3. Middle-aged men—Fiction. 4. Divorced men—Fiction. I. Title.

ps3556.0713l39 2006

813'.54—dc22 2006025570

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Ford, Richard, date.

The lay of the land / Richard Ford.

ISBN-13: 978-0-676-97248-1

ISBN-10: 0-676-97248-9

I. Title

PS3556.0713L39 2006 813'.54 C2006-902587-8

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents cither are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition

KRISTINA

The Lay of the Land 2 Richard Ford

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[Natheriel]

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[Natherial]

T HE L AY OF THE L AN D 3

Are You Ready to Meet Your Maker?

Last week, I read in the Asbury Press a story … that has come to sting me like a nettle. In one sense, it was the usual kind of news item we read every a.m., feel a deep, if not a wide, needle of shock, then horror about, stare off to the heavens for a long moment, until the eye shifts back to different matters—celebrity birthdays, sports briefs, obits, new realty offerings—which tug us on to other concerns, and by mid-morning we’ve forgotten.

But, under the stunted headline tex nursing deaths, the story detailed an otherwise-normal day in the nursing department at San Ysidro State Teachers College (Paloma Playa campus) in south Texas.

A disgruntled nursing student (these people are always men) entered a building through the front door, proceeded to the classroom where he was supposed to be in attendance and where a test he was supposed to be taking was in progress—rows of student heads all bent to their business. The teacher, Professor Sandra McCurdy, was staring out the window, thinking about who knows what—a pedicure, a fishing trip she would be taking with her husband of twenty-one years, her health.

The course, as flat-footed, unsubtle fate would have it, was called

“Dying and Death: Ethics, Aesthetics, Proleptics”—something nurses need to know about.

Don-Houston Clevinger, the disgruntled student—a Navy vet and father of two—had already done poorly on the midterm and was probably headed for a bad grade and a ticket home to McAllen. This Clevinger entered the quiet, reverent classroom of test takers, walked among the desks and toward the front to where Ms. McCurdy stood, arms folded, musing out the window, possibly smiling. And he said to her, raising a Glock 9-mm to within six inches of the space just above the mid-point between her eyes, he said, “Are you ready to meet your Maker?” To which Ms. McCurdy, who was forty-six and a better than average teacher and canasta player, and who’d been a flight nurse in Desert Storm, replied, blinking her periwinkle eyes in curiosity only twice, “Yes. Yes, I think I am.” Whereupon this Clevinger shot her, turned around slowly to address the astonished nurses-to-be and shot himself in approximately the same place.

4 Richard Ford

I was sitting down when I began to read this—in my glassed-in living room overlooking the grassy dune, the beach and the Atlantic’s somnolent shingle. I was actually feeling pretty good about things. It was seven o’clock on a Thursday morning, the week before Thanksgiving.