Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

Westland

SATURDAY MORNING at the zoo, facing the lions’ cage, overcast sky and a light breeze carrying the smell of peanuts and animal dung, the peacocks making their stilted progress across the sidewalks. I was standing in front of the gorge separating the human viewers from the lions. The lions weren’t caged, exactly; they just weren’t free to go. One male and one female were slumbering on fake rock ledges. Raw meat was nearby. My hands were in my pockets and I was waiting for a moment of energy so I could leave and do my Saturday-morning errands. Then this girl, this teenager, appeared from behind me, hands in her pockets, and she stopped a few feet away on my right. In an up-all-night voice, she said, “What would you do if I shot that lion?” She nodded her head: she meant the male, the closer one.

“Shot it?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t know.” Sometimes you have to humor people, pretend as if they’re talking about something real. “Do you have a gun?”

“Of course I have a gun.” She wore a protective blankness on her thin face. She was fixed on the lion. “I have it here in my pocket.”

“I’d report you,” I said. “I’d try to stop you. There are guards here. People don’t shoot caged animals. You shouldn’t even carry a concealed weapon, a girl your age.”

“This is Detroit,” she explained.

“I know it is,” I said. “But people don’t shoot caged lions in Detroit or anywhere else.”

“It wouldn’t be that bad,” she said, nodding at the lions again. “You can tell from their faces how much they want to check out.”

I said I didn’t think so.

She turned to look at me. Her skin was so pale it seemed bleached, and she was wearing a vaudeville-length overcoat and a pair of high-top tennis shoes and jeans with slits at the knees. She looked like a fifteen-year-old bag lady. “It’s because you’re a disconnected person that you can’t see it,” she said. She shivered and reached into her pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. “Lions are so human. Things get to them. They experience everything more than we do. They’re romantic.” She glanced at her crushed pack of cigarettes, and in a shivering motion she tossed it into the gorge. She swayed back and forth. “They want to kill and feast and feel,” she said.

I looked at this girl’s bleached skin, that candy-bar-and-cola complexion, and I said, “Are you all right?”

“I slept here last night,” she said. She pointed vaguely behind her. “I was sleeping over there. Under those trees. Near the polar bears.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“I wasn’t alone all night.” She was answering a question I hadn’t asked. “This guy, he came in with me for a while to be nice and amorous but he couldn’t see the point in staying. He split around midnight. He said it was righteous coming in here and being solid with the animal world, but he said you had to know when to stop. I told him I wouldn’t defend him to his friends if he left, and he left, so as far as I’m concerned, he is over, he is zippo.”

She was really shivering now, and she was huddling inside that long overcoat. I don’t like to help strangers, but she needed help. “Are you hungry?” I asked. “You want a hamburger?”

“I’ll eat it,” she said, “but only if you buy it.”

I took her to a fast-food restaurant and sat her down and brought her one of their famous giant cheeseburgers. She held it in her hands familiarly as she watched the cars passing on Woodward Avenue. I let my gaze follow hers, and when I looked back, half the cheeseburger was gone. She wasn’t even chewing. She didn’t look at the food. She ate like a soldier in a foxhole. What was left of her food she gripped in her skinny fingers decorated with flaking pink nail polish. She was pretty in a raw and sloppy way.

“You’re looking at me.”

“Yes, I am,” I admitted.

“How come?”

“A person can look,” I said.

“Maybe.” Now she looked back. “Are you one of those creeps?”

“Which kind?”

“The kind of old man creep who picks up girls and drives them places, and, like, terrorizes them for days and then dumps them into fields.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not like that. And I’m not that old.”

“Maybe it’s the accent,” she said. “You don’t sound American.”

“I was born in England,” I told her, “but I’ve been in this country for thirty years. I’m an American citizen.”

“You’ve got to be born in this country to sound American,” she said, sucking at her chocolate shake through her straw. She was still gazing at the traffic. Looking at traffic seemed to restore her peace of mind. “I guess you’re okay,” she said distantly, “and I’m not worried anyhow, because, like I told you, I’ve got a gun.”

