Richard Ford - Independence Day

Working over his Deluxe Belgian, piled with canned whipped cream and gelid strawberries, he declares that if we were to move here he would definitely invest in a “big paper route” (in Deep River, he says, this is an industry bossed over by “Italian greasers” who kick ass on whitebread kids who try to horn in). He likewise says, all sarcasm gone, gray eyes sparkling while he eats, that he’d feel obligated to visit the Hall of Fame once a week until he had it memorized—“Why else live here?”—and that he would eat here at The Water’s Edge “religiously every Sunday morning,” just like now, would find out all about the Cardiff Giant (another local attraction) and the Farmers’ Museum, possibly even work there as a guide, and would probably go out for baseball and football. He also surprisingly informs me, while I’m plowing through my own fast-congealing “Home Run Plate” and occasionally gazing out at a flock of mallards mooching popcorn from boat dock tourists, that he’s decided to read all of Emerson when he gets home, since he’ll probably be on probation and have more time for reading. He muddles his liquefying whipped cream around over his waffle cleats, getting it conscientiously into all sectors while explaining to me, head down, his Walkman still on his neck, that as a “borderline dyslexic” (this is news to me) he notices more than most people in his age bracket, since he doesn’t “process” things as fast and ends up having more opportunity to consider (or get completely derailed by) “certain subjects,” which is why he reads the labor-intensive New Yorker —“klepto’d out of Chuck’s crapper”—and why in fact he’s come to believe I need to ditch the realty business—“not interesting enough”—and move away from New Jersey — ditto — possibly to “a place sort of like this one,” and maybe get into a business like furniture stripping or bartending, something hands-on and low-stress, and “maybe get back to writing stories.” (He has always respected the fact that I was briefly a writer and keeps a signed copy of Blue Autumn in his room.)

My heart, needless to say, leaps to him. Beneath the turmoiled surfaces he means everyone everywhere all the best, security guards included. Cooperstown, even before he’s stepped through the doors of its magical Hall of Fame, has won a magical victory over him by inducing a stress-free idyll of small-pond-big-fish ordinariness he would dearly love to be his. (Seemingly all his bad-fitting rings have spun down into happy congruence.) Though I can’t help wondering if this brief flight of empire-sketching might not be the happiest moment of his life, and in a twinkling he may look back on it with no clarity, no grasp of the details. It may in fact turn out to cause him even greater anxiety and wider warping since he’ll never summon up such an idyll again in just this way and yet will never completely forget it or stop wondering about where it’s gone. This is the cautionary view I took when he was small and talked to people who weren’t there, a view I might’ve thought would protect him. I should’ve known, however, as I know now and as it ever is with kids and even those who’re older: nothing stays as it is for long and, once again, there’s no such thing as a false sense of well-being.

I should raise my Olympus now and snap his picture in this official happy moment. Only I can’t risk breaking his spell, since soon enough he’ll look again on life and conclude like the rest of us that he used to be happier but can’t remember exactly how.

“But look,” I say, staying in the spell with him, my hands cold, gazing at the top of his gouged head while he studies his waffle, his mind springing and lurching, his jaw muscles dedicatedly seeking the best alignment for his molars. (I love his fair, delicate scalp.) “I like real estate a lot. It’s both forward-thinking and conservative. It was always an ideal of mine to combine those two.”

He does not look up. The old skinny-armed fry cook, wearing a stained tee-shirt and a dirty sailor’s topper, leers at us from behind the row of empty counter stools and salt-and-pepper caddies. He senses we’re locking horns — over a divorce, a change in private schools, a bad report card, a drug bust, whatever visiting dads and sons usually bicker over within his earshot (usually not a father’s midlife career choices). I flash him a threatening look that makes him shake his head, hang a damp cigarette from his snaggly mouth and reconsider his grill.

Only three other diners are here with us — a man and woman who aren’t talking, merely sitting by a window staring at the lake over coffee, and an older, bald man in green pants and green nylon shirt playing an illegal poker machine in the dark and farthest corner, once in a while scoring a noisy win.

“You know the tightrope walker act? About falling off and having that be your great trick?” Paul is ignoring what I’ve declared about the delicate balance between progressivism and conservatism, with the fulcrum being the realty business. “That was just a joke.” He looks up at me, narrows his eyes over his three-quarters scarfed waffle and blinks his long lashes. He is a smarter boy than any.

“I guess I knew that,” I lie, clamping eye contact back on him. “But I took you seriously, though. I was just pretty sure you knew that making wild changes didn’t have much to do with real self-determination, which is what I want you to have, and which is really pretty much a natural sort of thing. It’s not that complicated.” I smile at him goonily.

“I’ve decided where I want to go to college.” He inserts one finger in the slick residue of maple syrup, which he’s moated all around his waffle, drawing a circle, then licking the sweet off with a pop.

“I’m all leers,” I say, which makes him give me an arch look; one more of our jokes from the trunk of lost childhood, Take it for granite. A new leash on life. Put your monkey where your mouse is . He, like me, is drawn to the fissures between the literal and the imagined.

“There’s this place in California, okay? You go to college and work on a ranch and get to brand cows and learn to rope horses.”

“Sounds good,” I say, nodding, wanting to keep our spirit level high.

“Yep, it is,” he says, a young Gary Cooper.

“You think you can study astrophysics on a cayuse?”

“What’s a cayuse?” He’s forgotten about being a cartoonist. “Aren’t we going fishing?” he says, and quickly moves his gaze outward to where the big lake extends from the boat slips toward folded indistinct mountain headlands. On the dock’s edge a girl is seated wearing a black bathing suit and an orange float vest, a pair of short water skis fastened to her feet. A sleek speedboat with her friends inside, two boys and a girl, rocks at idle fifty feet out, its motor gurgling. All in the boat are watching her on the dock. Suddenly the girl flags her hand up and wide. One boy turns and guns the boat, which even through our window glass gurgles loudly, then roars, seems for an instant to hesitate, then surges, almost leaps to life, its nose up, its rear sunk in foam, catching the thick rope-slack and yanking the girl off the dock and onto her skis, lariating her forward over the water’s mirror top away from us, until she is — faster than would seem possible — small upon the lake, a colorless dot against the green hills. “That’d be the butt, Bob,” Paul says, watching fiercely. He has seen this, almost exactly, on the Connecticut yesterday, but offers no sign of remembering.

“I guess we’re not going fishing,” I admit reluctantly. “I don’t think we’ve got time now. I had a big imagination. I just thought we had forever. We may have to miss Canton, Ohio, and Beaton, Texas, too.” It doesn’t matter to him, I think, though I wonder bleakly if one day he’ll be my guardian and do a better job. I also wonder just as bleakly if Ann actually has a boyfriend, and if so where she meets him, and what she wears and if she lies to truth-teller Charley the way I used to lie to her (my guess is she does).