Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  I would, I felt, be the perfect modern landlord: a man of superior sympathies and sound investments, with something to donate from years of accumulated life led thoughtfully if not always at complete peace. Everybody on the street would be happy to see my car come cruising by, because they’d know I was probably stopping in to install a new faucet kit in the kitchen, or to service the washer-dryer, or was just paying a visit to see if everybody was feeling good about things, which they always, I felt sure, would be. (Most people with an urge to diversify, I knew, would’ve checked with their accountant, bought beachfront condos on Marco Island, limited their loss exposure, set aside one unit for themselves, one for their grandchildren, put the others with a management company, then cleared the whole business out of their mind April to April.)

  What I thought I had to offer was a deep appreciation for the sense of belonging and permanence the citizens of these streets might totally lack in Haddam (through no fault of their own), yet might long for the way the rest of us long for paradise. When Ann and I—expecting the arrival of our son, Ralph—first came to Haddam from New York and moved into our Tudor-style house on Hoving Road, we landed with the uneasy immigrant sense that everybody but the two of us had been here since before Columbus and they all damn well wanted us to feel that way; that there was some secret insider knowledge we didn’t have simply because we’d shown up when we did—too late—yet unfortunately it was knowledge we could also never acquire, for more or less the same reasons. (This is total baloney, of course. Most people are late arrivals wherever they live, as selling real estate makes clear in fifteen minutes, though for Ann and me the uneasy feeling lasted a decade.)

  But the residents of Haddam’s black neighborhood, I concluded, had possibly never felt at home where they were either, even though they and their relatives might’ve been here a hundred years and had never done anything but make us white late-arrivers feel welcome at their own expense. And so what I thought I could do was at least help make two families feel at home and let the rest of the neighbors observe it.

  Therefore, with a relatively small down, I quickly snapped up the two houses on Clio Street, presented myself at the front door of each as the new owner and gave my pledge to the two startled families inside that I intended to keep the houses as rental properties, all reliances and responsibilities to be meticulously honored, and that they could feel confident about staying put as long as they wanted.

  The first family, the Harrises, immediately asked me in for coffee and carrot cake, and we got started on a good relationship that has lasted to the present—though they’ve since retired and moved in with their children in Cape Canaveral.

  The other family, however, the McLeods, were unfortunately miles different. They are a mixed-race family—man and wife with two small children. Larry McLeod is a middle-aged former black militant who’s married to a younger white woman and works in the mobile-home construction industry in nearby Englishtown. The day I came to his door he opened it wearing a tight red tee-shirt that had Keep on shooting ’til the last motherfucker be dead stenciled across the front. A big automatic pistol was lying just inside the door on a table, and not surprisingly it was the second thing my eyes lit on. Larry has long arms and bulging, venous biceps, as if he might’ve been an athlete once (a kick boxer, I decided), and acted surly as hell, wanting to know why I was bothering him during the part of the day when he was usually asleep, and even going so far as to tell me he didn’t believe I owned the house and was just there to hassle him. Inside on the couch I could see his skinny little white wife, Betty, watching TV with their kids—all three of them looking wan and drugged in the watery light. There was also an odd, bestilled odor inside the house, something I could almost identify but not quite, though it was like the air in a closet full of shoes that has been shut up for years.

  Larry kept on seeming mad as a bulldog and glaring at me through the latched screen. I told him exactly what I’d told the elderly Harrises—all responsibilities and reliances meticulously honored, etc., etc., though I specifically mentioned to him the requirement of keeping up the rent, which I spontaneously decided to drop by ten dollars. I added that I wanted the neighborhood to stay intact, with housing available and affordable for the people who lived there, and while I intended to make needed capital improvements to both houses he should feel confident these would not be reflected in rent increases. I explained that with this plan I could realistically foresee a net gain just by keeping the property in excellent condition, deducting expenses from my taxes, keeping my tenants happy and possibly selling out when I was ready to retire—though I allowed that seemed a long way off.