“Oh yeah,” I said.

“You’re not a real American because you don’t believe!” Then this child fumbled in her coat pocket and clunked down a small shiny handgun on the table, next to the plastic containers and the french fries. “So there,” she said.

“Put it back,” I told her. “Jesus, I hope the safety’s on.”

“I think so.” She wiped her hand on a napkin and dropped the thing back into her pocket. “So tell me your name, Mr. Samaritan.”

“Warren,” I said. “My name’s Warren. What’s yours?”

“I’m Jaynee. What do you do, Warren? You must do something. You look like someone who does something.”

I explained to her about governmental funding for social work and therapy, but her eyes glazed and she cut me off.

“Oh yeah,” she said, chewing her french fries with her mouth open so that you could see inside if you wanted to. “One of those professional friends. I’ve seen people like you.”

I drove her home. She admired the tape machine in the car and the carpeting on the floor. She gave me directions on how to get to her house in Westland, one of the suburbs. Detroit has four shopping centers at its cardinal points: Westland, Eastland, Southland, and Northland. A town grew up around Westland, a blue-collar area, and now Westland is the name of both the shopping center and the town.

She took me down fast-food alley and then through a series of right and left ninety-degree turns on streets with bungalows covered by aluminum siding. Few trees, not much green except the lawns, and the half-sun dropped onto those perpendicular lines with nothing to stop it or get in its way. The girl, Jaynee, picked at her knees and nodded, as if any one of the houses would do. The houses all looked exposed to me, with a straight shot at the elements out there on that flat grid.

I was going to drop her off at what she said was her driveway, but there was an old chrome-loaded Pontiac in the way, one of those vintage 1950s cars, its front end up on a hoist and some man working on his back on a rolling dolly underneath it. “That’s him,” the girl said. “You want to meet him?”

I parked the car and got out. The man pulled himself away from underneath the car and looked over at us. He stood up, wiping his hands on a rag, and scowled at his daughter. He wasn’t going to look at me right away. I think he was checking Jaynee for signs of damage.

“What’s this?” he asked. “What’s this about, Jaynee?”

“This is about nothing,” she said. “I spent the night in the zoo and this person found me and brought me home.”

“At the zoo. Jesus Christ. At the zoo. Is that what happened?” He was asking me.

“That’s where I saw her,” I told him. “She looked pretty cold.”

He dropped a screwdriver I hadn’t noticed he was holding. He was standing there in his driveway next to the Pontiac, looking at his daughter and me and then at the sky. I’d had those moments, too, when nothing made any sense and I didn’t know where my responsibilities lay. “Go inside,” he told his daughter. “Take a shower. I’m not talking to you here on the driveway. I know that.”

We both watched her go into the house. She looked like an overcoat with legs. I felt ashamed of myself for thinking of her that way, but there are some ideas you can’t prevent.

We were both watching her, and the man said, “You can’t go to the public library and find out how to raise a girl like that.” He said something else, but an airplane passed so low above us that I couldn’t hear him. We were about three miles from the airport. He ended his speech by saying, “I don’t know who’s right.”

“I don’t, either.”

“Earl Lampson.” He held out his hand. I shook it and took away a feel of bone and grease and flesh. I could see a fading tattoo on his forearm of a rose run through with a sword.

“Warren Banks,” I said. “I guess I’ll have to be going.”

“Wait a minute, Warren. Let me do two things. First, let me thank you for bringing my daughter home. Unhurt.” I nodded to show I understood. “Second. A question. You got any kids?”

“Two,” I said. “Both boys.”

“Then you know about it. You know what a child can do to you. I was awake last night. I didn’t know what had happened to her. I didn’t know if she had planned it. That was the worst. She makes plans. Jesus Christ. The zoo. The lions?”

I nodded.

“She’ll do anything. And it isn’t an act with her.” He looked up and down the street, as if he were waiting for something to appear, and I had the wild idea that I was going to see a float coming our way, with beauty queens on it, and little men dressed up in costumes.

