A Multitude of Sins (38 page)

What you did definitely changed things, he thought, as the powerful cruiser sped along. Even this view down the mountain was changed because of what had happened; it seemed less beautiful now. He thought about his job—that he would lose it. He’d be given the option of resigning, but there’d be no mistaking: sex with a fellow employee, a violent death, a clandestine trip on company time when other priorities were paramount—without a doubt, that didn’t work. He thought about Mary—that he would tell her about none of his true emotions, would omit most of the details and the history, would try to let the subject subside and hope that would be enough. He would try to put better things in their place. His parents, too—they would all have to grow up some.

He hadn’t seen Frances again after he’d seen her hung there in the little cedar tree, gazing up at him. It shocked him—that memory, and then not seeing her. It all made him feel peculiarly wronged and alone, as if he resented her absence more than he felt sorry about it. You could be happy, of course, that she’d seen the Grand Canyon before it got spoiled by houses and malls and freeways and glass office buildings. Though she’d tried to make him feel inadequate, that the things he cared about didn’t matter when they were put alongside the spiritual things she was so enthused about, but had now unfortunately given her life for—the healing energy.

But those things didn’t matter. Peering out the windshield at the flat, gray desert at evening, he understood that in fact very little of what he knew mattered; and that however he might’ve felt today—if circumstances could just have been better—he would now not be allowed to feel. Perhaps he never would again. And whatever he might even have liked,
bringing his full and best self to the experience, had now been taken away. So that life, as fast as this car hurtling down the side of a mountain toward the dark, seemed to be disappearing from around him. Being erased. And he was so sorry. And he felt afraid, very afraid, even though that sensation did not come to him in the precise and unexpected way he’d always assumed it would.

Acknowledgments

I wish to express, for the thousandth time, my gratitude to Gary L. Fisketjon, and also to Bill Buford, Meghan O’Rourke, Christopher MacLehose, Margaret Stead, Ian Jack and L. Rust Hills, for their generous efforts to make these stories better. I wish to thank, as well, Angela and Rea Hederman for their encouragement and long friendship. For being my acute reader and friend, I wish to thank Sarah MacLachlan. Finally, and again, my great gratitude goes to Amanda Urban.

RF

A Note on the Author

Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944. He has published six novels and three collections of stories, including
The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Wildlife, A Multitude of Sins
and, most recently,
The Lay of the Land. Independence Day
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

By the Same Author

NOVELS

A Piece of My Heart

The Ultimate Good Luck

The Sportswriter

Wildlife

Independence Day

The Lay of the Land

Canada

SHORT FICTION

Rock Springs

Women with Men: Three Stories

First published in Great Britain by the Harvill Press 2001

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © Richard Ford 1996, 1999, 2000, 2001

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

These stories appeared first, in somewhat different forms, in the following publications:

‘Privacy’, ‘Quality Time’, ‘Calling’, ‘Reunion’, ‘Crèche’, ‘Under the Radar’ (with the title ‘Issues’), ‘Puppy’ (
New Yorker
); ‘Dominion’ (with the title ‘The Overreachers’) (
Granta
); ‘Charity’ (
Tin House
). Richard Ford is grateful, in each instance, for the editors’ permission to reprint the stories here

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Bedford Square, London W1D 3QY

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781408835067

www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

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The Sportswriter

‘Ford is a masterful writer’
Raymond Carver

‘A devastating chronicle of contemporary alienation’
New York Times

‘Richard Ford’s sportswriter is a rare bird in life and nearly extinct in fiction’
Tobias Wolff

At dawn on Good Friday every year, Frank Bascombe and his wife meet to pay their respects at the grave of their firstborn. This year Frank plans to spend the Easter weekend with a new girlfriend while on assignment for his magazine. What might have been an idyllic adventure becomes a succession of calamities that extinguish almost all the carefully nourished equilibrium of a man grappling with the failure of love and the death of his son.

The end and the aftermath of a marriage, the emotional dislocation and the discovery of a new life while in the embrace of troubled memories of the old have seldom been more harrowingly plotted.
The Sportswriter
is also a wistful, very funny and always human illumination of domestic and sexual anguish through the story of Frank Bascombe, its hero, the sportswriter.

Buy this book at
www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

Independence Day

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award

‘The best novel out of America in many years … simply a masterpiece’
John Banville,
Guardian

‘It is nothing less than the story of the 20th century itself … Eloquently, with awkward grace, in his novels about an ordinary man, Ford has created an extraordinary epic’
The Times

After the disintegration of his family, the ruin of his career and an affair with a much younger woman, Frank Bascombe decides that the surest route to a ‘normal’ American life is to become an estate agent in Haddam, New Jersey. Frank blunders through the suburban citadels of the Eastern Seaboard and avoids engaging in life until the sudden, cataclysmic events of a Fourth-of-July weekend with his son jolt him back.

The sequel to
The Sportswriter
and the first novel to win the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year,
Independence Day
is a landmark in American Literature.

Buy this book at
www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

The Lay of the Land

‘Bascombe’s voice remains one of the most generous and wise in contemporary fiction, the honest testimony of a pilgrim seeking the transcendent in a decidedly mundane world’ Stephen Amidon,
Sunday Times

With
The Sportswriter
, in 1985, Richard Ford began a cycle of novels that ten years later – after
Independence Day
won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award – was hailed by
The Times
as ‘an extraordinary epic [that] is nothing less than the story of the 20th century itself’.

