The Sportswriter

10

Under the visor I have a Johnny Horizon Let’s-Clean-Up-America map, printed for the Bicentennial, and taped to the dash a page of directions in Vicki’s own hand on the “smart way” to get to Barnegat Pines. 206-A to 530-E to 70-S and (swerving briefly north) to an unnumbered county road referred to only as Double Trouble Road, which supposedly delivers you neat as a whistle to where you’re going.

Her directions route me past the most ordinary but satisfying New Jersey vistas, those parts that remind you of the other places you’ve been in your life, but in New Jersey are grouped like squares in a puzzle. It is a good time to put the top down and let in the winds.

Much of what I pass, of course, looks precisely like everyplace else in the state, and the dog-leg boundaries make it tricky to keep cardinal points aligned. The effect of driving south and east is to make you feel you’re going south and west and that you’re lost, or sometimes that you’re headed nowhere. Clean industry abounds. Valve plants. A Congoleum factory. U-Haul sheds. A sand and gravel pit close by a glass works. An Airedale kennel. The Quaker Home for Confused Friends. A mall with a nautical theme. Several signs that say HERE! Suddenly it is a high pale sky and a feeling like Florida, but a mile farther on, it is the Mississippi Delta — civilized life flattened below high power lines, the earth laid out in great vegetative tracts where Negroes fish from low bridges, and Mount Holly lumps on the far horizon just before the Delaware. Beyond that lies Maine.

I stop in the town of Pemberton near Fort Dix, and put in another call to X to express Easter greetings. Her recording talks in the same brassy business voice, and this time I leave a number — the Arcenaults’—where she can reach me. I also put in a call to Walter. He is on my mind today, although no one answers at his house.

In Bamber — a town that is no more than a post office and small lake across Route 530—I stop for a drink in a cozy rough-pine roadhouse with yellow lowlights and log tables. Sweet Lou’s Sportsman’s B’ar, owned — the signs inside all say — by a famous ex-center on the ’56 Giants, Sweet Lou Calcagno. Jack Dempsey, Spike Jones, Lou Costello, Ike and a host of others have all been close friends of Sweet Lou’s and contributed pictures to the walls, showing themselves embracing a smiling, crewcut bruiser in an open collar shirt who looks like he could eat a football.

Sweet Lou isn’t around at the moment, but when I sit down at the bar, a heavy pale-skinned woman in her fifties with beehive hair and elastic slacks comes out from a swinging door to the back and begins to clean an ashtray.

“Where’s Lou today,” I ask after I’ve ordered a whiskey. I would, in fact, like to meet him, maybe set up a Where Are They Now feature: “Former Giant lugnut Lou Calcagno once had a dream. Not to run a fumble in for a touchdown or to play in a league championship or to enter the Hall of Fame, but to own a little watering trough in his downstate Jersey home of Bamber, a quiet, traditional place where friends and fans could come and reminisce about the old glory days….”

“Lou who?” the woman says, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke away from me out the corner of her mouth.

I widen my grin. “Sweet Lou.”

“He’s where he is. How long since you been in?”

“A while, I guess it’s been.”

“I guess too.” She narrows her eyes. “Maybe in your other life.”

“I used to be a big fan of his,” I say, though this isn’t true. I’m not even sure I ever heard of him. To be honest, I feel like an idiot.

“He’s dead. He’s been dead maybe, thirty years? That’s approximately where he is.”

“I’m sorry to know that,” I say.

“Right. Lou was a real nunce,” the woman says, finishing wiping out the ashtray. “And he was a big nunce. I was married to him.” She pours herself a cup of coffee and stares at me. “I don’t wanna ruin your dreams. But. You know?”

“What happened?”

“Well,” she says, “some gangsters drove over here from Mount Holly and walked him into the parking lot out there like it was friends and shot him twenty or thirty times. That did it.”

“What the hell had he done to them?”

She shakes her head. “No idea. I was right here where I am behind this bar. They came in, three of them, all little rats. They said they wanted Lou to come out and talk, and when he did, boom. Nobody came back in to explain.”

“Did they catch the people?”

“Nope. They did not. Not one was caught. Lou and I were getting divorced anyway. But I was working for him afternoons.”

I look around the dark bar where Sweet Lou stares down at me from long ago and life, surrounded by his smiling friends and fans, an athlete who left sports a success to achieve a prosperous life in Bamber, which was no doubt his home, or near it, yet came to a bad end. Not the way these things usually turn out and not exactly what you’d want to read about before dinner behind a chilled martini.

Someone else, I see, is in the bar, an older gray-haired man in an expensive-looking silverish suit sitting talking to a young woman in red slacks. They are in the corner by the window. Above them is a huge somber-looking bear’s head.

I cluck my tongue and look at Lou’s widow. “It’s nice you keep the place this way.”

“He had it in his will that all these had to be left up, or I’d have changed it, what, a hundred years ago? It has to stay a B’ar, too, and buy from his distributorship. Otherwise I lose it to his guinea cousins in Teaneck. So I ignore him. I forget whose picture it is, really. He wanted to run everybody’s life.”

“Do you still own the distributorship?”

“My son by my second marriage. It fell in his lap.” She sniffs, smokes, stares out the small front door glass which casts a pale inward light.

“That’s not so bad.”

“It was the best thing he ever did, I guess. After he was in the ground he did it. Which figures.”

“My name’s Frank Bascombe, by the way. I’m a sportswriter.” I put my dollar on the bar and drink up my whiskey.

“Mrs. Phillips,” she says and shakes my hand. “My other husband’s dead, too.” She stares at me without interest and opens a saltine packet from a basket of them on the bar. “I haven’t seen one of you guys in years. They used to come all the time to interview Fatso. From Philly. He kept ’em in stitches. He knew jokes by the hundreds.” She drops the little red saltine ribbon into the clean ashtray and breaks the cracker in two.

“I’m sorry I didn’t know him.” I’m on my feet now, smiling, sympathetic, but ready to go.

“Well, I’m sorry I did. So we’re even.” Mrs. Phillips stubs out her cigarette before biting the saltine. She looks at it curiously as if considering Lou Calcagno all over again. “No, I take it back,” she says. “He wasn’t so awful all the time.” She gives me a sour smile. “Quote me. How’s that. Not all the time.” She turns and walks stoutly down the bar toward a TV that is dark. The other two patrons are getting up to go, and I am left with my own smile and nothing to say but, “Okay. Thanks. I’ll do it.”

Outside in the white-shell parking lot there is the promise of approaching new weather — Detroit weather — though the sun is shining. A wet wind has arrived over Bamber Lake, unsettling the dust, bending the pines along the row of empty lake cottages, sending the Sportsman’s B’ar sign wagging. The older man and the young woman in slacks climb into a red Cadillac and drive away toward the west, where a bank of quilty clouds has lowered the sky. I stand beside my car and think first of Lou Calcagno coming to his sad end where I am parked, and that this is exactly the place for such things, a place that was something once. I think about the balloonists I saw this morning, and if they will get down and moored before the stiff blow comes. I am glad to be away from home today, to be off in the heart of a landscape that is unknown to me, glad to be bumping up against a world that is not mine or of my devising. There are times when life seems not so great but better than anything else, and when you’re happy to be alive, though not exactly ecstatic.

I run the top up now against a chill. In a minute’s time I’m fast down the road out of scrubby Bamber, headed for my own rendezvous on Double Trouble Road.

Vicki’s directions, it turns out, are perfect. Straight through the seaside townlet of Barnegat Pines, cross a drawbridge spanning a tarnished arm of a metallic-looking bay, loop through some beachy rental bungalows and turn right onto a man-made peninsula and a pleasant, meandering curbless street of new pastel split-levels with green lawns, underground utilities and attached garages. Sherri-Lyn Woods, the area is named, and there are streets like it along other parallel peninsulas nearby, though there are no woods in sight. Most of the houses have boat docks out back with a boat of some kind tied up — a boxy cabin-fisherman or a sleek-hulled outboard. All in all it is a vaguely nautical-feeling community, though all the houses down the street look Californiaish and casual.

The Arcenaults’ house at 1411 Arctic Spruce is vaguely similar to the others, though hanging on its front at the place where the two levels join behind beige siding there is a near life-size figure of Jesus-crucified that makes it immediately distinctive. Jesus in his suburban agony. Bloody eyes. Flimsy body. Feet already beginning to sag and give up the ghost. A look of redoubtable woe and calm. He is painted a lighter shade of beige than the siding and looks distinctly Mediterranean.

The Arcenaults—the swaying plaque out front says — and I wheel in just ahead of unkind weather and come to rest beside Vicki’s Dart.

“Lynette just had to have ole Jesus hung out there,” Vicki whispers, when we’re only half in the door, where she has met me looking put out. “I think he’s the tackiest thing in the entire world and I’m a Catholic. You’re thirty minutes late, anyway.” She is a vision in a pink jersey dress, serious rose-colored heels, snapping stockings and crimson fingernails, her black hair uncurled and simplified for home.

Everybody, she says, is scattered through the house on all levels at once, and I am only able to meet Elvis Presley, a tiny white poodle wearing a diamond collar, and Lynette, Vicki’s stepmother, who comes to the kitchen door in a chef’s apron, holding a spoon and sings out “Hi, hi.” She is a pert and pretty little second wife with bright red hair and bunchy hips descending to ankletted ankles. Vicki whispers that she hails from Lodi, West Virginia, and is a thick-as-rock hillbilly, though I have the feeling we could be friendly if Vicki’d allow it. She is cooking meat and the house airs smell warm and thick. “Hope you like your lamb well, well, well done, Franky,” Lynette says, disappearing back into the kitchen. “That’s the way Wade Arcenault likes his.”

“Great. That’s exactly how I like mine,” I lie, and am suddenly aware that not only am I late but I haven’t brought a gift for anybody, not a flower, a greeting card, or an Easter bonbon. I am certain Vicki has noticed.

“You better put plenty of mint jelly on my plate.” Vicki rolls her eyes, then says to my ear, “You don’t either like it well done.”

Vicki and I sit on a big salmon-colored couch, with our backs to a picture window that faces Arctic Spruce Drive. The drapes are open and an amber storm light colors the room, which has old-master prints on the walls — a Van Gogh, a Constable seascape, and “The Blue Boy.” A plush blue carpet (a hunch tells me Everett had a hand here) covers the floor wall to wall. The house has exactly the feel of Vicki’s apartment, but its effect on me — in my youthful seersucker — is that I am the teacher who has given Vicki a bad mark at midterm and who has been invited to Sunday dinner to prove the family’s a solid one before finals. It isn’t a bad way to feel, and when dinner is over I’m sure I can leave in a hurry.

The television, a cabinet model the size of a large doghouse, is showing another NBA game without sound. I would be happy to watch it the rest of the afternoon, while Vicki reads Love’s Last Journey, and forget all about dinner.

“I’m hot, aren’t you hot?” Vicki says, and she suddenly jumps up, crosses the room and twists the thermostat drastically. Cooling, forced air hits me almost immediately from a high wall louver. She switches around, showing her nice fanny and gives me a witchy smile. This is a different girl at home, there’s no doubting that. “No need us smotherin indoors, is it?”

We sit for a while and silently watch the Knicks beat hell out of the Cavaliers. Cleveland plays its regular leggy, agitating garage-ball game while the Knicks seem club-footed and awkward as giraffes but inexplicably score more points, which makes the Cleveland crowd good and mad. Two giant Negroes start to scuffle after a loose ball, and a vicious fight breaks out almost instantly. Players, black and white, fall all over the floor like trees, and the game quickly becomes a free-for-all the referees can’t handle. Police come onto the floor and begin grabbing people, smiles on their big Slovak faces, and things seem likely to get worse. It is a usual Cleveland tactic.

Vicki clicks off the picture with a remote box hidden between the couch cushions, leaving me wide-eyed and silent. She jerks her dress down around her sleek knees and sits up high like a job applicant. I can see the broad, all-business outline of her brassiere (she needs a good-sized one) through the stretchy pink fabric. I would like to snake a hand round to one of those breasts and pull her back for an Easter kiss, which I still have not been given. Meat smell is everywhere.

“Did you read that Parade today,” she asks, giving her jersey another tug and staring across the room at an electric organ sitting against the wall underneath the flat and florid Van Gogh.

“I guess not,” I say, though I can’t remember actually what I have been doing. Waiting to be here. My sole occupation for the day.

“Ole Walter Scott’s said that a woman washed her hair with a honey shampoo and walked out in the backyard with a wet head and got stung to death by bees.” She casts a fishy eye around at me. “Does that sound like the truth?”

“What happened to the woman who washed her hair with beer? Did she end up marrying a Polack?”

She tosses her head around. “You’re a regular Red Skeleton, aren’t you?”

Out in the kitchen Lynette drops a pan with a loud bangety bang. “Scuze me, kids,” she calls out and laughs.

“You drop the set out of your ring?” Vicki says loudly.

