Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

Inside, my house has a strange public smell to it, a smell I would like on any other day but that today seems unwholesome. Upstairs, I put Merthiolate and a big band-aid on my knee, and change to chinos and a faded red madras shirt I bought at Brooks Brothers the year my book was published. A casual look can sometimes keep you remote from events.

I haven’t thought much about Walter. Occasionally his face has plunged into my thinking, an expectant sad-eyed face, the sober, impractical fellow I stood railside with on the Mantoloking Belle speculating about the lives ashore we were both embedded in, how we tended to see the world from two pretty distinct angles, but that on balance it didn’t matter much.

Which was all I needed! I didn’t need to know about Yolanda and Eddie Pitcock. Certainly not about his monkeyshines at the Americana. We didn’t need to become established . That is not my long suit.

No one answers when I call up to Bosobolo. He and his Miss Right, D.D., are no doubt being entertained “in the home” by some old chicken-necked Christology professor, and at this very moment he is probably backed into a bookshelved corner, clutching his ebony elbow and a glass of chablis, while Dr. So-and-so prattles about the hermeneutics of getting the goods on that old radical Paul the Apostle. Bosobolo, I’m sure, has other goods on his mind but is learning to be a first-class American. Though he could have it worse. He could still be running around in the jungle, dressed in a palm tutu. Or he could be me, morgue-bound and fighting a willowy despair.

My plan, which I’ve come to momentarily, is to call X, go do what I have to at the police, possibly see X — at her house (a remote chance to see my children) — then do what I haven’t a clue. The plan doesn’t reach far, though the literal possibilities might be just a source of worry.

A silent red “3” blinks on the answering machine, when I go to call X. “1” is in all likelihood Vicki wondering if I made it home safely and wanting to set up a powwow somewhere in the public domain where we can end love like grownups — less stridency and fewer lefts to the chin — a final half-turn of the old gem.

And she is right, of course, and smart to be. We don’t really share enough of the “big” interests. I am merely mad for her. And at best she is unclear about me, which leaves us where in six months time? I would never be enough for a Texas girl, anyway. Fascination has its virtuous limits. She needs attention to more than I could give mine to: to Walter Scott’s column, to being a New-Ager, to setting up a love nest, to a hundred things I really don’t care that much about but that grip her imagination. Consequently I’ll cut loose without complaining (though I’d be willing to spend one more happy night in Pheasant Meadow and then call it quits).

I punch the message button.

Beep . Frank, it’s Carter Knott.

I’m sneaking off to the Vet

tomorrow for the Cardinals

game. I guess I can’t get

enough of you guys. I’m

calling Walter too. It’s

Sunday morning. Call me at

home. Click .

Beep . Hey you ole rascal-thing.

I thought you were comin at

eleven-thirty. We’re all mad

at you down here so you better

not show your face. You know

who this is, dontcha? Click .

Beep . Frank, this is Walter

Luckett, Jr., speaking. It’s twelve

o’clock sharp here, Frank. I

was just throwing away some

old Newsweeks , and I found

this photograph of that DC-10

that went down a year or so

ago out in Chicago. O’Hare.

You might remember that,

Frank, you can see all those

people’s heads in the windows

looking out. It’s really

something. And I just can’t

help wondering what they

must’ve been thinking about,

since they are riding a bomb.

A big, silver bomb. That’s

about all I had in mind now.

Uhhmm. So long. Click .

Is this what he’d have told me if I’d been here to answer? What an Easter greeting! A chummy slice o’ life to pass along while you’re rigging your own blast-off into the next world. A while you were out from the grave! What else can happen?

I still cannot think a long thought about Walter. Though what I do think about is poor Ralph Bascombe, in his last hours on earth, only four blocks from here in Doctors Hospital and a lifetime away now. In his last days Ralph changed. Even in his features, he looked to me like a bird, a strangely straining gooney bird, and not like a nine-year-old boy sick to death and weary of unfinished life. Once he barked out loud at me like a dog, sharp and distinct, then he flopped up and down in his bed and laughed. Then his eyes shot open and burned at me, as if he knew me better than I knew myself and could see all my faults. I was in my chair beside his bed, holding his water cup and his terrible bendable straw. X was at the window, musing out at a sunny parking lot (and probably the cemetery). Ralph said loudly at me, “Oh, you son of a bitch, what are you doing holding that stupid glass? I could kill you for that.” And then he fell asleep again. And X and I just stared at each other and laughed. It’s true, we laughed and laughed until we cried with laughter. Not with fear or pain. What else was there to do, we must’ve said silently, and agreed that a good laugh was all right this time. No one would mind. It was at no one’s expense, and no one but the two of us would hear it — not even Ralph. It may seem callous, but we had that between ourselves, and who’s to be the judge when intimacy’s at work? It was one of our last moments of unalloyed tenderness in the world.

Though I suppose that in this memory of bereavement there is some for poor Walter, as wrongly and surely dead as my son, and just as absurd. I have tried not to be part of it. But why shouldn’t I? We all deserve mankind’s pity, his grief. And maybe never more than when we go outside its usual reaches and can’t get back.

No one answers at X’s house. She may be taking the children to a friend’s. Are we going to have to have another heart-to-heart, I wonder. Am I going to be the recipient of other unhappy news? Is Fincher Barksdale leaving Dusty and getting X knee-deep in mink-ranching in Memphis? On what thin strand does all equilibrium dangle?

I leave a message saying I’ll be by soon, then I’m off to the police, to have a look at Walter, though I have hope that a responsible citizen — possibly one of the Divorced Men with a police scanner — will already have come forward and performed this service for me.

The police station occupies part of the new brick-and-glass car-dealerish Village Hall where I rode out the heart-sore days of my divorce. The Hall is located near some of our nicer, more established residences, and it is closed now except for the brightly lighted cubicles in the back where the police hang out. From the outside where you drive around the circular entry, the last drowsy hours of Easter have softened its staunch Republican look. But it remains a house of hazards to me, a place where I’m uneasy each time I set my foot indoors.

Sergeant Beni valle, it turns out, is still on duty when I give my name to the watch officer, a young Italian-looking brushcut fellow wearing an enormous pistol and a gold name plate that says, PATRIARCA. He is in wry spirits, I can tell, and smiles a secret smile that implies some pretty good off-color jokes have been going the rounds all day, and were we a jot better friends he’d let me in on the whole hilarious business. My own smile, though, is not in tune for jokes, and after writing down my name he wanders off to find the sergeant.