The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  Of course—anyone would expect the rest to happen—I wake up in the Sea-Clift EMS truck, strapped to a yellow Stryker stretcher, shirtless and jacketless, covered with a thin pink blanket, my feet toward the back door. It is just like all the movies portray it—a fish-eye view, a jouncing, swerving ride under an elevated railroad in the Bronx, siren whoop-whooping, diesel motor growling, lights flashing. The fluorescent light inside is lime green, barely sufficient for decent patient care. The turns and roaring motorized dips make me roll against my nylon belt restraints. There’s the smell of rubbing alcohol and other disinfectants and aluminum. And I believe I’ve died and this is what death is—not the “distinguished thing,” but a swervy, bumpy ride with a lot of blinking lights all around you that never ends, a constant state of being in between departure and arrival, though that might be just for some. I’m bandaged and strung up to a collapsing clear plastic drip bag, and wearing a mask to aid my breathing. I can see the scruffy, heavy-set, red-bearded guy in a white shirt with his stethoscope, sitting beside me, talking to someone else in the compartment who I can’t see, talking in the calmest of voices, as if they’re on break from the produce department at Kroger’s and taking their time about clocking back in. They talk about the 5-K race and some guy they thought had “stroked out” but, it turns out, hadn’t. And some woman with a prosthetic leg whom they admired but couldn’t see having decent sex with. And about how no one would catch them out running in the street on Thanksgiving when they could be home watching the Sixers, and then something about the police saying the boys who’d shot me and Nick (and possibly Drilla) being Russians: “Go figure.” I am gripping. My hand can touch something cold and tubular, and I would like very much to sit up and see out the little louvered side windows to find out where we are. The clock on the wall here says it’s 2:33. But when I stir toward rising, the red-bearded EMS guy with the purple birthmark says, “Well, our friend’s come alive, looks like,” and puts a big freckled hand heavily on my good shoulder so that I can see he’s wearing a milky blue plastic glove. I’m aware that I say from under my mask, “It’s all right, I don’t have AIDS.” And that he says, “Sure, we know. Nobody does. These gloves are just my fashion statement.” And I may say, “I do have cancer, though.” And he may say, “In-te-rest-ing. Four inches lower and this would be a more leisurely trip.” Then I relax and stare at the dim, rocking, metallic-gray ceiling as the boxy crate roars on.

  The ceiling has a color snapshot of a thinner version of the red-haired paramedic in an Army desert uniform, kneeling, smiling down at me from a far-away land, and above his head a thought-balloon says “Oxygen In Use. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.” I may dream then that we’re passing onto the long bridge to Toms River, across Barnegat Bay, and that these two men are talking and talking and talking about the election and what a joke it is: “suspended agitation,” “diddling while home burns,” how no one has loyalty to our sacred institutions anymore, which is a national disgrace, since institutions and professions have always carried us along. In their view, it is a nature-nurture issue, and they agree that nurture is, while not everything, still very important (which I don’t feel so sure about). And then I think someone, I’m not sure who, is flossing his teeth and smiling at me at the same time.

  And at this point it becomes clear to me (how does one know such things?) that I’m not going to die from merely being shot in the chest by some little miscreant mouse who needs to spend some concentrated time alone thinking about things, particularly about his effect on others. Now, today, may be an end—time will tell what of—but it is not the end the way Ernie McAuliffe’s and Natheriel Lewis’s ends were unarguably the end for those good and passionate souls. And Nick, too, who can’t have survived his wounds. To know such a thing so clearly is a true mystery, but one does, which puts an interesting spin on the rest of life and how people pretend to live it, as well as on medical care and on religion and on business and the pharmaceutical industry, real estate—most everything, when you get right down to it.

  I could, of course, die in the hospital. Thousands do, victims of lawless pathogens that make their home there, felled by an otherwise-non-fatal wound; or I could suffer my titanium BBs to turn traitor to my tissues and become my worst enemy. These things are statistically possible and happen. Listen to Live at Five or read the Asbury Press. Nature doesn’t like to be observed, but can be.

  Whoop-whoop, whoop-whoop! Blaaaant, blaaaant! Vroom, vroom. “That’s right, that’s it. Just sit there. You motherfucker! I gotta dead guy in he-ah, or soon will. Ya silly son of a bitch.”

