Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

I have, just then, the recurrent aching memory of the long walk Clarissa and I took last August through the sun-warmed, healthy-elm-shaded streets of Rochester, a town noted for its prideful thereness and for looking like a small Lutheran college town instead of medical ground zero. It was the Friday before my procedure on Monday, and we’d decided to walk ourselves to sweaty exhaustion, eat an early dinner at Applebee’s and watch the Twins play the Tigers on TV at the Travelodge. We hiked out State Highway 14 to the eastern edge of town — on our feet where others were driving — beyond the winding streets of white-painted, well-tended, green-roof neighborhoods, past the Arab-donated Little League stadium and the federal medical facility and the Olmsted County truck-marshaling yard, beyond the newer rail-fenced ranch homes with snow machines, bass boats and fifth-wheelers For Sale on their lawns, past where a sand and gravel operation had cracked open the marly earth, and farther on to where dense-smelling alfalfa fields took up and a small, treed river bottom appeared, and the glaciated earth began to devolve and roll and slide greenly toward the Mississippi, fifty miles away. NO HUNTING signs were on all the fence posts. The summer landscape was as dry as a razor strop, the corn as high as an elephant’s gazoo, the far, hot sky as one-color gray as a cataract. There was, of course, a lake.

On a little asphalt hillcrest beside where the highway ribboned off to the east, Clarissa and I stopped to take the view back to town — the great, many-buildinged Mayo colossus dominating the pleasant, forested townscape like a kremlin. Impressive. These buildings, I thought, could take good care of anybody.

Sweat had beaded on Clarissa’s forehead, her tee-shirt sweated through. She passed a hand across her flushed cheek. A green truck with slatted sides rumbled past, kicking up hot breeze and sand grit, leaving behind a loud, sweetish aroma of pigs-to-market. “This is where America’s decided to receive its bad news, I guess, isn’t it?” She suddenly didn’t like being out here. Everything was far too specific.

“It’s not so terrible. I like it.” I did. And do. “Given the alternatives.”

“You would.”

“Wait’ll you’re my age. You’ll be happy there’re places like this to receive you. Things look different.”

“Maybe you should just move out here. Buy one of those nice, horrible houses with the green roofs and the green shutters and mullioned windows. Buy a Ski-Doo.”

I’d already given that some thought. “I think I’d do fine out here,” I said. We were both pretending I’d be dead on Monday, just to see how it felt.

“Great,” she said, then turned dramatically on her heel to gaze down the highway eastward. We were traveling no farther that day. “You think you’d do fine anywhere.”

“What’s the matter with that? Is it a mark of something to be unhappy?”

“No,” she said sourly. “You’re very admirable. Sorry. I shouldn’t pick on you. I don’t know why I bother.”

I started to say, Because I’m your father, I’m all that’s left — but I didn’t. I said, “I understand perfectly. You have my best interests at heart. It’s fine.” We started back walking to town and to the things town had in store for me.

E rnesto stares down at me off the curb the way he would if he was waiting for my mouth to numb up. It dawns on me he has no real idea who I am. I am real estate-related but possess no name, only a set of full-mouth X rays clamped to a cold white screen. Or maybe I’m the carpet-cleaning guy from Skillman. Or I own the Chico’s on Route 1, a place I know he skulks off to with his Lebanese hygienist, Magda.

Up in my darkened rearview, I see what may be Ernesto’s leemo, its pumpkin-tinted headlights rounding onto Laurel and commencing slowly toward us.

“What’s up for Thanksgiving in su casa, Ernesto?” I have somehow become pointlessly cheery. Ernesto eyes the white stretch, then glances back at me warily, as if I might just be the wrong person to witness this. He flicks a secret hand signal to the driver, and in so doing makes himself look effeminate instead of mal hombre machismo. Maybe one of the nice-personality Barnard girls with her gold-plated health report is waiting in the backseat, already popping the Veuve Clicquot.

“What’s going on what?” he says, his horn-rims and beret getting misted, his smile not quite earnest.

“Thanksgiving,” I say. “¿Qué pasa a su casa?” I’m deviling him, but I don’t care, since he won’t fix my night guard.

“Oh, we go to Atlantic City. Always. My wife likes to gamble at Caesars.” He’s departing now, inching crabwise toward the limo, which has halted a discreet distance down Laurel. In my side mirror I see the driver’s door swing open. A tall chorus-girl-looking female in silver satin shorty-shorts, high heels and a white Pilgrim collar with a tall red Pilgrim hat just like on the Pennsylvania highway signs gets out and pulls open the rear door. “I have to go now.” Ernesto looks back at me a little frantically, as if he might get left. “Hasta la vista,” he adds idiotically.

“Hugo de Naranja to you, too.”

“Okay. Yes. Thanks.” In the mirror I see him hustle down the street, giving the chorus-girl driver a quick peck and scampering in the limo door. The Pilgrim chauffeur looks my way, smiles at me scoping her out, then climbs back in the driver’s seat and slowly pulls around me and up Laurel Road.

It wouldn’t be bad to be in there with ole Ernesto is what I think. Not so bad to have his agenda, his particular species of ducks lined up. Though my guess is, none of it would work out for me. Not now. Not in the state I’m currently in.

T he Johnny Appleseed Bar, downstairs at the August Inn, where I’m meeting Mike Mahoney, is a fair replica of a Revolutionary War roadhouse tavern. Wide, worn pine floors, low ceilings, a burnished mahogany bar, plenty of antique copper lanterns and period “tack”—battle flags with snakes and mottoes, encrusted sabers, drumheads, homespun uniforms encased in glass, framed musket-balls, framed tricorn headgear — with (the pièce de résistance ) a wall-sized spotlit mural in alarmingly vivid colors of a loony-looking J. Appleseed seated backward astride a gray mule, saucepan on head, a Klem Kadiddlehopper grin on his lascivious lips, mindlessly distributing apple seeds off the mule’s bony south end. Which apparently was how the West was won. For years, Haddam bar-stool historians debated whether Norman Rockwell or Thomas Hart Benton had “executed” the Appleseed mural. Old-timers swore to have watched both of them do it at several different times, though this was disproved when Rockwell stayed at the inn in the sixties and said not even Benton could paint anything that bad.

I’m always happy in here any time of day or night, its clubby, bogus, small-town imperviousness making me sense a safe haven. And tonight especially, following today, with only a smattering of holiday tipplers nursing quiet cocktails along the bar, plus an anonymous him ’n her tucked into a dark red leather banquette in the corner, conceivably doing the deed right there — not that anyone would care. A wall TV’s on without sound, a miniature plastic Yule tree’s set up on the bottle shelf, a strand of silver (flammable) bunting’s swagged across the mirrored backbar. The old sack-a-bones bartender’s watching the hockey game. It’s the perfect place to end up on a going-nowhere Tuesday before Thanksgiving, when much of your personal news hasn’t been so festive. It’s one thing to marvel at what a bodacious planet we occupy, the way Dr. von Reichstag did, where humans ruminate about neutrinos. But it’s beyond marveling that those humans can invent a concept as balming to the ailing spirit as the “cozy local watering hole,” where you’re always expected, no questions asked, where you can choose from a full list of life-restoring cocktails, stare silently at a silent TV, speak non sequiturs to a nonjudgmental bartender, listen (or not) to what’s said around you — in other words, savor the “in but not all in,” “out but not all out” zeitgeist mankind would package and sell like hoola-hoops if it could and thus bring peace to a troubled planet.