Independence Day

by Richard Ford

  “And so this black lady said to me, just as we were about to shoot her up with anesthetic, ‘Doctah Burris, if today was a fish, I’d sho th’ow it back.’ And she grinned the biggest old snaggle-tooth grin, and off she went to sleep.” Henry rounds his eyes out wide and tries to suppress a whooping laugh with a phony mouth-shut grimace—his usual bedside performance.

  “What happened to her?” Gently I free my wrist and let it dangle, my eyes drawn helplessly back to the copter thirty yards away, where Paul Bascombe is right now being professionally on-loaded by two attendants, in advance of waving good-bye.

  “Oh, golly, I’m tellin’ you,” Henry Burris says, whispering and raising his voice both at once. “We fixed her right up like we’re going to do Paul today. She can see as clear as you can, or at least she could then. I’m sure she’s dead now. She was eighty-one.”

  I have complete faith in Henry Burris, due to our talk. He in fact reminds me of a younger, vigorous, more intelligent and no doubt less slippery Ted Houlihan. I have no reluctance about letting him darn away on my son’s retina, no sense of this being a terrible blunder or that regret will rise in me like molten metal and harden forever. It is the right thing to do in all ways and, for that reason, rare. “Discretion,” Henry Burris has said to me, “is our best route here, since what we worry about in these things are the problems we can’t see.” (Much like a house purchase.) “We’ve got some doctors who’ve seen it all down at Yale.” (Which I’ll bet is true; possibly I should ask what causes wincing.)

  My problem is only that I don’t know where to attach my own eyes to Henry, can’t sense him, and not even that I can’t tell you what makes him tick. Eyes make him tick: how you fix ’em, what’s wrong with ’em, what’s good about ’em, how they make us see and sometimes fail to (similar to Dr. Stopler’s contrast between the mind and the brain). But what I can’t tell, not that it even matters except for my comfort, is what and where his mystery is, the part you’d discover if you knew him for years, learned to respect him professionally, wanted to discover even more and so decided to take a dude-ranch vacation with him up to the Wind Rivers, or went on a twosome freighter trip around the world or a canoe exploration to the uncharted headwaters of the Watanuki. What are his uncertainties, the quality of his peace made with contingency, his worries about the inevitability of joy or tragedy out in the unknown where we all plow the seas: his rationale, based on experience, for the advisability of discretion? I know it about Irv, by God, and you could know mine in 8.2 seconds. But in Henry, where a clue would speak volumes and satisfy much, no clue’s in sight.

  It’s possible, of course, that he lacks a specific rationale; that for him it’s just eyes, eyes and more eyes, and secondarily a commanding wife with a statuesque bank account, all topped off by his own damn positive attitude. Discretion, in other words, is a standard, not optional, feature. His is the same glacially suitable, semi-affable medical emanation I sensed around Dr. Tisaris, though there was in Dr. T. that whiff of something else under her doctor smock. However (and I’m quitting thinking about it now), this is undoubtedly the very emanation you want in a healthcare provider, particularly when your son’s in need of serious fixing and you’re sure never to see the guy again.

  Ann is waiting a few yards away beneath the helipad’s red wind sock, talking overattentively to Irv, who’s still in his sandals and gold Mafia sweater and is all curled up in his own folded arms and a slightly feminine hip-in, knees-out posture, as if he feels in need of protection from the likes of Ann. They have discovered some mutual cronies from the “Thumb,” who went to the same glockenspiel camp in northern Michigan in the Fifties and frolicked like monkeys on the dunes before they were bulldozed to make a park, on and on. For Irv, today is a banner day for continuities, and he seems as engrossed as an Old Testament scholar, although conscious that Ann’s and my continuity is kaput and he should therefore hold some measure back (his snapshot, for instance).

  Ann has continued to pass a weather eye my way as I’ve stood with Henry, occasionally signaling me with a faint and faintly puzzled smile, once even a little one-finger wave, as if she suspected me of plotting a last-second dash in under the rotors to save my son from being saved by her and others, and hoped a twinkle in her eye would be enough to head me off. Though I’m not so stubborn and am a man of my word, if allowed to be. She may only want a small gesture of faith. But I feel a change is now in motion, a facing of fact long overdue, so that my good act toward her will be my faithful forbearance.

