The Sportswriter

by Richard Ford

  “Okay.” I take the page by another of its greasy corners. It is badly copied in gray with a nasty embalming-fluid odor all over it. I see the script is a neat, very small longhand, with a signature near the bottom.

  “Be careful with that stuff, it gets in your clothes. Cops smell like it all the time, it’s how you know we’re in the neighborhood.” He closes his folder, reaches in his pocket and takes out a pack of Kools.

  “I’ll read it later,” I say and fold the letter in thirds, then sit holding it, waiting for whatever is supposed to happen next to happen. We are both of us immobilized by how simple all this has been.

  Sergeant Benivalle lights his cigarette and inserts the burnt match into the book behind the others. The two of us sit then and stare at the yellow street map of the town we live in—each probably looking at the street where his own house sits. They couldn’t be far apart. Prolly he lives in The Presidents.

  “Where’d you say this guy’s wife was again?” Benivalle says, breathing smoke hugely into his lungs. Though he looks at least fifty, he is no older than I am. His life cannot have been an easy one so far.

  “She went to Bimini with another man.”

  He blows smoke, then sniffs loudly two times. “That’s the shits.” He braces against the curved back of the bench, clenching his cigarette in his teeth, thinking about Bimini. “There’s gotta be better things to do about it than kill yourself, though. It isn’t that bad. Wouldn’t you think?” He turns his big head and fixes me with eyes blue as fjords. He hasn’t liked this business with Walter one bit better than I have, and he’d like somebody to say a word to help him out of worrying about it.

  “I sure would think so,” I say and nod.

  “Boy-o-boy. Mmmmph. What a mess.” He extends both his legs and crosses them at the ankles. It is his way of inviting conversation between menfolk, though I’m stumped for what to say. It’s possible he would understand if I said nothing.

  “Do you think it would be all right if I went over to Walter’s house?” I actually surprise myself by saying this.

  Sergeant Benivalle looks at me strangely. “What do you want to do that for?”

  “Just to have a look. I wouldn’t stay long. It’s just probably the only way I’m going to get grips on this whole business. He gave me a key.”

  Sergeant Benivalle grunts, thinking about this request. He smokes his cigarette and stares at the smoke he exhales. “Sure,” he says almost indifferently. “Just don’t take anything out. The family has claims on everything. Okay?”

  “I won’t.” Everyone trusts everyone here. And why not? No one’s ever up to anything that could cause harm to anyone but themselves. “Are you married, Sergeant,” I ask.

  “Divorced.” He throws a narrow, flinty look my way, his eyes piggy with suspicion. “Why?”

  “Well. Some of us, we’re all of us divorced men—there’s a lot of us in town these days—we get together now and then. It’s nothing serious. We just gang up for a beer at the August once a month. Go to a ball game or two. We went fishing last week, in fact. I thought if you’d like to, I’d give you a call. It’s a pretty good group. Everything’s informal.”

  Sergeant Benivalle holds his Kool between his big thumb and his crooked forefinger, like a movie Frenchman, and flicks off an ash toward the polished floor. “Busy,” he says and sniffs. “Police work….” He starts to say more, then stops. “I forget what I was going to say.” He stares at the marble floor.

  I have embarrassed him without meaning to, and I’d just as soon leave now. It’s possible Sergeant Benivalle is nothing but Cade Arcenault years later, and I should leave him to his police work. Though it never hurts to show someone that their own monumental concerns and peculiar problems are really just like everybody else’s. We all have our own police work to do.

  “I’ll still call you, okay?” I grin like a salesman.

  “I doubt I’ll make it,” he says, suddenly distracted.

  “Well. We’re pretty flexible. I don’t come myself, sometimes. But I like the idea of going.”

  “Yeah,” Sergeant Benivalle says, and once again fattens his heavy lower lip.

  “I guess I’ll take off,” I say.

  He blinks at me as if waked up from a dream. “How come you have a key to that place?” He cannot not be a policeman, a fact I find satisfying. He is hard to imagine as anything else.

