Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

My furniture, when I stop to put on my barracuda jacket, all seems bland and too familiar, but also strange and unpossessed — the couches, tables, chairs, bookcases, rugs, pictures, lamps — not mine. More like the decor of a Hampton Inn in Paducah. How does this happen? Does this mean my time here is nearing its end?

“I’m heading to Absecon, okay?” I have seen an Absecon exit on the Garden State but never gotten off.

“I’m going with you,” Paul announces commandingly.

“No way. You almost fucked this all up.” It’s still a furnace in here. Sweat sprouts in my hairline. My jacket — slightly grimed from my Bob Butts one-rounder — is the finishing touch of persuasive but distressed fatherdom.

“That’s really not fair.” Paul blinks behind his glasses. I didn’t notice before, but Otto, Paul’s dummy — his stupid blue eyes popped open, lurid orange hair, hacking jacket, fingerless wooden mitts, black patent-leather pumps with white socks, plus his green derby all making him appear perfectly at home in my house — is seated at the table-full of food like a stunned guest. Thanksgiving is all his now.

“I can’t explain it to you right now, Paul. But I will. I love you.” I’m moving out the front door. Outside, the dirt-bike noise is intense, as if whoever it is, is running a gymkhana around my or the Feensters’ front yard. Nick will be out if he isn’t already, primed to deal cruelly, etc., etc. It could be a chance for us to act in concert, only I have to leave. My daughter’s in jail.

“I think you need me with you. I think—” Paul’s saying.

“We’ll talk about it later.”

Then abruptly all is silenced outside— no-noise as palpable as noise.

And I feel just as suddenly a sensation of beforeness, which I’ve of course felt on many, many days since my cancer was unearthed, the sensation of when there was no cancer, and oh, how good that was— before —what a rare gift, only I was careless and didn’t notice and have kicked myself ever since for missing it.

But I feel that same beforeness now. Though nothing’s happened that a before should be expected. Unless I’ve missed something — more than usual. The Next Level wouldn’t seem to be in the business of letting us miss important moments. Still, why does now —this moment, standing in my own house — feel like before ?

“What’s going on out there?” Paul says in a superior-sounding voice. His gray eyes bat at me. These words come from some old movie he’s seen and I have, too. Only he means them now, looks stern and suspicious, moves toward the doorknob, intent on turning it — to get to the bottom of, shed some light on, put paid to….

“No! Don’t do that, Paul,” I say. We all three look to one another — wondrous looks, different looks, because we are all different, yet are joined in our beforeness. It’s quiet outside now — we all say this with our silence. But it’s just the usual. The holiday calm. The peace of the harvest. The good soft exhale along this stretch of nice beach, the last sigh and surrender the season is famous for.

“Let me look,” I say, and go forward. “I’m leaving anyway.”

Paul’s brow furrows. Even in his horse-blanket suit, he is imploring. He heard what I said. “I’m going with you,” he says.

It’s hard to say no. But I manage. “No.”

I grasp the warm knob, give it a turn and pull open my front door.

And, just as it’s supposed to, everything changes. Before is everlastingly gone. There is only everlastingly after.

At first, I see nothing strange from my doorway, into which a cold gasp floods by my damp hairline. Only my hemispheric driveway. The high seaboard sky. My Suburban, its window duct-taped. Paul’s junker Saab behind the arborvitae. Sally’s LeBaron. Sandy Poincinet Road, empty and mistily serene toward the beach. And to the left, the Feensters’ yard with its sad topiary (the monkey, the giraffe, the hippo all neglected). Nick’s aqua Corvettes, enviably buffed, the upbraiding signs — DON’T EVEN THINK OF TURNING AROUND. BEWARE OF PIT BULL. DANGEROUS RIPTIDES. Nothing out of the ordinary. William Graymont, who’s caught something — possibly a bird — stands under the monkey, calmly staring down at his kill.

I begin walking toward my vehicle. Paul and Jill stand in the doorway behind me.

Where’s the clamorous, peace-destroying dirt bike, I wonder. Can it have simply vanished? I open the driver’s door, thoughts of Absecon re-encroaching with unhappy imagery — Clarissa in a room wearing beltless jailhouse garb; a two-way mirror with smirking men in suits behind it; an Oriental detective — a female — with small clean hands and a chignon; loathsome Thom at a desk, filling out forms. Then Clarissa remote from everything and everyone, forever. I test the gray duct tape across my broken window with an estimating poke — it gives but holds. Then Sally re-enters — on a Virgin flight from Maidenhead. How am I to re-establish myself as a vigorous, hearty, restless, randy Sea Biscuit, who’s also ready to forgive, forget, bygones staying bygones? I give Paul and Jill a fraught frown back where they stand in the doorway, followed by a bogus Teddy Roosevelt thumbs-up like Mike’s. A flight of geese, audible but invisible, passes over — honk-honk-honk-honk-honk in the misted air. I raise my eyes to them. “What the hell happened to your window?” Paul in his silly suit says, starting heavily out the door.

“Nothing,” I say. “It’s fine. It’ll be fine.”

“I should go with you.” He’s crossing the driveway, for some reason putting his hands on his hips like a majorette.

And that is when all hell breaks loose at the Feensters’.

From inside their big white modernistic residential edifice — the teak front door, I can see, is left open — comes the blaring, grinding, reckless start-up whang of a dirt bike. Possibly it’s sound effects, something Nick’s ordered from an 800 number on late-night TV, delivered in time for the holidays. The Sounds of Super-X. Give those neighbors something to be thankful for — when it’s turned off.

Paul and I stare in wonder — me across my Suburban hood, he mid-driveway. Inside the Feensters’, the dirt-bike racket winds up scaldingly, very authentic if it’s a recording— raaa-raaa-raaa-raaaraaaaaaaaaaa-er-raaaaaaa. I hear, but am not sure I hear, Drilla Feenster in a shrill operatic voice say, “No, no, no, no, no. You will not—” Her voice gets husky, insisting “no” to be the only acceptable thing about something. And then, through the Feensters’ open front door, wheeled up and rared back on its thick, black, cleated, high-fendered rear tire, a monstrous, gaudy, electric-purple Yamaha Z-71 “Turf Torturer” screams straight out onto the front drive, where the Corvettes are and the cat was. Astride the bike, captaining it, is a small-featured miniature white kid wearing green-and-black blotch camo, paratrooper boots, a black battle beret and a webbed belt full of what look to me like big copper-jacketed live rounds. (There is no way to make this seem normal.) The instant the bike touches front wheel down in the Feensters’ driveway, the kid snaps the handlebars into a gravel-gashing, throttle-up one-eighty that spins him around to face the house, at the same time giving the Yamaha more raaaa-raaaa-raaaarer-raaaas —popping the clutch out, in, out, spewing gravel against the Corvettes and looking neither left (at Paul and me, astonished across the yards) nor right, but back into the house, his face concentrated, luminous.

It’s not possible to know what’s happening here, only that it is happening and its consequences may not be good. I look at Paul, who looks at me. He seems perplexed. He is a visitor here. Jill steps out into the driveway to view things better. Gretchen has come to the door still in her chef’s hat and carrying a large metal kitchen spoon.