Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  “I never thought that’s what that meant,” I said, good emanations rising away into the mosquitoey darkness.

  “D’you think he trusts you?” Clink, clink, clink. “Thanks, guy.”

  “Yeah. I think he does.”

  “Well, but you can’t tell when you’re getting anyplace with kids. You just have to hope they don’t grow up like these little Mexican twerps, pulling stickups and getting shot. I take myself out to dinner and drink a toast to good luck every third Sunday in June.”

  “Why didn’t you have any kids, Karl?” A lone citizen of Long Eddy, a small man in a pale shirt, stepped out the front door to the top of the town hall steps, lit a cigarette and stood drinking in the smoke and considering the evening’s sweet benefactions. He was, I supposed, a disgruntled refugee from the cabinet minister’s explanations—possibly a moderate—and I felt envy for whatever he might’ve had on his mind just at that instant, the mere nothing-much of it: the satisfactions of optional community involvement, a point of honest disagreement with a trusted public servant, a short beer later with friends, a short drive home, a quiet after-hours entry to his own bed, followed by the slow caressing carriage to sleep at the hands of a willing other. Could he know, I wondered, how lucky he was? There was hardly a doubt he did.

  “Oh, Millie and I tried our best,” Karl said drolly. “Or I guess we did. Maybe we didn’t do it right. Let’s see now, first you put it in, then …” Karl was obviously in a mood to celebrate not being robbed and murdered. I held the receiver out in the dark so I wouldn’t have to hear his rube’s routine, and in that splitting instant I missed New Jersey and my life in it with a grinding, exile’s poignancy.

  “I’m just glad you’re all right down there, Karl,” I broke back in, without having listened.

  “We’re pretty damn busy down here,” he brayed back. “Fifty paid customers since eleven a.m.”

  “And no robberies.”

  “What’s that?”

  “No robberies,” I said more loudly.

  “No. Right. We’re actually geniuses, Frank. Geniuses on a small scale. We’re what this country’s all about.” Clink, clink, clink, mugs colliding. “Thanks, pal.”

  “Maybe,” I said, watching the pale-shirted man flick away his smoke, spit on the porch steps, run both hands back through his hair and reenter the tall door, revealing a coldly brilliant yellow light within.

  “You can’t tell me ole Bonzo’s uncle’s that fulla shit,” Karl said vehemently, referring to our President of the moment, whose cabinet minister was only yards away from me. “Because if he’s that fulla shit, I’m fulla shit. And I’m not fulla shit. That’s what I know. I’m not fulla shit. Not everybody can say that.” I wondered what our customers could be thinking, hearing Karl bellowing away behind his little sliding screen about not being fulla shit.

  “I don’t like him,” I said, though it made me feel debilitated to say so.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You believe God resides in all of us, nobility of man, help the poor, give it all away. Yakkedy, yakkedy, yak. I believe God resides in heaven, and I’m down here selling birch beer on my own.”

  “I don’t believe in God, Karl. I believe it takes all kinds.”

  “No it don’t,” he said. Karl might’ve been drunk or having another small stroke. “What I think is, Frank, you seem one way and are another, if you want to know the gospel truth, speaking of God. You’re a conservative in a fuckin’ liberal’s zoot suit.”

  “I’m a liberal in a liberal’s zoot suit,” I said. Or, I thought, but certainly didn’t admit to Karl, a liberal in a conservative’s zoot suit. In three days I’d been called a burglar, a priest, a homosexual, a nervous nelly, and now a conservative, none of which was true. (It was not an ordinary weekend.) “I do like to help the poor and displaced, Karl. I sure as hell in fact dragged you to the surface when you were tits-up.”

  “That was just for sport,” he said. “And that’s why you have so much effing trouble with your son. Your message is all mixed up. You’re lucky he’ll have anything to do with you at all.”

  “Why don’t you bite my ass, Karl?” I shouted, standing in the dark, wondering if there wasn’t some simple, legal way to put Karl out on the street, where he’d have more time to practice psychology. (Spiteful thoughts are not unique to conservatives.)