  “Walter just gave it to me. I don’t know why. I don’t know if he had many friends.”

  “People don’t usually give their keys to people.” He shakes his head and clicks back in his mouth.

  “People do weird things, I guess.”

  “All the time” he says and sniffs again. “Here,” he says. He reaches in his pocket behind his pack of Kools and pulls out a little blue plastic card case. “Keep this if you go over there.” He hands me a printed card with his name and title and the Haddam town seal printed on it. “Gene Benivalle. Sergeant of Detectives.” His no doubt unlisted home number is printed at the bottom. I could call him about the Divorced Men’s Club at this very number, as I’m sure he knows.

  “Okay.” I stand up.

  “Just don’t take anything, right?” he says hoarsely, sitting on the bench with his sheaf of papers in front of his stomach. “That’d be wrong.”

  I stuff his card in my shirt pocket. “Maybe we’ll see you some night.”

  “Nah,” he says, pushing his foot down hard on his cigarette and blowing smoke across his big knees.

  “I’ll probably call you anyway.”

  “Whatever,” he says, wearily. “I’m always here.”

  “So long,” I say.

  But he doesn’t like goodbyes. He’s not the type any more than he’s the handshake type. I leave him where he sits, under the red EXIT sign in the lobby, staring out the glass door at me as I go.

  X’s car sits alongside mine in the deepening dusk in front of Village Hall. She herself sits on the front fender carrying on a coaxing conversation with our two children, who are performing cartwheels on the public lawn and giggling. Paul is unwilling to fling his legs high enough in the air to achieve perfect balance, but Clarissa is expert from hours of practice, and even in her gingham granny dress, which I gave her, she can “walk the clouds,” her cotton panties astonishing in the failed daylight. On the front bumper of X’s car is a sticker that says “I’d Rather Be Golfing.”

  “I bought these two some ice cream, and this is the result,” X says, when I sit up on the warm fender beside her. She has not looked at me, merely taken my existence for granted from the evidence of my car. “It seems to have brought out the kid in them.”

  “Dad,” Paul shouts from the grass. “Clary’s going in the circus.”

  “Please scratch glass,” Clary says and immediately gets onto her hands again. They aren’t surprised to see me, though I notice they’ve passed a secret look between themselves. Their usual days are alive with secrets, and toward me they feel both secret humor and secret sympathy. They’d be happy for us to start a roughhouse on the lawn the way we do at home, but now we can’t. Paul probably has a new joke by now, better than the one from Thursday night.

  “She’s pretty good, isn’t she?” I call out.

  “I meant it as a compliment, all right?” Paul stands, hands on his hips in a girlish way. He and I suffer misunderstanding poorly. Clary lets herself fall on her bottom and laughs. She looks like her grandfather and has his almost silvery hair.

  “I think it’s odd that a town like this could have a morgue, don’t you?” X says, musing. She’s wearing a bright green-and-red sailcloth wraparound and a mint-colored knitted Brooks’ shirt like the ones I wear, and looks coolly clubby. She smoothes the material over her knees and lets her heels kick against the tire wall. She is in a generous mood.

  “I never thought about it,” I say, watching my children with admiration. “But I guess it’s surprising.”

  “One of Paul’s friends is a
pathologist’s son, and he says there’s a very modern facility in the basement in there.” She gazes at the brick-and-glass façade with placid interest. “No coroner, though. He drives down from New Brunswick on a circuit of some kind.” For the first time she looks at me eye to eye. “How are you?”

  I am happy to hear this confiding voice again. “I’m all right. This day’ll be over with.”

  “Sorry I had to call you at wherever that was.”

  “It’s fine. Walter died. We can’t help that.”

  “Did you have to view him?”

  “No. His relatives are coming from Ohio.”

  “Suicide is very Ohio, you know.”

  “I guess.” Hers, as always, is a perfect Michigan attitude. No one there has any patience for Ohio.

  “What about his wife?”

