The Lay of the Land (69 page)

Jill, large and green-suited, Paul, fidgety and zoot-suited, loiter in the front foyer, waiting on me like scolded servants. Jill’s hands are clasped behind her, schoolmarm-style—a habit. Both are grave but seem confident there’s nothing they can do. Our decommissioned and paralytically expensive Thanksgiving feast lies cooling, inedible and uncelebrated on the dining room table. The Men’s Ministry at Our Lady can come for it in a panel truck—and throw it in the ocean if they want to. Minuscule white-suited Gretchen is nowhere in sight. She may have been smart enough to leave.

My furniture, when I stop to put on my barracuda jacket, all seems bland and too familiar, but also strange and unpossessed—the couches, tables, chairs, bookcases, rugs, pictures, lamps—not mine. More like the decor of a Hampton Inn in Paducah. How does this happen? Does this mean my time here is nearing its end?

“I’m heading to Absecon, okay?” I have seen an Absecon exit on the Garden State but never gotten off.

“I’m going with you,” Paul announces commandingly.

“No way. You almost fucked this all up.” It’s still a furnace in here. Sweat sprouts in my hairline. My jacket—slightly grimed from my Bob Butts one-rounder—is the finishing touch of persuasive but distressed fatherdom.

“That’s really not fair.” Paul blinks behind his glasses. I didn’t notice before, but Otto, Paul’s dummy—his stupid blue eyes popped open, lurid orange hair, hacking jacket, fingerless wooden mitts, black patent-leather pumps with white socks, plus his green derby all making him appear perfectly at home in my house—is seated at the table-full of food like a stunned guest. Thanksgiving is all his now.

“I can’t explain it to you right now, Paul. But I will. I love you.” I’m moving out the front door. Outside, the dirt-bike noise is intense, as if whoever it is, is running a gymkhana around my or the Feensters’ front yard. Nick will be out if he isn’t already, primed to deal cruelly, etc., etc. It could be a chance for us to act in concert, only I have to leave. My daughter’s in jail.

“I think you need me with you. I think—” Paul’s saying.

“We’ll talk about it later.”

Then abruptly all is silenced outside—
no-noise
as palpable as noise.

And I feel just as suddenly a sensation of
beforeness,
which I’ve of course felt on many, many days since my cancer was unearthed, the sensation of when there was no cancer, and oh, how good that was—
before
—what a rare gift, only I was careless and didn’t notice and have kicked myself ever since for missing it.

But I feel that same
beforeness
now. Though nothing’s happened that a
before
should be expected. Unless I’ve missed something—more than usual. The Next Level wouldn’t seem to be in the business of letting us miss important moments. Still, why does
now
—this moment, standing in my own house—feel like
before
?

“What’s going on out there?” Paul says in a superior-sounding voice. His gray eyes bat at me. These words come from some old movie he’s seen and I have, too. Only he means them now, looks stern and suspicious, moves toward the doorknob, intent on turning it—to get to the bottom of, shed some light on, put paid to….

“No! Don’t do that, Paul,” I say. We all three look to one another—wondrous looks, different looks, because we are all different, yet are joined in our
beforeness.
It’s quiet outside now—we all say this with our silence. But it’s just the usual. The holiday calm. The peace of the harvest. The good soft exhale along this stretch of nice beach, the last sigh and surrender the season is famous for.

“Let me look,” I say, and go forward. “I’m leaving anyway.”

Paul’s brow furrows. Even in his horse-blanket suit, he is imploring. He heard what I said. “I’m going with you,” he says.

It’s hard to say no. But I manage. “No.”

I grasp the warm knob, give it a turn and pull open my front door.

And, just as it’s supposed to, everything changes.
Before
is everlastingly gone. There is only everlastingly
after.

At first, I see nothing strange from my doorway, into which a cold gasp floods by my damp hairline. Only my hemispheric driveway. The high seaboard sky. My Suburban, its window duct-taped. Paul’s junker Saab behind the arborvitae. Sally’s LeBaron. Sandy Poincinet Road, empty and mistily serene toward the beach. And to the left, the Feensters’ yard with its sad topiary (the monkey, the giraffe, the hippo all neglected). Nick’s aqua Corvettes, enviably buffed, the upbraiding signs—
DON’T EVEN THINK OF TURNING AROUND. BEWARE OF PIT BULL. DANGEROUS RIPTIDES.
Nothing out of the ordinary. William Graymont, who’s caught something—possibly a bird—stands under the monkey, calmly staring down at his kill.

