by Richard Ford
“I was doing pretty good.”
“Gogetchanotherball. Get a red one—they’re lucky.” She stands like a woodsman, with her mallet on her shoulder. She has but two wickets remaining, and pretends to want me to catch up.
“I resign,” I say and smile.
“Say what?”
“That’s what you say in chess. I’m not a match for you, not even a patch on your jeans.”
“Chest nothin, you’re the one wanted to play, and now you’re the one quittin. Go on and get a ball.”
“No I won’t. I’m no good at games, not since I was little.”
“People bet on this game in Texas. It’s taken very serious.”
“That’s why I’m no good at it.”
I take a seat on the damp porch step beside her red shoes and admire the green-tinted light and the lovely curving street. This snaky peninsula is the work of some enterprising developer who’s carted it in with trucks and reclaimed it from a swamp. And it has not been a bad idea. You could just as easily be in Hyannis Port if you closed your eyes, which for a moment I do.
Vicki goes back to hitting her green stripe, but carelessly now, using my method to show she isn’t serious. “When I was a lil girl I saw Alice in Wonderland, Cade and me. You know?” She looks up to see if I’m listening. “In the part where they played croquet with ostriches’ heads, or whatever those pink birds are, I cried bloody murder, ’cause I thought it killed ’em. I hated to see anything get hurt even then. That’s why I’m a nurse.”
“Flamingos,” I say and smile down at her.
“Is that what they were? Well, I know I cried about ’em.” Whack-crack. Her green makes a hard driving run toward the striped stake, then twirls by on the left. “There you go, that’s your fault. Shoota-mile.” She stands thrown-hipped in the breeze. I watch her with terrible desire. “You don’t play games, but you write about ’em all the time. That’s backwards.”
“I like it that way.”
“How’d you like ole Cade. Idn’t he great?”
“He’s a good fellow.”
“If he’d let me dress him he’d be a whole lot better, I’ll tell you that. Cade needs him a little girlfriend. He’s got being a policeman on the brain.” She comes over and sits on the step below mine, hugs her knees and tucks her skirt up under her. Her hair is sweet-smelling. While she was gone she has put on a good deal of Chanel No. 5.
I wish we could not talk about Cade now, but I have nothing much to substitute for him. Vicki has no interest in the upcoming NFL draft, or the early lead the Tigers have opened up in the East, or who might be ahead in the Knicks game, so I’m content to sit on the porch like a lazy freeholder, breathe in the salt air and look upwards at the daylight moon. In its own way this is quite inspiring.
“So how do you like it out here?” Vicki looks at me up over her shoulder, then back at the house across the street—another split-level, but with an oriental façade, its cornices tweaked, and painted China red.
“It’s great.”
“You don’t fit in at all, you know that.”
“I’m here to see you. I’m not trying to fit in.”
“I guess,” she says, and hugs her knees hard.
“Where’s your dad? I sort of have the feeling he’s ducking me.”
“No way for that, José.”
“I could get lost in a hurry, you know, if being here is one bit of trouble.”
“Right, you’re a heap of trouble. Breakin things and spillin food and roughin up poor ole Cade. Maybe you had better leave.”
She turns and gives me a different look, a look you’d give a man trying to recite the Lord’s Prayer in pig Latin. “Just don’t be dumb,” she says. “That man dudn’t duck nobody. He’s in the basement with his hobby. He probably dudn’t even know you’re here.” She glares into the moiling sky. “If anybody’s trouble it’s ole you-know-who in there. But I can’t talk about that. It’s his poison, let him drink it.”
“Just like you’re mine.” I scoot down a step so I can hug her shoulders around tight. No one up or down Arctic Spruce could care less, a far different place from prudent Michigan. The feeling out here is we can hug and smooch on the steps till our arms fall off and it’ll be just fine with folks.
Her shoulders rise and settle inside my bear’s hug. “I’m not so sweet,” she says.
“Don’t tell me any bad news now,”
She furrows her brow. “Well, look.”