I told him I had to leave. He shook his head.

“Stay a minute, Warren,” he said. “Come into the backyard. I want to show you something.”

He turned around and walked through the garage, past a pile of snow tires and two rusted-out bicycles. I followed him, thinking of my boys this morning at their Scout meeting, and of my wife, out shopping or maybe home by now and wondering vaguely where I was. I was supposed to be getting groceries. Here I was in this garage. She would look at the clock, do something else, then look back at the clock.

“Now, how about this?” Earl pointed an index finger toward a wooden construction that stood in the middle of his yard, running from one side to another: a play structure, with monkey bars and a swing set, a high perch like a ship’s crow’s nest, a set of tunnels to crawl through and climb on, and a little rope bridge between two towers. I had never seen anything like it, so much human effort expended on a backyard toy, this huge contraption.

I whistled. “It must have taken you years.”

“Eighteen months,” he said. “And she hasn’t played on it since she was twelve.” He shook his head. “I bought the wood and put it together piece by piece. She was only three years old when I did it, weekends when I wasn’t doing overtime at Ford’s. She was my assistant. She’d bring me nails. I told her to hold the hammer when I wasn’t using it, and she’d stand there, real serious, just holding the hammer. Of course, now she’s too old for it. I have the biggest backyard toy in Michigan and a daughter who goes off to the zoo and spends the night there and that’s her idea of a good time.”

A light rain had started to fall. “What are you going to do with this thing?” I asked.

“Take it apart, I guess.” He glanced at the sky. “Warren, you want a beer?”

It was eleven o’clock in the morning. “Sure,” I said.

We sat in silence on his cluttered back porch. We sipped our beers and watched the rain fall over things in our line of sight. Neither of us was saying much. It was better being there than being at home, and my morning gloom was on its way out. It wasn’t lifting so much as converting into something else, as it does when you’re in someone else’s house. I didn’t want to move as long as I felt that way.

I had been in the zoo that morning because I had been reading the newspaper again, and this time I had read about a uranium plant here in Michigan whose employees were spraying pastureland with a fertilizer recycled from radioactive wastes. They called it treated raffinate. The paper said that in addition to trace amounts of radium and radioactive thorium, this fertilizer spray had at least eighteen poisonous heavy metals in it, including molybdenum, arsenic, and lead. It had been sprayed out into the pastures and was going into the food supply. I was supposed to get up from the table and go out and get the groceries, but I had gone to the zoo instead to stare at the animals. This had been happening more often lately. I couldn’t keep my mind on ordinary, daily things. I had come to believe that depression was the realism of the future, and phobias a sign of sanity. I was supposed to know better, but I didn’t.

I had felt crazy and helpless, but there, on Earl Lampson’s porch, I was feeling a little better. Calm strangers sometimes have that effect on you.

Jaynee came out just then. She’d been in the shower, and I could see why some kid might want to spend a night in the zoo with her. She was in a T-shirt and jeans, and the hot water had perked her up. I stood and excused myself. I couldn’t stand to see her just then, breaking my mood. Earl went to a standing position and shook my hand and said he appreciated what I had done for his daughter. I said it was nothing and started to leave when Earl, for no reason that I could see, suddenly said he’d be calling me during the week, if that was all right. I told him that I would be happy to hear from him.

Walking away from there, I decided, on the evidence so far, that Earl had a good heart and didn’t know what to do with it, just as he didn’t know what to do with that thing in his backyard. He just had it, and it was no use to him.

He called my office on Wednesday. I’d given him the number. There was something new in his voice, of someone wanting help. He repeated his daughter’s line about how I was a professional friend, and I said, yes, sometimes that was what I was. He asked me if I ever worked with “bad kids”—that was his phrase — and I said that sometimes I did. Then he asked me if I would help him take apart his daughter’s play structure on the following Saturday. He said there’d be plenty of beer. I could see what he was after: a bit of free counseling, but since I hadn’t prepared myself for his invitation, I didn’t have a good defense ready. I looked around my office cubicle, and I saw myself in Earl’s backyard, a screwdriver in one hand and a beer in the other. I said yes.

