Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  Behind Karl I see the gang of state stoplight installers swaggering in a scattered group across the highway and on into our parking lot, still wearing their hard hats and thick insulated gloves. A couple are animatedly dusting off their thick pants, a couple are laughing. Half are black and half white, though they’re taking their break together as if they are best of friends. “I’ll have the big weenie,” I hear one say from a distance, making the others laugh some more. “‘She said hungrily’” someone else says. And they all laugh again (too boisterous to be sincere).

  I, though, want to get out of here, get back in my car, jack the a/c to the max and lickety-split head to the Shore before I get corralled into building Polish dogs and serving up root beer and watching out for stickup artists. I occasionally hold down the fort when Karl takes off for some medical checkup or to have his choppers adjusted, but I don’t like it and feel like an asshole every time. Karl, however, loves nothing better than the idea of “the boss” donning a paper cap.

  He has already started lining up cold mugs out of the freezer box. “How’s old Paul?” he says, forgetting about the Mexicans. “You oughta bring him out here and leave him with me a couple of days. I’ll shape him up.” Karl knows all about Paul’s brush with the law over filched condoms, and his view is that all fifteen-year-olds need shaping up. I’m sure Paul would pay big money to spend two free-wheeling days out here with Karl, cracking jokes and double entendres, garbaging down limitless root beers and Polish dogs and generally driving Karl nuts.

  But not a chance. The vision of Karl’s little second-floor bachelor apartment over in Lambertville, with all his old furniture from his prior Tarrytown life, his pictures of his dead wife, his closets full of elderly “man’s” things, odorous old toiletries on dressertop doilies, the green rubber drain rack, all the strange smells of lonely habits—I’d be grateful if Paul lived an entire life without having to experience that firsthand. And for fear of a hundred things: that a set of “mature” snapshots might just get left on a table, or a “funny magazine” turn up among the Times and Argosys under the TV stand, possibly an odd pair of “novelty undershorts” Karl might wear only at home and decide my son would think was “a gas.” Such notions come to solitary older men, happen without plan, and then boom—piggy’s in the soup before you know it! So that with all due respect to Karl, whom I’m happy to be in the hot dog business with and who has never given a hint something might be fishy about himself, a parent has to be vigilant (though it’s unarguable I have not been as vigilant as I should’ve been).

  All the state workers are standing outside now, staring at the closed sliding window as if they expected it to speak to them. There are seven or so, and they’re digging into their pockets for lunch money. “So how’s it going out there? You guys ready for a dog?” Karl shouts through the little window, as much to me as the state guys, as though we both know what we know—that this place is a friggin’ gold mine.

  “I think I’ll sneak on out,” I say.

  “Yeah, okay,” Karl says brightly, but now busily.

  “Got a hamburg?” someone outside says to the screen.

  “No burgs, just dogs,” Karl answers, and viciously slides back the screen. “Just dogs and birch beer, boys,” he says, turning cheery, leaning into the window, his big damp haunch hoisted once again into the air.

  “I’ll see you, Karl,” I say. “Everick and Wardell will be here early Monday.”

  “Right. You bet,” Karl shouts. He has no idea what I’ve said. He has entered his medium—dogs ‘n’ sweet suds—and his happy abstraction from life is my welcome cue to leave.

  I make a southerly diversion below Haddam now, take streaming 295 up from Philadelphia, bypass Trenton and skirt the campus of De Tocqueville Academy, where Paul could attend when and if he comes to live with me and had the least interest, even though I would personally prefer the public schools. Then I head off onto the spanky new I-195 spur for more or less a bullet shot across the wide, subsident residential plain (Imlaystown, Jackson Mills, Squankum—all viewed from freeway level), toward the Shore.

  I have not gone far before I pass above Pheasant Meadow, sprawled along the “old” Great Woods Road directly in the corridor of great silver high-voltage towers made in the shape of tuning forks. An older dilapidated sign just off the freeway announces: AN ATTRACTIVE RETIREMENT WAITS JUST AHEAD.

