Independence Day (74 page)

“You know, I thought I saw her at the Yale-Penn game last fall. She was with a big crowd of people. How long you two been kaput now?”

“Seven years, almost.”

“Well, there’s your biblical allotment.” Carter nods, still scratching his arm like a chimp.

“You catchin’ any fish, Carter?” I say. It is Carter who has sponsored me for the Red Man Club, but now never goes himself since his own kids live in California with their mom and tend to meet him in Big Sky or Paris. To my knowledge I’m the only member who regularly plies the Red Man’s unruffled waters, and soon expect to do more of it with my son, if I’m lucky enough.

Carter shakes his head. “Frank, I never go,” he says regretfully. “It’s a scandal. I need to.”

“Well, gimme a call.” I’m ready to leave, am already thinking about Sally, who’s coming at six. Carter’s and my ninety seconds are up.

Where the Mercedes has drawn to a halt in front of my former front door, a small, liveried driver in a black cap has jumped out and begun hauling bulky suitcases from the trunk. Then out from the back seat emerges a stupendously tall and thin black African man in a bright jungle-green dashiki and matching cap. He is long and long-headed, splendid enough to be a prince, a virtual Milt the Stilt when he reaches his full elevation. He looks out at the quiet, hedge-bound neighborhood, sees Carter and me scoping him out, and waves a great, slow-moving, pink-palmed hand toward us, letting it wag side to side like a practiced blessing. Carter and I rapidly—me in my car, him out—raise ours and wave back and smile and nod as if we wished we could speak his lingo so he could know the good things we’re thinking about him but unfortunately we can’t, whereupon the limo driver leads the great man straight into my house.

Carter says nothing, steps back and looks both ways down the curving street. He was not part of the injunction junta but came along afterward and thinks, I’m sure, that the Ecumenical Center is a good neighbor, which is what I always felt would be the case. It’s not true that you can get used to anything, but you can get used to much more than you think and even learn to like it.

Carter, it’s my guess, is now inventorying his day’s thoughts, jokes, headlines, sports scores, trying to determine if there’s anything he can say to interest me that won’t take over thirty more seconds yet still provide him an exit line so he can go plop back in his pool. I, of course, am doing the same. Save when tragedies strike, there’s little that really needs to be said to most people you know.

“So any news about your little agent’s murder?” Carter says in a businesslike voice, choosing a proper tragedy and replanting his paper-clad feet even farther apart on the smooth pavement and assuming an expression of dogged, hard-mouthed, law ’n’ order intolerance for all unwanted abridgments of personal freedoms.

“We’re offering a reward, but not that I know of,” I say, hard-mouthed myself, thinking once again of Clair’s bright face and her sharp-eyed, self-certain sweetness, which cut me no slack yet brought me to ecstasy, if but briefly. “It’s like she got struck by lightning,” I say, and realize I’m describing only her disappearance from my life, not her departure from this earth.

Carter shakes his head and makes of his lips a pocket of compressed air, which causes him to look deformed before he lets it all out with a
ptttt
noise. “They oughta just start stringin’ those kinda guys up by their dicks and lettin’ ’em hang.”

“I think so too,” I say. And I do.

Because there is truly nothing more to say after this, Carter may be about to ask me my view of the election and its possible radiant lines into the realty business and by that route snake around to politics. He considers himself a “Strong Defense—Goldwater Republican” and likes treading a line of jokey, condescending disparagement toward me. (It is his one unlikable quality, one I’ve found typical of the suddenly wealthy. Naturally he was a Democrat in college.) But politics is a bad topic for Independence Day.

“I heard you reading
Caravans
on the radio last week,” Carter says, nodding. “I really enjoyed that a lot. I just wanted you to know.” Though his thinking is suddenly commandeered by a whole new thought. “Okay, now look,” he says, his eyes turned intent. “You’re our words guy, Frank. I’d think a lot of things these days might make you want to go back to writing stories.” Having said this, he looks down, cinches his purple belt tight around his belly and peers at his small feet in their paper sleeves as if something about them has changed.