I begin walking toward my vehicle. Paul and Jill stand in the doorway behind me.

Where’s the clamorous, peace-destroying dirt bike, I wonder. Can it have simply vanished? I open the driver’s door, thoughts of Absecon re-encroaching with unhappy imagery—Clarissa in a room wearing beltless jailhouse garb; a two-way mirror with smirking men in suits behind it; an Oriental detective—a female—with small clean hands and a chignon; loathsome Thom at a desk, filling out forms. Then Clarissa remote from everything and everyone, forever. I test the gray duct tape across my broken window with an estimating poke—it gives but holds. Then Sally re-enters—on a Virgin flight from Maidenhead. How am I to re-establish myself as a vigorous, hearty, restless, randy Sea Biscuit, who’s also ready to forgive, forget, bygones staying bygones? I give Paul and Jill a fraught frown back where they stand in the doorway, followed by a bogus Teddy Roosevelt thumbs-up like Mike’s. A flight of geese, audible but invisible, passes over—honk-honk-honk-honk-honk in the misted air. I raise my eyes to them. “What the hell happened to your window?” Paul in his silly suit says, starting heavily out the door.

“Nothing,” I say. “It’s fine. It’ll be fine.”

“I should go with you.” He’s crossing the driveway, for some reason putting his hands on his hips like a majorette.

And that is when all hell breaks loose at the Feensters’.

From inside their big white modernistic residential edifice—the teak front door, I can see, is left open—comes the blaring, grinding, reckless start-up whang of a dirt bike. Possibly it’s sound effects, something Nick’s ordered from an 800 number on late-night TV, delivered in time for the holidays.
The Sounds of Super-X.
Give those neighbors something to be thankful for—when it’s turned off.

Paul and I stare in wonder—me across my Suburban hood, he mid-driveway. Inside the Feensters’, the dirt-bike racket winds up scaldingly, very authentic if it’s a recording—
raaa-raaa-raaa-raaaraaaaaaaaaaa-er-raaaaaaa.
I hear, but am not sure I hear, Drilla Feenster in a shrill operatic voice say, “No, no, no, no, no. You
will
not—” Her voice gets husky, insisting “no” to be the only acceptable thing about something. And then, through the Feensters’ open front door, wheeled up and rared back on its thick, black, cleated, high-fendered rear tire, a monstrous, gaudy, electric-purple Yamaha Z-71 “Turf Torturer” screams straight out onto the front drive, where the Corvettes are and the cat was. Astride the bike, captaining it, is a small-featured miniature white kid wearing green-and-black blotch camo, paratrooper boots, a black battle beret and a webbed belt full of what look to me like big copper-jacketed live rounds. (There is no way to make this seem normal.) The instant the bike touches front wheel down in the Feensters’ driveway, the kid snaps the handlebars into a gravel-gashing, throttle-up one-eighty that spins him around to face the house, at the same time giving the Yamaha more
raaaa-raaaa-raaaarer-raaaas
—popping the clutch out, in, out, spewing gravel against the Corvettes and looking neither left (at Paul and me, astonished across the yards) nor right, but back into the house, his face concentrated, luminous.

It’s not possible to know what’s happening here, only that it is happening and its consequences may not be good. I look at Paul, who looks at me. He seems perplexed. He is a visitor here. Jill steps out into the driveway to view things better. Gretchen has come to the door still in her chef’s hat and carrying a large metal kitchen spoon.

“Go back inside.” I say this loudly to Jill over the bike whine. The kid rider now takes note of me, fastens his eyes on me (he could be fourteen), then looks intently back through the Feensters’ open door, where someone he’s communicating with must be. He’s wearing an earpiece in the ear I can see, and his lips are moving. The kid rider points over to me and wags his gloved finger for emphasis. “You go back inside, too,” I say to Paul and turn to go in myself—just for the moment, lock the door, wait this one out. These sorts of things usually pass if you let ’em.

