The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  “He’s okay. He in the whale-watch bidnus anymore.” My drink set down in front of me, Termite (I’m only calling her that privately) begins giving a sink full of dirty glasses the three-tub, suds-rinse-rinse treatment, her little hands nimble as a card sharp’s. “Dat ole charter boat bidnus played out. He got into burials-at-sea for a while. Den dat crapped. Annend dis whale thing jumped up.”

  “Sounds great.” I take a first restorative sip. Termite has poured me a double dose of Old Woodweevil, meaning it’s happy hour. Soon the bar will be filling up with big women fresh from jobs as stevedores, hod carriers and diesel mechanics—happy warriors happy to have a place of their own. I wonder if Clarissa has a tattoo someplace I don’t know about, and if so, what does it say? Not Dad, we’re sure of that.

  The two shadowy women from the rear booth, one in a floral print muumuu her belly doesn’t fit into too well, the other in a bulky red turtleneck, stand up and walk arms around each other to the antique jukebox. One puts in a quarter and cues up Ole Perry singing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” then they begin slowly to dance to the sweet-sad melody underneath the unmoving disco globe.

  “She’d fuck a bullet wound, that skanky bitch,” I hear one of the two full-figured gals at the bar—the one in the Yankees cap—saying to Termite, who’s back down where they are, conniving about one of their friends.

  “Well, guess what?” Termite is brazenly smirking, rising up onto her toes on the duckboards better to get into the faces of the two women patrons. “Ah ain’t no fuckin’ bullet wound. I heeerd dat. You know what ahm sayin’?” She shoots a sudden feral look my way, then lowers her voice to a big stage whisper. “Ahmo be dat bitch’s worst nightmare.” Termite, I see, wears an enormous Jim Bowie sheath knife on her oversized silver-studded black bruiser-belt that’s drawn up so tight she must have trouble breathing. She herself is entirely in black—jeans, boots, tee-shirt, eyeshadow—everything but her silver flat-top, ear decor and TERMITE tattoo. I imagine she’s already been a lot of people’s nightmare, though she’s been completely welcoming to me and could bring me another highball and I wouldn’t mind it. My car window’s not fixed yet, and the roof’s drumming with sheets of merciless rain I’m happy to be out of.

  Termite sees me angling for her eye and leaves the disputers and saunters down to me, still carrying most of her fuck-you attitude with her. She’s skinny-bowlegged in her jeans, with excessive space between her taut little spavined thighs, so that she swaggers like the long-departed Charlie Starkweather, no small-change nightmare himself.

  “How you doin’? You still thirsty?” She rests her little hands on the bar rail and tap-taps an oversized silver thumb ring against the wood. “You suck dat one down like you needed it.”

  “It was good,” I say. “I’ll have another one just like it.” I have to take my piss now. My eye wanders to where the gents used to be.

  “Oh yeah, dey good.” Termite’s filling my glass where it sits, using the old ice, lots of whiskey and a quick squirt from the soda gun. “It’s over in dat corner,” she says, seeing where I’m looking without looking there. “Light’s burnt out. It don’t get the use it used to.”

  “Great.” I slide off my stool and test my walking stability, which is solid.

  Termite flashes a nasty smile down at her two friends as I go, and in the same stagy voice says, “It might be a ole alligator in dere, so you better be careful.”

  “Or worse,” one of the girls cracks back, and snorts.

  “Okay,” I say. “Will do.”

  Inside the GENTLEMEN door, nothing’s forbidding. The ceiling bulb actually works, though the grimy porcelain fixtures are decrepit fiftiesera Kohler, the hand-dryer fan’s hanging on a screw, and the woolly old window vent whose outside cover bangs in the wind lets cold mist in onto the layer of brown that gunks up everything. Still, the pissing facility’s perfectly usable. No alligators.

