The Sportswriter

by Richard Ford

  Outside, it is no longer snowing, but the streets impress me as too icy to risk a rental car. Our time in town feels already much too short, and in bad weather even the idea of the botanical garden begins to sink into the unlikely zone—though for Vicki, my guess is, it will make no difference.

  I’m sorry, however, to miss a renter. There is nothing quite like the first moments inside a big, strapping fleet-clean LTD or Montego—mileage checked, tank full, seat adjusted, the heavy door closed tight, the stirring “new” smell in your nostrils—the confidence that here is a car better even than the one you own (and even better than that, since you have only to ask for another one if this one craps out). To me, there is no feeling of freedom-within-sensible-limits quite like that. New today. New tomorrow. Eternal renewal on a manageable scale.

  I walk down to the snowy cab queue at Larned Street, but as I reach the icy corner I am stopped short and for a moment by a sound. On the chill Saturday morning airs, a faint hsss murmurs up the city streets from the sewers and alleyways, as if a cold wind was thrashing ditch grass somewhere nearby and, out here near the river, on the edge of things, I was in danger. Of what I have no idea. Though what I know, of course, is that I am running a tricky race now with my spirits, trusting my enthusiasm will outstrip the perils of usual, mid western literalness which can gang up against you quick and do you in like a doomed prisoner.

  My cab driver is a giant Negro named Lorenzo Small wood, who reminds me of the actor Sydney Greenstreet, and who drives with both arms straight out in front of him. On the dashboard he has an assortment of small framed pictures of babies, two pairs of baby shoes and a mat of white fringe, though he is not much for talking, and we get quickly out into the snowy traffic, weaving around dingy warehouse blocks and old hotels to Grand River, then head for the northwest suburbs. It is faster today, Mr. Smallwood says with humming uninterest, to stay on the “real streets,” and avoid “the Lodge,” where it’s already wall-to-wall assholes heading for their cabins up north.

  Strathmore, Brightmoor, Redford, Livonia, another Miracle Mile. We speed through the little connected burgs and townlets beyond the interior city, along white-frame dormered-Cape streets, into solider red-brick Jewish sections until we emerge onto a wide boulevard with shopping malls and thick clusters of traffic lights, the houses newer and settled in squared-off tracts. Outside everyone is “dressed for it,” a point of traditional pride among Michiganders. A freak spring snowstorm means nothing. Everyone still has “snows” on his Plymouth, and a winter face of workmanlike weather how-to. Michigan is a place where every man is handy with a jumper cable, a metal lathe and a snow blower. The mechanical nuts-and-bolts of anything is never a problem here. It’s what’s reliable and appealing in such an otherwise gray and unprepossessing panorama.

  Far out crowded Grand River I am struck by what seems like thousands of restaurants, and by how dedicated the population is to going out to eat. As much as cars, meals are what’s on people’s minds. Though there is a small and heart-swelling glory to these places—chop houses, hofbraus, rathskellers, rib joints, cafés of all good quality. Part of life’s essence is here. And on a brooding spring eve, a fast foray out to any one of them can be just enough to make any out-of-the-way loneliness bearable another nighttime through. In most ways, I can promise you, Michigan knows exactly what it’s doing. It knows the enemy and the odds.

  Mr. Smallwood pulls into a white enamel drive-in called The Squatter, and asks if I want a sinker. I am full to the gills from breakfast, but while he is inside I step out and give a call back to the Pontchartrain. I have briefly won back some enthusiam for the day—the buzzing in my stomach having subsided—and I want to share it all with Vicki, since there is no telling what new world and circumstances she has waked to, given the night’s shenanigans and the strange, whitened landscape confronting her in the daylight.

  “I was just lay in here watching the television,” she says in a bright voice. “Just like you said for me to do in your cute note. I already ordered up a Virgin Mary and a honey pull-apart. There’s nothing on TV yet, though. A movie’s next, supposedly.”

  “I’m sorry about last night,” I say softly, my voice taking a sudden decibel dive, so that I can barely make it out myself in the traffic noise on Grand River.

