Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  “I’m sure you’re a great mom,” I say, apropos of nothing.

  “Eastern religion,” she says in a wise-cracky voice. “Motherhood’s as close as I come to it.” She raises her small nose toward the warm, spruce-scented air and sniffs. “I smelled a lilac just then, but it’s too late for lilacs. Musta been somebody’s perfume.” She squints down hard at me as though I’ve suddenly moved far, far away and am moving farther (which I am). It’s a friendly squint, full of sympathy, and makes me want to come down off the porch and give her a bustly hug, but which would only confuse matters. “I assume you’ll find your son,” she says. “Or he’ll find you. Whatever.”

  “We will,” I say, holding my ground. “Thanks.”

  “Yep,” Char says, and then, as though she’s embarrassed by something else, adds, “They don’t usually stay gone long. Not long enough, really.” Then she hikes off into the trees alone, gone out of sight well before I can manage an audible good-bye.

  Très amusant,” a voice familiar to me speaks out of the summer’s wicking darkness. “Très, très amusant. Your most important sexual organ is between your ears. Eeeck, eeeck, eeeck. So use it.”

  Down the porch, in the last rocking chair in line, Paul is slouched barely visible behind his drawn-up knees, his The Rock shirt giving out the only light hereabouts. He’s been overhearing my cumbersome parting, no doubt wondering if I’ll get around to finding our dinner.

  “Howz ur health?” I say, walking down the line of rockers, laying a palm on the smooth spindled back of his and giving it a small, fatherly push.

  “Fine ‘n’ yours?”

  “Is that Dr. Rection’s anatomy advice?” I am, God knows, full of airy relief he’s not departed for Chicago or the Bay Area in the blaring-music car, or not off getting his ashes perilously hauled, or, worse, stretched out in the Cooperstown ER with a wound drip-drip-dripping on the tiles, waiting for some old turkey-neck GP, woozy from the Tunnicliff, to shake his head clear. (If I intend to have him home with me, I’ll need to be more vigilant.)

  “Was that my new mom?”

  “Almost. Did you eat anything?”

  “I got a mocktail, some mock turtle soup and a piece of mock apple pie. Don’t mock me, please.” These are all holdovers from childhood. If I could see his face, it would be worked into a look of secret satisfaction. He seems, however, completely calm. I might be making progress with him and not realizing it (every parent’s dearest hope).

  “Do you want to call your mother and say you got here safely?”

  “Ix-nay.” He’s tossing a little Hacky Sack up and down in the dark, barely making movement but suggesting he’s less calm than seems. I have an aversion to Hacky Sacks. My view is that its skills are perfect only for the sort of brain-dead delinquents who whonked me in the head on my way home from work this spring and sent me sprawling. I understand from it, though, that Paul may have made a connection with the towny kids on the corner.

  “Where’d you get that thing?”

  “I purchased it.” He still hasn’t looked around. “At the local Finast.” I would still like to ask him if he killed the helpless, driveway grackle, only it now seems too unwieldy a subject. It also seems preposterous to think he could be guilty. “I’ve got a new question to ask you.” He says this in a more assertive voice. Conceivably he’s spent the last four hours in a badly lit diner studying Emerson, fingering his Hacky Sack and mulling issues such as whether nature really suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom that can’t help itself; or whether every true man is a cause, a country and an age. Good issues for anyone to mull.

  “Okay,” I say just as assertively, not wanting to seem as eager and encouraged as I am. From across the lawn the tart odor not of lilac but of a car’s exhaust reaches my nostrils. I hear an owl, invisible on a nearby spruce bough. Who-who, who-who, who-who.

  “Okay, do you remember when I was pretty little,” Paul says very seriously, “and I used to invent friends? I had some talks with them, and they said things to me, and I’d get pretty involved doing it?” He stares fiercely forward.

  “I remember it. Are you doing it again?” This is not about Emerson.

  He looks around at me now, as if he wants to see my face. “No. But did it make you feel weird when I did that? Like make you mad or sick and want to puke?”

  “I don’t think so. Why?” I’m able to make out his eyes. I’m certain he thinks I’m lying.

  “You’re lying, but it’s okay.”