  I have, of course, had a last chance to reenter Paul’s brightly lit hospital room and say my good-byes. He lay, as before, seemingly painless and in resolute spirits, his eyes still patched and taped, his feet spraddled over the end of his gurney—a boy grown too big for his furnishings.

  “Maybe when I get out of the hospital and if I’m not on probation, I’ll come down and stay with you a while,” he said, blindly facing the light and as if this were an all-new subject he’d dreamed up in his sedative daze, though it made me light-headed, my arms featherish and tingling, since chances seemed iffy.

  “I’m looking forward to it if your mom thinks it’s a good idea,” I said. “I’m just sorry we didn’t have a very good time today. We didn’t get into the Hall of Fame, like you said.”

  “I’m not hall of fame material. It’s the story of my life.” He smirked like a forty-year-old. “Is there a Real Estate Hall of Fame?”

  “Probably,” I said, my hands on the bars of his bed.

  “Where would it be? In Buttzville, New Jersey?”

  “Or maybe Chagrin Falls. Or Cape Flattery, B.C. Maybe Sinking Springs, PA. One of those.”

  “Do you think they’d let me in school in Haddam in a pirate’s patch?”

  “If they’ll let you in with what you’ve got on today, I guess so.”

  “Do you think they’ll remember me?” He exhaled with the tedium of injury, his mind flickering with vivid pictures of school commencing in an old/new town.

  “I think you cut a pretty wide swath down there, if I remember it right.” I looked studiously down at his nose, wrinkled by the bandage, as if he could know I was concentrating on him.

  “I was never really appreciated down there.” And then he said, “Did you know more women attempt suicide than men? But men succeed more?” A smirk fattened his cheeks under his bandage.

  “It’s good to be worse at some things, I guess. You didn’t try to kill yourself, did you, son?” I stared even harder at him, feeling my posture suddenly sink with the awful weight of fearsome apprehension.

  “I didn’t think I was tall enough to get hit. I screwed up. I got taller.”

  “You’re just too big for your britches,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t lie—to me anyway. “I’m sorry I made you stand up there. That was a big mistake. I wish I’d gotten hit instead.”

  “You didn’t make me.” He squinted at the light he couldn’t see but could feel. “HBP. Runners advance.” He touched his bandaged ear with his warty finger. “Ouch,” he said.

  I put my hand on his shoulder and pressed down again, as I did in the batting cage, my fingers still bearing a scuff of his blood from my rough-up of this very ear. “It’s just my hand,” I said.

  “What would John Adams say about getting beaned?”

  “Who’s John Adams?” I said. He smiled a sweet self-satisfied smile at nothing. “I don’t know, son. What?”

  “I was trying to make up a good one. I thought maybe not seeing would help.”

  “Are you thinking you’re thinking now?”

  “No, I’m just thinking.”

  “Maybe he’d say—“

  “Maybe he’d say,” Paul interrupted, fully involved, “‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him blank.’ John Adams would say that.”

  “What?” I said, wanting to please him. “Swim? Water-ski? Windsurf? Alias Sibelius?”

  “Dance,” Paul said authoritatively. “Horses c
an’t dance. When John Adams got beaned, he said, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him dance.’ He’ll only dance if he feels like it.” I expected an eeeck or a bark. Something. But there was nothing.

  “I love you, son, okay?” I said, suddenly wanting to clear out and in a hurry. Enough was enough.

  “Yep, me too,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll see you soon.”

  “Ciao.”

  And I had the feeling he was far out ahead of me then and in many things. Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could’ve been. It can be corrupting.

  I leaned and kissed his shoulder through his shirt. And it was, luckily, then that the nurses came to make him ready to fly far, far away.

  Rotors, rotors, rotors, turning now in the warm afternoon. Strange faces appear in the open copter door. Henry Burris shakes my hand in his small trained one, ducks and goes stooping across the blue concrete to clamber in. Thwop-thwop, thwop-thwop, thwop-thwop. I give a thought to where Dr. Tisaris might be now—possibly playing mixed doubles on one of the cubed courts below. Well out of it.

