Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“I see what you mean.”

“She’s very aggressive. Very aggressive. The things she does. You sort of wonder if you should believe it.”

“Diaries are often fantasies. You probably shouldn’t be reading your daughter’s diary at all. It’s hers , Earl. She’s writing for herself, not for you.”

“She writes about me, sometimes.”

“You shouldn’t read it, Earl.”

Now pictures of a nuclear reactor, and shots of men in white outer-space protective suits with lead shielding, cleaning up some new mess. I felt my anger rising, as usual.

“I can’t help reading it,” Earl said. “A person starts prying, he can’t stop.”

“You shouldn’t be reading it.”

“You haven’t heard what I’m about to say,” Earl told me. “It’s why I’m calling you. It’s what she says.”

“What’s that?” I asked him.

“Not what I expected,” he said. “She pities me.”

“Well,” I said. More shots of the nuclear reactor. I was getting an idea.

“Well is right.” He took another breath. “First she says she loves me. That was shock number one. Then she says she feels sorry for me. That was shock number two. Because I work on the line at Ford’s and I drink beer and I live in Westland. Where does she get off? That’s what I’d like to know. She mentions the play structure. She feels sorry for me! My God, I always hated pity. I could never stand it. It weakens you. I never wanted anybody on earth pitying me, and now here’s my punk daughter doing it.”

“Earl, put that diary away.”

“I hear you,” he said. “By the way, what did you do with that gun?”

“Threw it off the Belle Isle Bridge,” I said.

“Sure you did,” he said. “Well, anyway, thanks for listening, Warren.” Then he hung up. On the screen in front of me, the newscaster was introducing the last news story of the evening.

Most landscapes, no matter where you are, manage to keep something wild about them, but the land in southern Michigan along the Ohio border has always looked to me as if it had lost its self-respect some time ago. This goes beyond being tamed. This land has been beaten up. The industrial brass knuckles have been applied to wipe out the trees, and the corporate blackjack has stunned the soil, and what grows there — the grasses and brush and scrub pine — grows tentatively. The plant life looks scared and defeated, but all the other earthly powers are busily at work.

Such were my thoughts as I drove down to the nuclear reactor in Holbein, Michigan, on a clear Saturday morning in August, my loaded gun under my seat. I was in a merry mood. Recently activated madcap joy brayed and sang inside my head. I was speeding. My car was trembling because the front end was improperly aligned and I was doing about seventy-five. One false move on the steering wheel and I’d be permanently combined with a telephone pole. I had an eye out for the constables but knew I would not be arrested. A magic shield surrounded my car, and I was so invincible that Martians could not have stopped me.

Although this was therapy rather than political action, I was taking it very seriously, especially at the moment when my car rose over the humble crest of a humiliated grassy hill and I saw the infernal dome and cooling towers of the Holbein reactor a mile or so behind a clutch of hills and trees ahead and to my left. The power company had surrounded all this land with high Cyclone fencing, crowned with barbed wire and that new kind of coiled lacerating razor wire they’ve invented. I slowed down to see the place better.

There wasn’t much to see because they didn’t want you to see anything; they’d built the reactor far back from the road, and in this one case they had let the trees grow (the usual demoralized silver maples and willows and jack pines) to hide the view. I drove past the main gate and noted that a sign outside the guards’ office regretted that the company could not give tours because of the danger of sabotage. Right. I hadn’t expected to get inside. A person doesn’t always have to get inside.

About one mile down, the fence took a ninety-degree turn to the left, and a smaller county road angled off from the highway I was on. I turned. I followed this road another half mile until there was a break in the trees and I could get a clear view of the building. I didn’t want a window. I wanted a wall. I was sweating like an amateur thief. The back of my shirt was stuck to the car seat, and the car was jerking because my foot was trembling with excited shock on the accelerator.

Through the thin trees, I saw the solid wall of the south building, whatever it held. There’s a kind of architecture that makes you ashamed of human beings, and in my generic rage, my secret craziness that felt completely sensible, I took the gun and held my arm out of the window. It felt good to do that. I was John Wayne. I fired four times at that building, once for me, once for Ann, and once for each of my two boys. I don’t know what I hit. I don’t care. I probably hit that wall. It was the only kind of heroism I could imagine, the Don Quixote kind. But I hadn’t fired the gun before and wasn’t used to the recoil action, with the result that after the last shot, I lost control of the car, and it went off the road. In any other state my car would have flipped, but this is southern Michigan, where the ditches are shallow, and I was bumped around — in my excitement I had forgotten to wear my seat belt — until the engine finally stalled in something that looked like a narrow offroad parking area.

I opened my door, but instead of standing up I fell out. With my head on the ground I opened my eyes, and there in the stones and pebbles in front of me was a shiny penny. I brought myself to a standing position, picked up the penny, a lucky penny, for my purposes, and surveyed the landscape where my car had stopped. I walked around to the other side of the car and saw a small pile of beer cans and a circle of ashes, where some revelers, sometime this summer, had enjoyed their little party of pleasure there in the darkness, close by the inaudible hum of the Holbein reactor. I dropped the penny in my trouser pocket, put the gun underneath the front seat again, and started the car. After two tries I got it out, and before the constables came to check on the gunshots, I had made my escape.

I felt I had done something in the spirit of Westland. I sang, feeling very good and oddly patriotic. On the way back I found myself behind a car with a green bumper sticker.

CAUTION: THIS VEHICLE

EXPLODES UPON IMPACT!

That’s me, I said to myself. I am that vehicle.

There was still the matter of the gun, and what to do with it. Fun is fun, but you have to know when the party’s over. Halfway home, I pulled off the road into one of those rest stops, and I was going to discard the gun by leaving it on top of a picnic table or by dropping it into a trash can. What I actually did was to throw it into the high grass. Half an hour later, I walked into our suburban kitchen with a smile on my face. I explained the scratch on my cheek as the result of an accident while playing racquetball at the health club. Ann and the boys were delighted by my mood. That evening we went out to a park and, sitting on a blanket, ate our picnic dinner until the darkness came on.

Many of the American stories I was assigned to read in college were about anger, a fact that would not have surprised my mother, who was British, from Brighton. “Warren,” she used to say to me, “watch your tongue in front of these people.” “These people” always meant “these Americans.” Among them was my father, who had been born in Omaha and who had married her after the war. “Your father,” my mother said, “has the temper of a savage.” Although it is true that my mind has retained memories of household shouting, what I now find queer is that my mother thought that anger was peculiar to this country.