  “I felt odd about it,” I say. “Not any of those other things, though.” I am not willing to be called a liar and have no defense in the truth.

  “Why were you?” He doesn’t seem angry.

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

  “Then think. I need to know. It’s like one of my rings.” He shifts back around and trains his gaze across toward the windows of the fancier inn across the road, where fewer warm and yellow room lights are on now. He wants my voice in his ears perfectly distilled. The waning moon has laid a silken, sparkling path dead across the lake, and above its luminance is arrayed a feast of summer stars. He makes, and I vaguely hear it, another tiny eeeck, a self-assuring sound, a little rallying eeeck.

  “It made me feel a little weird,” I say uncomfortably. “I thought you were getting preoccupied with something that maybe was hurtful in the long run.” (Innocence, what else? Though that word seems not exactly right either.) “I wanted you not to get tricked. I guess maybe it wasn’t very generous of me. I’m sorry. Maybe I’m wrong too. I could’ve just been jealous. I am sorry.”

  I hear him breathe, air hitting his bare knees where he has them hugged up to his chest. I feel a small loosening of relief, mixed of course with shame for ever making him feel his preoccupations mattered less than mine. Who’d have thought we’d talk about this?

  “It’s all right,” he says, as if he knew a great, great deal about me.

  “Why’d this come to mind?” I say, a warm hand still on his rocking chair, his back still turned to me.

  “I just remember it. I liked doing it, and I thought you thought it was bad. Don’t you really think something’s wrong with me?” he says—unbeknownst to him, fully within his own command now, an adult for just this moment.

  “I don’t think so. Not especially.”

  “On a scale of one to five, with five being hopeless?”

  “Oh,” I say. “One, probably. Or one and a half. It’s better than me. Not as good as your sister.”

  “Do you think I’m shallow?”

  “What do you do that’s shallow?” I wonder where he’s been to come back with these questions.

  “Make noises sometimes. Other things.”

  “They aren’t very important.”

  “Do you remember how old Mr. Toby would be now? I’m sorry to ask that.”

  “Thirteen,” I say bravely. “You did ask me about that today already.”

  “He could still be alive, though.” He rocks forward, then back, then forward. Maybe life will seem better when Mr. Toby reaches the end of his optimum life span. I hold his chair steady. “I’m thinking I’m thinking again,” he says as if to himself. “Things don’t fit down together right for very long.”

  “Are you worried about your court hearing?” I pinch his chair-back hard between my fingers and hold it nearly still.

  “Not especially,” he says, copying me. “Were you supposed to give me some big advice about it?”

  “Just don’t try to be the critic of your age, that’s all. Don’t be a wise-ankle. Let your best qualities come through naturally. You’ll be fine.” I touch his clean cotton shoulder, ashamed again, this time for waiting till now to touch him lovingly.

  “Are you coming up with me?”

  “No. Your mother’s going.”

  “I think Mom’s got a boyfriend.”

  “That’s not interesting to me.”

  “Well, it should be.” He says this compl
etely without commitment.

  “You don’t know. Why do you think you remember everything and think you’re thinking?”

  “I don’t know.” He stares out at headlights that are curving along the road in front of our inn. “That stuff just comes back around all the time.”

  “Do the things seem important to you?”

  “Importanter than what?”

  “I don’t really know. Importanter than something else you might do.” The debating club, getting your Junior Life Saver’s certificate, anything in the here and now.

  “I don’t want to have it forever. That’d be completely fucked up.” His teeth click down once and grind together hard. “Like today for a while, back at the basketball thing, it went away for a while. Then I got it back.”

  We pause in silence again. The first adult conversation a man can have with his son is one in which he acknowledges he doesn’t know what’s good for his own child and has only an out-of-date idea of what’s bad. I don’t know what to say.

  Through the trees now there comes into view a medium-size brown-and-white dog, a springer, loping toward us, a yellow Frisbee in his mouth, his collar jingling, his breath exaggerated and audible. Somewhere out behind him, a man’s hearty voice, someone out for a walk in the parky darkness. “Keester! Here, Keester,” the voice says. “Come on now, Keester. Fetch it! Keester—here, Keester.” Keester, on a mission of his own, stops, looks at us in the porch shadows, sniffs us, his Frisbee clenched tight, while his master strolls on, calling.