“It’s okay. I give you my word; whatever it is, later’s good enough.” I breathe in washed sweetness from her warm hair.
“Well, I do have something to tell you.”
“I just don’t want to spoil this afternoon.”
“Maybe it won’t.”
“Do I really have to hear it?”
“I think you should, yes.” She sighs. “You know that clam-handed old sawbones you were talkin’ to at the airport the other day? The one I came up and killed with a look?”
“I don’t want to know about you and Fincher,” I say. “It would count as a terrible part of my day. I command you never to tell me.” I stare at the swarming green sky. A small Cessna mutters across our airspace, seeking, I’m sure, a safe landing in Manahawkin or Ship Bottom, ahead of the storm. It does not seem a bit like Easter now, only another day without safeguards. Though the more normal the April day the better for me. Holidays can hold too many disappointments that I then have to accommodate.
“Look. I hadn’t been with that ole character.”
“Okay. That’s good to hear.”
“It’s your ex. She’s slippin off with him. The only reason I know is that I’ve seen her pick him up at the ER entrance three or four times. She’s got the light brown Citation, right?”
“What?”
“Well,” Vicki says. “If it hadn’t been he kissed her, I would’ve thought it was just innocent. But it idn’t innocent. That’s why I acted so peculiar at the airport. I figured ya’ll was about to fight.”
“Maybe it was somebody else,” I say. “There’s a lot of brown cars. G.M. made millions of them. They’re wonderful cars.”
“G.M.” She shakes her head in a teacherly way. “Not with your wife in ’em, they don’t.”
And for a sudden moment my mind simply ceases—which isn’t even so unusual, and there are times when nothing else will help, Sitting next to Ralph’s bed at the instant the nurse came in and said, “I’m sorry, Ralph has expired” (he was actually cold as an oyster when I touched his small clenched fist, and had been dead probably for an hour), at that moment when I knew he was dead, I remember my mind stopping. No other thought occurred to me immediately. No association or memory latched on to the event, or to the next one, for that matter, whatever it might’ve been. I don’t remember. No lines of poetry. No epiphanies. The room became like a picture of a room, though more greenish and murky for that time of the morning, and then it sank away and became tiny—as though I was having a look at it through the wrong end of a telescope. I have since heard this explained as a protective mechanism of the mind, and that I should be grateful for it. Though I’m certain it was brought on as much by fatigue as the shock of grief.
Nothing now grows smaller because of this unexpected news, though the air around me is tinged a stormy bottle green. The Chinese split-level maintains its ground in full view. Nothing has been thrown for a loop. I simply find myself staring across Arctic Spruce Drive at a chimney painted white, from which a gusty wind is drawing smoke at an angle perfectly perpendicular to the flue. All the draperies are closed. The grass out front is unspeakably green. You could putt on it and expect a good true roll to the cup.
I admit I am surprised; that the picture Vicki would like to paint of X kissing Fincher Barksdale in the front seat of her Citation outside the emergency room—when he is just off the cancer ward, smelling of disease and bodies—is as revulsive as any I could think of on my own. That the next scene, the one she hasn�
�t painted yet, of wherever the two of them are slying off to for whatever itchy plans they have, clouds up pretty fast—aided by the revulsion. At the same time it’s true I have to fight back a black hole of betrayal—for me and for Fincher’s wife, Dusty, which is totally unwarranted since she might not even care and I hardly know her anymore. This in turn makes me feel a sense of Fincher’s lizard’s depravity, which brings about more disgust.
But a thought I do not think. Nor contrive a mean and explicatory synthesis to formulate my position regarding what I’ve heard.
In other words, I do not exactly respond; except to remember: people will surprise you.
“I guess not,” I say agreeably, and stare off.
Vicki has twisted around to face me, her face above the split horizon of my two knees. She looks concerned, but willing to swap this look for a happy one. “So what’re you thinkin?”
“Nothing.” I smile, revulsion faded in me, leaving me only a little weak. I am glad I don’t have to stand up. The simple words “You cannot” come to mind, but I don’t have a finish for the phrase. “You cannot … what?” Dance? Fly? Sing an aria? Control the lives of others? Be happy all the time? “Why is it so important to tell me that just now?” I ask in a sudden but friendly way.
