by Richard Ford
“Sounds like a blast,” I say.
“Yeees. We have loads of fun. They send me down the leemo. Sometimes you should come with me.” Ernesto nods to certify I wouldn’t be sorry.
I have, just then, the recurrent aching memory of the long walk Clarissa and I took last August through the sun-warmed, healthy-elm-shaded streets of Rochester, a town noted for its prideful thereness and for looking like a small Lutheran college town instead of medical ground zero. It was the Friday before my procedure on Monday, and we’d decided to walk ourselves to sweaty exhaustion, eat an early dinner at Applebee’s and watch the Twins play the Tigers on TV at the Travelodge. We hiked out State Highway 14 to the eastern edge of town—on our feet where others were driving—beyond the winding streets of white-painted, well-tended, green-roof neighborhoods, past the Arab-donated Little League stadium and the federal medical facility and the Olmsted County truck-marshaling yard, beyond the newer rail-fenced ranch homes with snow machines, bass boats and fifth-wheelers For Sale on their lawns, past where a sand and gravel operation had cracked open the marly earth, and farther on to where dense-smelling alfalfa fields took up and a small, treed river bottom appeared, and the glaciated earth began to devolve and roll and slide greenly toward the Mississippi, fifty miles away. NO HUNTING signs were on all the fence posts. The summer landscape was as dry as a razor strop, the corn as high as an elephant’s gazoo, the far, hot sky as one-color gray as a cataract. There was, of course, a lake.
On a little asphalt hillcrest beside where the highway ribboned off to the east, Clarissa and I stopped to take the view back to town—the great, many-buildinged Mayo colossus dominating the pleasant, forested townscape like a kremlin. Impressive. These buildings, I thought, could take good care of anybody.
Sweat had beaded on Clarissa’s forehead, her tee-shirt sweated through. She passed a hand across her flushed cheek. A green truck with slatted sides rumbled past, kicking up hot breeze and sand grit, leaving behind a loud, sweetish aroma of pigs-to-market. “This is where America’s decided to receive its bad news, I guess, isn’t it?” She suddenly didn’t like being out here. Everything was far too specific.
“It’s not so terrible. I like it.” I did. And do. “Given the alternatives.”
“You would.”
“Wait’ll you’re my age. You’ll be happy there’re places like this to receive you. Things look different.”
“Maybe you should just move out here. Buy one of those nice, horrible houses with the green roofs and the green shutters and mullioned windows. Buy a Ski-Doo.”
I’d already given that some thought. “I think I’d do fine out here,” I said. We were both pretending I’d be dead on Monday, just to see how it felt.
“Great,” she said, then turned dramatically on her heel to gaze down the highway eastward. We were traveling no farther that day. “You think you’d do fine anywhere.”
“What’s the matter with that? Is it a mark of something to be unhappy?”
“No,” she said sourly. “You’re very admirable. Sorry. I shouldn’t pick on you. I don’t know why I bother.”
I started to say, Because I’m your father, I’m all that’s left—but I didn’t. I said, “I understand perfectly. You have my best interests at heart. It’s fine.” We started back walking to town and to the things town had in store for me.
Ernesto stares down at me off the curb the way he would if he was waiting for my mouth to numb up. It dawns on me he has no real idea who I am. I am real estate-related but possess no name, only a set of full-mouth X rays clamped to a cold white screen. Or maybe I’m the carpet-cleaning guy from Skillman. Or I own the Chico’s on Route 1, a place I know he skulks off to with his Lebanese hygienist, Magda.
Up in my darkened rearview, I see what may be Ernesto’s leemo, its pumpkin-tinted headlights rounding onto Laurel and commencing slowly toward us.
“What’s up for Thanksgiving in su casa, Ernesto?” I have somehow become pointlessly cheery. Ernesto eyes the white stretch, then glances back at me warily, as if I might just be the wrong person to witness this. He flicks a secret hand signal to the driver, and in so doing makes himself look effeminate instead of mal hombre machismo. Maybe one of the nice-personality Barnard girls with her gold-plated health report is waiting in the backseat, already popping the Veuve Clicquot.
“What’s going on what?” he says, his horn-rims and beret getting misted, his smile not quite earnest.
