A police cruiser, our lone Negro officer at the wheel, finally passes slowly by, on the lookout for the Clio Street bombers. He waves perfunctorily and continues on. He is now their neighbor.
“Look, when we get all our shit moved in, we’ll get you over here for a meal,” Joe says, turning loose Phyllis’s hand and trussing a short proprietary arm even more closely about her rounded shoulders. It is obvious she’s informed him of her newest medical sorrows, which may be why he came around to renting, which may be why she told him. Another reality check.
“That’s a meal I’m happy to wait for,” I say, wiping a driblet of sweat off my neck, feeling the touchy spot where I was struck by a baseball in a far-off city. I have expected Joe to bring up the lease-purchase concept at least once, but he hasn’t. Possibly he still harbors subconscious suspicions I’m a homosexual, which makes him standoffish.
I take a guarded look up at the old brick-veneer facade and curtained windows at #44, where there is no movement though I know surveillance is ongoing, and where I feel for an uneasy moment certain my $450 is being held hostage to the McLeods’ ingrown convictions regarding privacy and soleness, having nothing to do with financial distress, lost jobs or embarrassment (which I would know how to cope with). I am, in fact, less concerned for my money than with the prospect of my own life’s happy continuance with this problem unresolved. And yet I’m capable of making more of anything than I should, and I might just as well take a more complex approach to the unknown — such as never asking them for another goddamned nickel and seeing what effect that produces over time. Today, after all, is not only the fourth, but the Fourth. And as with the stolid, unpromising, unlikable Markhams, real independence must sometimes be shoved down your throat.
On a street we cannot see, a car alarm (possibly the same one as before) sets off loudly, and at hectic intervals, bwoop-bwip, bwoop-bwip, just as the bells at St. Leo’s begin tolling ten. It makes for a minor cacophony: thirteen clocks striking at the same second. Joe and Phyllis smile and shake their heads, look around at the heavens as if they were breaking open and this was the only signal they would hear. Though they have decided to try being happy, are in a firm acceptance mode and would agree at this moment to like anything. It must be said, at last, that I admire them.
I take a parting glimpse at Myrlene Beavers’s, where the silver bars of her walker are visible behind the screen. She is watching too, phone in her quaverous grip, alert to fresh outrage. “Who are these people? What do they hope to achieve? If only Tom were alive to take care of it.”
I’m shaking Joe Markham’s hand almost without knowing it. It is good to leave now, as I have done the best I can by everyone. What more can you do for wayward strangers than to shelter them?
Itake a morning’s ride up into town now, bent on nothing special — a drive-by of my hot-dog stand on the Green, a pass of the parade’s staging grounds for a sniff of the holiday aromas, a cruise (like a tourist’s) down my own street to inspect the site of Homo haddamus pithecarius, whose appearance, irrespective of provenance — M or F, human or ape, freedman or slave — I have a certain natural interest in. Who of us, after all, would be buried minus the hope of being returned someday to the air and light, to the curious, the tentative and even affectionate regard of our fellow uprights? None of us, I grant you, would mind a second appraisal with the benefit of some time having passed.
I in fact enjoy such a yearly drive through town, end to end, without my usual purposes to spur me (a property-line check, a roof and foundation write-up, an eleventh-hour visit before a closing), just a drive to take a look but not to touch or feel or be involved. Such a tour embodies its own quiet participation, since there is sovereign civic good in being a bystander, a watcher, one of those whom civic substance and display are meant to serve — the public.
Seminary Street has a measly, uncrowded, preparade staticness to it all around. The town’s new bunting is swagged on our three stoplights, the sidewalk flags not flying but lank. Citizens on the sidewalks all seem at yawing loose ends, their faces wide and uncommunicative as they stop to watch the parade crew blocking the curbs with sawhorses for the bands and floats that will follow, as if (they seem to say) this should be a usual Monday, one should be getting other things done and started. Skinny neighborhood boys I don’t recognize slalom the hot middle stripes on skateboards, their arms floating out for balance, while at the Virtual Profusion and the former Benetton and Laura Ashley (now in new personas as Foot Locker and The Gap) clerks are shoving sale tables back to their storefronts, preparing to wait in the cool indoors for crowds that may finally come.
It is an odd holiday, to be sure — one a man or woman could easily grow abstracted about, its practical importance to the task of holding back wild and dark misrule never altogether clear or provable; as though independence were only private and too crucial to celebrate with others; as though we should all just get on with being independent, given that it is after all the normal, commonsensical human condition, to be taken for granted unless opposed or thwarted, in which case unreserved, even absurd measures should be taken to restore or reimagine it (as I’ve tried to do with my son but that he has accomplished alone). Best maybe just to pass the day as the original signers did and as I prefer to do, in a country-like setting near to home, alone with your thoughts, your fears, your hopes, your “moments of reason” for what new world lies fearsomely ahead.
I cruise now out toward the big unfinished Shop Rite at the eastern verge of town, where Haddam borders on woodsy Haddam Township, past the Shalom Temple, the defunct Jap car dealer and the Magyar Bank, up old Route 27 toward New Brunswick. The Shop Rite was scheduled to be up and going by New Year’s, but its satellite businesses (a TCBY, a Color Tile and a Pet Depot) began dragging their feet after the stock market dip and the resultant “chill” in the local climate, so that all work is at present on hold. I, in fact, wouldn’t be sad or consider myself an antidevelopment traitor to see the whole shebang fold its tents and leave the business to our merchants in town; turn the land into a people’s park or a public vegetable garden; make friends in a new way. (Such things, of course, never happen.)
Out on the wide parking lot, fairly baking in the heat, waits most of our parade, its constituents wandering about in unparade-like disorder: a colonial fife-and-drum band from De Tocqueville Academy; a regiment of coonskin-cap regulars in buckskins, accompanied by several burly men in Mother Hubbards and combat boots (dressed to show independence can be won at the cost of looking ridiculous). Here is a brigade of beefy, wired-up wheelchair vets in American-flag shirts, doing weaves and wheelies while passing basketballs (others simply sit smoking and talking in the sunshine). Waiting, too, is another Mustang regatta, a female clown troupe, some local car dealers in good-guy cowboy hats, ready to chauffeur our elected officials (not yet arrived) in the backs of new convertibles, while a passel of political ingenues are all set to ride behind on a flatbed truck, wearing oversize baby diapers and convict clothes. A swank silver bus parked all by itself under the shadeless Shop Rite sign contains the Fruehlingheisen Banjo and Saxophone Band from Dover, Delaware, most of whose members have postponed coming out. And last but not least, two Chevy bigfoots, one red, one blue, sit mid-lot, ready to rumble down Seminary at parade’s end, their tiny cabs like teacups above their giant cleated wheels. (Later on there’re plans for them to crush some Japanese cars out at the Revolutionary War Battlefield.) All that’s lacking, in my view, are harem guards, who would make Paul Bascombe happy.