Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  “Well. My goodness. I don’t know,” Sally says, acting happily confused. “Where are you right now?”

  “Right now I’m in the Basketball Hall of Fame. I mean we’re visiting it—we’re not enshrined here. Not yet anyway.” I feel the most buoyant good spirit expand in my chest. All is not pissed away.

  “But isn’t that in Ohio?”

  “No, it’s in Springfield, Mass, where the first peach basket was nailed to the first barn door and the rest is history. Football’s in Ohio. We don’t have time for that.”

  “Where are you going, again?”

  She is enjoying all this, possibly relieved, acting breathless and appealed to. Plans might still spring to life. “Cooperstown, New York. One hundred seventy miles away,” I say enthusiastically. A woman several nooks down leans back and glowers at me as if I were making a call that amplified my voice in her receiver. Possibly she feels at risk being near a person in legitimately high spirits. “So whaddaya say?” I say. “Fly up to Albany right now, and we’ll pick you up.” I am talking too loud and need to put a lid on it before a Hall of Fame SWAT team is summoned. “I’m serious,” I say, more modulated, but more serious too.

  “Well, you’re very sweet to ask.”

  “I am very sweet. That’s right. But I’m not letting you off the hook.” I say this a bit too loud again. “I just woke up this morning and realized I was crazy as hell last night and that I’m crazy about you. And I don’t want to wait till Monday or whenever the hell.” For a nickel I’d muster Paul right back to the car and beat it back down to South Mantoloking along with all the other beach yahoos. Though I’d be a bad man for doing so. Being willing to invite Sally in on our sacred hombre-to-hombre is already bad enough—though like anybody else, Paul’d have more fun being along on something technically illicit. The world, as I told him, lets you do what you want if you can live with the consequences. We’re all free agents.

  “Could I ask you something?” she says, two jots too serious.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It may be too serious. I’m not a serious man. And it can’t be about you not coming up here.”

  “Would you tell me what you find so enthralling now that you didn’t notice last night?” Sally says this in a self-mocking, good-natured way. But important info is being sought. Who could blame her?

  “Well,” I say, my mind suddenly whirring. A man exits the bathroom, so that I get a stern whiff of urinal soap. “You’re a grownup, and you’re exactly the way you seem, at least as far as I can tell. Everybody’s not like that.” Including me. “And you’re loyal and you have a quality of straight-talking impartiality”—this sounds wrong—“that isn’t inconsistent with passion, which I really like. I guess I just have a feeling some things have to be investigated further between you and me or we’ll both be sorry. Or I will anyway. Plus, you’re just about the prettiest woman I know.”

  “I’m just about not the prettiest woman you know,” Sally says. “I’m pretty in a usual way. And I’m forty-two. And I’m too tall.” She sighs as though being tall made her tired.

  “Look, just get on a plane and come up here, and we’ll talk all about how pretty you are or aren’t while the moon sets on romantic Lake Otsego and we enjoy a complimentary cocktail.” While Paul goes who knows where? “I just feel a tidal attraction to you, and all boats rise on a rising tide.”

  “Your boat seems to rise most when I’m not around,” Sally says with distinctly diminished good nature. (It’s possible I’m not providing convincing answers again.) The woman in the far phone nook snaps closed an immense black patent-leather purse and goes striding quickly out. “Do you remember saying you wanted to be the ‘dean’ of New Jersey realtors last night? Do you even remember that? You talked all about soybeans and drought and shopping centers. We drank a lot. But you were in a state of some kind. You also said you were beyond affection. Maybe you’re still in some state.” (I should probably toss off a couple of barks to prove I’m nuts.) “Did you visit your wife?”

  This is not the wisest tack for her to take, and I should actually warn her off. But I simply stare at my little black phone screen, where it states in cool green letters: Do you wish to make another call?

  “Right. I did,” I say.

  “And how was that—was that nice?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Do you think you like her better when she’s not around?”