  “What happened last night, lessee?” I can hear the TV and the sound of ice cubes in her Virgin Mary tinking against the glass. It is a reassuring sound, and I wish I could be there to snuggle up under the warm covers with her and wait for the movie.

  “I wasn’t at my best, but I’ll do better,” I say almost soundlessly. I smell warm hash browns, a waffle, an order of French toast humming out of The Squatter’s exhaust fan, and I am suddenly starving.

  “This hotel’s a good place to spend your money,” she says, ignoring me completely.

  “Well then, go spend some.”

  “I’m watching something real cerebral right now,” she says, distracted. “It’s about how the government takes back fifteen tons of old money every week. Mostly just ones. That’s the work-horse bill. A hundred-dollar bill lasts for years, though it dudn’t in my pocket, I’ll tell you that. They are trying to figure out how to make shingles out of them. But right now all they can make is note pads.”

  “Are you having a swell time?”

  “So far.” She laughs a happy girlish laugh. I see Mr. Smallwood come rolling out the front of The Squatter, a small white paper bag in one huge hand and a sinker half in his mouth. The snow has already begun to melt to slush in the curb gutters.

  “I love you, okay,” I say, and suddenly feel terribly feeble. My heart pounds down on itself like an anvil, and I have that old ague-sense that my next breath will bring down a curtain of bright red over my eyes, and I will slump to the phone booth glass and cease altogether. “I love you,” I hear myself murmur again.

  “It’s okay with me. But you’re a nut, I’ll tell you that.” She is gay now. “A real Brazil nut. But I like you. Is that all you called up here to say?”

  “You just wait’ll I get back,” I say, “I’ll….” But for some reason I do not finish the sentence.

  “Do you miss your wife?” she says as gay as can be.

  “Are you crazy?” It is clear she has not gotten my point.

  “Oh boy. You’re some kind of something,” she says. I hear silverware clink against plates, the sound of the receiver getting far away from her. “Now you hurry back and let me go and watch this.” Clickety-click.

  Ten minutes later we are into the rolling landscape of snowy farmettes and wide cottage-bound lakes beyond the perimeter of true Detroit suburbia, the white-flight areas stretching clear to Lansing. It is here that Mr. Smallwood suggests we turn off the meter and arrange a flat rate, which, when I agree, starts him whistling and suggesting he could hang around till I’m ready to go back. He has friends, he says, in nearby Wixom, and we agree that I’ll be ready to roll by noon. I remember, briefly, a boy I knew in college from Wixom, Eddy Loukinen, and I enjoy a fond wonder as to where Eddy might be—running a car dealership in his hometown, or down in Royal Oak with his own construction firm. Possibly an insulated window frame outlet in the UP—trading cars every year, checking his market shares, quitting smoking, flying to the islands, slipping around on his wife. These were the futures we all had looking at us in 1967. Good choices. We were not all radicals and wild-eyes. And most of my bunch would tell you they’re glad to have a good thirty years left to see what surprises life brings. The possibility of a happy ending. It is not unique to me.

  It takes two gas station stops to find Herb’s. Both owners claim to know him and to work on his cars exclusively. And both give me a suspicious, bill-collector look, as if I might be looking for big Herb to do him harm or steal his fame. And in each instance Mr. Smallwood and I drive off feeling that phone calls are being made, a protective community rising to a misconstrued threat against its fallen hero. All of which makes me realize just how often I am with
people I don’t know and who don’t know me, and who come to know me—Frank Bascombe—only as a sportswriter. It is possibly not the best way to go into the world, as I explained to Walter two nights ago; with no confidants, with no real allies except ex-allies; no lovers except a Vicki Arcenault or her ilk. Though maybe this is the best for me, given my character and past, which at most are inconclusive. I could have things much worse. At least as a stranger to almost everyone and a sportswriter to boot, I have a clean slate almost every day of my life, a chance not to be negative, to give someone unknown a pat on the back, to recognize courage and improvement, to take the battle with cynicism head-on and win.

