by Richard Ford
A good ecumenist’s question, for a well-grounded fellow like me. Though the answer is plain and simple, or I wouldn’t be here at all.
I feel just as I wanted to feel, and knew I would when I made that hard left and came barreling back to the parking lot—a sweet and expanding hieratic ardor and free elevation above low spirits, a swoony, hot tingle right down to my toe tips, something akin to what sailors in the brig must feel when the president visits their ship. Suddenly I’m home, without fear, anxiety, or for that matter even any burdensome reverence. I’m not even in jeopardy of being bested at religion here—it’s not that kind of place—and can feel damn pleased with both myself and my fellow man. A rare immanence is mine, things falling back and away in the promise that more’s around here than meets the eye, even though it is of course a sham and will last only as far as my car. Better this than nothing, though. Or worse. To have hollow sorrow. Or regret. Or to be derailed by the spiky fact of being alone.
Then suddenly: “Rise my soul and stretch thy wings, thy better portion trace; Rise from transitory things toward heaven, thy destined place….” My voice springs forth strong and unequivocal, with Big Al’s baritone behind me in the chorus of confident, repentant suburbanites. (I can never think what the words mean or even imply.) The organ rattles the windows, raises the roof, tickles the ribs, sends a stirring through all our bellies—Jim’s, the ushers’, the preacher’s.
And then I’m gone.
A secret high sign to big Al, who understands me and everything perfectly and clasps his big stirrupy hands in front of him in a Masonic one-man handshake. It is time for the “Race to the Tomb,” and I am in no need of messages, having taken in all I want and can use, am “saved” in the only way I can be (pro tempore), and am ready to march on toward dark temporality, my banners all aflutter.
10
Under the visor I have a Johnny Horizon Let’s-Clean-Up-America map, printed for the Bicentennial, and taped to the dash a page of directions in Vicki’s own hand on the “smart way” to get to Barnegat Pines. 206-A to 530-E to 70-S and (swerving briefly north) to an unnumbered county road referred to only as Double Trouble Road, which supposedly delivers you neat as a whistle to where you’re going.
Her directions route me past the most ordinary but satisfying New Jersey vistas, those parts that remind you of the other places you’ve been in your life, but in New Jersey are grouped like squares in a puzzle. It is a good time to put the top down and let in the winds.
Much of what I pass, of course, looks precisely like everyplace else in the state, and the dog-leg boundaries make it tricky to keep cardinal points aligned. The effect of driving south and east is to make you feel you’re going south and west and that you’re lost, or sometimes that you’re headed nowhere. Clean industry abounds. Valve plants. A Congoleum factory. U-Haul sheds. A sand and gravel pit close by a glass works. An Airedale kennel. The Quaker Home for Confused Friends. A mall with a nautical theme. Several signs that say HERE! Suddenly it is a high pale sky and a feeling like Florida, but a mile farther on, it is the Mississippi Delta—civilized life flattened below high power lines, the earth laid out in great vegetative tracts where Negroes fish from low bridges, and Mount Holly lumps on the far horizon just before the Delaware. Beyond that lies Maine.
I stop in the town of Pemberton near Fort Dix, and put in another call to X to express Easter greetings. Her recording talks in the same brassy business voice, and this time I leave a number—the Arcenaults’—where she can reach me. I also put in a call to Walter. He is on my mind today, although no one answers at his house.
In Bamber—a town that is no more than a post office and small lake across Route 530—I stop for a drink in a cozy rough-pine roadhouse with yellow lowlights and log tables. Sweet Lou’s Sportsman’s B’ar, owned—the signs inside all say—by a famous ex-center on the ’56 Giants, Sweet Lou Calcagno. Jack Dempsey, Spike Jones, Lou Costello, Ike and a host of others have all been close friends of Sweet Lou’s and contributed pictures to the walls, showing themselves embracing a smiling, crewcut bruiser in an open collar shirt who looks like he could eat a football.
Sweet Lou isn’t around at the moment, but when I sit down at the bar, a heavy pale-skinned woman in her fifties with beehive hair and elastic slacks comes out from a swinging door to the back and begins to clean an ashtray.
