The Lay of the Land (54 page)

I stare up. He is no longer in his blue mechanic’s shirt that shows off his tattoos, but in a Jersey long-coat of inexpensive green vinyl manufacture, which makes him look like a seedy punk and is meant to. He’s cold, too, his hands stuffed in his shallow pockets. He’s rocking foot to foot. His nose is running, his forehead reddened, his hair a yellow tangle. But he is in positive spirits, possibly a little wine-drunk or stoned.

Cold air smacks my cheeks. “What time is it?”

Chris breathes out a congested nasal snurf. “Prolly. I don’t know. Midnight.” He looks over to Squatters. The
BAR
sign’s dark, but visible. No cars sit outside. Route 35’s a ghost highway, the bridge empty and palely lit. A garbage truck with a cop car leading it, blue flasher turning, moves slowly south toward Point Pleasant. “I seen your rig still here. I go, ‘Uh-oh, what the fuck is this?’” Chris shudders, tucks his chin into his lapel and breathes inside for warmth.

“I looked under the goddamn mat,” I say. I’m feeling extremely rough, as if I’d been manhandled for the second night in a row. I’m grinding my molars and must look deranged.

“That mat out front of the office,” Chris says, fidgety, chin down, pointing around toward the front door at a mat that’s invisible from my car. “We leave ’em there. That way, the car looks like it’s just sitting.”

“How the hell am I supposed to know that?”

“I don’t know,” says Chris. “It’s how everybody does it. How’d you get in?”

“It was unlocked.” I am slightly dazed.

“Oh. Man. I messed that up. I shoulda locked it. Lemme get them keys.”

Chris doesn’t act like a struggling American Existentialist scholarship boy at Monmouth, but a sweet, knuckleheaded grease monkey weighing a stint in trade school or the Navy. He is who he ought to be. It is a lesson I could apply to my son Paul if I chose to, and should.

Chris hustles back with my arrowhead fob, but grinning. “Didn’t you get cold in ’ere?” He swabs his nose, sucks back, hocks one on the gravel. He is someone’s son, capable of a good deed performed without undue gravity. He has saved me tonight, after nearly killing me. I now see he has SATAN inked into the flesh of his left metacarpals and JESUS worked into the right ones. Both inexpertly done. Chris is on a quest, his soul in the balance.

“Yeah, but it was fine,” I say. “I went to sleep. How much for the window?” I straighten my left leg, where I’m sitting half out the door, so I can reach my billfold. I’m tempted to ask who’s winning his soul. Old number 666 rarely has a chance anymore except in politics.

“Thirty,” he says. “But you can mail it to him. It’s all shut up. I gotta get home. Tomorrow’s a holiday. My wife’ll kill me.”

Wife! Chris has one of those
already
? Possibly he’s older than he looks. Possibly he’s not even Greek. Possibly he’s a father himself. Why do we think we know anything?

“Me, too.” A marital lie to make me feel better. “Thanks.” I effect a sore-necked look back at the duct-taped window, seemingly as impregnable as a bank.

“No problem,” Chris says. His skin-pink Camaro with a bright green replacement passenger door sits idling behind us, headlights shining, interior light on, its door standing open. “You’d be surprised how many of them babies I fix a month.” He grins again, a boyish grin, his teeth straight, strong and white. He’s leaving, rescue complete, heading home to his Maria or his Silvie, who won’t be mad, and will thrill to his return (after modest resistance).

“How old are you?” It seems the essential question to ask of the young.

“Thirty-one.” A surprise. “How ’bout you?”

“Fifty-five.”

“That ain’t so old.” His breath is thin smoke. His vinyl coat affords little warmth. “My dad’s, like, fifty-six. He does these tough-guy competitions for his age group, up at the convention hall in Asbury. He’s on his fourth wife. Nobody fucks with him.”

“I bet not.”

“Bet they don’t fuck with you,” Chris says to be generous.

“Not anymore they don’t.”

“There you go.” He breathes down into his lapel again. “That’s all you gotta worry about.”

“Happy Thanksgiving,” I say. “Early.” We are beating on, Chris and me, against the current.

“Oh yeah.” He looks embarrassed. “Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.”

C
onceivably it’s two. I’ve avoided clocks on my drive home, likewise during the passage through my empty house. Knowledge of the hour, especially if it’s later than I think, will guarantee me no sleep, promising that tomorrow’s celebration of munificence and bounty will degrade into demoralized fatigue before the food arrives.