Then I hear Drilla inside saying over again, “No-no-no-no-no-no.” And then very sharply, possibly from the Great Room—where there are Jerusalem marble countertops, copper fixtures, mortised bamboo floors, no expense spared top to bottom—there come two short metallic
brrrrp-brrrrp!
noises. And Drilla stops saying “No-no-no-no.”

“Oh,
man,”
Paul says mid-driveway.

Almost in the same instant as the
brrrrp-brrrrp
sounds, Nick Feenster appears, marching out the door, bulky and muscular in his electric-blue Lycra get-up—no anorak. He is barefoot, being led like a prisoner by another undersized white kid, the match of the first one, camo’d, booted, beret’d and web-belted, but who is holding pressed to Nick’s jawbone an oddly shaped, black boxy contraption with a stubby barrel that looks like a kid’s gun and is—unless someone else is still in the Feensters’ house—what I just heard go
brrrrp-brrrrp.
Nick’s eyes cut over to me across the yards through his topiary as he’s being shoved ahead. His walking style is bumpy, a bulky man’s gait. His jowly face is stony, full of hatred, as if he’d like to get his hands on the parties responsible, just have five minutes alone with one or all of them.

I have no idea what this is that’s happening in the yard. I look at Paul, who’s motionless, hands riding his hips in his plaid suit, staring across the yard as I’ve been. He is transfixed. Jill is a few steps behind and motionless, her generous mouth opened but silent, hands (real and inauthentic) clasped at her waist. Little Gretchen has disappeared from the doorway.

“Go inside. Call somebody,” I say—to Paul, to Jill, to both of them. “Call 911. This is something. This isn’t good.”

And as if her switch has been thrown, Jill turns and walks directly back inside the front door without a word.

“You go inside, I said,” I say to Paul. I have to have them inside, so I can know what to do. But Paul doesn’t budge.

Nick Feenster, when I look again, is exactly where he was in his driveway. But the kid from the fiery purple Yamaha is just getting in the driver’s seat of one of the Corvettes—becoming instantly invisible behind the wheel. The big bike has been allowed to fall on its side in the gravel but is running. The other boy’s still holding the black machine pistol under Nick’s chin. They’re stealing his cars. That’s all this is. This is about stealing cars. They get the keys and then they shoot him. He knows this.

The Corvette rumbles to life. Its headlights flick on, then off, its fiberglass body trembling. Then the kid is quick out of it, hurries around, jumps in the other Corvette. He has both sets of keys. The second aqua-and-white Corvette cranks and shimmies and vibrates. Smoke puffs out of its dual pipes. The kid revs and revs the big mill, just like he did the Yamaha, but then drops it in reverse, sends it springing backward, spewing gravel underneath, then (I can see him looking down at the gear shifter) he yanks it down into first, rips a buffeting, wheel-tearing power left in the gravel and, in a clamor of smoke and engine racket and muffler blare, gurgle and clatter, spins out of the Feensters’ driveway, bouncing out onto Poincinet Road and straight away toward Route 35.

“They’re going to shoot Nick,” I say—I suppose—to Paul, who hasn’t gone inside the way I told him to. The boy with the machine pistol is talking to Nick, and Nick, at the point of the stubby barrel, is talking to the boy, his lips moving stiffly, as if they were discussing something difficult. I hear a siren not so far away. A silent alarm has gone off. The police will have stopped the first boy already, and none of this will go much further. I begin walking toward Nick and the boy, who’re still talking. I lack a plan. I’m merely impelled to walk across the driveway and the tiny bit of scratchy lawn separating our two houses to do something productive. You’re not supposed to think thoughts in these moments, only to see things distinctly for the telling later: the remaining vibrating aqua-and-white Corvette; the topiary monkey and the hippo; the cottony sky; Nick’s house; the kid with the machine pistol; Nick, muscular and stern-jawed in his blue Lycras and big bare feet. Though I do think of the boy, this lethal boy with his gun, threatening Nick. But as if he was a mouse. A tiny mouse. A creature I can corner and trap and hold in my two hands and feel the insubstantial weight of and keep captured until he’s calm. They’re still talking, this boy and Nick. Behind me, I hear Paul say, “Frank.” Then I say, “Could I just…. Could I just…get a little involved here in this?” And then the boy shoots Nick, shoots him straight up under the jaw. One
brrrrp!
I am beside the measly topiary giraffe and say, “Oh, gee.” And almost as an afterthought, more a choice of activities he didn’t know he’d have to make, the boy shoots me. In the chest. And that, of course, is the truest beginning to the next level of life.