“Where’s Lou today,” I ask after I’ve ordered a whiskey. I would, in fact, like to meet him, maybe set up a Where Are They Now feature: “Former Giant lugnut Lou Calcagno once had a dream. Not to run a fumble in for a touchdown or to play in a league championship or to enter the Hall of Fame, but to own a little watering trough in his downstate Jersey home of Bamber, a quiet, traditional place where friends and fans could come and reminisce about the old glory days….”
“Lou who?” the woman says, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke away from me out the corner of her mouth.
I widen my grin. “Sweet Lou.”
“He’s where he is. How long since you been in?”
“A while, I guess it’s been.”
“I guess too.” She narrows her eyes. “Maybe in your other life.”
“I used to be a big fan of his,” I say, though this isn’t true. I’m not even sure I ever heard of him. To be honest, I feel like an idiot.
“He’s dead. He’s been dead maybe, thirty years? That’s approximately where he is.”
“I’m sorry to know that,” I say.
“Right. Lou was a real nunce,” the woman says, finishing wiping out the ashtray. “And he was a big nunce. I was married to him.” She pours herself a cup of coffee and stares at me. “I don’t wanna ruin your dreams. But. You know?”
“What happened?”
“Well,” she says, “some gangsters drove over here from Mount Holly and walked him into the parking lot out there like it was friends and shot him twenty or thirty times. That did it.”
“What the hell had he done to them?”
She shakes her head. “No idea. I was right here where I am behind this bar. They came in, three of them, all little rats. They said they wanted Lou to come out and talk, and when he did, boom. Nobody came back in to explain.”
“Did they catch the people?”
“Nope. They did not. Not one was caught. Lou and I were getting divorced anyway. But I was working for him afternoons.”
I look around the dark bar where Sweet Lou stares down at me from long ago and life, surrounded by his smiling friends and fans, an athlete who left sports a success to achieve a prosperous life in Bamber, which was no doubt his home, or near it, yet came to a bad end. Not the way these things usually turn out and not exactly what you’d want to read about before dinner behind a chilled martini.
Someone else, I see, is in the bar, an older gray-haired man in an expensive-looking silverish suit sitting talking to a young woman in red slacks. They are in the corner by the window. Above them is a huge somber-looking bear’s head.
I cluck my tongue and look at Lou’s widow. “It’s nice you keep the place this way.”
“He had it in his will that all these had to be left up, or I’d have changed it, what, a hundred years ago? It has to stay a B’ar, too, and buy from his distributorship. Otherwise I lose it to his guinea cousins in Teaneck. So I ignore him. I forget whose picture it is, really. He wanted to run everybody’s life.”
“Do you still own the distributorship?”
“My son by my second marriage. It fell in his lap.” She sniffs, smokes, stares out the small front door glass which casts a pale inward light.
“That’s not so bad.”
“It was the best thing he ever did, I guess. After he was in the ground he did it. Which figures.”
“My name’s Frank Bascombe, by the way. I’m a sportswriter.” I put my dollar on the bar and drink up my whiskey.
“Mrs. Phillips,” she says and shakes my hand. “My other husband’s dead, too.” She stares at me without interest and o
pens a saltine packet from a basket of them on the bar. “I haven’t seen one of you guys in years. They used to come all the time to interview Fatso. From Philly. He kept ’em in stitches. He knew jokes by the hundreds.” She drops the little red saltine ribbon into the clean ashtray and breaks the cracker in two.
“I’m sorry I didn’t know him.” I’m on my feet now, smiling, sympathetic, but ready to go.
“Well, I’m sorry I did. So we’re even.” Mrs. Phillips stubs out her cigarette before biting the saltine. She looks at it curiously as if considering Lou Calcagno all over again. “No, I take it back,” she says. “He wasn’t so awful all the time.” She gives me a sour smile. “Quote me. How’s that. Not all the time.” She turns and walks stoutly down the bar toward a TV that is dark. The other two patrons are getting up to go, and I am left with my own smile and nothing to say but, “Okay. Thanks. I’ll do it.”
