As there’s a lull at the pumps, I gas up first, then park oh the back forty, among the long-haul trucks and idling buses, and hike across the lot and into the lobby, where it’s as chaotic as a department store at Christmas yet also, strangely, half asleep (like an old-time Vegas casino at 4 a.m.), with its dark video arcade bing-jinging, long lines at the Roy’s and Nathan’s Famous and families walking around semi-catatonically eating, or else sitting arguing at plastic tables full of paper trash. Nothing suggests the 4th of July.
I make my visit to the cavernous men’s room, where the urinals flush the instant you’re done and on the walls, appropriately enough, there’re no pictures of Vince. I pass through the “Express Coffee Only” line at Roy’s, then carry my paper cup over to the phone bank, which as usual is being held hostage by twenty truckers in plaid shirts with big chained-on wallets, all leaning into the little metal phone cubbies, fingers sealing their ears, maundering to someone time zones away.
I wait till one of them hauls up on his jeans and saunters off like a man who’s just committed a secret sex act, then I set up shop and call for my messages, which I haven’t heard since three — nearly nine hours and counting. (My receiver holds onto the gritty warmth of the trucker’s grip as well as the lime-cologne odor from the rest room dispensers, a smell many women must find it possible to get used to.)
Message one (of ten!) is from Karl Bemish: “Frank, yeah. So’s you know. The little Frito Banditos just cruised through. CEY 146. Note that down in case they kill me. Another Mexican’s in the back seat this time through. I phoned the sheriff. Nothing to worry about.” Clunk.
Message two is another call from Joe Markham: “Look, Bascombe. Goddamn it. 259–6834. Call me. 609 area code. We’ll be here tonight.” Clunk.
Message three is a hang-up — undoubtedly Joe, going ballistic and becoming speechless.
Message four, though, is from Paul, in a mood of fierce hilarity. “Boss? Hello dere, boss?” His less than perfect Rochester voice. Someone else’s squeaky laughter is in the background. “If you needs to get laid, crawl up a chicken’s ass and wait!” Louder hilarity, possibly Paul’s girlfriend, the troubling Stephanie Deridder, though also possibly Clarissa Bascombe, his accomplice. “Okay, okay now. Wait.” He’s starting a new routine. This is not very good news. “You insect, you parasite, you worm! It’s Dr. Rection here. Dr. Hugh G. Rection, calling with your test results. It doesn’t look good for you, Frank. Oncology recapitulates ontogeny.” He couldn’t know what this means. “Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark.” This, of course, is very bad, though they’re both laughing like monkeys. Change clicks in a pay phone slot. “Next stop the Black Forest. I’ll have the torte, pleeeezzz. Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark. Make that two, t-o-o, doc-tah.” I hear the sound of the receiver being dropped, I hear them walking away giggling. I wait and wait and wait for them to come back (as though they were really there and I could speak to Paul, as though it wasn’t all recorded hours ago). But they don’t, and the tape stops. A bad call, about which I feel at a complete loss.
Message five is from Ann (strained, businesslike, a tone for the plumber who fixed her pipes wrong). “Frank, call me, please. All right? Use my private number: 203 526–1689. It’s important. Thanks.” Click.
Message six, Ann again: “Frank. Call me please? Anytime tonight, wherever you are—526–1689.” Click.
Message seven, another hang-up.
Message eight, Joe Markham: “We’re on our way to Vermont. So fuck you, asshole. You prick! You try to do—“ Clunk! Good riddance.
Message nine, Joe again (what a surprise): “We’re on our way to Vermont right now. So stick this message up your ass.” Clunk.
Message ten, Sally: “Hi.” A long, thought-organizing pause, then a sigh. “I should’ve been better tonight. I just … I don’t know what.” Pause. Sigh. “But — I’m sorry. I wish you were still here, even if you don’t. Wish, wish, wish. Let’s … umm … Sure. Just call me when you get home. Maybe I’ll come for a visit. Bye-bye.” Clunk.
Except for the last, an unusually unsettling collection of messages for 11:50 p.m.
I dial Ann and she answers immediately.
“What’s going on?” I say, more anxious than I care to sound.
“I’m sorry,” she says in an unsorry-sounding voice. “It’s gotten a little out of hand here today. Paul flipped out, and I thought maybe you could get up here early and take him off, but it’s okay now. Where are you?”
“At the Vince Lombardi.”
“The fence what?”
“It’s on the turnpike.” She has in fact used the facilities here. Years ago, of course. “I can make it in two hours,” I say. “What happened?”
“Oh. He and Charley got into a fracas in the boathouse, about the right way and the wrong way to varnish Charley’s dinghy. He hit Charley in the jaw with an oarlock. I think maybe he didn’t mean to, but it knocked him down. Almost knocked him out.”
“Is he all right?”
“He’s all right. No bones broken.”
“I mean is Paul all right?”
A pause for adjustment. “Yes,” she says. “He is. He disappeared for a while, but he came home about nine — which breaks his court curfew. Has he called you?”
“He left me a message.” No need for details: barking, hysterical laughter. (To be great is to be misunderstood.)
“Was he crazy?”
“He just seemed excited. I guessed he was with Stephanie.” Ann and I are of one mind about Stephanie, which is that their chemistry is wrong. In our view, for Stephanie’s parents to send her to a military school for girls — possibly in Tennessee — would be good.
“He’s very upset. I don’t really know why.” Ann takes a sip of something that has ice cubes in it. She has changed her drinking habits since moving to Connecticut, from bourbon (when she was married to me) to vodka gimlets, over whose proper preparation Charley O’Dell apparently exercises total mastery. Ann in general is much harder to read these days, which I assume is the point of divorce. Though on the subject of why now for Paul, my belief is that on any given day there’re truckloads of good excuses for “flipping out.” Paul, in particular, could find plenty. It’s surprising we all don’t do it more.
“How’s Clary?”
“Okay. They’ve gone to sleep in his room now. She says she wants to look out for him.”
“Girls mature faster than boys, I guess. How’s Charley? Did he get his dinghy waxed right?”
“He has a big lump. Look, I’m sorry. It’s all right now. Where is it you’re taking him again?”
“To the basketball and baseball halls of fame.” This suddenly sounds overpoweringly stupid. “Do you want me to call him?” My son with his own line, a proper Connecticut teen.
“Just come get him like you planned.” She’s ill at ease now, itchy to get off.
“How are you?” Comes to my mind that I haven’t seen her in weeks. Not so long, but long. Though for some reason it makes me mad.
“All right. Fine,” she says wearily, avoiding the personal pronoun.
“Are you spending enough time in skiffs? Getting to see the morning mist?”
“What’re you indicating with that tone?”
“I don’t know.” I actually don’t know. “It just makes me feel better.”
Phone silence descends. Video arcade and Roy Rogers clatter rises and encapsulates me. Another plaid-shirted, blue-jeaned wavy-haired, big-wallet trucker is now waiting midway of the lobby, glomming a sheaf of businessy-looking papers, staring hatchets at me as if I were on his private line.