Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“Well, guess what?” Termite is brazenly smirking, rising up onto her toes on the duckboards better to get into the faces of the two women patrons. “Ah ain’t no fuckin’ bullet wound. I heeerd dat. You know what ahm sayin’?” She shoots a sudden feral look my way, then lowers her voice to a big stage whisper. “Ahmo be dat bitch’s worst nightmare.” Termite, I see, wears an enormous Jim Bowie sheath knife on her oversized silver-studded black bruiser-belt that’s drawn up so tight she must have trouble breathing. She herself is entirely in black — jeans, boots, tee-shirt, eyeshadow — everything but her silver flat-top, ear decor and TERMITE tattoo. I imagine she’s already been a lot of people’s nightmare, though she’s been completely welcoming to me and could bring me another highball and I wouldn’t mind it. My car window’s not fixed yet, and the roof’s drumming with sheets of merciless rain I’m happy to be out of.

Termite sees me angling for her eye and leaves the disputers and saunters down to me, still carrying most of her fuck-you attitude with her. She’s skinny-bowlegged in her jeans, with excessive space between her taut little spavined thighs, so that she swaggers like the long-departed Charlie Starkweather, no small-change nightmare himself.

“How you doin’? You still thirsty?” She rests her little hands on the bar rail and tap-taps an oversized silver thumb ring against the wood. “You suck dat one down like you needed it.”

“It was good,” I say. “I’ll have another one just like it.” I have to take my piss now. My eye wanders to where the gents used to be.

“Oh yeah, dey good.” Termite’s filling my glass where it sits, using the old ice, lots of whiskey and a quick squirt from the soda gun. “It’s over in dat corner,” she says, seeing where I’m looking without looking there. “Light’s burnt out. It don’t get the use it used to.”

“Great.” I slide off my stool and test my walking stability, which is solid.

Termite flashes a nasty smile down at her two friends as I go, and in the same stagy voice says, “It might be a ole alligator in dere, so you better be careful.”

“Or worse,” one of the girls cracks back, and snorts.

“Okay,” I say. “Will do.”

Inside the GENTLEMEN door, nothing’s forbidding. The ceiling bulb actually works, though the grimy porcelain fixtures are decrepit fiftiesera Kohler, the hand-dryer fan’s hanging on a screw, and the woolly old window vent whose outside cover bangs in the wind lets cold mist in onto the layer of brown that gunks up everything. Still, the pissing facility’s perfectly usable. No alligators.

Plenty of messages have been left on the wall for future users to ponder, all illustrated with neatly-penciled, magic-markered or rudely carved depictions of the engorged male equipment, plus a variety of women with miraculous breasts, several demonstrating uncanny coupling postures. Appeals are made for the “Able-bodied Semen,” the “Lonely Hards Club” and “Fearless Fast-Dick Dick-tective Agency.” One, to the side of the urinal, has the nostalgic old 609 area code, with a request for “Discreet Callers Only.” Several messages propose reckless sexual chicanery with members of the Mouzakis family, including Grandma Mouzak and the Mouzakis pet sheep, Mouzy, who’s shown scaling a fence. The only items of unusual note as I complete a long, knee-weakening piss — other than the BUSH-GORE BOTH SUCK, lipsticked onto the scaly old mirror — is a chartreuse cell phone, a little Nokia that’s been tossed in the urinal as a gesture, I suppose, of dissatisfaction with its service. And beside it on the rubber grate is a half-eaten lunch-meat sandwich on white bread. It feels odd to piss on a sandwich and simultaneously into the ear hole of the miniature green telephone. But I’m past having a choice. My time in unlikely men’s rooms has tripled since my Mayo insertions, and I tend not to be as finicky as I once was.

When I re-take my place at the bar, feeling immensely better, my fresh highball’s waiting along with a new twin. Ms. Termite has stayed at my end and wants to be friendly, which makes me even happier to be here.

“So whadda you do? You some kinda salesman?” She hauls a soft pack of Camels out of her jeans, retrieves one with pinched lips and lights it with a silver Zippo as big as a Frigidaire. Click-crack-tink-snap. She exhales a gray smoke trickle out the corner of her mouth, skewing her lips like a convict. “Mind if I smoke? Ain’t spose to, but fuck it.”

“You bet,” I say, grateful for the forbidden aroma in my nostrils. When Mike fired up last night, I realized you don’t smell it as much as you used to. I’m tempted to bum one, though I haven’t smoked since military school and would probably suffocate. “I am a salesman,” I answer. “I sell houses.”

“Where at? Florida? One-a dem?”

“Right down in Sea-Clift. A ways south of here. Not far, really.”

“Oh yeah? Well ain’t dat sump’n.” Eyes squinted, her smoke in the corner of her mouth, Termite goes searching under the bar and produces a copy of the Shore Home Buyer’s Guide. The East Jersey Real Estate Board publishes this guide, and if Mike Mahoney’s done his homework, there’s a boxed Realty-Wise ad in the south Barnegat section showing 61 Surf Road, which the storm outside — vanguard of tropical depression Wayne — may now be washing out to sea.

“I been lookin’,” Termite says.

“What kind of place you lookin’ for?” I drop my g ’s as a gesture of camaraderie. Termite would be a challenging client, though possibly I could let Mike do the honors. He’d think it was great — and it would be.

“Oh. You know.” She plucks a fleck of tobacco off her tongue tip and in doing so gives me a glimpse of a silver stud punched through her tongue skin like a piece of horse tack. I want it to be still so I can get a better look, but in an instant it’s flickered and gone. “Just sump’n grand, overlookin’ de ocean and dat don’t cost nothin’. Maybe sump’n somebody died in, like what used to be about the Corvette dat girl died in in Laplace and dey couldn’t get the smell out, so they had to junk it. I could live with it. You got sump’n like dat? Where was it you live?”

“Sea-Clift.”

“Okay.” She sucks a molar and rolls her punctured tongue around her cheek at the concept of a town by that name. “Course, I got my momma. She in the wheelchair since I don’t know when.”

“That’s nice,” I say. “I mean it’s nice she can live with you. It’s not nice she’s in a wheelchair. That’s not nice.”

“Yeah. Diabetes amputated her leg off.” Termite frowns as if this was, for her, personally painful.

“I see.”

The two big ladies down the bar are re-animating their conversation at higher decibels. “Every time I get on a fuckin’ plane, I think, This sumbitch is gonna blow up. Makes me sleep better if I just accept it.” The couple from the back booth are still dancing, though Perry has long ago finished his Christmas song.

“Look. Lemme aks you somethin’.” Termite hikes her booted foot onto the lip of the rinse sink and holds her smoke like a pencil between her thumb and index finger. In spite of her tough-as-rivets, knife-wielding personal demeanor — little biceps veined and sculpted, brown eyes slightly, skeptically bulged, ringed fingers raw and probably callused from pumping iron — she is not the least bit masculine. In fact, she’s as feminine as Ava Gardner — just not in the same way as Ava Gardner. Her waist, with her big silver and black belt pulled tight, is as tiny as a dragonfly’s. And her breasts, possibly encased in something metal under her black muscle shirt, are sizable breasts no man would sniff at. I’d like to know what her mother calls her at home. Susan or Sandra or Amanda-Jean. Though she’d pop you in the kisser if you breathed it. “Where you come from originally?”