  It’s good to know they actually care—that it’s not like driving a beer truck or delivering uniforms to Mr. Goodwrench. What is their average time in traffic, one wonders.

  BANG! BANG! Bangety-ruuuump-crack. We’ve hit something now. “That’s right, asshole. That’s why I got this cowcatcher on this baby, for assholes like you!” Vroom, vroom, vroom-vroom. We’re off again. It can’t be far now.

  When I’m turned loose from this current challenge, I am going to sit down and write another letter to the President, which will be a response to his yearly Thanksgiving proclamation—generally full of platitudes and horseshit, and no better than poems written for ceremonial occasions by the Poet Laureate. This will be the first such letter I’ve actually sent, and though I know he will not have long to read it and gets letters from lots of people who feel they need to get their views aired, still, by some chance, he might read it and pass along its basic points to his successor, whoever that is (though of course I know—we all do). It will not be a letter about the need for more gun control or the need for supporting the family unit so fourteen-year-olds don’t steal cars, own machine pistols and shoot people, or about ending pregnancies, or the need to shore up our borders and tighten immigration laws, or the institution of English as a national language (which I support), but will simply say that I am a citizen of New Jersey, in middle age, with wives and children to my credit, a non-drug user, a non-jogger, without cell-phone service or caller ID, a vertically integrated non-Christian who has sponsored the hopes and contexts and dreams of others with no wish for credit or personal gain or transcendence, a citizen with a niche, who has his own context, who does not fear permanence and is not in despair, who is in fact a realtor and a pilgrim as much as any. (I will not mention cancer survivor, in case I’m finally not one.) I’ll write that these demographics confer on me not one shred of wisdom but still a strong personal sense of having both less to lose and curiously more at stake. I will say to the President that it’s one thing for me, Frank Bascombe, to give up the Forever Concept and take on myself the responsibilities of the Next Level—that life can’t be escaped and must be faced entire. But it’s quite another thing for him to, or his successor. For them, in fact, it is very unwise and even dangerous. Indeed, it seems to me that these very positions, positions of public trust they’ve worked hard to get, require that insofar as they have our interests at heart, they must graduate to the Next Level but never give up the Forever Concept. I have lately, in fact, been seeing some troubling signs, so that I will say there is an important difference worth considering between the life span of an individual and the life span of a whole republic, and that….

  “Absecon,” I hear someone say. “That’s Ab-see-con.” That’s not how I’ve been pronouncing it, but I will forever. Surely we’re not going to a hospital there. “When I was a kid, in Ab-see-con—” It’s the big red-headed Army medic, blabbing on in his south Jersey brogue. “My old man useta go to Atlantic City. They still had real bums over there then. Not these current fucks. This was the seventies, before all this new horseshit. He’d go get one a these bums and bring him home for Thanksgiving. You know? Clean him up. Give him some clothes. Useta look for bums about his own size. My mom useta hate it. I’ll tell ya. We’d—”

  We are slowing up. The siren’s gone silent. The two men inside with me are moving, legs partly bent, stooping. A two-way radio crackles and sputters from someone’s belt b
eside my face. The clock says it’s 3:04. “Could be you’ll want some backup,” a woman’s metallic voice says from a place where it sounds like the wind’s blowing. “Oh boy. Ooooohh boy. Oh man,” the woman’s faraway voice says. “This is somethin’. I promised you fireworks.” Sputter and fuzz. And we are, because I can feel it, backing up and turning at once. I strain against my webbed restraints to see something. My hands are cold. I feel my upper chest to be cold, too, and numb. A randy taste has dislodged from somewhere in my mouth. My chest actually hurts now, I have to admit. I’m not breathing all that well even with oxygen in use, though I’m glad to have it. “Delivery for occupant,” I hear a man’s voice say. “He had a big heart, my old man.” The medic is speaking again, “For all the good it did ’im.” The red-bearded face is peering down into mine out of the minty fluorescence. “How ya doin’, big ole boy? You holdin’ up?” the red mouth with the birthmark says. His blue eyes fix on me suspiciously. I wonder what my own eyes say back. “How’d you like your ambulance ride? Just like TV, wasn’t it?”

