The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  Small, dark-skinned yard personnel with backpack blower units that make them look like spacemen are busy in many yards here, whooshing oceans of late-autumn leaves and heaping them in piles beside great black plastic bags, before hauling them away in their beater trucks. The cold sky has gone cerulean and untroubled (weather being what passes for drama in the suburbs). I don’t miss Haddam, but I miss this—the triggering sense of emanation that a drive in what was once the country ratchets up in me. And today especially, since I’m not risking or pitching anything, am off duty and only along for moral support.

  “Is Michigan in Lansing or Ann Arbor?” Mike says, blinking expectantly, hands again in the prescribed steering positions. We are nearing our rendezvous and he’s on the alert.

  He knows I bleed Michigan blue but doesn’t really know what that means. “Why?”

  “I guess there’re some pretty interesting things going on at Michigan State right now.” He is speaking officially. Practicing at being authentic.

  “Did they discover a featherless turkey in time for Thanksgiving?” I say. “That’s what they’re good at over there.”

  A man stands alone on the wide grassy lawn of a bright yellow bay-windowed Dutch contemporary where Halloween pumpkins still line the front walk. He’s barefoot, wearing a white tae kwon do suit and is performing stylized Oriental exercises—one leg rising like a mantis while his arms work in an overhand swimming motion. Possibly it’s a form of pre-Thanksgiving stress maintenance he’s read about in an airline magazine. But something about my Suburban, its rumbling, radiant alien-ness, has made him stop, put palm to brow to shade the sun and follow us as we go past.

  “In my new-product seminar last week”—Mike nods as if he’s quoting Heraclitus (I, of course, pay for this)—“I saw some interesting figures about the lag between the top of the housing market and the first downturn in askings.” His narrow eyes are fixed stonily ahead. I used to eat that kind of computer spurtage for breakfast, and made a bundle doing it. But since I arrived at the Shore, I’m happy to list ’em ’n twist ’em. When man stops wanting ocean-front, it’ll be because they’ve paved the ocean. “I guess they’ve got a pretty good real estate institute over there,” Mike blathers on about Moo-U. “Using some pretty sophisticated costing models. We might plug into their newsletter.” Mike can occasionally drone like a grad student, relying on the ritual-reflexive “I guess” to get his most significant points set in concrete. (“I guess Maine’s pretty far from San Diego.” “I guess a hurricane really whips the wind up.” “I guess it gets dark around here once the sun sets.”)

  “Did you read any reports from Kalamazoo College?”

  Mike frowns over at me. He doesn’t know what Kalamazoo means, or why it would be side-splittingly hilarious. His round, bespectacled, over-serious face forms a suspicious tight-lipped question mark. Sense of humor can become excess baggage for immigrants, and in any case, Mike’s not always great company for extended periods.

  Ahead on the left rises an ancient white concrete silo standing in the cornfield, backed by third-growth hardwood through which mid-day light is flashing. A weathered roadside vegetable stand, years abandoned, sits at the road shoulder, and alongside it a pale blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville. When Ann and I arrived to Haddam blows ago, it was our standard Saturday outing to drive these very county roads, taking in the then-untouched countryside up to Hunterdon County and the river towns, stopping at a country store where they cooked a ham and eggs breakfast in the back, buying a set of andirons or a wicker chair, then pulling over for squash and turnips and slab-sided tomatoes in a place just like this, taking it all home in brown paper sacks. It was long before this became a wealth belt.

  I’m thinking this old roadside stall may actually have been one of our regulars. MacDonald’s Farm or some such place. Though it wasn’t run by a real farmer, but a computer whiz from Bell Labs, who’d taken an early buyout to spend his happy days yakking with customers about the weather and the difference between rutabagas and turnips.

  This dilapidated vegetable stand is also clearly our rendezvous point. Mike, pink Post-it in his fist, swerves us inexpertly straight across the oncoming lane and rumbles into the little dirt turn-out. The Caddy’s driver-door immediately swings open, and a large man begins climbing out. He is a square-jawed, thick-armed, tanned and taut Mediterranean, wearing clean and pressed khakis, a white oxford shirt (sleeves rolled Paul Bunyan-style), sturdy work boots and a braided belt with a silver tape measure cube riding his hip like a snub-nose. He looks like he just stepped out of the Sears catalog and is already smiling like the best, most handsome guy in the world to go into the sprawl business with. His Caddy has a volunteer fire department tag on its bumper.