  Plenty of messages have been left on the wall for future users to ponder, all illustrated with neatly-penciled, magic-markered or rudely carved depictions of the engorged male equipment, plus a variety of women with miraculous breasts, several demonstrating uncanny coupling postures. Appeals are made for the “Able-bodied Semen,” the “Lonely Hards Club” and “Fearless Fast-Dick Dick-tective Agency.” One, to the side of the urinal, has the nostalgic old 609 area code, with a request for “Discreet Callers Only.” Several messages propose reckless sexual chicanery with members of the Mouzakis family, including Grandma Mouzak and the Mouzakis pet sheep, Mouzy, who’s shown scaling a fence. The only items of unusual note as I complete a long, knee-weakening piss—other than the BUSH-GORE BOTH SUCK, lipsticked onto the scaly old mirror—is a chartreuse cell phone, a little Nokia that’s been tossed in the urinal as a gesture, I suppose, of dissatisfaction with its service. And beside it on the rubber grate is a half-eaten lunch-meat sandwich on white bread. It feels odd to piss on a sandwich and simultaneously into the ear hole of the miniature green telephone. But I’m past having a choice. My time in unlikely men’s rooms has tripled since my Mayo insertions, and I tend not to be as finicky as I once was.

  When I re-take my place at the bar, feeling immensely better, my fresh highball’s waiting along with a new twin. Ms. Termite has stayed at my end and wants to be friendly, which makes me even happier to be here.

  “So whadda you do? You some kinda salesman?” She hauls a soft pack of Camels out of her jeans, retrieves one with pinched lips and lights it with a silver Zippo as big as a Frigidaire. Click-crack-tink-snap. She exhales a gray smoke trickle out the corner of her mouth, skewing her lips like a convict. “Mind if I smoke? Ain’t spose to, but fuck it.”

  “You bet,” I say, grateful for the forbidden aroma in my nostrils. When Mike fired up last night, I realized you don’t smell it as much as you used to. I’m tempted to bum one, though I haven’t smoked since military school and would probably suffocate. “I am a salesman,” I answer. “I sell houses.”

  “Where at? Florida? One-a dem?”

  “Right down in Sea-Clift. A ways south of here. Not far, really.”

  “Oh yeah? Well ain’t dat sump’n.” Eyes squinted, her smoke in the corner of her mouth, Termite goes searching under the bar and produces a copy of the Shore Home Buyer’s Guide. The East Jersey Real Estate Board publishes this guide, and if Mike Mahoney’s done his homework, there’s a boxed Realty-Wise ad in the south Barnegat section showing 61 Surf Road, which the storm outside—vanguard of tropical depression Wayne—may now be washing out to sea.

  “I been lookin’,” Termite says.

  “What kind of place you lookin’ for?” I drop my g’s as a gesture of camaraderie. Termite would be a challenging client, though possibly I could let Mike do the honors. He’d think it was great—and it would be.

  “Oh. You know.” She plucks a fleck of tobacco off her tongue tip and in doing so gives me a glimpse of a silver stud punched through her tongue skin like a piece of horse tack. I want it to be still so I can get a better look, but in an instant it’s flickered and gone. “Just sump’n grand, overlookin’ de ocean and dat don’t cost nothin’. Maybe sump’n somebody died in, like what used to be about the Corvette dat girl died in in Laplace and dey couldn’t get the smell out, so they had to junk it. I could live with it. You got sump’n like dat? Where was it you live?”

  “Sea-Clift.”

  “Okay.” She sucks a molar and rolls her punctured tongue around her cheek at the concept of a town by that name. “Course, I got my momma. She in the wheelchair since I don’t know when.”

  “That’s nice,” I say. “I mean it’s nice she can live with you. It’s not nice she’s in a wheelchair. That’s not nice.”

  “Yeah. Diabetes amputated her leg off.” Termite frowns as if this was, for her, personally painful.

  “I see.”

  The two big ladies down the bar are re-animating their conversation at higher decibels. “Every time I get on a fuckin’ plane, I think, This sumbitch is gonna blow up. Makes
me sleep better if I just accept it.” The couple from the back booth are still dancing, though Perry has long ago finished his Christmas song.

  “Look. Lemme aks you somethin’.” Termite hikes her booted foot onto the lip of the rinse sink and holds her smoke like a pencil between her thumb and index finger. In spite of her tough-as-rivets, knife-wielding personal demeanor—little biceps veined and sculpted, brown eyes slightly, skeptically bulged, ringed fingers raw and probably callused from pumping iron—she is not the least bit masculine. In fact, she’s as feminine as Ava Gardner—just not in the same way as Ava Gardner. Her waist, with her big silver and black belt pulled tight, is as tiny as a dragonfly’s. And her breasts, possibly encased in something metal under her black muscle shirt, are sizable breasts no man would sniff at. I’d like to know what her mother calls her at home. Susan or Sandra or Amanda-Jean. Though she’d pop you in the kisser if you breathed it. “Where you come from originally?”

