by Richard Ford
I had walked as far as the base fence, which was across Tenth Avenue. Beyond it were apartments and the golf course where my father had taught lessons, and then the wide landing strip and the control tower and the flat low buildings of the base. Light was going out of the sky in the east. One jet took off as I watched, and the day seemed gray and over with. In an hour it would be full dark and much colder, and I would want to be at home.
On the side of the street toward town was a bar called the Mermaid, and cars were there, and on the roof was a neon sign with a green mermaid shining in the dull afternoon light. It was a place where airmen went, and my father had taken me there on the days he’d taught golf at the base. I knew what it was like inside there now, knew what color the light was, how the air smelled, knew the voices of the airmen–low and soft as if they knew secrets. As I walked past the bar a black Mercury drove in and parked, and the two Negroes I had seen fishing an hour ago, back in town, were inside. Their car, I saw, had a tag from another state–a yellow tag–and they were alone. The white girls who had been with them were gone, and the men were laughing as they got out. One put his long arm around the other man’s shoulders. ‘Oh, I couldn’t help it. No, no,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t help myself.’ They both laughed again, and the one who had talked looked at me and smiled as they walked past me, and said, ‘Don’t worry, son, we’re not going to kill anybody in here.’ Then they both laughed out loud and went inside the door to the Mermaid and disappeared.
And then I began to walk home. I had wanted to leave that day, but I saw that I couldn’t, because my parents were there still and I was too young. And even though I couldn’t help them by staying, we belonged together in some way I couldn’t change. I remembered as I walked through the cold evening toward the rising lights of Great Falls, a town that was not my home and never would be, that my mother had asked me in the middle of the night before if I had a plan for her. And I didn’t have a plan, though if I’d had one it would be that both of them could live longer than I would and be happier than I was. Death was less terrible at that moment than being alone, even though I was not alone and hoped I wouldn’t be, and even though it was a childish thought. I realized at that moment that I was crying and didn’t know I was, wouldn’t have guessed it. I was only walking home, I thought, trying to think about things, all the things in my life, just as they were.
Chapter 6
When I got home it was dark. The moon had gone behind clouds and I was cold as I came up the walk because I had not dressed warmly. Lights were on in our house, and up and down our street. Tiny mists of snow, the first snow of the year, were drifting onto the yard. It would not stay long, I guessed, though I didn’t know when winter truly started.
My mother was sitting on the couch–in the middle of it–in the living room, playing a card game by herself. It was a game I had seen her play before and it required two decks. She’d learned it in college. She was dressed the way she had been that morning–her white blouse with a white bow, a brown skirt and high heels. She looked nice to me. She was sitting on the front edge of the couch, with the cards laid out on the low coffee table, and her knees to the side. She looked like somebody who was going somewhere.
She looked up and smiled when I came inside and shut the door. She had half of the cards in her hand. I did not see a drink anywhere.
‘Where have you been till after dark,’ she said, ‘and half undressed on top of that?’
‘I went to work,’ I said. It was another lie, but I didn’t think it mattered and didn’t want to say I had walked as far as the air base.
‘Did you go to school?’ she said, still looking at me.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Well, you can later, I guess. I thought you might go after lunch.’
‘Where were you today?’ I said. I sat down on the chair that was beside the TV. My arms were cold, but it was warm inside. I wondered what there was in the house to eat. I had forgotten about eating.
‘I went to the Helen,’ she said. ‘Then I had some other things to do.’
‘Are you going to rent one of those?’ I said.
My mother divided the cards she was holding into two stacks and put one on top of the other. ‘I paid some out on one this morning,’ she said. ‘It seemed nice. You’d like it.’
‘Did you see Warren Miller?’
My mother put her cards down and sat back on the couch and looked at me. ‘I’m waiting for your father to come home,’ she said. And this was no surprise. I’d thought my father would be home that day if he wasn’t dead. He hadn’t said so, but it was just something I knew about both of them–the intervals it took them to do things. I knew them that well. ‘Did you happen,’ my mother said, ‘to find a pair of striped socks anywhere in this house today?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Well.’ She smiled. ‘Have you eaten anything?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But I’m hungry.’
‘I’d fix something,’ she said. Then she looked around at the clock that was beside the door to the kitchen. ‘I’ll fix something in a little while,’ she said. ‘Your father’s coming in a cab. I thought you might be him driving up.’
I looked out the window behind me and saw only the snow seeming to dance in a new wind, and the empty sidewalk, and the lights in the houses across Eighth Street. I thought our car must be in the garage now, and that my mother had been at Warren Miller’s house all day. Maybe she had been to the Helen Apartments for an hour, but she had gone to Warren’s after that. She didn’t care if I knew it. She may have felt like she had slipped off the world and, while we waited for my father to arrive, been waiting to hit the ground again. There was a way in which I felt that, too, and felt sorry for her.
‘It snowed up there where they were today,’ she said quietly. ‘And now it’s snowing down here.’ It was just a thing to say, to make waiting not be uncomfortable.
‘I know it,’ I said.
