Richard Ford - Independence Day

As soon as I saw this one I angled straight toward the lot, though at the precise moment I turned I apparently dozed off and drove right across the white-tire barrier, over a petunia bed, and gave one of the green picnic tables a board-cracking whack, which brought the owner, Karl Bemish, booming out the side door in his paper cap and his apron, wanting to know what in the hell I featured myself doing, and pretty sure I was drunk and in need of being arrested.

None of it came to anything unhappy (far from it). I was naturally enough awakened by the crash, climbed out apologizing at a high rate of speed, offered to take a breathalyzer, peeled off three hundred bucks to cover all damages and explained I’d been fishing, not closing down some gin mill in Frenchtown, and had veered into the lot because I thought the place was so goddamned irresistible out here by the brook with strings of bulbs and white trees, and in fact still wanted a root beer if he could see his way clear to selling me one.

Karl let himself be talked out of being mad by stuffing my wad of money in his apron pocket and relying on good character to concede that sometimes innocent things happen and sometimes (if rarely) the stated cause of an event is the real cause.

With my root beer in hand, I took a table that wasn’t cracked and sat smilingly beside babbling Trendle Brook, my thoughts on my father stopping with me in just such places in the long-ago Fifties, in the far-away South, when as a Navy purchasing officer he had taken me on trips so my mother could recover from the chaos of being home alone with me night and day.

After a while Karl Bemish came out, having switched off all but one string of bulbs. He was carrying another root beer for me and a real suds for himself, and sat down across the table, happy to have a late-night chit-chat with a stranger who in spite of some initial suspiciousness seemed to be a good person to end the day with by virtue of being the only one around.

Karl, of course, did all the talking. (There were apparently insufficient opportunities to talk to his customers through the sliding window.) He was a widower, he said, and had been employed in the ergonomics field up in Tarrytown for almost thirty years. His wife, Millie, had died three years before, and he’d just decided to take his retirement, cash in his company stock and go looking for something imaginative to do (this sounded familiar). He knew plenty about ergonomics, a science I’d never even heard of, but nothing about retail trade or the food service industry or dealing with the public. And he admitted he’d bought the birch beer stand totally on a whim, after seeing it advertised in an entrepreneurs magazine. Where he had grown up, in the little upstate Polish community of Pulaski, New York, there’d been a place just like his right by a little stream that ran into Lake Ontario, and it of course was the “real meeting place” for all the kids and the grownups too. He’d met his wife there and even remembered working in the place and wearing a brown cotton smock with his name stitched in darker brown script on the front and a brown paper cap, though he admitted he could never find any actual evidence he’d worked there and had probably just dreamed it up as a way better to furnish his past. He remembered that place and time, though, as the best of his life, and his own birch beer stand served, he felt, to commemorate it.

“Of course, things haven’t worked out exactly perfect here now,” Karl said, taking his white paper cap off and setting it on the sticky planks of the picnic table, revealing his smooth, lacquered-looking dome, shiny under the string of lights strung back to the Depot. He was sixty-five and a big sausage-handed, small-eared guy who looked more like he might’ve loaded bricks for a living.

“It sure seems awful good to me,” I said, taking an admiring look around. Everything was newly painted, washed, picked up, as GI’d as a hospital grounds. “I’d think you pretty much had a gold mine out here.” I nodded approvingly, full to the gills with rich and creamy root beer.

“Super my first year and a half. I did super,” Karl Bemish said. “The previous guy had let the place run down. And I put some money in it and fixed everything up. People in the little communities out here said it was great to see an old place restored and wanted to see it catch on again, and people like you stopped by late. It became a meeting place again, or started to. And I guess I got overexcited, ’cause I added a machine to make these slush puppies. I had some cash flow. Then I bought a yogurt machine. Then I bought a trailer kitchen to cater parties with. Then I got this idea from the entrepreneurs magazine to buy an old railroad dining car to fix up as a restaurant and put it beside here; maybe have a waiter out there, a limited menu, rig it up with chrome fixtures, original tables, bud vases, carpets. For special occasions.” Karl looked over his shoulder in the direction of the brook and frowned. “It’s all back there. I bought the goddamn thing from a place in Lackawanna and had it trucked down here in two pieces and set up right on a length of track. That’s about when I ran out of money.” Karl shook his head and brushed at a mosquito camped out on his pate.

“That’s a shame,” I said, peering into the dark and making out a blacker-than-normal hulk sitting still and ominous in the night. The original bad idea.

“I had big plans going,” Karl Bemish said, and smiled across the table in a defeated way meant to suggest again that innocent things happen but that big ideas are inherently big mistakes.

“But you’re still doing fine,” I said. “You can just hold off on expansion till you renew your capital base.” These were expressions I’d only recently learned in the realty business and hardly knew the meaning of.

“I’m carrying pretty stiff debt,” Karl said dolefully, as if that were equivalent to toting around a hunk of lead in his heart. With his flat pink thumbnail he stabbed at a hardened root beer droplet bonded to the tabletop. “I’m about, oh, six months from two tits up out here.” He sniffed and dug away at the scab of sweetness, baked on by a long summer of shitty luck.

“Can’t you recapitalize?” I said. “Sell off the dining car, maybe take out an equity loan?” More realty lingo.

“Don’t got the equity,” Karl said. “And no one wants a goddamned dining car in central Jersey.”

I was ready to drag myself home by then, have a real drink and pile into bed. But I said, “So what do you think you’re going to do?”

“I need an investor to come in and clear my debt, then maybe trust me not to run us into the ground again. You know anybody like that? ‘Cause I’m going to lose this pop stand before I have a chance to prove I’m not a complete asshole. It’ll be too bad.” Karl was not making an attempt at a joke, as my son would’ve.

I looked around behind Karl Bemish, at his little orange birch beer outlet — neat, hand-lettered signs all over the trees: “Walk dogs here ONLY!” “PLEASE don’t litter.” “Our customers are our BEST FRIENDS.” “THANKS, come again.” “ BIRCH BEER is GOOD for YOU.” It was a sweet little operation, with, I imagine, plenty of local goodwill and a favorable suburban-semi-rural location — a few old farms nearby, with small but prospering vegetable patches, the odd nursery cum cider mill, some decades-old hippie pottery operations and one or two mediocre, mostly treeless golf courses. New housing soon would be sprouting up in the open pastures. Traffic flow was good at the intersection of 518 and 31, where there was already a two-way stop and as growth continued there would have to be a light, since 31, if no longer the main road, was at least the scenic former main road from the northwestern counties down to the state house in Trenton. All of which spelled money.