  I smiled at Larry through the metal screen. “Uh-huh,” was the total of what he had to say, though he glanced over his shoulder once as if he was about to instruct his wife to come interpret something I’d said. Then he returned his gaze to me and looked down at the pistol on the table. “That’s registered,” he said. “Check it out.” The pistol was big and black, looked well oiled and completely bursting with bullets—able to do an innocent world irretrievable damage. I wondered what he needed it for.

  “That’s good,” I said cheerfully. “I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other.”

  “Is that it?” Larry said.

  “That’s about it.”

  “All right then,” he said, and closed the door in my face.

  Since this first meeting nearly two years ago, Larry McLeod and I have not much enriched or broadened each other’s world-views. After a few months of sending his rent check by mail he simply stopped, so that I now have to go by the house every first of the month and ask for it. If he’s there, Larry always acts menacing and routinely asks me when I plan to get something fixed—though I’ve kept everything in both houses in good condition the entire time and have never let longer than a day go by to have a drain unplugged or a ball float replaced. On the other hand, if Betty McLeod happens to answer the door she simply stares out at me as if she’s never seen me before and has in any case stopped communicating with words. She almost never has the rent check herself, so when I see her pale, scraggly-haired little pointy-nosed face appear like a specter behind the screen, I know I’m out of luck. Sometimes neither of us even speaks. I just stand on the porch trying to look pleasant, while she peers silently out as if she were staring not at me but at the street beyond. Finally she just shakes her head, begins pushing the door closed, and I understand I am not getting paid that day.

  This morning when I park at 44 Clio it is eight-thirty and already a third way up the day’s heat ladder and as still and sticky as a summer morning in New Orleans. Parked cars line both sides, and a few birds are chirping in the sycamores planted in the neutral ground decades ago. Two elderly women stand farther down the sidewalk chatting at the corner of Erato, leaning on brooms. A radio plays somewhere behind a window screen—an old Bobby Bland tune I knew all the words to when I was in college but now can’t even remember the title of. A somber mix of vernal lethargy and minor domestic tension fills the air like a funeral dirge.

  The Harrises’ house sits still empty, our agency’s green-and-gray FOR RENT sign in the yard, the new white metal siding and new three-way windows with plastic screens glistening dully in the sunlight. The aluminum flashing I installed below the chimney and above the eaves makes the house look spanking new, which in most ways it is, since I also installed soffit vents, roll-in insulation in the attic (upping the R factor to 23), refooted half the foundation and still mean to put up crime bars as soon as I find a tenant. The Harrises have been gone now for half a year, and I frankly don’t understand my failure to attract a tenant, since rentals are tight as a drumhead and I have priced it fairly at $575, utilities included. A young black mortuarial student from Trenton came close, but his wife felt the commute was too long. Then two sexy black legal secretaries came frisking through, though for some reason felt the neighborhood wasn’t safe enough. I of course had a long explanation ready for why it was probably
the safest neighborhood in town: our one black policeman lives within shouting distance, the hospital is only three blocks away, people on the block get to know one another and pay attention as a matter of course; and how in the one break-in in anybody’s memory, citizen-neighbors charged out of their houses and brought the crook to ground before he got to the corner. (That the crook turned out to be the son of the black policeman, I didn’t mention.) But it was no use.

  For reasons of my restricted access, the McLeods’ house isn’t yet as spiffy as the former Harrises’. The seedy brick veneer’s still in place, and a couple of porch boards will soon begin “weathering” if nothing’s done. Though hiking up the front steps I can hear the new window unit humming on the side (Larry demanded it, though I got it used out of one of our management properties), and I’m sure someone’s home.

  I give the doorbell one short ring, then stand back and put a businesslike but altogether friendly smile on my face. Anyone inside knows who’s out here, as do all the neighbors. I glance around and down the hot, shaded street. The two women are still talking beside their brooms, the radio is still playing blues in some hot indoors. “Honey Bee,” I remember, is the Bobby Bland song, but can’t yet think of the words. I notice the grass in both yards is long and yellowed in spots, and the spirea Sylvania Harris planted and kept watered to a fare-thee-well are scrawny and dry and brown and probably rotten at the roots. I lean around and take a quick look down the fenced side yard between houses. Pink and blue hydrangeas are barely blooming along the foundation walls where they conceal the gas and water meters, and both areas seem deserted and unused, inviting to a burglar.