“I coulda said something else,” Ly nette says, “but I won’t on Easter.”

“Small favors, please,” Vicki says.

“I had a ring that big once,” Lynette’s friendly voice says.

“So where’d he go?” Vicki says and gives me a hot look. She and Lynette are not the best of friends. I wish, though, that they could pretend to be for the afternoon.

“That poor man died of cancer before you were in the picture,” Lynette says light-heartedly.

“Was that about the time you converted over?”

Lynette’s beaming face pops around the kitchen door molding, her eyes sharpened. “Shortly after, sweetheart, that’s right.”

“I guess you needed help and guidance.”

“We all do, don’t we, Vicki sweet? Even Franky, I bet.”

“He’s Presbyterian.”

“Well-o-well.” Lynette is gone from the door back to her stove. “Back in the hills we called them the country club, though I understand they’ve gotten pious since Vatican II. The Catholics got easier and the others had to get harder.”

“I doubt the Catholics got any easier,” I say, though for this Vicki fires me a savage look of warning.

Lynette suddenly reappears, nodding seriously at me and pulling a curl of damp orange hair off her temple. She still seems someone a person could like. “We ought none of us to get lax the way this world is headed,” she says.

“Lynette works at the Catholic crisis center in Forked River,” Vicki says in a tired singsong.

“That’s mighty right, sweetheart,” Lynette smiles, then is gone again and begins making thick stirring noises in a bowl. Vicki looks as disgusted with everything as it’s possible to be.

“What it comes down to is she answers the phone,” Vicki whispers, but loud enough. “And they call that a crisis-line.” She flounces back on the couch and buries her chin over in her collarbone, staring at the wall. “I guess I’ve seen a crisis or two. Some guy came in one time down in Dallas with his entire thing sticking out of his friend’s pocket, and we had to sew that gentleman right back on.”

“Alienation didn’t work out, you see.” Lynette speaks energetically from the kitchen. “That’s what we’re finding out now from the colleges. A lot of people want to get back in the world now, so to speak. And I don’t try to force my religion onto them. I’ll stay on a line as much as eight straight hours with some individual and he won’t be Catholic at all. Course, I have to stay in bed two days after that. We all wear headphones.” Lynette walks into the doorway, cradling a big crockery bowl in her arms like a farm wife. Her smile is the most patient one in the world. But she has the look of a woman who wants to start something. “Some crises don’t bleed out in the open, Vicky hon.”

“Whoop-dee-do,” Vicki says and rolls her eyes.

“Now you’re a writer, right?” Lynette says.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, that’s awfully nice too.” Lynette gazes down lovingly into her bowl while she thinks this over. “Do you ever sometimes write religious tracts?”

“No ma’am, I never have. I’m a sportswriter.”

Vicki signals the TV to start again, and sighs. On the screen a tiny dark-skinned man is diving off a high cliff into a narrow inlet of surging white water. “Acapulco,” Vicki mutters.

Lynette is smiling at me now. My answer, whatever it was, has been enough for her, and she just wants to take this chance to look me over.

“Well, Lynette, why don’t you stare at Frank an hour or two,” Vicki nearly shouts and crosses her arms angrily.

“I just want to see him, hon. I like to have one time to see a whole person clearly. Then I know them. It doesn’t hurt a thing. Frank can tell I mean only good, can’t you, Frank?”

“Absolutely.” I smile.

“I’m glad I ain’t livin here,” Vicki snaps.

“That’s why you have a nice place all your own,” Lynette says amiably. “Of course, I’ve never been invited there.” She ambles into the steamy, meaty kitchen, leaving the two of us on the couch alone with the cliff-divers.

“You and me ought to have a talk,” Vicki says sternly, her eyes suddenly red and full of tears. The forced air comes on again and drums us both with a cool mechanical influx. Elvis Presley trots to the door and looks at us. “Get outa here, Elvis Presley,” Vicki says. Elvis Presley turns around and trots into the dining room.

“What about?” I smile hopefully.

“Just a bunch of things.” She wipes her eyes with her fingertips, which requires her to duck her head.

“About you and me?”

“Yes.” She makes her pouty lips go sour. And once again my poor heart drums fast. Who knows why? To save me? I don’t have a liar’s clue to what needs to be said between us, but her mood is a mood with unhappy finality in it.

Why, though, can’t everything — just for today — wait? Wait a beat as the actor says. Just go on without change a bit longer? Why can’t every sweet untranscendent thing we know or think we know go on along a little longer without closure having to rear its practical head? Walter Luckless Luckett could not have been more right about me. I don’t like to think of this or that thing ending, or even changing. Death, the old streamliner, is not my friend, nor will he ever be.

Though I can’t put off whatever this is, and maybe I don’t even want to. She is a demon after changes today, her whole person exuding transition. Only there’s no real need for it, is there? (Thunk-a, thunk-a thunk, my heart’s pumping.) We haven’t even had dinner yet, not tasted the lamb cooked hard as a coaster. I have yet to meet her father and her brother. I had sheltered hope that her dad and I could become bosom buddies even if Vicki and I didn’t work things out. He and I could still be friends. If his tire went flat some rainy night in Haddam or Hightstown or anyplace within my area code, he could call me up, I’d drive out to get him, we’d have a drink while the tire was being fixed at Frenchy’s and he would go off into the Jersey darkness certain he had a friend worthy of his trust and who looked down life’s corridor more or less the way he did. Maybe we could take the brother fishing at Manasquan (no need to bring the women in on it). Vicki could be married to Sweet Lou Calcagno’s stepson over in Bamber, have a wonderful life as a beer distributor’s wife with all the hullygully of kids. And I could be the trusted family friend with a heart of gold. I’d renounce my failed suitor’s glower for the demeanor of a wise old uncle. That would be enough for me, just the natural playing out of the pleasing present.

Vicki stares out the window at the houses along Arctic Spruce, her arm on the couch back. Sometimes it is possible to see in her face the lineaments of the older woman she will be, when her features will take on dimension, weight around the chin, a character more serious than now. She will undoubtedly be stout in later life, which is not always a hopeful sign.

Amber light has turned the lawns as green as England. In driveways all up the curving curbless street sit bright new cars — Chryslers, Olds, Buicks — each one with a hefty, moneyed look. In the middle distance a great white RV sits in a side yard. Smoke curls from almost every white brick chimney, though it is not cold enough by a long shot. Some doors have wreaths up since Christmas. My trailing wind has arrived.

Someone, I see, has set white croquet wickets around the Arcenaults’ front lawn. Two striped stakes face each other at less than regulation distance. Games have been planned for the day, and here is how I will paint my trapdoor to escape the incoming empty moment I feel.

“Let’s play,” I say, giving Vicki’s arm an uncle’s squeeze. This is not a ruse I’m up to, only a break in the broody unfinished silence we’ve fallen victims to.

She looks amazed, though she isn’t. Her eyes round out like dimes. “In all this wind and the rain comin?”

“It isn’t raining yet.”

“Man-o-man-o-man,” Vicki says, and snaps her fingers in hot succession. “It’s your funeral.” But she is off the couch quick, and headed for some upstairs storage room for mallets.

On television, CBS is trying to get us settled back into basketball, now that things are under control again. However, each time they show what’s happening on the court, a short, bulb-nosed, red-faced man wearing a loud, checked sport coat comes into the picture shouting “Aw, fuck you” soundlessly at someone on the New York team, waving a stubby arm in disgust. This checked coat guy is one of my favorites. Mutt Greene, the Clevelands’ G.M. I interviewed him once just after I’d restarted life as a sportswriter. He was a coach in Chicago then, but by his own choice has since moved up to the front office in another city, where I’m sure life seems better. He said to me “People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are.” He was smoking a big expensive cigar in a cramped coach’s office under the Chicago arena. “I mean, do you actually realize how much adult conversation is spent on this fuckin business? Facts treated like they were opinions just for the simple purpose of talking about it longer? Some people might think that’s interesting, bub, but I’ll tell you. It’s romanticizing a goddamn rock by calling it a mountain range to me. People waste a helluva lot of time they could be putting to useful purposes. This is a game. See it and forget about it.” Afterwards we got involved in a pretty lively conversation about grass seeds and the piss-poor choices you face when your trouble was a high water table and inadequate drainage, which was not my problem, but was the case at his home on Hilton Head.

The interview wasn’t very productive on the subject of “seeing the keys” in classic big-man, small-man match-ups, which is what I was after. But I think of it as informative, though I don’t agree with everything he said. Still, he was happy to sit down with a young sportswriter and teach a lesson in life. “Keep things in perspective and give an honest effort” is what I took back to the Sheraton Commander that night. And when you’ve done with that take an interest in a new grass seed or an old Count Basie record you’ve missed listening to lately, or a catalog or a cocktail waitress, which — the last of these — is precisely what I did and wasn’t sorry about it.

On the court now the players are paying everyone murderous looks and pointing long bony fingers as threats. In particular the black players look fierce, and the white boys, pale and thin-armed, seem to want to be peacemakers, though they are actually just trying to stay out of trouble’s way. The trainer, a squat, worried-looking man in white pants, is trying to pull Mutt Greene down a runway below the stands. But Mutt is fighting mad. To him, real life’s going on here. Nothing’s for show. He has lost all perspective and wants to raise a little hell about the Knicks’ way of playing. He’s come out of the stands to show what he’s worth, and I admire him for it. I’m sure he misses the old life.

Suddenly the picture flicks and another cliff-diver stands staring down at his frothy fate. CBS has given up.

Elvis Presley trots into the kitchen door again, jingling his little diamond collar, and sniffs the air. He is uncertain about me, and who could blame him?

Lynette is right behind him, her eyes sparkly and furtive but full of good cheer. “Elvis Presley ’bout runs this whole family.” She taps Elvis Presley lightly with her toe. “He’s fixed, of course, so you don’t have to worry about your leg. He idn’t but half a man, but we do love him.”

Elvis Presley, sits in the doorway and stares at me.

“He’s something,” I say.

“Doesn’t Vicki seem like she’s worried to you?” Lynette’s voice becomes cautionary. Her bright eyes are speculative and she crosses her arms in absolute slow motion.

“She seems just fine to me.”

“Well, I thought maybe since you all went to Detroit, something unhappy’d happened.”

So! Everybody including Elvis Presley knows everything, and wants to turn it to their own purposes, no matter how idle. A full-disclosure family. No secrets unless individuals make decisions for themselves, which runs the risk of general disapproval. Vicki has obviously told an aromatic little-but-not-enough, and Lynette wants filling in. She is not exactly as I want her to be, and as of this moment I transfer fully back to Vicki’s alliance.

“Everything’s great that I know of.” I admit nothing with a smile.

“Well good-should, then.” Lynette nods happily. “We all just love her and want the best for her. She’s the bravest ole thing.”

No answer. No “Why is she brave?” or “Tell me what you make of Everett?” or “In fact, she is seeming just the least little bit peculiar all of a sudden.” Nothing from me, except “She’s wonderful,” and another grin.

“Yes she is now,” Lynette beams, but full of warning. Then she is gone again, leaving Elvis Presley in the doorway, frozen in an empty stare.

In the time it takes Vicki to come back with the mallets, her brother Cade comes pushing through the front door. He has been out back tying down a tarp on his Boston Whaler, and when I shake his hand it is rock-fleshed and chilled. Cade is twenty-five, a boat mechanic in nearby Toms River, and a mauler of a fellow in a white T-shirt and jeans. He is, Vicki has told me, on the “wait list” for the State Police Academy and has already developed a flat-eyed, officer’s uninterest for the peculiarities of his fellow man.

“Down from Haddam, huh?” Cade grunts, once we’ve let go of each other’s hands and are standing hard-by with nothing to say. His speech does not betray one trace of Texas, where he grew up, and instead he has developed now into full-fledged Jersey young-manhood with an aura of no-place/no-time surrounding him like poison. He looms beside me like a mast and stares furiously out the front window. “I useta know a girl in South Brunswick. Useta take her skatin in a rink on 130. You might know where that is?” A snicker and a sneer appear on his lips at once.

“I know exactly,” I say and sink my hands deep in my pockets. Indeed I’ve watched my own two precious children (and once my third) skate there for hours on end while I hugged the rail in estranged admiration.

“There’s a Mann’s Tri-Plex in there now, I guess,” Cade says, looking around the room as if perplexed by getting into this embarrassing conversation in the first place. He’d feel much better if he could put the cuffs on me and push me head-down into the back seat of a cruiser. On the ride downtown we could both relax, be ourselves, and he could share a cruel joke with me and his partner — amigos in our roles, as God intended. As it is I’m from an outside world, the type of helpless citizen who owns the expensive boats he repairs; the know-nothings with no mechanical skills he hates for the way we take care of property he himself can’t afford. I am not who normally comes for dinner, and he’s having a hard time being human about me.