  “She’s not ‘not around,’” I say. “We’re divorced. She’s remarried to a sea captain. It’s like Wally. She’s officially dead, only we still talk.” I’m suddenly as deflated by a thought of Ann as I was happy to be thinking of Sally, and what I’m tempted to say is, “But the real surprise is she’s leaving ole Cap’n Chuck, and we’re getting married again and moving to New Mexico to start up an FM station for the blind. That’s really the reason I’m calling—not to invite you to come up here, just to give you my good news. Aren’t you happy for me?” There’s an unwieldy silence on the line, after which I say: “I really just called up to say I had a good time last night.”

  “I wish you’d stayed. That’s what my message said, if you haven’t heard it yet.” Now she is mum. Our little contretemps and my little rising tide have gone off together in a stout, chilly breeze. Good spirits are notoriously more fragile than bad.

  A tall, big-chested man in a pale-blue jumpsuit comes strolling down the phone alcove, holding a little girl by the hand. They stop along the opposite phone bank, where the man begins to make a call, reading off a paper scrap as the little girl, in a frilly pink skirt and a white cowboy shirt, watches him. She looks at me across the shadowy way—a look, like mine, of needing sleep.

  “Are you still there?” Sally says, possibly apologetic.

  “I was watching a guy make a phone call. I guess he reminds me of Wally, though he shouldn’t, since I don’t think I ever saw Wally.”

  Another mum pause. “You really have very few sharp angles, you know, Frank. You’re too smooth from one thing to the next. I can’t keep up with you very well.”

  “That’s what my wife thinks too. Maybe you two should discuss it. I think I’m just more at ease in the mainstream. It’s my version of sublime.”

  “And you’re also very cautious, you know,” Sally says. “And you’re noncommittal. You know that, don’t you? I’m sure that’s what you meant last night about being beyond affection. You’re smooth and you’re cautious and you’re noncommittal. That’s not a very easy combination for me.” (Or a good one, I’m sure.)

  “My judgments aren’t very sound,” I say, “so I just try not to cause too much trouble.” Joe Markham said something like this yesterday. Maybe I’m being transformed into Joe. “But when I feel something strong, I guess I jump in. That’s how I feel right now.” (Or did.)

  “Or you seem to anyway,” Sally says. “Are you and Paul having lots of fun?” A shift back in the direction of rising spirits, speaking of smooth.

  “Yeah. Loads and loads. You would too.” I get a faint but putrid sniff of the dead grackle still on my receiver hand. Apparently it’s to be on my skin forever and ever. I intend to ignore this last remark about seeming to jump in.

  “I’m sorry you don’t think your judgment’s very sound,” Sally says, falsely perky. “That doesn’t bode very well for how you say you feel about me either, does it?”

  “Whose cuff links were those on the bed table?” This, of course, is rash and against all good judgment. But I’m indignant, even though I have no good right to be.

  “They were Wally’s,” Sally says, perky but not falsely. “Did you think they belonged to somebody else? I just got them out to send to his mother.”

  “Wally was in the Navy, I thought. He almost got blown up in a boat. Isn’t that right?”

  “He did. But he was in the Marines. Not that it matters. You just made up the Navy for him. It’s all right.”

  “Okay. Yeah, I was callin’ about this house you got fo
r rent on Friar Tuck Drive,” I hear the big man say across the alcove. His little girl is staring up at her dad/unc/abductor as if he’d told her he needed some moral support and she should focus all her thoughts his way. “What’s the rent on that one?” he says. He is a southwesterner, possibly a twangy Texan. Though he isn’t wearing dusty old Noconas but a pair of white Keds no-lace low-tops of the male-nurse/minimum-security-prisoner variety. These are Texans without a ranch. My guess is he’s busted out of the oil patch, a new-age Joad moving his precious little brood up to the rust belt to set life spinning in a new orbit. It occurs to me the McLeods may likewise be in hot financial water and be in need of a break but are too stubborn to say so. That would change my attitude about the rent, though not totally.

  “Frank, did you hear what I said, or have you just drifted off into space?”

  “I was watching the same guy trying to rent a house. I wish I had something I could show him in Springfield. Of course, I don’t live here.”