Frank Bascombe’s story resumes in the fall of 2000, with the presidential election still hanging in the balance and Thanksgiving looming before him with all the perils of a post-nuclear family get-together. He’s now, at fifty-five, plying his trade as a real estate agent on the Jersey shore and contending with health, marital, and familial issues that have his full attention. This is Richard Ford’s first novel in more than a decade: the funniest, most engaging and explosive book he’s written.

Buy this book at
www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

The Ultimate Good Luck

‘His prose has a taut, cinematic quality that bathes his story with the same hot, mercilessly white light that scorches Mexico’
New York Times

‘Ford’s taut, compelling prose is as piercingly clear as a police siren. No other storyteller writes about the alienated and uncommitted with such mastery’
Sunday Times

Harry Quinn and his girlfriend Rae head to Oaxaca, Mexico, to spring Rae’s brother Sunny from jail and protect him from the sinister drug dealer he is suspected of having double-crossed. But instead of a simple jail-break, Harry and Rae fall into a nightmarish series of entanglements with expat whores and Zapotec Indians. The Cocaine Era’s answer to Graham Greene, this exquisitely choreographed novel tracks Rae’s and Harry’s inexorable descent into the Mexican underworld, where only a stroke of ultimate good luck can keep them alive.

‘So hard-boiled and tough that it might have been written on the back of a trench coat. A grand
Maltese Falcon
of a novel’
Stanley Elkin

Buy this book at
www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

Rock Springs

‘A collection of stunning impact, which marks Ford’s arrival at the pinnacle of his craft’
Sunday Times

‘These are beautifully imagined and crafted stories. By turns heart rending and wickedly funny – and just plain wicked. Richard Ford is a born storyteller with an inimitable lyric voice – and
Rock Springs
is the poetry of realism’
Joyce Carol Oates

The stories in this celebrated collection are about ordinary women and children. Unemployed, on the way back to prison, marriages in tatters, they confront their fates with hard-won optimism and flashes of insight.

‘The people in this marvellous book of short stories have no fixed points; they have moved away from their childhood town, or their first marriage, and lost track of parents who have usually split up themselves. They live on the fringes of legality, matter of fact about car theft and bad cheques. Motels and inter-state highways are the natural landscape of their lives …
Rock Springs
confirms Ford’s place among our finest writers’
The Times

Buy this book at
www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

Women with Men

‘Richard Ford is one of the best writers in America. Potentially the very best’
Gordon Burn

‘At once funny and heartbreaking, as Ford’s work usually is … This is fiction at its finest’
John Banville

‘Here are three perfect “long” stories, so sinuously entwined and so subtly echoing one another that the whole towers like a great novel’
Mail on Sunday

Three outstanding novellas, depicting with a heart-wrenching honesty the limits of human love. Against settings that range from the alleyways of Paris to the northern plains of Montana and the suburbs of Chicago, Richard Ford dramatises the impasses and abysses that exist in all romantic relationships. Capturing men and women at defining moments of truth – whether during seismic arguments, or simply in the course of everyday life – Ford affirms yet again his reputation as one of the great American writers of our time.

‘This sparkling collection sees the author of
Independence Day
at the top of his form. The stories are both powerful fictions in their own right and a perfectly formed triptych’
Sunday Telegraph

Buy this book at
www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

Wildlife

‘Every sentence Ford writes, illuminates … His prose is strong, clear and satisfying, resonant with the bleak rhythms of unrewarded lives’
Sunday Times

‘Ford’s book observes the human animal with friendship, understanding, and an almost clinical detachment’
Independent on Sunday

In the autumn of 1960, Joe Brinson and his parents move to the edge of the Rocky Mountains to cash in on the promise of the American frontier, to seize a future as broad as the sweep of the Montana prairies. But when Joe’s father leaves home to fight the forest fires that have raged since the summer, and his mother meets an older man, Joe finds his life changing too suddenly, blazing into unrecognisable pieces like the forests surrounding them.

‘Ford writes carefully and with simplicity that is not deceptive but extremely difficult to achieve, about powerless, uninformed people and their surroundings, in close-up’
Victoria Glendinning,
The Times

‘What is satisfying in
Wildlife
is its density. This is proper storytelling, lean and taut. And it is real, grownup life. Ford captures perfectly the loneliness that can only be had in families’
New Statesman

Buy this book at
www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

A Piece of My Heart

‘This is quality writing in the highest American tradition of Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck’
The Times

‘Superb … Brutally real and at the same time haunting … One of those rare surprises that come along every few years’
Jim Harrison

Robard Hughes has raced across the country in pursuit of a woman, and Sam Newell is hunting for the missing part of himself. On an uncharted island on the Mississippi, both these godless pilgrims find what they have been searching for in an explosion of shocking violence. The novel that launched the career of one of America’s late-twentieth-century masters,
A Piece of My Heart
is a
tour de force
that does justice to Ford’s diverse literary gifts: his unerring eye for detail, his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, and his sharp understanding of human nature.