Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

“Tell Cade goodbye,” I say.

“Will do.” Wade comes down and squares me up with a small earnest hand on my shoulder — half a manly hug. “Come back and we’ll go out fishing.” Wade makes a squeaky, embarrassed laugh, and in fact looks slightly dizzy.

“I’ll do it, Wade.” And God knows I would. Though that will never happen in a hundred moons, and I will never see his face again outside a toll plaza. We will never stalk, hungry as bears, into a Red Lobster, never be friends in the ways I had hoped — ways to last a lifetime.

I wave them all goodbye.

On the front lawn everything including our empty croquet wickets is lost and gray and gone straight to hell. I stand in the fluttering wind and sight down the unpeopled curve of Arctic Spruce to the point where it sweeps from sight, all its plantings fresh and immature, its houses split-level and perfectly isosceles. Wade Arcenault is a lucky man to live here, and I am, at heart, cast down to loss in its presence.

Vicki knows I’m stalling and tampers with the door latch of my Malibu until, as if by magic, it swings open.

She is bemused, in no mind for words. I, of course, would talk till midnight if I thought it could improve my chances.

“Why don’t we just go get a motel room right now?” I paint a grin on my face. “You haven’t been to Cape May. We could have a big time.”

“What about your ole dead guy? Herb?” Vicki sets her chin up haughtily. “What about him?”

“Walter.” She’s made me feel slightly embarrassed. “He’s not going anywhere. But I’m still alive. Frank’s still among the living.”

“I’d be ashamed,” Vicki says, shoving the door wide open between us. The wind now has a wintry grit in it. The front has passed quickly and left us in a gray spring chill. In half a minute, she is going. This is the last chance to love her.

“Well, I’m not,” I say loudly into the wind. “I didn’t kill my self. I want you to go off and let me love you. And tomorrow we’ll get married.”

“Not hardly.” She looks glumly at the dry black weather stripping on my poor car’s poor window frame. She picks off a piece with a crimson fingernail.

“Why not?” I say. “I want to. This time yesterday we were in bed like newly weds. I was one of the only six people in the world then. What the hell happened? Did you just go crazy? Twenty minutes ago you were happy as a monkey.”

“No way I went crazy, José,” she says coarsely.

“My name’s not José, goddamn it.” I cast a wintry eye at Lynette’s spurious beigey Jesus nailed to the siding. He makes life a perfect misery for as many as he can, then never takes the heat. He should try resurrection in today’s complex world. He’d fall right off His cross on His ass. He couldn’t sell newspapers.

“We don’t have none of the same interests, doesn’t look like,” Vicki says nearly inaudibly, fumbling a finger at her blue Navajo earring. “I just figured that out sitting at the table.”

“But I’m interested in you! ” I shout. “Isn’t that enough?” The wind is kicking up. From around the house Wade’s Boston Whaler blunks against the dock. My own words are broken and carried off like chaff.

“Not to be married, it isn’t,” she says, her jaw set in certainty. “Just foolin like what we been doin is one thing. But that won’t get you all the way to death.”

“What will? Just tell me and I’ll do it. I want to go all the way to death with you.” Words, my best refuge and oldest allies, are suddenly acting to no avail, and I am helpless. In the wind, in fact, words hardly seem to clear my mouth. It is like a dream in which my friends turn against me and then disappear — a poor man’s Caesar dream, a nightmare in itself. “Look here. I’ll get interested in nursing. I’ll read some books and we can talk about nursing all the goddamn time.”

Vicki tries to smile but looks dumbfounded. “I don’t know what to say, really.”

“Say yes! Or at least something intelligent. I might just kidnap you.”

“Right you won’t.” She curls her lip and narrows her eyes, a look I’ve never seen and that scares me. She is without fear if fearlessness is what’s asked for. But just so long as she is fearlessly mine.

“I’m not going to be fooled with,” I say, and move toward her.

“I just don’t love you enough to marry you,” She throws down her hands in exasperation. “I don’t love you in the right way. So just go on. You’re liable to say anything, and I don’t like that.” Her hair has become whipped and tangled.

“There isn’t any right way,” I say. “There’s just love and not love. You’re crazy.”

“You’ll see,” she says.

“Get in this car.” I pull back the door. (She has decided not to love me because I might change her, but she couldn’t be more wrong. It is I who’ll happily bend.) “You just think you want some little life like Lynette’s to complain about, but I’m going to give you the best of all worlds. You don’t know how happy you’re going to be.” I give her a big signpost grin and step forward to put my arms around her, but she busts me full in the mouth with a mean little itchy fist that catches me midstride and sends me to the turf. I manage to grab onto the car door to ease my fall, but the punch is a looping girl’s left hook straight from the shoulder, and I actually walked directly into it, eyes wide open.

“I’ll ’bout knock you silly,” she says furiously, both fists balled like little grapeshoots, thumbs inward. “Last guy took holt of me went to eye surgery.”

And I can’t help smiling. It is the end to all things, of course. But a proper end. I taste thick, squeamish blood in my mouth. (My hope is that no one inside has seen this and feels the need to help me.) When I look up, she has backed off a half step, and to the right of dolorous Jesus I see Cade’s big head peering down at me, impassive as Buddha. Though in all ways Cade does not matter in this, and I don’t mind his seeing me in defeat. It is an experience he already knows, and would sympathize with if he could.

“Get on up and go see your dead guy,” Vicki says in a quavery, cautionary voice.

“Okay.” I’m still smiling my dopey Joe Palooka smile. Possibly there are even stars and whirligigs shooting above my head. I might not be in complete control, but I’m certain I can drive.

“You awright, aren’t you?” She will not come a step closer, but squints an assessing eye at me long-distance. I’m sure I am pale as potatoes, though I’m not ashamed to be decked by a strong girl who can turn grown men over in their beds and get them in and out of distant bathrooms single-handed. In fact, it confirms everything I have always believed of her. There may be hope yet for us. This may be the very love she’s been seeking but hasn’t trusted, and needed only to whop me good to make us both realize it.

“Why don’t you call me tomorrow?” I say, sprawled on my elbows, my head starting to ache, though I’m still smiling a good loser’s smile.

“I doubt that.” She crosses her arms like Maggie in the funnies. Who is a better Jiggs than I am? Who is worse at learning from his experience?

“You better go inside,” I say. “It’s an indignity for you to see me get on my feet.”

“I didn’t mean to hit you,” she says in a bossy way.

“Like hell. You’d’ve knocked me out if you knew how to make a fist. You make a girl’s fist.

“I don’t hit too many.”

“Go on,” I say.

“You sure you’re awright?”

“Would you call me tomorrow?”

“Maybe, maybe not.” I can actually hear her stockings scrape as she turns and starts back across the lawn in the wind, her arms swinging, each foot planted toe-down to keep from sinking in the sod. She does not look back — as she shouldn’t — and quickly dis appears into the house. Cade has likewise left the window. And for a time then I sit where I’ve fallen beside my car and stare up at the rending clouds, trying to make the world around me stop its terrifying spin. Everything has seemed beckoning and ahead, though I am unsure now if life has not suddenly passed me like a big rumbling semi and left me flattened here by the road.