  “They’re divorced.”

  “Well. You poor old guy,” she says and pats me on my knee and gives me a quick and unexpected smile. “Want me to buy you a drink? The August is open. I’ll run these two Indians home.” She glances into the near dark, where our children are sitting in a private powwow on the grass. They are each other’s confidants in all crucial matters.

  “I’m okay. Are you going to marry Fincher?”

  She glances at me impassively then looks away. “I certainly am not. He’s married unless something’s changed in three days.”

  “Vicki says you two are the hot topic in the Emergency Room.”

  “Vicki-schmicky,” she says and sighs audibly through her nostrils. “Surely she’s mistaken. Surely you can’t be interested.”

  “He’s an asshole and a change-jingler, that’s all. He’s down in Memphis starting an air-conditioned mink ranch at this very moment. That’s the kind of guy he is.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “It’s true.”

  “True?” X looks at me heartlessly. I am the asshole here, of course, but I don’t care. Something seems at stake. The stability and sanctity of my divorce.

  “I thought you were interested in software salesmen.”

  “I’ll marry and fuck,” she whispers terribly, “whoever I choose.”

  “Sorry,” I say, but I’m not. Out on Seminary Street I see the lights go on weakly, blink once, then stay on.

  “Men always think other men are assholes,” X says, coldly. “It’s surprising how often they’re right.”

  “Does Fincher think I’m an asshole?”

  “He’s intimidated by you. And anyway, he isn’t so bad. He’s pretty certain about some things in his life. He just doesn’t show it.”

  “How about Dusty?”

  “Frank, I will take your children to Michigan and you’ll never see them again, except for two weeks every summer in the Huron Mountain Club with my father to chaperone. This if you don’t lay off me at this moment. How would you like that?” She isn’t serious about this, and it’s possible, I think now, that Vicki has made this whole business up for reasons of her own, though I would rather believe it was a mistake. X sighs again wearily. “I gave Fincher putting lessons, because he’s playing in a college reunion tournament in Memphis. He was embarrassed about it, so we went over to Bucks County to Idlegreen and putted for a few days. He needed to improve his confidence.”

  “Did you put some iron in his putter?” I would like to ask about the putative kiss, but the moment’s passed.

  It is full dark now, and we are silent and alone in it. Cars murmur along Cromwell Lane, their headlights sweeping in the direction of the Institute, where an “Easter sing” is no doubt on for tonight. St. Leo the Great chimes out a last chance, admonitory call. Three uniformed policemen stroll outside laughing, heading off for a supper at home. I recognize officers Carnevale and Patriarca, whom I imagine, for some reason, to be distant cousins. They walk in lock step toward their personal cars and pay no attention to us. It is a dreamy, average, vertiginous evening in the suburbs—not too much on excitement, only the lives of isolated individuals in the harmonious secrecy of a somber age.

  I can’t deny I’m relieved about Fincher Barksdale, though—a misunderstanding, that is what I’m ready to believe. “Your father sent a message,” I say.

  “Oh?” Her face grows instantly skeptical.

  “He told me to tell your mother he has bladder cancer.”

  “She told him the same thing once when I was a little girl, and he forgot to ask her about it the next day and went away on business. Only now it’s different. It’s a way to make them feel passionate. She’ll think that’s hilarious.”

  “He said I could marry you again if I wanted to.”

  X sniffs, then looks into her hands as if one might contain something she’s forgotten. “He can’t stop giving me away.”

  “He’s a nice guy, isn’t he?”

  “No, he’s not.” She casts a secret glance at me. “I’m sorry about your friend. Was he a nice, good friend?” The footlights that illumine the shubbery around Village Hall all go on at once. A Negro janitor steps to the glass door and peers out between his palms, then wanders back with a long dust mop in tow. It is cool now out of doors. A car horn blows briefly. The policemen’s taillights disappear down the dark streets.

  “No. I didn’t know him very well.”

  “What could’ve happened?” I hear my children giggle in the damp grass, sweet music of not-to-worry-in-this-world.

