by Richard Ford
The job I found was in the photographer’s studio on Third Avenue. It was a place that took airmen’s photographs, and engagement and class pictures, and what I did was clean up when school was over, replace bulbs in the photographer’s lamps, and rearrange the backdrops and posing furniture for the next day.
I finished with that work by five o’clock, and sometimes I would walk home past the YWCA and slip through the back door and down into the long tiled pool room where my mother taught her classes of adults until five, and from five to six was free to teach privately and be paid for it. I would stand at the far end behind the tiers of empty bleachers and watch her, hear her voice, which seemed happy and lively, encouraging and giving instruction. She would stand on the side in her black bathing suit, her skin pale, and make swimming motions with her arms for her students standing in the shallow water. Mostly they were old women, and old men with speckled bald heads. From time to time they ducked their faces into the water and made the swimming motions my mother made–slow, jerky grasps–without really swimming or ever moving, just staying still, standing and pretending. ‘It’s so easy,’ I would hear my mother say in her bright voice, her arms working the thick air as she talked. ‘Don’t be afraid of it. It’s all fun. Think about all you’ve missed.’ She’d smile at them when their faces were up, dripping and blinking, some of them coughing. And she would say, ‘Watch me now.’ Then she’d pull down her bathing cap, point her hands over her head to a peak, bend her knees and dive straight in, coasting for a moment, then breaking the surface and swimming with her arms bent and her fingers together, cutting the water in easy reaching motions to the far side and back again. The old people–ranchers, I thought, and the divorced wives of farmers–watched her in envy and silence. And I watched, thinking as I did that someone else who saw my mother, not me or my father, but someone who had never seen her before, would think something different. They would think: ‘Here is a woman whose life is happy’; or ‘Here is a woman with a nice figure to her credit’; or ‘Here is a woman I wish I could know better, though I never will.’ And I thought to myself that my father was not a stupid man, and that love was permanent, even though sometimes it seemed to recede and leave no trace at all.
On the first Tuesday in October, the day before the World Series began, my father came back to the house after dark. It was chill and dry outside, and when he came in the back door his eyes were bright and his face was flushed and he seemed as if he had been running.
‘Look who’s here now,’ my mother said, though in a nice way. She was cutting tomatoes at the sink board and looked around at him and smiled.
‘I’ve got to pack a bag,’ my father said. ‘I won’t have dinner here tonight, Jean.’ He went straight back to their room. I was sitting beside the radio waiting to turn on some baseball news, and I could hear him opening a closet door and shoving coat hangers.
My mother looked at me, then she spoke toward the hallway in a calm voice. ‘Where are you going, Jerry?’ She was holding a paring knife in her hand.
‘I’m going to that fire,’ my father said loudly from the bedroom. He was excited. ‘I’ve been waiting for my chance. I just heard thirty minutes ago that there’s a place. I know it’s unexpected.’
‘Do you know anything about fires?’ My mother kept watching the empty doorway as if my father was standing in it. ‘I know about them,’ she said. ‘My father was an estimator. Do you remember that?’
‘I had to make some contacts in town,’ my father said. I knew he was sitting on the bed putting on different shoes. The overhead light was on and his bag was out. ‘It’s not easy to get this job.’
‘Did you hear me?’ my mother said. She had an impatient look on her face. ‘I said you don’t know anything about fires. You’ll get burned up.’ She looked at the back door, which he’d left partway open, but she didn’t go to close it.
‘I’ve been reading about fires in the library,’ my father said. He came down the hall and went into the bathroom, where he turned on the light and opened the medicine cabinet. ‘I think I know enough not to get killed.’
‘Could you have said something to me about this?’ my mother said.
I heard the medicine cabinet close and my father stepped into the kitchen doorway. He looked different. He looked like he was sure that he was right.
‘I should’ve done that,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t.’ He had his shaving bag in his hand.
‘You’re not going out there.’ My mother looked at my father across the kitchen, across over my head in fact, and seemed to smile. ‘This is a stupid idea,’ she said, and shook her head.
‘No it’s not,’ my father said.
‘It isn’t your business,’ my mother said, and pulled up the front of her blue apron and wiped her hands on it, though I don’t think her hands were wet. She was nervous. ‘You don’t have to do this. I’m working now.’
‘I know you are,’ my father said. He turned and went back into the bedroom. I wanted to move from where I was but I didn’t know where a better place was to be, because I wanted to hear what they would say. ‘We’re going to dig firebreaks up there,’ he said from the bedroom. I heard the locks on his bag snap closed. He appeared again in the doorway, holding a gladstone bag, a bag his father had given him when he had gone away to college. ‘You’re not in any danger,’ he said.
‘I might die while you’re gone,’ my mother said. She sat down at the metal table and stared at him. She was angry. Her mouth looked hardened. ‘You have a son here,’ she said.
‘This won’t be for very long,’ my father said. ‘It’ll snow pretty soon, and that’ll be that.’ He looked at me. ‘What do you think, Joe? Is this a bad idea?’
