by Richard Ford
My view of the “Big A,” though—should I ever have it—is that it quickly becomes its own comfort zone and is not as bad as it’s billed. Dr. Zippee, who attended med school in Karachi and interned down at Hopkins, travels back to the old country every winter to work in a madrassa (whatever that is). He complains to me that America, in its vengeful zeal to run the world, has ruined life where he came from; that the Taliban started out as good guys who were on our side. But now, thanks to us, the streets aren’t safe at night. I tell him, to me Pakistanis and Indians are the same people, like Israelis and Arabs, and northern and southern Irishmen. Religion’s just their excuse to maim and incinerate each other—otherwise they’d die of boredom. “Awesome,” he says and laughs like a chimp. He’s recently bought a cottage on Mount Desert and hopes soon to leave New Jersey behind. In his view, life is about pain management, and I need to do a better job managing mine.
Copland’s soaring as I make it out onto the bridge. Barnegat Bay, this morning, is a sea of sequins the wind plays over, with the long island and Seaside Heights out ahead, appearing, in a moment of spearing sunlight, to be unchanged. Gulls are towering. A few tiny numbered sails are dimpling far out on a gusty land breeze. The temperature’s topped out at thirty-five. You’d need to be a show-off to be on the water. I’m certain I’m dressed too lightly, though I’m elated to be back at The Shore, even to face disaster. Our true emotions are never conventional.
An Air-Tran—one of the old vibrator 737s—is just nosing up from Atlantic City into the low, gray ceiling, full of sleepy gamblers, headed back to Milwaukee. I can make out the lowercase “a” on its tail, as it disappears into the fog off the ocean side where my old house once sat, but apparently sits no more.
LATER YESTERDAY MORNING, AFTER I SPOKE TO Arnie, Sally came downstairs to where I was eating my All-Bran, and stood staring, musing through the window into the back yard at the late-autumn squirrel activity. I was pleased to be thinking nothing worth recording, not about Arnie Urquhart, just breathing to the cadence of my chews. After a while of not speaking, she sat down across from me, holding a book I’d noticed her reading late into the night—her light stayed on after I’d gone to sleep, then was switched off, then on again later. It’s not unusual for people our age.
“I read this shocking thing last night.” She held the book she’d been engrossed by, clutched to her yoga shirt. Her eyes were intent. She seemed worried. I couldn’t make out the book’s spine but understood she meant to tell me about it.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Well.” She pursed her lips. “Back in 1862, right when the Civil War was in full swing, the U.S. Cavalry had time to put down an Indian revolt in Minnesota. Did you know that?”
“I did,” I said. “The Dakota uprising. It’s pretty famous.”
“Okay. You know about it. I didn’t.”
“I know some things,” I said and stared down at a banana slice.
“Okay. But. In December of 1862, our government hanged thirty-eight Sioux warriors on one big scaffold. Just did it all at once.”
“That’s famous, too,” I said. “Supposedly they’d massacred eight hundred white people. Not that that’s an excuse.”
Sally took in a breath and turned her head away in a manner to indicate a tear she didn’t want seen might be wobbling out of her eyes. “But do you know what they said?” These words were nearly choked with throat-clogging emotion.
“What who said?”
“The Indians. They all began shouting out as they were standing on the gallows, waiting to drop and never speak again.”
I didn’t know. But I looked up to let her understand I realized this was important to her, and that the next thing she said would be important to me. Possibly my spoon had paused on its upward arc toward my mouth. I may have shaken my head in amazement.
“They all shouted, ‘I’m here!’ They started calling that out in their Sioux language, all around that awful contraption that was about to kill them. People who heard it said it was awe-inspiring.” (Not awesome.) “No one ever forgot it. Then they hanged them. All of them. At one moment. ‘I’m here.’ As if that made it all right for them. Made death tolerable and less awful. It gave them strength.” Sally shook her head. Her tear of anguish for long-ago 1862 did not emerge. She held her book tight to her front and smiled at me mournfully, across the glass-topped table where I’ve eaten possibly three thousand breakfasts. “I just thought you’d want to know about that. I’m sorry to ruin your breakfast.”
“I’m glad to know about it, sweetheart,” I said. “It didn’t ruin my breakfast at all.”
“I’m here,” she said and seemed to embarrass herself.
“So am I,” I said.