“Well, I just hate secrets. And I had this one with me a while. And if I waited any longer you might get to feeling so good that maybe I couldn’t tell you at all or it’d ruin your whole day. I coulda told you in Detroit, but that would’ve been awful.” She nods at me soberly, chin out, as if she couldn’t agree more with what she’s just heard herself say. “This way, you got time to get over it.”
“I appreciate your thinking about me,” I say, though I’m sorry she is such a spendthrift of secrets.
“You’re my ole pardner, aren’t you?” She gives me a pat on my knees and the grin she’s wanted to give me all along. It’s nice to see, in spite of everything.
“What am I again?”
“My ole pardner. That’s what I use to call Daddy when I was a little bitty thing.” She bats her eyes at me.
“I’m more than that, at least I used to be. I still want to be, anyway.” And I have to staunch a terrible tear that fills my eye like a freshet.
In some of the heart’s business there is really no net gain. Let someone who knows tell you.
“Why, you bet,” Vicki says. “But cain’t we be friends, too? I’m gon always want to be your pardner.” She plants a big fishy kiss upon my cold cheek. And up above me the sky swirls and tears apart, and on my face I feel the first serious drop of storm that’s all along been waiting for its time.
Wade Arcenault is a cheery, round-eyed, crewcut fellow with a plainsman’s square face and hearty laugh. I instantly recognize him from Exit 9, where he has taken my money hundreds of times but doesn’t recognize me now. He is not a large man, hardly taller than Lynette, though his forearms, exposed and khaki sleeves up for washing at the sink, are ropy and tanned. He gives my hand a good wet shake right where he’s washing. With a sly-secret smile he tells me he’s been “down in his devil’s dungeon” rewiring a Sunbeam fry-pan for Lynette to use to make Dutch Babies—her favorite Easter dessert. The pan sits splendidly fixed now on the counter top.
He is not at all what I expected. I had envisioned a wiry, squint-eyed little pissant—a gun store owner type, with fading flagrant tattoos of women on emaciated biceps, a man with a cruel streak for Negroes. But that is the man of bad stereotype, the kind my writing career foundered over and probably should have. The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being. And for a moment Wade and I do nothing more than stand and stare at the fry-pan’s drastic utilitarian lines like deaf-mutes, unable to get a better subject out in the open.
“So now how was the trip down, Frank?” Wade says with brusque heartiness. There is a frontier tautness in his character that makes him instantly trustworthy and appealing, a man with his priorities straight and a permanent twinkle in his eye that says he expects someone—me, maybe—to tell him something that will make him extremely happy. Nothing, in fact, would please me more.
“I came down through Pemberton and Bamber, Wade. It’s one of my favorite drives. I’d like to take a canoe in the Rancocas one of these days. Parts of Africa must be a lot like that.”
“Isn’t it something, Frank?” Wade Arcenault’s eyes ramble around in their sockets, seeking what, I don’t know. Strange to say, Wade has no more of a Texas accent than Cade. “This is our little Garden of Eden down here, and we want to keep it so the outsiders don’t ruin it for us, which is why I don’t mind driving fifty miles to work. Though I guess I shouldn’t be closing the drawbridge.” His clear eyes sparkle with admission. “We’re all from someplace else these days, Frank. People who were born right here don’t even recognize it anymore. I’ve talked to them.”
“But I bet they like it. This peninsula is a good idea.”
“There’s just the ri-niest little erosion problem out back,” Wade says, finishing drying his hands with a dish towel. “But we’ve got our builder, this smart young Rutger’s grad, Pete Calcagno.” (A name I know!) “He’s done his share with his backhoe and sandbags, and he’ll get her licked, is what I think.” Wade beams at me. “Most people want to do right, is my concept.”