‘No,’ I said. And I said it too fast, without thinking what it meant to my mother.
‘You’d do it, wouldn’t you?’ my father said.
‘Will you like it if your father gets burned up out there, and you never see him again?’ my mother said to me. ‘Then you and I go straight to hell together. How will that be?’
‘Don’t say that, Jean,’ my father said. He put his bag on the kitchen table and came and knelt beside my mother and tried to put his arms around her. But she got up from her chair and walked back to where she had been cutting tomatoes and picked up the knife and pointed it at him, where he was still kneeling beside the empty chair.
‘I’m a grown woman,’ she said, and she was very angry now. ‘Why don’t you act like a grown man, Jerry?’
‘You can’t explain everything,’ my father said.
‘I can explain everything,’ my mother said. She put the knife down and walked out the kitchen door and into the bedroom, the one she had not been sleeping in with my father, and closed the door behind her.
My father looked at me from where he was, still beside her chair. ‘I guess my judgment’s no good now,’ he said. ‘Is that what you think, Joe?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think it is.’
And I thought his judgment was good, and that going to fight the fire was a good idea even though he might go and get killed because he knew nothing about it. But I did not want to say all of that to him because of how it would make him feel.
My father and I walked from home in the dark down to the Masonic Temple on Central. A yellow Cascade County school bus was parked at the corner of Ninth, and men were standing in groups waiting to go. Some of the men were bums. I could tell by their shoes and their coats. Though some were just regular men who were out of work, I thought, from other jobs. Three women who were going waited together under the streetlight. And inside the bus, in the dark, I could see Indians were in some of the seats. I could see their round faces, their slick hair, the tint of light off their eyeglasses in the darkness. No one would get in with them, and some men were drinking. I could smell whiskey in the night air.
My father put his bag on a stack of bags beside the bus, then came and stood next to me. Inside the Masonic Temple–which had high steps up to a glass center door–all t
he lights were on. Several men inside were looking out. One, who was the man I had seen with my father in the Jack ’n Jill, held a clipboard and was talking to an Indian man beside him. My father gestured to him.
‘People categorize other people,’ my father said. ‘But you shouldn’t do that. They should teach you that in school.’
I looked at the men around me. Most of them were not dressed warmly enough and were shifting from foot to foot. They looked like men used to work, though they did not seem glad to be going to fight a fire at night. None of them looked like my father, who seemed eager.
‘What will you do out there?’ I said.
‘Work on a fire line,’ my father said. ‘They dig trenches the fire won’t cross. I don’t know much more, to tell you the truth.’ He put his hands in his jacket pockets and blew down into his shirt. ‘I’ve got this hum in my head now. I need to do something about it.’
‘I understand,’ I said.
‘Tell your mother I didn’t mean to make her mad.’
‘I will,’ I said.
‘We don’t want to wake up in our coffins, though, do we? That’d be a rude surprise.’ He put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me close to him and squeezed me and laughed an odd little laugh, as if the idea had actually given him a scare. He looked across Central Avenue at the Pheasant Lounge, the place I had seen him go into the week before. On the red neon sign over the door a big cock pheasant was busting up into the night air, its wings stretched into the darkness–escaping. Some men waiting at the Masonic Temple had begun to go across the street into the bar. ‘I’m only thinking about right this minute now,’ he said. He squeezed my shoulder again, then put his hands back into his jacket pockets. ‘Aren’t you cold?’
‘I’m a little cold,’ I said.
‘Then go back home,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to watch me get on a bus. It might be a long time. Your mother’s probably thinking about you.’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘She doesn’t need to get mad at you. She’s mad enough at me.’
I looked at my father. I tried to see his face in the streetlight. He was smiling and looking at me, and I think he was happy for that moment, happy for me to be with him, happy that he was going to a fire now to risk whatever he cared about risking. It seemed strange to me, though, that he could be a man who played golf for a living and then one day become a man who fought forest fires. But it’s what was happening, and I thought I would get used to it.
‘Are you too old now to give your old dad a kiss?’ my father said. ‘Men love each other, too. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. And he took my cheeks in his hands and kissed me on the mouth, and squeezed my face. His breath smelled sweet to me and his face was rough.
‘Don’t let what your parents do disappoint you,’ he said.
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I won’t.’ I felt afraid then for some reason, and I thought if I stayed there I would show him that I was, so I turned around and started back up Central in the dark and the growing cold. When I got to the corner I turned to wave good-bye. But my father was not in sight, and I thought that he had already gotten onto the bus and was waiting in his seat among the Indians.
Chapter 3
When I got home the lights were still on in our house. My mother was watching television in her bedroom, still dressed, and drinking a glass of beer. When I came in the door she looked at me as if I was my father and whatever she thought about him she thought about me, too.
‘Is he gone off to fight the big fire now?’ she said. She was almost casual in the way she said this. She reached and put down her glass on the bed table.
‘He got on a bus,’ I said.