And with those words she got up, came around the square table, kissed me once on my forehead, still embarrassed, then went away, carrying her book back to where she’d come from in the house.
MIDWAY ON THE BRIDGE, HEADED ACROSS TO DARKEST Seaside Heights, where who knows what awaits me (heartstrings plucked, outrage, wronged rectitude, and all that’s right corrupted), I realize there’s nothing I can really do for Arnie Urquhart’s domiciliary suffering, or to make things jake. Jake’s already blown out the window and all but forgotten, from what I’ve seen on TV. And yet: you bear some responsibility to another human you sell a house to. Not a financial one. Conceivably not a moral one. But one in which, even rarer, the professional and human operate on a single set of rails. A priestly, vocational responsibility. Though for all I know, Arnie might just as easily feel relief that his house is an ass-over-teacups total loss. It may have been just the thing he’d lain in bed and dreamed about—like the day you sell your vintage, lap-sided Lyman in-board: the runner-up best day of your life, after the day you bought it. Second-house ownership is often like that. People know they’re going to rue the day long before they sign the papers—but they do it anyway. Arnie may just be pretending to mourn. After all, he now owns a hunk of prime, undeveloped oceanfront—even if the taxes stay high. He can sit tight and wait for destiny—assuming anybody ever wants oceanfront again.
Though what I sense with my ex-realtor’s brain is that Arnie may simply want me to take the trouble to be there—to be his witness. It’s what the Christers all long for, dawn to dusk. It’s why there are such things as “best men,” “pallbearers,” “godfathers,” “invitees to an execution.” Everything’s more real if two can see it. A flying saucer. A Sasquatch. The face of the Redeemer in an oil smear at Jiffy Lube. And today I’m willing to say “I’m here” to whoever can hear me, and for whatever good it might do for man or beast.
AN UNUSUAL SIGHT GREETS ME AS I CURVE DOWN off the bridge into what used to be Seaside Heights (Central Ave., north to Ortley Beach, south to Sea-Clift). A New Jersey State Police command-post trailer has been hauled across the roadway to block unauthorized vehicles. Sawhorses are piled against Jersey barriers, red and silver flashers spinning on a striped trooper car that’s parked alongside—everything but razor wire and a machine-gun nest—beyond which the wound of the storm’s destruction assaults my eye. Up Central, toward my old office, as far as I can see along the beach side of the avenue, civic life has sustained a fierce whacking—house roofs sheared off, exterior walls stripped away, revealing living rooms full of furniture, pictures on bed tables, closets stuffed with clothes, stoves and refrigerators standing out white for all to see. Other houses are simply gone altogether. Great, heaping Mount Trashmores (one with a Christmas tree on top), piled with building debris, dirt, sand, ruined Halloween decorations, auto fenders, cabinets, toilets, mailboxes—all that could be bashed into and blown to smithereens—have risen on every corner. Awaiting what, it’s not clear. Meanwhile, a god’s own lot of human activity’s underway beneath the mottled sky, up the avenue and down the side-leading residential streets, ocean to bay. Much of it, I see, is police activity—large men in SWAT-team garb, and National Guard troopers in desert issue, their tiny lethal riflery strapped to their chests, patrolling.
There are State Health vans with workers in white hazmat suits. Power-line people are here with cherry pickers (they come in convoys from Texas and Minnesota, and won’t be kept away). As well, there’re trucks of every species—Datsuns like the terrorists in Kabul use, new F-150s, raised Dodge muscle rigs, all the way to elephant-size dumpers and decommissioned garbage scows—conscripted to get destruction, pain, the memory of pain and destruction, up, out and away and into some landfill in Elizabeth like the 9/11 remains. Nothing’s livable or OPEN. There’s no power. A carpet of ocean and beach sand has been driven up onto the streets and yards and under all the ruined cars, as if The Shore in a single night had turned into Riyadh. It’s a post-combat zone, though in its own way perfectly pacific and orderly. I expect to see buzzards circling in the misty air. Though instead, a squadron of brown pelicans floats along the beachfront, seeking something familiar or edible or both.
