Free Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford Page A

way up. On the screen a beefy, barrel-shaped man in camo gear—face smudged with self-eliminating paint, and seated in a camo’d wheelchair—was just at that moment squeezing off, from an enormously-scoped, lethally-short-barreled black rifle propped on some kind of dousing stick, a terrible bullet aimed in the direction of a gigantic bull elk, possibly two thousand yards away across a pristine, echoing Valhalla-like mountainscape.
    BOOM!
    The entire mountain—plus my living room and the vaulted sky above it—quaked, then went deaf at the awful sound.
    BOOM! Again the terrible report. The sun went dark,avalanches broke free, tiny sylvan creatures beside faraway alpine rills looked guardedly toward the heavens.
    The elk—grazing, calm, thinking who-knows-what elk thoughts—suddenly went all weird and knee-wiggly, as if its parts had simultaneously resigned their roles. After which, in exactly one second, its head rose slightly as though it had heard something (it had), then it went right over like a candlepin into the dust-burst the bullet had kicked up, having passed straight through the creature as if it was butter.
    â€œWooo-hooo-hooo-hooo! Woooooo!” a man’s voice somewhere out of the picture began woo-hooing. “Ooooh man , oh man, oh man!”
    â€œI am a deadly motherfucker,” the wheelchair marksman said (I could read his lips), his rifle across his unfeeling knees. He turned toward whoever was woo-hooing, a great crazed smile on his fat camo face. “It doesn’t get any better than this, does it, Arlo? Does it? Oh sweet Jesus . . .”
    I quick ditched the Naipaul onto the couch, got my hands on the clicker, and doused the picture. I’d earlier been watching the NFL injury rundown, hoping to see if the Giants had a snowball’s chance against the Falcons on Sunday. They didn’t.
    My house’s interior, absent the ear-warping TV clamor, became, then, intergalactically silent. And still. Like a room a security camera was guarding—a secret view for a stranger’ssecret purposes. I often imagine myself as “a figure” in an elevator, being viewed through the grainy lens of just such a secreted camera. Mute. Unmindful. Generic—waiting for my floor, then the door opening, and (in my imagining) a hooded man stepping in before I can step out, and beginning to berate me or pummel me or shoot me at close range. (I watch too much television.) The head shrinkers at Mayo—where I get my prostate re-checks—would have a field day with my data set. There’s a side to this little drama that doesn’t make me look good, I realize—not someone you’d trust to run a day care or even a dog rescue.
    Though shouldn’t our complex mental picture of ourselves at least partly include such a neutralized view? Not just the image that smiles wryly back from the shaving mirror; but the solitary trudger glimpsed in the shop window, shoulders slumped, hairline backing away, neck flesh lapping, bent as if by winds—shuffling down the street to buy the USA Today ? Is that person not worth keeping in mind and paid a modicum? If not a round of huzzahs, at least a tip of the hat? A high five (or at least a low one)? I don’t share every view with Sally, who’d shout the rafters down with laughter if she knew all my innermost thoughts.
    â€œMy goodness,” Ms. Pines said from behind me, inside the tiny foyer now—my silent house’s primordial self suddenly all around her in a way anyone would find startling. It’s toobad we don’t let ourselves in for more unexpected moments. Life would be less flimsy, feel more worth preserving. The suburbs are supposedly where nothing happens, like Auden said about what poetry doesn’t do; an over-inhabited faux terrain dozing in inertia, occasionally disrupted by “a Columbine” or “an Oklahoma City” or a hurricane to remind us what’s