My advice to him, though unspoken, is that he’d better get used to me and mine, since I am the people he’ll be giving tickets to sooner or later, average solid citizens whose ways and mores he’ll ridicule at the risk of getting into a peck of trouble. I can, in fact, be of use to him, could be instructive of the outside world if he would let me.

“Uhn, where’s Vicki?” Cade looks suddenly caged, glancing around the room as if she might be hiding behind a chair. Simultaneously he opens his thick fist to display a piece of silvery, tooled metal.

“She’s gone to get croquet mallets,” I say. “What’s that?”

Cade stares down at the two-inch piece of tubular metal and purses his lips. “Spacer,” he says and then is silent a moment. “Germans make it. It’s the best in the world. And it’s a real piece of crap’s what it is.”

“What’s it to?” My hands are firm and deep in my pockets. I’m willing to take an interest in “spacer” for the moment.

“Boat,” Cade says darkly. “We should be making these things over here. That way they’d last.”

“You’re right about that,” I say. “It’s too bad.”

“I mean, what’re you gonna do if you’re out on the ocean and this thing cracks? Like this.” One greasy finger fine-points a hairline fissure in the spacer’s side, something I’d never have noticed. Cade’s dark eyes grow hooded with suppressed annoyance. “You gonna call for a German? Is that it? I’ll tell you what you’d do, mister.” His eyes find me gazing stupidly at the spacer, which seems obscure and unimportant. “You kiss your ass goodbye if a storm comes up.” Cade nods grimly and pops his big hand shut like a clam. All his feelings are pretty closely positioned into this conceit — the strongest chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and he’s resolved never to be that link in his personal life, where he’s in control. This is the central fact of all tragedy, though to me it’s not much to get excited about. His is the policeman’s outlook, mine the sportswriter’s. To me a weak link bears some watching, and you’d better have replacements handy in case it goes. But in the meantime it could be interesting to see how it bears up and tries to do its job under some bad conditions, all the while giving its best in the other areas where it’s strong. I’ve always thought of myself as a type of human weak link, working against odds and fate, and I’m not about to give up on myself. Cade, on the other hand, wants to lock up us offenders and weak links so we’ll never again see the light of day and worry anybody. We would have a hard time being good friends, this I can see.

“You been to Atlantic City lately?” Cade says suspiciously.

“Not in a long time.” X and I went on our honeymoon there, stayed in the old Hadden Hall, walked on the boardwalk and had the time of our lives. I haven’t been back since, except once for a karate match, when I flew in after dark and left two hours later. I doubt Cade is interested in this.

“It’s all ruined now,” Cade says, shaking his head in dismay. “Hookers and spic teenagers all over. It useta be good. And I’m not even prejudiced.”

“I’d heard it’s changed.”

“Changed?” Cade smirks, the first sign of a real smile I’ve seen so far. “Nagasaki changed, right?” Cade suddenly flings his head toward the kitchen. “I’m hungry enough eat a lug wrench.” And a strangely happy smile breaks over his tragic big bullard’s face. “I’ve got to go wash up or Lynette’ll shoot me.” He shakes his head, appreciative and grinning.

Suddenly all is good cheer. Whatever troubled him is gone now. Atlantic City. Weak links. Faulty spacers. Spies. Criminals he will someday arrest and later want to joke with on the long ride downtown. All gone. This is a feature of his outlook I have not expected. He can forget and be happy — a real strength. A good meal is waiting somewhere. A TV game. A beer. Clear sailing beyond the squall-line of life. It isn’t so bad, when you don’t think of it.

In the front yard Vicki displays for me the most excellent way to hit a croquet ball, the between-the-straddled-legs address, which lets her give her ball a good straight ride that makes her whoop with pleasure. I am a side-approacher by nature, having played some golf at Lonesome Pines and when I first married X. I also enjoy hitting the stupid striper with one hand, though I give up touch every time. Vicki gives me dark and disreputable looks when I hit, then even more aggressively straddles her green ball and hikes her skirt above her knees to get the straightest pendulum swing. She’s half around the course before I’m through a wicket, though I’m a tinge dreamy now, my mind not truly on our game.

The Detroit weather has arrived finally, though it is not the same storm. All the anger has gone out of it, and it consents to being just a gusty, plucky breeze with a few sprinklings of icy rain — a mild suburban shower at best, though the light has passed from Sunday amber to late afternoon aquamarine. In fact it’s wonderful to be out of doors and away from the house, even though we play under the eyes of crucified Jesus. I have no idea where Vicki’s father is. Is this interpretable as a dark sign, a gesture of unwelcome? Should I be asking what I’m doing here? I was, after all, invited, though I feel in an unavoidable way as alone as a nomad.

“You havin fun?” Vicki says. She has managed to nest her green stripe close enough to my yellow ball to give it a good clacking whack under her stockinged foot, scooting it through the grass and into the flowerbed where it is lost among the snapdragons against the house.

“I was doing pretty good.”

“Gogetchanotherball. Get a red one — they’re lucky.” She stands like a woodsman, with her mallet on her shoulder. She has but two wickets remaining, and pretends to want me to catch up.

“I resign,” I say and smile.

“Say what?”

“That’s what you say in chess. I’m not a match for you, not even a patch on your jeans.”

“Chest nothin, you’re the one wanted to play, and now you’re the one quittin. Go on and get a ball.”

“No I won’t. I’m no good at games, not since I was little.”

“People bet on this game in Texas. It’s taken very serious.”

“That’s why I’m no good at it.”

I take a seat on the damp porch step beside her red shoes and admire the green-tinted light and the lovely curving street. This snaky peninsula is the work of some enterprising developer who’s carted it in with trucks and reclaimed it from a swamp. And it has not been a bad idea. You could just as easily be in Hyannis Port if you closed your eyes, which for a moment I do.

Vicki goes back to hitting her green stripe, but carelessly now, using my method to show she isn’t serious. “When I was a lil girl I saw Alice in Wonderland, Cade and me. You know?” She looks up to see if I’m listening. “In the part where they played croquet with ostriches’ heads, or whatever those pink birds are, I cried bloody murder, ’cause I thought it killed ’em. I hated to see anything get hurt even then. That’s why I’m a nurse.”

“Flamingos,” I say and smile down at her.

“Is that what they were? Well, I know I cried about ’em.” Whack-crack. Her green makes a hard driving run toward the striped stake, then twirls by on the left. “There you go, that’s your fault. Shoota-mile.” She stands thrown-hipped in the breeze. I watch her with terrible desire. “You don’t play games, but you write about ’em all the time. That’s backwards.”

“I like it that way.”

“How’d you like ole Cade. Idn’t he great?”

“He’s a good fellow.”

“If he’d let me dress him he’d be a whole lot better, I’ll tell you that. Cade needs him a little girlfriend. He’s got being a policeman on the brain.” She comes over and sits on the step below mine, hugs her knees and tucks her skirt up under her. Her hair is sweet-smelling. While she was gone she has put on a good deal of Chanel No. 5.

I wish we could not talk about Cade now, but I have nothing much to substitute for him. Vicki has no interest in the upcoming NFL draft, or the early lead the Tigers have opened up in the East, or who might be ahead in the Knicks game, so I’m content to sit on the porch like a lazy freeholder, breathe in the salt air and look upwards at the daylight moon. In its own way this is quite inspiring.

“So how do you like it out here?” Vicki looks at me up over her shoulder, then back at the house across the street — another split-level, but with an oriental façade, its cornices tweaked, and painted China red.

“It’s great.”

“You don’t fit in at all, you know that.”

“I’m here to see you. I’m not trying to fit in.”

“I guess,” she says, and hugs her knees hard.

“Where’s your dad? I sort of have the feeling he’s ducking me.”

“No way for that, José.”

“I could get lost in a hurry, you know, if being here is one bit of trouble.”

“Right, you’re a heap of trouble. Breakin things and spillin food and roughin up poor ole Cade. Maybe you had better leave.”

She turns and gives me a different look, a look you’d give a man trying to recite the Lord’s Prayer in pig Latin. “Just don’t be dumb,” she says. “That man dudn’t duck nobody. He’s in the basement with his hobby. He probably dudn’t even know you’re here.” She glares into the moiling sky. “If anybody’s trouble it’s ole you-know-who in there. But I can’t talk about that. It’s his poison, let him drink it.”

“Just like you’re mine.” I scoot down a step so I can hug her shoulders around tight. No one up or down Arctic Spruce could care less, a far different place from prudent Michigan. The feeling out here is we can hug and smooch on the steps till our arms fall off and it’ll be just fine with folks.

Her shoulders rise and settle inside my bear’s hug. “I’m not so sweet,” she says.

“Don’t tell me any bad news now,”

She furrows her brow. “Well, look.”

“It’s okay. I give you my word; whatever it is, later’s good enough.” I breathe in washed sweetness from her warm hair.

“Well, I do have something to tell you.”

“I just don’t want to spoil this afternoon.”

“Maybe it won’t.”

“Do I really have to hear it?”

“I think you should, yes.” She sighs. “You know that clam-handed old sawbones you were talkin’ to at the airport the other day? The one I came up and killed with a look?”

“I don’t want to know about you and Fincher,” I say. “It would count as a terrible part of my day. I command you never to tell me.” I stare at the swarming green sky. A small Cessna mutters across our airspace, seeking, I’m sure, a safe landing in Manahawkin or Ship Bottom, ahead of the storm. It does not seem a bit like Easter now, only another day without safeguards. Though the more normal the April day the better for me. Holidays can hold too many disappointments that I then have to accommodate.

“Look. I hadn’t been with that ole character.”

“Okay. That’s good to hear.”

“It’s your ex. She’s slippin off with him. The only reason I know is that I’ve seen her pick him up at the ER entrance three or four times. She’s got the light brown Citation, right?”

“What?”

“Well,” Vicki says. “If it hadn’t been he kissed her, I would’ve thought it was just innocent. But it idn’t innocent. That’s why I acted so peculiar at the airport. I figured ya’ll was about to fight.”

“Maybe it was somebody else,” I say. “There’s a lot of brown cars. G.M. made millions of them. They’re wonderful cars.”

“G.M.” She shakes her head in a teacherly way. “Not with your wife in ’em, they don’t.”

And for a sudden moment my mind simply ceases — which isn’t even so unusual, and there are times when nothing else will help, Sitting next to Ralph’s bed at the instant the nurse came in and said, “I’m sorry, Ralph has expired” (he was actually cold as an oyster when I touched his small clenched fist, and had been dead probably for an hour), at that moment when I knew he was dead, I remember my mind stopping. No other thought occurred to me immediately. No association or memory latched on to the event, or to the next one, for that matter, whatever it might’ve been. I don’t remember. No lines of poetry. No epiphanies. The room became like a picture of a room, though more greenish and murky for that time of the morning, and then it sank away and became tiny — as though I was having a look at it through the wrong end of a telescope. I have since heard this explained as a protective mechanism of the mind, and that I should be grateful for it. Though I’m certain it was brought on as much by fatigue as the shock of grief.

Nothing now grows smaller because of this unexpected news, though the air around me is tinged a stormy bottle green. The Chinese split-level maintains its ground in full view. Nothing has been thrown for a loop. I simply find myself staring across Arctic Spruce Drive at a chimney painted white, from which a gusty wind is drawing smoke at an angle perfectly perpendicular to the flue. All the draperies are closed. The grass out front is unspeakably green. You could putt on it and expect a good true roll to the cup.

I admit I am surprised; that the picture Vicki would like to paint of X kissing Fincher Barksdale in the front seat of her Citation outside the emergency room — when he is just off the cancer ward, smelling of disease and bodies — is as revulsive as any I could think of on my own. That the next scene, the one she hasn’t painted yet, of wherever the two of them are slying off to for whatever itchy plans they have, clouds up pretty fast — aided by the revulsion. At the same time it’s true I have to fight back a black hole of betrayal — for me and for Fincher’s wife, Dusty, which is totally unwarranted since she might not even care and I hardly know her anymore. This in turn makes me feel a sense of Fincher’s lizard’s depravity, which brings about more disgust.

But a thought I do not think. Nor contrive a mean and explicatory synthesis to formulate my position regarding what I’ve heard.

In other words, I do not exactly respond; except to remember: people will surprise you.

“I guess not,” I say agreeably, and stare off.

Vicki has twisted around to face me, her face above the split horizon of my two knees. She looks concerned, but willing to swap this look for a happy one. “So what’re you thinkin?”

“Nothing.” I smile, revulsion faded in me, leaving me only a little weak. I am glad I don’t have to stand up. The simple words “You cannot” come to mind, but I don’t have a finish for the phrase. “You cannot … what?” Dance? Fly? Sing an aria? Control the lives of others? Be happy all the time? “Why is it so important to tell me that just now?” I ask in a sudden but friendly way.

“Well, I just hate secrets. And I had this one with me a while. And if I waited any longer you might get to feeling so good that maybe I couldn’t tell you at all or it’d ruin your whole day. I coulda told you in Detroit, but that would’ve been awful.” She nods at me soberly, chin out, as if she couldn’t agree more with what she’s just heard herself say. “This way, you got time to get over it.”