  Ann, bare-legged in her buttoned-up trench coat, shakes hands like a man with Irv. I see her lips moving and his seeming to mouth it all back verbatim: “Hope, hope, hope, hope, hope.” She turns then and walks straight across the grass to where I stand, slightly stooped, thinking about Henry Burris’s hands, small enough to get inside a head and fix things. He’s got a head for eyes and the hands to match.

  “Okay?” Ann says brightly, indestructible. I no longer fear or suppose she could die before I die. I am not indestructible; do not even wish to be. “Where will you be tonight so I can call you?” she says over the thwop-thwop-thwop.

  “Driving home.” I smile. (Her old home.)

  “I’ll leave a number on your box. What time will you get there?”

  “It’s just three hours. He and I talked about his coming down with me this fall. He wants to.”

  “Well,” Ann says less loudly, tightening her lips.

  “I do great with him almost all the time,” I say in the hot, racketing air. “That’s a good average for a father.”

  “We’re interested in him doing well,” she says, then seems sorry. Though I am delivered to silence and perhaps a small catch of dread, a fear of disappearance all over again, a mind’s snapshot of my son standing with me on the small lawn of my house, doing nothing, just standing—canceled.

  “He’d do great,” I say, meaning: I hope he’d do great. My right eye flickers with fatigue and, God knows, everything else.

  “Do you really want to?” Her eyes squint in the rotor wash, as if I might be telling the biggest of all whoppers. “Don’t you think it’d cramp your style?”

  “I don’t really have a style,” I say. “I could borrow his. I’ll drive him up to New Haven every week and wear a straitjacket if that’s what you want. It’ll be fun. I know he needs some help right now.” These words are not planned, possibly hysterical, unconvincing. I should probably mention the Markhams’ faith in the Haddam school system.

  “Do you even like him?” Ann looks skeptical, her hair flattened by the swirling wind.

  “I think so,” I say. “He’s mine. I lost almost everybody else.”

  “Well,” she says and closes her eyes, then opens them, still looking at me. “We’ll just have to see when this is over. Your daughter thinks you’re great, by the way. You haven’t lost everybody.”

  “That’s enough to say.” I smile again. “Do you know if he’s dyslexic?”

  “No.” She looks out at the big rumbling copter, whose winds are beating us. She wants to be there, not here. “I don’t think he is. Why? Who said he was?”

  “No reason, really. Just checking. You should get going.”

  “Okay.” She quickly, harshly grabs me behind my head, her fingers taking my scalp where I’m tender and pulling my face to her mouth, and gives me a harder kiss on my cheek, a kiss in the manner of Sally’s kiss two nights ago, but in this instance a kiss to silence all.

  Then off she goes toward an air ambulance. Henry Burris is waiting to gangway her in. I, of course, can’t see Paul on his strapped-in litter, and he can’t see me. I wave as the door slides slap-shut and the rotors rev. A helmeted pilot glances back to see who’s in and who’s not. I wave at no one. The red ground lights around the concrete square suddenly snap on. A swirl and then a pounding of hot air. Mown grass blasts my legs and into my face and hair. Fine sand dervishes around me. The wind sock flaps valiantly. And then their craft is aloft, its tail rising, miraculously orbiting, its motor gathering itself, and like a spaceship it moves off and begins swiftly to grow smaller, a little, and then more, then smaller and smaller yet, until the blue horizon and the southern mountains enclose it in lusterless, blameless light. And everything, every thing I have done today is over with.

  INDEPENDENCE DAY

  Streets away, in the summoning, glimmery early-morning heat, a car alarm breaks into life, shattering all silences. Bwoop-bwip! Bwoop-bwip! Bwoop-bwip! On the front steps of 46 Clio Street, reading my paper, I gaze up into the azure heavens through sycamore boughs, take a breath, blink and wait for peace.