  “Life’s interesting,” I say from under my mask.

  “Oh yeah.”

  Suddenly, there’s lots of outside light and a burst of cold air. The door, which I can see, has opened, and my stretcher is moving. The face of a bright-eyed, smiling young nurse, a black woman in a long white labcoat, and corn-rows with gold beads intertwined and tortoiseshell glasses, is staring into my face. She’s saying, “Mr. Bascombe? Mr. Bascombe? Can you tell me how you feel?”

  I say, “Yes. I don’t feel like a big ole boy, that’s one thing.”

  “Well then, why don’t you tell me how you are,” she says. “I’d like to know.”

  “Okay,” I say. And as we move along, that is what I begin to do—with all my best concentration, I begin to try to tell her how I am.

  Thanksgiving

  Violence, that imposter, foreshortens our expectancies, our logics, our next days, our afternoons, our sweet evenings, our whole story.

  At 23,000 feet, the land lies north and east to the purple horizon. Terminal moraine, which in summer nurtures alfalfa fields, golf courses, sod farms, stands of yellow corn, is now masked and frozen white, fading into dusk. Wintry hills pass below, some with frail red Christmas lights aglitter on tiny porches, then a gleaming silver-blue river and the tower trail of our great midwestern power grid. It is all likable to me. Minnesota.

  My fellow passengers on Northwest Flight 1724 (world’s most misunderstood airline), all thirty of us, are Mayo bound. O’Hare straight up to Rochester. The blond, heavy-boned, duck-tailed flight attendant—a big Swede—knows who her passengers are. She acts jokey-light-hearted if you’re just flying up for a colonoscopy—“the routine lube job”—but is chin-set, hard-mouth serious if your concerns are more of an “impactful,” exploratory nature. As usual, I fall into the mid-range of patient-passenger profiles—those who’re undergoing successful treatment and on our way to Rochester to hear encouraging news. At 23,000 feet, no one is the least bit reluctant to discuss personal medical problems with whoever fate has seated next to them. Above the engines’ hum, you hear earnest, droning heartland voices dilating on what an aneurysm actually is, what it feels like to undergo an endoscopy or a heart catheterization (“The initial incision in your leg’s the goddamn worst part”) or a vertebra fusion (“They go in through the front, but of course you don’t feel it, you’re asleep”). Others, less care-laden, discuss how “the Cities” have changed—for the better, for the worse—in the years they’ve been coming up here; where’s the best muskie fishing to be found (Lake Glorvigen); whether it was King Hussein or Saddam Hussein who was a Mayo patient once upon a time (AIDS and “the syph” are rumored); and what a good newspaper USA Today has turned out to be, “especially the sports.” Many tote thick manila envelopes containing crucial evidentiary X rays from elsewhere. BRAIN, SPINE, NECK, KNEE are stamped in red. I have only myself—and Sally Caldwell—plus a prostate full of played-out BBs destined to be with me forever. And I have my thoughts for a sunny prognosis and a good start to year two of the young Millennium, which includes a new direction in the Presidency—one it’s hard to see how we’ll survive—though the enfeebled new man’s little worse than his clownish former opponent, both being smirking cornpones unfit to govern a ladies’ flower show, much less our frail, unruly union.

  Sally, beside me on the aisle of our regional Saab 340 turboprop, is reading a book encased in one of the crocheted book cozies women years ago employed to sneak Peyton Place or Bonjour Tristesse into the beauty parlor (my mother did it with Lady Chatterley’s Lover), books requiring privacy for full enjoyment. Sally’s reading a thick paperback called Tantrism and Your Prostate, by a Dr. White. She’s assured me there’re strategies woven into his recommendations that are part of our (my) natural maturing process and pretty much common sense anyway, and will clear out a lot of underbrush and open up some new paths we’ll both soon be breathless to enter. The sex part is still a source of concern—for me but not, apparently, for Sally—since we’ve yet to fully reconvene since she returned from Blighty and I cleared customs at Ocean County Hospital from my successful gunshot surgery, which left amazingly small scars and wasn’t nearly as bad as you’d imagine (pretty much the way it happens on Gunsmoke or Bonanza). I did wake up on the operating table, though the Pakistani surgeon, Dr. Iqbal, just started laughing at my shocked, popped-opened peepers and said, “Oh, well, my goodness, look who can’t stand to miss anything.” They put me out again in two seconds, and I have no memory of pain or fear, only of Dr. Iqbal laughing. The two .32 slugs are at home on my bedside table, where I have in the past two weeks studied them for signs of significance and found none. Sally believes there’s nothing to worry about on the sexual front and that she knows everything’ll kick into gear once I regain full strength and get some good news in Rochester.