  “Okay-yay,” Sally says, ready for our conversation to float off too. I have registered whose cuff links they were, though they aren’t any of my business. The Navy-Marine mixup I can’t explain. “Is it pretty up there?” she asks brightly.

  “Yeah, it’s beautiful. But really,” I say, suddenly picturing Sally’s face, a winning face, worth wanting to kiss. “Don’t you want to come up here? I’m popping for everything. Your money’s no good. All you can eat. Double stamps. Carte blanche.”

  “Why don’t you just call me some other time, okay? I’ll be home tonight. You’re very distracted. You’re probably tired.”

  “Are you sure? I’d really like to see you.” I should mention that I’m not beyond affection, because I’m not.

  “I’m sure,” she says. “And I’m just going to say good-bye now.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay.”

  “Good-bye now,” she says, and we hang up.

  The little cowgirl across the alcove gives me a fretful look. Possibly I was talking too loud again. Her big Texan daddy swivels half around to look at me. He has a big tough-jawed face, unruly dark hair and enormous pipe-fitter’s mitts. “No,” he says decisively into the phone. “No, that ain’t gonna work, that’s way outa line. Forgit that.” He hangs up, crumpling his little scratch of paper, which he drops on the carpet.

  He fishes in his breast pocket, pulls out a pack of Kools, takes one out with his mouth, still holding little Suzie’s hand, lights up one-handed with a thick, mean-looking Zippo. He blows a big, frustrated, lung-shuddering drag right at the international NO SMOKING insignia attached to the carpeted ceiling, and I immediately expect to be drenched in cold chemicals, for alarms to trigger, security people to skid around the corner on the dead run. But nothing happens. He gives me an antagonistic look where I’m lost in front of my phone screen. “You got a problem?” he says, fishing back in his cigarette pocket for something he doesn’t find.

  “No,” I say, grinning. “I just have a daughter about your daughter’s age”—a total fabrication, followed hard by another one—“and she just reminded me of her.”

  The man looks down at the child, who must be eight and who looks up at him smiling, charmed by being noticed but unsure exactly how to be charmed. “You want me to sell this one to you?” he says, at which moment the little girl throws her head back and lets her whole self go limp so she’s hanging off his big mitt, smiling and shaking her pretty head.

  “Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope,” she says.

  “They’re too expensive for me,” he says in his Texas accent. He raises his child off the ground, limp as a carcass, and gives her a dainty little swing out.

  “You cain’t sell me,” she says in a throaty, bossy voice. “I’m not for sale.”

  “You’re for sale big time, that’s whut,” he says. I smile at his joke—a helpless fatherish way of expressing love to a stranger in a time of hardship. I should appreciate it. “You don’t have a house to rent, do you?”

  “Sorry,” I say. “I’m not from Springfield. I’m just here for a visit. My son’s running around in here someplace.”

  “You know how long it takes to get up here from Oklahoma?” he says, his cigarette in one side of his big mouth.

  “It’s probably not that quick.”

  “Two days, two nights straight. And we been in the KOA for three damn days. I got a highway job starts up in a week, and I can’t find anything. I’m gonna have to send this orphan back.”

  “Not me,” the little girl says in her bossy voice and lets her knees give way, hanging on. “I’m not an orphan.”

  “You!” the big guy says to his daughter and frowns, though not angrily. “You’re my whole damn problem. If I didn’t have you with me, somebody would’ve been considerate of me by now.” He gives me a big leer and a roll of the eyes. “Stand up on your feet, Kristy.”

  “You’re a redneck,” his daughter says, and laughs.

  “I might be, and I might be worse than that,” he says more seriously. “You think your daughter’s like this outfit?” He’s already starting to walk away, holding his daughter’s tiny hand in his great one.

  “They’re both pretty sweet when they want to be, I bet,” I say, watching his child’s quick knock-kneed steps and thinking of Clarissa giving Ann and me, or possibly just me, the finger. “The holiday’ll probably change everything.” Though I don’t know how. “I’ll bet you find someplace to stay today.”

  “It’s that or drastic measures,” he says, walking away toward the lobby.

  “What’s that mean?” his daughter says, hanging onto his hand. “What’s drastic measures?”

