Though not before he had spoken briefly to Ed. The police woman had asked him if he wished to when she called, and he’d felt she wanted him to, that it was his duty, after all, given his position.
“I don’t really get all this,” Ed had said, his voice slow and gruff with emotion. He imagined Ed sitting in a dark room, a bitter, disheveled man (more or less the man he’d imagined having a fistfight with — Lon Chaney, Jr.). “What were you doing there?”
“I’m a friend,” Howard said, solemnly. “We drove up together.”
“Is that it?” Ed said. “A friend?”
“Yes,” Howard said, and paused. “That’s it. Basically.”
Ed laughed a dry mirthless laugh, and then possibly — Howard wasn’t sure, but possibly — he sobbed.
He wanted to say more to Ed, but neither one seemed to have any more to say, not even “I’m sorry.” And then Ed simply hung up.
For reasons he didn’t understand, a corporal from the Arizona Highway Patrol suggested they drive back down to where Howard could catch a bus back to Phoenix. The STRIKE IT RICH was where the bus stopped. One would be arriving late. He had the drinks coupons if there was a wait.
On the drive down, the officer wanted to talk about everything under the sun but seemed not to want to talk about what had transpired that day. He was a large, thick-shouldered, dark-haired man in his fifties, with a lined, square, attractively tanned face, whose beige uniform and pointed trooper’s hat seemed to fill up the driver’s seat. His name was Fitzgerald, and he was interested that Howard sold real estate, and that his deceased “friend” had, too. Trooper Fitzgerald said he’d moved to Arizona from Pittsburgh many years before, because it was getting too crowded back east. Real estate, he believed, was the measure and key to everything. Everyone’s quality of life was measured out in real estate values, only it was in reverse: the higher the price, the worse the life. Though the sad truth, he believed, was that in not much time all you’d see (Officer Fitzgerald pointed straight out the windshield, down to where Howard had seen the multi-colored, multi-layered beautiful desert open up that morning, but where it now seemed purplish, smoggy gray), all that would be houses and parking lots and malls and offices and the whole array of the world’s ills that come of living too near to your neighbor: crime, poverty, hostility, deceit and insufficient air to breathe. These would presently descend like a plague, and it wouldn’t be long after that until the apocalypse. All the police in the world couldn’t stop that onslaught, he said. He nodded his head in deep agreement with himself.
“Are you pretty religious, then, I guess?” Howard asked.
Officer Fitzgerald wore his trooper’s hat set low on his big square head, almost touching his sunglasses rims. “Oh, no, no, no,” he said, exposing his big straight, white teeth gripping his lower lip. “You don’t need a book to know what’s coming. You just need to be able to count the bodies.”
“I guess that’s right,” Howard said, and suddenly felt uncomfortable wearing shorts in this man’s solemn presence. He looked at his bare knees and noticed again how he’d scraped them getting back over the wall after Frances died. Trying to escape. It was embarrassing. He thought of Frances saying he’d thank her all the way back to Phoenix. He couldn’t remember why she’d said that or even when. Then he thought of the night before, when he’d waked to find her on her hands and knees, staring down into his face in the dark. He’d smelled her sour breath, sensed her chest heaving like an animal’s. He’d believed she intended to speak to him, feared she would say terrible things — about him — things he’d never forget. But she’d said nothing, just stared as if her open eyes no longer possessed sight. After several moments she’d lain back down on her side and said, “I don’t know you, do I? I don’t remember you.” And he’d said, “No, you don’t. We’ve never been introduced. But it’s all right.” She’d turned away from him then, faced the wall and slept. In the morning she’d remembered almost none of it. He hadn’t wanted to remind her. He’d thought of it as a kindness.
What you did definitely changed things, he thought, as the powerful cruiser sped along. Even this view down the mountain was changed because of what had happened; it seemed less beautiful now. He thought about his job — that he would lose it. He’d be given the option of resigning, but there’d be no mistaking: sex with a fellow employee, a violent death, a clandestine trip on company time when other priorities were paramount — without a doubt, that didn’t work. He thought about Mary — that he would tell her about none of his true emotions, would omit most of the details and the history, would try to let the subject subside and hope that would be enough. He would try to put better things in their place. His parents, too — they would all have to grow up some.
He hadn’t seen Frances again after he’d seen her hung there in the little cedar tree, gazing up at him. It shocked him — that memory, and then not seeing her. It all made him feel peculiarly wronged and alone, as if he resented her absence more than he felt sorry about it. You could be happy, of course, that she’d seen the Grand Canyon before it got spoiled by houses and malls and freeways and glass office buildings. Though she’d tried to make him feel inadequate, that the things he cared about didn’t matter when they were put alongside the spiritual things she was so enthused about, but had now unfortunately given her life for — the healing energy.
But those things didn’t matter. Peering out the windshield at the flat, gray desert at evening, he understood that in fact very little of what he knew mattered; and that however he might’ve felt today — if circumstances could just have been better — he would now not be allowed to feel. Perhaps he never would again. And whatever he might even have liked, bringing his full and best self to the experience, had now been taken away. So that life, as fast as this car hurtling down the side of a mountain toward the dark, seemed to be disappearing from around him. Being erased. And he was so sorry. And he felt afraid, very afraid, even though that sensation did not come to him in the precise and unexpected way he’d always assumed it would.
Acknowledgments
I wish to express, for the thousandth time, my gratitude to Gary L. Fisketjon, and also to Bill Buford, Meghan O’Rourke, Christopher MacLehose, Margaret Stead, Ian Jack and L. Rust Hills, for their generous efforts to make these stories better. I wish to thank, as well, Angela and Rea Hederman for their encouragement and long friendship. For being my acute reader and friend, I wish to thank Sarah MacLachlan. Finally, and again, my great gratitude goes to Amanda Urban.
RF
A Note on the Author
Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944. He has published six novels and three collections of stories, including The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Wildlife, A Multitude of Sins and, most recently, The Lay of the Land. Independence Day was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.