Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“I’ve plateaued,” Wade says irritably. “Left it all in the last century.” He’s frowning, as if he, too, has spied something wrong up ahead of us. The Millennium clearly has different resonances for different age brackets.

“Maybe enough’s enough, Wade. You know?”

“So other people tell me.”

What Wade and I have seen altered about my car is that the driver’s-side backseat window’s been smashed and glass particles scattered on the sparse grass. Below the door, on top of the glittering glass, is a flesh-colored Grand Union plastic bag with the milk carton inside. Though when I pick it up, it’s as heavy as a brick, and on closer notice I discover that the Sealtest carton inside — a pink-toned photograph of a missing teen on the label — actually contains a brick. The carton’s mission hasn’t been what it seemed when I felt it bumping my leg, its little brigand owner awaiting his chance at mischief. Did he sense I was a Suburban owner? Was I under surveillance from the beginning? This is why I never hope: Hoping is not a practical mechanism for events that actually happen.

“Little pissmires nailed you,” Wade snarls, taking in the damage, completely clear-brained, bifocals flashing at the chance to be permissibly pissed off, instantly intuiting the whole criminal scenario. “Too bad Cade’s not here,” he says, “though they probably didn’t leave any prints.” He hasn’t seen the actual culprit, only the virtual one (the real one’s spitting image). “Shouldn’t of stuck that stupid sticker on your bumper.” He scowls, walking around behind my car, assessing things like a cop, his little bandy-legged self full-up with race bile, which makes me angrier than the busted window — and fingers me as a typical liberal. “They probably hate fat-ass Gore worse than they hate shit-for-brains,” he says. (His only name for Bush.) Wade’s mouth wrinkles into a twisted, unhumorous smile of seen-it-all pleasure. “What’d they get? Did you leave your billfold in there?”

“No.” I touch my lumpy back pocket, then peer inside the mostly glassless window hole, trying not to touch a sharp edge. Glass kernels carpet the backseat and floor. Sunlight on the roof has turned it hot and boggy inside. The deed can’t be more than five minutes old. I stand up and look longingly around, as if I could rerun things, set a guiding, weighted hand onto little Shaquille’s or little Jamal’s sun-warmed head, walk with him over to the boardwalk for a funnel cake and some unangrified, nonjudgmental, free-form man-to-man about where one goes wrong in these matters. Possibly he’s a member of Cub Pack 31 and is at work on his larceny merit badge.

Nothing’s present in the backseat but a torn-out Asbury Park Press real estate page, a couple of red-and-white bent-legged Realty-Wise signs and the pink Post-it with Mike’s directions to Mullica Road. That seems long ago. Though yesterday wasn’t better than today. If anything, it was worse. I haven’t been in a fistfight today or had my neck twisted (yet). I haven’t been vilified, haven’t gotten in deep with my ex-wife, haven’t gone to a funeral. It may not be the right moment to count my blessings, but I do.

An enormous Invector RV as big as a team bus, with Indian arrow markings on its side, comes rumbling past us, its owner-operator a tiny balding figure with sunglasses inside the slide-back captain’s window. He frowns down at me with empathy and stops. He’s a “Good Sam” and has the smiling, stupid mouthy-guy-with-the-halo decal on one of his back windows. These birds are always Nazis. The captain’s sweet-faced wife’s behind him in the copilot’s space, craning past to see down to me and my lower-case woes. I know she feels empathy for me, too. But being peered down at, shattered glass around my feet, my car busted and an orange-skinned old loony as my teammate, makes me feel a wind-whistling loss far beyond empathy’s reach.

“Vehicle crime’s up twenty percent due to the Internet,” the Invector captain says from behind his sunglasses, surveying the scene from above. He’s weasly, with a puny little mustache that he may have just started. His wife’s saying something I can’t hear. Another man and woman, their lifelong friends, plus the square head of a Great Dane, appear in the back living-quarters window. All stare at me gravely, the dog included.

“What’d he say?” Wade says from behind my car.

I can’t repeat it. A saving force in the universe forbids me. Something tells me these travelers are from central Florida, possibly the Lakeland area, which makes me hate them. I shrug and look back at my window hole. I’m still holding Wade’s Panasonic, as if I was taping everything.

“No use callin’ the cops,” the land-yacht driver says, down from his little window. His wife nods. Their passengers have pulled the café curtains farther apart and are rubber-necking me and Wade and my broken vehicle. Both are holding tall-boys of Schlitz. I am another feature of the interesting New Jersey landscape, a textbook case of worsening crime statistics. Eighty percent of murders are committed by people who know their victims, which means many murders are probably not as senseless as they seem.

“I guess,” I say, and fake a grateful smile upward.

“Oh yeah!” From somewhere, a hidey-hole the police wouldn’t find — in a safe box, a glove compartment, under the sun visor — the land-yacht guy produces a nickel-plated revolver as big as Wade’s video cam, from whose barrel end he coolly blows invisible smoke like an old-west gunfighter who is also a good samaritan. “They don’t fuck with me,” he smirks. His wife gives him a halfhearted whap on the shoulder for language reasons. Their friends in the back laugh soundlessly. I’m sure they’re all Church of Christers.

“That oughta do it,” I say.

“That already has done it,” he says. “I’m ex-peace officer.” He lowers his big Ruger, S&W, Colt, whatever, smiles a goofy sinister smile, then revs his Invector into new life, issuing an order over his shoulder to his passengers, who disappear from the window. He sets some kind of blue ball-cap with U.S. Navy braiding onto his skint head. “Buckle up. We’re casting off,” a man’s voice says inside. The captain’s wife mouths something to me as her window of opportunity closes, but I can’t hear for the motor noise. “Okay,” I say. “Thanks.” But it’s the wrong thing to say as they sway away over the dry grass toward new marvels awaiting them.

C old pre-Thanksgiving winds whistle through my broken back window, stiffening my neck and making me feel like I’m catching something, even though I had a flu shot and am probably not. The advance weather of tropical depression Wayne is moving up the seaboard, and the once-nice sky has quilted into dense cotton batting, the cold sun that warmed us in the bleachers now retired. It’s November. Nothing more nor less.

The Queen Regent’s big finish has contributed little to Wade and me, only a bleak and barren humility, suggesting closure’s easier to wish for than locate. Driving back out Lake Avenue toward the Fuddruckers — through a precinct of crumbling mansions, a Dominican “hair station,” the Cobra motorcycle club and the Nubian Nudee Revue, all bordering a pretty green lake with low Parisian bridges crossing to a more prosperous town to the south (Ocean Grove) — I spy my little culprit window smasher, tootling along down the crumbling sidewalk in his big silver shoes and hooded sweatshirt, under the heavy hand of the Chicago Jew-Dog purveyor, a giant coffee-black Negro with woolly hair and big inner-tube biceps. Wade’s mooning out the window, sees these citizens and makes a satisfied grunt of approval, as if to say, See, now. More of this kind of parental oversight will get you less of that other stuff…pass on the vital gnosis of the civilization…a sense of what’s right…intact units, yadda, yadda, yadda. Better than a perp walk into social services in plastic bracelets, I’ll concede, and drive us on.