The Lay of the Land

by Richard Ford

  “I’m one of you,” I want to say to these joggers out my window like a crowd in a jogger republic undergoing a coup. “The race is ahead of me, too. I’m not just this. I’m that. And that. And that. There’s more to me than meets your gimlet eye.” But it isn’t so.

  A bare coffee-colored arm flags out of the milling crowd, with a squat body attached and a face I know above the three blue stars ’n bars of the Honduran flag worn as a singlet. This is Esteban, from the Cormorant Court roofing crew, waving happily to me, el jefe, his gold restorations flashing in the hidden sun’s glint. He’s socked into the runner crowd, way more a part of things than I feel. My thumb juts to tap the horn, but I catch myself in time and wave instead. Though it’s then I have to press across the opposing lane of Ocean Ave and onto Timbuktu. The electric carillon in Our Lady commences its pre-race clamor, startling the shit out of me. The runner crowd shifts as one toward the starting line and up goes the gun (Father Ray is the shooter). I carry through with my turn, extra careful, since the motorcycle cops are eyeing me. But in an instant, I’m across and anonymous again as the gun goes off and the beast crowd swells with a sigh, and then all of it’s behind me.

  Mike Mahoney—bony, businesslike, crisply turned-out realty go-getter—is the first human I see down Timbuktu. He’s out in the street beside his Infiniti with its REALTORS ARE PEOPLE TOO sticker and Barnegat Lighthouse license tag, waving, a happy grin on his round flat face, as though I’d gotten lost and just happened down the right street by dumb luck. He’s wearing his amber aviators and clutching a bouquet of white listing sheets. Twenty yards beyond him is a beige Lincoln Town Car, the exact model Newark Airport limo drivers drive. Outside the Lincoln waits a small, ovoid mustachioed personage in what looks like, through my windshield, a belted linen-looking suit that matches the Town Car’s paint job, into which the man almost perfectly blends. This is the client Mike has somehow convinced to hang around. I’m a half hour late—for reasons of my difficult son—but frankly don’t much care.

  Timbuktu Street is a three-block residential, connecting Ocean Avenue to Barnegat Bay out ahead. The closed-for-the-season Yacht Club is at the end to the left, and across the gray water the low populous sprawl of Toms River is two-plus miles away. The bay bridge itself is visible, though at 11:30 on Thanksgiving morning, it is not much in use.

  Houses on Timbuktu (Marrakesh Street is one street south, Bimini one street north) are all in the moderate bracket. The bay side is naturally cheaper than the ocean side, but prices go up close to the water, no matter what water it is. Most of these are frank plain-fronted ranches, some with camelbacks added, some with new wood-grained metal siding, all hip-roofed, three-window, door-in-the-middle, pastel frame constructions on small lots. Most were put up en masse, ten streets at a time, after Hurricane Cindy flattened all the aging cypress and fir bungalows the first Sea-Clift settlers built from Sears kits in the twenties. A few of those ’59-vintage owners are still around, though most houses have changed hands ten times and are owned by year-rounders who’re retired or commute to the mainland, or who keep their houses as rentals or a summer bolt-hole for the extended family. Several are owned and kept in mint condition by Gotham and Philadelphia policemen and firefighters who store their big trailered Lunds and refurbished Lymans, shrink-wrapped in blue plastic, on their pink-and-green crushed-marble “lawns.” These small streets, with their clean-facade, well-barbered, moderately-priced dwellings (250–300 bills) are, in fact, the social backbone of Sea-Clift, and even though most newcomers are Republicans, it’s they who oppose the Dollars For Doers schemes to grow out the economy like a mushroom.