‘Did you think your father would be injured?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I hoped he wouldn’t be.’
‘Me too,’ my mother said. ‘That’s the truth.’ She folded her arms and looked across the room at the front windows. ‘I have passion for him. I feel that. But I don’t feel I have the way to express it now. I guess that’s it. That’s the problem.’ She ran her fingers back through her brown hair and cleared her throat. I could see she had a little mark on her neck, like a little bruise, something she touched with her finger without realizing it. ‘Events can maroon you more than people can. I know that,’ she said, and breathed out. ‘Do you feel that way, Joe? Don’t you feel marooned out here?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t.’
‘That’s good,’ my mother said. ‘I guess you have a lot to look forward to.’
She stood up. She was watching out the front window. She brushed her hand over the front of her skirt and pushed her hair back again. I looked at her, then looked around. Outside at the curb beyond our wooden fence was a yellow cab, its red roof light shining in the snowy evening. The interior light was on, and I could see the driver turned back, talking to someone who I knew was my father. I saw my father’s hand with money in it and saw the driver laugh at something they were saying. Then the back door opened and my father got out, holding the gladstone bag he’d left with. It seemed like a long time ago to me.
‘Well. There comes the firefighter,’ my mother said. She was standing, looking out the porch window from in front of the couch. She had her arms crossed and was standing very straight.
I got up out of my chair and opened the front door. The porch light was on. I went down the steps to meet my father, who was halfway up the walk, and put my arms around him. He looked larger than he had two days ago, and he was smiling. His black hair had been cut short and his face was dirty and unshaven. He put his bag down and put his arms around me. He had on a heavy canvas shirt and canvas pants and black logger’s boots, and when my face was against his clothes what he smelled like was ashes and thin
gs that had been burned. His shirt was stiff and dirty and rough against my face. I heard the cab drive away. He put his hand on my neck, and it was cold and hard. ‘It started to snow,’ he said, ‘so they sent the smart people home. How are you doing down here?’ His voice seemed clipped, and he hugged me again, harder. It seemed silly in a way, because he had not been gone very long.
‘That’s good,’ I said.
‘Is your mother still walking on her lip?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I held on to him a moment. ‘I don’t know,’ I said again.
‘Well, we’ll have to see, I guess,’ he said. He picked up his bag. ‘Let’s get out of the snow. You’d think we were in Montana here.’ We walked, the two of us, up the porch steps and into the house, where it was warm and the lights were all turned on and my mother was waiting.
She was sitting back on the couch facing the front door, where she’d been when I came home, though she was not playing cards. The cards were all in two decks in front of her on the table. She smiled at him when we came in, but she didn’t stand up. And I knew that surprised him. It was not what he thought would happen, and it must have let him down and let him know that something was not usual.
‘How was the fire?’ was all my mother said. ‘Did you put it out?’
‘No,’ my father said. He was smiling. I think he must’ve known he was.
‘I could’ve guessed,’ she said. And then she smiled at him again, and got up off the couch and came across the living room and kissed him, put her hands on his arms and kissed him on the cheek. I was standing right beside them. When she had kissed him she said, ‘I’m glad to see you back, Jerry. Joe is, too.’ Then she walked away from him and me, and sat back down on the couch.
‘I feel like I’ve been gone a long time,’ my father said.
‘Three days is all,’ my mother said. She looked as if she was still smiling, but she wasn’t. ‘Have you eaten any dinner?’
‘No,’ my father said, ‘but I’m not hungry.’ He stood for a moment holding his black suitcase. I thought one of them would tell me to leave the room, to go do something for myself, but they didn’t. And I just stood beside the front door feeling a draft seep in over the sill and across my ankles.
‘Why don’t you sit down?’ my mother said. ‘You must be tired. You must’ve seen a lot of different things.’
‘I don’t know who I’m waiting to impress here,’ my father said, and set his bag down behind the front door and sat where I had been sitting, in the armchair beside the television. I could see him better. He moved stiffly. The backs of his hands were hard, as if they had been baked, and I could still smell the ash smell that was on him. It was a smell I hadn’t associated with a person before I had smelled it at the cafe where my mother and I had eaten two nights before.
‘You don’t have to impress me,’ my mother said. ‘That’s for sure.’
‘Did you think I’d be killed?’ my father said.
‘I hoped you wouldn’t be,’ my mother said. She smiled at him then in a way to make you think she liked him. ‘We’d have been disappointed here at home,’ she said. ‘Will the fire ever go out?’
My father looked at his hands, where they were red and sore-looking. ‘It’ll smoke and smolder on for a long time. It’s hard to put out.’
‘I had a mystical feeling while you were gone,’ my mother said, and I could see her relax a little. I thought that maybe things were going to be fine now, and there wouldn’t be trouble. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that maybe the whole fire was a thing not to be put out at all. And you men just–everybody–went there to invigorate yourselves.’
