Richard Ford - Independence Day

“Where’d you get that thing?”

“I purchased it.” He still hasn’t looked around. “At the local Finast.” I would still like to ask him if he killed the helpless, driveway grackle, only it now seems too unwieldy a subject. It also seems preposterous to think he could be guilty. “I’ve got a new question to ask you.” He says this in a more assertive voice. Conceivably he’s spent the last four hours in a badly lit diner studying Emerson, fingering his Hacky Sack and mulling issues such as whether nature really suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom that can’t help itself; or whether every true man is a cause, a country and an age. Good issues for anyone to mull.

“Okay,” I say just as assertively, not wanting to seem as eager and encouraged as I am. From across the lawn the tart odor not of lilac but of a car’s exhaust reaches my nostrils. I hear an owl, invisible on a nearby spruce bough. Who-who, who-who, who-who .

“Okay, do you remember when I was pretty little,” Paul says very seriously, “and I used to invent friends? I had some talks with them, and they said things to me, and I’d get pretty involved doing it?” He stares fiercely forward.

“I remember it. Are you doing it again?” This is not about Emerson.

He looks around at me now, as if he wants to see my face. “No. But did it make you feel weird when I did that? Like make you mad or sick and want to puke?”

“I don’t think so. Why?” I’m able to make out his eyes. I’m certain he thinks I’m lying.

“You’re lying, but it’s okay.”

“I felt odd about it,” I say. “Not any of those other things, though.” I am not willing to be called a liar and have no defense in the truth.

“Why were you?” He doesn’t seem angry.

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

“Then think. I need to know. It’s like one of my rings.” He shifts back around and trains his gaze across toward the windows of the fancier inn across the road, where fewer warm and yellow room lights are on now. He wants my voice in his ears perfectly distilled. The waning moon has laid a silken, sparkling path dead across the lake, and above its luminance is arrayed a feast of summer stars. He makes, and I vaguely hear it, another tiny eeeck , a self-assuring sound, a little rallying eeeck .

“It made me feel a little weird,” I say uncomfortably. “I thought you were getting preoccupied with something that maybe was hurtful in the long run.” (Innocence, what else? Though that word seems not exactly right either.) “I wanted you not to get tricked. I guess maybe it wasn’t very generous of me. I’m sorry. Maybe I’m wrong too. I could’ve just been jealous. I am sorry.”

I hear him breathe, air hitting his bare knees where he has them hugged up to his chest. I feel a small loosening of relief, mixed of course with shame for ever making him feel his preoccupations mattered less than mine. Who’d have thought we’d talk about this?

“It’s all right,” he says, as if he knew a great, great deal about me.

“Why’d this come to mind?” I say, a warm hand still on his rocking chair, his back still turned to me.

“I just remember it. I liked doing it, and I thought you thought it was bad. Don’t you really think something’s wrong with me?” he says — unbeknownst to him, fully within his own command now, an adult for just this moment.

“I don’t think so. Not especially.”

“On a scale of one to five, with five being hopeless?”

“Oh,” I say. “One, probably. Or one and a half. It’s better than me. Not as good as your sister.”

“Do you think I’m shallow?”

“What do you do that’s shallow?” I wonder where he’s been to come back with these questions.

“Make noises sometimes. Other things.”

“They aren’t very important.”

“Do you remember how old Mr. Toby would be now? I’m sorry to ask that.”

“Thirteen,” I say bravely. “You did ask me about that today already.”

“He could still be alive, though.” He rocks forward, then back, then forward. Maybe life will seem better when Mr. Toby reaches the end of his optimum life span. I hold his chair steady. “I’m thinking I’m thinking again,” he says as if to himself. “Things don’t fit down together right for very long.”

“Are you worried about your court hearing?” I pinch his chair-back hard between my fingers and hold it nearly still.

“Not especially,” he says, copying me. “Were you supposed to give me some big advice about it?”

“Just don’t try to be the critic of your age, that’s all. Don’t be a wise-ankle. Let your best qualities come through naturally. You’ll be fine.” I touch his clean cotton shoulder, ashamed again, this time for waiting till now to touch him lovingly.

“Are you coming up with me?”

“No. Your mother’s going.”

“I think Mom’s got a boyfriend.”

“That’s not interesting to me.”

“Well, it should be.” He says this completely without commitment.

“You don’t know. Why do you think you remember everything and think you’re thinking?”

“I don’t know.” He stares out at headlights that are curving along the road in front of our inn. “That stuff just comes back around all the time.”

“Do the things seem important to you?”

“Importanter than what?”

“I don’t really know. Importanter than something else you might do.” The debating club, getting your Junior Life Saver’s certificate, anything in the here and now.

“I don’t want to have it forever. That’d be completely fucked up.” His teeth click down once and grind together hard. “Like today for a while, back at the basketball thing, it went away for a while. Then I got it back.”

We pause in silence again. The first adult conversation a man can have with his son is one in which he acknowledges he doesn’t know what’s good for his own child and has only an out-of-date idea of what’s bad. I don’t know what to say.

Through the trees now there comes into view a medium-size brown-and-white dog, a springer, loping toward us, a yellow Frisbee in his mouth, his collar jingling, his breath exaggerated and audible. Somewhere out behind him, a man’s hearty voice, someone out for a walk in the parky darkness. “Keester! Here, Keester,” the voice says. “Come on now, Keester. Fetch it! Keester — here, Keester.” Keester, on a mission of his own, stops, looks at us in the porch shadows, sniffs us, his Frisbee clenched tight, while his master strolls on, calling.

“Come on now, Keester,” Paul says. “Eeeck, eeeck.”

“It’s Keester, the wonder dog,” I say. Keester seems happy to be just that.

“I was bewildered when I saw I’d turned into a dog—“

“Named Keester,” I say. Keester stares up at us now, uncertain why we strangers would know his name. “I guess my thinking is,” I say, “you’re trying to keep too much under control, son, and it’s holding you back. Maybe you’re trying to stay in touch with something you liked, but you have to keep going. Even if it’s scary and you screw up.”

“Uh-huh.” He leans his head back toward me and looks up. “How can I not be a critic of my age? Is that something you think’s pretty great?”

“It doesn’t have to be great,” I say. “But for instance, if you go in a restaurant and the floor’s marble and the walls are oak, you wouldn’t wonder if it’s all fake. You’d sit down and order tournedos and be happy. And if you don’t like it, or you think it’s a mistake to eat there, you just don’t come back. Does that make any sense?”

“No.” He shakes his head confidently. “I probably wouldn’t stop thinking about it. Sometimes it’s not that bad to think about it. Keester,” he says in a sharp command voice to poor old baffled Keester. “Think! Think, boy! Remember your name.”