Independence Day (14 page)

I, naturally, have passed this place incalculable times but have paid it only the briefest attention (which is what the prison planners expected, the whole shebang as unremarkable as a golf course). Though looked at now, a grassy, summery compound with substantial trees ranked beyond its boundaries, where an inmate can do any damn thing he wants but leave—read a book, watch color TV, think about the future—and where one’s debts to society can be unobtrusively retired in a year or two, it seems like a place anyone might be glad to pause just to get things sorted out and cut through the crap.

“It looks like some goddamn junior college,” Joe Markham says, still talking in the higher decibels but seeming calmer now. We’re stopped on the opposite shoulder, with traffic booming past, and are rubbernecking the fence and the official silver-and-black sign that reads: N.J. MEN’S FACILITY—A MINIMUM SECURITY ENVIRONMENT, behind which New Jersey, American and Penal System flags all rustle on separate poles in the faint, damp breezes. There’s no guardhouse here, no razor wire, no electric fences, no watchtowers with burp guns, stun grenades, searchlights, no leg-chewing canines— just a discreet automatic gate with a discreet speaker box and a small security camera on a post. No biggie.

“It doesn’t look that bad, does it?” I say.

“Where’s our house from here?” Joe says, still loudly, leaning to see across me.

We study the row of big trees which is Penns Neck, the Houlihan house on Charity Street invisible within.

“You can’t see it,” Phyllis says, “but it’s back there.”

“Out of sight, out of mind,” Joe says. He flashes a look back at Phyllis in her shades. A giant dump truck blows past, rocking the car on its chassis. “They have a gap in the fence where you can trade recipes.” He snorts.

“A cake with a file in it,” Phyllis says, her face unresigned. I try to catch her eye in the rearview, but can’t. “I don’t see it.”

“I goddamned see it,” Joe growls.

We sit staring for thirty more seconds, and then it’s off we go.

A
s a negative inducement and a double cincher, I drive us out past Mallards Landing, where everything is as it was two hours ago, only wetter. A few workmen are moving inside the half-studded homes. A crew of black men is loading wads of damp sod off a flatbed and stacking them in front of the MODEL that’s supposedly OPEN but isn’t and in fact looks like a movie façade where a fictionalized American family would someday pay the fictionalized mortgage. It puts me and, I’m sure, the Markhams in mind of the prison we just left.

“Like I was saying to Phyllis,” I say to Joe, “these are in your price window, but they’re not what you described.”

“I’d rather have AIDS than live in that junk,” Joe snarls, and doesn’t look at Phyllis, who sits in the back, peering out toward the strobing oil-storage depot and the bulldozed piles of now unsmoldering trees.
Why have I come here?
she is almost certainly thinking.
How long a ride back is it by Vermont Transit?
She could be down at the Lyndonville Farmers’ Co-op at this very moment, a clean red kerchief on her head, she and Sonja blithely but responsibly shopping for the holiday—surprise fruits for the “big fruit bowl” she’ll take to the Independence Day bash. Chinese kites would be tethered above the veggie stalls. Someone would be playing a dulcimer and singing quirky mountain tunes full up with sexual double meanings. Labs and goldens by the dozens would be scratching and lounging around, wearing colorful bandanna collars of their own. Where has that all disappeared to, she is wondering. What have I done?

Suddenly
crash-boom!
Somewhere miles aloft in the peaceful atmosphere, invisible to all, a war jet breaks the barrier of harmonious sound and dream, reverbs rumbling toward mountaintops and down the coastal slope. Phyllis jumps. “Oh fuck,” she says. “What was that?”

“I broke wind. Sorry,” Joe says, smirking at me, and then we say no more.

A
t the Sleepy Hollow, the Markhams, who have ridden the rest of the way in total motionless silence, seem now reluctant to depart my car. The scabby motel lot is empty except for their ancient borrowed Nova with its mismatched tires and moronic anesthetists’ sticker caked with Green Mountain road dirt. A small, pinkly dressed maid wearing her dark hair in a bun is flickering in and out the doorway to #7, loading a night’s soiled linen and towels into a cloth hamper and carting in stacks of fresh.