  I ring the bell again, suddenly conscious that no one’s answering and that I’ll have to come back after the weekend, when the rent will be more in arrears and possibly in jeopardy of being forgotten. Ever since I became the owner here, I’ve wondered if I shouldn’t just move out of my house on Cleveland—put it up for sale—and transfer into my rental unit as a cost-cutting, future-securing measure, and as a way of putting my money where my mouth is in the human-relations arena. Eventually the McLeods would take off out of pure dislike for me, and I could then locate new tenants to be my neighbors (possibly a Hmong family to spice the mix). Though under current market stresses my house on Cleveland could conceivably sit empty for months, after which I could get lowballed and sustain a major whomping—even acting as my own agent and carrying the paper. Whereas, on the other hand, finding a quality, short-term renter for a larger house like mine, even in Haddam, is a tricky proposition and rarely works out happily.

  I ring the doorbell one more time, stand back to the top of the steps, listen for sounds within—footfalls, a back door closing, a muffled voice, the sound of kids’ bare feet running. But nothing. This has happened before. Someone’s, of course, inside, but no one’s answering, and short of using my landlord’s key or calling the police and saying I’m “worried” about the inhabitants, I have nothing to do but fold my tents and come again, possibly later in the day.

  Back up on busy Seminary Street, I park in front of the Lauren-Schwindell building and make a fast turn through the office, where the usual holiday realty-office languor hangs over the still-empty desks, blank Real-trom consoles and copy machines. Almost everyone, including the younger agents, has stood steadfastly in bed an extra hour, pretending the holiday exodus means no one’s doing any real business and that anybody who needs to can just jolly well call them at home. Only Everick and Wardell are glimpsable, passing in and out of the back storage room, the outside door to the parking lot left standing open. They’re returning FOR SALE signs retrieved from the ditches and woodlots where our local teenagers toss them once they’re tired of having them on their walls at home or when their mothers won’t stand for it any longer. (We offer a no-questions-asked, three-dollar “capture fee” for every one brought in, and Everick and Wardell—grave-faced, gangly, beanpole bachelor twins in their late fifties, who are lifelong Haddamites and oddly enough Trenton State graduates—have made a science out of knowing exactly where to search.) The Lewises, who I usually find impossible to tell apart, live around the corner from my two rentals in a duplex left them by their parents, and in fact are tight-fisted, no-nonsense landlords in their own right, owning a block of senior-citizen units in Neshanic, from which they enjoy a nice profit. Yet they still work part-time for the agency and regularly do minor upkeep chores for me on Clio Street, duties they perform with a severe, distinctly put-upon efficiency that might make someone out of the know conclude they resented me. Though that is not at all the case, since they have both told me on more than one occasion that by being born in Mississippi, even with all the heavy baggage that brings along, I naturally possess a truer instinct for members of their race than any white northerner could ever approximate. This is, of course, not one bit true, though theirs is an old-style racial stationlessness that forever causes baseless “verities” to persist on with the implacable force of truth.

  Our receptionist, Miss Vonda Lusk, has I see exited the ladies room and parked herself halfway down the row of empty desks, with a smoke and a Coke, and is sitting, one leg crossed and swinging, happily answering the phones and leafing through Time magazine till we shut down in earnest at noon. She is a big, tall, bulgy-busted, wry-humored blonde who wears a ton of makeup, bright-colored, ludicrously skimpy cocktail dresses to work, and lives in nearby Grovers Mills where she was head majorette back in 1980. She was also best friends with Clair Devane, our murdered agent, and regularly wants to discuss “the case” with me because she seems to know Clair and I once had a discreet special something of our own. “I think they’re not pushing this thing hard enough,” is her persistent view of the police attitude. “If she’d been a local white girl you’d have seen a big difference. You’d have FBI here out your butt.” Three white men, in fact, were taken into custody for a day, though they were let go, and in the weeks since then it’s true that no apparent progress has been made, though Clair’s boyfriend is a well-connected black bond lawyer in a good firm in town, and the realty board along with his partners have established a $5,000 reward. Yet it’s also true that the FBI made inquiries before deciding Clair’s death was not a federal crime but a simple murder.