  Out front of Herb’s house, I’m greeted from around the side by a loud “Hey now!” before I can even see who’s talking. Mr. Smallwood stares out his closed cab window. He has heard of Herb, he’s said, though he has the story of Herb’s life wrong and thinks Herb is a Negro. In any case he wants to see him before he cuts out for Wixom.

  Herb’s house is on curvey little Glacier Way, a hundred yards from Walled Lake itself and not far from the amusement park that operates summers only. I came here long ago, when I was in college, to a dense, festering old barrely dancehall called the Walled Lake Casino. It was at the time when line dances were popular in Michigan, and my two friends and I drove over from Ann Arbor with the thought of picking up some women, though of course we knew no one for forty miles and ended up standing against the firred, scarred old walls being wry and sarcastic about everyone and drinking Cokes spiked with whiskey. Since then, Mr. Smallwood has informed me, the Casino has burned down.

  Herb’s house is like the other houses around it—a little white Cape showing a lot of dormered roof and with a small picture window on one side of the front door. The kind of house a tool-and-dye maker would own—a sober Fifties structure with a small yard, a two-car garage in back and a van in the drive with HERB’S on its blue Michigan plates.

  Herb wheels into view from around the corner of the house, making tire tracks in the melting snow. The moment he is visible, Mr. Smallwood puts his cab in gear and goes whooshing off down the street and around the corner, leaving me alone in the front yard with Herb Wallagher, stranded like a prowler.

  “I thought you’d be bigger,” Herb shouts with a big gap-toothed grin. He shoots a great hand out at me, and when I embrace it he nearly hauls me down to the ground.

  “I thought you’d be smaller, Herb,” I say, though this is a lie. He is much smaller than I thought. His legs have shrunk and his shoulders are bony. Only his head and arms are good-sized, giving him a gaping, storkish appearance behind his thick horn-rims. He has twice cut himself shaving and doctored it with toilet paper, and is wearing a T-shirt that says BIONIC on the front, and a pair of glen-plaid Bermudas below which a brand new pair of red tennis shoes peek out. It is hard to think of Herb as an athlete.

  “I like to be outside on a day like this, Frank. It’s a wonderful day, isn’t it?” Herb looks all around at the sky like a caged man, making his head go loose on its stem.

  “It’s a great day, Herb.” We both, for the moment, affect the corny accents of Kansas hay farmers, though Herb is dead wrong about the weather. It looks like it may snow again and go nasty before the morning is over.

  “Every year it got to be spring, ya know, I’d start thinking about motorcycles or some kind of hot car to buy. I had four or five cars and two or three bikes.” Herb sits looking away toward a spot above the coping of the house across the street, a house exactly like his except for the pale-blue roof. Beyond it several streets away Walled Lake shines through the yard gaps like metal. I am sorry to hear Herb referring to his life in the past tense. It is not an optimistic sign. “Well, Frank, how do you wanna get this over with,” Herb almost shouts at me in his put-on Kansas brogue. He smiles another big fierce smile, then pops both his hands on the black, plastic armrests of his chair as though he’d like nothing better than to spring up and strangle me. “You wanna go in the house or walk to the lake or what? It’s your choice.”

  “Let’s try the lake, Herb,” I say. “I used to come over here when I was in college. I’d be happy to see it again.”

  “Clarice!” Herb bellows, frowning up toward the little front door, squirming in his chair and muling it to face the way he wants. He is not interested in my past, though that’s no crime since I am not much interested myself. “Clar-eeeece!”

  The door opens behind the storm-glass and a slender, pretty black woman with extremely short hair and wearing jeans steps half out onto the step. She gives me a watery half-smile. “Clarice, this is old Frank Bascombe. He’s gonna try to make a monkey outa me, but I’m going to kick his keister for him. We’re going to the lake. You better bring us a coupla bathing suits, cause we might take a swim.” Herb grins back at me in mockery.

  “I’m keeping my distance from him, Mrs. Wallagher.” I give her a friendly smile to match the frail one she has given me.

  “Herb’ll talk too much to swim,” Clarice says, shaking her head patiently at Herb the perennial bad boy.

