Richard Ford - Independence Day

“It’s all right, Myrlene,” I say at nothing, which causes the muumuu specter to recede into the shadows.

“What’s the matter?”

I turn quickly, and Betty McLeod is behind the screen, which she is this instant latching. She looks out at me with an unwelcoming frown. She’s wearing a quilted pink housecoat and holding its scalloped collar closed with her skinny papery fingers.

“Nothing’s the matter” I say, shaking my head in a way that probably makes me look deranged. “I think Mrs. Beavers just called the cops on me. I’m just trying to collect the rent.” I’d like to look amused about it, but I’m not.

“Larry isn’t here. He’ll be home tonight, so you’ll have to come back.” Betty says this as though I’d been yelling in her face.

“Okay,” I say, and smile mirthlessly. “Just tell him I came by like every other month. And the rent’s due.”

“He’ll pay you,” she says in a sour voice.

“That’s great, then.” Far back in the house, I hear a toilet flushing, water slackly then more vigorously touring the new pipes I had installed less than a year ago and paid a pretty penny for. Larry has no doubt just waked up, had his long morning piss and is holing up in the bathroom until I’m dispensed with.

Betty McLeod blinks at me defiantly as we both listen to the water trickle. She is a sallow, pointy-faced little Grinnell grad, off the farm near Minnetonka, who married Larry while she was doing a social work M.A. at Columbia and he was working himself through trade school at some uptown community college. He’d been a Green Beret and was searching for a way out of the city hell (all this I learned from the Harrises). Betty’s Zion Lutheran parents naturally had a conniption when she and Larry came home their first Christmas with baby Nelson in a bassinet, though they’ve reportedly recovered. But since moving to Haddam, the McLeods have lived an increasingly reclusive life, with Betty staying inside all the time, Larry going off to his night job at the mobile-home factory and the kids being their only outward signs. It’s not so different from many people’s lives.

In truth I don’t much like Betty McLeod, despite wanting to rent the house to her and Larry because I think they’re probably courageous. To my notice she’s always worn a perpetually disappointed look that says she regrets all her major life choices yet feels absolutely certain she made the right moral decision in every instance, and is better than you because of it. It’s the typical three-way liberal paradox: anxiety mingled with pride and self-loathing. The McLeods are also, I’m afraid, the kind of family who could someday go paranoid and barricade themselves in their (my) house, issue confused manifestos, fire shots at the police and eventually torch everything, killing all within. (This, of course, is no reason to evict them.)

“Well,” I say, moving back to the top step as if to leave, “I hope everything’s A-okay around the house.” Betty looks at me reproachfully. Though just then her eyes leave mine, move to the side, and I turn around to see one of our new black-and-white police cruisers stopping behind my car. Two uniformed officers are inside. One — the passenger — is talking into a two-way radio.

“He’s still over there!” Myrlene Beavers bawls from inside her house, totally lost from sight. “That white man! Go on and git him. He’s breakin’ in.”

The policeman who was talking on the radio says something to his partner-driver that makes them both laugh, then he gets out without his hat on and begins to stroll up the walk.

The cop, of course, is an officer I’ve known since I arrived in Haddam — Sergeant Balducci, who is only answering disturbance calls today because of the holiday. He is from a large local family of Sicilian policemen, and he and I have often passed words on street corners or chatted reticently over coffee at the Coffee Spot, though we’ve actually never “met.” I have tried to talk him out of a half-dozen parking tickets (all unsuccessfully), and he once assisted me when I’d locked my keys in my car outside Town Liquors. He has also cited me for three moving violations, come into my house to investigate a burglary years ago when I was married, once stopped me for questioning and patted me down not long after my divorce, when I was given to long midnight rambles on my neighborhood streets, during which I often admonished myself in a loud, desperate voice. In all these dealings he has stayed as abstracted as a tax collector, though always officially polite. (Frankly, I’ve always thought of him as an asshole.)

Sergeant Balducci approaches almost to the bottom of the porch steps without having looked at either Betty McLeod or me. He hitches up on the heavyweight black belt containing all his police gear — Mace canister, radio, cuffs, a ring of keys, blackjack, his big service automatic. He is wearing his iron-creased blue and black HPD uniform with its various quasi-military markings, stripes and insignia, and either he has gained weight around his thick midsection or he’s wearing a flak vest under his shirt.

He looks up at me as if he’d never laid eyes on me before. He is five-ten with a heavy-browed, large-pored face as vacant as the moon, his hair cut in a regimental flattop.

“We got a problem out here, folks?” Sergeant Balducci says, setting one polished police boot on the bottom step.

“Nothing’s wrong,” I say, and for some reason am breathless, as if more’s wrong here than could ever meet the eye. I mean, of course, to look guilt-free. “Mrs. Beavers just got the wrong idea in her head.” I know she’s watching everything like an eagle, her mind apparently departed for elsewhere.

“Is that right?” Sergeant Balducci says and looks at Betty McLeod.

“Nothing’s wrong,” she says inertly, behind her screen.

“We have a reported break-in in progress at this address.” Sergeant Balducci’s voice is his official voice. “Do you live here, ma’am?” He says this to Betty.

Betty nods but adds nothing helpful.

“And did anybody break into your house or attempt to?”

“Not that I know of,” she says.

“What’s your business here?” Officer Balducci says to me, gazing around at the yard to see if he can notice anything out of the everyday — a broken pane of glass, a bloody ball-peen hammer, a gun with a silencer.

“I’m the owner,” I say. “I was just stopping by on some business.” I don’t want to say I’m here hawking the rent, as if collecting rent were a crime.

“You’re the owner of this house?” Officer Balducci’s still glancing casually around but finally settles his gaze back on me.

“Yes, and that one too.” I motion toward the Harrises’ empty ex-home.

“What’s your name again?” he says, producing a little yellow spiral notebook and a ballpoint from his back pocket.

“Bascombe,” I say. “Frank Bascombe.”

“Frank …,” he says as he writes, “Bascombe. Owner.”

“Right,” I say.

“I think I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?” He looks slowly down, then up at me.

“Yes,” I say, and immediately picture myself in a lineup with a lot of unshaven sex-crime suspects, being given the once-over by Betty McLeod behind a two-way mirror. He has known a great deal about my life, once, but has simply let it recede.

“Did I arrest you one time for D and D?”

“I don’t know what D and D is, but you didn’t arrest me for it. You gave me a ticket twice”—three times, actually—“for turning right on red on Hoving Road after not making a full stop. Once when I didn’t do it and once when I did.”

“That’s a pretty good average.” Sergeant Balducci smiles, mocking me as he’s writing in his notebook. He asks Betty McLeod her name, too, and enters that in his little book.