  In the office we’ve at least officially left her desk unoccupied until the murderer is found (though in fact business hasn’t been good enough to hire somebody in her place). And Vonda for her part has kept a piece of black ribbon taped across Clair’s chair and a single rose in a murky bud vase on the empty wood-grain top. We are all warned against forgetting.

  This morning, though, Vonda has global matters more in mind. She is a current-events buff, reads all the magazines in the office and has her Time folded over on her amply exposed thigh. “Look here, Frank, are you a single-warhead guy or a ten-warhead guy?” She sings this out when she sees me and flashes me her big okay-what’s-up-with-you smile. She’s wearing an outlandish red, white and blue off-the-shoulder taffeta getup that wouldn’t let her pick a dime up off a countertop and stay decent. There is nothing between us but banter.

  “I’m still a single-warhead guy,” I say, heading for the front now with three listing sheets, Everick and Wardell having taken one look at me and ducked out the back (not unusual), so that I’ve deposited in their message box some already prepared instructions for where and when to park the dogs-on-wheels stand beside the Haddam Green once they’ve trailered it Monday from Franks, the root beer stand I own west of town on Route 31. This is the way they prefer to conduct all affairs—indirectly and at a distance. “I think there’re too many warheads around these days,” I say, heading toward the door.

  “Well then, you’re in deep doo-doo on your vision thing, according to Time.” She’s twirling a strand of golden hair around her little finger. She’s a yellow-dog Democrat and knows I’m one too, and thinks—unless I miss my guess—that we could have some fun together.

  “We’ll have to talk about it,” I say.

  �
��That’s quite all right,” she says archly. “I’m sure you’re busy. Did you know Dukakis speaks fluent Spanish?” This is not for me but for whoever might be listening, as if the empty office were jammed with interested people. Only I’m out la puerta seeming not to hear and as quick as possible back to the cool serenity of my Crown Victoria.

  By nine I’m on my way out King George Road toward the Sleepy Hollow Motel on Route 1, to pick up Joe and Phyllis Markham and (it’s my hope) sell them our new listing by noon.

  Haddam out this woodsy way doesn’t seem like a town in the throes of a price decline. An old and wealthy settlement, founded in 1795 by disgruntled Quaker merchants who split off from their more liberal Long Island neighbors, traveled south and set up things the right way, Haddam looks prosperous and confidently single-minded about its civic expectations. The housing stock boasts plenty of big 19th-century Second Empires and bracketed villas (now owned by high-priced lawyers and software CEOs) with cupolas and belvederes and oriels punctuating the basic architectural lingua, which is Greek with Federalist details, and post-Revolutionary stone houses fitted with fanlights, columned entries and Roman-y flutings. These houses were all big-ticket items the day the last door got hung in 1830, and hardly any turn up on the market except in vindictive divorces in which a spouse wants a big FOR SALE sign stuck out front of a former love nest to get the goat of the party of the second part. Even the few “village-in” Georgian row houses have in the last five years become prestige addresses and are all owned by rich widows, privacy-hungry gay husbands and surgeons from Philadelphia who keep them as country places they can hie off to with their nurse-anesthetists during the color season.

  Though looks, of course, can be deceiving and usually are. Asking prices have yet to reflect it, but banks have slowly begun rationing money and coming back to us realtors with “problems” about appraisals. Many sellers who’d nailed down early-retirement plans at Lake of the Ozarks or for a “more intimate” place in Snowmass, now that the kids are finished at UVA, are taking a wait-and-see attitude and deciding Haddam’s a lot better place to live than they’d imagined when they thought their houses were worth a fortune. (I didn’t get into the residential housing business at exactly the optimum moment; in fact, I got in at almost the worst possible moment—a year before the big gut-check of last October.)