Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

“It’d get hot for the minks, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh well, you have to air-condition, Frank. Definitely. No way around that mountain. The start-up’s sky high, too.” Fincher is nodding like a banker, his blond and grayed head a pleasant puzzle of fresh financial wranglings. He crams both hands in his pockets and gives whatever’s down there another stern jingle. Though just for the moment I am struck by Fincher’s hair, the thinning top of which sinks into view as he glances ritually at his spectators. His hair is barbered into the dopey-blond Tab Hunter brushcut circa 1959, crisp as a saltine and with just a soupçon of odorless colloid to hold it in place. He is the perfect southerner-in-exile, a slew-footed mainstreet change jingler in awful clothes — a breed known only outside the south. At Vandy he was the tallish, bookish Memphian meant for a wider world — brushcut, droopy suntans, white bucks, campaign belt and a baggy long-sleeved Oxford shirt, hands stuffed in his pockets, arrogantly bored yet supremely satisfied and accustomed to the view from his eyrie. (Essentially the very way he is now.) At Hopkins he met and married a girl from Goucher who couldn’t stand the South and craved the suburbs as if they were the Athens of Pericles, and Fincher has been free ever since to jingle his change and philander around the links with the other southern renegades of whom, as I’ve said, there is a handsome cadre. When the awful day of reckoning comes to Fincher, I want to be somewhere far away in a boat, I know that.

“Frank,” Fincher says, having gone on talking about mink farms while I rode up over the clouds, “now don’t you think it’d be a high-water mark for the New South? You care about all those things, don’t you?”

“Not much,” I say, and the truth is not at all.

“Well now, Frank, everybody thought old Tom Edison was crazy, didn’t they?” Fincher pulls his ticket folder out of his back pocket and whacks it across his palm and smirks.

“I’m pretty sure everybody thought Edison was smart, Fincher.”

“Okay. You know what I mean, son.”

“It’s forward thinking, Fincher, I’ll give it that much.”

And Fincher suddenly assumes an unexpected dazed look as if that was the signal he has been waiting for. And for a moment we stand in silence among hundreds of milling passengers, just the way we might stand together at the window up in the Petroleum Club in Memphis, brainstorming and conniving over next year’s tail-gate party at the Commodore-Ole Miss game. Somehow or other Fincher has managed to set himself at ease, despite my reservations with his mink farm, and I actually admire him for it.

“You know, Frank. I’ve probably never said this to you.” Fincher nods his head like a sage old trial judge. “But I admire the hell out of what you do and how you lead your life. There’s a lot of us would like to do that, but lack the nerve and the dedication.”

“What I do’s pretty easy, Fincher. You’d probably be as good at it as I am. You ought to give it a try.” I squeeze my toes inside my shoes.

“Now you’d need to tie me up in chains and beat me with a stick to get me to write, Frank. I get the ants nowadays just writing a scrip.” Fincher’s mouth mulls down in a mock-grimace. He secretly knows he could do it as well as I can and most likely better, but feels the need to pay me some kind of unfelt compliment. “There’s a whole lot of us would like to mouse off with a little nurse, too,” Fincher says with a big wink.

I turn and look off down the crowded concourse and see Vicki skittering back with her insurance papers, walking with difficulty on her plastic high heels. She looks like a secretary on an urgent trip to the copy machine, elbows thrown out for balance, her feet seemingly made of wood. Fincher has seen her and recognized her from the hospital halls, and I am caught.

Fincher has suddenly adopted the old dirty-leg innuendo he perfected in the Phi Delt house down at Vanderbilt, and means to reduce me to fun or force a briny confidence. A sinister uneasiness surrounds us both. He is more untrustworthy than I thought, and I am as on my guard as any man who has something worth defending — though wretched ever to have let him hold me in a conversation. Fincher is threatening to pull the plug on all anticipation, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let him do it.

“Why don’t you mind your own business, Fincher,” I say, and look him dead in the eyes. I could punch him in the nose, bloody up his jackass pants, and send him home to Memphis in stitches.

“Now-now-now.” Fincher raises his chin and saunters back a half step onto his heels, glancing up over my shoulder toward Vicki. “We’re white men, here, Frank.”

“I’m not married anymore,” I say fiercely. “Anything I do is all right.”

“Yes indeed.” Fincher flashes his big-tooth smile, but it is for Vicki, not me. I am defeated and cannot help wondering if Fincher hasn’t been on this very track before me.

“Well, look what you see when you aren’t properly armed,” Vicki says, fastening a good grip on my arm, and giving Fincher a nasty little smile to let me know she’s got his number. I love her more than I can say.

Fincher mumbles something like “mighty small world,” but he has become half-hearted at best. “I got the insurance,” Vicki says and flutters the papers up to me, ignoring Fincher completely. “You might see a name you know if you look. I changed religions, too.” Her sweet face is gone plain with seriousness. It is a face I did not even want to see two moments before, but that I welcome now as a friend of my heart. I unfold the thick onionskin sheaf from Mutual of Omaha, and see Vicki’s name here as Victory Wanda Arcenault — and mine partway down as beneficiary. The sum is $150,000.

“What about the Pope?” I say.

“He’s still a good ole bird. But I’ll never see him.” She blinks her eyes up at me as if a light had burst into view around my ears. “I’ll see you , though.”

I would like to hug her till she squeaked, but not in Fincher’s presence. It would give him something to think about, and I want to give him nothing. At the moment he is standing with his mouth formed into a small, perfect o . “Thanks,” I say.

“I liked the idea of you spending all that money and thinking about me. It’d make me happy then wherever I was. You could buy a Corvette — only you’d probably want a Cadillac.”

“I just want you,” I say. “Anyway we’ll be together if it crashes.”

She rolls her eyes up at the high crystal-lighted airport ceiling. “That’s true, isn’t it?” She takes the policy back and kneels down to put it in her Le Sac bag.

“I ’spec I’ll just steal on off,” Fincher says, eyes flashy-darty since something has taken place here outside his ken. He has bent himself slightly at the waist and is on the verge of embarrassment, an emotion he has not felt, in all likelihood, for twenty years.

The concourse has begun welling up around us with people wearing paper tags on their breasts that say “Get-Away.” They appear from nowhere and begin flowing in the direction of gates 36–51. The air suddenly smells sweet and peanutty. A plane has been held up for late-arrivers, and a feeling of relief circles us like a spring breeze.

“It’s good to see you, Fincher,” I say. Fincher, of course, is no more a lecher than the rest of us, and I am relieved to let him and his grave Ichabod’s features slip away.

“Uh-huh, you bet,” Vicki says and glances at Fincher with distaste, a look he seems to accept with gratitude.

“I guess they’re lettin us on a little early.” Fincher flashes a smile.

“You have a good trip,” I say.