Richard Ford - Independence Day

Paul looks me over seriously — chinos, Weejuns, yellow socks, Black Watch plaid short-sleeve from Mountain Eyrie Outfitters in Leech Lake, Minnesota, clothes I’ve worn as long as he’s known me, the same as I wore the day I stepped off the New York Central in Ann Arbor in 1963 and am at home in still. Generic clothing.

“No,” Paul says.

“But see,” I say, the crunched Self-Reliance still under my thigh, “in my line of work I’m supposed to dress in a way that makes clients feel sorry for me, or better yet superior to me. I think I accomplish that pretty well.” Paul looks over at me again with a distasteful look that might be ready to slide into sarcasm, only he doesn’t know if I’m making fun of him. He says nothing. Though what I’ve just told him, of course, is merely true.

I steer us back now through a nice but less nice neighborhood of red-and green-shuttered houses on narrower streets, thinking by this route to wind back to 28 and find the Deerslayer. Plenty’s for sale here too. Cooperstown, it seems, is up for grabs.

“What’s your new tattoo say?”

Paul instantly holds his right wrist up for me to see, and what I make out upside down is the word “insect,” stained in dull-blue Bicpen-looking ink right into his tender flesh. “Did you think that up by yourself,” I say, “or did someone help you?”

Paul sniffs. “In the next century we’re all going to be enslaved by the insects that survive this century’s pesticides. With this I acknowledge being in a band of maladapted creatures whose time is coming to a close. I hope the new leaders will treat me as a friend.” He again sniffs, then worries his nose with his dirty fingers.

“Is that a lyric from some rock song?” I’m getting us back into the traffic flow, heading toward the center of town again. We have made a circle.

“It’s just common knowledge,” Paul says, rubbing his knee with his wart.

Almost immediately I see a sign I missed when Paul and I were arguing: a tall, rail-thin, buckskin-and-high-moccasined pioneer man in profile, holding a flintlock rifle, standing on a lakeshore with triangular pine trees in the background. DEERSLAYER INN STRAIGHT AHEAD. A blessed promise.

“Don’t you have a better view of human progress than that?” I push right out across Main among the late-Saturday traffic and trolley vans shunting tourists hither and yon. Lake Otsego is unexpectedly straight out ahead — lush, Norwegian-looking headlands miles away on its far shore, lumping north into the hazy Adirondacks.

“Too many things are bothering me all the time. It gets to be old.”

“You know,” I say, ignoring him, “those guys who founded this whole place thought if they didn’t shake loose of old dependencies they’d be vulnerable to the world’s innate wildness—“

“By place do you mean Cooperstown?”

“No. I don’t. I meant something else.”

“So who was Cooperstown named after?” he says, facing toward the sparkling lake as if it were space he was considering flying off into.

“James Fenimore Cooper,” I say. “He was a famous American novelist who wrote books about Indians playing baseball.” Paul flashes me a look of halfway pleasant uncertainty. He knows I’m tired of him and may be making fun of him again. Though I can also see in his features — as I have other times, and as the dappled light passes over them — the adult face he’ll most likely end up with: large, grave, ironic, possibly gullible, possibly gentle, but not likely so happy. Not my face, but a way mine could’ve been with fewer coping skills. “Do you think you’re a failure?” I say, slowing across from the Deerslayer, ready to turn up the drive through two rows of tall spruces beyond which is the longed-for inn, its Victorian porches shaded deep in the late day, the big chairs I’ve daydreamed about occupied by a few contented travelers, but with room for more.

“At what?” Paul says. “I haven’t had enough time to fail yet, I’m still learning how.” I wait for traffic to clear. Lake Otsego is beside us now, flat and breezeless through an afternoon haze.

“I mean at being a kid. An ass-o-lescent. Whatever it is you think you are now.” My blinker is blinking, my palms gripping the wheel.

“Sure, Frank,” Paul says arrogantly, possibly not even knowing what he’s agreeing to.

“Well, you’re not,” I say. “So you’re just going to have to figure out something else to think about yourself, because you’re not. I love you. And don’t call me Frank, goddamn it. I don’t want my son to call me Frank. It makes me feel like your fucking stepfather. Why don’t you tell me a joke. I could use a joke. You’re good at that.”

And then a sudden stellar quiet settles on us two, waiting to turn, as if a rough barrier had been reached, tried, failed at but then briskly gotten over before we knew it or how. I for some reason sense that Paul might cry, or at least nearly cry — an event I haven’t witnessed in a long time and that he has officially ceased yet might try again just this once for old times’ sake.

But in fact it’s my own eyes that go hot and steamy, though I couldn’t tell you why (other than my age).

“Can you hold your breath for fifty-five seconds straight?” Paul says as I swing up across the highway.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Do it,” Paul says, looking straight at me, deadpan. “Just stop the car.” He is opaque and gloating with something hilarious.

And so, in the shady drive to the Deerslayer, I do. I hit the brakes. “All right, I’m holding it,” I say. “This better be really funny. I’m ready for a drink.”

He clamps his mouth shut and closes his eyes, and I close mine, and we wait together in the a/c wind and engine murmur and thermostat click while I count, one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand …

When I closed my eyes the dashboard digital read 5:14, and when I open them it reads 5:15. Paul has his open, though he seems to be counting silently like a zealot speaking some private beseechments to God.

“Okay. Fifty-five. What’s the punch line? I’m in a hurry.” My foot is easing off the brake. “‘I didn’t know shit could hold its breath so long?’ Is it that good?”

“Fifty-five is how long the first jolt lasts in the electric chair. I read that in a magazine. Did you think it seemed like a long time or a short time?” He blinks at me, curious.

“It seemed pretty long to me,” I say unhappily. “And that wasn’t very funny.”

“Me too,” he says, fingering his bunged-up ear rim and inspecting his finger for blood. “It’s supposed to knock you out, though.”

“That’d be a lot better,” I say. Parents, of course, think about dying day and night — especially when they see their children one weekend a month. It’s not so surprising their children would follow suit.

“You just lose everything when you lose your sense of humor,” Paul says in a mock-official voice.

And I’m back in gear then, tires skidding on pine needles and up into the cool and (I hope) blissful removes of the Deerslayer. A bell is gonging. I see an old belfry stand in the side yard being clappered by a smiling young woman in a white tunic and chef’s hat, waving to us as we arrive, just like in some travelogue of happy summer days in Cooperstown. I wheel in feeling as if we were late and everybody had been distracted by our absence, only now we’ve arrived and everything can start.

The Deerslayer is as perfect as I’d hoped — a wide, rambling, spavined late Victorian with yellow scalloped mansards, spindle-lathed porch railings, creaky stairs leading to long, shadowy, disinfectant-smelling hallways, little twin pig-iron bedsteads, a table fan, and a bath at the end of the hall.