Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

I cast up into the bleachers, half-wolfed hot dog in hand, seeking Wade’s orange face, and find it instantly, sunk in the crowd at the top row. He’s glowering down at me for not being up where he is, with a good view across the Progress Zone to the far away Queen Regent. Wade makes an awkward, spasmic hand gesture for me to get my ass up there. It’s a movement a person having a heart attack would make, and people on either side of him give him a fishy eye and inch away. (“Some smelly old nut sat beside us at the implosion. You can’t go anywhere—”)

But I’m in no mood for climbing over strangers to achieve closer bodily contact with Wade — plus, I have my dog, and am as happy here as I’m likely to get today. The sun at the crowd’s edge feels good, the air rinsed clean like a state fair on the first afternoon before the rides are up. No matter that we’re in a no-man’s-land in a dispirited seaside town, waiting to watch an abandoned building get turned to rubble — the second explosion I’ve been close to in two days.

I wave enigmatically up to Wade, raise my hot dog bun, point to my wrist as if it had a watch on it that said zero hour. Wade mouths back grudging words no one can hear. Then I turn my attention back to Big Frank, who’s standing beside his red plunger box while a skinny white kid with technical know-how, wearing a plain white jumpsuit, screws wires to terminals on top, looking questioningly up at Big Frank as if he doesn’t think any of this is going quite right. In the distance, through the fence and across the three football fields, I can make out small human figures moving hastily inside the Queen Regent’s secure perimeter toward what must be the exit gates. Many more blue-and-white Asbury PD cruisers are now apparent, all with their blue flashers going. Yellow traffic lights I also hadn’t noticed are blinking along the emptied streets. A police helicopter, an orange-striped Coast Guard chopper and a “News at Noon” trafficopter are hovering just off the boardwalk in anticipation of a big bang soon to come. The Salvation Army bell is clanging, and for the first time I hear hearty, sing-song human voices chanting from somewhere “Save the cream, save the cream,” which, of course, is “Save the Queen, save the Queen.” The chanters are nicely dressed (but unavailing) landmark loonies who’ve been forced into a spot outside some white police sawhorses, where they can make their voices heard but be ignored.

Big Frank, through his electric megaphone, which makes his strong New Jersey basso seem to come out of a cardboard box, is spieling about how the “seismic effects” of what we’re about to witness will be detectable in China, yet the charges have been so ingeniously calculated by his family that the Queen Regent will fall straight down in exactly eighteen seconds, every loving brick coming to rest in arithmetically predetermined spots. “Nat-ur-al-ly” there’ll be some dust (none of it asbestos), but not even as much, he’s saying, as a stolen garbage truck would kick up in Newark — this is also due to climatological gauging, humidity indexing, plus fiber optics, lasers, etc. The sound will be surprisingly modest, “so you might want to hire us to renovate your mother-in-law’s house in Trenton, hawr, hawr, hawr.” A Coast Guard cutter is stationed just off the boardwalk (“In case one of my brothers gets blown out there”). Scuba divers are in the water. Fish and geese migration patterns won’t be disrupted, nor will air quality or land values in Asbury Park — a murmur of general amusement. Likewise hospital services. “All efforts, in other words,” he concludes, “have been expended to make the demolition nuttin’ more than a fart in a paint bucket.”

Big Frank stumps heavily off his central master of ceremonies spot to confer, head-down, with the skinny technician kid, plus two other swart-haired parties in red jumpsuits, who look like they might be filling station employees, though for all I know are the Rutgers Ph.D.’s. One of these red-suits hands Big Frank a set of old-fashioned calipered earphones with a mouthpiece attached. Big Frank, hard hat in hand, holds one phone to his ear, seems to listen intently to something — a voice? — coming through, then begins barking orders back, his meathead’s big mouth cut into a downward swoop of anger, his head nodding.

Conceivably something’s amiss, something that might postpone the big mushroom cloud and send us all cruising back down the streets of Asbury Park seeking substitute excitements. A hush of waiting has fallen over the hurly-burly, and a low hum of individual voices and single laughters and beer-can pops arises. A rich fishy smell drifts in off the sea — contributor, no doubt, to the Queen Regent’s run of bad luck, since it comes from discharge practices long banned, though the pollutants are still in the soil and the atmosphere. From some undetermined place, there’s a high-pitched mechanized whee-wheeing in the air, like the ghost of an empty ferris wheel at the boardwalk Fun Zone, where millions idled and thrilled and smooched away summer evenings without a care for what came before or next. To me, there’s good to be found in these random sensations. I’ve made it my business at this odd time of life, when the future seems interesting but not necessarily “fun,” to permit no time to be a dead time, since you wouldn’t want to forget at a later, direr moment what that earlier, possibly better, day or hour or era was “like”; how the afternoon felt when the implosion got canceled, what specific life got lived as you awaited the Queen Regent’s decline to rubble. You definitely would want to know that, to have that on your mind’s record instead of say, like poor Ernie, hearing the thanatologist droning, “Frankee, Frankee? Can you hear me? Can you hear any-ting? Is you all de vay dead?”

Then… boom, boom, boom, boom. Boomety-boom. Boom, boom. Boomety-boomety! The Queen Regent is going. Right now. I’m happy I didn’t duck out to the Throne Room.

Innocent puffs of gray-white smoke, small but specific and unquestionably consequential, go poof-poof-poof all up and down the Queen’s nine-storey height, as if someone, some authority inside, was letting air out of old pillows, sweeping her clean, putting her in top form for the big reopening. Birds — the gulls I’d seen before, diving, swooping and wheeling — are suddenly flying away. No one warned them.

Our entire crowd — many are standing — exhales or gasps or sighs a spoon-moon-Juning “ahhhh” as if this is the thing now, finally, what we’ve come for, what nothing else can ever get better than.

Big Frank’s staring, startled, right along with us, his big baldy head still calipered, his mouth gapped open, though he quickly closes it hard as an anvil, nostrils flaring. The two swarthy red-suited assistants have backed away as if he might start wind-milling punches. The skinny kid who’d wired the plunger box is blabbing into Big Frank’s sizable ear, though Big Frank’s staring out at the building being consumed in smoke, the plunger still stagily up at his feet.

Boom. Boom. Boomety-boom. Again, puffs of now grayer smoke squirt out all around the Queen Regent’s foundation skirting, and another big one at the top, from the crenellated crown. And now commences a set of larger sounds. These things never go off with one bang, but more like a percussive chess game — the pawns first, then the bishops, then the knights. Whatever’s left stands and fights but can’t do either. At least that’s how it happened down in Ventnor.

Now another series of boom-booms, bigger towering ones erupt from the Queen Regent’s core. The old dowager has yet to shudder, lean or sway. Possibly she won’t go down at all and the crowd will be the winner. Some yokel up in the stands laughs and yaps, “She ain’t fallin’. They fucked this all up.” Spectators have begun smiling, looking side to side. Wade, I can see, is getting all on tape. The Grove ladies will love him even more if the Queen survives. Big Frank’s now glaring. I can read his lips, and they say, Fuck you. It’ll fuckin’ fall, you pieces of shit.