Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [76]
“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?”
“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.