  “Being your ole man, for starters,” he says, as they go out of sight. Then he adds, “But it might mean a whole lot of things too.”

  Paul, when I walk out to find him, is not waiting with an armload of vending-machine provisions but has taken up an observer position alongside “The Shoot-Out” exhibit, which dominates one whole wall-side of Level 1 and where a lot of visitors have already become noisy participators.

  “The Shoot-Out” is nothing more than a big humming people-mover conveyor belt, just like in an airport, but built right alongside and at the same level as a spotlit arena area, full of basketball backboards, hoops and posts, at varying heights and distances from the belt—ten feet, five yards, two feet, ten yards. Along beside the moving handrail and between the little arena and the people-mover itself, a trough of basketballs is continuously being replenished through a suction tube under the floor, exactly in the manner of a bowling alley rack. A human being getting on the moving floor (as many already are) and traveling at approximately one half of one mile an hour, can simply pick up ball after ball and shoot basket after basket—jump shots, hooks, two-hand sets, over the back, one’s whole repertoire—until he reaches the other end, where he steps off. (Such a screwy but ingenious machine has undoubtedly been invented by someone with a dual major in Crowd Control and Automated Playground Management from Southern Cal, and anybody in his right mind would’ve fought to get ground-floor money in on it. In fact, if the Hall of Fame management didn’t insist that you first mull past murky old Phogg Allen pictures and replicas of Bob Lanier’s dogs, everyone would spend his whole visit right down here where the real action is, and the rest of the building could go back to being a dentist’s office.)

  A pocket-size grandstand has been built just on the other side of the conveyor, and plenty of spectators are up there now, noisily ya-hooing and razzing their kids, brothers, nephews, stepsons who’re taking the ride and trying to shoot the eyes out of all the baskets.

  Paul, who’s on the sidelines by the entrance gate, where there’s a line of kids waiting to get on, seems on the alert, as though he were running the whole contraption. He is, however, watching a scrappy, thick-thighed white kid in a New York Knicks uniform, who’s hustling around among the backboards, kicking trapped balls toward the suction tube gutter, tipping stuck balls out of the nets, snapping vi
cious passes back at kids on the conveyor and occasionally taking a graceless little short-armed hook shot, which always goes in, no matter what basket he shoots at. No doubt he’s the manager’s son.

  “Did you try out your patented two-hand set yet?” I say, coming up right behind Paul and over the noise. I instantly smell his sour sweat smell when I put my hand on his shoulder. There’s also, I can see, a thick scabby jag in his scalp, where whoever authored his skint haircut made a mistake. (Where are such things done?)

  “That’d be good, wouldn’t it,” he says coldly, going on watching the white kid. “That nitwit thinks because he works here his game’s gonna improve. Except the floor’s tilted and the baskets aren’t regulation. So he’s actually fucked.” This seems to make him satisfied. He has purchased no food that I can see.

  “You better give it a try,” I say over the basketball clatter and the thrum the giant machine’s making. I feel exactly like a dad among other real dads, encouraging my son to do what he doesn’t want to do because he’s afraid he’ll be bad at it.

  “D’you always dribble before you shoot?” someone in the bleachers shouts out at the moving conveyor. A short bald man who’s about to try a precarious hook shot yells back without even looking: “Why don’t you try eating me,” then wings a shot that misses everything and causes other people in the bleachers to laugh.

  “You do it.” Paul snorts a disparaging little snuffle. “I saw some Nets scouts in the crowd.” The Nets are his favorite team to belittle, because they’re no good and from New Jersey.

  “Okay, but then you have to do it.” I cuff his shoulder in an unnatural comradely way, catching another unappetizing look at his offended ear.

  “I don’t have to do anything,” he says without looking at me, just watching the bright, indoor air a-throng with orange balls.

  “Okay, you just watch me, then,” I say lamely.

  I step around him and into line and am quickly right up to the little gate behind a small black kid. I take a look back at Paul, who’s watching me, leaning an elbow on the plywood fence that separates the arena from the waiting line, his face completely unawed, as if he expects to see me do something stupid beyond all previous efforts.