Clarissa’s bedroom window’s been left open, and I crank it closed, intentionally noticing nothing. I listen to none of my day’s messages. I’ve shown one house to one serious client on the day before Thanksgiving, a day when most toilers in my business are headed off to convivial tables elsewhere. For that reason I’m ahead of the game—which is generally my tack: With few obligations, turn freedom into enterprise. Thoreau said a writer was a man with nothing to do who finds something to do. He would’ve made the realty Platinum Circle. His heirs would own Maine.

But passing by my darkened home office a second time, I’m unable to resist my messages. After all, Clarissa herself might’ve called with a plea that I shoot down and collect her at the elephant gate at the Taj Mahal. In my unwieldy state of acceptance, I concede that something once unpromising could show improvement.

Clare Suddruth has, not surprisingly, called at six—a crucial interval, and at the vulnerable cocktail hour. He says he definitely wants to “re-view” the Doolittle house on Friday, if possible. “At least let’s get through the damn front door this time.” He’s bringing “the boss.” “At my age, Frank, there’s no use worrying about the long run in anything.” He says this as if I hadn’t spoon-fed him those very words. Estelle, the MS survivor, has been counseling with Clare about matters eschatological. I’m just relieved not to have to call the Drs. Doolittle with unhappy news that would cost me the listing. Though Clare’s the type to come in with a low-ball offer, consume weeks with back-and-forth and then get pissed off and walk away. My best strategy is to say I’m tied up until next week (when I’ll be at Mayo) and hope he gets desperate.

Call #2 is from Ann Dykstra, more cut-and-dried-businessy than last night’s sauvignon blanc ramble about what a good man I am, what a long transit life is, me snagging the Hawk’s liner at the Vet in ’87. “Frank, I think we need to talk about tomorrow. I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t come. Paul and Jill just left, which was very strange. Did you know she only has one hand? Some awful accident. Maybe I’m just saving myself.” What’s wrong with that? “Anyway, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself on several fronts. I sort of sense you may feel the same. Call me before you go to bed. I’ll be up.”

Too late.

Call #3 listens to my Realty-Wise recording, waits, breathes, then says “Shit” in a man’s voice I don’t recognize and hangs up. This is normal.

Call #4 is from the Haddam Boro Police—putting me on the alert. A Detective Marinara. The room where he’s speaking is crowded with voices and phones ringing and paper rattling. “Mr. Bascombe, I wonder if I could talk to you. We’re investigating an incident at Haddam Doctors on eleven twenty-one. Your name came up in a couple of different contexts.” A tired sigh. “Nothing to be alarmed about, Mr. Bascombe. We’re just establishing some investigative parameters here. My number’s (908) 555-1352. That’s Detective Mar-i-nar-a, like the sauce. I’ll be working late. Thanks for your help.”
Click.

What investigatory parameters? Though I know. The boys at Boro Hall are hard at it, connecting dots, leveling the playing field. My license number was mentally logged by Officer Bohmer. Dot one. My years-old connection with the grievously unlucky Natherial (who couldn’t have been the target) has been cross-referenced from his list of life acquaintances. Dot two. Possibly my passing association with Tommy Benivalle (who’s conceivably under indictment somewhere) has hit pay dirt via the FBI computer. Dot three. My fistfight with Bob Butts at the August has disclosed an unstable, potentially dangerous personality. Dot four. Who of us could stand inspection and not come out looking like we did it—or at least feeling that way? I am again a person of interest and my best bet is to call and admit everything.

Call #5 is, also predictably, from Mike, at ten, and sounds as if he may have been into the sauce (he’s a Grand Marnier man). Mike hopes that I’ve enjoyed an excellent day with my family around me (I haven’t); he also notes that Buddha permits individuals to make decisions without giving offense because “the nature of existence is permanent, which can include temporarily taking up a quest to free oneself from the cycle of time.” There’s more, but I don’t intend to hear it at what is probably two-something. He’ll be naming streets in Lotus Estates by Monday. His arc is shorter than most.

I’m relieved there’s no call-out-of-the-weirdness from Paul, and half-relieved/half not that there’s nothing from Wade. Nothing’s from Clarissa. And I’ll be honest and admit, in the new spirit of millennial necessity, that not a night begins and ends without a thought that Sally Caldwell might call me. I’ve played such a call through my brain cells a hundred times and taken pleasure in each and every one. I don’t know where she is. Mull or not Mull. She could be in Dar es Salaam, and I’d welcome a call gratefully. A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing
seems
is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain. The true truth is, I wish Sally would come home to me, that we could be we again, and Wally could wear a tartan, hybridize many trees and be satisfied with his hermit’s lot—which he chose and, for all I know, may long for, given the kind of lumpy-mumpy bloke he was in this house. Possibly I will call her on Thanksgiving, use the emergency-only number. Nothing has qualified as an emergency—but may.

