Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

I sit down on the public bench beside a big framed town map, breathing in the floor-mop smell of waiting rooms, leaning on my knees and peering out the glass doors through the lobby and across the lawn of elms and ginkgoes and spring maples. Outside is all almond light now, and in an hour a dreamy celestial darkness will return and one more day find its end. And what a day! Not a typical one at all. And yet it ends as softly, in as velvet a hush and airish a calm as any. Death is not a compatible presence hereabouts, and everything is in connivance — forces municipal and private — to say it isn’t so; it’s only a misreading, a wrong rumor to be forgotten. No harm done. This is not the place to die and be noticed, though it isn’t a bad place to live, all things considered.

Two cyclists glide across my view. A man ahead, a woman behind; a child in a child’s secure-seat strapped snug to Papa. All three are white-helmeted. Red pennants wag on spars in the dusk. All three are on their way home from an informal prayer get-together somewhere down some street, at some Danish-modern Unitarian hug-a-friend church where cider’s on tap and damn and hell are permissible — life on the continual upswing week after week. (It is the effect of a seminary in your town.) Now they’re headed homeward, fresh and nuclear, their frail magneto lights whispering a gangway to old darkness. Here come the Jamiesons. Mark, Pat and baby Jeff. Here comes life. All clear. Nothing can stop us now.

But they are wrong, wrong these Jamiesons. I should tell them. Life-forever is a lie of the suburbs — its worst lie — and a fact worth knowing before you get caught in its fragrant silly dream. Just ask Walter Luckett. He’d tell you, if he could.

Sergeant Benivalle appears through a back office door, and he’s exactly the fellow I expected, the chesty, flat-top, sad-eyed man with bad acne scars and mitts the size of work gloves. His mother must not have been a spaghetti-bender, since his eyes are pale and his square head stolid and Nordic. (His stomach, though, is firmly Italian and envelopes his belt buckle, squeezing the little silver snub-nose strapped above his wallet.) He is not a man to shake hands, but looks at the red EXIT sign above our heads when we meet. “We can just sit here, Mr. Bascombe,” he says. His voice is hoarse, wearier than earlier in the day.

We sit on the shiny bench while he fingers through a manila file. Officer Patriarca takes his seat behind the watch desk window, props up his feet and begins glancing through a Road & Track with a black drag-strip hero-turned-TV-personality smiling on the front.

Sergeant Benivalle sighs deeply and shuffles sheets of paper. Silent as a prisoner, I await him.

“Ahhh. Okay now. We’ve been in touch with family … a sister … in … Ohio, I guess. So …” He lifts a stapled page briefly to reveal a bright photograph of a man’s feet clad in a pair of rope sandals, toes pointed upward. Absolutely these are Walter’s feet, which I hope will be identification enough. Bascombe identifies deceased from picture of feet . “So that,” Sergeant Benivalle says slowly, “should eliminate your need to identify the, uh, deceased.”

“I didn’t really feel that need, anyway,” I say.

Sergeant Benivalle glances at me dismissively. “We have fingerprints coming, of course. But it’s just easier to get a positive this way.”

“I understand.”

“Now,” he says, flipping more pages. It’s surprising how much paper work has already been compiled. (Was Walter in some other kind of trouble?) “Now,” he says again and looks at me. “You’re the sportswriter, aren’t you?”

“Right.” I smile weakly.

Sergeant Benivalle glances back into his papers. “Who’s taking the AL East this year?”

“Detroit. They’re pretty good.”

He sighs. “Yep. Prolly so. I wish I had time to see a game. But I’m busy.” He protrudes his bottom lip, looking down. “I play a little golf, once in a blue moon.”

“My wife’s the teaching pro over at Cranbury Hills,” I say, though I add quickly, “my ex-wife, I mean.”

“That right?” Benivalle says, forgetting golf entirely. “I’ve got grass asthma,” he says, and since I can add nothing to that, I say nothing. “Do you,” he pauses, “have any idea why this Mr., uh, Luckett would take his own life, Mr. Bascombe, just off the top of your head?”

“No. I guess he gave up hope. That’s all.”

“Um-huh, um-huh.” Sergeant Benivalle reads down his folder. Inside, a form has been typed: HOMICIDEREPORT. “That usually happens at Christmas a lot more. Not that many people do it on Easter.”

“I never thought much about it.”

Sergeant Benivalle wheezes when he breathes, a small peeping noise down inside his chest. He fingers toward the back of the file. “I could never write,” he says thoughtfully. “I wouldn’t know what to say. That must be hard.”

“It’s really not too hard.”

“Um-huh. Well. I’ve got this, uh, copy of this letter for you.” He slides a slick Thermofax sheet out the back of his sheaf, holding it out daintily by a corner. “We keep the original, which you can claim in three months if the estate agrees to release it to you.” He looks at me.

“Okay.” I take the page by another of its greasy corners. It is badly copied in gray with a nasty embalming-fluid odor all over it. I see the script is a neat, very small longhand, with a signature near the bottom.

“Be careful with that stuff, it gets in your clothes. Cops smell like it all the time, it’s how you know we’re in the neighborhood.” He closes his folder, reaches in his pocket and takes out a pack of Kools.

“I’ll read it later,” I say and fold the letter in thirds, then sit holding it, waiting for whatever is supposed to happen next to happen. We are both of us immobilized by how simple all this has been.

Sergeant Benivalle lights his cigarette and inserts the burnt match into the book behind the others. The two of us sit then and stare at the yellow street map of the town we live in — each probably looking at the street where his own house sits. They couldn’t be far apart. Prolly he lives in The Presidents.

“Where’d you say this guy’s wife was again?” Benivalle says, breathing smoke hugely into his lungs. Though he looks at least fifty, he is no older than I am. His life cannot have been an easy one so far.

“She went to Bimini with another man.”

He blows smoke, then sniffs loudly two times. “That’s the shits.” He braces against the curved back of the bench, clenching his cigarette in his teeth, thinking about Bimini. “There’s gotta be better things to do about it than kill yourself, though. It isn’t that bad. Wouldn’t you think?” He turns his big head and fixes me with eyes blue as fjords. He hasn’t liked this business with Walter one bit better than I have, and he’d like somebody to say a word to help him out of worrying about it.

“I sure would think so,” I say and nod.

“Boy-o-boy. Mmmmph. What a mess.” He extends both his legs and crosses them at the ankles. It is his way of inviting conversation between menfolk, though I’m stumped for what to say. It’s possible he would understand if I said nothing.

“Do you think it would be all right if I went over to Walter’s house?” I actually surprise myself by saying this.

Sergeant Benivalle looks at me strangely. “What do you want to do that for?”

“Just to have a look. I wouldn’t stay long. It’s just probably the only way I’m going to get grips on this whole business. He gave me a key.”

Sergeant Benivalle grunts, thinking about this request. He smokes his cigarette and stares at the smoke he exhales. “Sure,” he says almost indifferently. “Just don’t take anything out. The family has claims on everything. Okay?”