Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [77]
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,