  It’s also these same home owners who’re made rueful by the sight of a neighbor house being torn off its foundation and trucked away, leaving behind scarred ground that once was a compatible vista, to be replaced by some frightening new construction. The worst is always assumed. And even though the identical houses along these identical, all but tree-less streets are simplicity and modesty’s essence, and finally no great shakes, that’s exactly how the owners want it, and know for certain a new house of unforeseeable design will rob their street of its known character and kick the crap out of values they’re looking to cash in on. I’ve already received concerned calls from the Timbuktu Neighbors Coalition, advancing the idea that I “donate”(!) the emptied lot at 118 for a passive park. Though even if I wanted to (which I don’t), no one in the Coalition would keep it up or pay the liability premiums, since many Coalition-owners are absentees and quite a few are elderly, on fixed whatevers. Eventually, the “park” would turn into a weedy eyesore everyone’d blame me for. Prices would then fall, and everyone would’ve forgotten that an attractive new house could’ve been there and made everything rosy. Better—as I told the Coalition lady—to sell the lot to some citizen who can afford it, then let the community do what communities do best: suppress diversity, discourage individuality, punish exuberance and find suitable language to make it seem good for everyone and what America’s all about. Placards (like election placards) still stand in some yards, shouting SAVE TIMBUKTU FROM EVIL DEVELOPERS!!! Though the house at 118 is already up on steel girders and in a week will be history.

  Mike’s heading toward my driver’s window as I pull to the curb. He’s smiling and glancing back, nodding assurances to his client and generally brimming with house-selling certainty.

  “I got tied up,” I say out the window, and look annoyed.

  “It’s better, it’s better,” Mike says in a whisper, then has another glance at the Town Car clients. He looks like a dashboard doll, since he’s wearing a strange knee-length black knitted sweater with a mink-looking collar, a Black Watch plaid sports-car cap, green cords and green suede loafers with argyle socks. It would seem to be his Scottish ensemble. “It’s good to make them wait.” He has drawn close to my face, so that I’m almost nose-into the fur trim on his sweater. The breeze on the bay side of Barnegat Neck is stouter than I expected. Inland weather is bringing change. We’ll have a proper blustery Thanksgiving cold snap before the day’s done. I bend forward against my steering wheel and give a look through the windshield up at pleasant, leaf-green #118, hiked up on dull red girders that have several impressive-looking hydraulic jacks under them, so the entire house, sill and all, has been elevated five feet off its brick foundation, exposing light and air and affording a view to the back yard. Two sets of heavy-duty tires and axles await use in what was once the front yard, in preparation for actually moving the house—which, like its neighbors, is unornamented, aluminum-sided, with brighter, newer green roof shingles mixed with old. The Arriba house movers have put their enigmatic sign up in the yard: EL GATO DUERME MIENTRAS QUE TRABAJAMOS.

  This is the first time I’ve seen 118 up on its sleds, and I frankly can’t blame the neighbors for feeling “violated,” which is what the Coalition lady said before she started to cry and told me I was a gangster. It’s not a very good thing to do to a street’s sense of integrity—prices or no prices—to start switching houses like Monopoly pieces. I’m actually sorry I’ve done it now. It would’ve been better if the new owners had torn 118 down as planned and put their new house up in its dust. Orderly residential succession would have been satisfied, although possibly nobody would’ve been any happier. All the more reason to let Mike sell it to his clients right off the sleds and shift the focus to them—who at least plan to live in it, albeit someplace else.

  “I’ve been telling them inventory’s down a third and demand’s kicking up.” Mike’s whispered breath is warm and once again has tobacco on it. He practices all kinds of breath-purifying techniques, as if that’s the thing buyers look for first. His Infiniti has a Dalai Lama-approved incense air-freshener strung to the rearview, and his car seats are always strewn with Clorets and Dentyne papers. But today’s efforts are so far unavailing.

  I stare curiously out at Mike’s shiny round face—a face of high, faraway mountain crags, clouded pinnacles and thinnest airs, all forsaken for the chance to se
ll houses in the Garden State. And just for that instant, I cannot for the life of me think of his name—even though I just thought it. I’d like to say his name, frame a question in a confidential manner that lets him know I’m behind his deal 110 percent, and why doesn’t he just take my thumbs-up from right here in the car. I’ll wave a cheery welcome aboard to the fat little Hindu (or Mohammedan or Buddhist or Jainist or whatever he is), then motor off to be home when Sally calls and Clarissa returns with tales. Possibly Jill will have given Paul a sedative and we can all watch the Patriots pregame on Fox before the food’s festive arrival.

  Only, my mind has problematically swallowed up this bright-eyed little brown man’s name, even though I can tell you everything else there is to know about him. Gone from me like a leaf in the wind.

