Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

“I won’t.” Everyone trusts everyone here. And why not? No one’s ever up to anything that could cause harm to anyone but themselves. “Are you married, Sergeant,” I ask.

“Divorced.” He throws a narrow, flinty look my way, his eyes piggy with suspicion. “Why?”

“Well. Some of us, we’re all of us divorced men — there’s a lot of us in town these days — we get together now and then. It’s nothing serious. We just gang up for a beer at the August once a month. Go to a ball game or two. We went fishing last week, in fact. I thought if you’d like to, I’d give you a call. It’s a pretty good group. Everything’s informal.”

Sergeant Benivalle holds his Kool between his big thumb and his crooked forefinger, like a movie Frenchman, and flicks off an ash toward the polished floor. “Busy,” he says and sniffs. “Police work….” He starts to say more, then stops. “I forget what I was going to say.” He stares at the marble floor.

I have embarrassed him without meaning to, and I’d just as soon leave now. It’s possible Sergeant Benivalle is nothing but Cade Arcenault years later, and I should leave him to his police work. Though it never hurts to show someone that their own monumental concerns and peculiar problems are really just like everybody else’s. We all have our own police work to do.

“I’ll still call you, okay?” I grin like a salesman.

“I doubt I’ll make it,” he says, suddenly distracted.

“Well. We’re pretty flexible. I don’t come myself, sometimes. But I like the idea of going.”

“Yeah,” Sergeant Benivalle says, and once again fattens his heavy lower lip.

“I guess I’ll take off,” I say.

He blinks at me as if waked up from a dream. “How come you have a key to that place?” He cannot not be a policeman, a fact I find satisfying. He is hard to imagine as anything else.

“Walter just gave it to me. I don’t know why. I don’t know if he had many friends.”

“People don’t usually give their keys to people.” He shakes his head and clicks back in his mouth.

“People do weird things, I guess.”

“All the time” he says and sniffs again. “Here,” he says. He reaches in his pocket behind his pack of Kools and pulls out a little blue plastic card case. “Keep this if you go over there.” He hands me a printed card with his name and title and the Haddam town seal printed on it. “Gene Benivalle. Sergeant of Detectives.” His no doubt unlisted home number is printed at the bottom. I could call him about the Divorced Men’s Club at this very number, as I’m sure he knows.

“Okay.” I stand up.

“Just don’t take anything, right?” he says hoarsely, sitting on the bench with his sheaf of papers in front of his stomach. “That’d be wrong.”

I stuff his card in my shirt pocket. “Maybe we’ll see you some night.”

“Nah,” he says, pushing his foot down hard on his cigarette and blowing smoke across his big knees.

“I’ll probably call you anyway.”

“Whatever,” he says, wearily. “I’m always here.”

“So long,” I say.

But he doesn’t like goodbyes. He’s not the type any more than he’s the handshake type. I leave him where he sits, under the red EXIT sign in the lobby, staring out the glass door at me as I go.

X’s car sits alongside mine in the deepening dusk in front of Village Hall. She herself sits on the front fender carrying on a coaxing conversation with our two children, who are performing cartwheels on the public lawn and giggling. Paul is unwilling to fling his legs high enough in the air to achieve perfect balance, but Clarissa is expert from hours of practice, and even in her gingham granny dress, which I gave her, she can “walk the clouds,” her cotton panties astonishing in the failed daylight. On the front bumper of X’s car is a sticker that says “I’d Rather Be Golfing.”

“I bought these two some ice cream, and this is the result,” X says, when I sit up on the warm fender beside her. She has not looked at me, merely taken my existence for granted from the evidence of my car. “It seems to have brought out the kid in them.”

“Dad,” Paul shouts from the grass. “Clary’s going in the circus.”

“Please scratch glass,” Clary says and immediately gets onto her hands again. They aren’t surprised to see me, though I notice they’ve passed a secret look between themselves. Their usual days are alive with secrets, and toward me they feel both secret humor and secret sympathy. They’d be happy for us to start a roughhouse on the lawn the way we do at home, but now we can’t. Paul probably has a new joke by now, better than the one from Thursday night.

“She’s pretty good, isn’t she?” I call out.

“I meant it as a compliment, all right?” Paul stands, hands on his hips in a girlish way. He and I suffer misunderstanding poorly. Clary lets herself fall on her bottom and laughs. She looks like her grandfather and has his almost silvery hair.

“I think it’s odd that a town like this could have a morgue, don’t you?” X says, musing. She’s wearing a bright green-and-red sailcloth wraparound and a mint-colored knitted Brooks’ shirt like the ones I wear, and looks coolly clubby. She smoothes the material over her knees and lets her heels kick against the tire wall. She is in a generous mood.

“I never thought about it,” I say, watching my children with admiration. “But I guess it’s surprising.”

“One of Paul’s friends is a pathologist’s son, and he says there’s a very modern facility in the basement in there.” She gazes at the brick-and-glass façade with placid interest. “No coroner, though. He drives down from New Brunswick on a circuit of some kind.” For the first time she looks at me eye to eye. “How are you ?”

I am happy to hear this confiding voice again. “I’m all right. This day’ll be over with.”

“Sorry I had to call you at wherever that was.”

“It’s fine. Walter died. We can’t help that.”

“Did you have to view him?”

“No. His relatives are coming from Ohio.”

“Suicide is very Ohio, you know.”

“I guess.” Hers, as always, is a perfect Michigan attitude. No one there has any patience for Ohio.

“What about his wife?”

“They’re divorced.”

“Well. You poor old guy,” she says and pats me on my knee and gives me a quick and unexpected smile. “Want me to buy you a drink? The August is open. I’ll run these two Indians home.” She glances into the near dark, where our children are sitting in a private powwow on the grass. They are each other’s confidants in all crucial matters.

“I’m okay. Are you going to marry Fincher?”

She glances at me impassively then looks away. “I certainly am not. He’s married unless something’s changed in three days.”

“Vicki says you two are the hot topic in the Emergency Room.”

“Vicki-schmicky,” she says and sighs audibly through her nostrils. “Surely she’s mistaken. Surely you can’t be interested.”

“He’s an asshole and a change-jingler, that’s all. He’s down in Memphis starting an air-conditioned mink ranch at this very moment. That’s the kind of guy he is.”

“I’m aware.”

“It’s true.”

“True?” X looks at me heartlessly. I am the asshole here, of course, but I don’t care. Something seems at stake. The stability and sanctity of my divorce.

“I thought you were interested in software salesmen.”

“I’ll marry and fuck,” she whispers terribly, “whoever I choose.”

“Sorry,” I say, but I’m not. Out on Seminary Street I see the lights go on weakly, blink once, then stay on.

“Men always think other men are assholes,” X says, coldly. “It’s surprising how often they’re right.”