In all, there’s the palpable, ghostly urge to “put back” what was. Though, in my view—just arriving—it’s too bad it can’t be left as it is a bit longer, like a ghost that goes on spooking. Decades ago, in my unsatisfactory Marine Corps tour, a few of us privates were dispatched as forward observers from Camp Pendleton down to Ensenada, to surveil enemy buildup in the local bordellos and mescalerias. At the time, I noticed it was impossible to discern if the tumbled-down Mexican buildings we passed were actually tumbled down or half tumbled up, with new residents waiting somewhere offstage. Ortley Beach—what I can see of it now—looks that way, as I’m sure do all the once-sparkling beach towns north and south: locked into a moment of indecisiveness between being and not being. I once made a handsome living off this patch of now-salted earth. I should be able to envision the grains of possibility in what’s left of it. But for the moment, I cannot.
LOOTERS BEWARE! A SIGN ON THE SHOULDER OF THE exit curve warns all who’d enter and do ill. A skull ’n’ crossbones has been painted on in red to drive the point home. CURFEW 6 PM THIS MEANS U! fills out the space to make it personal. A forest of other signs is sprouted around like political yard art, announcing, WE’LL BUY YOUR HOUSE (OR WHAT’S LEFT OF IT). MARTELLO BROTHERS—REFUSE HAULING. HABLA INGLES—RAPIDO! LEARN GRIEF COUNSELING IN TEN DAYS. FAST MOLD REMOVAL. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS. WRITERS’ COOPERATIVE. NRA ICE-BREAKER AT THE TOMS RIVER HAMPTON INN. A DRUNK DRIVER KILLED MY DAUGHTER. FLOW YOGA. TANTRIC SEX WORKSHOP. FIRST RESPONDERS SPAGHETTI SUPPER. One sign merely says NOTHING BESIDE REMAINS (for victims with a liberal arts degree).
As I nose up to the command-post trailer, Copland turned off, a policeman steps out a side door down to the sandy pavement. No one’s permitted in except contractors, owners, and local officialdom (plus President Obama and our big candied yam of a governor). But I’m in luck. The cop, hiking up his heavy cop belt and situating his blue hat on his big cop head, is a man I know. It is Corporal Alyss of the Sea-Clift PD. Years back, I sold his house in Seaside Park when he was a rookie and his family size suddenly doubled, requiring a bigger, cheaper place—in Silverton.
Palm forward, Officer Alyss transforms himself now into a human Jersey-barrier, warning off looters, unauthorized rubberneckers, and sneakers-in like me. When I buzz down my window, he comes round to utter his discouraging words, big right hand rested on his big black Glock. He’s much larger than the last time I saw him. Portland concrete seems to have been added to his shape and size, in-uniform. He doesn’t quite move naturally—fully Kevlar’d with heavy, combat footwear as thick as moon boots, plus his waist-harness of black-leather cop gear: scorch-your-eyes perpetrator spray, silver cuffs, a walkie-talkie as big as a textbook, a head-knocking baton in a metal loop, extra ammo clips, a row of black snap-closed compartments that could hold most anything, plus a pair of sinister black gloves. He is the Michelin man of first responders, his police ball cap with gold insignia beetled down to his eyebrows. I want to laugh, since he’s a sweetie at heart. But he’s too uncomfortable not to be sympathized with. In any case, laughing at the police is a prime misstep in New Jersey.
“Okay, sir. I just need you to . . .” Corporal Alyss begins his “just-turn-’er-around-and-head-your-ass-on-back-across-the bridge” spiel. As I suspected, he’s not seen me properly. Though a sneaky smile’s awakening, and he shifts his big face to the side, leaning toward my window, like a kid (a big kid). “All right. All right,” he says, his smile breaking through, becoming in an instant the jolliest of gendarmes. I’m outed as a friendly. (He takes plenty of ribbing about his name—Alyss/Alice—and has clearly grown into his job.) His big Ukrainian earlobes, I notice—fat, pendulous, and pink—do not have the hint of a crease. He obviously lacks a care in the world. All his needs are met with his tidy Silverton family, a badge, and a gun. “I guess you’re down here to teach us all how smart you are to get out when you did,” he says. He’s beaming, his big, blue Slavic eyes wide and intense as he peers in and around inside my car. He is only thirty-five, played tight end at Rider, then spent a year in Ecuador on his Pentecostal mission, bullying the natives into accepting Jesus. His old man was a beat cop in Newark and paid “the ultimate price.” You get to know such things in the realty business. His wife, Berta, was one of the nurses who looked after me when I got shot and stayed a long time in the hospital.