“I appreciate your thinking about me,” I say, though I’m sorry she is such a spendthrift of secrets.

“You’re my ole pardner, aren’t you?” She gives me a pat on my knees and the grin she’s wanted to give me all along. It’s nice to see, in spite of everything.

“What am I again?”

“My ole pardner. That’s what I use to call Daddy when I was a little bitty thing.” She bats her eyes at me.

“I’m more than that, at least I used to be. I still want to be, anyway.” And I have to staunch a terrible tear that fills my eye like a freshet.

In some of the heart’s business there is really no net gain. Let someone who knows tell you.

“Why, you bet,” Vicki says. “But cain’t we be friends, too? I’m gon always want to be your pardner.” She plants a big fishy kiss upon my cold cheek. And up above me the sky swirls and tears apart, and on my face I feel the first serious drop of storm that’s all along been waiting for its time.

Wade Arcenault is a cheery, round-eyed, crewcut fellow with a plainsman’s square face and hearty laugh. I instantly recognize him from Exit 9, where he has taken my money hundreds of times but doesn’t recognize me now. He is not a large man, hardly taller than Lynette, though his forearms, exposed and khaki sleeves up for washing at the sink, are ropy and tanned. He gives my hand a good wet shake right where he’s washing. With a sly-secret smile he tells me he’s been “down in his devil’s dungeon” rewiring a Sunbeam fry-pan for Lynette to use to make Dutch Babies — her favorite Easter dessert. The pan sits splendidly fixed now on the counter top.

He is not at all what I expected. I had envisioned a wiry, squint-eyed little pissant — a gun store owner type, with fading flagrant tattoos of women on emaciated biceps, a man with a cruel streak for Negroes. But that is the man of bad stereotype, the kind my writing career foundered over and probably should have. The world is a more engaging and less dramatic place than writers ever give it credit for being. And for a moment Wade and I do nothing more than stand and stare at the fry-pan’s drastic utilitarian lines like deaf-mutes, unable to get a better subject out in the open.

“So now how was the trip down, Frank?” Wade says with brusque heartiness. There is a frontier tautness in his character that makes him instantly trustworthy and appealing, a man with his priorities straight and a permanent twinkle in his eye that says he expects someone — me, maybe — to tell him something that will make him extremely happy. Nothing, in fact, would please me more.

“I came down through Pemberton and Bamber, Wade. It’s one of my favorite drives. I’d like to take a canoe in the Rancocas one of these days. Parts of Africa must be a lot like that.”

“Isn’t it something, Frank?” Wade Arcenault’s eyes ramble around in their sockets, seeking what, I don’t know. Strange to say, Wade has no more of a Texas accent than Cade. “This is our little Garden of Eden down here, and we want to keep it so the outsiders don’t ruin it for us, which is why I don’t mind driving fifty miles to work. Though I guess I shouldn’t be closing the drawbridge.” His clear eyes sparkle with admission. “We’re all from someplace else these days, Frank. People who were born right here don’t even recognize it anymore. I’ve talked to them.”

“But I bet they like it. This peninsula is a good idea.”

“There’s just the ri-niest little erosion problem out back,” Wade says, finishing drying his hands with a dish towel. “But we’ve got our builder, this smart young Rutger’s grad, Pete Calcagno.” (A name I know!) “He’s done his share with his backhoe and sandbags, and he’ll get her licked, is what I think.” Wade beams at me. “Most people want to do right, is my concept.”

“I agree.” And I most surely do! It is certainly true of me, and unquestionably true of Wade Arcenault. He, after all, bought his divorced daughter a house full of new furniture, and stood by and let her pick out every stick, then stepped up and wrote a whopper check so she could get a good start in a new northern environment. A lot of people would like to do that, but not many would follow through all the way.

Wade’s blue eyes cut mischievously toward the basement door. Something I’ve done or said seems to have made him take to me, at least in a preliminary way. “Lynette,” he says loudly, putting his eyes on the ceiling. “Have I got time to take this boy down to my devil’s dungeon?” He gives me a wide wink and looks upwards again. (Maybe we’ll be able to get a fishing trip planned, no matter how things go with Vicki.)

“I doubt if Grant’s army could be expected to stop you, could it?” Lynette smiles in at us through the serving bay to the dining room, shakes her pretty red head, and waves us on.

In through the living room door I spy Vicki and Cade sitting on the salmon couch having what looks like an intimate talk. Cade’s wardrobe and stultifying social life are no doubt under reappraisal.

Wade goes tromping off down the dark basement steps with me right behind. And immediately the heavy kitchen air is exchanged for the cool, chemically pungent odors indigenous to suburban basements where the owner is nobody’s fool and has his termite contract up-to-date. I am one of their number.

“All right now, stay there, Frank,” Wade says, lost in darkness ahead of me, his steps crossing concrete. Behind me Lynette’s plump arm closes the kitchen door.

“Hold your horses, now.” Wherever he is, Wade is enthusiastic.

I hold on to a wood 2×6 bannister, not certain of even one more step. Something, I sense, is large and in front of me.

Wade is fiddling with metal objects, possibly the shade of a utility lamp, a fuse-box door, possibly a box of keys. “Ahh, the Christ,” he mutters.

Suddenly a light flutters on, not a utility lamp but a shimmering white fluorescence in the raftered ceiling. What I see first in the light is not, I think, what I’m supposed to see. I see a big picture of the world photographed from outer space, fastened to the cinderblock wall above Wade’s workbench. In it, all of space is blue and empty, and North America clear as in a dream, from miles away, in perfect outline white against a dark surrounding sea.

“What d’you think, Frank?” Wade says with pride.

My eyes try to find him, but instead find, directly in front of me where I could touch it, a big black car — so close I can’t make out what it is, though it certainly is a car, with plenty of chrome and a glassy black finish. CHRYSLER is lettered above big wide louvered grill work.

“By God, Wade,” I say and find him down the long-fendered side, his hand on the tip of a high rear fin above the red taillight. He’s grinning like a TV salesman who this time has put together something really special, something the little woman will have to like, something anyone in his nut would be proud to own as an investment, since its value can only increase.

It is a big box-safe of a car with fat whitewalls, ballistic bumpers, and an air of postwar styling-with-substance that makes my Malibu only a sad reminder.

“They don’t make these anymore, Frank.” Wade pauses to let these words hold sway. “I restored it myself. Cade helped me some, but he got bored soon as the motor work was over. Bought this off a soapstone Greek in Little Egg, and you should’ve seen it. Brown. Full of holes. Chrome half gone. Just a Swiss cheese, is what it was.” Wade looks at the finish as if it might have murmured. It’s chilly in the basement, and the Chrysler seems as cold and hard as a black diamond. “The roll-pleat inside still needs work,” Wade admits.

“How’d you get it in here?”

Wade grins. He’s been waiting for this one. “One Bilco door, back around there where you can’t see it. The tow truck just slid it down. Cade and I had a ramp rigged out of channel irons. I had to relearn welding. You know anything about arc welding, Frank?”

“Not a damn thing,” I say. “I should, though.” I look at the photo of the earth again. It is a good thing to have, I think, for maintaining a sense of perspective, though in its homely surroundings the globe seems as exotic as a tapestry.

“Not necessary,” Wade says soberly. “The principles are all pretty straightforward. Resistance is the whole thing. You’d pick it up in a minute.” Wade smiles at the thought that I might someday own a marketable skill.

“What’re you going to do with it, Wade?” I say, a question that just came to me.

“I haven’t thought about that,” Wade says.

“Do you ever drive it?”

“Oh, I do. Yes. I start it up and drive it a foot one way and a foot or two back. There isn’t much room down here.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets and leans sideways on the fender, looking up and around at the low rafters into the dark cinder block crawl space. Above us I hear muffled voices, the sound of footsteps squeezing from kitchen to dining room. I hear Cade’s clomping off in another direction, no doubt upstairs to change clothes. I hear Elvis Presley’s paws tick the kitchen floor. Then nothing. Wade and I are silent in the presence of his Chrysler and each other.

This situation could, of course, result in disaster, as many such situations do. A fear of what he may innocently ask me now, or a greater fear that I may have nothing special to say in answer and be left standing here as mute as a rocker panel — these make me wish I were back upstairs seeing the Knicks whip tar out of the Cavaliers, cheek-by-jowl with my old friend Cade. Sports is a first-rate safety valve when you and your whole value system are brought under friendly but unexpected scrutiny.

“Just what kind of fellow are you?” would be a perfectly natural curiosity. “What are your intentions regarding my daughter?” (“I’m not at all sure” would not be much of an answer.) “Who in the world do you think you are?” (I’d be stumped.) Suddenly I feel cold, though Wade doesn’t seem to have any tricks up his sleeve. He is someone with codes I respect and that I would like to like me. All the best signs, in other words, are not so different from all the worst. Wade puts his fingertips to the porcelain-black fender and stares at them. I’m sure if I were closer every feature of me would be spelled out clear as a mirror.

“Frank,” Wade says, “do you like fish?” He looks up at me almost imploringly.

“You bet I do.”

“You do, huh?”

“I sure do.”

Wade peers down at the shiny black surface again. “I was just thinking maybe you and me could go eat at the Red Lobster some night, get away from these women. Really have us a talk. You ever been there?”

“I sure have. Plenty of times.” In fact, when X and I were first divorced, I went practically no place else. All the waitresses got to know me, knew I liked the broiled bluefish not overcooked and went out of their way to cheer me up, which is exactly what they’re paid to do but usually don’t.

“I go just for the haddock,” Wade says. “It’s a meal in itself. I call it the poor man’s lobster.”

“We ought to go. It’d be great.” I slip my cold hands in my jacket pockets. All in all I would still jump at the chance to get back upstairs.

“Frank, where’re your parents?” Wade looks gravely at me.

“They’re both dead, Wade,” I say. “A long time now.”

“Mine, too.” He nods. “Both of ’em gone. We all come from nowhere in the end, right?”

“I guess I don’t really mind that part,” I say.

“Right, right, right, right.” Wade has crossed his arms and backed up against the Chrysler fender. He gives me a right-angles glance, then stares off into the crawl space again. “What brought you to New Jersey? You’re a writer, is that right?”

“It’s a pretty long story, Wade. I was married before. I’ve got two kids up in Haddam. It would take some time to explain all that.” I smile in a way I hope will head him off, though I know Wade probably doesn’t give a damn about it. He’s just trying to be friendly.

“Frank, I like women. How about you?” Wade swivels his crewcut head toward me and grins, a straightforward grin of amusement, founded on the old anticipation of pleasure, the source of eighty percent of all happiness. It is the same to him as liking haddock, though more interesting because it might turn out to be a little dirty.

“I guess I do too, Wade.” And I smile broadly back.

Wade raises his chin in an “I-knew-it” way, and puts his tongue against his cheek. “I’ve never wanted a night out with the boys in my life, Frank. What fun that is, I don’t know,”

“Not much,” I say. And I think of my doleful nights in the “Back in Action” course, and with the Divorced Men, floating higgledy-piggledy on the chilly waters off Mantoloking like an army planning its renewed attack upon the beaches of lived life. I silently pledge never again to be in their number. I am finished with that and them. Life’s ashore, after all (though God love them).

“Now don’t get me wrong, Frank,” Wade says warily, still staring off, as if I was standing somewhere else. “I’m not into your and Vicki’s business. You two’ll just have to fight that out.”

“It gets complicated.”

“You bet it does. It’s hard to know what to want at your age. How old are you, anyway, Frank?”

“Thirty-eight,” I say. “How old are you?”

“Fifty-six. I was forty-nine when my wife died of cancer.”

“That’s young, Wade.”

“We were living in Irving, Texas, then. I was a petroleum engineer for Beutler Oil, worked a mile from a house I owned outright. I had a daughter married. I took my son to Cowboys’ games. We lived what we thought was a good life. And then, bang, we suffered a heckuva terrible loss. Just overnight, it seemed like. Vicki and Cade just were wrecked by it. So you bet I know what complicated is.” He nods toward his own private miseries.

“I know it was a hard time,” I say.

“Divorce must be something like that, Frank. Lynette’s divorced from a pretty decent guy, you know. Her second husband — her first died, too — I’ve met him. He’s a decent guy, though we’re not friends. But they couldn’t make it together. It’s no reflection. She’s had a son killed in Oklahoma, herself.”

Vicki has apparently mentioned Ralph, which is all right with me. He is, after all, part of my permanent public record. His lost life serves to further explain and punctuate mine. Wade, I’m happy to say, is doing his best here to “take me on as an individual,” to speak in his own voice, and let me speak in mine, to be as within himself as it’s possible to be with someone he doesn’t know and could just as easily hate on sight. He could be giving me the third-degree down here, and I’d like to let him know I appreciate it that he isn’t — though I’m not sure how to. By being direct and unambiguous and nothing like what I expected, he has left me nothing to say.

