been on a horse before.

Garp thought it must have hurt her to sit on horse back, but suddenly she asked, “Can I have another ride?” Garp was at least glad to hear that she had a tongue.

It was then that Garp saw the nattily dressed, elderly gentleman whose mustache had been innocent; he was making his meek way out of the park, coming cautiously into the parking lot, looking anxiously about for the madman who'd so savagely snatched his pants down and sniffed him like some dangerous omnivore. When the man saw Garp standing beside the policeman, he seemed relieved—he assumed Garp had been apprehended—and he more boldly walked toward them. Garp contemplated running—to avoid the confusion, the explanation—but just then the policeman said, “I have to get your name. And what it is that you do. Besides run in the park.” He laughed.

“I'm a writer,” Garp told him. The policeman was apologetic that he hadn't heard of Garp, but at the time Garp hadn't published anything except “The Pension Grillparzer'—there was very little the policeman could have read. This seemed to puzzle the policeman.

“An unpublished writer?” he asked. Garp was rather glum about it. “Then what do you do for a living?” the policeman said.

“My wife and my mother support me,” Garp admitted.

“Well, I have to ask you what they do,” the policeman said. “For the record, we like to know how everyone makes a living.”

The offended gentleman with the white mustache, who had overheard only the last bits of this interrogation, said, “Just as I would have thought! A vagrant, a despicable bum!”

The policeman stared at him. In his early, unpublished years Garp felt angry whenever he was forced to admit how he had enough to live on; he felt more like inviting confusion at this moment than he felt moved to clear things up.

“I'm glad to see you've caught him, anyway,” the old gentleman said. “This used to be a nice park, but the people who get in here these days—you ought to patrol it more closely,” he told the policeman, who guessed that the old man was referring to the child molester. The cop didn't want the business discussed in front of the child, so he rolled his eyes up toward her—she sat rigid in the saddle—and tried to indicate to the old gentleman why he shouldn't continue.

“Oh no, he didn't do it to that child!” the man cried, as if he'd just noticed her, mounted beside him, or just noticed she was not dressed under the policeman's coat—her small clothes bugged in her arms. “How vile!” he cried, glaring at Garp. “How disgusting! You'll want my name, of course?” he asked the policeman.

“What for?” the policeman said. Garp had to smile.

“Look at him smirking there!” the old man cried. “Why, as a witness, of course—I'd tell my story to any court in the country, if it could condemn such a man as that!”

“But what were you a witness to?” the policeman said.

“Why, he did that...thing...to me, too!” the man said.

The policeman looked at Garp; Garp rolled his eyes. The policeman still clung to the sanity that the old gentleman was referring to the child molester, but he didn't understand why Garp was being treated with such abuse. “Well, sure,” the policeman said, to humor the old fool. He took his name and address.

Months later Garp was buying a package of three prophylactics when this same old gentleman walked into the drugstore.

“What?! It's you!” the old man shouted. “They let you out already, did they? I thought they'd put you away for years!”

It took Garp a moment to recognize the person. The druggist assumed that the old codger was a lunatic. The gentleman in his trimmed, white mustache advanced cautiously on Garp.

“What's the law coming to?” he asked. “I suppose you're out on good behavior? No old men or young girls to sniff in prison, I suppose! Or some lawyer got you off on some slick technicality? That poor child traumatized for all her years and you're free to roam the parks!”

“You've made a mistake,” Garp told him.

“Yes, this is Mr. Garp,” the druggist said. He didn't add, “the writer.” If he'd considered adding anything, Garp knew, it would have been “the hero,” because the druggist had seen the ludicrous newspaper headlines about the crime and capture in the park.

UNSUCCESSFUL WRITER NO FAILURE AS HERO!

CITIZEN CATCHES PARK PERVERT;

SON OF FAMOUS FEMINIST HAS KNACK FOR HELPING GIRLS...

Garp was unable to write for months because of it, but the article impressed all the locals who knew Garp only from the super-market, the gymnasium, the drugstore. In the meantime, Procrastination had been published—but almost no one seemed to know. For weeks, clerks and salespeople would introduce him to other customers: “Here's Mr. Garp, the one who nabbed that molester in the park.”

“What molester?”

“That one in city park. The Mustache Kid. He went after little girls.”

“Children?”

“Well, Mr. Garp here is the one who got him.”

“Well, actually,” Garp would say, “it was the policeman on his horse.”

“Knocked all his teeth down his throat, too!” they would crow with delight—the druggist and the clerk and the salespeople here and there.

“Well, that was actually the horse,” Garp admitted, modestly.

And sometimes someone would ask, “And what is it you do, Mister Garp?”

The following silence would pain Garp, as he stood thinking that it was probably best to say that he ran—for a living. He cruised the parks, a molester-nabber by profession. He hung around