  “Okay, okay, don’t let’s get her started,” Herb growls, then grins. It is their little burlesque, though it’s an odd thing to see in people of two different races, and so young. Herb couldn’t be thirty-four yet, though he looks fifty. And Clarice has entered that long, pale, uncertain middle existence in which years behind you is not a faithful measure of life. Possibly she is thirty, but she is Herb’s wife, and that fact has made everything else—race, age, hopes—fade. They are like retirees, and neither has gotten what he or she bargained for.

  When I look around, Herb has wheeled himself down the walk and is already out in the street, I offer his pretty little wife a little wave which she answers with a wave, and I go off hauling up the rear after Herb.

  “Okay now, Frank, what’s this bunch of lies supposed be about,” Herb says gruffly as we whirl along. There is one more street of lined Capes—some with campers and boat trailers out front—then a wider artery road that leads back to the expressway, and beyond that is the lake, lined with small cottages owned mostly, I’m sure, by people from the city—policemen, successful car salesmen, retired teachers. All are closed and shuttered for the winter. It is not a particularly nice place, a shabby summer community of unattractive bungalows. Not the neighborhood I’d expected for an ex-all-pro.

  “I’ve got my mind on an update on Herb Wallagher, Herb. How he’s doing, what’re his plans, how life’s treating him. Maybe a little inspirational business on the subject of character for people with their own worries. Maybe a touch of optimism in the soup.”

  “All right,” Herb says. “Super. Super.”

  “I know readers would be interested in hearing about your job as spirit coach. Guys you played with taking their cue from you on going the extra half-mile. That kind of thing.”

  “I’m not going to be doing that anymore, Frank,” Herb says grimly, pushing harder on his wheels. “I’m planning to retire.”

  “Why so, Herb?” (Not the best news for starters.)

  “I just wasn’t getting the job done down there, Frank. Too much bullshit involved.”

  An uneasy silence descends as we cross the road to Walled Lake. Most of the snow has melted here and only a gray crust remains on the shoulder where passersby have tossed their refuse. A hundred years ago, this country would’ve been wooded and the lake splendid and beautiful. A perfect place for a picnic. But now it has all been ruined by houses and cars.

  Herb coasts on down the concrete boat ramp in between two boarded-up and fenced-in cottages, and wheels furiously up onto the plank dock. Across Walled Lake is the expressway, and up the lakeside beyond the cottages a roller coaster track curves above the tree line. The Casino must’ve been nearby, though I see no sign of it.

  “It’s funny,” Herb says, where he can see the lake from an elevation. “When I first saw you, you had a halo around your head. A big gold halo. Do you ever notice that, Frank?” Herb whips
his big head around and grins at me, then looks back at the empty lake.

  “I never have, Herb.” I take a seat on the pipe bannister that runs the length of the dock at the end of which two aluminum boats ride in the shallow water.

  “No?” Herb says. “Well.” He pauses a moment in a reverie. “I’m glad you came, Frank,” he says, but does not look at me.

  “I’m glad to be here, Herb.”

  “I get mad sometimes, Frank, you know? God damn it. I just get boiling.” Herb suddenly whacks both his big open hands on the black armrests, and shakes his head.

  “What makes you mad, Herb?” I have not taken a note yet, of course, nor have I touched my recorder, something I will need to do since I have a terrible memory. I am always too involved with things to pay strict attention. Though I feel like the interview has yet to get started. Herb and I are still getting to know each other on a personal level, and I’ve found you can rush an interview and come away with such a distorted sense of a person that he couldn’t recognize himself in print—the first sign of a badly written story.

  “Do you have theories about art, Frank?” Herb says, setting his jaw firmly in one fist. “I mean do you, uh, have any fully developed concepts of, say, how what the artist sees relates to what is finally put on the canvas?”

  “I guess not,” I say. “I like Winslow Homer a lot.”

  “All right. He’s a good one. He’s plenty good,” Herb says, and smiles a helpless smile up at me.

  “He’d paint Walled Lake here, and it’d feel and look pretty much like this, I think.”

  “Maybe he would.” Herb looks away at the lake.