The day I came over, it was a fair morning, for Michigan. This state is like Holland. Cold, clammy mists mix with freezing rain in autumn, and hard rains in the spring are broken by tropical heat and tornadoes. It’s attack weather. The sky covers you with a metallic-blue, watercolor wash over tinfoil. But this day was all right. I worked out there with Earl, pulling the wood apart with our crowbars and screwdrivers, and we had an audience, Jaynee and Earl’s new woman. That was how she was introduced to me: Jody. She’s the new woman. She didn’t seem to have more than about eight or nine years on Jaynee, and she was nearsighted. She had those thick corrective lenses. But she was pretty in the details, and when she looked at Earl, the lenses enlarged those eyes, so that the love was large and naked and obvious.

I was pulling down a support bar for the north end of the structure and observing from time to time the neighboring backyards. My boys had gone off to a Scout meeting again, and my wife was busy, catching up on some office work. No one missed me. I was pulling at the wood, enjoying myself, talking to Earl and Jaynee and Jody about some of the techniques people in my profession use to resolve bad family quarrels; Jaynee and Jody were working at pulling down some of the wood, too. We already had two piles of scrap lumber.

I had heard a little of how Earl raised Jaynee. Her mother had taken off, the way they sometimes do, when Jaynee was three years old. He’d done the parental work. “You’ve been the dad, haven’t you, Earl?” Jody said, bumping her hip at him. She sat down to watch a sparrow. Her hair was in a ponytail, one of those feminine brooms. “Earl doesn’t know the first thing about being a woman, and he had to teach it all to Jaynee here.” Jody pointed her cigarette at Jaynee. “Well, she learned it from somewhere. There’s not much left she doesn’t know.”

“Where’s the mystery?” Jaynee asked. She was pounding a hammer absentmindedly into a piece of wood lying flat on the ground. “It’s easier being a woman than a girl. Men treat you better ’cause they want you.”

Earl stopped turning his wrench. “Only if you don’t go to the zoo anytime some punk asks you.”

“That was once,” she said.

Earl aimed himself at me. “I was strict with her. She knows about the laws I laid down. Fourteen laws. They’re framed in her bedroom. Nobody in this country knows what it is to be decent anymore, but I’m trying. It sure to hell isn’t easy.”

Jody smiled at me. “Earl restrained himself until I came along.” She laughed. Earl turned away so I wouldn’t see his face.

“I only spent the night in the zoo once,” Jaynee repeated, as if no one had been listening. “And besides, I was protected.”

“Protected,” Earl repeated, staring at her.

“You know.” Jaynee pointed her index finger at her father with her thumb in the air and the other fingers pulled back, and she made an explosive sound in her mouth.

“You took that?” her father said. “You took that to the zoo?”

Jaynee shrugged. At this particular moment, Earl turned to me. “Warren, did you see it?”

I assumed he meant the gun. I looked over toward him from the bolt I was unscrewing, and I nodded. I was so involved in the work of this job that I didn’t want my peaceful laboring disturbed.

“You shouldn’t have said that,” Jody said to Jaynee. Earl had disappeared inside the house. “You know your father well enough by now to know that.” Jody stood up and walked to the yard’s back fence. “Your father thinks that women and guns are a terrible combination.”

“He always said I should watch out for myself,” Jaynee said, her back to us. She pulled a cookie out of her pocket and began to eat it.

“Not with a gun,” Jody said.

“He showed me how to use it,” the daughter said loudly. “I’m not ignorant about firearms.” She didn’t seem especially interested in the way the conversation was going.