  I am here before nine, again in my red REALTOR jacket and my own The Rock shirt, awaiting the Markhams, currently on their way down from New Brunswick. Though unlike most of my previous intercourse with them, this time there is not a long story. Possibly there is even a hopeful one.

  At the end of yesterday’s bewildering if not completely demoralizing events, Irv was good enough to chauffeur me back up to Cooperstown—a drive during which he talked a mile a minute and in an almost desperate way about needing to get out of the simulator business, except that in his current view and based on careful analysis, the rah-rah, back-slap, yahoo days in his industry were all done, so that a policy favoring a career move seemed foolhardy, whereas holding his cards seemed wise. Continuity—an earnest new commanding metaphor—was applicable to all and was taking up the slack for synchronicity (which never carries you far enough).

  When we arrived long into the shaded dewy hours of early evening, the Deerslayer lot was jammed full of new vacationer cars and my Ford had been towed away, since inasmuch as I was no longer a paying guest my license number was no longer on file. Irv and I and the resurrected Erma then sat in the office at the Mobil station behind Doubleday Field and waited until the tow-truck driver arrived with keys to the razor-wire impoundment, during which time I decided to make my necessary calls before paying my sixty dollars, saying good-bye and turning homeward alone.

  My second call and inexcusably late was to Rocky and Carlo’s, to leave a message with Nick the bartender. Sally would receive this when she got in from South Mantoloking, and among its profuse apologies were instructions to go straight to the Algonquin (my first call), where I’d reserved a big suite for her, there to check in and order room service. Later that night, from the village of Long Eddy, New York, halfway down the Delaware, we spoke and I told her all about the day’s lamentable happenings and some odd feeling of peculiar and not easily explainable hope I’d already started to revive by then, after which we were able to impress each other with our seriousness and the possibilities for commitment in ways we admitted were “dangerous” and “anxious-making” and that we had never quite advanced to in the solitary months of only “seeing” each other. (Who knows why we hadn’t, except there’s nothing like tragedy or at least a grave injury or major inconvenience to cut through red tape and bullshit and reveal anyone’s best nature.)

  Joe and Phyllis Markham, when I reached them, were as meek as mice on hearing they’d missed their chance on the Houlihan house, that I was now fresh out of good ideas and a long way from home, that my already afflicted son had been poleaxed playing baseball and was at that moment in ominous surgery at Yale-New Haven and would probably lose his vision. In my
voice, I know, were the somber tonalities and slow, end-stop rhythms of resignation, of having run the course, made the valiant try in more ways than ten, endured imprecation, come back from the trash heap with no hard feelings, and yet in a moment or two I would say good-bye forever. (“Realty death” is the industry buzzword.)

  “Frank, look,” Joe said, annoyingly tapping a pencil lead on the receiver from within his medium-priced double at the Raritan Ramada and seeming as clearheaded, plainspoken and ready to own up to reality as a Lutheran preacher at the funeral of his impoverished aunt. “Is there any way Phyl and I could get a peek at that colored rental property you mentioned? I know I got away from myself a little on Friday when I flared up that way. And I probably owe you an apology.” (For calling me an asshole, a prick, a shithead? Why not, I thought, though that was as close as we got.) “There’s one colored family in Island Pond who’s been there since the Underground Railroad. Everybody treats ’em like regular citizens. Sonja goes to school right beside one of them every day.”

  “Tell him we want to look at it tomorrow,” I heard Phyllis say. Changes had occurred aloft, I realized, a storm pushed on out to sea. In the realty business, change is good; from 100 percent for to 150 percent against, or vice versa, are everyday occurrences and signs of promising instability. My job is to make all that seem normal (and, if possible, make every nutty change in a client’s mind seem smarter than anything I myself could’ve advised).

  “Joe, I’ll be home tonight around eleven, God willing.” I leaned wearily against the window glass at the Mobil, the da-ding, da-ding, da-ding of the customer bell going constantly. (There was no use picking up the racial cudgels to try explaining to Joe that it was not “a colored house” but my house.) “So if I don’t call you, I’ll meet you on the porch at forty-six Clio Street at nine a.m. tomorrow.”