Richard Ford - Independence Day: Bascombe Trilogy (2)

In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems. Shaded lawns lie still and damp in the early a.m. Outside, on peaceful-morning Cleveland Street, I hear the footfalls of a lone jogger, tramping past and down the hill toward Taft Lane and across to the Choir College, there to run in the damp grass. In the Negro trace, men sit on stoops, pants legs rolled above their sock tops, sipping coffee in the growing, easeful heat. The marriage enrichment class (4 to 6) has let out at the high school, its members sleepy-eyed and dazed, bound for bed again. While on the green gridiron pallet our varsity band begins its two-a-day drills, revving up for the 4th: Boom-Haddam, boom-Haddam, boom-boom-ba-boom. Haddam-Haddam, upn-at-em! Boom-boom-ba-boom!

Elsewhere up the seaboard the sky, I know, reads hazy. The heat closes in, a metal smell clocks through the nostrils. Already the first clouds of a summer T-storm lurk on the mountain horizons, and its hotter where they live than where we live. Far out on the main line the breeze is right to hear the Amtrak, The Merchants special, hurtle past for Philly. And along on the same breeze, a sea-salt smell floats in from miles and miles away, mingling with shadowy rhododendron aromas and the last of the summers staunch azaleas.

Though back on my street, the first shaded block of Cleveland, sweet silence reigns. A block away, someone patiently bounces a driveway ball: squeak then breathing then a laugh, a cough All riiight , thats the waaay. None of it too loud. In front of the Zumbros, two doors down, the streets crew is finishing a quiet smoke before cranking their machines and unsettling the dust again. Were repaving this summer, putting in a new line, resodding the neutral ground, setting new curbs, using our proud new tax dollarsthe workers all Cape Verdeans and wily Hondurans from poorer towns north of here. Sergeantsville and Little York. They sit and stare silently beside their yellow front-loaders, ground flatteners and backhoes, their sleek private carsCamaros and Chevy lowridersparked around the corner, away from the dust and where it will be shady later on.

And suddenly the carillon at St. Leo the Great begins: gong, gong, gong, gong, gong, gong, then a sweet, bright admonitory matinal air by old Wesley himself: Wake the day, ye who would be saved, wake the day, let your souls be laved.

T hough all is not exactly kosher here, in spite of a good beginning. (When is anything exactly kosher?)

I myself, Frank Bascombe, was mugged on Coolidge Street, one street over, late in April, spiritedly legging it home from a closing at our realty office just at dusk, a sense of achievement lightening my step, still hoping to catch the evening news, a bottle of Roederera gift from a grateful seller Id made a bundle forunder my arm. Three young boys, one of whom I thought Id seen beforean Asianyet couldnt later name, came careering ziggy-zaggy down the sidewalk on minibikes, conked me in the head with a giant Pepsi bottle, and rode off howling. Nothing was stolen or broken, though I was knocked silly on the ground, and sat in the grass for ten minutes, unnoticed in a whirling daze.

Later, in early May, the Zumbros house and one other were burgled twice in the same week (they missed some things the first time and came back to get them).

And then, to all our bewilderment, Clair Devane, our one black agent, a woman I was briefly but intensely linked with two years ago, was murdered in May inside a condo she was showing out the Great Woods Road, near Hightstown: roped and tied, raped and stabbed. No good clues leftjust a pink while-you-were-out slip lying in the parquet entry, the message in her own looping hand: Luther family. Just started looking. Mid-90s. 3 p.m. Get key. Dinner with Eddie. Eddie was her fianc.

Plus, falling property values now ride through the trees like an odorless, colorless mist settling through the still air where all breathe it in, all sense it, though our new amenitiesthe new police cruisers, the new crosswalks, the trimmed tree branches, the buried electric, the refurbished band shell, the plans for the 4th of July paradedo what they civically can to ease our minds off worrying, convince us our worries arent worries, or at least not ours alone but everyonesno onesand that staying the course, holding the line, riding the cyclical nature of things are what this countrys all about, and thinking otherwise is to drive optimism into retreat, to be paranoid and in need of expensive treatment out-of-state.

And practically speaking, while bearing in mind that one event rarely causes another in a simple way, it must mean something to a town, to the local esprit , for its values on the open market to fall. (Why else would real estate prices be an index to the national well-being?) If, for instance, some otherwise healthy charcoal briquette firms stock took a nosedive, the company would react ASAP. Its people would stay at their desks an extra hour past dark (unless they were fired outright); men would go home more dog-tired than usual, carrying no flowers, would stand longer in the violet evening hours staring up at the tree limbs in need of trimming, would talk less kindly to their kids, would opt for an extra Pimms before dinner alone with the wife, then wake oddly at four with nothing much, but nothing good, in mind. Just restless.

And so it is in Haddam, where all around, our summer swoon notwithstanding, theres a new sense of a wild world being just beyond our perimeter, an untallied apprehension among our residents, one I believe theyll never get used to, one theyll die before accommodating.

A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things youll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself youll have to change your way of doing things. Only you dont. You cant. Somehow its already too late. And maybe its even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what youve feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, though we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only its too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life.

T his morning I am up early, in my upstairs office under the eaves, going over a listing logged in as an Exclusive just at closing last night, and for which I may already have willing buyers later today. Listings frequently appear in this unexpected, providential way: An owner belts back a few Manhattans, takes an afternoon trip around the yard to police up bits of paper blown from the neighbors garbage, rakes the last of the winters damp, fecund leaves from under the forsythia beneath which lies buried his old Dalmatian, Pepper, makes a close inspection of the hemlocks he and his wife planted as a hedge when they were young marrieds long ago, takes a nostalgic walk back through rooms hes painted, baths grouted far past midnight, along the way has two more stiff ones followed hard by a sudden great welling and suppressed hearts cry for a long-lost life we must all (if we care to go on living) let go of And boom: in two minutes more hes on the phone, interrupting some realtor from a quiet dinner at home, and in ten more minutes the whole deeds done. Its progress of a sort. (By lucky coincidence, my clients the Joe Markhams will have driven down from Vermont this very night, and conceivably I could complete the circuitlisting to salein a single days time. The record, not mine, is four minutes.)