  Pheasant Meadow, not old but already gone visibly to seed, is the condo community where our black agent, Clair Devane, met her grim, still unsolved and inexplicable death. And in fact, as I watch it drift by below me, its low, boxy, brown-shake buildings set in what was once a farmer’s field, now abutting a strip of pastel medical arts plazas and a half-built Chi-Chi’s, it seems so plainly the native architecture of lost promise and early death (though it’s possible I’m being too harsh, since not even so long ago, I—arch-ordinary American—was a suitor to love there myself, wooing, in its tiny paper-walled, nubbly-ceilinged rooms, its dimly lit entryways and parking desert, a fine Texas girl who liked me some but finally had more sense than I did).

  Clair was a fresh young realty associate from Talladega, Alabama, who’d gone to Spelman, married a hotshot computer whiz from Morehouse working his way up through an aggressive new software company in Upper Darby, and who for a sweet moment thought her life had locked into a true course. Except before she knew it she’d ended up with no husband, two kids to raise and no work experience except once having been an RA in her dormitory and, later, having kept the books for Zeta Phi Beta imaginatively enough that at year’s end a big surplus was available to stage a carnival for underprivileged Atlanta kids and also to have a mixer with the Omegas at Georgia Tech.

  On a fall Sunday in 1985, during an afternoon drive “in the country,” which included a mosey through Haddam, she and her husband, Vernell, fell into a ferocious, screaming fight right in the middle of after-church traffic on Seminary Street. Vernell had just announced in the car that he had somehow fallen into true love with a female colleague at Datanomics and was the very next morning (!) moving out to L.A. to “be with her” while she started a new company of her own, designing educational packages targeted for the DIY home-repair industry. He allowed to Clair that he might drift back in a few months, depending on how things went and on how much he missed her and the kids, though he couldn’t be sure.

  Clair, however, just opened the car door, stepped out right at the stoplight at Seminary and Bank, across from the First Presbyterian (where I occasionally “worship”) and simply started walking, looking in store windows as she went and smilingly whispering, “Die, Vernell, die right now,” to all the white, contrite Presbyterians whose eyes she met. (She told me this story at an Appleby’s out on Route 1, when we were at the height of our ardent but short-lived amours.)

  Later that afternoon she checked into the August Inn and called her sister-in-law in Philadelphia, revealing Vernell’s treachery and telling her to go get the kids at the baby-sitter’s and put them on the first flight to Birmingham, where her mother would be waiting to take them back to Talladega.

  And the next morning—Monday—Clair simply hit the bricks, looking for work. She told me she felt that even though she didn’t see many people who looked like her, Haddam seemed as good a town as any and a damn sight better than the City of Brotherly Love, where life had come unstitched, and that the measure of any human being worthy of the world’s trust and esteem was her ability to make something good out of something shitty by reading the signs right: the signs being that some strong force had crossed Vernell off the list and at the same time put her down in Haddam across from a church. This she considered to be the hand of God.

  In no time she found a job as a receptionist in our office (this was less than a year after I came on board). In a few weeks she’d started the agent’s course I took up at the Weiboldt school. And in two months she had her kids back, had bought a used Honda Civic and was set up in an apartment in Ewingville with a manageable re
nt, a pleasant, tree-lined drive to Haddam and a new and unexpected sense of possibility wrought from disaster. If she wasn’t a hundred percent free and clear, she was at least free and making ends meet, and before long she started seeing me on the Q.T., and when that didn’t seem to work she got together with a nice, somewhat older Negro attorney from a good local firm, whose wife had died and whose bad-tempered kids were all grown and gone.

  It is a good story: human enterprise and good character triumphing over adversity and bad character, and everybody in our office coming to love her like their sister (though she never really sold much to the moneyed white clientele Haddam attracts like sheep, but came to specialize in rentals and condo turnarounds, which are not much of our market).