  “Uhmmm,” I say. Of course I don’t need to know his name to carry on a conversation with him. Though not knowing it has had the added defect of sweeping clean the conversational path from in front of me, like the police sweeping pedestrians from in front of the 5-K to Ortley and back. I remember all that perfectly! What the hell’s going on? Am I having a stroke? Or just bored to nullity by one more house going on the sale block? This may be how you know you’ve reached the finish line in real estate. I even remember that.

  I smile out at this strangely dressed, burbling little man, hoping to neutralize alarm from my face. Though why should there be any? Whatever we’re about to do—I assume sell a house—doesn’t seem to require me. I peer out toward the small pear-shaped man in his wrong-season suit, beside his Lincoln, which wears what looks like blue-and-white Empire State plates and also, I see now, a blue BUSH sticker on its left bumper. He has his short fat-man’s arms folded and is staring thoughtfully at 118 up on its girders, as if this is a marvelous project he’s now in charge of but needs to study for a while. The Town Car appears packed with shadowy human cargo—three distinct heads in back, plus a dog staring through the back window, its tongue out in a happy-dog laugh.

  I look back at this diminutive unnamed man at my window. It’s possible I don’t look normal. “So,” I say, “are we all set, then?” I smile exuberantly, suddenly invigorated with what I’m here for and ready to do it—press the flesh, seal the deal, say howdy and make the outsider feel wanted—things I’m good at. “I’m ready to meet the pigeon,” I say for some reason, which seems to distress and sink the grin on———’s round mug. Bill, Bert, Baxter, Boris, Bently…I’ll come to it.

  “Mr. Bagosh, Frank,”———says, sotto voce through my window. Frank. Me.

  ———smiles in at me faintly. His thumb is, I can see, twisting his pinkie ring. Thank goodness he doesn’t know I can’t say his fucking name. He’d think I’m demented. Which I’m not. This kind of thing happens. Possibly vertigo again.

  “How is it again?” I say.

  “Bagosh,” Carl, Carey, Chris, Court, Curt, Coop says, pushing his listing papers into his silly sweater’s side pocket, then pulling down on his sports-car cap to look more official. He doesn’t want me involved in this now. Something doesn’t feel right. He sees his deal evaporating. But I’m doing it, if only because I don’t know how to leave. He casts a guarded look at my block-M sweatshirt. Then behind his aviators, his eyes drift down to my jeans, as if I might not be wearing pants at all.

  “Bagosh it is.” I start out of the car, surprisingly feeling damn good about selling a house on Thanksgiving. Cash deal to sweeten the pot—if I remember right. I actually love this kind of shirt-sleeve, write-a-check, hand-it-over deal. Real estate used to have plenty of them. Nowadays, parties are walled off from exposure, require exit strategies, escape hatches in case a sparrow flies against a screen on the third Tuesday and this is thought to be a bad omen. America is a country lost in its own escrow.

  I don’t know why I can’t say Ed, Ewell, Ernie, Egbert, Escalante, Emerson, Everett’s name, but I can’t. He’s Tibetan. He’s my associate. I’ve known him for a year and a half. He and his wife are estranged, with genius-level kids. He’s a Libertarian but a social moderate. A Buddhist. A tiger in our trade, a clotheshorse, a happy little business warrior. I just can’t come up with his handle, even out on chilly Timbuktu, with a mind-clearing whistle-breeze gusting off the bay. Maybe I should ask to borrow his business card to make a note.

  Mr. Bagosh is heading toward us with a big pleased grin on his plump lips. He has a toddling-sideways motoring gait you sometimes see experienced waiters use. What I couldn’t see from the car is that he’s wearing walking shorts with his belted Raj jacket, plus rattan loafers and socks of the thinnest white silk up to his knees. We are in Rangoon (when it was still Burma). I’m just out of the cockpit of my Flying Fortress, ready for a gin-rickey, a good soak, a new linen suit of my own and some social introductions. This man—Bagosh—coming across the lobby is just the fellow to make it all happen (in addition to being a spy for our side).

  “Bagosh,” this good man says into the Barnegat breezes, far from Rangoon, here now on Timbuktu. He must’ve thought it’d be warm here.

  “Bascombe,” I say in the same robust spirit.