The sea and air outside my window are of a single petroleum density, with no hint of the tide stage. One socketed nautical light drifts southward at an incalculable distance. I’ve always attributed such lights to commercial craft, dragging for flounder, or a captaincy like the
Mantoloking Belle,
commandeered by divorced men or suicide survivors or blind golfers out on the waves for a respite before resuming brow-furrowing daylight roles. Though I know now, and am struck, that these can be missions of another character—grieving families scattering loved ones’ ashes, tossing wreaths upon the ocean’s mantle, popping a cork in remembrance. Giving rather than taking.

When our sweet young son Ralph breathed his last troubled breath in the now-bomb-shattered Haddam Doctors, in time-dimmed ’81 (Reagan was President, the Dodgers won the Pennant), Ann and I, in one of our last free-wheeling marital strategizings—we were deranged—sought to plot an “adventurous but appropriate” surrender of our witty, excitable, tenderhearted boy to time’s embrace. A journey to Nepal, a visit to the Lake District, a bush-pilot adventure to the Talkeetnas—destinations he’d never seen but would’ve relished (not without irony) as his last residence. But I was squeamish and still am about cremation. Something’s more terrifying than death itself about the awful, greedy flames, the sheer canceling. Whereas death seems a regular thing, a familiar, in no need of fiery dramatizing, orderly to the point of stateliness, just as Mike says. I couldn’t cremate my son! Only to have him come back in powdered form, in a handy box, with a terrifying new name I’d never forget in four hundred years:
Cremains!
I’ve scattered the ashes of two Red Man Clubmen, and these residues turn out not to be powdered nearly
enough,
but are ridden through with bits of bone—odorless gray grit—like the cinders we Sigma Chi pledges used to shovel onto the front walk of the chapter house in Ann Arbor.

Ann felt exactly the same. We had two other children to think about; Paul was seven, Clarissa five. Plus, there was no way to transport a whole embalmed body on an around-the-world victory lap. It would’ve cost a fortune.

For a few brief hours, we actually thought about, and twice talked of donating Ralph’s physical leavings to science, or of possibly going the organ donor route. Though we pretty quickly realized we could never bear the particulars or face the documents or stand to have strangers thank us for our “gift,” and would never forgive ourselves once the deeds were done.

So finally, with Lloyd Mangum’s help, we simply and solemnly buried Ralph in a secular ceremony in the “new part” of the cemetery directly behind our house on Hoving Road, where he rests now near the founder of Tulane University, east of the world’s greatest expert on Dutch elm disease, a stone’s throw away from the inventor of the two-level driving range and, as of yesterday, in sight of Watcha McAuliffe. Interment at sea—a shrouded bundle sluiced off the aft end of a sportfishing craft with a fighting seat and a flying deck, performed under cover of darkness and far enough out so the Coast Guard wouldn’t come snooping—wasn’t an option we knew about. But it’s on my list for when my own time arrives and final thoughts are in the ballpark.

But. Acceptance, again. What have I now accepted that visits me in my stale bedroom, where I’m warm and dank beneath the covers, my stack of unread books beside me, and at an unknown but indecent hour? What is it that rocked me like an ague, turned me loose like a flimsy ribbon on a zephyr? All these years and modes of accommodation, of coping, of living with, of negotiating the world in order to fit into it—my post-divorce dreaminess, the long period of existence in the early middle passage, the states of acceptable longing, of being a variablist, even the Permanent Period itself—these now seem
not
to be forms of acceptance the way I thought, but forms of fearful nonacceptance, the laughing/grimacing masks of denial turned to the fact that, like the luckless snowmobiler Chick Frantal, my son, too, would never
be
again in this life we all come to know too well.

It’s
this
late-arriving acknowledgment that’s unearthed me like a boulder tumbled down a mountain.
That
was my lie, my big fear, the great pain I couldn’t fathom even the thought of surviving, and so didn’t fathom it; fathomed instead life as a series of lives, variations on a theme that sheltered me. The lie being: It’s not Ralph’s death that’s woven into everything like a secret key, it’s his
not death,
the
not
permanence—the extra beat awaited, the mutability of every fact, the grinning, eyebrows-raised chance that something’s waiting even if it’s not. These were my sly ruses and slick tricks, my surface intrigues and wire-pulls, all played
against
permanence, not
to
it.