Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“The ninth law in your bedroom,” Earl announced, “says you use violence only in self-defense.” He stepped to the fence, then held his arm straight up into the air and fired once. That sound, that shattering, made me drop my wrench. It hit the ground with a clank, three inches from my right foot. Through all the backyards of Westland I heard the blast echoing. The neighborhood dogs set up a barking chain; front and back doors slammed.

Earl was breathing hard and staring at his daughter. We were in a valley, I thought, of distinct silence. “That’s all the bullets I own for that weapon,” he said. He put the gun on the doorstep. Then he made his way over to where his daughter was sitting. There’s a kind of walk, a little stiff, where you know every step has been thought about, every step is a decision. This was like that.

Jaynee was munching the last of her cookie. Her father grabbed her by the shoulders and began to shake her. It was like what you see in movies, someone waking up a sleepwalker. Back and forth her head tossed. “Never never never never never,” he said. I started to laugh, but it was too crazed and despairing to be funny. He stopped. I could see he wanted to make a parental speech: his face was tightening up, his flesh stiff, but he didn’t know how to start it, the right choice for the first word, and his daughter pushed him away and ran into the house. In that run, something happened to me, and I knew I had to get out of there.

I glanced at Jody, the new woman. She stood with her hands in her blue jeans. She looked bored. She had lived here all her life. What had just happened was a disturbance in the morning’s activities. Meanwhile, Earl had picked up a board and was tentatively beating the ground with it. He was staring at the revolver on the steps. “I got to take that gun and throw it into Ford Lake,” he said. “First thing I do this afternoon.”

“Have to go, Earl,” I said. Everything about me was getting just a little bit out of control, and I thought I had better get home.

“You’re going?” Earl said, trying to concentrate on me for a moment. “You’re going now? You’re sure you don’t want another beer?”

I said I was sure. The new woman, Jody, went over to Earl and whispered something to him. I couldn’t see why, right now, out loud, she couldn’t say what she wanted to say. Christ, we were all adults, after all.

“She wants you to take that.22 and throw it,” Earl said. He went over to the steps, picked up the gun, and returned to where I was standing. He dropped it into my hand. The barrel was warm, and the whole apparatus smelled of cordite.

“Okay, Earl,” I said. I held this heavy object in my hand, and I had the insane idea that my life was just beginning. “You have any particular preference about where I should dispose of it?”

He looked at me, his right eyebrow going up. This kind of diction he hadn’t heard from me before. “Particular preference?” He laughed without smiling. “Last I heard,” he said, “when you throw a gun out, it doesn’t matter where it goes so long as it’s gone.”

“Gotcha,” I said. I was going around to the front of the house. “Be in touch, right?”

Those two were back to themselves again, talking. They would be interested in saying good-bye to me about two hours from now, when they noticed that I wasn’t there.

In the story that would end here, I go out to Belle Isle in the city of Detroit and drop Earl’s revolver off the Belle Isle Bridge at the exact moment when no one is looking. But this story has a ways to go. That’s not what I did. To start with, I drove around with that gun in my car, underneath the front seat, like half the other residents of this area. I drove to work and at the end of the day I drove home, a model bureaucrat, and each time I sat in the car and turned on the ignition, I felt better than I should have because that gun was on the floor. After about a week, the only problem I had was not that the gun was there but that it wasn’t loaded. So I went to the ammo store — it’s actually called the Michigan Rod and Gun Club — about two miles away from my house and bought some bullets for it. This was all very easy. In fact, the various details were getting easier and easier. I hadn’t foreseen this. I’ve read Freud and Heinz Kohut and D. W. Winnicott, and I can talk to you about psychotic breaks and object-relations and fixation on oedipal grandiosity characterized by the admixture of strong object cathexes and the implicitly disguised presence of castration fears, and, by virtue of my being able to talk about those conditions, I have had some trouble getting into gear and moving when the occasion called for it. But now, with the magic wand under the front seat, I was getting ready for some kind of adventure.

Around the house my character was improving rather than degenerating. Knowing my little secret, I was able to sit with Gary, my younger son, as he practiced the piano, and I complimented him on the Czerny passages he had mastered, and I helped him through the sections he hadn’t learned. I was a fiery angel of patience. With Sam, my older boy, I worked on a model train layout. I cooked a few more dinners than I usually did: from honey-mustard chicken, I went on to varieties of stuffed fish and other dishes with sauces that I had only imagined. I was attentive to Ann. The nature of our intimacies improved. We were whispering to each other again. We hadn’t whispered in years.

I was front-loading a little fantasy. After all, I had tried intelligence. Intelligence was not working, not with me, not with the world. So it was time to try the other thing.

My only interruption was that I was getting calls from Earl. He called the house. He had the impression that I understood the mind and could make his ideas feel better. I told him that nobody could make his ideas feel better, ideas either feel good or not, but he didn’t believe me.

“Do you mind me calling like this?” he asked. It was just before dinner. I was in the study, and the news was on. I pushed the MUTE button on the remote control. While Earl talked, I watched the silent coverage of mayhem.

“No, I don’t mind.”

“I shouldn’t do this, I know, ’cause you get paid to listen, being a professional friend. But I have to ask your advice.”

“Don’t call me a professional friend. Earl, what’s your question?” The pictures in front of me showed a boy being shot in the streets of Beirut.

“Well, I went into Jaynee’s room to clean up. You know how teenage girls are. Messy and everything.”

“Yes.” More Beirut carnage.

“And I found her diary. How was I to know she had a diary? She never told me.”

“They often don’t, Earl. Was it locked?”

“What?”

“Locked. Sometimes diaries have locks.”

“Well,” Earl said, “this one didn’t.”

“Sounds as though you read it.” Shots now on the TV of the mayor of New York, then shots of bag ladies in the streets.

Earl was silent. I decided not to get ahead of him again. “I thought that maybe I shouldn’t read it, but then I did.”

“How much?”

“All of it,” he said. “I read all of it.”

I waited. He had called me . I hadn’t called him. I watched the pictures of Gorbachev, then pictures of a girl whose face had been slashed by an ex-boyfriend. “It must be hard, reading your daughter’s diary,” I said. “And not right , if you see what I mean.”

“Not the way you think.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t mind the talk about boys. She’s growing up, and you can wish it won’t happen, but it does. You know what I’m saying?”

“Yes, I do, Earl.” A commercial now, for Toyotas.

“I don’t even mind the sex, how she thinks about it. Hey, I was no priest myself when I was that age, and now the women, they want to have the freedom we had, so how am I going to stop it, and maybe why should I?”