The Markhams would both rather be dead than anywhere that’s available to them, and for a heady, unwise moment I consider letting them follow me home, setting them up for a weekend of house discussion on Cleveland Street—a safe, depression-free base from which they could walk to a movie, eat a decent bluefish or manicotti dinner at the August Inn, window-shop down Seminary Street till Phyllis can’t stand not to live here, or at least nearby.

Though that is simply not in the cards, and my heart strikes two and a half sharp, admonitory beats at the very thought. Not only do I not like the idea of them rummaging around in my life’s accoutrements (which they would absolutely do, then lie about it), but since we’re not talking offer, I want them left as solitary as Siberia so they can get their options straight. They could always, of course, move themselves up to the new Sheraton or the Cabot Lodge and pay the freight. Though in its own way each of these is as dismal as the Sleepy Hollow. In my former sportswriter’s life I often sought shelter and even exotic romance in such spiritless hideaways, and often, briefly, found it. But no more. No way.

Joe has gone all the way through his list of questions left unanswered on the listing sheet, which he has spindled, then folded, his former lion’s certainty now beginning to wane. “Any chance of a lease option back there at Houlihan’s?” he says, as we all three just sit.

“No.”

“Any chance Houlihan might come off a buck fifty-five?”

“Make an offer.”

“When can Houlihan vacate?”

“Minimum time. He has cancer.”

“Would you negotiate the commission down to four percent?”

(This comes as no surprise.) “No.”

“What’s the bank renting money for these days?”

(Again.) “Ten-four on a thirty-year fixed, plus a point, plus an application fee.”

We skirl down through everything Joe can dredge up. I have turned the a/c vent into my face until I almost decide again to let them move into my house. Except, forty-five showings is the statistical point of no return, and the Markhams have today gone to forty-six. Clients, after this point, frequently don’t buy a house but shove off to other locales, or else do something nutty like take a freighter to Bahrain or climb the Matterhorn. Plus, I might have a hard time getting them to leave. (In truth, I’m ready to cut the Markhams loose, let them set off toward a fresh start in the Amboys.)

Though of course they might just as well say, “Okay. Let’s just get the sonofabitch bought and quit niggly-pigglying around. We’re in for the full boat. Let’s get an offer sheet filled out.” I’ve got a boxful in my trunk. “Here’s five grand. We’re moving into the Sheraton Tara. You get your sorry ass back over to Houlihan’s, tell him to get his bags packed for Tucson or go fuck himself, because one fifty’s all we’re offering because that’s all we’ve got. Take an hour to decide.”

People do that. Houses get sold on the spot; checks get written, escrow accounts opened, moving companies called from windy pay phones outside Hojo’s. It makes my job one hell of a lot easier. Though when it happens that way it’s usually rich Texans or maxillary surgeons or political operatives fired for financial misdealings and looking for a place to hide out until they can be players again. Rarely does it happen with potters and their pudgy paper-making wives who wander back to civilization from piddly-ass Vermont with emaciated wallets and not a clue about what makes the world go around but plenty of opinions about how it ought to.

Joe sits in the front seat grinding his molars, breathing audibly and staring out at the foreign national swamping out their soiled room with a mop and a bottle of Pine-Sol. Phyllis, in her Marginalia shades, sits thinking—what? It’s anybody’s guess. There’s no question left to ask, no worry to express, no resolve or ultimatum worth enunciating. They’ve reached the point where nothing’s left to do but act. Or not.

But by God, Joe doesn’t like it even in spite of loving the house, and sits inventorying his brain for something more to say, some barrier to erect. Likely it will have to do with “seeing from above” again, or wanting to make some great discovery.

“Maybe we
should
think about renting,” Phyllis says vacantly. I have her in my mirror, keeping to herself like a bereaved widow. She has been staring at the hubcap bazaar next door, where no one’s visible in the rain-soaked yard, though the hubcaps sparkle and clank in the breeze. She may be seeing something as a metaphor for something else.

