Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

I am, though, happy to arrive, and to take a stool at the near end of the bar, with a view toward the other patrons — two women drinking and talking to the bartender.

A s I left Asbury Park, with Wade careering off toward what destiny I don’t know, and an empty nest awaiting me and the weather swarming into my car, I tried — just as I did the day I returned from Mayo last August, radiating anti-cancer contamination like Morse code — to imagine what a really good day might be. And in each instance I thought of the same thing (this strategy, as childlike as it seems, ought not be scoffed at).

Two years ago, Sally and I set off on one of our cut-rate one-day flying adventures — this time to Moline — with the intention of taking an historic boat trip down the Mississippi, visiting some interesting Algonquian earthworks, seeing a Civil War ironclad that had been hauled out of the muck and given its own museum, and maybe stopping off at the Golden Nugget casino, which the same Algonquians had built to recoup their dignity. We planned to finish the day with an early dinner in the rotating tenth-floor River Room of the Holiday Inn-Moline, then get back on the plane in time to be home by 3 a.m.

But when we got to the departure dock of the romantic old paddle-wheeler, the S.S. Chief Illini, a storm began dumping every manner of precip on us — snow, rain, sleet, hail, arriving by turns with a coarse wind at their backs. We’d bought our tickets off the Internet ahead of time, but neither Sally nor I wanted any part of a river cruise, wanted only to head back up the old cobbled streets of the historic district in search of a nice place to have lunch and to hatch a new plan for the hours that remained — possibly a leisurely trip through the John Deere Museum, since we had time to kill. I went aboard and told the boat captain, who was also the concessionaire and proprietor of the cruise business and owner of the Chief Illini, that we were sacrificing our tickets due to weather skittishness but wanted him to know (since he seemed personable and accommodating) that we’d be back another time and buy more tickets. To which the captain, a big happy-faced galoot dressed in his river pilot’s blue serge uniform with gold epaulettes and a captain’s cap, said, “Look here, you folks, we don’t want anybody not to have a good time in Moline. I know this weather’s the pits and all. I’ll just return your money, and don’t you sweat it. We’re not in the business here in River City to take anybody’s dough without rendering a first-class service. In fact, since you’ve come all this way”—he didn’t know we’d flown from Newark but recognized we probably weren’t locals—“maybe you’ll be my guest at the Miss Moline diner my sister runs, where she makes authentic Belgian waffles with farm-fresh eggs and homemade sticky buns. How ’bout I just give her a call and say you’re on your way up there? And here’re some tickets to the John Deere Museum, the best one you’ll find from here to South Dakota.”

We didn’t end up eating at the Miss Moline. But we did take in the museum, which was well-curated, with interesting displays about glaciation, wind erosion and soil content that explained why in that part of America you could grow anything you wanted pretty much anytime — forget about the growing season.

When I think about it now, here in the Manasquan — or the Old Squatters — with my window being fixed while I take my ease in these familiar detoxified surrounds, I can almost believe I made it up, so perfect a day did it produce for Sally and me, and so enduring has it been as illustration of how things can work out better than you thought — like now — even when all points of the spiritual weather vane forecast dark skies.

O kay, I could aks you again, but it ain’t good to wake up de dead.” A small mouse-faced woman with a silver flat-top and two good-sized ears full of tiny regimented gold loops stacked lobe to helix, faces me across the empty bar surface. A look of wry, not hostile, amusement sits on her lips, though her lips also have a permanent wrinkle to their contours, as if harsh words had once passed through but things had gotten better now.

I don’t know what she’s been saying, but assume it’s to do with my drink preference. I’ve decided on the time-honored highball, the all-around drinker’s drink, to commemorate the old divorced men, many of whom have now died. It’s perfect for me in my state. “I’d like a tall bourbon and soda on ice, please.”

“Dat ain’t what I sed. But whatever.”

I smile pointlessly. “Sorry.”

“I aksed wuz you sure you wuz meetin’ your friends in de right place here.” The bartender casts a look around down the bar toward her customers, two large older women elbowed in over birdbath-size cocktails, covertly eyeing me but clearly amused.

“I think so.” Her accent is pure swamp-water coon-ass, straight from St. Boudreau Parish, far beyond the Atchafalaya. She’s trying to be nice, making me know as gently as possible that the atmospheric old Manasquan has become a watering hole for late-middle-passage dykes and possibly I might be happier elsewhere, but I don’t have to leave if I don’t want to.

Except I couldn’t be happier than to be here amidst these fellow refugees. The nautical motif’s intact. The framed greasy-glass heroic fish photos still cover the walls with coded significance. The light’s murky, the smells are congenial, the world’s held at bay, as in the storied Manasquan days. Probably the drinks are just as good. I couldn’t care less whose orientation’s bending its big elbow beside mine. In fact, I feel a strong Darwinian rightness about what was once a hard-nuts old men’s hidey-hole transitioning into a safe house for tolerant, wry, full-figured, thick-armed goddesses in deep mufti (one’s wearing a Yankees cap, another a pair of bulgy housepainter’s dungarees over a Vassar sweatshirt). My own daughter used to be one of their number, I could tell them — but possibly won’t.

“I used to come in here when Evangelis owned it,” I say gratefully, referring to old Ben Mouzakis’s sister’s husband.

“Fo’ my time, dahlin’,” the bartender croons, organizing my highball. I see she has a vivid green tattoo on her skinny neck, inches below her ear. Gothic letters spell out TERMITE, which I guess could be her name, though I’m not about to call her that.

“How’s ole Ben doing?”

“He’s okay. He in the whale-watch bidnus anymore.” My drink set down in front of me, Termite (I’m only calling her that privately) begins giving a sink full of dirty glasses the three-tub, suds-rinse-rinse treatment, her little hands nimble as a card sharp’s. “Dat ole charter boat bidnus played out. He got into burials-at-sea for a while. Den dat crapped. Annend dis whale thing jumped up.”

“Sounds great.” I take a first restorative sip. Termite has poured me a double dose of Old Woodweevil, meaning it’s happy hour. Soon the bar will be filling up with big women fresh from jobs as stevedores, hod carriers and diesel mechanics — happy warriors happy to have a place of their own. I wonder if Clarissa has a tattoo someplace I don’t know about, and if so, what does it say? Not Dad, we’re sure of that.

The two shadowy women from the rear booth, one in a floral print muumuu her belly doesn’t fit into too well, the other in a bulky red turtleneck, stand up and walk arms around each other to the antique jukebox. One puts in a quarter and cues up Ole Perry singing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” then they begin slowly to dance to the sweet-sad melody underneath the unmoving disco globe.

“She’d fuck a bullet wound, that skanky bitch,” I hear one of the two full-figured gals at the bar — the one in the Yankees cap — saying to Termite, who’s back down where they are, conniving about one of their friends.