Richard Ford - Independence Day

Though where Paul is concerned I’ve only just begun trying. And while I don’t subscribe to the “crash-bam” theory of human improvement, which says you must knock good sense into your head and bad sense out, yesterday may have cleared our air and accounts and opened, along with wounds, an unexpected window for hope to go free. A last in some ways, but a first in others. “The soul becomes,” as the great man said, by which he meant, I think, slowly.

L ast night, when I stopped in the moon-shot river village of Long Eddy, New York, a TOWN MEETING TONITE sign had been posted in both directions. “Reagan Cabinet Minister to Explain Things and Answer Questions” was their important agenda, there on the banks of the Delaware, where just below town single fishermen in ghostly silhouette stood in the darkly glittering stream, their rods and lines flicking and arcing through the hot swarms of insects.

At a pay phone on a closed-up filling station wall, I made a brief reconnaissance call down to Karl Bemish, to learn if the menacing “Mexicans” had had their fates sealed at the business end of Karl’s alley sweeper. (Not, I prayed.)

“Oh well, jeez, hell no, Franky. Those guys,” Karl said merrily from his cockpit behind the pop-stand window. It was nine. “The cops got them three skunks. They went to knock over a Hillcrest Farms over in New Hope. But the guy runnin’ it was a cop himself. And he came out the front blazin’ with an AK-47. Shot out the glass, all the tires, penetrated the engine block, cracked the frame, shot all three of ‘em in the course. None of them died, though, which is sort of a shame. Did it standing right on the sidewalk. I guess you need to be a cop to run a small business these days.”

“Boy,” I said, “boy-oh-boy.” Across silent, deserted Highway 97, all the windows in the belfried town hall were blazing and plenty of cars and pickups sat parked out front. I wondered who the “Reagan Minister” might’ve been — possibly someone on his way to prison and a Christian conversion.

“I bet you’re having a bang-up time, aren’t you, with your kid?” Mugs were clanking in the background. I could hear muffled, satisfied voices of late-night customers as Karl opened and shut the window slide and the cash register dinged. Good emanations, all.

“We had some problems,” I said, feeling numbed by the day’s menu of sad events, plus the driving, plus my skull and all my bones beginning to ache.

“Ahh, you prolly got your expectations jacked up too high,” Karl said, preoccupied yet annoying. “It’s like armies moving on their bellies. It’s slow going.”

“I never thought that’s what that meant,” I said, good emanations rising away into the mosquitoey darkness.

“D’you think he trusts you?” Clink, clink, clink. “Thanks, guy.”

“Yeah. I think he does.”

“Well, but you can’t tell when you’re getting anyplace with kids. You just have to hope they don’t grow up like these little Mexican twerps, pulling stickups and getting shot. I take myself out to dinner and drink a toast to good luck every third Sunday in June.”

“Why didn’t you have any kids, Karl?” A lone citizen of Long Eddy, a small man in a pale shirt, stepped out the front door to the top of the town hall steps, lit a cigarette and stood drinking in the smoke and considering the evening’s sweet benefactions. He was, I supposed, a disgruntled refugee from the cabinet minister’s explanations — possibly a moderate — and I felt envy for whatever he might’ve had on his mind just at that instant, the mere nothing-much of it: the satisfactions of optional community involvement, a point of honest disagreement with a trusted public servant, a short beer later with friends, a short drive home, a quiet after-hours entry to his own bed, followed by the slow caressing carriage to sleep at the hands of a willing other. Could he know, I wondered, how lucky he was? There was hardly a doubt he did.

“Oh, Millie and I tried our best,” Karl said drolly. “Or I guess we did. Maybe we didn’t do it right. Let’s see now, first you put it in, then …” Karl was obviously in a mood to celebrate not being robbed and murdered. I held the receiver out in the dark so I wouldn’t have to hear his rube’s routine, and in that splitting instant I missed New Jersey and my life in it with a grinding, exile’s poignancy.

“I’m just glad you’re all right down there, Karl,” I broke back in, without having listened.

“We’re pretty damn busy down here,” he brayed back. “Fifty paid customers since eleven a.m.”

“And no robberies.”

“What’s that?”

“No robberies,” I said more loudly.

“No. Right. We’re actually geniuses, Frank. Geniuses on a small scale. We’re what this country’s all about.” Clink, clink, clink, mugs colliding. “Thanks, pal.”

“Maybe,” I said, watching the pale-shirted man flick away his smoke, spit on the porch steps, run both hands back through his hair and reenter the tall door, revealing a coldly brilliant yellow light within.

“You can’t tell me ole Bonzo’s uncle’s that fulla shit,” Karl said vehemently, referring to our President of the moment, whose cabinet minister was only yards away from me. “Because if he’s that fulla shit, I’m fulla shit. And I’m not fulla shit. That’s what I know. I’m not fulla shit. Not everybody can say that.” I wondered what our customers could be thinking, hearing Karl bellowing away behind his little sliding screen about not being fulla shit.

“I don’t like him,” I said, though it made me feel debilitated to say so.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You believe God resides in all of us, nobility of man, help the poor, give it all away. Yakkedy, yakkedy, yak. I believe God resides in heaven, and I’m down here selling birch beer on my own.”

“I don’t believe in God, Karl. I believe it takes all kinds.”

“No it don’t,” he said. Karl might’ve been drunk or having another small stroke. “What I think is, Frank, you seem one way and are another, if you want to know the gospel truth, speaking of God. You’re a conservative in a fuckin’ liberal’s zoot suit.”

“I’m a liberal in a liberal’s zoot suit,” I said. Or, I thought, but certainly didn’t admit to Karl, a liberal in a conservative’s zoot suit. In three days I’d been called a burglar, a priest, a homosexual, a nervous nelly, and now a conservative, none of which was true. (It was not an ordinary weekend.) “I do like to help the poor and displaced, Karl. I sure as hell in fact dragged you to the surface when you were tits-up.”

“That was just for sport,” he said. “And that’s why you have so much effing trouble with your son. Your message is all mixed up. You’re lucky he’ll have anything to do with you at all.”

“Why don’t you bite my ass, Karl?” I shouted, standing in the dark, wondering if there wasn’t some simple, legal way to put Karl out on the street, where he’d have more time to practice psychology. (Spiteful thoughts are not unique to conservatives.)

“I’m too busy to gas with you now,” Karl said. I heard the cash register ding again. “Thanks a million. Hey, pardon me, ladies, you want your change, don’t you? Two cents is two cents. Next. Come on, don’t be shy, sweetheart.” I waited for Karl to blast back something else infuriating, something more about my message being mixed. But he simply put the phone down without hanging it up, as if he meant to return, so that for a minute I could hear him going about his business serving customers. But in a while I put my receiver back on the hook and just stared out at the sparkling, alluring river beyond me in the dark, letting my breathing come back to normal.