  My gut, however, instantly says this is a man to be cautious of—the too neatly rolled sleeves are the giveaway—a man who is more or less, but decidedly not, what he seems. My gut also tells me Mike will fall in love with him in two seconds due to his large, upright, manly American-ness. If I don’t watch out, the deal’ll be done.

  “What’s this guy’s name again?” I’ve heard it but don’t remember. We’re climbing out. The big Caddy guy’s already standing out in the dusty breeze, laving his big hands as if he’d just washed them in the car. Outside here, the wind’s colder than at the Shore. The barometer’s falling. Clouds are fattening to the west. I have on only my tan barracuda jacket, which isn’t warm enough. Money says this guy’s Italian, though he’s all spruced up and could be Greek, which wouldn’t be better.

  “Tom Benivalle.” Mike frowns, grabbing his blazer from the backseat.

  I rest my case.

  “Mr. Mahoney?” the big guy announces in a loud voice. “Tom Benivalle, gladda meetcha.” Gruff, let’s-cut-the-bullshit Texas Hill Country drawl resonates in his voice. He’s seemingly not disturbed that a tiny forty-three-year-old Tibetan dressed like a Mafia golfer and with an Irish name might be his new partner.

  Though it’s all an act. Benivalle is a storied central New Jersey name with much colorful Haddam history in tow. A certain Eugene (Gino) Benivalle, doubtless an uncle, was for a time Haddam police chief before opting for early retirement to Siesta Key, just ahead of a trip to Trenton on a statutory rape charge brought by his fourteen-year-old niece. Tommy, clean-cut, helmet-haired, big schnoz, tiny-dark-eyed good groomer, looks like nothing as much as a cop, up to and including a gold-stud earring. This could be a sting operation. But to catch who?

  Mike thrusts himself forward, his face flushed, and gives Benivalle a squinch-eyed, teeth-bared, apologetic grin, along with a double-hander handshake I’ve counseled him against, since Jerseyites typically grow wary at free-floating goodwill, especially from foreigners who might be Japanese. Though Mike isn’t having it. He reluctantly introduces me as his “friend” while buttoning his blazer buttons. We’ve agreed to keep my part in this hazy, though I already sense he wishes I’d leave. Tom Benivalle enfolds my hand in his big hairy-backed one. His palm’s as soft as a puppy’s belly, and he transmits an amiable sweet minty smell I recognize as spearmint. He’s applied something lacquer-ish to his forehead-bordering hair that makes it practically sparkle. The prospect that Benivalle might represent shadowy upstate connections isn’t unthinkable. But face-to-face with him, my guess is not. My guess is Montclair State, marketing B.A., a tour with Uncle Sam, then home to work for the old man in the wholesale nursery bidnus in West Amwell. Married, then kids, then out on his own, tearing up turf and looking around for new business opportunities. He’s probably forty, drives his Caddy to mass, drinks a little Amarone and a little schnapps, plays racquetball, pumps minor iron, puts out the odd chimney fire and voted for Bush but wouldn’t actually hurt a centipede. Which is no reason to go into business with him.

  Benivalle turns from our handshake and strides off as a gust of November breeze raises grit off Mullica Road and peppers my neck. He’s cutting to the chase, heading to the edge of the cornfield to showcase the acreage, demonstrate he’s done his homework, befo
re sketching out the business plan. Put the small talk on hold. It’s how I’d do it.

  Mike and I follow like goslings—Mike flashing me a deviled look meant to stifle early judgment. He’s already in love with the guy and doesn’t want the deal queered. I round my eyes at him in phony surprise, which devils him more.