‘Just like a school-boy,’ she said. She looked at her glass of beer.
‘He told me he hadn’t intended to cause any trouble.’
‘I’m sure it’s true,’ my mother said. ‘He has very beautiful intentions. What’s your opinion?’
‘I think it’s all right,’ I said.
My mother reached for her glass and took a drink out of it and shook her head while she swallowed. ‘What about me?’ she said, and rested her glass on her stomach. People on the television were laughing. A fat man was running around a small man and being chased by a dog. I didn’t feel comfortable being in the room at that moment. ‘Maybe he’s going to leave me. Maybe we’re on our own right now.’
‘I don’t think he’s going to do that,’ I said.
‘We haven’t been very intimate lately. You might as well hear that.’
I did not say anything.
‘You probably think I’m making too big a deal out of this, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know what you’re thinking,’ I said.
‘Nobody really wants to please you, that’s all.’ She shook her head as if it was almost a joke. ‘That’s all. They want to please themselves. If you’re happy with that, then everything’s great. If you aren’t, too bad. That’s important,’ my mother said. ‘It’s the key to everything.’ She put her head back on the pillow and stared up at the light globe in the ceiling. ‘Happiness. Sadness. The works. You’re happy if–’
Just at that moment the phone started to ring in the kitchen. I turned to go answer it, but my mother said, ‘Let’s don’t answer that.’ The phone kept ringing, loud and with a hard metal sound where it sat on the table, as if something urgent was waiting to be said by whoever was calling. But we were not going to hear it. I must’ve looked nervous because my mother smiled at me, a smile she had smiled at me all my life. ‘Who do you think it is?’ she said. The phone quit ringing and the house was completely silent except for the TV.
‘Maybe it was Dad,’ I said.
‘Maybe it was,’ she said.
‘It could’ve been a wrong number, too,’ I said, though I thought the phone call was my father and I felt afraid because I hadn’t answered it.
‘We’ll never know now,’ my mother said. ‘But. What I was saying.’ She took a last drink of her beer. ‘You’re happy if the thing you naturally want makes the other person happy. If it’s not that way, then I don’t know. I guess you’re in limbo.’
‘Where’s that?’ I said, because I had never heard that word before.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s the place where nobody wants to be. It’s the middle where you can’t feel the sides and nothing happens. Like now.’
For a moment I felt the phone was about to start ringing again, felt a current go through the lines of the house, as if the lines were part of me, alive and surging with a message. But it didn’t ring, and the feeling in me died out.
‘Tomorrow might be a better day,’ my mother said. ‘Now’s not so hot.’ She reached and turned off the lamp beside her bed. ‘Turn off my light, Joe,’ she said. I switched off the overhead light. ‘And go to bed, too,’ she said, lying there in her clothes in the light from the television. ‘Something’ll happen to make things seem different.’
‘I hope so,’ I said.
My mother turned over and faced the wall. I thought she went to sleep at that instant, because she didn’t say anything else to me. And I went to my room down the hall, and in a short time afterward I went to sleep myself.
The next day I went to school as I would on any other day, but my mother told me as I was leaving that she was going out that morning to look for a better job than teaching swimming classes.
‘I don’t want to be poor,’ she said. She was standing at the bathroom sink in her petticoat, putting black pins in her hair. ‘We might have to move into a smaller place,’ she said. ‘I thought of that. Would you mind that?’
‘I think Dad will be back,’ I said.
‘Do you?’ she said. ‘Is that your best opinion on the subject?’ She looked at me where I was in the hall, holding my coat and my school books under my arm. It was warm in the house. The bathroom heater was turned up high, and I could see the little blue flames.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is.’ I was surprised she w
as thinking about these changes already.
‘Fine. I’ll remember that,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ She glanced at me with pins in her mouth and her hands in her hair, and nodded. ‘You’re a very trusting boy. You wouldn’t be a very good lawyer. You don’t want to be a lawyer, though, do you?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘What do you want to be?’
This was something we had not precisely talked about for a long time, and I did not have my answer ready. ‘I’d like to work on a railroad someplace,’ I said.
‘That’s not very good,’ my mother said. ‘You have to find a better profession. When you come back today have a better answer.’ My mother looked at herself in the mirror. ‘We went to college,’ she said. ‘Your father and I both. But you wouldn’t know it.’ She stared at herself, wrinkled her nose. ‘Handsome is as handsome does, I guess,’ she said. ‘You’re wasting your life standing here watching me, sweetheart. Go to school.’ And I went to school just as she said.
When I came back home at three o’clock–it was not a day that I worked at the photographer’s studio–there was a car parked across the street from our house, a pink, four-door Oldsmobile I did not know, and a man was in our living room, a man I did not know either.
The man stood up when I came in the front door. He and my mother had been sitting in chairs, not very close together. My mother’s hair was fixed with the black pins she had been putting in that morning, and the man had on a suit and a tie. It was still warm in the house and they were both drinking bottles of beer. My mother had her shoes off and was in her stocking feet.