  Sally’s hand, her right hand, grazes mine when we encounter turbulence and go buffeting along over the oceany chop, while our fellow passengers—all regional flying veterans and all fatalists—start laughing and making woo-hoo-ing noises. Someone, a woman with a nasal Michigan voice, says, “Up-see-daisee. Ain’t this fun now?” None of us would mind that much if our ship went down or was hijacked to Cuba or just landed someplace other than our destination—some fresh territory where new and unexpected adventures could blossom, back-burnering our inevitables till later.

  Since she’s been back from her own Wanderjahr, Sally has seemed unaccountably happy and hasn’t wanted to sit down for a full and frank debriefing, which is understandable and can wait forever if need be. I was in the hospital some of the time, anyway, and since then there’s been plenty to do—police visits and sit-down interviews with prosecutors, an actual lineup at the Ocean County Court House, where I identified the perpetrators, all this along with Clarissa’s difficulties in Absecon. (The pint-size accomplices were twins and Russians, boyfriends of the faithless Gretchen. It turns out there’s a story there. I, however, am not going to tell it.)

  Paul and Jill, it should be said, proved to be much better than average ground support in all our difficulties, although they’ve now driven back to K.C. to celebrate the Yule season “as a couple.” Paul and I were never precisely able to get onto the precise same page because I was in the hospital, but we now seem at least imprecisely to be reading the same book, and since I was shot, he has seemed not as furious as he was before, which may be as good as these things get. I don’t know to this moment if he and Jill are married or even intend to be. When I asked him, he only smoothed his beard-stache and smiled a crafty, uxorious smile, so that my working belief has become that it doesn’t matter as long as they’re “happy.” And also, of course, I could be wrong. He did, as an afterthought, tell me Jill’s last name—which is Stockslager and not Bermeister—and I’ll admit the news made me relieved. But again, as to Sally’s and my true reconciliation (in both the historical and marital senses), it will come in time, or never will, if there’s a difference. In her
letter, she said she didn’t know if there was a word that describes the natural human state for how we exist toward each other. And if that’s so, it’s fine with me. Ideal probably wouldn’t be the right word; sympathy and necessity might be important components. Though truthfully, love seems to cover the ground best of all.

  When she arrived the day after Thanksgiving, Sally carried with her a wooden box containing Wally’s cremains. (I was zonked in the Ocean County ICU and she didn’t actually bring the box up there.) Wally, it seems, had just been a man who no matter how hard he tried could never find full satisfaction with life, but who actually came as close to happiness as he ever would by living alone, or as good as alone, as a bemused and trusted arborist on a remittance man’s estate (there are words for these people, but they don’t explain enough well enough). His nearly happy existence all went directly tits-up when Sally forcibly re-inserted herself into his life for reasons that were her own and were never intended to last forever—though poor Wally didn’t know that. After a few weeks together on Mull, Wally grew as grave as a monk, then gradually morose, apparently feared his paradise on earth would now not be sustainable, but could not (as he couldn’t from the start) explain to Sally that marriage was just a bad idea for a man of his solitary habits. She said she would’ve welcomed hearing that, had tried lovingly to make him discuss it and put some fresh words in place, but hadn’t succeeded and saw she was spoiling his life and was already planning to leave. But with no place else to run away to, and not realizing he could just stay in Mull, and thus in a fit of despair and incommunicable fearfulness and sorrow, Wally took a swim with a granite paving stone tied to his ankle and set his terrible fears and unsuitedness for earth adrift with the outward tide. She said when he was found he had a big smile on his round and innocent face.