“Wade, what part of Texas did you grow up in?” I say, and grin hopefully.

“I’m from northeast Nebraska, Frank. Oakland, Nebraska.” He scratches the back of his hand, perhaps thinking of wheat fields. “I went to school in Texas, now. Started in 1953 at A&M. Already married. Vicki was on the way, I think. It took me forever to graduate, and I worked in the oil fields all that time. But what I was saying about women, though, was that when my first wife, Esther, died, I was afraid I wouldn’t be interested in women anymore. You know? You can just lose interest in women, Frank. I don’t mean in a lead-in-your-pencil sense. But up here.” Wade looks at me and points a finger right at the middle of his forehead. “You lose touch with you,” he says. “With your own needs. And I did that. Vicki can tell you about it, ’cause she took care of me.” Wade rolls his eyes in a way that is ridiculously outside his character, though I’ve seen Vicki do it plenty of times, and it is entirely possible that he learned it from her. It is a woman’s gesture and makes Wade seem womanly, as if life had taught him some harder lessons than he was man enough to suffer. “I did some crazy, crazy things along in there, Frank,” Wade says and smiles in a self-forgiving way (he is no New-Ager, I can tell you that). “I kidnaped a baby out of a shopping mall. Now is that crazy?” Wade looks at me in amazement. “A little colored baby girl. I can’t even tell you why now. At the time I would’ve said it was reaching out for commitment, I guess. Crying in the wilderness. I’d have been doing my crying on death row if they’d caught me, I can tell you that. And I damn well would’ve deserved it.” Wade nods solemnly into the shadows as if all his darkest motives were imprisoned there now and could not reach him anymore.

“That’s a helluva thing to do, Wade. What’d you do about it?”

“It was one hell of a pickle, Frank. Fortunately I returned that little baby to its stroller. But I’d already had it in the car with me. God knows what I would’ve done with it. That’s when you hit the twilight zone.”

“Maybe you didn’t want to do it. That you didn’t follow up on that is a pretty good argument, if you ask me.”

“I know that theory all right, Frank. But I’ll tell you what happened. I bumped into this Aggie classmate, Buck Larsen. It was at a reunion in College Station. We hadn’t seen each other in probably twenty-six years. And it so happens he was with the Turnpike Authority. And we just started jabbering like you do. I told him that Esther had died, on and on, kids, women, tears, and that I had to get out of Dallas. I didn’t even know it myself, you understand? You know how that is. You’re the writer.”

“Pretty well, I guess.” (At least he and Buck didn’t go to a motel.)

“It’s pretty hard to tell where your intentions lie exactly, isn’t it?” Wade offers me a pitiful smile.

“It’s a lot easier in books. I know that.”

“Damn right it is. We read some books at A&M. Not that many, I guess.” Now we can both grin together. “Where’d you attend, Frank?”

“Michigan.”

“East Lansing, right?”

“Ann Arbor.”

“Well. You read more books there than I did at College Station, I know that.”

“Just looking at everything around here now, it looks like you made the right choices, Wade.”

“Frank, I guess so.” With his toe Wade pokes at a scuff of dry concrete on the floor. He pressures it until it’s clear it won’t budge, then he shakes his head. “Your life can change a hundred ways, I’ll tell you that.”

“I know it, Wade.”

“I took a job with the Turnpike Authority. I left Cade with Esther’s folks in Irving and came up and lived a bachelor’s life for a year. As far away from my other life as I could get. I went from being an engineer in Texas to being a toll-taker in New Jersey in a week’s time. With help of course. It was a step down. With a big cut in pay. But I didn’t care because I was a total wreck, Frank. You don’t think you’re a total wreck, but you are, and I had to start over again, get taken up by a new place, as crazy a place as this is, it didn’t matter. I’m a problem-solver by nature, Frank. Engineers always are. And this was my problem. If you ask me, Americans are too sensitive to moving down in rank. It isn’t so bad.”

“It doesn’t sound easy though. It makes my problems seem pretty small in comparison.”

“I can’t tell you if it was easy or not.” His forehead ravels as if he wished he could, would like to be able to talk about that too, only it is lost to him now — a mercy. “You know, son. There’s a fellow works for us up at Exit 9. I won’t say his name. Except in 1959, he was living out west near Yellowstone. Had a wife and three children, a house and a mortgage. A job, a life. One night he’d been to a bar and was on his way home. And just after he left, a whole side of a mountain collapsed down on the bar. He stopped in the middle of the highway, he told me, and he could see back in the moonlight to where a lot of lights had been that were all gone because this huge landslide had taken place. Killed everybody but him. And do you know what he did?” Wade raises his eyebrows and squints, both at the same time.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea.” (Who in a modern world wouldn’t?)

“Well, and you’d be right. He got in his car and drove east. He said he felt like somebody’d just said, ‘Here, Nick, here’s your whole life being handed to you again. See if you can’t do better this time.’ And he’s reported dead right now out in Idaho or Wyoming, or one of those states. Insurance paid. Who knows where his family is? His kids? And he works right beside me on the Turnpike, happy as a man can be. I’d never tell it, of course. And I’m a lot luckier than he is. We both just had new lives served to us, and a conviction to do something with them.” Wade looks at me seriously, rubs his palms delicately on the chrome door handle beside him. He wants me to know that he’s discovered something important late in life, something worth knowing when very few people ever discover any thing by just living. He’d like to pass some wisdom along from the for-what-it’s-worth department, though I can’t help wondering what his friend’s wife would think if she ever came through Exit 9 at just the right moment. It could happen. “Do you want to get married again, Frank?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s a good answer,” Wade says. “I didn’t think I did. Living alone didn’t seem so bad after being married for twenty-nine years. What do you think?”

“It has its plusses, Wade. Did you meet Lynette up here?”

“I met her at a rock concert, and don’t ask me what I was doing there because I couldn’t tell you. This was in Atlantic City, three years ago. I’m not a joiner, and if you’re not a joiner you can end up in some pretty strange places proving to yourself how independent you are.”

“I usually end up staying home reading. Though I get in my car sometimes and drive all day, too. It sounds like what you’re talking about.”

“That’s not so good, doesn’t sound to me like.”

“It isn’t always, no.”

“Well, anyway. Here was ole Lynette. She’s about your age, Frank. Been widowed, divorced, and came to this concert with a Spanish guy who was about twenty-five. And he had just up and disappeared on her. I won’t tell you all the gory details. But we ended up out at the Howard Johnson’s on the freeway drinking coffee and talking the truth to each other till four in the morning. It turns out we both had a yearning to do something useful and positive with what time we had left to us, and neither one of us was much of a perfectionist, by which I mean we both knew we weren’t exactly perfect for each other.” Wade folds his arms and looks stern.

“How long before you got married, Wade? Not that long, I’ll bet.” I direct a sly grin at Wade because a big sly grin needs to come on his face at the thought of that starry night on the smoggy Atlantic City Expressway, and I’m glad to help him out. It must’ve seemed to them that they had beached together on a blasted, deserted shingle, and were damned lucky to be there. It is not a bad story, and worth a hundred grins.

“Not that long, Frank,” Wade says proudly, cracking the very grin needed to get into the spirit of that old charmed time again. “Her divorce was settled, and we didn’t see any use waiting. She’s a Catholic, after all. A divorce was bad enough. And she didn’t want us to be living together, which would’ve been fine with me. Only in a month I was married, and had this house! Boy!” Wade smiles and shakes his head at the remarkable singularity of unplanned life.

“You struck it rich, I’d say.”

“Well, Lynette and I are opposites of a sort. She’s pretty definite about things. And I’m a lot less definite, nowadays anyway. She takes being a Catholic pretty seriously — more so since her son got killed. And I kinda let her have her way there. I joined just for her sake, but we don’t hold mass here, Frank. I’d say we were just alike in the one thing that counts — we’re not rich people, and I’m not sure we really love each other or need to, but we want to be a good force in a small world and give a good accounting in the time that’s left.” Wade looks at me on the steps as if I were going to judge him, and he was hoping I’d come down and give him a big crack on the shoulders like a linebacker. I’m sure he has told me all this — a subject we might’ve gotten into in greater depth at the Red Lobster, and where I might’ve done more of the talking — because he wants to give me a fair sense of what the family is here, just in case I was weighing joining up. And it’s true that the Arcenaults are a world apart from what I expected. Only better. Wade couldn’t recommend himself or his tidy life to me in sweeter, more agreeable terms. What better prospects than to hitch up here. Forge a commitment in Sherri-Lyn Woods (odd weekends and holidays). I might eventually make friends with Cade, write him a subtle letter of recommendation to a good junior college; get him interested in marketing techniques instead of police work and guns. I might buy my own Whaler and dock it behind the house. It could be a damn good ordinary life, that’s for sure.

Though for some reason I am nervous and embarrassed. My hands are still cold and stiff, and I stuff them inside my pants pockets and stare at Wade blank as a tomb door. That I withhold at just this moment is a major failing in my character.

“Frank,” Wade says, sharp-eyed and studious now. “I want to hear from you on this. Do you think it’s too little to do with your life? Just collect tolls, raise a family, work on an old car like this, go out on the ocean with your son and fish for fluke? Maybe love your wife?”

I cannot answer fast enough, all reluctance aside. “No,” I almost shout. “Not a bit. I think it’s goddamn great, Wade, and you’re a damn lucky son of a bitch to get it.” (I’m shocked to hear myself call Wade a son of a bitch.)

“There’s more romance, I’d guess, in what you do, though, Frank. I don’t see a lot of the world where I stand, though I’ve already seen plenty of it.”

“Our lives are probably a lot more alike than you’d think, Wade. If you don’t mind my saying so, yours might even be better.”

“There are a lot of things went into an old car like this, if you get my meaning.” Wade smiles proudly now, happy for my vote of approval. “Little touches I can’t put into words. I’ll come down here at four in the morning sometimes and tinker till daylight. And I have it to look forward to when I drive home. And I’ll tell you this, son. Any day I come up upstairs, I’m happy as a lark, and my devils are in their dungeon.”

“That’s great, Wade.”

“And it’s every bit of it completely knowable, son. Wires and bolts. I could show you everything, though I can’t tell you. You could sure do it yourself.” He looks at me and shakes his head in amazement. Wade is not a full-disclosure kind of man, no matter how it might seem. And in this case, I know exactly what he’s discovered, know the worth and pleasure it can be to anyone. Though for some strange reason, as I look down at Wade looking up at me, what I think of is Wade alone, walking down a long empty hospital corridor, holding a single suitcase, stopping at a numberless door and peeking in on a neat, empty room where the bed is turned down and harsh sunlight comes through a window, and things inside are clean as they can be. Tests are what he’s here for. Many, many of them. And once he’s walked in the room he will never be the same. This is the beginning of the end, and frankly it scares me witless and gives me a terrible shudder. I would like to hug him now, tell him to stay out of hospitals, meet the reaper at home. But I can’t. He would get the wrong idea and everything between us would be ruined just when it’s started so well.

Above us, in the fitful activity of the house, someone has begun to play the bass intro to “What’d I Say” on the electric organ, the four low minor-note sex-and-anticipation vamp before ole Ray starts his moan. The hum sinks through the rafters and fills the basement with an unavoidable new atmosphere. Despair.

Wade glances at the ceiling, happy as a man could have any right to be. It is as if he knew this very thing would happen and hears it as a signal that his house is in superb working order and ready for him to find his place in it once again. He is a man completely without a subtext, a literalist of the first order.

“I feel, Frank, like I’ve seen your face before. It’s familiar to me. Isn’t that strange?”

“You must see a lot of faces, Wade, wouldn’t you guess?”

“Everybody in New Jersey’s at least once.” Wade flashes the patented toll-taker’s grin. “But I don’t remember many. Yours is just a face I remember. I thought it the moment I saw you.”

I can’t bear to tell Wade that he has taken my $1.05 four hundred times, smiled and told me to have myself “a super day,” as I whirled off into the rough scrimmage of Route 1-South. That would be too ordinary an answer for his special kind of question, and for this charged moment. Wade is after mystery here, and I am not about to deny him. It would be as if Mr. Smallwood from Detroit had turned out to be a former grease jockey at Frenchy Montreux’s Gulf, who had changed my oil and given me lubes, only I hadn’t noticed, but suddenly did and pointed it out: mystery, first winded, then ruined by fact. I would rather stay on the side of good omens, be part of the inexplicable, an unexpected bellwether for whatever is ahead. Discretion, oddly enough, is the best response for a man of stalled responses.

Behind me the kitchen door opens, and I turn to see Lynette’s cute cheerleader’s face peering down at both of us, looking amused — a palpable relief, though I read in her look that this whole man-talk-below-decks business has been scheduled in advance and that she’s been minding the kitchen clock for a prearranged moment to call us topside. I’m the lucky subject (but not the victim) of other people’s scheming, and that is never bad. It is, in fact, a cozy feeling, even if it can be put to no good use.