“I’m just going down to counsel an old client, Pete. His house got blown away.” No need to tell him it was my house. Just the facts, here.
“Yeah, well, tell me about it,” Corporal Alyss says, his smile fading. He is not a handsome boy—all his features way too big, too pink, too fleshy—a cross between a Minnesota farmer and one of his animals. He’s lucky to have a wife. His little shoulder microphone sputters, but emits no voice. Even though he might not say it—and though he himself moved years ago—it probably rankles him that I moved away. “Your old office is an empty lot,” he says. “Back wall just blew in.” He’s all police business-y now, as if some training session he’s sat through has flashed up into his thick head. Our friendship is paling.
“I heard,” I say up through the window. Chill air has rushed in, carrying sour odors of ocean and diesel and Corporal A’s leather rigging. Another cop, a black, hatless NJ state trooper in jodhpurs, has appeared at the trailer door, watching us gravely. He takes note of my license plate, then steps back inside, where they’re probably playing hearts. “Did you guys survive okay,” by which I mean him and his brood.
“Just lost our electric. Some roof coping,” he says soberly, extending his lip. “Nothing like down here. Insurance won’t pay ours either, though. Ours is supposedly wind, not water.” He inserts a big thumb knuckle into his ear canal for a scratch, cocks his mouth awry, while his other hand rests on his police issue. He’s most at ease not moving. “The wife’s having repetitive thought patterns. Just worrying, you know?” He’s forgotten I know her and know her name. All is policing to police. The rest of the world is like groceries on the shelf.
“I guess it’s natural.”
“Oh yeah.” He looks confident and says nothing more, as he thinks about what’s “natural” and what’s not.
“Okay if I drive on down to Poincinet Road?” I try to act like I’ve already been there twenty times and am going back to resume whatever I was doing before.
“That’s all changed down there,” he said. “The storm, and before the storm. You prolly won’t recognize it. But yeah. Just be careful.” He takes his thumb out of his ear and wipes his nose with it, then backs away from my car door. He produces a tiny red notebook from his flak-vest pocket, and with a ballpoint notes down my license number. “I’ll write you down in case you get in there, and we never see you again. We’ll know who to call.” He smiles at his note-taking. He is a mystery—even for all that’s plain about him. It’s not easy to balance his life: one minute friendly; one minute a hostage situation; and all the time in between longing to be home with the kids, cooking brats on the Weber and smiling at the day.
“Great,” I say. “I’ll be safe.”
“No worries.” ( . . . On my inventory;
a two-word misnomer meaning “You’re absolutely welcome. I’m really glad to be able to assist you. After all, we seek each other in these dire times. So know that I’m thinking about you. And do be safe.”) No worries is maybe better.
I run my window back up. Corporal Alyss steps farther back, drags the NJSP sawhorse to the left, waves me through past the skull ’n’ bones and the message from Ozymandias. I give him my two-hand fellowship wave and drive on. His back is already to me. He’s forgetting I exist. I’m here. He’s here. But, in another sense, we’re not.
SEA-CLIFT, WHEN I DRIVE SOUTH ON CENTRAL, gives to the world the sad look of having taken a near-fatal punch in the nose. Power poles are mostly up but lacking wires. Sand has eddied up over everything low-down. Houses—even the now-and-then ones that look unscathed—seem stunned to stillness. Roofs, windows, front stoops, exterior walling, garages, boats shrink-wrapped in blue polypropylene—all look as if a giant has strode out of the gray sea and kicked the shit out of everything. Here are all places where people have lived. And not just smarty-pants, foggy-shuttered summer renters who stay ninety days past Memorial Day, but a sturdy corps of old-time “Clift-dwellers” plus happy retirees, alongside an older echelon of hedge-fund, coupon clippers who’ve bought in since the ’70s and call it “home.” Each in his own way patronizes the pizzerias, the mom-and-pops, the car-repairs, the Chinese takeout, the fried-seafood eateries where the TV’s never off in the bar and a booth’s always waiting. A bracing atmosphere of American faux egalitarianism long has reigned here—which drew me two decades back, when I moved down from Haddam. I arrived when seven hundred thousand still meant seven hundred thousand and could buy you a piece of heaven. With Sally Caldwell as my helpmate I couldn’t have been happier.