Outside in the white-shell parking lot there is the promise of approaching new weather—Detroit weather—though the sun is shining. A wet wind has arrived over Bamber Lake, unsettling the dust, bending the pines along the row of empty lake cottages, sending the Sportsman’s B’ar sign wagging. The older man and the young woman in slacks climb into a red Cadillac and drive away toward the west, where a bank of quilty clouds has lowered the sky. I stand beside my car and think first of Lou Calcagno coming to his sad end where I am parked, and that this is exactly the place for such things, a place that was something once. I think about the balloonists I saw this morning, and if they will get down and moored before the stiff blow comes. I am glad to be away from home today, to be off in the heart of a landscape that is unknown to me, glad to be bumping up against a world that is not mine or of my devising. There are times when life seems not so great but better than anything else, and when you’re happy to be alive, though not exactly ecstatic.
I run the top up now against a chill. In a minute’s time I’m fast down the road out of scrubby Bamber, headed for my own rendezvous on Double Trouble Road.
Vicki’s directions, it turns out, are perfect. Straight through the seaside townlet of Barnegat Pines, cross a drawbridge spanning a tarnished arm of a metallic-looking bay, loop through some beachy rental bungalows and turn right onto a man-made peninsula and a pleasant, meandering curbless street of new pastel split-levels with green lawns, underground utilities and attached garages. Sherri-Lyn Woods, the area is named, and there are streets like it along other parallel peninsulas nearby, though there are no woods in sight. Most of the houses have boat docks out back with a boat of some kind tied up—a boxy cabin-fisherman or a sleek-hulled outboard. All in all it is a vaguely nautical-feeling community, though all the houses down the street look Californiaish and casual.
The Arcenaults’ house at 1411 Arctic Spruce is vaguely similar to the others, though hanging on its front at the place where the two levels join behind beige siding there is a near life-size figure of Jesus-crucified that makes it immediately distinctive. Jesus in his suburban agony. Bloody eyes. Flimsy body. Feet already beginning to sag and give up the ghost. A look of redoubtable woe and calm. He is painted a lighter shade of beige than the siding and looks distinctly Mediterranean.
The Arcenaults—the swaying plaque out front says—and I wheel in just ahead of unkind weather and come to rest beside Vicki’s Dart.
“Lynette just had to have ole Jesus hung out there,” Vicki whispers, when we’re only half in the door, where she has met me looking put out. “I think he’s the tackiest thing in the entire world and I’m a Catholic. You’re thirty minutes late, anyway.” She is a vision in a pink jersey dress, serious rose-colored heels, snapping stockings and crimson fingernails, her black hair uncurled and simplified for home.
Everybody, she says, is scattered through the house on all levels at once, and I am only able to meet Elvis Presley, a tiny white poodle wearing a diamond collar, and Lynette, Vicki’s stepmother, who comes to the kitchen door in a chef’s apron, holding a spoon and sings out “Hi, hi.” She is a pert and pretty little second wife with bright red hair and bunchy hips descending to ankletted ankles. Vicki whispers that she hails from Lodi, West Virginia, and is a thick-as-rock hillbilly, though I have the feeling we could be friendly if Vicki’d allow it. She is cooking meat and the house airs smell warm and thick. “Hope you like your lamb well, well, well done, Franky,” Lynette says, disappearing back into the kitchen. “That’s the way Wade Arcenault likes his.”
“Great. That’s exactly how I like mine,” I lie, and am suddenly aware that not only am I late but I haven’t brought a gift for anybody, not a flower, a greeting card, or an Easter bonbon. I am certain Vicki has noticed.
“You better put plenty of mint jelly on my plate.” Vicki rolls her eyes, then says to my ear, “You don’t either like it well done.”
Vicki and I sit on a big salmon-colored couch, with our backs to a picture window that faces Arctic Spruce Drive. The drapes are open and an amber storm light colors the room, which has old-master prints on the walls—a Van Gogh, a Constable seascape, and “The Blue Boy.” A plush blue carpet (a hunch tells me Everett had a hand here) covers the floor wall to wall. The house has exactly the feel of Vicki’s apartment, but its effect on me—in my youthful seersucker—is that I am the teacher who has given Vicki a bad mark at midterm and who has been invited to Sunday dinner to prove the family’s a solid one before finals. It isn’t a bad way to feel, and when dinner is over I’m sure I can leave in a hurry.