  “Come on now, Keester,” Paul says. “Eeeck, eeeck.”

  “It’s Keester, the wonder dog,” I say. Keester seems happy to be just that.

  “I was bewildered when I saw I’d turned into a dog—“

  “Named Keester,” I say. Keester stares up at us now, uncertain why we strangers would know his name. “I guess my thinking is,” I say, “you’re trying to keep too much under control, son, and it’s holding you back. Maybe you’re trying to stay in touch with something you liked, but you have to keep going. Even if it’s scary and you screw up.”

  “Uh-huh.” He leans his head back toward me and looks up. “How can I not be a critic of my age? Is that something you think’s pretty great?”

  “It doesn’t have to be great,” I say. “But for instance, if you go in a restaurant and the floor’s marble and the walls are oak, you wouldn’t wonder if it’s all fake. You’d sit down and order tournedos and be happy. And if you don’t like it, or you think it’s a mistake to eat there, you just don’t come back. Does that make any sense?”

  “No.” He shakes his head confidently. “I probably wouldn’t stop thinking about it. Sometimes it’s not that bad to think about it. Keester,” he says in a sharp command voice to poor old baffled Keester. “Think! Think, boy! Remember your name.”

  “It will make sense,” I say. “You don’t have to fight to get everything right, that’s all. Sometimes you can relax.” I notice two more yellow window squares go dark in the big inn across the way. Who-who, goes the owl. Who-who. Who-who. He’s got Keester in his sights, standing stupidly with his yellow Frisbee, waiting for us to get interested in throwing it, as we always do.

  “If you’re a tightrope walker in the circus, what’s your best trick?” Paul looks up at me, smiling cruelly.

  “I don’t know. Doing it blindfolded. Doing it naked.”

  “Falling,” Paul says authoritatively.

  “That’s not a trick,” I say. “It’s a fuck-up.”

  “Yeah, but he can’t stand the straight and narrow another minute, because it’s so boring. And nobody ever knows if he falls or jumps. It’s great.”

  “Who told you about that?” Keester, finally disappointed by us, turns and trots off through the trees, becoming a paler and paler hole in the dark, then is gone.

  “Clarissa. She’s worse than I am. She just doesn’t show it. She doesn’t act out anything, because she’s sneaky.”

  “Who says?” I am absolutely certain this isn’t true, certain she’s just as she seems, flipping the bird behind her parents’ backs like any normal girl.

  “Dr. Lew D. Zyres sez,” Paul says, and suddenly bounds up, with me still clinging to his chairback. “My session’s over tonight, Doctah.” He starts off toward the front screen, his big shoes noisily clunkety-clunking on the porch boards. He is again trailing a sour smell. Possibly it is the smell of stress-related problems. “We need some fireworks,” he says.

  “I’ve got bottle rockets and sparklers in the car. And this wasn’t a session. We don’t have sessions. This was you and your father having a serious talk.”

  “People are always shocked at me when I say”—the screen swings open and Paul tromps in out of sight—“ciao.”

  “I love you,” I say to my son, slipping away, but who should hear these words again if only to be able to recall much later on: “Somebody said that to me, and nothing since then has really seemed quite as bad as it might have.”

  10

  “You know, Jerry, the truth is I just began to realize I didn’t care what happened to me, you know? Worry and worry about making your life come out right, you know? Regret everything you say or do, everything seems to sabotage you, then you try to quit sabotaging yourself. But then that’s a mistake. Finally you just have to figure a lot’s out of your control, right?”

  “Right! Thanks! Bob from Sarnia! Next caller. You’re on Blues Talk. You’re on the air, Oshawa!”

  “Hi, Jerry, it’s Stan….”

  Out my window a tall, blond, bronze-skinned, no-shirt, chisel-chest hombre of about my own age is working a big chamois cloth over a red vintage Mustang with what looks to be red-and-white Wisconsin plates. For some reason he’s wearing green lederhosen, and it is his loud and blarey radio that has shaken me awake. Crackling morning light and leafy shadow spread across the gravel and the lawns of neighborhood houses behind the inn. It’s Sunday. The lederhosen guy’s here for the “Classic Car Parade,” which rolls tomorrow, and doesn’t want the dust and grime to get ahead of him. His pretty plump-as-a-knödel wife is perched on the fender of my car, sunning her short brown legs and smiling. They’ve hung their bright red floor mats off my bumper to dry.