“Why do you think that, Carter? Does now seem like a dramatic time to be alive? I’m pretty happy with it, but it hasn’t to me. I’d find it encouraging if you thought so.” The limo is now swinging around to leave, its heavy pipes murmuring against the driveway surface. I’m frankly flattered Carter knows anything about my prior writing life.

My fingers, delving half-consciously between my seat and the passenger’s, come up with the tiny red bow Clarissa gave me. Along with Carter’s personal crediting of my long-ago and momentary life as a writer, finding this makes me feel measurably better, since my spirits had drooped over thoughts of Clair.

“It just seems to me like a lot more things need explaining these days, Frank.” Carter is still peering at his toes. “When you and I were in college, ideas dominated the world—even if most of them were stupid. Now I can’t even think of a single new big idea, can you?” He looks up, then down at Clarissa’s red bow, which I’m holding in my palm, and wrinkles his nose as though I were presenting him with a riddle. Carter, I sense, has been sitting too long on the sidelines counting his money, so that the world seems both simple and simply screwed up. He may, I’m afraid, be on the brink of voicing some horseshit, right-wing dictum about freedom, banning the income tax, and government interventionism in a free-market economy—“ideas” to feed his need for some certitude and whole-heartedness between now and cocktail hour. He of course is not interested in my former writing career.

But if Carter were to ask me—as a man once did on a plane to Dallas back when I was a sportswriter—what I thought he ought to do with his life now that he’d come into a bank vault full of loot, I’d tell him what I told that man: dedicate your life to public service; do a tour with VISTA or the Red Cross, or hand-deliver essential services to the sick and elderly in West Virginia or Detroit (the man on the Dallas flight wasn’t interested in this advice and said he thought he might just “travel” instead). Carter indeed would probably like to be put in touch with Irv Ornstein, once he’s retired from his fantasy baseball career. Irv, panting to get free of the simulator business, could tempt Carter with the big new commanding metaphor of
continuity
, and the two of them could start cooking up some sort of self-help scheme to franchise on television and make another fortune.

Or I could suggest he come down just the way I did and have a talk with our crew at L & S, since we have yet to replace Clair but soon must. Stepping into her shoes could satisfy his unsatisfied needs by championing the “idea” of doing something for others. He’s at least as qualified as I was, and in some of the same ways—except that he’s married.

Or possibly
he
should take up words, pen some stories of his own to fling out into the void. But as for me on that score—I’ve been there. The air’s too thin. Thanks, but no thanks.

I muse up at Carter’s small, delicate features, which seem added on to a flat map. I mean to look as though I can’t imagine a single idea, good or bad, but know there to be plenty floating around loose. (My most obvious idea would be misconstrued, turned into a debate I don’t care to have, ending us up in the politics of stalemate.)

“Most important ideas still probably start with physical acts, Carter,” I say (his friend). “You’re an old classicist. Maybe what you need to do is get off your butt and stir up some dust.”

Carter stares at me a long moment and says nothing, but is clearly thinking. Finally he says, “You know, I
am
still in the Active Reserves. If Bush could get a little conflict fired up when he gets in, I could be called up for serious midlife ass kicking.”

“There’s an idea, I guess.” My daughter’s red bow is attached to my little finger like a reminder, and what I’m reminded of is my LICK BUSH sticker, which I’m sorry Carter hasn’t seen. Though this is enough, and I ease my car down into gear. The limo’s taillights brighten at Venetian Way, swing left and glide from sight. “You might arrange to get yourself killed doing that.”

“I-BOG is what we used to say in my platoon: In a blaze of glory.” Carter mugs a little and rolls his eyes. He’s no fool. His fighting days are long over, and I’m sure he’s glad of it. “You relatively happy with your current life’s travails, ole Franko? Still planning on staying in town?” He does not exactly mean “travails” but something more innocent, and smiles at me with purest, conversation-ending sincerity built upon the rock of lived life.

“Yep,” I say, with goodwill in all ways equal to his. “You already know I believe home’s where you pay the mortgage, Carter.”

“I’d think real estate might get a little tiresome. About as ridiculous as most jobs.”