Unexpectedly, though, she sits forward and lays a consolidating mitt on Joe’s bare, hairy shoulder, which causes him to jump like he’d been stabbed. Though he quickly detects this as a gesture of solidarity and tenderness, and lumpily reaches round and grubs her hand with his. All patrols and units are now being called in. A unified response is imminent. It is the bedrock gesture of marriage, something I have somehow missed out on, and rue.

“Most of your better rentals turn up when the Institute term ends and people leave. That was last month,” I say. “You didn’t like anything then.”

“Is there anything we might get into temporarily?” Joe says, limply holding Phyllis’s plump fingers as though she were laid out beside him in a hospital bed.

“I’ve got a place I own,” I say. “It might not be what you want.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Joe and Phyllis say in suspicious unison.

“Nothing’s wrong with it,” I say. “It happens to be in a black neighborhood.”

“Oh Je-sus. Here we go,” Joe says, as if this was a long-foreseeable and finally sprung trap. “That’s all I need. Spooks. Thanks for nothin’.” He shakes his head in disgust.

“That’s not how we look at things in Haddam, Joe,” I say coolly. “That’s not how I practice realty.”

“Well, good for you,” he says, seething but still holding Phyllis’s hand, probably tighter than she likes. “You don’t live there,” he fumes. “And you don’t have kids.”

“I do have kids,” I say. “And I’d happily live there with them if I didn’t already live someplace else.” I give Joe a hard, iron-browed frown meant to say that beyond what he already doesn’t know about, the world he left behind in nineteen seventy-whatever is an empty crater, and he’ll get no sympathy here if it turns out he doesn’t like the present.

“What you got, some shotgun shacks you collect rent on every Saturday morning?” Joe says this in a mealy, nasty way. “My old man ran that scam in Aliquippa. He ran it with Chinamen. He carried a pistol in his belt where they could see it. I used to sit in the car.”

“I don’t have a pistol,” I say. “I’m just doing you a favor by mentioning it.”

“Thanks. Forget about it.”

“We could go look at it,” Phyllis says, squeezing Joe’s hairy knuckles, which he’s balled up now into a menacing little fist.

“In a million years, maybe. But only maybe.” Joe yanks up the door latch, letting hot Route 1 whoosh in.

“The Houlihan house is worth thinking about,” I say to the car seat Joe is vacating, giving a sidelong look to Phyllis in the back.

“You realty guys,” Joe says from outside, where I can just see his ball-packer shorts. “You’re always nosing after the fucking sale.” He then just stalks off in the direction of the cleaning woman, who’s standing beside her laundry hamper and his very room, looking at Joe as if he were a strange sight (which he is).

“Joe’s not a good compromiser,” Phyllis says lamely. “He may be having dosage problems too.”

“He’s free to do whatever he wants, as far as I’m concerned.”

“I know,” Phyllis says. “You’re very patient with us. I’m sorry we’re so much trouble.” She pats me on
my
shoulder, just the way she did asshole Joe. A victory pat. I don’t much appreciate it.

“It’s my job,” I say.

“We’ll be in touch with you, Frank,” Phyllis says, struggling to exit her door to the hot morning heading toward eleven.

“That’s just great, Phyllis,” I say. “Call me at the office and leave a message. I’ll be in Connecticut with my son. I don’t get to spend that much time with him. We can do pretty much everything on the phone if there’s anything to talk about.”

“We’re trying, Frank,” Phyllis says, blinking pathetically at the idea of my son who’s an epileptic, but not wanting to mention it. “We’re really trying here.”

“I can tell,” I lie, and turn and give her a contrite smile, which for some reason drives her right out of the doorway and across the hot little crumbling motel lot in search of her unlikely husband.

I
now find myself in a whir to get back into town, and so split the breeze over the steamy pavement up Route 1, retaking King George Road for the directest route to Seminary Street. I have more of the day returned to me than I’d expected, and I mean to put it to use by making a second stop by the McLeods’, before driving out to Franks on Route 31, then heading straight down to South Mantoloking for some earlier than usual quality time with Sally, plus dinner.