18

I wonder at what Ms. McCurdy saw as she fell. What were her last recorded visual inputs before she closed her amazed eyes upon this toilsome, maybe not entirely bad life forever? Did she get to see the crack-brained Clevinger squeeze the final round into his melon? Did she see her astonished nursing students get the education of their lives? Did she see, for one last eye flutter, the sands of Paloma Playa or glimpse an oil derrick out at sea? A bather? A man standing in a tepid surf, looking back at her curiously, waving good-bye? I have the hope of a man who never hopes.

You’re told about the long, shimmering corridor with the spooky light at the end and the New Age music piped in (from where?). Or of the chapter-by-chapter performance review of your muddled life, scrolling past like microfiche while you pause at death’s stony door for some needed extra suffering. Or of the foggy, gilded, curving steps leading to the busy bearded old man at the white marmoreal desk with the book, who scolds you about the boats he’s already sent, then sends you below.

Maybe for some it happens.

But what I tried very, very hard to do, there on Nick Feenster’s lawn, was keep my eyes open, stay alert, maintain visual contact with as much as possible, keep the dots connected. Shooting three living humans apparently does not make a big impression on a fourteen-year-old, because even before I let myself kneel on the lawn and take notice of the two holes in my barracuda jacket high up in my left pectoral region, then look up at the boy with an odd sensation of gratitude, he’d already climbed into Nick’s Corvette and put it into clunking gear, after which he wheeled around in the driveway and roared off, narrowly missing Nick and geysering gravel in my whitening face, turning onto Route 35, where possibly the Sea-Clift police were already waiting to catch him as he headed onto the Toms River bridge.

My son Paul appeared at once to aid me where I lay on the lawn, as did Jill. Oddly enough, Paul kept asking me—I was awake for all of this—if I felt I was going to be all right, was I going to be all right, was I going to be all right. I said I didn’t know, that being shot in the chest was often pretty serious. And then Detective Marinara arrived—I may have dreamed this—having decided to celebrate Thanksgiving with us after all. He said—I may have dreamed this, too—that he knew quite a lot about bullet wounds to the chest, and mine might be all right. He called an ambulance from the radio in his jacket pocket.

And it came. I was lying on the cold ground, breathing shallow but religiously regular breaths, staring up glass-eyes into the misty sky, where I again could hear the geese winging through the smoky air, even see their spectral bodies, wings set, barely agitating. A stocky red-haired man with a red beard and a purple birthmark on his lower lip arrived and looked down at me. He had a hypodermic syringe in his mouth and a pink-tubed stethoscope around his rucked neck. “So, how’s it going there, Frank?” he said. “You gonna die?” He had one of the clotted Shore accents and grinned at me as if my dying was the furthest thing from his mind. “You ain’t gonna gork off on us, are you? Right here on your own lawn, in front of God and everybody. And on Thanksgiving? Are you, huh? That wouldn’t be too cool, big ole boy. Ruin everybody’s day. Specially mine.” He was giving it to me in the arm. The ground was very cold and hard. I wondered if the bullets (I didn’t know how many, then) had entered my chest and gone out the other side. I wanted to ask that and to explain that it wasn’t my lawn. But I must’ve lost consciousness, because I don’t even remember the needle being taken out, only that I hadn’t been called “big ole boy” in a long time. Not since my father called me that on our golfing days on the sun-baked Keesler course, when he would smack the living shit out of the ball, then look down at me, with my little junior clubs, and say, “Can you hit it that far, big ole boy? Let’s see if you can, big ole boy. Give her a mighty ride.” It’s worth saying that it doesn’t hurt
that
much to be shot in the chest. It was something I always wondered about as far back as my Marine Corps days, when people talked a lot about it. There’s the hit and then it’s hot and hurts some, then it’s numb. You definitely hear it.
Brrrrp!
You instantly feel strange, surprised (I was already cold, but I felt much colder) and then you—I, anyway—just kneel down to try to get some rest, and there’s the feeling then that everything’s going on without you. Which it pretty much is.