“So far, not. So far it’s fine. You oughta try it, since you’re retired.”

“I’m not
that
retired.” He winks at me for reasons that aren’t clear.

“I’m headed for the parade, ole Knott-head. You endure a fine Independence Day.”

Carter snaps up a crisp, absurd little army salute in his colorful poolside attire. “Ten-four. Go forth and do well, Cap’n Bascombe. Bring back glory and victory or at least tales of glory and victory. Jefferson still lives.”

“I’ll do my best,” I say, slightly embarrassed. “I’ll do my best.” And I motor off into my day, smiling.

A
nd that is simply that. The whole nine yards, that which
it
was all about for a time, ending well, followed by a short drive to a parade.

There is, naturally, much that’s left unanswered, much that’s left till later, much that’s best forgotten. Paul Bascombe, I still believe, will come to live with me for some part of his crucial years. It may not be a month from now or six. A year could go by, and there would still be time enough to participate in his new self-discovery.

It is also possible that I will soon be married, following years supposing I never could again, and so would no longer view myself as the suspicious bachelor, as I admit I sometimes still do. The Permanent Period, this would be, that long, stretching-out time when my dreams would have mystery like any ordinary person’s; when whatever I do or say, who I marry, how my kids turn out, becomes what the world—if it makes note at all—knows of me, how I’m seen, understood, even how I think of myself before whatever there is that’s wild and unassuagable rises and cheerlessly hauls me off to oblivion.

Up Constitution Street, from my car seat, I now can see the marchers passing beyond crowded spectators’ heads, hear the booms of the big drums, the cymbals, see the girls in red and white skirtlets high-prancing, batons spinning, a red banner held aloft ahead of flashing trumpets borrowing the sun’s spangly light. It is not a bad day to be on earth.

I park behind our office and beside the Press Box Bar, lock up and then stand out in the noon heat below a whitening sky and begin my satisfied amble up to the crowd. “Ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom! Hail to the victors valiant, hail to the conquering heroes …” Ours is a familiar fight song, and everyone up ahead of me applauds.

Late last night when I was dead asleep and the worst of my day’s events were put to rest after a long trial-by-error followed by the reemergence of some small hope (which is merely human), my phone rang. And when I said hello from the darkness, there was a moment I took to be dead silence on the line, though gradually I heard a breath, then the sound of a receiver touching what must’ve been a face. There was a sigh, and the sound of someone going, “Ssss, tsss. Uh-huh, uh-huh,” followed by an even deeper and less certain “Ummm.”

And I suddenly said, because someone was there I felt I knew, “I’m glad you called.” I pressed the receiver to my ear and opened my eyes in the dark. “I just got here,” I said. “Now’s not a bad time at all. This is a full-time job. Let me hear your thinking. I’ll try to add a part to the puzzle. It can be simpler than you think.”

Whoever was there—and of course I don’t know who, really—breathed again two times, three. Then the breath grew thin and brief. I heard another sound, “Uh-huh.” Then our connection was gone, and even before I’d put down the phone I’d returned to the deepest sleep imaginable.

And I am in the crowd just as the drums are passing—always the last in line—their
boom-boom-booming
in my ears and all around. I see the sun above the street, breathe in the day’s rich, warm smell. Someone calls out, “Clear a path, make room, make room, please!” The trumpets go again. My heartbeat quickens. I feel the push, pull, the weave and sway of others.

RICHARD FORD

The author of six novels and two collections of stories, Richard Ford has received the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction. His work has been translated into sixteen languages. He lives in Maine and New Orleans.

BOOKS BY R ICHARD F ORD

THE SPORTSWRITER

As a sportswriter, Frank Bascombe makes his living studying people—men, mostly—who live entirely within themselves. This is a condition that Frank himself aspires to. But at thirty-eight, he suffers from incurable dreaminess, occasional pounding of the heart, and the not-too-distant losses of a career, a son, and a marriage. And in the course of the Easter week in which Richard Ford’s wonderfully eloquent and moving novel transpires, Bascombe will end up losing the remains of his familiar life, though with spirits soaring.