Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

Wade is exhausted. His rucked hands, in the skinny lap of his jackass pants, have begun just noticeably to tremble, and his old white-fringed head won’t exactly be still and is ducked, anticipating sleep — which he complains he does little of. He smells possibly more sour, and one of his scuffed patent-leather slip-ons taps the floor mat softly. Old people, no matter what anyone says, do not make the best company when spirits flag. They tend to sink toward private thoughts or embarrassed, uncomprehending silence, from whose depths they don’t give much of a shit about anybody else’s private thoughts — all the “great experience” they carry become essentially useless. Not that I blame him. Seeing an implosion has given him the peek into oblivion he wanted. It simply hasn’t changed anything.

I remember, years ago, after my father died and my mother and I were living in a sandy, ant-infested asbestos-sided house near Keesler, my mother one morning backed our big green Mercury right over my little black-and-white kitten, Mittens. Apparently nothing caught her notice, because she continued out onto the street and drove away to her job. It was not the best time in her life. But Mittens made a terrible squawling scream I heard inside the house. And when I raced out in a panic of knowledge and cold helplessness, there was the sad, mangled little cat, not long for the planet, flopping and wriggling, making awful strangling noises out of his crushed little gullet and turning me crazed, since my mother was gone and no one was there to help.

Next door, on our neighbor’s front porch, was the neighbor lady’s — Mrs. Mockbee’s — antique old daddy, a dapper turkey-necked fossil who told my mother he’d fought in the Civil War but of course hadn’t. Still, he called himself Major Mockbee and sat long days on his daughter’s concrete porch in a straw boater, red bow tie, suspenders, spats and seersucker suit, chewing, spitting and talking to himself while Keesler Saber jets flew over.

He alone was there when Mittens got flattened by my mother’s Merc. The only adult. And it was to him I fled, my mind a fevered chaos, across the driveway in the sweltering Mississippi morning, across the damp St. Augustine and up the three steps onto the porch. The poor little cat had already grown quiet, breathing his troubled last. But I pushed his smushed limp body straight into Major Mockbee’s field of vision — he knew me, we’d spoken before. And I said, tears squirting, my heart pounding, my limbs aching with fear (I shouted, really), “My mother ran over my cat. I don’t know what to do!”

To which Major Mockbee, after spitting a glob over the porch rail into the camellias, clearing his acrid old throat and putting on a pair of wire spectacles to have a better look, said, “I believe you’ve got yourself a Persian. It looks like a Persian. I’d say something’s wrong with it, though. It looks sick.”

Unfair, I know. But truth is truth. I sometimes think of old people as being like pets. You love them, amuse yourself with them, tease and humor them, feed them and make them happy, then take solace that you’re probably going to live longer than they will.

Back in the Barnegat Pines days of ’84—when Wade took life more as it tumbled, projected a seamless, amiable surface, kept his garage neat, his tools stowed, his oil changed, tires rotated, went to church most Sundays, watched the Giants not the Jets, prayed for both the Democrats and the Republicans, favored a humane, Vatican II approach to the world’s woes, inasmuch as we live amid surfaces, etc. — back then I just assumed he, like the rest of us (prospective son-in-laws think such things), would wake up one morning at four, feel queasy, a little light-headed, achy from that leaf raking he’d done the evening before and decide not to get up quite yet. Then he’d put his head back to the pillow for an extra snooze and somewhere around six and without a whimper, he’d soundlessly buy the farm. “He usually didn’t sleep that late, but I thought, well, he’s been under a strain at work, so I just let him—” Gone. Cold as a pike.

Only, age plays by strange rules. Wade’s now survived happiness to discover decrepitude. To be alive at eighty-four, he’s had to become someone entirely other than the smooth-jawed ex-Nebraska engineer who was cheered to see the sun rise, cheered to see it set. He’s had to adapt (Paul would say “develop”) — to shrink around his bones like a Chinaman, grow stringy, volatile, as self-interested as a pawnbroker, unable to see his fellowmen except as blunt instruments of his demon designs. Apart from merely liking him, and liking to match Wade-remembered to Wade-present tense, I’m also interested for personal reasons in observing if any demonstrable good’s to be had from getting as old as Methuselah, other than that the organism keeps functioning like a refrigerator. We assume persistence to be a net gain, but it still needs to be proved.

“Why don’t you come down to my place for dinner?” Wade says gruffly out of the blue, more energetic than I expected.

“Thanks, but I’ve got some duties.” Not true. We’re re-crossing 35, the route I’ll take home. Some commercial establishment — I don’t know where, but cultural literacy tells me it’s there — will be eager to fix my back window, if only in a temporary way until after the holiday. Busted Back Windows R-Us.

“What the hell duties have you got?” Wade cuts his jagged eyes at me, working his tongue tip along his lower lip. He gives one bulky beige hearing device a jab with his thumb. “You don’t have a new girlfriend, do you?”

“I have a wife. I have two wives. At least I—”

“Hah!” Wade makes a strangled noise that could be a cough or a last gasp of life. “You know the penalty for bigamy? Two wives! I had two. I’m single now. Never had so much fun.” Wade’s forgotten we’re acquainted. He’ll be calling me Ned next. Ned might be better than Frank now, since Frank’s not feeling so enthusiastic.

Evenings down at the Grove are not for everybody. Dinner’s at 6:00 and over by 6:25. Then the inmates (the ones that can) scuttle out to the common room for rapt-silence CNN viewing and alarming postprandial personal odors. Meals are color-coded — something brown, something red, something that once was green, with tapioca or syrupy no-sugar fruit to follow. If I went with Wade, we’d arrive early, have to wait in his two-room “en suite,” full of his bric-a-brac, his bathroom full of medicines, his framed Turnpike battle insignias and vestigial home furnishings from Barnegat Pines. We’d watch a Jeopardy rerun, then get in an argument, like we did the one time I was a guest and unexpectedly saw him naked. It’s no wonder Cade and family stay up in Pohatcong and don’t much look in. What can you do? Things are what they are. If we hang on too long, we reach the back side of the Permanent Period, where life doesn’t grow different, there’s just more of it until the lights go dim.

“I’ve got a surprise for you.” Wade’s white slip-on’s still tapping the floor mat, but his hand-trembling and neck-ducking have ceased. I’ve turned up the heater due to the back window draft. Suburbans have world-beating comfort systems, which is a reason to own one.

Wade claims he indulges in unbridled semi-sexual liaisons with several of the grannies at the Grove — in spite of being dead below the belt line. He charms them with his implosion videos and spicy narratives about things he’s seen in the backseats of stretch limos passing through his tollbooth. During my one visit, he had a tiny powdery-cheeked, pink-haired lawyer’s widow in her seventies as his squeeze. They smirked and winked, and Wade made lewd innuendos about night-time feats he was still capable of after two vodka gimlets and a Viagra chaser.