  “I’m pure cracker,” I say. “Mississippi.”

  “I heeerd dat,” Termite sneers. A lineage check means we’re aiming toward subject matter her customers down the bar wouldn’t tolerate, something, in her experience, only another southerner could possibly comprehend: exactly why your colored races are constitutionally unsuited to work a forty-hour week; the consequences of their possessing statistically proven smaller brains; why they can’t swim or leave white women alone. It’s too bad there can’t be something good to come from being a southerner. However, I’m getting happily drunk on my second highball and these are subjects easily skirted.

  “Okay. See. I read this.” Termite inches in close to the bar, drops her voice. “Your brain don’t have no manager, see. Not really. It’s just like a plant. It go dis way, den it go dat way. Dey ain’t no self ever runnin’ it. It just like adapts. We all just like accidents dat we got minds at all.” Her little rodent’s face grows solemn with the dark implications of this news. I know something about this matter from my bathroom study of the Mayo newsletter, where such matters are regularly reported on. The mind is a metaphor. Consciousness is cellular adaptation, intelligence is as fortuitous as pick-up sticks. All true. I only hope Termite’s not vectoring us toward adumbrations about The Lord and His Overall Design. If she is, I’ll run right out into the storm. “You know what ahm sayin’?” She’s whispering in a secret-keeping voice the other bar patrons aren’t supposed to hear. “You know what ahm sayin’?” she says again.

  “I do.”

  “Millennium! What fuckin’ Millennium?” The big boisterous girls are getting drunker, too, and have decided they’ve got the place to themselves, which they nearly do. No one’s come in since I did. “I musta been in the crapper when that happened!”

  Termite gives them a disgusted look and begins spindling the Shore Home Buyer’s Guide into a tight tube, scrolling it smaller and smaller into itself until it looks solid. “So, see,” she says, still confidentially. “Like I’m fifty-one”—I’d have said forty—“and I try to like test ma mind sometimes. Okay?” I smile as if I know, and simultaneously try to know. “I try to think of a specific thing. I try to remember somethin’. To see if I can. Like—and it’s usually a name—de name of dem flowers with red berries on ’em we useta always have at Christmas. Or maybe something’ll come up when ahm talking, and I wanta say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s like…’ Den I can’t think of it. You know? They’s just a hole there where what I want to say ought to be. It ain’t never nuttin important, like what’s Jack Daniel’s or how you make a whiskey sour. It’s like ahm sayin’, ‘…and den we all drove over to Freehold.’ But den I can’t say Freehold. Dat ain’t the best example. ’Cause I can say Freehold, whatever. But if I give you a good example, den I won’t think of it. I can’t even think of a good example. You know what I’m talkin’ about with dis thing?”

  Termite takes a long consternated drag on her Camel, then douses it in the rinse sink and tosses the butt into a black plastic garbage can behind the bar, blowing smoke straight down without lowering her head.

  “I’ve had that happen to me plenty of times,” I say. Who hasn’t? This is the kind of pseudo-problem that would easily succumb to a Sponsor call. And as always, my solution would be: Forget the hell about it. Think about something better—a new apartment with a wheelchair ramp and maybe a Jenn-Air and lots of phone jacks. Your mind’s not the fucking Yellow Pages. You’ve got no business asking it to perform tasks it’s not interested in just so you can show off. To me, it’s a worse signal that anybody would ever worry about these things than that he/she can’t remember every little bit of nibshit minutiae you can dream up but that maybe doesn’t even exist.

  “Pyracantha?”

  “Say what?” Termite blinks at me.

  “That Christmas flower with the red berries.”

  “Dere it is, okay. But dat ain’t all. ’Cause the real baddest thing is that when I can’t get what you just said into my mind, den I worry about dat, and den dat like opens the floodgates for stuff you wouldn’t believe.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Stuff I don’t wanna talk about.” Termite guardedly eyes the two large-bodies down the bar again, as if they might be snickering at her. They are, in fact, pulled in close together, whispering, but holding hands like married bears.

  “But I mean, true stuff?” I’m wondering but not wondering very hard.

  “Yeah, true stuff. Stuff I don’t like to think about. Okay?”