The brooding, churchy Ray Charles chords come down louder now. This is Vicki’s work. “You men can talk old cars all day if you want to, but there’s folks ready to sit down.” Lynette’s eyes twinkle with impatient good humor. She can tell everything’s A-Okay down here. And she’s right. If we are not great friends, we soon will be.

“How ’bout let’s eat a piece of dead sheep, Frank?” Wade laughs, giving his belly a rub. “Agnus dei,” he chortles up toward Lynette.

“That is not what it is,” Lynette says, and rolls her eyes in the (I see now) Arcenault manner. “What’ll he say next, Frank? Agnus Dei is what you are, Wade, not what we’re eatin. Heavens.”

“I’m sure too tough to chew, Frank, I’ll tell you that right now. Haw.” And up out of the shadowy basement we come — all hands on deck — into the warm and sunlit kitchen, the whole Arcenault crew arrived and ready for ritual Sunday grub.

Dinner is a more ceremonial business than I would’ve guessed. Lynette has transformed her dining room into a hot little jewel box, crystal-candle chandelier, best silver and linens laid. The instant we’re seated she has us all join hands around the obloid so that I end up uneasily grabbing both Wade’s and Cade’s (no resistance from Cade) while Vicki holds Wade’s and Lynette’s. And I can’t help thinking — eyes stitched shut, peering soundlessly down into the familiar death-ball of liquid crimson flame behind which waits an infinity of black soul’s abyss from which nothing but Wade and Cade’s cumbersome hands can keep me from tumbling — what strange, good luck to be reckoned among these people like a relative welcome from Peoria. Though I can’t keep from wondering where my own children are at this moment, and where X is — my hope being that they are not sharing a fatherless, prix fixe Easter brunch at some deserted seaside Ramada in Asbury Park with Barksdale, back on the sneak from Memphis, taking my place. That news I could’ve passed a happy day without, though we can never stop what comes to us by right. I am overdue, in fact, for a comeuppance, and lucky not to be spending the day cruising some mall for an Easter takeout — the way poor Walter Luckett no doubt is, lost in the savage wilderness of civil life.

Lynette’s blessing is amiably brief and upbeat-ecumenical in its particulars — I assume for my benefit — taking into account the day and the troubled world we live in but leaving out Vatican II and any saintly references unquestionably on her mind — where they count — and winding up with a mention of her son, Beany, in a soldier’s grave at Fort Dix but present in everyone’s mind, including mine. (Molten flames, in fact, give way at the end to reveal Beany’s knifey mug leering at me out from oblivion’s sanctum.)

Wade and Cade have both put on garish flower ties and sports jackets, and look like vaudevillians. Vicki gives double cross-eyes at me when I smile at her and attempt to act comfortable among the family. Talk is of the weather as we dig into the lamb, then a brief pass into state politics; then Cade’s chances of an early call-up at the police academy and speculation about whether uniforms will be assigned the first morning, or if more tests will need to be passed, which Cade seems to view as a grim possibility. He leads a discussion on the effect of driving fifty-five, noting that it’s all right for everybody else but not him. Then Lynette’s work on the Catholic crisis-line, then Vicki’s work at the hospital, which everyone agrees is both as difficult and rewarding a service to mankind as can be — more, by implication, than Lynette’s. No one mentions our weekend in the faraway Motor City, though I have the feeling Lynette is trying to find a place for the word Detroit in practically every sentence, to let us all know she wasn’t born yesterday and isn’t making a stink since Vicki, like all other divorced gals, can take care of her own beeswax.

Cade cracks a baiting smile and asks me who I like in the AL East, to which I answer Boston (my least favorite team). I, of course, am behind Detroit all the way, and know in fact that certain crucial trades and a new pitching coach will make them virtually unstoppable come September.

“Boston. Hnuhn.” Cade leers into his plate. “Never see it.”

“Wait and see,” I say with absolute assuredness. “There’re a hundred and sixty-two games. They could make one smart trade by the deadline and pretty much have it their way.”

“It’d have to be for Ty Cobb.” Cade guffaws and eyes his father slavishly, his mouth full of a dinner roll.

I laugh the loudest while Vicki crosses her eyes again, since she knows I’ve led Cade to the joke like a trained donkey.

Lynette smiles attentively and maneuvers her lamb hunk, English peas and mint jelly all nearer one another on her plate. She is an understanding listener, but she is a straightforward questioner too, someone who wouldn’t let you off easy if you called up the crisis-line with a silly crisis. It seems she has me fixed in her mind. “Now were you in the service, Frank?” she says pleasantly.

“The Marines, but I got sick and was discharged.”

Lynette’s face portrays real concern. “What happened?”

“I had a blood syndrome that made a doctor think I was dying of cancer. I wasn’t, but nobody figured it out for a while.”

“You were lucky, then, weren’t you?” Lynette is thinking of poor dead Beany again, cold in the Catholic section of the Fort Dix cemetery. Life is never fair.

“I was headed over in six more months, so I guess so. Yes ma’am.”

“You don’t have to ma’am me, Frank,” Lynette says and bats her eyes all around. She smiles dreamily down the table at Wade, who smiles back at her in his best old southern gent manner. “My former husband was in Vietnam in the Coast Guard,” Lynette says. “Not many knew the Guard was even there. But I have letters postmarked the Mekong Delta and Saigon.”

“Where’ve you got ’em hid?” Vicki smirks at everyone.

“Past is past, sweetheart. I threw them out when I met that man right there.” Lynette nods and smiles at Wade. “We don’t need to pretend, do we. Everybody’s been married here except Cade.”

Cade blinks his dark eyes like a puzzled bull.

“Those guys saw some real tough action,” Wade says. “Stan told me, Lynette’s ex-husband, that he probably killed two hundred people he never saw, just riding along shooting the jungle day after day, night after night.” Wade shakes his head.

“That’s really something,” I say.

“Right,” Cade grunts sarcastically.

“Are you sorry not to have seen real action,” Lynette says, turning to me.

“He sees enough,” Vicki says and smirks again. “That’s my department.”

Lynette smiles dimly at her. “Be nice, sweetheart. Try to be, anyway.”

“I’m perfect,” Vicki says. “Don’t I look perfect?”

“I’d have some more of that lamb,” I say. “Cade, can I pass some your way?” Cade gives me a devious look as I catch a slab of gray lamb and pass him the platter. For some reason, my mind cannot come up with a good sports topic, though it’s trying like a computer. All I can think is facts. Batting averages. Dates. Seating capacities. Third-down ratios of last year’s Super Bowl opponents (though I can’t remember which teams actually played). Sometimes sports are no help.

“Frank, I’d be interested to hear you out on this one,” Wade says, swallowing a big wedge of lamb. “Just in your journalist’s opinion, are we, would you say, in a prewar or a postwar situation in this country right now?” Wade shakes his head in earnest dismay. “I guess I get sour about things sometimes. I wish I didn’t.”

“I haven’t paid much attention to politics the last few years, to tell the truth, Wade. My opinion never seemed worth much.”

“I hope there’s a world war before I’m too old to be in it. That’s all I know,” Cade says.

“That’s what Beany thought, Cade.” Lynette frowns at Cade.

“Well,” he says to his plate after a moment’s numbed silence.

“Now seriously, Frank,” Wade says. “How can you stay isolated from events on a grand scale, is my question.” Wade isn’t badgering me. It is just the earnest way of his mind.

“I write sports, Wade. If I can write a piece for the magazine on, say, what’s happening to the team concept here in America, and do a good job there, I feel pretty good about things. Pretty patriotic, like I’m not isolating myself.”

“That makes sense.” Wade nods at me thoughtfully. He is leaning on his elbows, over his plate, hands clasped. “I can buy that.”

“What has happened to the team concept,” Lynette asks, and looks at everyone by turns. “I’m not sure I know even what that is.”

“That’s pretty complicated,” Wade says, “wouldn’t you say so, Frank?”

“If you talk to athletes and coaches the way I do, that’s all you hear, from the pros especially. Baseball, football. The line is, everybody has a role to play, and if anybody isn’t willing to play his role, then he doesn’t fit into the team’s plans.”

“It sounds all right to me, Frank,” Lynette says.

“It’s all a crocka shit’s what it is.” Cade scowls miserably at his own two hands, which are on the table. “They’re just all assholes. They wouldn’t know a team if it bit ’em on the ass. They’re all prima donnas. Half of ’em are queers, too.”

“That’s certainly intelligent, Cade,” Vicki says. “Thanks very much for your brilliant comment. Why don’t you tell us some more of your philosophies.”

“That wasn’t too nice, Cade,” Lynette says. “Frank had the floor then.”

“Ppptttt,” Cade gives a Bronx cheer and rolls his eyes.

“Is that some new language you learned working on boats?” Vicki says.

“Okay, seriously, Frank.” Wade is still leaning up on his elbows like a jurist. He’s hit a subject with some meat on its bones, and he’s ready to saw right in. “I think Lynette’s got a pretty valid point in what she says here.” (Forgetting for the moment Cade’s opinion.) “I mean, what’s the matter with following your assignment on the team? When I was working oil rigs, that’s exactly how we did it. And I’ll tell you, too, it worked.”

“Well, maybe it’s too small a point. Only the way these guys use team concept is too much like a machine to me, Wade. Too much like one of those oil wells. It leaves out the player’s part — to play or not play; to play well or not so well. To give his all. What all these guys mean by team concept is just cogs in the machine. It forgets a guy has to decide to do it again every day, and that men don’t work like machines. I don’t think that’s a crazy point, Wade. It’s just the nineteenth-century idea — dynamos and all that baloney — and I don’t much like it.”

“But in the end, the result’s the same, isn’t it?” Wade says seriously. “Our team wins.” He blinks hard at me.

“If everybody decides that’s what they want, it is. If they can perform well enough and long enough. It’s just the if I’m concerned about, Wade. I worry about the decide part, too, I guess. We take too much for granted. What if I just don’t want to win that bad, or can’t?”

“Then you shouldn’t be on the team.” Wade seems utterly puzzled (and I can’t blame him). “Maybe we agree and I don’t know it, Frank?”

“It’s all niggers with big salaries shootin dope, if you ask me,” Cade says. “I think if everybody carried a gun, everything’d work a lot better.”

“Oh, Christ.” Vicki throws down her napkin and stares away into the living room.

“Who’s he?” Cade gapes.

“You can just be excused, Cade Arcenault,” Lynette says crisply, with utter certainty. “You can leave and live with the other cavemen. Tell Cade, Wade. He can leave the table.”

“Cade.” Wade beams an unmistakable look of unmentionable violence Cade’s way. “Put the lock on that, mister.” But Cade cannot stop smirking and lurks back in his chair like a criminal, folding his big arms and balling his fists in hatred. Wade balls his own fists and butts them together softly in front of him, while his eyes return to a point two inches out onto the white field of linen tablecloth. He is cogitating about teams still, about what makes one and what doesn’t. I could jawbone about this till it’s time to start home again, though I admit the whole subject has begun to make me vaguely uneasy.

“What you’re telling me then, Frank, and I may have this all bum-fuzzled up. But it seems to me you’re saying this idea—” Wade arches his eyebrows and smiles up at me in a beatific way “—leaves out our human element. Am I right?”

“That says it well, Wade.” I nod in complete agreement. Wade has got this in terms he likes now (and a pretty versatile sports cliché at that). And I am pleased as a good son to go along with him. “A team is really intriguing to me, Wade. It’s an event, not a thing. It’s time but not a watch. You can’t reduce it to mechanics and roles.”

Wade nods, holding his chin between his thumbs and index fingers. “All right, all right, I guess I understand.”

“The way the guys are talking about it now, Wade, leaves out the whole idea of the hero, something I’m personally not willing to give up on yet. Ty Cobb wouldn’t have been a role-player.” I give Cade a hopeful look, but his eyes are drowsy and suffused with loathing. My knee begins to twitch under the table.

“I’m not either,” Lynette says, her eyes alarmed.

“It also leaves out why the greatest players, Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth, sometimes don’t perform as greatly as they should. And why the best teams lose, and teams that shouldn’t win, do. That’s team play of another kind, I think, Wade. It’s not role-playing and machines like a lot of these guy s’ll tell you.”

“I think I understand, Wade,” Lynette says, nodding. “He’s saying athletes and all these sports people are just not too smart.”

“I guess it’s giving a good accounting, sweetheart, is what it comes down to,” Wade says somberly. “Sometimes it’ll be enough. Some times it isn’t going to be.” He purses his lips and stares at my idea like a crystal vase suspended in his mind’s rare ether.

I stare at my own plateful of second helping I haven’t touched and won’t, the pallid lamb congealed and hard as a wood chip, and the untouched peas and brocoli flower alongside it cold as Christmas. “When I can make that point in one of our Our Editors Think’ columns, Wade, that half a million people’ll read, then I figure I’ve addressed the big picture. What you said: events on a grand scale. I don’t know what else I really can do after that.”