  “I’m too busy to gas with you now,” Karl said. I heard the cash register ding again. “Thanks a million. Hey, pardon me, ladies, you want your change, don’t you? Two cents is two cents. Next. Come on, don’t be shy, sweetheart.” I waited for Karl to blast back something else infuriating, something more about my message being mixed. But he simply put the phone down without hanging it up, as if he meant to return, so that for a minute I could hear him going about his business serving customers. But in a while I put my receiver back on the hook and just stared out at the sparkling, alluring river beyond me in the dark, letting my breathing come back to normal.

  My call to the Algonquin and Sally had a completely different, unexpected and altogether positive result, which, when I got home and found out Paul had weathered his surgery as well as could be hoped, allowed me to crawl in bed with all the windows open and the fan on (no more thought of reading Carl Becker or drifting to sleep) and to swoon off into profound unconscious while the cicadas sang their songs in the silent trees.

  Sally, to my surprise, was as sympathetic as a blood relative to my long story about Paul’s getting beaned, our never making it into the Hall of Fame, my having to stay in Oneonta, then heading home late rather than pounding down to NYC to share the night with her, and instead dispatching her to the nicest place I could think of (albeit for another night alone). Sally said she thought she could hear something new in my voice, and for the first time: something “more human” and even “powerful” and “angular,” whereas, she reminded me, I had seemed until this weekend “pretty buttoned up and well insulated,” “priestly” (this again), often downright “ornery and exclusive,” though “down deep” she’d always thought I was a good guy and actually not cold but pretty sympathetic. (I had thought most of these last things about myself for years.) This time, though, she said, she thought she heard worry and some fear in my voice (buzzy timbres familiar, no doubt, from her dying clients’ critiques of Les Misérables or M. Butterfly on their chatty return trips to the Shore, but apparently not incompatible with “powerful” or “angular”). She could tell I’d been “vitally moved” by something “deep and complicated,” which my son’s injury may have been “only the tip of the iceberg for.” It may, she said, have everything to do with my gradual emergence from the Existence Period, which she actually said was a “simulated way to live your life,” a sort of “mechanical isolation that couldn’t go on forever;” I was probably already off and running into “some other epoch,” maybe some more “permanent period” she was glad to see because it boded well for me as a person, even if the two of us didn’t end up together (which it seemed might be the case, since she didn’t really know what I meant by love and probably wouldn’t trust it).

  I, of course, was simply relieved she wasn’t sitting back with her long legs parked on a silken footrest, ordering tins of Beluga caviar and thousand-dollar bottles of champagne and calling up everybody she knew from Beardsville to Phnom Penh and regaling them at length about what a poor shiftless specimen I was—really just pathetic when you got right down to it—and actually comical (something I’d already admitted to), given my idiotic and juvenile attempts to make good. Just such narrowly missed human connections as this can in fact be fatal, no matter who’s at fault, and often result in unrecoverable free fall and a too-hasty conclusion that “the whole goddamn thing’s not worth bothering with or it wouldn’t be so goddamn confusing all the goddamn time,” after which one party (or both) just wanders off and never thinks to look toward the other again. Such is the iffiness of romance.

  Sally, however, seemed willing to take a longer look, a deeper breath, bli
nk hard and follow her gut instincts about me, which meant looking for good sides (making me up with the brighter facets out). All of which was damn lucky for me since, standing there by the dark gas station in Long Eddy, I could sense like a faint, sweet perfume in the night the possibility of better yet to come, only I had no list of particulars to feel better about, and not much light on my horizon except a keyhole hope to try to make it brighter.

