Independence Day by Richard Ford Read Free Book Online Page A

watered to a fare-thee-well are scrawny and dry and brown and probably rotten at the roots. I lean around and take a quick look down the fenced side yard between houses. Pink and blue hydrangeas are barely blooming along the foundation walls where they conceal the gas and water meters, and both areas seem deserted and unused, inviting to a burglar.
    I ring the bell again, suddenly conscious that no one’s answering and that I’ll have to come back after the weekend, when the rent will be more in arrears and possibly in jeopardy of being forgotten. Ever since I became the owner here, I’ve wondered if I shouldn’t just move out of my house on Cleveland—put it up for sale—and transfer into my rental unit as a cost-cutting, future-securing measure, and as a way of putting my money where my mouth is in the human-relations arena. Eventually the McLeods would take off out of pure dislike for me, and I could then locate new tenants to be my neighbors (possibly a Hmong family to spice the mix). Though under current market stresses my house on Cleveland could conceivably sit empty for months, after which I could get lowballed and sustain a major whomping—even acting as my own agent and carrying the paper. Whereas, on the other hand, finding a quality, short-term renter for a larger house like mine, even in Haddam, is a tricky proposition and rarely works out happily.
    I ring the doorbell one more time, stand back to the top of the steps, listen for sounds within—footfalls, a back door closing, a muffled voice, the sound of kids’ bare feet running. But nothing. This has happened before. Someone’s, of course, inside, but no one’s answering, and short of using my landlord’s key or calling the police and saying I’m “worried” about the inhabitants, I have nothing to do but fold my tents and come again, possibly later in the day.
    B ack up on busy Seminary Street, I park in front of the Lauren-Schwindell building and make a fast turn through the office, where the usual holiday realty-office languor hangs over the still-empty desks, blank Real-trom consoles and copy machines. Almost everyone, including the younger agents, has stood steadfastly in bed an extra hour, pretending the holiday exodus means no one’s doing any real business and that anybody who needs to can just jolly well call them at home. Only Everick and Wardell are glimpsable, passing in and out of the back storage room, the outside door to the parking lot left standing open. They’re returning FOR SALE signs retrieved from the ditches and woodlots where our local teenagers toss them once they’re tired of having them on their walls at home or when their mothers won’t stand for it any longer. (We offer a no-questions-asked, three-dollar “capture fee” for every one brought in, and Everick and Wardell—grave-faced, gangly, beanpole bachelor twins in their late fifties, who are lifelong Haddamites and oddly enough Trenton State graduates—have made a science out of knowing exactly where to search.) The Lewises, who I usually find impossible to tell apart, live around the corner from my two rentals in a duplex left them by their parents, and in fact are tight-fisted, no-nonsense landlords in their own right, owning a block of senior-citizen units in Neshanic, from which they enjoy a nice profit. Yet they still work part-time for the agency and regularly do minor upkeep chores for me on Clio Street, duties they perform with a severe, distinctly put-upon efficiency that might make someone out of the know conclude they resented me. Though that is not at all the case, since they have both told me on more than one occasion that by being born in Mississippi, even with all the heavy baggage that brings along, I naturally possess a truer instinct for members of their race than any white northerner could ever approximate. This is, of course, not one bit true, though theirs is an old-style racial stationlessness that forever causes baseless “verities”