“That’s everything in life right there, is my belief,” Lynette says, though she’s thinking of another subject, and her bright green eyes scout the table for anyone who hasn’t finished his or hers yet.

In the kitchen an electric coffeemaker clicks, then spurts, then sighs like an iron lung, and I get an unexpected whiff of Cade who smells of lube jobs and postadolescent fury. He cannot help himself here. His short life — Dallas to Barnegat Pines — has not been especially wonderful up to now, and he knows it. Though to my small regret, there’s nothing on God’s green earth I can do to make it better for him. My future letter-of-recommendation and fishing excursions with just the three men cut no ice with him. Perhaps one day he will stop me for speeding, and we can have the talk we can’t have now, see eye-to-eye on crucial issues — patriotism and the final rankings in the American League East, subjects that would bring us to blows in a second this afternoon. Life will work out better for Cade once he buttons on a uniform and gets comfortable in his black-and-white machine. He is an enforcer, natural born, and it’s possible he has a good heart. If there are better things in the world to be, there are worse, too. Far worse.

Vicki is staring down at her full plate, but glances up once out the tops of her eyes and gives me a disheartened sour-mouth of disgust. There is trouble, as I’ve suspected, on the horizon. I have talked too much to suit her and, worse, said the wrong things. And worse yet, jabbered on like a drunk old uncle in a voice she’s never heard, a secular Norman Vincent Pealeish tone I use for the speaker’s bureau and that even makes me squeamish sometimes when I hear it on tape. This may have amounted to a betrayal, a devalued intimacy, an illusion torn, causing doubt to bloom into dislike. Our own talk is always of the jokey-quippy-irony style and lets us leap happily over “certain things” to other “certain things”—cozy intimacy, sex and rapture, ours in a heartbeat. But now I may have stepped out of what she thinks she knows and feels safe about, and become some Gildersleeve she doesn’t know, yet instinctively distrusts. There is no betrayal like voice betrayal, I can tell you that. Women hate it. Sometimes X would hear me say something — something as innocent as saying “Wis-sconsin” when I usually said “Wisconsin”—and turn hawk-eyed with suspicion, wander around the house for twenty minutes in a brown brood. “Something you said didn’t sound like you,” she’d say after a while. “I can’t remember what it was, but it wasn’t the way you talk.” I, of course, would be stumped for what to answer, other than to say that if I said it, it must be me.

Though I should know it’s a bad idea to accompany anyone but yourself home for the holidays. Holidays with strangers never turn out right, except in remote train stations, Vermont ski lodges or the Bahamas.

“Who’ll have coffee?” Lynette says brightly. “I’ve got decaf.” She is clearing dishes smartly.

“Knicks,” Cade mutters, pounding to his feet and slumping off.

“Nix to you too, Cade,” Lynette says, pushing through the kitchen door, arms laden. She turns to frown, then cuts her eyes at Wade who is sitting with a pleasant, distracted look on his square face, palms flat on the tablecloth thinking about team concept and the grand scale of things. She widely mouths words to the effect of getting a point across to this Cade Arcenault outfit, or there’ll be hell to pay, then vanishes out the door, letting back in a new scent of strong coffee.

Wade is galvanized, and gives Vicki and me a put-on smile, rising from the head of the table, looking small and uncomfortable in the loose-fitting sports jacket and ugly tie — unquestionably a joke present from the family or the men at the toll plaza. He has worn it as a token of good spirits, but they have temporarily abandoned him. “I guess I’ve got a couple things to do,” he says miserably.

“Don’t you rough up on that boy now,” Vicki threatens in a whisper. Her eyes are savage slits. “Life ain’t peaches-and-milk for him either.”

Wade looks at me and smiles helplessly, and once again I imagine him peeping into an empty hospital room from which he’ll never return.

“Cade’s fine, sister,” he says with a smile, then wanders off to find Cade, already deep in some squarish room of his down a hallway on another level.

“It’ll be all right,” I say, soft and sober-voiced now, meant to start me back on the road to intimacy. “There’s just too many new people in Cade’s life. I wouldn’t be any good at it either.” I smile and nod in one fell motion.

Vicki raises an eyebrow — I am a strange man with inexpert opinions concerning her family life, something she needs like a new navel. She turns a dinner spoon over and over in her fingers like a rosary. The boat collar of her pink jersey has slid a fraction off-center exposing a patch of starkly white brassiere strap. It is inspiring, and I wish this were the important business we were up to instead of old dismal-serious — though I have only myself to blame. Sic transit gloria mundi. When is that ever not true?

“Your father’s a great guy,” I say, my voice becoming softer with each word. I should be silent, portray a different fellow entirely, affect some hidden antagonism of my own to balance hers. Only I’m simply not able to. “He reminds me of a great athlete. I’m sure he’ll never have a nervous breakdown.”

Lynette clatters dessert plates and coffee cups in the kitchen. She’s listening to us, and Vicki knows it. Anything said now will be for a wider consumption.

“Daddy and Cade oughta be living here by theirselves,” Vicki says scornfully. “He oughtn’t to be hooked up with this ole gal. They oughta be both big bachelors havin the time of their lives.”

“He seems pretty happy to me.”

“Don’t start on me ’bout my own daddy, if you please. I know you well enough, don’t I? I ought to know him!” Her eyes grow sparkly with dislike. “What’s all that guff you were spewin about. Patriotism. Team concept. You sounded like a preacher. I just about mortified.”

“They’re things I believe in. More people could stand to think that way, if you ask me.”

“Well, you oughta believe them to yourself quietly then. I can’t take this.”

At this moment, Elvis Presley comes to the living room door and stares up at me. He’s heard something he doesn’t like and intends to find out if I’m responsible. “I don’t even like men,” Vicki says, staring belligerently at her spoon. “Ya’ll don’t make yourselves happy ten minutes at a time. You and Everett both. Y’act like tormented dogs. Plus, you bring it all on yourselves.”

“I think it’s you that’s unhappy.”

“Yeah? But it’s really you, though, idn’t it? You hate everything.”

“I’m pretty happy.” I put on a big smile, though it’s true I am heartsick. “You make me happy. I know that. You can count on that.”

“Oh boy. Here we go. I shouldn’t of told you about your ex and whatever his name is. You been Serious Sam ever since.”

“I’m not Serious Sam. I don’t even care about that.”

“Shoot. You should’ve seen your face when I told you.”

“Look at it now, though.” My grin is ear-to-ear, though it is impossible to argue in behalf of your own good spirits without defeating them completely and getting mad as hell. Elvis Presley has seen enough and goes back behind the couch. “Why don’t we just get married?” I say. “Isn’t that a good idea?”

“Because I don’t love you enough, that’s why.” She looks away. More dishes clatter in the kitchen. Cups settle noisily into saucers. Far away, in a room I know nothing of, a phone rings softly.

“Now that’s the phone,” I hear Lynette say to no one in particular, and the ringing stops.

“Yes you do,” I say brightly. “That’s just a bunch of hooey. I’ll get right down on my knees right now.” I get onto my knees and walk on them all the way around the table to where she sits, thighs crossed regally and entombed in taut panty hose. “A man’s on his knees to plead and beg with you to marry him. He’d be faithful, and take out the garbage and do dishes and cook, or at least pay someone to do it. How can you say no?”

“It ain’t gon be hard,” she says giggling, embarrassed at me for yet another reason.

“Frank?”

My name. Unexpected. Called from somewhere in the unexplored cave of the house. Wade’s voice. Probably he and Cade want me up there to watch the end of the Knicks game — once again everything decided in the last twenty seconds. But wild horses couldn’t pull me away from here. This is serious.

“Ho, Wade,” I call out, still on my knees in my pleader’s pose in front of his regal daughter. One more bout of ardent pleading-tickling and we’ll both be laughing, and she’ll be mine. And why shouldn’t she? My always needn’t be forever. I’m ready for the plunge, nervy as a cliff-diver. Though if down the line things go rotten we can both climb the cliffs again. Life is long.

“Phone’s for you,” Wade calls. “You can take it up here in Lynette’s and my room.” Wade sounds sobered and bedeviled, a pitiable presence from the top of the stairs. A door clicks softly shut.

“Who’s that?” Vicki says scratchily, tugging on her pink skirt as if we’d been caught in heavy petting. Her brassiere strap is now exposed completely.

“I don’t know.” Though I have a terrible bone-aching crisis fear that I have forgotten something important and am about to stare disaster in the face. A special assignment I was supposed to write but have somehow completely neglected, everyone up in New York rushing round in emergency moods trying to find me. Or possibly an Easter date I made months ago and have overlooked, though there’s no one I know well enough to ask me. I cannot guess who it is. I plant a quick kiss of promised return on Vicki’s stockinged knee, get to my feet and head off to investigate. “Don’t move,” I say. The kitchen door is just opening as I leave.

Above floors, a dark and short carpeted hall leads to a bathroom at the end where a light is on. Two doors are shut on one side, but on the other, one stands open, a bluish light shining through. Ahead of me I hear a thermostat click and the sound of whooshing air.

I step into Wade and Lynette’s nuptial sanctum where the blue light radiates from a bed lamp. The bed is also blue, a skirted-and-flounced four-poster canopy, king-sized and wide as a peaceful lake. Nothing is an inch out of place. Rugs raked. Vanity sparkling. No underwear or socks piled on the blue Ultrasuede loveseat beside the window overlooking the windy boat channel. The door to the bathroom is discreetly closed. A smell of face powder lingers. The room is perfect as a place where strangers can accept personal phone calls.

The phone is on the bed table, its conscientious little night light glowing dimly.

“Hello,” I say, with no idea what I will hear, and sink expectant into the soft flounced silence.

“Frank?” X’s voice, solemn, reliable, sociable. I am instantly exhilarated to hear her. But there is an undertone I do not comprehend. Something beyond speech, which is why she is the only one who can call me.

I feel a freeze going right to the bottom of my feet. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s all right,” she says. “Everyone’s all right. Everyone’s fine here. Well, everyone’s not, actually. Someone named, let’s see, Walter Luckett is dead, apparently. I guess I don’t know him. He sounds familiar, but I don’t know why. Who is he?”

“What do you mean, he’s dead?” Consolation spurts right back up through me. “I was with him last night. At home. He isn’t dead.”

She sighs into the receiver, and a dumb silence opens on the line. I hear Wade Arcenault’s voice, soft and evocative, speaking to his son across the hall behind a closed door. A television mumbles in the background, a low crowd noise and a ref’s distant whistle. “Now in the best of all possible worlds….” Wade can be heard to say.

“Well,” X says quietly, “the police called here about thirty minutes ago. They think he’s dead. There’s a letter. He left it for you.”

“What do you mean?” I say, and am bewildered. “You sound like he killed himself.”

“He shot himself, the policeman said, with a duck gun.”

“Oh no.”

“His wife’s out of town, evidently.”

“She’s in Bimini with Eddie Pitcock.”

“Hmm,” X says. “Well.”

“Well what?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry to call you. I just listened to your message.”

“Where’re the children?”

“They’re here. They’re worried, but it isn’t your fault. Clary answered the phone when the police called. Are you with what’s-her-face?” (A first-rate Michigan expression of practiced indifference.)

“Vicki.” Vicki Whatsherface.

“Just wondering.”

“Walter came to the house last night and stayed late.”

“Well,” X says, “I’m sorry. Was he a friend of yours, then?”

“I guess so.” Somebody in Cade’s room claps his hands loudly three times in succession, then whistles.

“Are you all right, Frank?”

“I’m shocked.” In fact, I can feel my fingertips turning cold. I lie down backwards on the silky bedspread.

“The police want you to call them.”

“Where was he?”

“Two blocks from here. At 118 Coolidge. I may have even heard the shot. It isn’t that far.”

I stare up through the open canopy into an absolutely blue ceiling. “What am I supposed to do? Did you already say that?”

“Call a Sergeant Benivalle. Are you all right? Would you like me to come meet you someplace?”

Cade lets out a loud, raucous laugh across the hall.

“Isn’t that the goddamn truth!” Wade says in high spirits. “It is the god-damndest thing, I swear.”

“I’d like you to meet me someplace,” I say in a whisper. “I’ll have to call you, though.”

“Where in the world are you?” (This, in her old scolding lover’s style of talk: ‘Where will you turn up next?’ ‘Where in the world have you been?’)

“Barnegat Pines,” I say softly.

“Wherever that is.”

“Can I call you?”

“You can come over here if you want to. Of course.”

“I’ll call soon as I know what to do.” I have no idea why I should be whispering.

“Call the police, all right?”

“All right.”

“I know it’s not a happy call.”

“It’s hard to think about right now. Poor Walter.” In the pale blue ceiling I wish I could see something I recognized. Almost anything would do.

“Call me when you get here, Frank.”

Though of course there is nothing to see above me. “I will,” I say. X hangs up without saying anything, as if “Frank” were the same as saying “Goodbye. I love you.”