  “Yes. Wonderful.” We clasp hands. He gives me his two-hander, which is okay this time. “Mr. Mahoney has told me superior things about you.”

  Bingo! But Mahoney? I wouldn’t have guessed it. I extend to Mr. Mahoney an affirming business associate’s smile. Mike. All is normal again. We at least know who we are.

  “I love your house!” Mr. Bagosh nearly shouts with pleasure. In his toddling way, he half-turns and regards 118 up on its severe machinery, as if it was a piece of rare sculpture he was connoisseur to. “I want to buy it right now. Just as we see it here. Up on its big boats. Whatever they are.” He leans back and beams, as if saying “its big boats” afforded him inexpressible pleasure.

  “Well, that’s what we’re here for.” I nod at Mr. Mahoney at my side. He’s re-examining his listing sheets and looking more confident. I have the rich, ineradicable fetor of English Leather burning in my nostrils and also, I believe, on my hand. It’s no doubt Mr. Bagosh’s signature scent since his school days in Rajpur or some such outpost.

  “We’re down from the Buffalo area, Mr. Bascombe,” Mr. Bagosh says pridefully. “I own an awards and trophies business, and my business has been good this year.” He has twinkling black eyes, and his fine white hair has been choreographed into a swirling comb-down from the far reaches that complements a little goatee, which is not so different from my son Paul’s beard-stache, only presentable. On anyone but an Indian—if that’s what he is—this configuration would make him look like a masseur. The three of us, me in my block-M and Nikes, Mike in his Scotch get-up, Bagosh in his tropical lounging-wear, are probably the strangest things anyone on Timbuktu—a street of cops, firemen, Kinko’s managers and plumbers—has yet witnessed, and might make them all less sorry to see the house head down the road.

  “I’m not sure what that is,” meaning the “awards business,” though I have an idea.

  “Oh, well,” Mr. Bagosh says expansively in a plummy accent. “If you become a salesman of the year in New Jersey. And you receive a wonderful awahd for this honor. We supply this awahd—in the Buffalo area. In Erie, as well. We’re a chain of six. So.” His mouse-brown face virtually glows. Possibly he’s five eight and sixty, and obviously happy to see the complex world in terms of bestowing awards on inhabitants and to make a ton of money doing it. “We say ours is a rewarding business. But it has been very profitable.” This is his standard joke and makes him lower his eyes to stifle a look of pleasure.

  “That’s great.” I pass an eye over his Town Car, which has all gold accessories—gold door handles, gold side mirrors, gold and silver hubcaps and gold window frames. Even the famed Lincoln hood ornament is gold-encrusted. It is the car I saw at the office yesterday. In the passenger’s seat, a swarthy Madonna-faced woman with dense black hair and a pastel scarf covering part of her head is talking non-stop into a cell phone and paying no attention to what we’re doing. In the back
I count possibly three sub-teen faces (there could be more). A large-eyed girl peers at me through the tinted window. The others—two slender boys with vulpine expressions—are fidgeting with handheld video gizmos as though they don’t know they’re in a car in New Jersey. The dog is not to be seen.

  But ecce homo—Bagosh. Family number two is my guess. The cell-phone Madonna looks not much older than Clarissa and is probably a mail-order delivery from the old country, where she may have been unmarriageable in ways Buffalo residents couldn’t care less about. A young widow.

  “I guess a lot more people are getting awards now,” I say.

  “Oh my, yes. It’s very good today. Very positive. When my father started in the business in 1961, everyone said, ‘Oh, Sura, my God. This doesn’t make sense. There’s no possible way for you. You’re mad as a hatter.’ But he was smart, you know? When I finished at Eastman and came into the firm, he had two stores. And now I have six. Two more next year, maybe.” Mr. Bagosh links his manicured fingers across the belted front of his Raj cabana jacket and rests them on his prosperous little belly—one pinkie wears a raucous diamond Mike is probably envious of. He’s a better candidate for one of the mansionettes Mike’s planning in Montmorency County than for 118. Though he may already have one of those in Buffalo, and maybe in Cozumel. In any case, the first commandment of residential sales is never to question the buyer’s motives. Leave that for the lawyers and the bankruptcy referees, who get paid to do it.