Richard Ford - Independence Day

“A guy once climbed over the fence while I was out back sacking leaves,” Ted says. “Susan and I took him inside, gave him some coffee and an egg salad sandwich. Turned out he was an alderman from West Orange. He’d just gotten in over his head. But he ended up helping me bag leaves for an hour, then going back over. We got a Christmas card from him for a while.”

“He’s probably back in politics,” I say, happy Ted has spared Phyllis this anecdote.

“Probably.”

“We’ll be in touch.”

“I’ll be right here,” Ted says. He closes the front door behind me.

I nside the car, the Markhams seem to want to get rid of me as fast as possible, and, more important, neither one makes a peep about an offer.

As we’re pulling out the drive we all notice another realtor’s car slowing to a stop, a young couple front and back — the woman videotaping the Houlihan place through the passenger window. The driver’s-side sign on the big shiny Buick door says BUY AND LARGE REALTY— Freehold, NJ .

“This place’ll be history by sundown,” Joe says flatly, seated beside me, his get-up-and-go oddly got-up-and-gone. No mention of any gas odor. Phyllis has had no real chance to browbeat him, but a look can raze cities.

“Could be,” I say, staring knives at the BUY AND LARGE Buick. Ted Houlihan may have already reneged on our exclusive , and I’m tempted to step out and explain some things to everybody involved. Though the sight of competing buyers could put a special, urgent onus to act on Phyllis and Joe, who watch these new people in disapproving silence as I drive us back down Charity Street.

On the way to Route 1, Phyllis — who has now put on dark glasses and looks like a diva — suddenly insists I drive them “around” so she can see the prison. Consequently, I negotiate us back through the less nice, bordering neighborhoods, curve in behind a new Sheraton and a big Episcopal church with a wide, empty parking lot, then merge out onto Route 1 north of Penns Neck, where, a half mile down the road in what looks like a mowed hayfield, there sits, three hundred yards back, a complex of low, indistinct flat-green buildings fenced all around and refenced closer in, which altogether constitutes the offending “big house.” We can see basketball backboards, a baseball diamond, several fenced and lighted tennis courts, a high-dive platform over what might very well be an Olympic-size pool, some paved and winding “reflection paths” leading out into open stretches of field where pairs of men — some apparently elderly and limping — are strolling and chatting and wearing street clothes instead of prison monkey garb. There’s also, apparently for atmosphere, a large flock of Canada geese milling and nosing around a flat, ovoid pond.

I, naturally, have passed this place incalculable times but have paid it only the briefest attention (which is what the prison planners expected, the whole shebang as unremarkable as a golf course). Though looked at now, a grassy, summery compound with substantial trees ranked beyond its boundaries, where an inmate can do any damn thing he wants but leave — read a book, watch color TV, think about the future — and where one’s debts to society can be unobtrusively retired in a year or two, it seems like a place anyone might be glad to pause just to get things sorted out and cut through the crap.

“It looks like some goddamn junior college,” Joe Markham says, still talking in the higher decibels but seeming calmer now. We’re stopped on the opposite shoulder, with traffic booming past, and are rubbernecking the fence and the official silver-and-black sign that reads: N.J. MEN’S FACILITY — A MINIMUM SECURITY ENVIRONMENT, behind which New Jersey, American and Penal System flags all rustle on separate poles in the faint, damp breezes. There’s no guardhouse here, no razor wire, no electric fences, no watchtowers with burp guns, stun grenades, searchlights, no leg-chewing canines— just a discreet automatic gate with a discreet speaker box and a small security camera on a post. No biggie.

“It doesn’t look that bad, does it?” I say.

“Where’s our house from here?” Joe says, still loudly, leaning to see across me.

We study the row of big trees which is Penns Neck, the Houlihan house on Charity Street invisible within.

“You can’t see it,” Phyllis says, “but it’s back there.”

“Out of sight, out of mind,” Joe says. He flashes a look back at Phyllis in her shades. A giant dump truck blows past, rocking the car on its chassis. “They have a gap in the fence where you can trade recipes.” He snorts.

“A cake with a file in it,” Phyllis says, her face unresigned. I try to catch her eye in the rearview, but can’t. “I don’t see it.”

“I goddamned see it,” Joe growls.

We sit staring for thirty more seconds, and then it’s off we go.

A s a negative inducement and a double cincher, I drive us out past Mallards Landing, where everything is as it was two hours ago, only wetter. A few workmen are moving inside the half-studded homes. A crew of black men is loading wads of damp sod off a flatbed and stacking them in front of the MODEL that’s supposedly OPEN but isn’t and in fact looks like a movie façade where a fictionalized American family would someday pay the fictionalized mortgage. It puts me and, I’m sure, the Markhams in mind of the prison we just left.

“Like I was saying to Phyllis,” I say to Joe, “these are in your price window, but they’re not what you described.”

“I’d rather have AIDS than live in that junk,” Joe snarls, and doesn’t look at Phyllis, who sits in the back, peering out toward the strobing oil-storage depot and the bulldozed piles of now unsmoldering trees. Why have I come here? she is almost certainly thinking. How long a ride back is it by Vermont Transit? She could be down at the Lyndonville Farmers’ Co-op at this very moment, a clean red kerchief on her head, she and Sonja blithely but responsibly shopping for the holiday — surprise fruits for the “big fruit bowl” she’ll take to the Independence Day bash. Chinese kites would be tethered above the veggie stalls. Someone would be playing a dulcimer and singing quirky mountain tunes full up with sexual double meanings. Labs and goldens by the dozens would be scratching and lounging around, wearing colorful bandanna collars of their own. Where has that all disappeared to, she is wondering. What have I done?

Suddenly crash-boom! Somewhere miles aloft in the peaceful atmosphere, invisible to all, a war jet breaks the barrier of harmonious sound and dream, reverbs rumbling toward mountaintops and down the coastal slope. Phyllis jumps. “Oh fuck,” she says. “What was that?”

“I broke wind. Sorry,” Joe says, smirking at me, and then we say no more.

A t the Sleepy Hollow, the Markhams, who have ridden the rest of the way in total motionless silence, seem now reluctant to depart my car. The scabby motel lot is empty except for their ancient borrowed Nova with its mismatched tires and moronic anesthetists’ sticker caked with Green Mountain road dirt. A small, pinkly dressed maid wearing her dark hair in a bun is flickering in and out the doorway to #7, loading a night’s soiled linen and towels into a cloth hamper and carting in stacks of fresh.

The Markhams would both rather be dead than anywhere that’s available to them, and for a heady, unwise moment I consider letting them follow me home, setting them up for a weekend of house discussion on Cleveland Street — a safe, depression-free base from which they could walk to a movie, eat a decent bluefish or manicotti dinner at the August Inn, window-shop down Seminary Street till Phyllis can’t stand not to live here, or at least nearby.