The television, a cabinet model the size of a large doghouse, is showing another NBA game without sound. I would be happy to watch it the rest of the afternoon, while Vicki reads Love’s Last Journey, and forget all about dinner.
“I’m hot, aren’t you hot?” Vicki says, and she suddenly jumps up, crosses the room and twists the thermostat drastically. Cooling, forced air hits me almost immediately from a high wall louver. She switches around, showing her nice fanny and gives me a witchy smile. This is a different girl at home, there’s no doubting that. “No need us smotherin indoors, is it?”
We sit for a while and silently watch the Knicks beat hell out of the Cavaliers. Cleveland plays its regular leggy, agitating garage-ball game while the Knicks seem club-footed and awkward as giraffes but inexplicably score more points, which makes the Cleveland crowd good and mad. Two giant Negroes start to scuffle after a loose ball, and a vicious fight breaks out almost instantly. Players, black and white, fall all over the floor like trees, and the game quickly becomes a free-for-all the referees can’t handle. Police come onto the floor and begin grabbing people, smiles on their big Slovak faces, and things seem likely to get worse. It is a usual Cleveland tactic.
Vicki clicks off the picture with a remote box hidden between the couch cushions, leaving me wide-eyed and silent. She jerks her dress down around her sleek knees and sits up high like a job applicant. I can see the broad, all-business outline of her brassiere (she needs a good-sized one) through the stretchy pink fabric. I would like to snake a hand round to one of those breasts and pull her back for an Easter kiss, which I still have not been given. Meat smell is everywhere.
“Did you read that Parade today,” she asks, giving her jersey another tug and staring across the room at an electric organ sitting against the wall underneath the flat and florid Van Gogh.
“I guess not,” I say, though I can’t remember actually what I have been doing. Waiting to be here. My sole occupation for the day.
“Ole Walter Scott’s said that a woman washed her hair with a honey shampoo and walked out in the backyard with a wet head and got stung to death by bees.” She casts a fishy eye around at me. “Does that sound like the truth?”
“What happened to the woman who washed her hair with beer? Did she end up marrying a Polack?”
She tosses her head around. “You’re a regular Red Skeleton, aren’t you?”
Out in the kitchen Lynette drops a pan with a loud bangety bang. “Scuze me, kids,” she calls out and laughs.
&nbs
p; “You drop the set out of your ring?” Vicki says loudly.
“I coulda said something else,” Ly nette says, “but I won’t on Easter.”
“Small favors, please,” Vicki says.
“I had a ring that big once,” Lynette’s friendly voice says.
“So where’d he go?” Vicki says and gives me a hot look. She and Lynette are not the best of friends. I wish, though, that they could pretend to be for the afternoon.
“That poor man died of cancer before you were in the picture,” Lynette says light-heartedly.
“Was that about the time you converted over?”
Lynette’s beaming face pops around the kitchen door molding, her eyes sharpened. “Shortly after, sweetheart, that’s right.”
“I guess you needed help and guidance.”
“We all do, don’t we, Vicki sweet? Even Franky, I bet.”
“He’s Presbyterian.”
“Well-o-well.” Lynette is gone from the door back to her stove. “Back in the hills we called them the country club, though I understand they’ve gotten pious since Vatican II. The Catholics got easier and the others had to get harder.”
“I doubt the Catholics got any easier,” I say, though for this Vicki fires me a savage look of warning.
Lynette suddenly reappears, nodding seriously at me and pulling a curl of damp orange hair off her temple. She still seems someone a person could like. “We ought none of us to get lax the way this world is headed,” she says.
“Lynette works at the Catholic crisis center in Forked River,” Vicki says in a tired singsong.
“That’s mighty right, sweetheart,” Lynette smiles, then is gone again and begins making thick stirring noises in a bowl. Vicki looks as disgusted with everything as it’s possible to be.
“What it comes down to is she answers the phone,” Vicki whispers, but loud enough. “And they call that a crisis-line.” She flounces back on the couch and buries her chin over in her collarbone, staring at the wall. “I guess I’ve seen a crisis or two. Some guy came in one time down in Dallas with his entire thing sticking out of his friend’s pocket, and we had to sew that gentleman right back on.”