Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“Go back inside.” I say this loudly to Jill over the bike whine. The kid rider now takes note of me, fastens his eyes on me (he could be fourteen), then looks intently back through the Feensters’ open door, where someone he’s communicating with must be. He’s wearing an earpiece in the ear I can see, and his lips are moving. The kid rider points over to me and wags his gloved finger for emphasis. “You go back inside, too,” I say to Paul and turn to go in myself — just for the moment, lock the door, wait this one out. These sorts of things usually pass if you let ’em.

Then I hear Drilla inside saying over again, “No-no-no-no-no-no.” And then very sharply, possibly from the Great Room — where there are Jerusalem marble countertops, copper fixtures, mortised bamboo floors, no expense spared top to bottom — there come two short metallic brrrrp-brrrrp! noises. And Drilla stops saying “No-no-no-no.”

“Oh, man,” Paul says mid-driveway.

Almost in the same instant as the brrrrp-brrrrp sounds, Nick Feenster appears, marching out the door, bulky and muscular in his electric-blue Lycra get-up — no anorak. He is barefoot, being led like a prisoner by another undersized white kid, the match of the first one, camo’d, booted, beret’d and web-belted, but who is holding pressed to Nick’s jawbone an oddly shaped, black boxy contraption with a stubby barrel that looks like a kid’s gun and is — unless someone else is still in the Feensters’ house — what I just heard go brrrrp-brrrrp. Nick’s eyes cut over to me across the yards through his topiary as he’s being shoved ahead. His walking style is bumpy, a bulky man’s gait. His jowly face is stony, full of hatred, as if he’d like to get his hands on the parties responsible, just have five minutes alone with one or all of them.

I have no idea what this is that’s happening in the yard. I look at Paul, who’s motionless, hands riding his hips in his plaid suit, staring across the yard as I’ve been. He is transfixed. Jill is a few steps behind and motionless, her generous mouth opened but silent, hands (real and inauthentic) clasped at her waist. Little Gretchen has disappeared from the doorway.

“Go inside. Call somebody,” I say — to Paul, to Jill, to both of them. “Call 911. This is something. This isn’t good.”

And as if her switch has been thrown, Jill turns and walks directly back inside the front door without a word.

“You go inside, I said,” I say to Paul. I have to have them inside, so I can know what to do. But Paul doesn’t budge.

Nick Feenster, when I look again, is exactly where he was in his driveway. But the kid from the fiery purple Yamaha is just getting in the driver’s seat of one of the Corvettes — becoming instantly invisible behind the wheel. The big bike has been allowed to fall on its side in the gravel but is running. The other boy’s still holding the black machine pistol under Nick’s chin. They’re stealing his cars. That’s all this is. This is about stealing cars. They get the keys and then they shoot him. He knows this.

The Corvette rumbles to life. Its headlights flick on, then off, its fiberglass body trembling. Then the kid is quick out of it, hurries around, jumps in the other Corvette. He has both sets of keys. The second aqua-and-white Corvette cranks and shimmies and vibrates. Smoke puffs out of its dual pipes. The kid revs and revs the big mill, just like he did the Yamaha, but then drops it in reverse, sends it springing backward, spewing gravel underneath, then (I can see him looking down at the gear shifter) he yanks it down into first, rips a buffeting, wheel-tearing power left in the gravel and, in a clamor of smoke and engine racket and muffler blare, gurgle and clatter, spins out of the Feensters’ driveway, bouncing out onto Poincinet Road and straight away toward Route 35.

“They’re going to shoot Nick,” I say — I suppose — to Paul, who hasn’t gone inside the way I told him to. The boy with the machine pistol is talking to Nick, and Nick, at the point of the stubby barrel, is talking to the boy, his lips moving stiffly, as if they were discussing something difficult. I hear a siren not so far away. A silent alarm has gone off. The police will have stopped the first boy already, and none of this will go much further. I begin walking toward Nick and the boy, who’re still talking. I lack a plan. I’m merely impelled to walk across the driveway and the tiny bit of scratchy lawn separating our two houses to do something productive. You’re not supposed to think thoughts in these moments, only to see things distinctly for the telling later: the remaining vibrating aqua-and-white Corvette; the topiary monkey and the hippo; the cottony sky; Nick’s house; the kid with the machine pistol; Nick, muscular and stern-jawed in his blue Lycras and big bare feet. Though I do think of the boy, this lethal boy with his gun, threatening Nick. But as if he was a mouse. A tiny mouse. A creature I can corner and trap and hold in my two hands and feel the insubstantial weight of and keep captured until he’s calm. They’re still talking, this boy and Nick. Behind me, I hear Paul say, “Frank.” Then I say, “Could I just…. Could I just…get a little involved here in this?” And then the boy shoots Nick, shoots him straight up under the jaw. One brrrrp! I am beside the measly topiary giraffe and say, “Oh, gee.” And almost as an afterthought, more a choice of activities he didn’t know he’d have to make, the boy shoots me. In the chest. And that, of course, is the truest beginning to the next level of life.

I wonder at what Ms. McCurdy saw as she fell. What were her last recorded visual inputs before she closed her amazed eyes upon this toilsome, maybe not entirely bad life forever? Did she get to see the crack-brained Clevinger squeeze the final round into his melon? Did she see her astonished nursing students get the education of their lives? Did she see, for one last eye flutter, the sands of Paloma Playa or glimpse an oil derrick out at sea? A bather? A man standing in a tepid surf, looking back at her curiously, waving good-bye? I have the hope of a man who never hopes.

You’re told about the long, shimmering corridor with the spooky light at the end and the New Age music piped in (from where?). Or of the chapter-by-chapter performance review of your muddled life, scrolling past like microfiche while you pause at death’s stony door for some needed extra suffering. Or of the foggy, gilded, curving steps leading to the busy bearded old man at the white marmoreal desk with the book, who scolds you about the boats he’s already sent, then sends you below.

Maybe for some it happens.

But what I tried very, very hard to do, there on Nick Feenster’s lawn, was keep my eyes open, stay alert, maintain visual contact with as much as possible, keep the dots connected. Shooting three living humans apparently does not make a big impression on a fourteen-year-old, because even before I let myself kneel on the lawn and take notice of the two holes in my barracuda jacket high up in my left pectoral region, then look up at the boy with an odd sensation of gratitude, he’d already climbed into Nick’s Corvette and put it into clunking gear, after which he wheeled around in the driveway and roared off, narrowly missing Nick and geysering gravel in my whitening face, turning onto Route 35, where possibly the Sea-Clift police were already waiting to catch him as he headed onto the Toms River bridge.

My son Paul appeared at once to aid me where I lay on the lawn, as did Jill. Oddly enough, Paul kept asking me — I was awake for all of this — if I felt I was going to be all right, was I going to be all right, was I going to be all right. I said I didn’t know, that being shot in the chest was often pretty serious. And then Detective Marinara arrived — I may have dreamed this — having decided to celebrate Thanksgiving with us after all. He said — I may have dreamed this, too — that he knew quite a lot about bullet wounds to the chest, and mine might be all right. He called an ambulance from the radio in his jacket pocket.