  Another American—Joe Markham, for instance—might snarl out at them: “Getyerfuckinmatsoffyaasshole.” But that would spoil a morning, wake the world too early (including my son). Bob from Sarnia has already put it well enough.

  By eight I’ve shaved and showered, using the clammy, tiny-windowed, beaverboard cubicle, already hot and malodorous from the previous user (I spied the woman with the neck brace slipping in, slipping out).

  Paul is twisted into his covers when I rouse him with our oldest reveille: “Time’s a wastin’ … miles to go … I’m hungry as a bear … hop in the shower.” We’ve checked out when we checked in and now have only to eat and beat it.

  Then I’m down the stairs, hearing church bells already, as well as the muffled sumptuary noises of belly-buster breakfasts being eaten in the dining room by a group of total strangers who have only the Baseball Hall of Fame in common.

  I’m eager to call Ted Houlihan (I forgot to try again last night), and get him ready for a miracle: the Markhams have crumbled; my strategy’s borne fruit; his balls are as good as gone. Though the choking-man diagram, here again above the phone as I listen to ring after ring, reminds me unerringly of what realty’s all about: we—the Markhams, the bad apples at Buy and Large, Ted, me, the bank, the building inspectors—we’re all hankering to get our hands around somebody’s neck and strangle the shit out of him for some little half-chewed piece of indigestible gristle we identify as our “nut,” the nitty gritty, the carrot that makes the goat trot. Better, of course, to take a higher road, operate on the principle of service and see if things don’t turn out better….

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, good news, Ted!” I shout straight into the receiver. The breakfast club in the next room falls hushed at my v
oice—as if I’d gone hysterical.

  “Good news here too,” Ted says.

  “Let’s hear yours first.” I am instantly wary.

  “I sold the house,” Ted says. “Some new outfit down in New Egypt. Bohemia, or something, Realty. They got it off the MLS. The woman brought a Korean family over last night around eight. And I had an offer in hand by ten.” When I was gabbing with Paul about whether or not he’s truly hopeless. “I called you around nine and left a message. But I really couldn’t say no. They put the money in their trust account night deposit.”

  “How much?” I say grimly. I experience a small, tight chill and my stomach goes corked.

  “What’s that?”

  “How much did the Koreans pay?”

  “Full boat!” Ted says exuberantly. “Sure. One fifty-five. I jewed the girl a point too. She hadn’t done anything to earn it. You’d done more by a long shot. Your office gets half, of course.”

  “My clients just don’t have anyplace to live now, Ted.” My voice has lowered to a razor-thin whisper. I would be happy to choke Ted with my hands. “We had an exclusive listing with you, we talked about that yesterday, and at the least you were going to get in touch with me so I could put a competitive offer in, which is what I’ve got authorized.” Or nearly. “One fifty-five. Full boat, you said.”

  “Well.” Ted pauses in a funk. “I guess if you want to come back at one-sixty, I could tell the Koreans I forgot. Your office would have to work it out with Bohemia. Evelyn something’s the girl’s name. She’s a little go-getter.”

  “What I think is, Ted, we’re going to have to probably sue you for breach of contract.” I say this calmly, but I’m not calm. “Have to tie your house up for a couple of years while the market drops, and let you convalesce at home.” All baloney, of course. We’ve never sued the first client. It’s business suicide. Instead, you simply bag your 3%, of which I get half, exactly $2,325, maybe make a worthless complaint to the state realty board, and forget about it.

  “Well, you have to do what you have to do, I guess,” Ted says. I’m sure he’s standing once again at the rumpus room window in a sleeveless sweater and chinos, mooning out at his pergola, his luau torches and the bamboo curtain he’s just breached in a big way. I wonder if the Koreans even bothered to walk out back last night. Although a big lighted prison might’ve made them feel safer. They aren’t fools.