Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

The noisy drinker down the bar leans forward and smirks at me. “So whadda you think?” He is Bob Butts, owner (once) of Butts Floral on Spring Street, since replaced by the Virtual Profusion and going great guns. Bob is red-skinned, fattish and embittered. His mother, Lana, ran the shop after Bob’s dad died in Korea. This was prehistoric Haddam, when it was a sleepy-eyed, undiscovered jewel. When Lana moved to Coral Gables and remarried, Bob took over the shop and ran it in the ground, gambling his brains out in Tropworld, which was new in Atlantic City. Bob’s a first-rate dickhead.

The two men beyond him, I don’t know, but are shady, small-time Haddam cheezers I’ve seen six hundred times — in Cox’s News or in the now-departed Pietroinferno’s. I have an idea they’re involved with delivering the Trenton Times and possibly less obvious merchandise. The hatchet-faced, thin-haired woman, wearing a blowsy black dress suitable for a funeral, I’ve never seen, though she’s apparently Bob’s companion. It would be easy to say these four are members of a Haddam demimonde, but in fact they’re only regular citizens holding out in defiance, rather than making the move to Bordentown or East Windsor.

“What do I think about what?” I lean forward and look straight at Bob Butts, raising my warming martini to my lips. President Clinton has disappeared off the screen. Though I wonder what he’s doing in real time — having a stiff belt himself, possibly. His last two years haven’t been much to brag about. Like Clarissa, I wish he was running again. He’d do better than these current two monkeys.

“All this election bullshit.” Bob Butts cranes forward, then back, to get a better look at me. Lester’s pouring him another 7&7. Bob’s haggard lady friend gives me an unfocused, boozy stare, as if she knows all about me. The two Trenton Times guys muse at their shot glasses (root beer schnapps, my bet). “Some guy got blown up over at the hospital today. Bunch of pink confetti. This shit’s gone too far. The Democrats are stealin’ it.” Bob’s wet, bloodshot eyes clamp onto me, signaling he knows who I am now — a nigger-lovin’, tax-and-spend, pro-health-care, abortion-rights, gay-rights, consumer-rights, tree-hugging liberal (all true). Plus, I sold my house and left the door open to a bunch of shit Koreans, and probably even had something to do with him losing the flower shop (also true).

Bob Butts is wearing a disreputably dirty brown shawl-collar car coat made of a polymer-based material worn by Michigan frosh in the early sixties but not since, and looks like hell warmed over. He has on chinos like mine and white Keds with no socks. He’s been in need of a shave for several days. His thin, lank hair is long and dirty and he could do with a bath. Obviously, Bob’s experiencing a downward loop, having once been handsome, clever, gaunt to the point of febrile Laurence Harvey effeminance. Like Calderon, he cut a wide swath through the female population, who he used to woogle in his back room, right on the stem-strewn metal arranging table. That’s maybe all you can hope for if you’re a florist.

“I don’t really see what the Democrats have to do with whoever got blown up at the hospital,” I say. I half-turn and take a casual, calculated look back at the Appleseed mural, brightly lit by a row of tiny silver spotlights attached to the low ceiling. By looking at goofball Johnny, I’m essentially addressing nut-case Bob. This is the message I want subliminally delivered. I also don’t want Bob to think I give half a shit about anything he says, since I don’t. I’m ready right now for Mike to show up. But then I can’t resist adding, “And I don’t see where the Democrats are stealing anything, unless getting more votes could be said to be a form of theft. Maybe you do. Maybe it’s why you’re not in the flower business anymore.”

“Could be said.” Bob Butts grins idiotically. “Could be said you’re an asshole. That could be said.”

“It’s already been said,” I say. I don’t want to fan this disagreement beyond the boundary of impolite bar argument. I’m not sure what would wait out past that frontier at my age and state of health and with a big drink already under my belt. And yet the same irresistible urge makes me unable not to add, still facing the Appleseed mural, “It’s actually been said by even bigger shit-heels than you are, Bob. So don’t worry too much about surprising me.” I shift around on my bar stool and entertain the rich thought of a second chilled Boodles. Only, I hear scuffling and wood being scraped. The hatchet-faced woman says, “Oh, Jesus Christ, Bob!” Then a bar stool like the one I’m sitting on hits the floor. And suddenly there’s a fishy odor in my nostrils and mouth, and Bob Butts’ small, rough hands go right around my neck, his whiskery chin jamming into my ear, his throat making a gurgling noise both mechanical, like a car with a bad starter, and also simian— grrrrr —into my ear canal—“ Grrrrr, grrrrr, grrrrr” —so that I tip over off my bar stool, which tumbles sideways, and Bob and I go sprawling toward the pine floor. I’m trying to grab a fistful of his reeking car coat and haul it in the direction I’m falling so he’ll hit the floor first and me on top — which bluntly happens. Though the bar stool next to mine — heavy as an anvil — topples down onto me with a clunk in my rear rib cage that doesn’t knock the breath out of me but hurts like shit and makes me expel a not-voluntary “oooof.”

“Cocksucker, you cocksucker.” Bob Butts is gurgling in my ear and stinking. “Grrrr, errrr, grrrr.” These are noises (I for some reason find myself thinking ) Bob probably learned as a child, and that were funny once, but now come into play in a serious effort to murder me. Bob’s grip isn’t exactly around my windpipe, only my neck, but he’s squeezing the crap out of me and digging his grimed fingernails into my skin. My flesh is stinging, but I don’t feel shocked or in any jeopardy, except possibly from the fall.

No one else in the bar does anything to help. Not Lester, not the two Trenton Times palookas, not the witchy, balding woman in widow’s weeds who’s invoked Jesus Christ. They simply ignore Bob and me wrestling on the floor, as if a new bar customer, in for a Fuzzy Navel, might think it was great to see two middle-aged guys muggling around on the damp boards, trying to accomplish nobody’s too sure what-in-the-fuck.

All of this begins to seem like an annoyance more than a fight, like having someone’s pet monkey hanging on your neck, though we’re down on the floor and the stool’s on top of me and Bob’s going “ Grrrr, errrr, grrrr ” and squeezing my neck, his breath and hair reeking like week-old haddock. Suddenly, I lose all my wind and have to buck the bar stool off my back to breathe, and in doing so I get my knee in between Bob’s own squirming, jimmering knees and my right elbow into his sternum, just below where I could interrupt his windpipe. I lean on Bob’s hard breast bone, stare down into his bulging, blood-splurged eyes, which register that this event may be almost over. “Bob,” I half-shout at him. His eyes widen, he bares his long yellow teeth, refastens a fisted grip on my neck tendons and croaks, “Cocksucker.” And with no further prelude, I go ahead and jackhammer my kneecap straight up into Bob’s nuttal pouch pretty much as hard as I can — given my weakened state, given my lack of inclination and the fact that I’ve had a martini and had hoped the evening would turn out to be pleasant, since so much of the day hadn’t.

Bob Butts erupts instantly in a bulbous-eyed, Gildersleevian “Oooomph,” his cheek and lips exploding. His eyes squeeze melodramatically shut. He lets go of my neck and goes as flaccid as a lifesaving dummy. Instead of more “Grrrr, errr, grrr,” he groans a deep, agonizing and, I’ll admit, satisfying “Eeeeeuh-uh-oh.”