  And indeed, before I finally climbed back in my car and headed off into the lush night toward Jersey, she began talking at first about whether or not it would ever be possible for her to get married after all these years, and then about what kind of permanent epoch might be dawning in her life. (Such thoughts are apparently infectious.) She went on to tell me—in much more dramatic tones than Joe Markham had on Friday morning—that she’d had dark moments of doubting her own judgment about many things, and that she worried about not knowing the difference between risking something (which she considered morally necessary) and throwing caution to the winds (which she considered stupid and, I supposed, had to do with me). In several electrifying leaps and connections that made good sense to her, she said she wasn’t a woman who thought other adults needed mothering, and if that’s what I wanted I should definitely look elsewhere; she said that making her up (which she referred to then as “reassembling”) just to make love appealing was actually intolerable, no matter what she’d said yesterday, and that I couldn’t just keep switching words around indefinitely to suit myself but needed instead to accept the unmanageable in others; and finally that while she might understand me pretty well and even like me a lot, there was no reason to think that necessarily meant anything about true affection, which she again reminded me I’d said I was beyond anyway. (These accounted, I’m sure, for the feelings of congestion she experienced early Friday morning and that prompted her call to me while I was in bed snuffling over my Becker and the difference between making history and writing it.)

  I told her, raptly watching while the last of the night’s anglers waded back across the ever darker but still brilliant surface of the Delaware, that I once again had no expectations for reassembling her, or for mothering either, though from time to time I might need a facilitator (it didn’t seem necessary to give in on everything), and that I’d thought in these last days about several aspects of an enduring relationship with her, that it didn’t seem at all like a business deal, and that I liked the idea plenty, in fact felt a kind of whirring elevation about her and the whole prospect—which I did. Plus, I had a strong urge to make her happy, which didn’t seem in the least way smooth (or cowardly, as Ann had said), and wished in fact she’d take the train to Haddam the next day, by which time the Markhams and the parade would be in the record books and we could resume our speculations into the evening, lie out in the grass on the Great Lawn of the Institute (where I still had privileges as temporal consultant without portfolio) and watch Christian fireworks, after which we might ignite some sparks of our own (a borrowed idea, but still a good one).

  “That all sounds nice,” Sally said from her suite on West Forty-fourth. “It seems reckless, though. Doesn’t it to you? After the other night, when it seemed all so over with?” Her voice suddenly sounded mournful and skeptical at once, which wasn’t the tone I’d exactly hoped for.

  “Not to me it doesn’t,” I said out of the dark. “To me it seems great. Even if it is reckless it seems great.” (Supposedly I was the one tarred with the “caution” brush.)

  “Something about all those things I said to you about myself and about you, and now taking the train down and lying in the grass watching fireworks. It’s suddenly made me feel like I don’t know what I’m getting into, like I’m out of place.”

  “Look,” I said, “if Wally shows up, I’ll do the honorable thing, assuming I know what it is or who he is.”

  “Well, that’s sweet,” she said. “You’re sweet. I know you’d try to do that. I’m not going to think about Wally showing up anymore, though.”

  “That’s a good idea,” I said. “That’s what I’m doing too. So don’t worry about feeling out of place. That’s what I’m here for.”

  “That’s an encouraging start,” she said. “It is. It’s always encouraging to know what you’re here for.”

  And in that way last night it all began to seem promising and doable, if lacking in long-term specifics. I finished our talk by telling her not that I loved her but that I wasn’t beyond affection, which she said she was glad to hear. Then I beat it back down the road toward Haddam as fast as humanly possible.

  Out in the unshaded center of the Haddam green, I notice all citizens beginning to look up. Young moms with prams and jogger pairs in Lycra tights, cadres of long-haired boys with skateboards on shoulders, men in bright braces wiping sweat off their brows, all gaze into heaven’s vault beyond linden, witch hazel and beech limbs. The Dutch dancers stop their bustle and hurry off the floor, the police and firemen step out of their tent to the grass, seeking to see. Everick and Wardell, Uncle Sam and I (fellow townsman, alone in my car with the sunroof back), each raise eyes to the firmament, while the honky-country music comes to a stop, just as if there were one special moment of portent in this day, to be overseen by some infallible Mr. Big with a knack for coincidence and surprises. Not so far away, still on their practice field, I hear the Haddam band lock down on one sustained note in perfect major-key unison. Then the crowd—as random minglers, they have not precisely been a crowd—makes a hushed, suspiring “Ohh” like an assent to a single telepathic message. And suddenly down out of the sky come four men en parachute! smoke canisters bracketed to their feet—one red, one white, one blue, one (oddly) bright yellow like a caution to the other three. They for a moment make me dizzy.

