Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Paul is staring machine-gun holes into me. I can feel it. The card I stupidly didn’t respond to properly last spring featured a chrome-breasted, horse-faced blonde in a fifties one-piece bathing suit and stiletto heels, grinning lasciviously while lining up a bunch of white mice dressed in tiny racing silks along a tiny starting stripe. It was clearly a still from an old porn movie devoted to all the interesting things one can do with rodents. The tall blonde had dollar bills sprouting out her cleavage and her grin contained a look of knowing lewdness that unquestionably implicated the mice. Paul’s caption (sad and heart-wrenching for his father) was “Put Your Money Where Your Mouse Is.” I didn’t think it was very funny but should’ve faked it, given the fury I unleashed.

But this time, I’m ready — though the cold driveway setting isn’t ideal. I’ve slowly creased my lips to form two thick mouth-corners of insider irony. I narrow my eyes, turn and regard Paul with a special Chill Wills satchel-faced mawp he’ll identify as my instant triple-entendre tumbling to all tie-ins, hilarious special nuances and resonances only the truly demented and ingeniously witty could appreciate and that no one should even be able to think of, much less write, without having gone to Harvard and edited the Lampoon. Except he has and can, even though he’s in love with a big disabled person, is twenty pounds too pudgy and has mainstreamed himself damn near to flat-line out in K.C. You can hang too much importance on a smile of fatherly approval. But I’m not risking it.

“Okay, okay, okay,” I say in dismissal that means approval. Standard words of approval would be much riskier. I do my creased-mouth Chill Wills mawp again for purposes of Paul’s re-assessment and so we can travel on a while longer functioning as father and son. Parenthood, once commenced, finds its opportunities where it can. “Okay. That’s funny,” I say.

“I’m willing to admit”—Paul is officiously brimming with pleasure, while smoothing his beard-stache around his mouth like a seamy librarian—“that they rejected that one as too sensitive, ethnically. It was one of my favorites, though.”

I’m tempted to comment that it pushes the envelope, but don’t want to encourage him. His plaid joker’s jacket is probably stuffed with other riotous rejects. “Grape Vines Think Alike.” “The Elephant of Surprise.” “The Margarine of Error.” “Preston de Service”—all our old yuks and sweet guyings from his lost childhood now destined for the time capsule, since Hallmark can’t use them. Too sensitive.

And then for the second time in ten minutes we are struck dumb out here, all four of us — me, Marinara, Paul and Jill — aware of something of small consequence that doesn’t have a name, as though a new sound was in the air and each thinks the others can’t hear it.

Loogah-loogah-loogah, blat-blat-blat-a-blat —a sound from down Poincinet Road. Terry Farlow, my neighbor, the Kazakhstan engineer, has fired up his big Fat Boy Harley in the echo chamber of his garage. We all four turn, as if in fear, as the big CIA Oklahoman rolls magisterially out onto his driveway launching pad, black-suited, black-helmeted as an evil knight, an identically dressed Harley babe on the bitch seat, regal and helmeted as a black queen. Loogah, loogah, loogah. He pauses, turns, activates the automatic garage-door closer, gives his babe a pat to the knee, settles back, gears down, tweaks the engine— blat-a-blat-BLAT-blat-blat-blat —then eases off, boots up, out and down Poincinet, idling past the neighbors’ houses and mine with nary a nod (though we’re all four watching with gaunt admiration). He slowly rounds the corner past the Feensters’—Nick ignores him — accelerates throatily out onto 35, and begins throttling up, catches a more commanding gear, then rumbles on up the highway toward his Thanksgiving plans, whatever they might offer.

To my shock, I can’t suppress the aching suspicion that the helmeted, steel-thighed honey, high on the passenger perch, gloved hands clutching Terry’s lats, knees pincering his buns, inner-thigh hot place pressed thrillingly to his coccyx, was Bernice Podmanicsky, my almost-savior from the day’s woolly woes, and who I was just thinking might still be reachable. Wouldn’t she know I’d sooner or later be calling? The Harley, already a memory up Route 35, stays audible a good long time, passing through its gears until it attains its last.

I’ve handed back Detective Marinara’s “We’re Pregnant” card. He studies it a moment, as though he’d never really looked before, then effects a mirthless, comprehending smile at all the grinning brides and beaming grooms. This is not what Paul had in mind: vague amusement. I’m close enough to smell Marinara’s QUIT SMOKING gum, his breath, cigarette-warm and medicine-sweet. He dyes his hair its shiny shade of too-black black, and down in his bristly chest hair, tufted out of his brown polo, he wears a gold chain — finer than his watchband — with a gold heart and tiny gold cross strung together. My original guess was Dutch Neck, but now I think Marinara hails from the once all-Italian President streets of Haddam — Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Cleveland, etc. — a neighborhood where I once resided, where Ann resides today and where once Paul and Clarissa were sweet children.

“Maybe you want to come in and try that organic turkey,” I say. “And some organic dressing and mock pumpkin pie with plain yogurt for whipped cream.” Paul and Jill grin warm encouragement for this idea, as if Detective Marinara was a homeless man we’d discovered to have been a first violinist with the London Symphony and can nurse back to health by adopting him into our lives and paying for his rehab.

“Yeah. No,” Marinara says — proper Jersey syntax for refusal. He cranes his fine-featured head all around and winces, as if his neck’s stiff. “I gotta get back to my sister’s to get in on the fighting. This is just, you know—” He smiles a professional, closed-mouth smile and plunges both hands in his brown jacket pockets, giving Paul’s “We’re Pregnant” card a good crunching. “You’ll still come over and do our show-and-tell for us, will you?” He now reminds me of a young Bob Cousy in his Celtic heyday, all purpose and scrap, maximizing his God-givens but strangely sad behind his regular-Joe features.

“Absolutely. Just tell me when. I’m always happy to come to Haddam.” (Not at all true.)

“Like I said. We think we got him. But you never know.”

“No, you don’t.” I’m not asking who’s the culprit, in case I sold him a house or he was once a fellow member in the Divorced Men’s Club.

“You go to Michigan?” Marinara side-eyes my maize-and-blue block-M as if it was worthy of esteem.

“I did.”

He sniffs and looks around as Nick Feenster’s entering his house, carrying his buffing supplies clutched to his electric blue chest. At the door, he turns and gives us all a look of warning, as if we were gossiping about him, then regards his twin Corvettes the same way. It’s cold as steel out here. I’m ready to get inside.

“I wanted to go there,” Marinara says, wagging his shoulders an inch back and forth with the thought of Michigan.

“What stopped you?”

“I was a Freehold kid, you know?” Wrong again. “I got all intoxicated with the band and the neat football helmets and the fight song. Saturday afternoons, leaves turning. All that. I thought, Man, I could go to Michigan, I’d be, you know. All set forever.”

“But you didn’t go?”

“Naaaa.” Marinara’s bottom lip laps over the top one and presses in. It is a face of resignation, which no doubt strengthens his aptitude for police work. “I was the wrong color. Scuse my French.”