I call information for the Haddam police and dial it immediately. As I wait I try to remember if I’ve ever laid eyes on Sergeant Benivalle, though there’s no doubt I have. I’ve seen the whole guinea lot of them at Village Hall. In the normal carryings-on of life they are unavoidable and familiar as luggage.

“Mr. Bascombe,” a voice says carefully. “Is that right?”

“Yes.”

I recognize him straight off — a big chesty, small-eyed detective with terrible acne scars and a flat-top. He is a man with soft thick hands he used, in fact, to take my fingerprints when our house was broken into. I remember their softness from years ago. He is a good guy by my memory, though I know he’d never remember me.

And in fact Sergeant Benivalle might as well be talking to a recording. Death and survivorship have become the equivalents of pianos to a house-mover — big items, but a day’s work that will end.

He explains in a voice void of interest that he would like me to offer positive identification of “the deceased.” No one nearby will, and I reluctantly agree to. Yolanda is unreachable in Bimini, though he seems not to be bothered by it. He says he will have to give me a Thermofax of Walter’s letter, since he needs it to keep “for evidence.” Since Walter left another note for the police, there is no suspicion of foul play. Walter killed himself, he says, by blowing his brains out with a duck gun, and the time of death was about one P.M. (I was playing croquet on the lawn.) He bolted the shotgun, Sergeant Benivalle says, to the top of the television set and rigged a remote controi to release the trigger. The TV was on when people arrived — the Knicks and Cavaliers from Richfield.

“Now, Mr. Bascombe,” the Sergeant says, using his private, off-duty voice. I hear him riffling through papers, blowing smoke into the receiver. He is sitting, I know, at a metal desk, his mind wandering past other crimes, other events of more concern. It is Easter there, too, after all. “Can I ask you something personal?”

“What?”

“Well.” Papers riffle, a metal drawer closes. “Were you and this Mr. Luckett, uh, sorta into it?”

“Do you mean did we have an argument, no.”

“I don’t, uhm, mean an argument. I mean, were you romantically linked. It would help to know that.”

“Why would it help you to know that?”

Sergeant Benivalle sighs, his chair squeaks. He blows smoke into the receiver again. “Just to account for the, uh, event in question here. No big deal. You of course don’t have to answer.”

“No,” I say. “We were just friends. We belonged to a divorced men’s club together. This seems like an intrusion to me.”

“I’m sort of in the intrusion business down here, Mr. Bascombe.” Drawers open and close.

“All right. I just don’t exactly see why that has to be an issue.”

“It’s okay, thanks,” Sergeant Benivalle says wearily (I’m not sure what he means by this either). “If I’m not here, ask for the copy with the watch officer. Tell ’em who you are so you can, ah, identify the deceased. All right?” His voice has suddenly brightened for no reason.

“I’ll do that,” I say irritably.

“Thanks,” Sergeant Benivalle says. “Have a good day.”

I hang up the phone.

Though it is not a good day, nor is it going to be. Easter has turned to rain and bickering and death. There’s no saving it now.

“Whaaaat?” Vicki shouts, all shock and surprise at the death of someone she has never met, her face creased into a look of pain and uninterested disbelief.

“Why, oouu noouu,” Lynette exclaims, making the sign of the cross twice and in a devil’s own hurry, without leaving the kitchen door. “Poor man. Poor man.”

I’ve told them only that a friend of mine is dead and I have to go back right away. Dutch Babies and piping hot coffee sit all around, though Wade and Cade are still upstairs ironing things out.

“Well course you do,” Lynette says sympathetically. “You better go on right now.”

“Dyouwanme to go with you?” For some reason Vicki grins at this idea.

Why do I have the feeling she and Lynette have struck some sympathetic pact while I was on the phone? An understanding that puts a ceiling and a floor to old grievances and excludes me — the family closing ranks suddenly and officially, leaving me in the cold. This is the grim side of the non-nuclear family — its capacity to pile disaster on disaster. (Son of a bitch!) After I leave they’ll stoke the fire, haul out the sheet music and sing favorite oldies — together alone. I am called away at the very worst time, before they realize how much they all really like me and want someone just like me around forever. Preemptive, ill-meant death has intruded. Its gluey odors are spread over me. I can smell them myself.

“No,” I say. “There wouldn’t be anything for you to do anyway. You go on and stay here.”

“Well it’s the God’s truth, idn’t it?” Vicki gets up and comes to stand beside me in the dining room archway, looping her arm encouragingly through mine. “I’ll walk with you out, though.”

“Lynette….” I start to say, but Lynette is already waving a spoon at me from the end of the table.

“Now don’t say a word, Franky Bascombe. Just go see ’bout your friend who needs you.”

“Tell Wade and Cade I’m sorry.” I want more than anything not to leave, to be around another hour to sing “Edelweiss” and doze off in my chair while Vicki files her nails and daydreams.

“About what? What is it’s going on?” Wade has heard commotion and come right down to see what all the trouble is about. He’s at the top of the stairs, half a level above us, leaning over as if he were about to fly.

“Let me explain it all to you later, Dad,” Lynette says, and raises her fingers to her lips.

“You two haven’t had a fuss, have you?” Wade’s look is pure bafflement. “I hope nobody’s mad. Why are you leaving, Frank?”

“His best friend’s dead, that’s all,” Vicki says. “That’s what the phone call was about.” It’s clear she wants me out of here and in a hurry, and intends to be on the phone to the dagger-head in Texas before my key is in the ignition.

Though what have I done that’s so wrong? Can a longed-for life sink below the waves because a tone in my voice wasn’t exactly appreciated? Can affections be frail as that? Mine are heartier.

“Wade, I’m just as sorry as hell about this.” I reach up the short carpeted stairway to shake his hard hand. Bafflement has not altogether left him nor me.

“Me too, son. I hope you’ll come on back here. We’re not going anyplace.”

“He’ll come back,” Lynette chirps. “Vicki’ll see to that.” (Vicki is silent on this subject.)

“Tell Cade goodbye,” I say.

“Will do.” Wade comes down and squares me up with a small earnest hand on my shoulder — half a manly hug. “Come back and we’ll go out fishing.” Wade makes a squeaky, embarrassed laugh, and in fact looks slightly dizzy.

“I’ll do it, Wade.” And God knows I would. Though that will never happen in a hundred moons, and I will never see his face again outside a toll plaza. We will never stalk, hungry as bears, into a Red Lobster, never be friends in the ways I had hoped — ways to last a lifetime.

I wave them all goodbye.

On the front lawn everything including our empty croquet wickets is lost and gray and gone straight to hell. I stand in the fluttering wind and sight down the unpeopled curve of Arctic Spruce to the point where it sweeps from sight, all its plantings fresh and immature, its houses split-level and perfectly isosceles. Wade Arcenault is a lucky man to live here, and I am, at heart, cast down to loss in its presence.

Vicki knows I’m stalling and tampers with the door latch of my Malibu until, as if by magic, it swings open.

She is bemused, in no mind for words. I, of course, would talk till midnight if I thought it could improve my chances.

“Why don’t we just go get a motel room right now?” I paint a grin on my face. “You haven’t been to Cape May. We could have a big time.”

“What about your ole dead guy? Herb?” Vicki sets her chin up haughtily. “What about him?”

“Walter.” She’s made me feel slightly embarrassed. “He’s not going anywhere. But I’m still alive. Frank’s still among the living.”

“I’d be ashamed,” Vicki says, shoving the door wide open between us. The wind now has a wintry grit in it. The front has passed quickly and left us in a gray spring chill. In half a minute, she is going. This is the last chance to love her.

“Well, I’m not,” I say loudly into the wind. “I didn’t kill my self. I want you to go off and let me love you. And tomorrow we’ll get married.”

“Not hardly.” She looks glumly at the dry black weather stripping on my poor car’s poor window frame. She picks off a piece with a crimson fingernail.

“Why not?” I say. “I want to. This time yesterday we were in bed like newly weds. I was one of the only six people in the world then. What the hell happened? Did you just go crazy? Twenty minutes ago you were happy as a monkey.”

“No way I went crazy, José,” she says coarsely.

“My name’s not José, goddamn it.” I cast a wintry eye at Lynette’s spurious beigey Jesus nailed to the siding. He makes life a perfect misery for as many as he can, then never takes the heat. He should try resurrection in today’s complex world. He’d fall right off His cross on His ass. He couldn’t sell newspapers.

“We don’t have none of the same interests, doesn’t look like,” Vicki says nearly inaudibly, fumbling a finger at her blue Navajo earring. “I just figured that out sitting at the table.”

“But I’m interested in you!” I shout. “Isn’t that enough?” The wind is kicking up. From around the house Wade’s Boston Whaler blunks against the dock. My own words are broken and carried off like chaff.

“Not to be married, it isn’t,” she says, her jaw set in certainty. “Just foolin like what we been doin is one thing. But that won’t get you all the way to death.”

“What will? Just tell me and I’ll do it. I want to go all the way to death with you.” Words, my best refuge and oldest allies, are suddenly acting to no avail, and I am helpless. In the wind, in fact, words hardly seem to clear my mouth. It is like a dream in which my friends turn against me and then disappear — a poor man’s Caesar dream, a nightmare in itself. “Look here. I’ll get interested in nursing. I’ll read some books and we can talk about nursing all the goddamn time.”

Vicki tries to smile but looks dumbfounded. “I don’t know what to say, really.”

“Say yes! Or at least something intelligent. I might just kidnap you.”

“Right you won’t.” She curls her lip and narrows her eyes, a look I’ve never seen and that scares me. She is without fear if fearlessness is what’s asked for. But just so long as she is fearlessly mine.

“I’m not going to be fooled with,” I say, and move toward her.

“I just don’t love you enough to marry you,” She throws down her hands in exasperation. “I don’t love you in the right way. So just go on. You’re liable to say anything, and I don’t like that.” Her hair has become whipped and tangled.

“There isn’t any right way,” I say. “There’s just love and not love. You’re crazy.”

“You’ll see,” she says.

“Get in this car.” I pull back the door. (She has decided not to love me because I might change her, but she couldn’t be more wrong. It is I who’ll happily bend.) “You just think you want some little life like Lynette’s to complain about, but I’m going to give you the best of all worlds. You don’t know how happy you’re going to be.” I give her a big signpost grin and step forward to put my arms around her, but she busts me full in the mouth with a mean little itchy fist that catches me midstride and sends me to the turf. I manage to grab onto the car door to ease my fall, but the punch is a looping girl’s left hook straight from the shoulder, and I actually walked directly into it, eyes wide open.

“I’ll ’bout knock you silly,” she says furiously, both fists balled like little grapeshoots, thumbs inward. “Last guy took holt of me went to eye surgery.”

And I can’t help smiling. It is the end to all things, of course. But a proper end. I taste thick, squeamish blood in my mouth. (My hope is that no one inside has seen this and feels the need to help me.) When I look up, she has backed off a half step, and to the right of dolorous Jesus I see Cade’s big head peering down at me, impassive as Buddha. Though in all ways Cade does not matter in this, and I don’t mind his seeing me in defeat. It is an experience he already knows, and would sympathize with if he could.

“Get on up and go see your dead guy,” Vicki says in a quavery, cautionary voice.

“Okay.” I’m still smiling my dopey Joe Palooka smile. Possibly there are even stars and whirligigs shooting above my head. I might not be in complete control, but I’m certain I can drive.

“You awright, aren’t you?” She will not come a step closer, but squints an assessing eye at me long-distance. I’m sure I am pale as potatoes, though I’m not ashamed to be decked by a strong girl who can turn grown men over in their beds and get them in and out of distant bathrooms single-handed. In fact, it confirms everything I have always believed of her. There may be hope yet for us. This may be the very love she’s been seeking but hasn’t trusted, and needed only to whop me good to make us both realize it.

“Why don’t you call me tomorrow?” I say, sprawled on my elbows, my head starting to ache, though I’m still smiling a good loser’s smile.

“I doubt that.” She crosses her arms like Maggie in the funnies. Who is a better Jiggs than I am? Who is worse at learning from his experience?

“You better go inside,” I say. “It’s an indignity for you to see me get on my feet.”

“I didn’t mean to hit you,” she says in a bossy way.

“Like hell. You’d’ve knocked me out if you knew how to make a fist. You make a girl’s fist.

“I don’t hit too many.”

“Go on,” I say.

“You sure you’re awright?”

“Would you call me tomorrow?”

“Maybe, maybe not.” I can actually hear her stockings scrape as she turns and starts back across the lawn in the wind, her arms swinging, each foot planted toe-down to keep from sinking in the sod. She does not look back — as she shouldn’t — and quickly dis appears into the house. Cade has likewise left the window. And for a time then I sit where I’ve fallen beside my car and stare up at the rending clouds, trying to make the world around me stop its terrifying spin. Everything has seemed beckoning and ahead, though I am unsure now if life has not suddenly passed me like a big rumbling semi and left me flattened here by the road.