  “He quit being interested in what’s next, I guess. I don’t know. I tend not to be much of an alarmist.”

  “You don’t worry that it was your fault, do you?”

  “I hadn’t thought about that. I don’t see how.”

  “You have awfully odd relationships. I don’t know how you stand it.”

  “I don’t have any relationships at all.”

  “I know that. But it’s the way you like it.”

  Clarissa calls out from the darkness haltingly, wanting to know the exact time. It is 7:36. She is beginning to feel a strangeness out of doors, as though she might suddenly be cut loose and abandoned. “It’s early,” Paul whispers.

  “I’m going over to Walter’s house tonight. Would you like to come with me?”

  X turns to me with a look of outlandish surprise. “What on earth? Did he have something of yours?”

  “No. I just want to go by there. He gave me a key, and I want to use it. The police don’t mind if I don’t take anything.”

  “It’s ghoulish.”

  I sit in silence, then, and listen for meaningful sounds in the darkness—a train whistle far out on the main line, a long-haul trucker drumming up Route 1 from as far away as Arkansas, a small plane humming through the angelic night sky—anything to console us two in these last thin moments. Genuinely good conversations with your ex-wife are limited by the widening territories of intimacy from which you’re restricted. It is finally okay, I guess. “That’s fine,” I say.

  “But you’re probably going anyway, aren’t you?” X looks at me, then stares out at the lighted foyer of Village Hall, through which is the tax assessor’s glassed-in office. We can both see the janitor with his dust mop moving in slow motion.

  “I guess so,” I say. “It’s really all right.”

  “Why?” She looks at me with narrow eyes, her look of skepticism at earthly uncertainties, entities she has never much liked.

  “I don’t need to say. Men feel things women don’t. You don’t have to disapprove of it.”

  “You do such odd things.” She smiles sympathetically, though magisterially also. “You’re so vague sometimes. Are you really all right? You looked pale when I could see you.”

  “I’m not completely all right. But I will be.” I could tell her about Vicki knocking my block off, and being hit by a shopping cart. But what the hell good would it do? It would be in the way of full disclosure, and neither of us wants that again, now or ever. We have probably been here too long.

  “We just see each other about deaths now,” X says, somberly. “I
sn’t that sad?”

  “Most divorced people don’t see each other at all. Walter’s wife went to Bimini, and he never saw her again. So I think we do pretty well. We have wonderful children. We don’t live very far apart.”

  “Do you love me,” X says.

  “Yes.”

  “I was wondering about it. I haven’t asked you in a long time.”

  “I’m always glad to tell you, though.”

  “I haven’t really heard it in a long time, except from the children. I’m sure you’ve heard it several times.”

  “No.” (Though it would be a lie to say I haven’t heard it at all.)

  “Sometimes I think about you being involved with all different kinds of people I don’t know anything about, and it seems so odd. I don’t like the feeling.”

  “I’m involved with fewer people all the time.”

  “Does that make you lonely?”

  “No. Not a bit.”

  The fender of her Citation has grown cold in the darkness. Our two children—weary at last of each other’s secrets—have climbed to their feet and are standing out in the dark like shy ghosts of themselves, wanting to be pleased and made over. It is like old times in a way. They stand not far from us and stare, wondering what’s going on, saying nothing, exactly like their very ghosts might.

  “Do you really want me to go over there with you?” X says, blinking but ready to give in.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Yes. Well,” she says and sniffs a little chuckle laugh. “I can drop these two at the Armentis’ for half a hour. They like it over there, anyway. I don’t know what might happen to you alone.”

  “I’ll pay if it costs anything.”

  X shakes her head and slides off the fender. “You’ll pay, huh?” The moon has appeared suddenly over the stalky elms—a bright, wide and ethereal world above us, illuminating trees and patches of empty street and the older white residences beyond. She glances at me in amusement. “Who did you think was going to pay?” She laughs.

  “I just wanted to be a good sport.”