“Thanksgiving,” I say. “¿Qué pasa a su casa?” I’m deviling him, but I don’t care, since he won’t fix my night guard.
“Oh, we go to Atlantic City. Always. My wife likes to gamble at Caesars.” He’s departing now, inching crabwise toward the limo, which has halted a discreet distance down Laurel. In my side mirror I see the driver’s door swing open. A tall chorus-girl-looking female in silver satin shorty-shorts, high heels and a white Pilgrim collar with a tall red Pilgrim hat just like on the Pennsylvania highway signs gets out and pulls open the rear door. “I have to go now.” Ernesto looks back at me a little frantically, as if he might get left. “Hasta la vista,” he adds idiotically.
“Hugo de Naranja to you, too.”
“Okay. Yes. Thanks.” In the mirror I see him hustle down the street, giving the chorus-girl driver a quick peck and scampering in the limo door. The Pilgrim chauffeur looks my way, smiles at me scoping her out, then climbs back in the driver’s seat and slowly pulls around me and up Laurel Road.
It wouldn’t be bad to be in there with ole Ernesto is what I think. Not so bad to have his agenda, his particular species of ducks lined up. Though my guess is, none of it would work out for me. Not now. Not in the state I’m currently in.
The Johnny Appleseed Bar, downstairs at the August Inn, where I’m meeting Mike Mahoney, is a fair replica of a Revolutionary War roadhouse tavern. Wide, worn pine floors, low ceilings, a burnished mahogany bar, plenty of antique copper lanterns and period “tack”—battle flags with snakes and mottoes, encrusted sabers, drumheads, homespun uniforms encased in glass, framed musket-balls, framed tricorn headgear—with (the pièce de résistance) a wall-sized spotlit mural in alarmingly vivid colors of a loony-looking J. Appleseed seated backward astride a gray mule, saucepan on head, a Klem Kadiddlehopper grin on his lascivious lips, mindlessly distributing apple seeds off the mule’s bony south end. Which apparently was how the West was won. For years, Haddam bar-stool historians debated whether Norman Rockwell or Thomas Hart Benton had “executed” the Appleseed mural. Old-timers swore to have watched both of them do it at several different times, though this was disproved when Rockwell stayed at the inn in the sixties and said not even Benton could paint anything that bad.
I’m always happy in here any time of day or night, its clubby, bogus, small-town imperviousness making me sense a safe haven. And tonight especially, following today, with only a smattering of holiday tipplers nursing quiet cocktails along the bar, plus an anonymous him ’n her tucked into a dark red leather banquette in the corner, conceivably doing the deed right there—not that anyone would care. A wall TV’s on without sound, a miniature plastic Yule tree’s set up on the bottle shelf, a strand of silver (flammable) bunting’s swagged across the mirrored backbar. The old sack-a-bones bartender’s watching the hockey game. It’s the perfect place to end up on a going-nowhere Tuesday before Thanksgiving, when much of your personal news hasn’t been so festive. It’s one thing to marvel at what a bodacious planet we occupy, the way Dr. von Reichstag did, where humans ruminate about neutrinos. But it’s beyond marveling that those humans can invent a concept as balming to the ailing spirit as the “cozy local watering hole,” where you’re always expected, no questions asked, where you can choose from a full list of life-restoring cocktails, stare silently at a silent TV, speak non sequiturs to a nonjudgmental bartender, listen (or not) to what’s said around you—in other words, savor the “in but not all in,” “out but not all out” zeitgeist mankind would package and sell like hoola-hoops if it could and thus brin
g peace to a troubled planet.
After my sad divorce seventeen years ago, and before I was summoned to the bar of residential realty, I found myself on a stool here many a night, enjoying a croque monsieur from the upstairs kitchen, plus seventy or eighty highballs, sometimes with a “date” I could smooch up in the shadows, then later slithering (alone or à deux) up the steps out onto Hulfish Street and into a warm Jersey eventide with not a single clue about where my car might be. I frequently ended up lurching home to Hoving Road (avoiding busier streets, and cops), and diving straight into bed and towering sleep. I may have experienced my fullest sensation of belonging in Haddam on those nights, circa 1983. By which I mean, if you saw a fortyish gentleman stepping unsteadily out of a bar into a dark suburban evening, staring around mystified, looking hopefully to the heavens for guidance, then careening off down a silent, tree-bonneted street of nice houses where lights are lit and life athrum, one of which houses he enters, tramps upstairs and falls into bed with all his clothes on—wouldn’t you think, Here’s a man who belongs, a man with native roots and memory, his plow deep in the local earth? You would. What’s belonging all about, what’s its quiddity, if not that drunk men “belong” where you find them?
