Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

“It’s okay with me. But you’re a nut, I’ll tell you that.” She is gay now. “A real Brazil nut. But I like you. Is that all you called up here to say?”

“You just wait’ll I get back,” I say, “I’ll….” But for some reason I do not finish the sentence.

“Do you miss your wife?” she says as gay as can be.

“Are you crazy?” It is clear she has not gotten my point.

“Oh boy. You’re some kind of something,” she says. I hear silverware clink against plates, the sound of the receiver getting far away from her. “Now you hurry back and let me go and watch this.” Clickety-click.

Ten minutes later we are into the rolling landscape of snowy farmettes and wide cottage-bound lakes beyond the perimeter of true Detroit suburbia, the white-flight areas stretching clear to Lansing. It is here that Mr. Smallwood suggests we turn off the meter and arrange a flat rate, which, when I agree, starts him whistling and suggesting he could hang around till I’m ready to go back. He has friends, he says, in nearby Wixom, and we agree that I’ll be ready to roll by noon. I remember, briefly, a boy I knew in college from Wixom, Eddy Loukinen, and I enjoy a fond wonder as to where Eddy might be — running a car dealership in his hometown, or down in Royal Oak with his own construction firm. Possibly an insulated window frame outlet in the UP — trading cars every year, checking his market shares, quitting smoking, flying to the islands, slipping around on his wife. These were the futures we all had looking at us in 1967. Good choices. We were not all radicals and wild-eyes. And most of my bunch would tell you they’re glad to have a good thirty years left to see what surprises life brings. The possibility of a happy ending. It is not unique to me.

It takes two gas station stops to find Herb’s. Both owners claim to know him and to work on his cars exclusively. And both give me a suspicious, bill-collector look, as if I might be looking for big Herb to do him harm or steal his fame. And in each instance Mr. Smallwood and I drive off feeling that phone calls are being made, a protective community rising to a misconstrued threat against its fallen hero. All of which makes me realize just how often I am with people I don’t know and who don’t know me, and who come to know me — Frank Bascombe — only as a sportswriter. It is possibly not the best way to go into the world, as I explained to Walter two nights ago; with no confidants, with no real allies except ex-allies; no lovers except a Vicki Arcenault or her ilk. Though maybe this is the best for me, given my character and past, which at most are inconclusive. I could have things much worse. At least as a stranger to almost everyone and a sportswriter to boot, I have a clean slate almost every day of my life, a chance not to be negative, to give someone unknown a pat on the back, to recognize courage and improvement, to take the battle with cynicism head-on and win.

Out front of Herb’s house, I’m greeted from around the side by a loud “Hey now!” before I can even see who’s talking. Mr. Smallwood stares out his closed cab window. He has heard of Herb, he’s said, though he has the story of Herb’s life wrong and thinks Herb is a Negro. In any case he wants to see him before he cuts out for Wixom.

Herb’s house is on curvey little Glacier Way, a hundred yards from Walled Lake itself and not far from the amusement park that operates summers only. I came here long ago, when I was in college, to a dense, festering old barrely dancehall called the Walled Lake Casino. It was at the time when line dances were popular in Michigan, and my two friends and I drove over from Ann Arbor with the thought of picking up some women, though of course we knew no one for forty miles and ended up standing against the firred, scarred old walls being wry and sarcastic about everyone and drinking Cokes spiked with whiskey. Since then, Mr. Smallwood has informed me, the Casino has burned down.

Herb’s house is like the other houses around it — a little white Cape showing a lot of dormered roof and with a small picture window on one side of the front door. The kind of house a tool-and-dye maker would own — a sober Fifties structure with a small yard, a two-car garage in back and a van in the drive with HERB’S on its blue Michigan plates.

Herb wheels into view from around the corner of the house, making tire tracks in the melting snow. The moment he is visible, Mr. Smallwood puts his cab in gear and goes whooshing off down the street and around the corner, leaving me alone in the front yard with Herb Wallagher, stranded like a prowler.

“I thought you’d be bigger,” Herb shouts with a big gap-toothed grin. He shoots a great hand out at me, and when I embrace it he nearly hauls me down to the ground.

“I thought you’d be smaller, Herb,” I say, though this is a lie. He is much smaller than I thought. His legs have shrunk and his shoulders are bony. Only his head and arms are good-sized, giving him a gaping, storkish appearance behind his thick horn-rims. He has twice cut himself shaving and doctored it with toilet paper, and is wearing a T-shirt that says BIONIC on the front, and a pair of glen-plaid Bermudas below which a brand new pair of red tennis shoes peek out. It is hard to think of Herb as an athlete.

“I like to be outside on a day like this, Frank. It’s a wonderful day, isn’t it?” Herb looks all around at the sky like a caged man, making his head go loose on its stem.

“It’s a great day, Herb.” We both, for the moment, affect the corny accents of Kansas hay farmers, though Herb is dead wrong about the weather. It looks like it may snow again and go nasty before the morning is over.

“Every year it got to be spring, ya know, I’d start thinking about motorcycles or some kind of hot car to buy. I had four or five cars and two or three bikes.” Herb sits looking away toward a spot above the coping of the house across the street, a house exactly like his except for the pale-blue roof. Beyond it several streets away Walled Lake shines through the yard gaps like metal. I am sorry to hear Herb referring to his life in the past tense. It is not an optimistic sign. “Well, Frank, how do you wanna get this over with,” Herb almost shouts at me in his put-on Kansas brogue. He smiles another big fierce smile, then pops both his hands on the black, plastic armrests of his chair as though he’d like nothing better than to spring up and strangle me. “You wanna go in the house or walk to the lake or what? It’s your choice.”

“Let’s try the lake, Herb,” I say. “I used to come over here when I was in college. I’d be happy to see it again.”

“Clarice!” Herb bellows, frowning up toward the little front door, squirming in his chair and muling it to face the way he wants. He is not interested in my past, though that’s no crime since I am not much interested myself. “Clar-eeeece!”

The door opens behind the storm-glass and a slender, pretty black woman with extremely short hair and wearing jeans steps half out onto the step. She gives me a watery half-smile. “Clarice, this is old Frank Bascombe. He’s gonna try to make a monkey outa me, but I’m going to kick his keister for him. We’re going to the lake. You better bring us a coupla bathing suits, cause we might take a swim.” Herb grins back at me in mockery.

“I’m keeping my distance from him, Mrs. Wallagher.” I give her a friendly smile to match the frail one she has given me.

“Herb’ll talk too much to swim,” Clarice says, shaking her head patiently at Herb the perennial bad boy.

“Okay, okay, don’t let’s get her started,” Herb growls, then grins. It is their little burlesque, though it’s an odd thing to see in people of two different races, and so young. Herb couldn’t be thirty-four yet, though he looks fifty. And Clarice has entered that long, pale, uncertain middle existence in which years behind you is not a faithful measure of life. Possibly she is thirty, but she is Herb’s wife, and that fact has made everything else — race, age, hopes — fade. They are like retirees, and neither has gotten what he or she bargained for.