  And yet completely mysteriously, in a routine showing of one of her condos right out here below me in Pheasant Meadow, a condo she’d shown ten times before and to which she arrived early to turn on lights, flush the toilets and open the windows—all normal chores—she was confronted by what the state police believe were at least three men. (As I said before, indications were that they were white, though I couldn’t say what those indications were.) For two days, Everick and Wardell were extensively questioned, due to their access to keys, but they were completely exonerated. The unknown men, though, bound Clair hand and foot, gagged her with clear plastic tape, then raped and murdered her, slashing her throat with a packing knife.

  Drugs were at first thought to be a motive, not that she was in any way implicated. It was speculated the unnamed men could’ve been repackaging bricks of cocaine, and Clair just walked unluckily in. The police know that empty condos in remote or declining locations, developments where good times have come and gone or never even came, often serve as havens for illicit transactions of all kinds—drug deals, the delivery of kidnapped Brazilian babies to rich childless Americans, the storage of various contrabands including dead bodies and auto parts, cigarettes and animals—anything that might profit from the broad-daylight anonymity condos are designed to provide. Our receptionist, Vonda, has a private-public theory that the owners, some young Bengali businessmen from New York, are at the bottom of everything and have a secret interest in pushing condo prices down for tax reasons (several agencies, including ours, have stopped showing property there). But there’s no proof nor any reason to imagine anyone would need to kill as sweet a soul as Clair was for their purposes to win out. Only they did.

  Immediately after Clair’s murder, the women in our office, along with most of the other female realtors in town, formed mutual-protection groups. Some have begun to carry guns and Mace canisters and Tasers to work and right on out to houses they are showing. Women realtors now go around only in twos. Several have enrolled in martial arts classes, and “grieving and coping” sessions are still going on in different offices after business hours. (We men were encouraged to come, but I felt I already knew plenty about grieving and enough about coping.) There is even a clearinghouse number whereby any female agent can ask for and be given a male escort to any showing she feels uneasy about; and twice I’ve gone out just to be there when the clients show up, in case there was any funny business (there hasn’t been any). None of these precautions, needless to say, can be discussed with the clients, who would hot-foot it out of town at the first sniff of danger. In both instances I was simply introduced as Ms. So-and-so’s “associate,” no explanations given; and when the coast proved clear, I inconspicuously departed.

  Since May, all the realtors in Haddam have contributed to the Clair Devane Fund for her kids’ education ($3,000 has so far been raised, enough for two full days at Harvard). Yet in spite of all the gloominess and hollow feeling, and the practical realization that “this kind of thing can happen here, and did,” that no one is very far from a crime statistic, and the general recognition of how much we take our safety for granted—in spite of all that, no one talks about Clair much now, other than Vonda, whose cause she somehow is. Clair’s kids have moved out with Vernell in Canoga Park, her fiancé, Eddie, is in quiet mourning (though he has already been seen lunching with one of the legal secretaries who considered renting my house). Even I have made my peace, having said my explicit adieus long before, when she was alive. Eventually her desk will be manned by someone else and business will go on—sad to say, but true—which is the way people want it. And in that regard, as well as respecting the most private of evidence, it can sometime already seem as though Clair Devane had not fully existed in anyone’s life but her very own.

  Nowadays I end up driving over once a week to pass a jolly-intimate evening with Sally Caldwell. We often attend a movie, later slip out to some little end-of-a-pier place for an amber-jack steak, a pitcher of martinis, sometimes a stroll along a beach or out some jetty, following which events take care of themselves. Though often as not I end up driving home in the moonlight alone, my heart pulsing regularly, my windows wide open, a man in charge of his own tent stakes and personal equipment, my head full of vivid but fast-disappearing memories and no anxious expectancies for a late-night phone call (like this morning’s) full of longing and confusion, or demands that I spell out my intentions and come back immediately, or bitter accusations that I have not been forthright in every conceivable way. (I may not have, of course; forthright being a greater challenge than would seem, though my intentions are always good if few.) Our relationship, in fact, hasn’t seemed to need more attention to theme or direction but has proceeded or at least persisted on autopilot, like a small plane flying out over a peaceful ocean with no one exactly in command.

  Not of course that this is best—life’s paradigm mapped out to perfection. It’s simply what is: fine in the eternity of the here, and now.