Of course—anyone would expect the rest to happen—I wake up in the Sea-Clift EMS truck, strapped to a yellow Stryker stretcher, shirtless and jacketless, covered with a thin pink blanket, my feet toward the back door. It is just like all the movies portray it—a fish-eye view, a jouncing, swerving ride under an elevated railroad in the Bronx, siren
whoop-whooping,
diesel motor growling, lights flashing. The fluorescent light inside is lime green, barely sufficient for decent patient care. The turns and roaring motorized dips make me roll against my nylon belt restraints. There’s the smell of rubbing alcohol and other disinfectants and aluminum. And I believe I’ve died and this is what death is—not the “distinguished thing,” but a swervy, bumpy ride with a lot of blinking lights all around you that never ends, a constant state of being in between departure and arrival, though that might be just for some. I’m bandaged and strung up to a collapsing clear plastic drip bag, and wearing a mask to aid my breathing. I can see the scruffy, heavy-set, red-bearded guy in a white shirt with his stethoscope, sitting beside me, talking to someone else in the compartment who I can’t see, talking in the calmest of voices, as if they’re on break from the produce department at Kroger’s and taking their time about clocking back in. They talk about the 5-K race and some guy they thought had “stroked out” but, it turns out, hadn’t. And some woman with a prosthetic leg whom they admired but couldn’t see having decent sex with. And about how no one would catch them out running in the street on Thanksgiving when they could be home watching the Sixers, and then something about the police saying the boys who’d shot me and Nick (and possibly Drilla) being Russians: “Go figure.” I am gripping. My hand can touch something cold and tubular, and I would like very much to sit up and see out the little louvered side windows to find out where we are. The clock on the wall here says it’s 2:33. But when I stir toward rising, the red-bearded EMS guy with the purple birthmark says, “Well, our friend’s come alive, looks like,” and puts a big freckled hand heavily on my good shoulder so that I can see he’s wearing a milky blue plastic glove. I’m aware that I say from under my mask, “It’s all right, I don’t have AIDS.” And that he says, “Sure, we know. Nobody does. These gloves are just my fashion statement.” And I may say, “I do have cancer, though.” And he may say, “In-te-
rest
-ing. Four inches lower and this would be a more leisurely trip.” Then I relax and stare at the dim, rocking, metallic-gray ceiling as the boxy crate roars on.

The ceiling has a color snapshot of a thinner version of the red-haired paramedic in an Army desert uniform, kneeling, smiling down at me from a far-away land, and above his head a thought-balloon says “Oxygen In Use. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.” I may dream then that we’re passing onto the long bridge to Toms River, across Barnegat Bay, and that these two men are talking and talking and talking about the election and what a joke it is: “suspended agitation,” “diddling while home burns,” how no one has loyalty to our sacred institutions anymore, which is a national disgrace, since institutions and professions have always carried us along. In their view, it is a nature-nurture issue, and they agree that nurture is, while not everything, still very important (which I don’t feel so sure about). And then I think someone, I’m not sure who, is flossing his teeth and smiling at me at the same time.

And at this point it becomes clear to me (how does one know such things?) that I’m not going to die from merely being shot in the chest by some little miscreant mouse who needs to spend some concentrated time alone thinking about things, particularly about his effect on others. Now, today, may be an end—time will tell what of—but it is not
the
end the way Ernie McAuliffe’s and Natheriel Lewis’s ends were unarguably
the
end for those good and passionate souls. And Nick, too, who can’t have survived his wounds. To know such a thing so clearly is a true mystery, but one does, which puts an interesting spin on the rest of life and how people pretend to live it, as well as on medical care and on religion and on business and the pharmaceutical industry, real estate—most everything, when you get right down to it.

I could, of course, die in the hospital. Thousands do, victims of lawless pathogens that make their home there, felled by an otherwise-non-fatal wound; or I could suffer my titanium BBs to turn traitor to my tissues and become my worst enemy. These things are statistically possible and happen. Listen to
Live at Five
or read the
Asbury Press.
Nature doesn’t like to be observed, but can be.

Whoop-whoop, whoop-whoop! Blaaaant, blaaaant! Vroom, vroom.
“That’s right, that’s it. Just sit there. You mother
fucker
! I gotta dead guy in he-ah, or soon will. Ya silly son of a bitch.”