  “You bet.” I take a subject-changing sip of my—now—third happy-hour highball. I may have had enough. I don’t have the stamina I used to. I’m also on the brink of a discussion that threatens to tumble into seriousness—the last thing I want. I’d rather talk about beach erosion or golf or the Eagles’ season or the election, since I’m sure these girls have to be Democrats.

  “You think ahm losing my mind?” Termite asks accusingly.

  “Absolutely not. I don’t think that. Like I said. I’ve had that happen to me. Your mind’s just got a lot in it.” Tattoo and piercing decisions, who’s a good knife sharpener, her invalid mom.

  “’Cause Mamma thinks mebbe I’m losing it. Ya know what ahm sayin’? And sometimes I think I am, too. When I want de name of some got-damn red flower, or whatever dat woman’s name is who’s the Astronaut—whatever—then I can’t think of it.” Her lips curl in a smile of disgust with herself—a look she’s used to.

  And then, in by-the-book bartender protocol, she turns and walks away, resuming something with the lovebirds who’ve been smooch-dancing to Perry. I hear her say, “…they just treat Thanksgiving like it really meant somethin’. What I want to know is, what is it?”

  “Me, too,” one of the slow dancers speaks, with an echo that registers sadly in the bar.

  Termite’s left me the spindled Home Buyer’s Guide. I intend to show her my ad and leave my card. Sometimes a new vista, a new house number, a new place of employ, a new set of streets to navigate and master are all you need to simplify life and take a new lease out on it. Real estate might seem to be all about moving and picking up stakes and disruption and three-moves-equals-a-death, but it’s really about arriving and destinations, and all the prospects that await you or might await you in some place you never thought about. I had a drunk old prof at Michigan who taught us that all of America’s literature, Cotton Mather to Steinbeck—this was the same class where I read The Great Gatsby—was forged by one positivist principle: to leave, and then to arrive in a better state.

  I take this opportunity to climb off my stool and walk to the porthole door and have a check across the lot to find out if my car window’s ready. It isn’t. Chris, the Fitzgerald scholar, has pulled it into the fluorescent-lit garage bay and is moving around the murky shop interior, seeming to be in search of the right materials for the job. The other man, small and raffish and unshaven, stands at the office door, looking up at the rain-torn skies as if into a cloud of sorry thoughts. Edward Hopper in New Jersey.

  I reclaim my bar stool and remind myself
to grab another piss or be faced with again relieving myself in the rain, behind some darkened Pathmark, where I’ve already been caught more than once by security patrols, resulting in a lot of unwieldy explanation. In each instance, however, the officers were moonlighting middle-age cops and completely sympathized.

  Termite’s staying down with the girls at the end of the bar. No one else has shown up for happy hour (weather and the holiday are always negatives). I leaf through the Buyer’s Guide, perusing the broker-associate faces in their winning, confidence-pledging smiley cameos. The glam Debs, Lindas and Margies with their golden silky hair, big earrings, plenty of lens gauze to disguise what they really look like, and the men all blow-dried Woodys and mustachioed Maxes in hunky poses—blue jeans, open-collar plaids, tasteful silver accessories and gold throat jewelry. Most of what’s for sale are “houses,” our term of art for cookie-cutter ranches and undersized split-levels—nothing different from our basic inventory in Sea-Clift. Every few pages, there’s a grandiose one-of-a-kind “palatial beach estate” that doesn’t list the price but everyone knows is seizure-inducing.

  My 61 Surf Road listing is back on page ninety-six, a boilerplate box with the Doolittles’ house in washed-out color, a shot captured by Mike using our old Polaroid. It strikes me again, even knowing what I now know, that it’s as good as there is at this location, at this time, at this price. There are nicer listings in Brielle, but at twice the ticket. Monday morning, I’ll call Boca and discuss options regarding foundation issues and amending the disclosure statement. “Foundation needs attention” is naturally a death knell in a saturated market unless the buyer sees the whole thing as a tear-down. My bet is the Doolittles jerk the listing and hand it to a competitor who knows nothing about the foundation. I’m not sure I’d blame them.

  “Hey! You!” the big Yanks-cap mama bear down the bar (she’s shit-faced) is addressing me. I smile as if I’m eager to be spoken to. “You wouldn’t happen to be named Armand, would you? And you wouldn’t happen to be from Neptune, I guess?”