Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“Pretty long, though. Twenty years?”

“No. Or yes. I don’t remember.”

Bud sniffs back through his little ruby-veined nose, then wags his shoulders like a boxer. “A while, though.”

“I thought you liked the unexamined life, Bud.”

“For selling lamps,” Bud snaps. “I was at Princeton, Frank, with Poindexter and that crowd. Empirical all the way. I had a scholarship over to Oxford but went on and attended Harvard Law. It was the sixties.”

“I never believe people, Bud.”

“Well, you can sure as shit believe that.”

Bud’s translucent eyelids snap like a crow’s. He’s misunderstood me. He thinks I’ve deprecated his academic accomplishment, about which I couldn’t care less.

“That’s my answer to your question, Bud. How could I not know you went to Princeton? You probably haven’t told me more than four hundred times. I’m sure Harvey Effing’s mother knows you went to Princeton. You probably reminded her when you were in there.”

“Your answer is what ?” Bud says.

“My answer is, I tend not to believe people.”

“About what?”

Lloyd groans down in his tussive chest. All day, death, and now questions.

“About anything. It lets people act freely. I realized it one day. A guy told me he was driving back to his motel for his checkbook then coming right back to where we’d been looking at a condo over in Seaside Park. He was going to write me a check for twenty-five thousand on the spot. I knew he exactly intended to. And I was going to stand there and wait till he came back. But I realized, though, that I didn’t believe a fucking thing he said. I just pretended to, to make him feel good. That’s what I’ve learned. It’s a big relief.”

“Did the guy come back,” Lloyd asks.

“He did, and I sold him the condo.”

Bud’s livery lips wrinkle in distaste meant to signify concern. “You’ve gotten deep since your prostate flare-up.”

“My prostate didn’t flare up, you asshole. It had cancer. I believe that, though. If you trust people unnecessarily, it incurs an obligation on everybody. Suspending judgment’s a lot easier. Maybe you can do that with lamps.”

“Makes sense,” Lloyd says quietly. “I probably feel the same way.” He lowers his big funereal brow at Bud as a warning.

“Whatever.” Bud makes a display of looking around the empty yard, as if Harvey Effing’s mother was calling him. The driveway’s empty. Water’s puddling from the melted snow. The postman, in his blue government sweater and blue twill pants, is just traversing the lawn from next door in some wiggly black galoshes he hasn’t bothered to snap. He radiates a wide, welcoming postal-carrier got-something-for-you smile and hands Lloyd a stack of letters bound with a red rubber band.

“That’s great,” Lloyd grunts, and smiles but doesn’t peek at his letters. Surely some are heart-warming thank-yous for all the above-and-beyond kindness by the M&G staff when Uncle Beppo was “taken,” and for the extra time needed so a long-estranged brother could arrive from Quito, especially since Uncle B. wasn’t discovered in his apartment until some time had passed. I wonder what Lloyd’s answer was to the what-have-you-learned question.

“ Whatever’ s about it,” I say to Bud, who’s still gooning around the yard at nothing. I believe I detect a ghostly Parkinson’s tremor in Bud’s chin, something he may not know about himself. His pudding chin is slightly oscillating, though it may be because I yelled at him and made him nervous. “I want you to understand, Bud. When I didn’t believe the guy’d come back, it wasn’t that I dis believed him. I just decline to make people have to bear extra responsibility for their own insecure intentions. Having to be believed is too big a burden. I thought you studied philosophy. It isn’t so hard.”

“Okay, that’s fine.” Bud smiles faintly and pats me softly on the front of my barracuda jacket, as if I was about to start throwing punches and needed calming.

“Fuck you, Bud.”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay. That’s great. Fuck me.” Bud fattens his bunchy cheeks and smirks. The funeral contingent has now lost its funerary decorum. I’m, of course, largely to blame.

“Better get going.” Lloyd’s stuffing his mail into his overcoat pocket.

“Time to,” Bud says. He’s staring straight at Lloyd’s chest, so as not to have to face me. “Hope you feel better, Frank.”

“I feel great, Bud. I hope you feel better. You don’t look so good.”

“Chasing a cold,” Bud says, and commences walking in his gimpy gait across the damp lawn, heading down Willow, back toward Seminary and the unreflective lamp business. It’s why I hate men my age. We all emanate a sense of youth lost and tragedy-on-the-horizon. It’s impossible not to feel sorry for our every little setback.

“Those kids coming to visit, are they?” Lloyd’s happy to be upbeat.

“They sure are, Lloyd.” We’re watching Bud cross Willow, stamping grass and snow-melt off his oxfords, clutching his coat collar up around his neck. He doesn’t look back, though he thinks we’re talking about him.

“You can’t enter the same stream twice, can you, Frank?” Lloyd says.

I look squarely at Lloyd, as if by gazing on him I’ll come to know what he means, since I don’t have the vaguest idea, though I’m certain it has something to do with the life lessons we both know: takes all kinds; for every day, turn, turn, turn; life’d be dull if we were all the same. “Small blessings,” I say solemnly.

“Thanks for showing up. We needed some bodies.” This is not a pun to Lloyd. He is a born literalist and couldn’t survive otherwise.

“It was a good thing,” I lie, and think a thought about Ernie’s epitaph and how smart a cookie he was to know what to say at the end. We should all be that smart, all heed the lesson.

S urprisingly — though probably not that surprisingly — the inside of my Suburban when I climb in is gaseous with stinging, whanging anti-Permanent Period ethers that make me have to run the windows down to get a usable breath. Conceivably it’s low blood sugar from being starved, which makes me clench my jaw. When you have cancer in your nether part, plus a bolus of radiant heavy metal — most of which has spent its payload by now, though it’s my keepsake forever — your systems don’t run on autopilot like they used to. Everything begs for suspicious notice — a headache, loose bowels, erectile virtuosity or its opposite, bloodshot eyes, extra fingernail growth. Dr. Psimos, my Mayo surgeon, explained all this. Though once my procedure was over, he said, nothing on a daily basis would be caused per se by my condition, unless I went prospecting for uranium, in which case my needle would point out the mother lode up my butt.

“It’ll be in your mind, Frank, but that’s about it,” Psimos said, leaning back, self-satisfied in his doctor chair, like a forty-year-old lab-coated Walter Slezak. His tiny Mayo seventh-floor pale-green office walls were full of diplomas — Yale, the Sorbonne, Heidelberg, Cornell, plus one designating him a graduate of the Suzuki Method of pianism. Those hirsute sausagey digits, capable of injecting hot needles into tender zones, also contained “The Flight of the Bumblebee” in their muscle memory.

It was our presurgical chat, the entire duration of which he sat teasing a bad backlash out of a tiny silver fly reel, using those same meaty fingers, assisted by a surgical clamp and some magnifying spectacles. Out his little window, the entire Mayo skyline — the bland tan hospital edifices, smokestacks, helipads, radar dishes, antennae, winking red beacons, everything but anti-aircraft batteries and ack-acks — projected the reassuring solidity of a health-care Pentagon to wayward pilgrim patients like me and the King of Jordan.