  The helmeted parachutists, wearing stars ‘n’ stripes, jumpsuits and cumbersome packs binding their torsos and backsides, all come careening to earth within five seconds, landing semi-gracefully with a hop-skip-jump close by the Dutch dance floor. Each man—and I only guess they’re men, though reason would have it they’re not just men; conceivably they’re also kidney-transplant survivors, AIDS patients, unwed mothers, ex-gamblers or the children of any of these—each apparent man promptly flourishes a rakish hand like a circus performer, does a partly-smoke-obscured but still stylish star turn to the crowd and, after a smattering of stunned and I can only say is sincere and relieved applause, begins strenuously reefing in his silks and lines, and sets about getting the hell on to the next jump, in Wickatunk—all this before my momentary dizziness has really begun to clear. (Possibly I’m more drained than I thought.)

  Though it is wonderful: a bright and chancy spectacle of short duration enhancing the day’s modest storage of fun. More of this would be better all around, even at the risk of someone’s chute not opening.

  The crowd begins straying apart again, becoming single but gratified minglers. The dancers—skirts bunched in front like frontier women—return to their dance floor, and someone reignites the hillbilly music, with a strutting fiddle and steel guitar out ahead and a throaty female singing, “If you loved me half as much as I loved you.”

  I climb out of my car onto the grass and stare at the sky to glimpse the plane the jumpers have leaped free of, some little muttering dot on the infinite. As always, this is what interests me: the jump, of course, but the hazardous place jumped from even more; the old safety, the ordinary and predictable, which makes a swan dive into invisible empty air seem perfect, lovely, the one thing that’ll do. This provokes butterflies, ignites danger.

  Needless to say, I would never consider it, even if I packed my own gear with a sapper’s precision, made friends I could die with, serviced the plane with my own lubricants, turned the prop, piloted the crate to the very spot in space, and even uttered the words they all must utter at least silently as they go—right? “Life’s too short” (or long). “I have nothing to lose but my fears” (wrong). “What’s anything worth if you won’t risk pissing it away?” (Taken
together, I’m sure it’s what “Geronimo” means in Apache.) I, though, would always find a reason not to risk it; since for me, the wire, the plane, the platform, the bridge, the trestle, the window ledge—these would preoccupy me, flatter my nerve with their own prosy hazards, greater even than the risk of brilliantly daring death. I’m no hero, as my wife suggested years ago.

  Nothing’s up there to see anyway, no low-flying Cessna or Beech Bonanza recircling the drop site. Only, miles and miles high, the silver-glinting needle’s-eye flash of a big Boeing or Lockheed inches its way out to sea and beyond, a sight that on most days would make me long to be anywhere but where I am, but that on this day, with near disaster so close behind me, leaves me happy to be here. In Haddam.

  And so I continue my bystander’s cruise around town for the purpose of my own and civic betterment.

  A loop through the Gothic, bowery, boxwood-hedged Institute grounds and out the “backs” and around and down onto the Presidents Streets—oak-dappled Coolidge, where I was bopped on the head, wider and less gentrified Jefferson, and on to Cleveland, where the search is under way for signs of history and continuance in the dirt in front of my house and the Zumbros’. Though no one’s digging this morning. A yellow “crime scene” tape has been stretched around two mulberries and the backhoe, and serves to define the orange-clay hole where evidence has been uncovered. I look down and in from my car window, for some reason not wanting to get out but willing to see something, anything, conclusive—my own dwelling being just to starboard. Yet only a cat stands in the open trench, the McPhersons’ big black tom, Gordy, covering up his private business with patience. Time, forward and back, seems suddenly not of the essence on my street, and I ease away having found out nothing, but not at all dissatisfied.

  I take a sinuous drive across Taft Lane and up through the Choir College grounds, where it’s tranquil and deserted, the flat brick buildings shut tight and echoless for the summer—only the tennis courts in use by citizens in no humor for a parade.