  “Okay. Now our parcel runs straight south to Mullica Creek,” Benivalle’s saying in a deeper but less LBJish voice, raising a long arm and pointing out toward the silo and the pretty band of trees that follows the water’s course (when there’s water there). “Which is in the floodplain.” He glances at me, heavy brows gathering over his black eyes. He knows I know he knows I know. Still, full disclosure, numbers crunched, regulations read and digested: My presence has been registered. It’s possible we’ve met somewhere. Benivalle bites his bottom lip with his top teeth—familiar to me as the stagecraft of our current President. Sharp wind is gusting but fails to disturb a follicle of Benivalle’s dense black do. “So,” he goes on, “we establish our south lot lines a hundred feet back from the mean high-water mark—the previous hundred-year flood. The creek runs chiefly west to east. So we have about a hundred twenty-five available acres if we clear the woods and grade it off.”

  Mike is smiling wondrously.

  “How many units do you get on a hundred and twenty-five?” I say this because Mike isn’t going to.

  Benivalle nods. Great question. “Average six thousand with a footprint of about sixty-two per.” This means a living room the size of a fifties tract home. Benivalle tucks his big thumb in under his braided belt, rears back delicately on his boot heels and continues staring toward Mullica Creek as if only in that way can he say what needs saying next. “The state’s got its setback laws—you prob’ly know all that—for homes this size. You got some wiggle room on your street widths, but there’s not that much you can fudge. So. I’m expecting a density of forty on three-acre lots, leaving some double lots for presale or all-cash offers. Maybe if you got a friend who’s interested in building a ten-thousand-footer.” A smile at the prospect of such a Taj Mahal. He is now addressing me more than Mike, whom he seems to want to treat benevolently, instead of as just some little foreign team-mascot type who can probably do a good somersault.

  “How much do they cost?” Mike finally says.

  “High-end, a buck-twenty per,” Benivalle answers quick. He, I see, has old, smoothed-over acne craters in both cheeks. It gives him a Neville Brand stolidness, suggesting old humiliations suffered. It also gives him a Neville Brand aura of untrustworthiness that’s oddly touching but isn’t helped by the earring. No doubt Mrs. B. talks about his face to her girlfriends. He also has extremely regular, straight white teeth, which make him look dull.

  “That’s seven hundred twenty thousand,” I say.

  “A-bout.” Benivalle laps his bottom lip over his top one and nods. “We don’t see much high-end fluctuation out here, Mr. Baxter.” Why not Mr. Bastard? “They see it, they buy it, or else they don’t. They’ve all got the dough. Down in Haddam last year, they got a double-digit spike in million-dollar deals. Our problem’s the same as theirs.”

  “What’s that?”

  Benivalle unaccountably smiles at the luck of it. “Inventory. Used to be it was location in this business, Frank. If I can call you that.”

  “You bet.” I make my cheeks smile.

  “Now go over to Hunterdon County and Warren, it’s way different. Prices rose twenty-three, twenty-four percent here this year. Median price is four-fifty.” Benivalle brusquely scratches his rucked neck like Neville Brand would, and in a way that makes him look older.

  “You don’t own the land, do you?” Mike suddenly says, forgetting that he’s supposed to help buy it. He’s been in a swoon since his two-hander was reciprocated. The thought that this out-of-date farmland, this comely but useless woods, this silted, dry creek could be transformed into a flat-as-a-griddle housing tract, on which behemoth-size dwellings in promiscuous architectural permutations might sprout like a glorious city of yore and that it could all be done to his bidding and profit is almost too much for him.

  “I’ve got an option.” Benivalle nods again, as though this was news not to be bruited. “The old guy who used to operate this vegetable stand”—his big mitt motions toward the tumbledown gray-plank produce shack—“his family owns it.”

  “MacDonald,” I suddenly realize—and say.

  “Okay,” Benivalle says, like a cop. “You know him? He’s dead.”

  “I used to buy tomatoes from him twenty-five years ago.”

  “I used to pick those freakin’ tomatoes,” Benivalle says matter-offactly. “I worked for him. Like—”

  “I probably bought tomatoes from you.” I can’t keep from grinning. Here is a human being from my certifiable past—not all that common if you’re me—who may actually have laid his honest human eyes on my dead son, Ralph Bascombe.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Benivalle says.