  Best would be … well, good for a time was Cathy Flaherty in a wintry, many-windowed flat overlooking the estuary in Saint-Valéry (walks along the cold Picardy coast, fishermen fishing, foggy views across foggy bays, etc., etc.). Good was the early days (even the middle to late days) of my unrequited love for Nurse Vicki Arcenault of Pheasant Meadow and Barnegat Pines (now a Catholic mother of two in Reno, where she heads the trauma unit at Reno St. Veronica’s). Good was even much of my sportswriting work (for a time, at least), my days back then happily dedicated to giving voice to the inarticulate and inane in order that an abstracted-but-still-yearning readership be painlessly diverted.

  All that was good, sometimes even mysterious, sometimes so outwardly complicated as to seem interesting and even transporting, which is what most life gets by on and what we’ll take as scrip against what’s eternally due us.

  But best? There’s no use going through that card sort. Best’s a concept without reference once you’re married and have loused that up; maybe even once you’ve had your first banana split at age five and find, upon finishing it off, that you could handle another one. Forget best, in other words. Best’s gone.

  My lady friend Sally Caldwell is the widow of a boy I attended Gulf Pines Military Academy with, Wally “Weasel” Caldwell of Lake Forest, Illinois; and for that reason Sally and I sometimes act as if we have a long, bittersweet history together of love lost and fate reconciled—which we don’t. Sally, who’s forty-two, merely saw my snapshot, address and a short personal reminiscence of Wally in the Pine Boughs alumni book printed for our 20th Gulf Pines reunion, which I didn’t attend. At the time she didn’t know me from Bela Lugosi’s ghost. Only in trying to dream up a good reminiscence and skimming through my old yearbook for somebody I could attribute something amusing to, I chose Wally and sent in a mirthful but affectionate account that made fleeting reference to his having once drunkenly washed his socks in a urinal (a complete fabrication; I, in fact, chose him because I discovered from another school publication that he was deceased). But it was my “reminiscence” that Sally happened to see. I barely, in fact, had any memory of Wally, except that he was a fat, bespectacled boy with blackheads who was always trying to smoke Chesterfields using a cigarette holder—a character who, in spite of a certain likeness, turn
ed out not to be Wally Caldwell at all but somebody else, whose name I never could remember. I have since explained my whole gambit to Sally, and we have had a good laugh about it.

  I learned later from Sally that Wally had gone to Vietnam about the time I enlisted in the Marines, had come damn close to getting blown to bits in some ridiculous Navy mishap which left him intermittently distracted, though he came home to Chicago (Sally and two kids waiting devotedly), unpacked his bags, talked about studying biology, but after two weeks simply disappeared. Completely. Gone. The End. A nice boy who would’ve made a better than average horticulturist, became forever a mystery.

  Sally, however, unlike the calculating Ann Dykstra, never remarried. Finally, for IRS reasons, she was forced to obtain a divorce by having Wally declared a croaker. But she went right on and raised her kids as a single mom in the Chicago suburb of Hoffman Estates, earned her B.A. in marketing administration from Loyola while holding down a full-time job in the adventure-travel industry. Wally’s well-heeled Lake Forest parents provided her with make-ends-meet money and moral support, having realized she was not the cause of their son’s going loony and that some human conditions are beyond love’s reach.

  Years went by.

  But as quick as the kids were old enough to be safely dumped out of the nest, Sally put into motion her plan for setting sail with whatever fresh wind was blowing. And in 1983, on a rental-car trip to Atlantic City, she happened to turn off the Garden State in search of a clean rest room, stumbled all at once upon the Shore, South Mantoloking and the big old Queen-Anne-style double-gallery beach house facing the sea, a place she could afford with her parents’ and in-laws’ help, and where her kids would be happy coming home to with their friends and spouses, while she got her feet wet in some new business enterprise. (As it happened, as marketing director and later owner of an agency that finds tickets to Broadway shows for people in the later stages of terminal illness but who somehow think that seeing a revival of Oliver or the original London cast of Hair will make life—discolored by impending death—seem brighter. Curtain Call is her company’s name.)