It’s 6:25 and Mike is not yet in evidence. Hard to imagine what a diminutive Tibetan and a macaroni land developer could do together for an entire afternoon of rotten weather. How many plat maps, zoning ordinances, traffic projections, air-quality regulations, floodplain variances and EEOC regs can you pore over without needing sedation, and on the first day you ever laid eyes on each other?
From the elderly bartender, I order a Boodles, eighty proof, straight up, take a tentative lick off the martini-glass rim and feel exactly the way I want to feel: better—able to face the world as though it was my friend, to strike up conversations with total strangers, to see others’ points of view, to think most everything will turn out all right. Even my jaw relaxes. My eyes attain good focus. The bothersome belly sensation that I probably erroneously associate with my prostate has ceased its flickering. For the first time since I woke at six in Sea-Clift and knew I could sleep another hour, I breathe a sigh of relief. A day has passed intact. It’s nothing I take for granted.
My fellow patrons are all Haddam citizens I’ve seen before, may even have done business with, but who, because of my decade’s absence, pretend never to have laid eyes on me. Ditto the bean-pole, white-shirted, green-plastic-bow-tied bartender, Lester, who’s stood the bar here thirty years. He’s a Haddam townie, a slope-shouldered, high-waisted Ichabod in his late sixties, a balding bachelor with acrid breath no woman would get near. He’s given me the standard, noncommittal “Whatchouhavin,” even though years ago I listed his mother’s brick duplex on Cleveland Street, next door to my own former house, where Ann now lives, presented him two full-price offers in a week, only to have him back out (which he had every right to do) and turn the place into a rental—a major financial misreading in 1989, which I pointed out to him, so that he never forgave me. Often it’s the case that no matter how successful or pain-free a transaction turns out—and in Haddam there was never a bad one—once it’s over, clients often begin to treat the residential agent like a person who’s only half-real, someone they’ve maybe only dreamed about. When they pass you in a restaurant or mailing Christmas cards at the PO, they’ll instantly turn furtive and evade your eyes, as if they’d seen you on a sexual-predators list, give a hasty, mumbled, noncommittal “Howzitgoin?” and are gone. And I might’ve made them a quick two mil or ended a bad run of vein-clogging hassles or saved them from pissing away all in a divorce or a Chapter 11. At some level—and in Haddam this level is routinely reached—people are embarrassed not to have sold their own houses themselves and resentful about paying the commission, since all it seems to involve is putting up a sign and waiting till the dump truck full of money stops out front. Which sometimes happens and sometimes doesn’t. Looked at from this angle, we realtors are just the support group for the chronically risk-averse.
Lester’s begun using the remote to click channels away from the hockey game, staring up turkey-necked, gob open at the Sanyo bracketed above the flavored schnapps. He’s carrying on separate dialogues with the different regulars, desultory give-and-takes that go on night to night, year to year, never missing a beat, just picked up again using the all-purpose Jersey conjunction, So. “So, if you put in an invisible fence, doesn’t the fuckin’ dog get some kinda complex?” “So, if you ask me, you miss all the fuckin’ nuance using sign language.” “So, to me, see, flight attendants are just part of the plane’s fuckin’ equipment—like oxygen masks or armrests. Not that I wouldn’t schtup one of them. Right?” Lester nibbles his lip as he flips past sumo wrestling, cliff divers in Acapulco, two people who’ve won a game-show contest and are hugging, then on past several channels with different people dressed in suits and nice dresses, sitting behind desks, talking earnestly into the camera, then past a black man in an ice-cream suit healing a fat black woman in a red choir robe by making her fall over backward on a big stage—more things than I can focus on in my relaxed, not-all-in, not-all-out state of mind.