  “What happened to ole MacDonald?” I’m forgetting the option, the floodplain, inventory, footprint, usable floor space. Memory rockets to that other gilded time—red mums, orange pumpkins, fat dusty tomatoes, leathery gourds, sunlight streaming through the roof cracks in the warm, rich-aired produce stand. Ralph, age five or six, would march up to the counter and somebody—Tommy Benivalle, acned, furiously masturbating high schooler and reserve on the JV wrestling squad—would look gravely down, then slip my son a root beer rock candy on condition he tell no one, since Farmer MacDonald got a “pretty penny” for them. It became Ralph’s first joke. Every penny a pretty penny.

  “He passed.” Meaning ole MacDonald. “Like I said. A few years ago.” Tom Benivalle’s not at ease sharing the past with me. He brushes a speck of phantom road grit off his oxford cloth shirtsleeve. On his breast pocket there’s stitched a tiny colorful pheasant bursting into flight. He buys his shirts from the same catalog I buy mine—minus the pheasant.

  Silence momentarily becalms us while Benivalle refinds the skein of business talk. He is not the bad guy I thought. I could mention my son. He could say he remembered him. “He’s got a daughter up in Freylinghuysen,” he says about the now dead owner. “I approached her about this. She was okay.”

  “You must’ve known her when you were kids.”

  Mike’s still staring at the acreage in his mustard blazer, dreaming conquest dreams. A whole new it has bumped up onto his horizon. Lavallette no longer the final it. He and Mrs. Mahoney might see eye-to-eye again.

  “Yeah, I sorta did,” Benivalle says scratchily. “He worked at Bell Labs, the old man. My dad had a decorative-pottery place up in Frenchtown. They did some business.” How do I know these natives? I should’ve been an FBI profiler. Sometimes no surprise can be a blessing. I, however, am not the business partner here. My job is to be the spiritual Geiger counter, and see to it Benivalle understands Mr. Mahoney has serious (non-Asian) backers who know a thing or two. I’m sure I’ve done that by now. Thoughts of my son go sparkling away.

  “I’m going to take off,” I say, turning toward Mike, who’s still staring away, dazzled. “I’ve gotta see a man about a horse.”

  Benivalle blinks. “So, then, are you in the horse business?” It’s his first spontaneous utterance to me—besides my name—and it causes him to ravel his brow, turn the corners of his mouth up in a non-smile, touch a finger to the stud in his earlobe and let his eyes examine me.

  I smile back. “It’s just an expression.” Mike unexpectedly turns and looks to me as if I’d spoken his name.

  “I get it,” Benivalle says. He’s ready for me to get going, for it to be just the two of them, so he can start making his spiel to Mike about having himself certified for all that government moolah so they can start moving Urdu speakers down from Gotham and Teaneck. He may think Mike’s a Pakistani. My work here is done, and fast.

  Mike and I begin our walk back across the gusty turn-out toward my Suburban. Sweet pungence of leaf-burn swims in the air from the linked back
yards across Mullica Road, where a homeowner’s daydreaming against his rake, garden hose at the ready, peering into the cool flames and curling smoke, indifferent to the good-neighbor ordinances he’s breaching, woolgathering over how things should most properly be, and how they once had been when something he can’t exactly remember was the rule of the day and he was young. It could all be put back into working order, he knows, if the Democrats could be kept from boosting the goddamned fucking election that he, because he was on a business trip to Dayton and had jury duty in Pennington the second he got home, somehow forgot to vote in. “Whatever It Takes” should be the battle hymn of the republic.

  “So, I’ll see you later,” Mike says, nose in the breeze as we come to my parked vehicle. He’s feeling tip-top about everything now, even though seeming eager is incautious.

  “I’ll be at the August,” I say. Benivalle has already headed toward his Caddy. He has no inclination for good-byes with strangers. “Gladda meetcha,” I shout to him in the stiff wind, but he’s already mashing a little cell phone to his ear and can’t hear me. “Yeah. I’m out here at the parcel,” I hear him say. “It’s all great.”

  “What do you think?” Mike says barely under his breath. His flat freckled nose has gone pale in the cold, his small pupils shining with hope for a thumbs-up. His spiffy business outfit—expensive shoes and blazer—makes him seem helpless. His lapel, I see, sports a tiny American flag in the buttonhole. A new addition.