It’s good to know they actually care—that it’s not like driving a beer truck or delivering uniforms to Mr. Goodwrench. What is their average time in traffic, one wonders.

BANG! BANG! Bangety-ruuuump-crack.
We’ve hit something now. “That’s right, asshole. That’s why I got this cowcatcher on this baby, for assholes like you!”
Vroom, vroom, vroom-vroom.
We’re off again. It can’t be far now.

When I’m turned loose from this current challenge, I am going to sit down and write another letter to the President, which will be a response to his yearly Thanksgiving proclamation—generally full of platitudes and horseshit, and no better than poems written for ceremonial occasions by the Poet Laureate. This will be the first such letter I’ve actually sent, and though I know he will not have long to read it and gets letters from lots of people who feel they need to get their views aired, still, by some chance, he
might
read it and pass along its basic points to his successor, whoever that is (though of course I know—we all do). It will not be a letter about the need for more gun control or the need for supporting the family unit so fourteen-year-olds don’t steal cars, own machine pistols and shoot people, or about ending pregnancies, or the need to shore up our borders and tighten immigration laws, or the institution of English as a national language (which I support), but will simply say that I am a citizen of New Jersey, in middle age, with wives and children to my credit, a non-drug user, a non-jogger, without cell-phone service or caller ID, a vertically integrated non-Christian who has sponsored the hopes and contexts and dreams of others with no wish for credit or personal gain or transcendence, a citizen with a niche, who has his own context, who does not fear permanence and is not in despair, who is in fact a realtor and a pilgrim as much as any. (I will not mention cancer survivor, in case I’m finally not one.) I’ll write that these demographics confer on me not one shred of wisdom but still a strong personal sense of having both less to lose and curiously more at stake. I will say to the President that it’s one thing for me, Frank Bascombe, to give up the Forever Concept and take on myself the responsibilities of the Next Level—that life can’t be escaped and must be faced entire. But it’s quite another thing for him to, or his successor. For them, in fact, it is very unwise and even dangerous. Indeed, it seems to me that these very positions, positions of public trust they’ve worked hard to get, require that insofar as they have our interests at heart, they must graduate to the Next Level but never give up the Forever Concept. I have lately, in fact, been seeing some troubling signs, so that I will say there is an important difference worth considering between the life span of an individual and the life span of a whole republic, and that….

“Absecon,” I hear someone say. “That’s Ab-
see
-con.” That’s not how I’ve been pronouncing it, but I will forever. Surely we’re not going to a hospital there. “When I was a kid, in Ab-see-con—” It’s the big red-headed Army medic, blabbing on in his south Jersey brogue. “My old man useta go to Atlantic City. They still had real bums over there then. Not these current fucks. This was the seventies, before all this new horseshit. He’d go get one a these bums and bring him home for Thanksgiving. You know? Clean him up. Give him some clothes. Useta look for bums about his own size. My mom useta hate it. I’ll tell ya. We’d—”

We are slowing up. The siren’s gone silent. The two men inside with me are moving, legs partly bent, stooping. A two-way radio crackles and sputters from someone’s belt beside my face. The clock says it’s 3:04. “Could be you’ll want some backup,” a woman’s metallic voice says from a place where it sounds like the wind’s blowing. “Oh boy. Ooooohh boy. Oh man,” the woman’s faraway voice says. “This is somethin’. I promised you fireworks.” Sputter and fuzz. And we are, because I can feel it, backing up and turning at once. I strain against my webbed restraints to see something. My hands are cold. I feel my upper chest to be cold, too, and numb. A randy taste has dislodged from somewhere in my mouth. My chest actually hurts now, I have to admit. I’m not breathing all that well even with oxygen in use, though I’m glad to have it. “Delivery for occupant,” I hear a man’s voice say. “He had a big heart, my old man.” The medic is speaking again, “For all the good it did ’im.” The red-bearded face is peering down into mine out of the minty fluorescence. “How ya doin’, big ole boy? You holdin’ up?” the red mouth with the birthmark says. His blue eyes fix on me suspiciously. I wonder what my own eyes say back. “How’d you like your ambulance ride? Just like TV, wasn’t it?”