Then all at once, the President, my president—big, white-haired, smiling, puffy-faced and guileless—his face and figure fill the color screen. President Clinton strolls casually, long-strided, across a green lawn, suppressing an embarrassed smile. He’s in blue cords, a plain white shirt, a leather bomber jacket and Hush Puppies like mine. He’s doing his best to look shy and undeserving, guilty of something, but nothing very important—stealing watermelons, driving without a learner’s permit, taking a peek through a hole in the wall of the girls’ locker room. He’s got his Labrador, Buddy, on a leash and is talking and flirting with people off-camera. Behind him sits a big Navy copter with a white-hatted Marine at attention by the gangway. The President has just saluted him—incorrectly.
“Where’s the fuckin’ Mafia when you need them bastards?” Lester’s growling up at the tube. He makes a pistol out of his thumb and index finger and assassinates the man I voted for with a soft pop of his lizard lips. “Ain’t he havin’ the time of his fuckin’ life with this election bullshit. He loves it.” Lester swivels around to his patrons, his mouth sour and mean. “Country on its fuckin’ knees.”
“Easier to give blow jobs,” one of the regulars says, and thumbs his glass for a fill-up.
“And you’d know about that,” Lester says, and grins evilly.
The couple in the back booth, who’ve been doing whatever away from everybody’s notice, unexpectedly stands up, moving their banquette table noisily out of the way, as if they thought a fight was about to erupt or their sexual shenanigans required more leg room. All five of us, plus an older woman at the bar, have a gander at these two getting their coats on and shuffling out through the tables. Happily, I don’t know them. The woman’s young and thin and watery-blond and pretty in a sharp-featured way. He’s a short-armed, gangsterish meatpie with dark curly hair, stuffed into a three-piece suit. His trousers are unzipped and part of his shirttail’s poked guiltily through the fly.
“What’s your hurry there, folks?” Lester yaps, and leers as the couple heads for the red EXIT lozenge and up to the street.
The noisy drinker down the bar leans forward and smirks at me. “So whadda you think?” He is Bob Butts, owner (once) of Butts Floral on Spring Street, since replaced by the Virtual Profusion and going great guns. Bob is red-skinned, fattish and embittered. His mother, Lana, ran the shop after Bob’s dad died in Korea. This was prehistoric Haddam, when it was a sleepy-eyed, undiscovered jewel. When Lana moved to Coral Gables and remarried, Bob took over the shop and ran it in the ground, gambling his brains out in Tropworld, which was new in Atlantic City. Bob’s a first-rate dickhead.
The two men beyond him, I don’t know, but are shady, small-time Haddam cheezers I’ve seen six hundred times—in Cox’s News or in the now-departed Pietroinferno’s. I have an idea they’re involved with delivering the Trenton Times a
nd possibly less obvious merchandise. The hatchet-faced, thin-haired woman, wearing a blowsy black dress suitable for a funeral, I’ve never seen, though she’s apparently Bob’s companion. It would be easy to say these four are members of a Haddam demimonde, but in fact they’re only regular citizens holding out in defiance, rather than making the move to Bordentown or East Windsor.
“What do I think about what?” I lean forward and look straight at Bob Butts, raising my warming martini to my lips. President Clinton has disappeared off the screen. Though I wonder what he’s doing in real time—having a stiff belt himself, possibly. His last two years haven’t been much to brag about. Like Clarissa, I wish he was running again. He’d do better than these current two monkeys.
“All this election bullshit.” Bob Butts cranes forward, then back, to get a better look at me. Lester’s pouring him another 7&7. Bob’s haggard lady friend gives me an unfocused, boozy stare, as if she knows all about me. The two Trenton Times guys muse at their shot glasses (root beer schnapps, my bet). “Some guy got blown up over at the hospital today. Bunch of pink confetti. This shit’s gone too far. The Democrats are stealin’ it.” Bob’s wet, bloodshot eyes clamp onto me, signaling he knows who I am now—a nigger-lovin’, tax-and-spend, pro-health-care, abortion-rights, gay-rights, consumer-rights, tree-hugging liberal (all true). Plus, I sold my house and left the door open to a bunch of shit Koreans, and probably even had something to do with him losing the flower shop (also true).
