Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“I’m pure cracker,” I say. “Mississippi.”

“I heeerd dat,” Termite sneers. A lineage check means we’re aiming toward subject matter her customers down the bar wouldn’t tolerate, something, in her experience, only another southerner could possibly comprehend: exactly why your colored races are constitutionally unsuited to work a forty-hour week; the consequences of their possessing statistically proven smaller brains; why they can’t swim or leave white women alone. It’s too bad there can’t be something good to come from being a southerner. However, I’m getting happily drunk on my second highball and these are subjects easily skirted.

“Okay. See. I read this.” Termite inches in close to the bar, drops her voice. “Your brain don’t have no manager, see. Not really. It’s just like a plant. It go dis way, den it go dat way. Dey ain’t no self ever runnin’ it. It just like adapts. We all just like accidents dat we got minds at all.” Her little rodent’s face grows solemn with the dark implications of this news. I know something about this matter from my bathroom study of the Mayo newsletter, where such matters are regularly reported on. The mind is a metaphor. Consciousness is cellular adaptation, intelligence is as fortuitous as pick-up sticks. All true. I only hope Termite’s not vectoring us toward adumbrations about The Lord and His Overall Design. If she is, I’ll run right out into the storm. “You know what ahm sayin’?” She’s whispering in a secret-keeping voice the other bar patrons aren’t supposed to hear. “You know what ahm sayin’?” she says again.

“I do.”

“Millennium! What fuckin’ Millennium?” The big boisterous girls are getting drunker, too, and have decided they’ve got the place to themselves, which they nearly do. No one’s come in since I did. “I musta been in the crapper when that happened!”

Termite gives them a disgusted look and begins spindling the Shore Home Buyer’s Guide into a tight tube, scrolling it smaller and smaller into itself until it looks solid. “So, see,” she says, still confidentially. “Like I’m fifty-one”—I’d have said forty—“and I try to like test ma mind sometimes. Okay?” I smile as if I know, and simultaneously try to know. “I try to think of a specific thing. I try to remember somethin’. To see if I can. Like — and it’s usually a name — de name of dem flowers with red berries on ’em we useta always have at Christmas. Or maybe something’ll come up when ahm talking, and I wanta say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s like…’ Den I can’t think of it. You know? They’s just a hole there where what I want to say ought to be. It ain’t never nuttin important, like what’s Jack Daniel’s or how you make a whiskey sour. It’s like ahm sayin’, ‘…and den we all drove over to Freehold.’ But den I can’t say Freehold. Dat ain’t the best example. ’Cause I can say Freehold, whatever. But if I give you a good example, den I won’t think of it. I can’t even think of a good example. You know what I’m talkin’ about with dis thing?”

Termite takes a long consternated drag on her Camel, then douses it in the rinse sink and tosses the butt into a black plastic garbage can behind the bar, blowing smoke straight down without lowering her head.

“I’ve had that happen to me plenty of times,” I say. Who hasn’t? This is the kind of pseudo-problem that would easily succumb to a Sponsor call. And as always, my solution would be: Forget the hell about it. Think about something better — a new apartment with a wheelchair ramp and maybe a Jenn-Air and lots of phone jacks. Your mind’s not the fucking Yellow Pages. You’ve got no business asking it to perform tasks it’s not interested in just so you can show off. To me, it’s a worse signal that anybody would ever worry about these things than that he/she can’t remember every little bit of nibshit minutiae you can dream up but that maybe doesn’t even exist.

“Pyracantha?”

“Say what?” Termite blinks at me.

“That Christmas flower with the red berries.”

“Dere it is, okay. But dat ain’t all. ’Cause the real baddest thing is that when I can’t get what you just said into my mind, den I worry about dat, and den dat like opens the floodgates for stuff you wouldn’t believe.”

“What stuff?”

“Stuff I don’t wanna talk about.” Termite guardedly eyes the two large-bodies down the bar again, as if they might be snickering at her. They are, in fact, pulled in close together, whispering, but holding hands like married bears.

“But I mean, true stuff?” I’m wondering but not wondering very hard.

“Yeah, true stuff. Stuff I don’t like to think about. Okay?”

“You bet.” I take a subject-changing sip of my — now — third happy-hour highball. I may have had enough. I don’t have the stamina I used to. I’m also on the brink of a discussion that threatens to tumble into seriousness — the last thing I want. I’d rather talk about beach erosion or golf or the Eagles’ season or the election, since I’m sure these girls have to be Democrats.

“You think ahm losing my mind?” Termite asks accusingly.

“Absolutely not. I don’t think that. Like I said. I’ve had that happen to me. Your mind’s just got a lot in it.” Tattoo and piercing decisions, who’s a good knife sharpener, her invalid mom.

“’Cause Mamma thinks mebbe I’m losing it. Ya know what ahm sayin’? And sometimes I think I am, too. When I want de name of some got-damn red flower, or whatever dat woman’s name is who’s the Astronaut — whatever — then I can’t think of it.” Her lips curl in a smile of disgust with herself — a look she’s used to.

And then, in by-the-book bartender protocol, she turns and walks away, resuming something with the lovebirds who’ve been smooch-dancing to Perry. I hear her say, “…they just treat Thanksgiving like it really meant somethin’. What I want to know is, what is it?”

“Me, too,” one of the slow dancers speaks, with an echo that registers sadly in the bar.

Termite’s left me the spindled Home Buyer’s Guide. I intend to show her my ad and leave my card. Sometimes a new vista, a new house number, a new place of employ, a new set of streets to navigate and master are all you need to simplify life and take a new lease out on it. Real estate might seem to be all about moving and picking up stakes and disruption and three-moves-equals-a-death, but it’s really about arriving and destinations, and all the prospects that await you or might await you in some place you never thought about. I had a drunk old prof at Michigan who taught us that all of America’s literature, Cotton Mather to Steinbeck — this was the same class where I read The Great Gatsby —was forged by one positivist principle: to leave, and then to arrive in a better state.

I take this opportunity to climb off my stool and walk to the porthole door and have a check across the lot to find out if my car window’s ready. It isn’t. Chris, the Fitzgerald scholar, has pulled it into the fluorescent-lit garage bay and is moving around the murky shop interior, seeming to be in search of the right materials for the job. The other man, small and raffish and unshaven, stands at the office door, looking up at the rain-torn skies as if into a cloud of sorry thoughts. Edward Hopper in New Jersey.

I reclaim my bar stool and remind myself to grab another piss or be faced with again relieving myself in the rain, behind some darkened Pathmark, where I’ve already been caught more than once by security patrols, resulting in a lot of unwieldy explanation. In each instance, however, the officers were moonlighting middle-age cops and completely sympathized.