Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

Wade’s blue eyes cut mischievously toward the basement door. Something I’ve done or said seems to have made him take to me, at least in a preliminary way. “Lynette,” he says loudly, putting his eyes on the ceiling. “Have I got time to take this boy down to my devil’s dungeon?” He gives me a wide wink and looks upwards again. (Maybe we’ll be able to get a fishing trip planned, no matter how things go with Vicki.)

“I doubt if Grant’s army could be expected to stop you, could it?” Lynette smiles in at us through the serving bay to the dining room, shakes her pretty red head, and waves us on.

In through the living room door I spy Vicki and Cade sitting on the salmon couch having what looks like an intimate talk. Cade’s wardrobe and stultifying social life are no doubt under reappraisal.

Wade goes tromping off down the dark basement steps with me right behind. And immediately the heavy kitchen air is exchanged for the cool, chemically pungent odors indigenous to suburban basements where the owner is nobody’s fool and has his termite contract up-to-date. I am one of their number.

“All right now, stay there, Frank,” Wade says, lost in darkness ahead of me, his steps crossing concrete. Behind me Lynette’s plump arm closes the kitchen door.

“Hold your horses, now.” Wherever he is, Wade is enthusiastic.

I hold on to a wood 2×6 bannister, not certain of even one more step. Something, I sense, is large and in front of me.

Wade is fiddling with metal objects, possibly the shade of a utility lamp, a fuse-box door, possibly a box of keys. “Ahh, the Christ,” he mutters.

Suddenly a light flutters on, not a utility lamp but a shimmering white fluorescence in the raftered ceiling. What I see first in the light is not, I think, what I’m supposed to see. I see a big picture of the world photographed from outer space, fastened to the cinderblock wall above Wade’s workbench. In it, all of space is blue and empty, and North America clear as in a dream, from miles away, in perfect outline white against a dark surrounding sea.

“What d’you think, Frank?” Wade says with pride.

My eyes try to find him, but instead find, directly in front of me where I could touch it, a big black car — so close I can’t make out what it is, though it certainly is a car, with plenty of chrome and a glassy black finish. CHRYSLER is lettered above big wide louvered grill work.

“By God, Wade,” I say and find him down the long-fendered side, his hand on the tip of a high rear fin above the red taillight. He’s grinning like a TV salesman who this time has put together something really special, something the little woman will have to like, something anyone in his nut would be proud to own as an investment, since its value can only increase.

It is a big box-safe of a car with fat whitewalls, ballistic bumpers, and an air of postwar styling-with-substance that makes my Malibu only a sad reminder.

“They don’t make these anymore, Frank.” Wade pauses to let these words hold sway. “I restored it myself. Cade helped me some, but he got bored soon as the motor work was over. Bought this off a soapstone Greek in Little Egg, and you should’ve seen it. Brown. Full of holes. Chrome half gone. Just a Swiss cheese, is what it was.” Wade looks at the finish as if it might have murmured. It’s chilly in the basement, and the Chrysler seems as cold and hard as a black diamond. “The roll-pleat inside still needs work,” Wade admits.

“How’d you get it in here?”

Wade grins. He’s been waiting for this one. “One Bilco door, back around there where you can’t see it. The tow truck just slid it down. Cade and I had a ramp rigged out of channel irons. I had to relearn welding. You know anything about arc welding, Frank?”

“Not a damn thing,” I say. “I should, though.” I look at the photo of the earth again. It is a good thing to have, I think, for maintaining a sense of perspective, though in its homely surroundings the globe seems as exotic as a tapestry.

“Not necessary,” Wade says soberly. “The principles are all pretty straightforward. Resistance is the whole thing. You’d pick it up in a minute.” Wade smiles at the thought that I might someday own a marketable skill.

“What’re you going to do with it, Wade?” I say, a question that just came to me.

“I haven’t thought about that,” Wade says.

“Do you ever drive it?”

“Oh, I do. Yes. I start it up and drive it a foot one way and a foot or two back. There isn’t much room down here.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets and leans sideways on the fender, looking up and around at the low rafters into the dark cinder block crawl space. Above us I hear muffled voices, the sound of footsteps squeezing from kitchen to dining room. I hear Cade’s clomping off in another direction, no doubt upstairs to change clothes. I hear Elvis Presley’s paws tick the kitchen floor. Then nothing. Wade and I are silent in the presence of his Chrysler and each other.

This situation could, of course, result in disaster, as many such situations do. A fear of what he may innocently ask me now, or a greater fear that I may have nothing special to say in answer and be left standing here as mute as a rocker panel — these make me wish I were back upstairs seeing the Knicks whip tar out of the Cavaliers, cheek-by-jowl with my old friend Cade. Sports is a first-rate safety valve when you and your whole value system are brought under friendly but unexpected scrutiny.

“Just what kind of fellow are you?” would be a perfectly natural curiosity. “What are your intentions regarding my daughter?” (“I’m not at all sure” would not be much of an answer.) “Who in the world do you think you are?” (I’d be stumped.) Suddenly I feel cold, though Wade doesn’t seem to have any tricks up his sleeve. He is someone with codes I respect and that I would like to like me. All the best signs, in other words, are not so different from all the worst. Wade puts his fingertips to the porcelain-black fender and stares at them. I’m sure if I were closer every feature of me would be spelled out clear as a mirror.

“Frank,” Wade says, “do you like fish?” He looks up at me almost imploringly.

“You bet I do.”

“You do, huh?”

“I sure do.”

Wade peers down at the shiny black surface again. “I was just thinking maybe you and me could go eat at the Red Lobster some night, get away from these women. Really have us a talk. You ever been there?”

“I sure have. Plenty of times.” In fact, when X and I were first divorced, I went practically no place else. All the waitresses got to know me, knew I liked the broiled bluefish not overcooked and went out of their way to cheer me up, which is exactly what they’re paid to do but usually don’t.

“I go just for the haddock,” Wade says. “It’s a meal in itself. I call it the poor man’s lobster.”

“We ought to go. It’d be great.” I slip my cold hands in my jacket pockets. All in all I would still jump at the chance to get back upstairs.

“Frank, where’re your parents?” Wade looks gravely at me.

“They’re both dead, Wade,” I say. “A long time now.”

“Mine, too.” He nods. “Both of ’em gone. We all come from nowhere in the end, right?”

“I guess I don’t really mind that part,” I say.

“Right, right, right, right.” Wade has crossed his arms and backed up against the Chrysler fender. He gives me a right-angles glance, then stares off into the crawl space again. “What brought you to New Jersey? You’re a writer, is that right?”

“It’s a pretty long story, Wade. I was married before. I’ve got two kids up in Haddam. It would take some time to explain all that.” I smile in a way I hope will head him off, though I know Wade probably doesn’t give a damn about it. He’s just trying to be friendly.