Richard Ford - The Lay of the Land

“What?” he snaps. He’s putting his video cam down on the passenger’s side seat as if it was his honored guest.

“Tell Ricki I said howdy.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that.”

“When am I likely to see you again? When’s our next blow-up?” Wade has forgotten I’ve invited him for Thanksgiving, an offer I now silently retract in self-defense.

“I dunno.” He’s begun crawling into his car from the wrong side.

“Wade, are you okay in there?” My smile dwindles to a half smile of concern.

“How do I look?” His baggy ass and the scuffed soles of his slip-ons face me out of his open car door.

I could get the Asbury cop to come confiscate Wade’s car keys if I thought he’d lost his marbles and presented a threat to the public. Except I’d have to drive him home. “You got your keys?” I sing out hopefully.

“Kiss my ass.” He’s struggling down onto his donut, his feet to the floor, back to his cushion. I hear him breathe sternly. “Goddamn piece of shit.”

“What’s happening in there, Wade? You need some help?”

Wade burns a scowl back at me, then looks at his instruments. “Goddamn door’s busted. Some idiot woman backed into me at CVS. Now get your silly ass out and close my door. You nunce.” He’s got his little biscuit hands fastened to the wheel at ten and two, like Mike Mahoney. His keys dangle from the ignition, where they’ve been the whole time. He gets her cranked as I get out into the cold. It’s sizing up to rain more. Yesterday’s weather is hanging over the seaboard like a bad memory. Plus there’s tropical disturbance Wayne.

“I wanted you to get to see Vicki,” Wade says. “She wants to see you.” He can’t remember her new name and won’t look at me, only out at the Fuddruckers’ chained and locked front door. He’s resigned more than mad and, like all good fathers, ineptly keeping vigil for his offspring’s improvement. “We’ll have lunch” is not what he wants to hear. Wade wants me in the steak place with his honey bunch, ordering our third martini, with love — belated, grateful, willing, candid, budding and, above all, permanent — saturating the dark, rich airs like gardenias. It’s his last try to set things right before his hour’s called.

Though based on history, there’s nothing I can do. The last thing Vicki Arsenault ever said to me sixteen years ago, from her bachelorette apartment in Pheasant Run on the Hightstown Pike, by phone to my former, since-demolished family home in Haddam, was, “Woo, boy-hidee, you like to of fooled me.” She talked in a wide, east Dallas, barrel-racer lingo, just right for barrooms, bronco-buster sex and no bullshit but hers. I loved it.

“How did I fool you, sweetheart? I love you so much,” I said. It was spring. The copper beech was in abundance. The wisteria and lilacs in bloom. The dreamy time of love’s labors lost.

“‘Sweetheart’?” she pooh-poohed. “Love me ? Opposites cain’t love. Opposites just attract. And we’re done through with that. Least I am. But I almost took a tumble. I’ll give you that.” I remember her wonderful tongue-cluck, like a jockey signaling giddy-up.

“I still want you to marry me,” I said. And I dearly did — would’ve in a minute and been happy. Although it would’ve been the lamp business more than the realty business, the unexamined life more than the life steeped in reflection and contingency. Win-win.

“Yeah, but first we’d get married”—I knew she was beaming her big Miss Cotton Bowl smile—“and then we’d have to get divorced. And I need somebody who’ll get me all the way to death. And that id’n you.”

Death. Even then!

“I’ll give a call in the next couple days, Wade.” I’m leaning into his open door, radiating bad faith. “Maybe Ricki’ll have time to grab lunch. It’d be good to catch up.” The prospect makes my brain swell.

Wade carefully uncouples his spectacles from his crusted ears and gives his old eyes a good knuckle-kneading that’s probably painful. He turns toward me, sockets hollowed, pale and knobby, his left pupil orbited out to left field. Age is not gentle or amusing.

“I can’t talk you into it?” he says, insulted.

“I guess not, Wade.” I smile the way you would into the upside-down mirror of an iron-lung patient. “I’ll call. We’ll stage a lunch.”

“You’re not vital anymore. You know that?” He sniffs as if my words carried a bad odor, then looks disgusted and shakes his head. His Olds is idling. The Asbury cop, his gray exhaust visible in falling temps, eases out into traffic and slowly motors away. The wind has a bite that stings my butt. Across the access road, the Parkway groans with the hum-bum-bum sounds of pre-Thanksgiving hurry-up.

“I’m working on vital,” I say. “It’s on my short list.” I try a smile.

“Hunh,” Wade grumps. He doesn’t know what I’m talking about. “You’re a nunce. I already said that.”

“Could be true.” I’m holding his car door open.

“Remember the three boats, Franky?” The three boats parable is Wade’s favorite. He’s told me the three boats story six times in support of six different points of reference — most recently the presidential race and the American people’s blindness to the obvious.

“I do, Wade. I only get three boats.”

“What?” He can’t hear me. “You only get three, and you already had two.” He gives me a mean threat-look across the seat, where his silver Panasonic lies full of new implosion footage. “This is your last one.” My first pair of boats, I take it, symbolizes my two marriages, though they could also reference my prostate condition.

“Okay, I’ll give it some serious thought. Maybe it’ll make me more vital. I hope so.”

“How long has it been for you?” Wade drops the Olds into gear, causing a sinister metal-on-metal ker-klunk.

“How long’s what been? There’s been a lot of ‘it’s’ this year. Hard to keep ’em straight.”

“Since you were with anybody?” His scraggly old brows dart up lewdly.

“Since I was with anybody?” Wade’s lips tremble with a hint of below-the-belt seaminess. “What do you mean?” I’m still holding open the passenger door, but I must be squeezing it, because my thumb’s gotten numb. What’s the matter with the world all of a sudden?

“Ah, forget it. The hell with you.” He’s scowling up into his rearview. Conversation over. He’s ready to make a move.

“I don’t want to think about the implications of what you’re saying, Wade.” Why does this sound so pompous and stupid?

“Yeah, yeah,” Wade growls. “Think, think, thinky, think. Where do you think you’re gonna end up?”

“Go fuck yourself. Okay?” I stand back and give his car door a powerful slam closed. I can just hear him say, “Yeah, maybe I will.”

Wade’s begun backing up, using his mirror in the tried-and-true manner of the old and joint-frozen. I have to step lively since he hauls on the wheel like a stevedore, swerves and nearly swipes my foot. I can see his mouth working, in furious converse with the face in the rearview.

“Be careful, Wade,” I call out. He’s glued to his mirror and can’t see the fat red postpole holding aloft the gold sunburst Fuddruckers’ WORLD’S GREATEST HAMBURGERS sign, plus a smaller white one that says EAT HEALTHY! TRY AN OSTRICH BURGER!

The old Eighty Eight crunches straight into the postpole with a hollow metallic bung noise, the whole vehicle caroming back and jangling to a stop, giving Wade a jolt inside. He glowers up at the mirror, half-cocks his head around as three black letters off the Ostrich Burger sign spiral down — the O, the N and the H —and clatter onto his rusted-through vinyl roof.