Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

W e’re nearing the 195 junction with the Garden State, where millions (or at least hundreds of thousands) are now streaming south toward Atlantic City — not a bad choice for Turkey Day. It’s the stretch of highway we detoured around this morning due to police activity. I shoot through the interchange as new lighted town signage slips past: Belmar, South Belmar, pie-in-the-sky Spring Lake, all sprawling inland from the ocean into the pine scrub and lowlands west of the Parkway. HUNGRY FOR CAPITAL. REGULAR BAPTIST CHURCH — MEET TRIUMPH AND DISASTER HEAD-ON. HOCKEY ALL NIGHT LONG. NJ IS HOSPITAL COUNTRY. Any right-thinking suburbanite would like to feel confident about these things.

I’m aware Mike’s been cutting his eyes at me and frowning. He can possibly smell my soaked shoes. Mike occasionally broadcasts condescending, hanging-back watchfulness, which I take to mean I’m acting too American and not enough the velvet-handed secular-humanist-spiritualist I’m supposed to be. (This always pisses me off.) And perched on his seat in his fawn trousers, pink sweater, his ersatz Rolex and little Italian shoes with gold lounge-lizard socks, he’s pissing me off again. I’m like chesty old Wallace Beery ready to rip up furniture in the barroom and toss some drunks around like scarecrows.

“What the fuck?” I say, as menacing as I can manage. All around us are mostly tour buses, Windstars and church-group vans headed down to see Engelbert Humperdinck at Bellagio. Mike ignores me and peers ahead into the taillit traffic, little hands gripping the armrests like he’s in a hurtling missile. “Are you going into the land-developing business and start throwing up trophy mansions for Pakistani proctologists and make yourself rich, or what? Aren’t I supposed to hear the pitch and give you the benefit of my years of non-experience?” The aroma I’ve been sniffing since we left Haddam is not just urine but also, I think, garlic — not usual from Mike. Benivalle has given him the full gizmo — some gloomy il forno out on 514, where ziti, lasagne and cannoli hang off the trees like Christmas candy.

Mike turns a serious and judicious look my way, then returns to the taillight stream, as if he has to pay attention in case I don’t.

“So? What?” I say, less Wallace Beery-ish, more mentorish Henry Fonda-like. The car in front of us is a wide red Mercedes 650 with louvered back windows and some kind of delta-wing radar antenna on the trunk. A big caduceus is bolted to the license plate holder and below it a bumper sticker says ALL LIFE IS POST-OP. GET BUSY LIVING IT. Back-lit human heads are visible inside, wagging and nodding and, I guess, living it.

“Not sure.” Mike is barely audible, as if speaking only to himself.

“About what? Is Benivalle a cutie pie?” Cutie pie is our office lingo for shit-heel walk-ins who waste your time looking at twenty listings, then go behind your back and try to buy from the seller. Cutie pie sounds to us like mobster talk. We always say we’re “putting out a contract” on some “cutie pie,” then laugh about it. Most cutie pies come from far east Bergen County and never buy anything.

“No, he’s not,” Mike says morosely. “He’s a good guy. He took me to his home. I met his wife and kids — in Sergeantsville. She fixed a big lunch for us.” The ziti. “We drove out to his Christmas tree farm in Rosemont. I guess he owns three or four. That’s just one business.” Mike’s laced his fingers, pinkie ring and all, and begun rotating his thumbs like a granny.

“What else does he do?” I’m only performing my agreed-to duty here.

“A mobile-home park that’s got a driving range attached, and he owns four laundromats with Internet access with his brother Bobby over in Milford.” Mike compresses his lips to a stern little line, all the while thumbs gyrating. These are rare signs of stress, the inner journey turning bumpy. Entrepreneurship clearly unsettles him.

“Why the hell does he need you to go into business with him? He’s got a plate-full. Has he ever developed anything except Christmas trees and laundromats?”

“Not so far.” Mike is brooding.

In Benivalle’s behalf, he is, of course, the model of the go-it-alone, self-starter that’s made New Jersey the world-class American small-potatoes profit leader it is. Before he’s forty, he’ll own a chain of Churchill’s Chickens, a flush advertising business, hold an insurance license and be ready to go back to school and study for the ministry. Up from the roadside vegetable stand, he’s exactly what this country’s all about: works like a dray horse, tithes at St. Melchior’s, has never personally killed anyone, stays in shape for the fire department, loves his wife and can’t wait for the sun to come up so he can get crackin’.

Which doesn’t mean Mike should risk his hairless little Tibetan ass in the housing business with the guy, back-loaded as that business is with cost over-runs, venal subcontractors slipping kickbacks to vendors, subpar re-bar work, off-the-books payouts to inspectors, insurers, surveyors, bankers, girlfriends, the EPA and shady guys from upstate — anybody who can get a dipper in your well and sink you into Chapter 11. Guys like Benivalle almost never know when to stay small, when a laundromat in the hand is worth two McMansions in the cornfield. This deal smells of ruin, and neither one of them needs a new ruin when 30-years are at 7.8, the Dow’s at 10.4, and crude’s iffy at 35.16.

“He’s also got an eighteen-year-old who’s mentally challenged,” Mike says, and aims a reproving glower to indicate I’m, again, more American than he’s comfortable with — though he’s just as American as I am, only from farther east.

“So what? He’s raking it in.” A mind’s picture of my son Paul Bascombe’s angry face — not a bit challenged — predictably enters my thinking with predictable misgiving.

“His wife’s not really well, either,” he says. “She can’t work because she has to drive little Carlo everywhere. They’ll have to put him in a care facility next year. That’s expensive.” Mike, of course, has a seventeen and a thirteen-year-old with his wife, now in the Amboys — little Tucker and little Andrea Mahoney. Plus, because he’s a Buddhist, he’s crippled by seeing the other guy’s point of view about everything — a fatal weakness in business. I’m crippled by it, too, just not when it comes to giving advice.

“Yeah,” I say, “but it’s not your kid.”

“No.” Mike stops gyrating his digits and settles himself on the passenger’s seat. He’s thinking what I’m thinking. Who wouldn’t?

We’re suddenly five hundred yards from Exit 82 and Route 37. Our turn-off. I have no memory of the last 15.6 miles — earth traversed, traffic negotiated, crashes avoided. We’re simply here, ready to get off. The red Mercedes with the caduceus dematerializes into the traffic speeding south — a Victorian manse on the beach at Cape May in its future, a high-roller suite at Bally’s.

I slide us off to the right. And then instantly, even in the dark, the crumpled remains of a tour bus come into view. Undoubtedly it’s the bigpileupontheGardenState that made the news crawl and stoppered the Parkway this morning when we tried to get on. The big Vista Cruiser’s down over the corrugated metal barriers into the pine and hardwoods, flipped on its side like a wounded green-and-yellow pachyderm, left-side tires and undercarriage exposed to the night air, a gash opened in the graded berm, as if lightning had ripped through.

All passengers would be long gone now — medi-vac’d to local ERs or just limped away, dazed, into the timber. There’s no sign of fire, though the big tinted vista windows have been popped out and the bus skin ripped open through the lettering that says PETER PAN TOURS (no doubt the Jaws of Life were used). Men in white jumpsuits are at this moment maneuvering a giant wrecker down the embankment from the Route 37 side, preparing to winch the bus upright and tow it away. No one who isn’t getting off at Toms River would see anything, though an Ocean County deputy’s at the ramp bottom, directing traffic with a red flare.