Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [75]
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