“I agree.” And I most surely do! It is certainly true of me, and unquestionably true of Wade Arcenault. He, after all, bought his divorced daughter a house full of new furniture, and stood by and let her pick out every stick, then stepped up and wrote a whopper check so she could get a good start in a new northern environment. A lot of people would like to do that, but not many would follow through all the way.
Wade’s blue eyes cut mischievously toward the basement door. Something I’ve done or said seems to have made him take to me, at least in a preliminary way. “Lynette,” he says loudly, putting his eyes on the ceiling. “Have I got time to take this boy down to my devil’s dungeon?” He gives me a wide wink and looks upwards again. (Maybe we’ll be able to get a fishing trip planned, no matter how things go with Vicki.)
“I doubt if Grant’s army could be expected to stop you, could it?” Lynette smiles in at us through the serving bay to the dining room, shakes her pretty red head, and waves us on.
In through the living room door I spy Vicki and Cade sitting on the salmon couch having what looks like an intimate talk. Cade’s wardrobe and stultifying social life are no doubt under reappraisal.
Wade goes tromping off down the dark basement steps with me right behind. And immediately the heavy kitchen air is exchanged for the cool, chemically pungent odors indigenous to suburban basements where the owner is nobody’s fool and has his termite contract up-to-date. I am one of their number.
“All right now, stay there, Frank,” Wade says, lost in darkness ahead of me, his steps crossing concrete. Behind me Lynette’s plump arm closes the kitchen door.
“Hold your horses, now.” Wherever he is, Wade is enthusiastic.
I hold on to a wood 2×6 bannister, not certain of even one more step. Something, I sense, is large and in front of me.
Wade is fiddling with metal objects, possibly the shade of a utility lamp, a fuse-box door, possibly a box of keys. “Ahh, the Christ,” he mutters.
Suddenly a light flutters on, not a utility lamp but a shimmering white fluorescence in the raftered ceiling. What I see first in the light is not, I think, what I’m supposed to see. I see a big picture of the world photographed from outer space, fastened to the cinderblock wall above Wade’s workbench. In it, all of space is blue and empty, and North America clear as in a dream, from miles away, in perfect outline white against a dark surrounding sea.
“What d’you think, Frank?” Wade says with pride.
My eyes try to find him, but instead find, directly in front of me where I could touch it, a big black car—so close I can’t make out what it is, though it certainly is a car, with plenty of chrome and a glas
sy black finish. CHRYSLER is lettered above big wide louvered grill work.
“By God, Wade,” I say and find him down the long-fendered side, his hand on the tip of a high rear fin above the red taillight. He’s grinning like a TV salesman who this time has put together something really special, something the little woman will have to like, something anyone in his nut would be proud to own as an investment, since its value can only increase.
It is a big box-safe of a car with fat whitewalls, ballistic bumpers, and an air of postwar styling-with-substance that makes my Malibu only a sad reminder.
“They don’t make these anymore, Frank.” Wade pauses to let these words hold sway. “I restored it myself. Cade helped me some, but he got bored soon as the motor work was over. Bought this off a soapstone Greek in Little Egg, and you should’ve seen it. Brown. Full of holes. Chrome half gone. Just a Swiss cheese, is what it was.” Wade looks at the finish as if it might have murmured. It’s chilly in the basement, and the Chrysler seems as cold and hard as a black diamond. “The roll-pleat inside still needs work,” Wade admits.
“How’d you get it in here?”
Wade grins. He’s been waiting for this one. “One Bilco door, back around there where you can’t see it. The tow truck just slid it down. Cade and I had a ramp rigged out of channel irons. I had to relearn welding. You know anything about arc welding, Frank?”
“Not a damn thing,” I say. “I should, though.” I look at the photo of the earth again. It is a good thing to have, I think, for maintaining a sense of perspective, though in its homely surroundings the globe seems as exotic as a tapestry.
“Not necessary,” Wade says soberly. “The principles are all pretty straightforward. Resistance is the whole thing. You’d pick it up in a minute.” Wade smiles at the thought that I might someday own a marketable skill.
“What’re you going to do with it, Wade?” I say, a question that just came to me.
