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?”
“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.
Earl called me a few more times, in irate puzzlement over his life. The last time was at the end of the summer, on Labor Day. Usually Ann and I and the boys go out on Labor Day to a Metropark and take the last long swim of the summer, but this particular day was cloudy, with a forecast for rain. Ann and I had decided to pitch a tent on the back lawn for the boys, and to grill some hot dogs and hamburgers. We were hoping that the weather would hold until evening. What we got was drizzle, off and on, so that you couldn’t determine what kind of day it was. I resolved to go out and cook in the rain anyway. I often took the weather personally. I was standing there, grim-faced and wet, firing up the coals, when Ann called me to the telephone.
It was Earl. He apologized for bringing me to the phone on Labor Day. I said it was okay, that I didn’t mind, although I did mind, in fact. We waited. I thought he was going to tell me something new about his daughter, and I was straining for him not to say it.
“So,” he said, “have you been watching?”
“Watching what? The weather? Yes, I’ve been watching that.”
“No,” he said, “not the sky. The Jerry Lewis Telethon.”
“Oh, the telethon,” I said. “No, I don’t watch it.”
“It’s important, Warren. We need all the money we can get. We’re behind this year. You know how it’s for Jerry’s kids.”
“I know it, Earl.” Years ago, when I was a bachelor, once or twice I sat inside drinking all weekend and watching the telethon and making drunken pledges of money. I didn’t want to remember such entertainment now.
“If we’re going to find a cure for this thing, we need for everybody to contribute. It’s for the kids.”
“Earl,” I said, “they won’t find a cure. It’s a genetic disorder, some scrambling in the genetic code. They might be able to prevent it, but they won’t cure it.”
There was a long silence. “You weren’t born in this country, were you?”
“No,” I said.
“I didn’t think so. You don’t sound like it. I can tell you weren’t born here. At heart you’re still a foreigner. You have a no-can-do attitude. No offense. I’m not criticizing you for it. It’s not your fault. You can’t help it. I see that now.”
“Okay, Earl.”
Then his voice brightened up. “What the hell,” he said. “Come out anyway. You know where Westland is? Oh, right, you’ve been here. You know where the shopping center’s located?”
“Yes,” I said.
“It’s the clown races. We’re raising money. Even if you don’t believe in the cure, you can still come to the clown races. We’re giving away balloons, too. Your kids will enjoy it. Bring ’em along. They’ll love it. It’s quite a show. It’s all on TV.”
“Earl,” I said, “this isn’t my idea of what a person should be doing on a holiday. I’d rather—”
“I don’t want to hear what you’d rather do. Just come out here and bring your money. All right?” He raised his voice after a quick pause. “Are you listening?”
“Yes, Earl,” I said. “I’m listening.”
Somehow I put out the charcoal fire and managed to convince my two boys and my wife that they should take a quick jaunt to Westland. I told them about Earl, the clown races, but what finally persuaded the boys was that I claimed there’d be a remote TV unit out there, and they might turn up with their faces on Channel 2. Besides, the rain was coming down a little harder, a cool rain, one of those end-of-summer drizzles that make your skin feel the onset of autumn. When you feel like that, it helps to be in a crowd.
They had set up a series of highway detours around the shopping center, but we finally discovered how to get into the north parking lot. They’d produced the balloons, tents, and lights, but they hadn’t produced much of a crowd. They had a local TV personality dressed in a LOVE NETWORK raincoat trying to get people to cheer. The idea was, you made a bet for your favorite clown and put your money in his fishbowl. If your clown won, you’d get a certificate for a free cola at a local restaurant. It wasn’t much of a prize, I thought; maybe it was charity, but I felt that they could do better than that.
Earl was clown number three. We’d brought three umbrellas and were standing off to the side when he came up to us and introduced himself to my wife and the boys. He was wearing an orange wig and a clown nose, and he had painted his face white, the way clowns do, and he was wearing Bozo shoes, the size eighteens, but one of his sleeves was rolled up, and you could see the tattoo of that impaled rose. The white paint was running off his face a bit in the rain, streaking, but he didn’t seem to mind. He shook hands with my children and Ann and me very formally. He had less natural ability as a clown than anyone else I’ve ever met. It would never occur to you to laugh at Earl dressed up in that suit. What you felt would be much more complicated. It was like watching a family member descend into a weakness like alcoholism. Earl caught the look on my face.
“What’s the matter, Warren?” he asked. “You okay?”
I shrugged. He had his hand in a big clown glove and was shaking my hand.
“It’s all for a good cause,” he said, waving his other hand at the four lanes they had painted on the parking lot for the races. “We’ve made a lot of money already. It’s all for the kids, kids who aren’t
as lucky as ours.” He looked down at my boys. “You have to believe,” he said.
“You sound like Jaynee,” I told him. My wife was looking at Earl. I had tried to explain him to her, but I wasn’t sure I had succeeded.
“Believe what?” she asked.
“You’ve been married to this guy for too long,” he said, laughing his big clown laugh. “Maybe your kids can explain it to you, about what the world needs now.” There was a whistle. Earl turned around. “Gotta go,” he said. He flopped off in those big shoes.
“What’s he talking about?” my wife asked.
They lined up the four clowns, including Earl, at the chalk, and those of us who were spectators stood under the tent and registered our bets while the LOVE NETWORK announcer from Channel 2 stood in front of the cameras and held up his starter’s gun. I stared for a long time at that gun. Then I placed my bet on Earl.
The other three clowns were all fat middle-aged guys, Shriners or Rotarians, and I thought Earl had a good chance. My gaze went from the gun down to the parking lot, where I saw Jaynee. She was standing in the rain and watching her old man. I heard the gun go off, but instead of watching Earl, I watched her.
Her hair was stuck to the sides of her head in that rain, and her cotton jacket was soaked through. She had her eyes fixed on her father. By God, she looked affectionate. If he wanted his daughter’s love, he had it. I watched her clench her fists and start to jump up and down, cheering him on. After twenty seconds I could tell by the way she raised her fist in the air that Earl had clumped his way to victory. Then I saw the new woman, Jody, standing behind Jaynee, her big glasses smeared with rain, grinning.
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