“That was just information,” Jody said. “It wasn’t for you to use.” She was standing and waiting for Earl to reappear. I didn’t do work like this, and I didn’t hear conversations like this during the rest of the week, and so I was the only person still dismantling the play structure when Earl reappeared in the backyard with the revolver in his right hand. He had his shirtsleeve pulled back so anybody could see the tattoo of the rose run through with the saber on his forearm. Because I didn’t know what he was going to do with that gun, I thought I had just better continue to work.

“The ninth law in your bedroom,” Earl announced, “says you use violence only in self-defense.” He stepped to the fence, then held his arm straight up into the air and fired once. That sound, that shattering, made me drop my wrench. It hit the ground with a clank, three inches from my right foot. Through all the backyards of Westland I heard the blast echoing. The neighborhood dogs set up a barking chain; front and back doors slammed.

Earl was breathing hard and staring at his daughter. We were in a valley, I thought, of distinct silence. “That’s all the bullets I own for that weapon,” he said. He put the gun on the doorstep. Then he made his way over to where his daughter was sitting. There’s a kind of walk, a little stiff, where you know every step has been thought about, every step is a decision. This was like that.

Jaynee was munching the last of her cookie. Her father grabbed her by the shoulders and began to shake her. It was like what you see in movies, someone waking up a sleepwalker. Back and forth her head tossed. “Never never never never never,” he said. I started to laugh, but it was too crazed and despairing to be funny. He stopped. I could see he wanted to make a parental speech: his face was tightening up, his flesh stiff, but he didn’t know how to start it, the right choice for the first word, and his daughter pushed him away and ran into the house. In that run, something happened to me, and I knew I had to get out of there.

I glanced at Jody, the new woman. She stood with her hands in her blue jeans. She looked bored. She had lived here all her life. What had just happened was a disturbance in the morning’s activities. Meanwhile, Earl had picked up a board and was tentatively beating the ground with it. He was staring at the revolver on the steps. “I got to take that gun and throw it into Ford Lake,” he said. “First thing I do this afternoon.”

“Have to go, Earl,” I said. Everything about me was getting just a little bit out of control, and I thought I had better get home.

“You’re going?” Earl said, trying to concentrate on me for a moment. “You’re going now? You’re sure you don’t want another beer?”

I said I was sure. The new woman, Jody, went over to Earl and whispered something to him. I couldn’t see why, right now, out loud, she couldn’t say what she wanted to say. Christ, we were all adults, after all.

“She wants you to take that.22 and throw it,” Earl said. He went over to the steps, picked up the gun, and returned to where I was standing. He dropped it into my hand. The barrel was warm, and the whole apparatus smelled of cordite.

“Okay, Earl,” I said. I held this heavy object in my hand, and I had the insane idea that my life was just beginning. “You have any particular preference about where I should dispose of it?”

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 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.

I looked around the parking lot and thought: Everyone here understands what’s going on better than I do. But then I remembered that I had fired shots at a nuclear reactor. All the desperate remedies. And I remembered my mother’s first sentence to me when we arrived in New York harbor when I was ten years old. She pointed down from the ship at the pier, at the crowds, and she said, “Warren, look at all those Americans.” I felt then that if I looked at that crowd for too long, something inside my body would explode, not metaphorically but literally: it would blow a hole through my skin, through my chest cavity. And it came back to me in that shopping center parking lot, full of those LOVE NETWORK people, that feeling of pressure of American crowds and exuberance.

We collected our free cola certificates, and then I hustled my wife and kids back into the car. I’d had enough. We drove out of the Westland parking lot, then were directed by a detour sign into a service drive that circled the entire shopping center and reentered the lot on the north side, back at the clown races. I saw Jaynee again, still in the rain, hugging her American dad, and Jody holding on to his elbow, looking up at him, pressing her thigh against his. I took another exit out of the lot but somehow made the same mistake I had made before and, once again, found myself back in Westland. Every service drive seemed designed to bring us back to this same scene of father, daughter, and second wife. I gave them credit for who they were and what they were doing — I give them credit now — but I had to get out of there immediately. I don’t know how I managed to get out of that place, but on the fourth try I succeeded.