Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“Absecon,” I hear someone say. “That’s Ab- see -con.” That’s not how I’ve been pronouncing it, but I will forever. Surely we’re not going to a hospital there. “When I was a kid, in Ab-see-con—” It’s the big red-headed Army medic, blabbing on in his south Jersey brogue. “My old man useta go to Atlantic City. They still had real bums over there then. Not these current fucks. This was the seventies, before all this new horseshit. He’d go get one a these bums and bring him home for Thanksgiving. You know? Clean him up. Give him some clothes. Useta look for bums about his own size. My mom useta hate it. I’ll tell ya. We’d—”

We are slowing up. The siren’s gone silent. The two men inside with me are moving, legs partly bent, stooping. A two-way radio crackles and sputters from someone’s belt beside my face. The clock says it’s 3:04. “Could be you’ll want some backup,” a woman’s metallic voice says from a place where it sounds like the wind’s blowing. “Oh boy. Ooooohh boy. Oh man,” the woman’s faraway voice says. “This is somethin’. I promised you fireworks.” Sputter and fuzz. And we are, because I can feel it, backing up and turning at once. I strain against my webbed restraints to see something. My hands are cold. I feel my upper chest to be cold, too, and numb. A randy taste has dislodged from somewhere in my mouth. My chest actually hurts now, I have to admit. I’m not breathing all that well even with oxygen in use, though I’m glad to have it. “Delivery for occupant,” I hear a man’s voice say. “He had a big heart, my old man.” The medic is speaking again, “For all the good it did ’im.” The red-bearded face is peering down into mine out of the minty fluorescence. “How ya doin’, big ole boy? You holdin’ up?” the red mouth with the birthmark says. His blue eyes fix on me suspiciously. I wonder what my own eyes say back. “How’d you like your ambulance ride? Just like TV, wasn’t it?”

“Life’s interesting,” I say from under my mask.

“Oh yeah.”

Suddenly, there’s lots of outside light and a burst of cold air. The door, which I can see, has opened, and my stretcher is moving. The face of a bright-eyed, smiling young nurse, a black woman in a long white labcoat, and corn-rows with gold beads intertwined and tortoiseshell glasses, is staring into my face. She’s saying, “Mr. Bascombe? Mr. Bascombe? Can you tell me how you feel?”

I say, “Yes. I don’t feel like a big ole boy, that’s one thing.”

“Well then, why don’t you tell me how you are,” she says. “I’d like to know.”

“Okay,” I say. And as we move along, that is what I begin to do — with all my best concentration, I begin to try to tell her how I am.

Violence, that imposter, foreshortens our expectancies, our logics, our next days, our afternoons, our sweet evenings, our whole story.

At 23,000 feet, the land lies north and east to the purple horizon. Terminal moraine, which in summer nurtures alfalfa fields, golf courses, sod farms, stands of yellow corn, is now masked and frozen white, fading into dusk. Wintry hills pass below, some with frail red Christmas lights aglitter on tiny porches, then a gleaming silver-blue river and the tower trail of our great midwestern power grid. It is all likable to me. Minnesota.

My fellow passengers on Northwest Flight 1724 (world’s most misunderstood airline), all thirty of us, are Mayo bound. O’Hare straight up to Rochester. The blond, heavy-boned, duck-tailed flight attendant — a big Swede — knows who her passengers are. She acts jokey-light-hearted if you’re just flying up for a colonoscopy—“the routine lube job”—but is chin-set, hard-mouth serious if your concerns are more of an “impactful,” exploratory nature. As usual, I fall into the mid-range of patient-passenger profiles — those who’re undergoing successful treatment and on our way to Rochester to hear encouraging news. At 23,000 feet, no one is the least bit reluctant to discuss personal medical problems with whoever fate has seated next to them. Above the engines’ hum, you hear earnest, droning heartland voices dilating on what an aneurysm actually is, what it feels like to undergo an endoscopy or a heart catheterization (“The initial incision in your leg’s the goddamn worst part”) or a vertebra fusion (“They go in through the front, but of course you don’t feel it, you’re asleep”). Others, less care-laden, discuss how “the Cities” have changed — for the better, for the worse — in the years they’ve been coming up here; where’s the best muskie fishing to be found (Lake Glorvigen); whether it was King Hussein or Saddam Hussein who was a Mayo patient once upon a time (AIDS and “the syph” are rumored); and what a good newspaper USA Today has turned out to be, “especially the sports.” Many tote thick manila envelopes containing crucial evidentiary X rays from elsewhere. BRAIN, SPINE, NECK, KNEE are stamped in red. I have only myself — and Sally Caldwell — plus a prostate full of played-out BBs destined to be with me forever. And I have my thoughts for a sunny prognosis and a good start to year two of the young Millennium, which includes a new direction in the Presidency — one it’s hard to see how we’ll survive — though the enfeebled new man’s little worse than his clownish former opponent, both being smirking cornpones unfit to govern a ladies’ flower show, much less our frail, unruly union.

Sally, beside me on the aisle of our regional Saab 340 turboprop, is reading a book encased in one of the crocheted book cozies women years ago employed to sneak Peyton Place or Bonjour Tristesse into the beauty parlor (my mother did it with Lady Chatterley’s Lover ), books requiring privacy for full enjoyment. Sally’s reading a thick paperback called Tantrism and Your Prostate, by a Dr. White. She’s assured me there’re strategies woven into his recommendations that are part of our (my) natural maturing process and pretty much common sense anyway, and will clear out a lot of underbrush and open up some new paths we’ll both soon be breathless to enter. The sex part is still a source of concern — for me but not, apparently, for Sally — since we’ve yet to fully reconvene since she returned from Blighty and I cleared customs at Ocean County Hospital from my successful gunshot surgery, which left amazingly small scars and wasn’t nearly as bad as you’d imagine (pretty much the way it happens on Gunsmoke or Bonanza ). I did wake up on the operating table, though the Pakistani surgeon, Dr. Iqbal, just started laughing at my shocked, popped-opened peepers and said, “Oh, well, my goodness, look who can’t stand to miss anything.” They put me out again in two seconds, and I have no memory of pain or fear, only of Dr. Iqbal laughing. The two.32 slugs are at home on my bedside table, where I have in the past two weeks studied them for signs of significance and found none. Sally believes there’s nothing to worry about on the sexual front and that she knows everything’ll kick into gear once I regain full strength and get some good news in Rochester.

Sally’s hand, her right hand, grazes mine when we encounter turbulence and go buffeting along over the oceany chop, while our fellow passengers — all regional flying veterans and all fatalists — start laughing and making woo-hoo -ing noises. Someone, a woman with a nasal Michigan voice, says, “Up-see-daisee. Ain’t this fun now?” None of us would mind that much if our ship went down or was hijacked to Cuba or just landed someplace other than our destination — some fresh territory where new and unexpected adventures could blossom, back-burnering our inevitables till later.