Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

What I see as I approach the Neptune’s Daily Catch doesn’t make my heart hopeful. No cars are parked in front. The blue neon FISH sign is turned off. As I pull to the curb, inside appears empty. Grainy daylight falls in through the big windows, turning the interior dishwater gray. Chairs are upside down on tabletops. Next door, the Women of Substance second-hand shop is closed. The Parallel Universe video arcade is open three doors down, but only a thin bald man’s standing in the door alone, reading a magazine. Four men in khaki clothing and heavy corduroy jackets wait at the corner under the Garden State Parkway sign, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from the Wawa across Central. Mexicans, these are. Illegals — unlike my Hondurans — hoping to be picked up for a job across the bridge, unaware today’s a holiday. They eye me and laugh as if I’m the cops and they’re invisible.

The thought, however, that I may be wrong and Bernice is inside at a back table having an Irish coffee alone, awaiting opening time, makes me get out and peer through the plate-glass window. Arnie Sikma, the owner, is an old Reed College SDSer who’s evolved into a community-activist, small-business booster, and has stuck various groups’ advertising stickers on his front window beside the door. ORTLEY, AN UNUSUAL NAME FOR THE USUAL PLACE. WE ROOT FOR THE PHILLIES. SUPPORT OUR TROOPS (from Gulf War days). PROTECT RAPTORS, NOT RAPISTS. THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS — JERSEY SHORE NEPHROLOGY CLINIC. PEOPLE HAVE TO DIE…SOMEWHERE (a hospice in Point Pleasant).

But no Bernice when I peer in between my cupped hands. Or anyone. Arnie’s left the Christmas Muzak on outside—“Good King Wenceslas” sung by a choir. “Yon-der pea-sant, who is he, where and what his dwel-ling—” No one out in the cold hears it but me and the Mexicans.

Though a hand-written note scotch-taped to the door announces that, “We will be closed Thanksgiving Day due to a loss in our family. God Bless You All. The Mgt.”—naturally a sign that alarms me. Since does it mean family family (Arnie’s of Dutch extraction in Hudson, New York, up-river — a distant relation of the original patroons)? Or does it mean extended family? The Neptune’s Daily Catch Bistro “family” of trusted employees. Does it mean Bernice, heretofore scheduled to work the buffet? Though wouldn’t it mention her name — like the Van Tuyll daughter Ann told me about two nights ago? “Our trusted and beloved Miss B—”

A hot sizzling sensation spreads up my cold neck, then spreads down again. How can I find out? I once called information to learn if Bernice was listed, in case I someday decided to call her and needed to be made to feel like my best self in return for a movie ticket to the Toms River Multiplex and a late dinner at Bump’s. I found out she possessed a phone but didn’t choose to list its number. Waitresses rarely do. I couldn’t very well tell the operator, “Yeah, but she thinks I’m great. It’s fine. I won’t give the number to anybody or do anything weird.” Those innocent days are behind us now.

Gusty ocean air with a strong grease smell in it pushes a white Styrofoam container along the sidewalk — the kind of container you’d carry your unfinished fried calamari home in. One of the khaki-suited Mexicans gives the container a soccer kick out into the boulevard, which inspires another, smaller Mexican to address the box with a complex series of side kicks and heel kicks that finally send it flying in the air. His associates all laugh and sing out “Ronal dito ,” which amuses the kicker, who sashays back up onto the curb and makes them all howl.

A skinny, elderly bald man in red running shorts and a blue singlet with a 5-K card on his chest—#174—glides past us up Central on bulky in-lines, arm swings propelling him like a speed skater, one hand tucked behind, his old eagle’s face as serene as the breeze. He is heading home. The Mexicans all eye him with amusement.

I gaze up to the woolen sky and think of good-soul Bernice, her sweet breath, full smiling lips, dainty ankles, dense virile hair not everyone would go for and that possibly I didn’t go for or else I’d know her phone number. Where is she today? Safe? Sound? Not so good? How would I find out? Call Arnie Sikma at home the minute I arrive. Ask for her number as a special favor. High up and to the north, a pale blue and optimistic fissure has opened in the undercloud. Two jet contrails, one southerly, one headed east and out to sea, have crossed there, leaving a giant and, for an instant, perfect X at 39,000 feet above where I am, in Ortley, outside a good fish place, contemplating the life of a friend. X marks my spot (and every place else that can see it). “Begin here. This is where I left it. This is where the gold is. This is—” what?

Only the most dry-mouthed Cartesian wouldn’t see this as a patent signal, a communiqué from the spheres, an important box on an important form with my name on top — X’d in or X’d out, counted present or absent. You’d just need to know what the fucker means, wouldn’t you? There may have been others. Two swans on the bay shore. A quick red fox in the bedroom. A letter. A call. Three boats. All can be signage. I’d thought Ralph’s finality, my acceptance and succession to the Next Level and general fittedness to meet my Maker were my story, what the audience would know once my curtain closed — my, so-to-speak, character. “He made peace with things, finally, old Frank.” “He was kind of a shit-bird, but he got it sorted out pretty good just before—” “He actually seemed clear-sighted, damn near saint-like toward the end there—” This happens when you have cancer, though it’s not a fun happening.

Except now there’s more ? Just when you think you’ve been admitted to the boy-king’s burial chamber and can breathe the rich, ancient captured air with somber satisfaction, you find out it’s just another anteroom? That there’s more that bears watching, more signs requiring interpretation, that what you thought was all, isn’t? That this isn’t it ? That there’s no it, only is. Hard to know if this is heartening or disheartening news to a man who, as my son says, believes in development.

The cloud fissure has now closed primly, and what was a sign — like a rainbow — is no more. Somehow I know that Bernice Podmanicsky is not the family member lost. She’d laugh to know I even worried about her. “Oh, handsome”—she’d beam at me—“I didn’t know you cared. You’re just such an unusual man, aren’t ya? A real handful. Some lucky girl—” It’s odd how our fears, the ones we didn’t know we had, alter our sight line and make us see things that never were.

The Mexicans are all looking at me as if I’ve been carrying on a boisterous conversation with myself. Possibly it’s my block-M. I should take it off and give it to them. Their faces are serious, their small grabby hands jammed in their tattered jacket pockets. Their expectancy of work is being clouded over by my suspicious starings into the Bistro and the firmament. They are religious men and on the lookout for signs of their own, one of which I may have become. Possibly I’m “touched” and am about to be drawn up into heaven by a lustrous beam of light and they (in the good version) will find true vocations at last: to tell the thing they saw and of its wonders. Is that not the final wish of all of us on earth? To testify of our witness to wonders?

But as an assurance, since I cannot ascend to heaven in front of them today, I’d still like to speak something typically First World and welcoming, put them off their guard. We are together, after all. Simple me. Simple them.

Only when I turn their way, a welcome grin gladdening my cheeks, my eyes crinkling up happy, my mind concocting a formulation in their mother tongue— “Hola. ¿Cómo están? ¿Pasando un buen día?” —they stiffen, set their narrow shoulders and lock their knees inside their khakis, their faces organized to say they want nada of me, seek no assurance, offer none. So that all I can do is freeze my grin like a crazy man caught in his craziness. They look away at the empty boulevard to search for the truck that isn’t coming. For all five of us, together and apart, the moment for signs goes past.