‘That’s not exactly right,’ my father said. He looked up at me. His eyes were red and small and tired. But he looked fine, and maybe he was invigorated the way my mother had said. There didn’t seem anything wrong with that. ‘It takes you outside yourself is what it does,’ he said. ‘You see everything from outside. You’re up against so big a thing out there.’ He looked up at me again and at my mother, and he blinked his eyes. ‘Everything seems arbitrary. You step outside your life and everything seems like something you choose. Nothing seems very natural. It’s probably hard to understand. I saw flames a hundred feet high suddenly just turn sideways like a blowtorch. Just go out of kilter. A man got blown off his horse just from air blowing past him.’ My father shivered, as though a fright had passed through him. And he shook his head quickly as if he wanted to shake a picture out of it.
‘That’s awful,’ my mother said.
‘I feel strange now,’ my father said. ‘But I’m glad to be home.’
‘I’m glad you came,’ my mother said. She looked at me in a way I thought was confused. She was making a decision. And though I knew what I wished she would decide, I didn’t have the nerve to say so, to try to help her. They had things to say to each other that I had nothing to do with. ‘How did it all start?’ she said then. ‘Do they know how that happened?’
‘Arson,’ my father said, and sat back in his chair. ‘A man did it. I wouldn’t want to be him. Somebody’ll kill him, I know that. It may have been an Indian.’
‘Why would you think that?’ my mother said.
‘I just don’t like them,’ my father said. ‘They leave their own behind, and they’re secretive. I don’t like to trust them.’
‘I see,’ my mother said.
‘What about school?’ my father said to me then, and turned toward me. He seemed to need to turn his whole body when he did. Probably he had been sleeping on the ground, is what I thought, and ached from it.
‘He’s doing fine at that,’ my mother said before I could answer. I think she didn’t want me to lie to him, and she knew that I was about to. The truth wouldn’t have helped anything then.
‘That’s good.’ My father smiled at me. ‘I guess I haven’t been gone that long, have I?’
‘You’ve been gone long enough,’ my mother said. And for a moment neither of them said anything.
‘A man talked to me today about a job with the Forestry. The foresters,’ my father said. He was not paying much attention to my mother. He was feeling better about things, I think. ‘A college degree is a plus with them. Experience isn’t so important. They’ll provide us a house up in Choteau.’
‘Jerry, I have something I have to tell you,’ my mother said. She sat forward on the edge of the couch, with her knees together and her hands on her skirt. My father stopped talking about the Forestry and looked at her. He could tell something was important, though I don’t think he had any idea what it might be. That my mother would leave him was the last thing he could’ve had on his mind. I think he might’ve thought things were going to be better. He had a right to think that, really.
‘Tell me what it is, Jean,’ he said. ‘I’m just running on here. I’m sorry.’
‘I’m going to move into another place. I’m going to move in tomorrow,’ my mother said, and her voice seemed louder than it needed to be. She looked as though she had just said something she hadn’t understood herself, and that had scared her. It is probably not how she thought she would feel.
‘What do you mean by that?’ my father said. ‘What in the world?’ He was staring at her.
‘It’s a surprise, I know,’ my mother said. ‘I’m surprised myself.’ She had not moved, had kept her knees together and her hands very still on her lap.
‘Are you crazy?’ my father said.
‘No,’ my mother said very quietly. ‘I don’t think I am.’
My father suddenly turned and looked out the front window. It was as if he thought someone was there, outside on the porch or in the yard or the street, watching him, somebody he could have reference to, somebody who could give him an idea about what was happening to him. The street was empty, of course. Snow was coming down through the streetlamp light.
He turned and looked at my mother again, quickly. He had forgotten about me. They both had. My father’s face was pale.
‘I’m coming down with som
ething,’ he said, and he clenched his fist on the arm of the chair. ‘Probably a cold.’ My mother just stared at him. ‘Are you stepping out on me?’ he said. He tapped his fist on the chair arm as if he was nervous.
My mother looked at me. Maybe she didn’t even want to have to go through with anything now. But she had gone too far, and I don’t think she saw any choice. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Yes. I am.’
‘Who is it?’ my father said.
‘Oh, just somebody I like,’ my mother said.
‘Somebody from the country club?’ my father said. He was getting furious, and my mother must’ve felt she couldn’t stop it now.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But that’s not what it’s about. That’s just a circumstance.’
‘I know that,’ my father said. ‘I believe that.’ He got up and walked around the room. It was as if he wanted to hear his feet hit the floor, hear the loud noise his boots made on the wood. He walked around behind the couch, then back into the middle of the room. I could smell him, the ashy smell, and I knew my mother could too. Then he sat back down in the chair by the television.
‘I don’t know what makes life hold together at all,’ he said. He did not seem as mad now, only very unhappy. I felt sorry for him.
‘I know,’ my mother said. ‘I don’t either. I’m sorry.’
My father squeezed his hands together tightly in front of him. ‘What in the hell are you thinking about, Jean?’ He looked up at me then. ‘I don’t even care who it is.’ He said this to me, for some reason.
‘It’s Warren Miller,’ my mother said flatly.
‘Well, good for him then,’ my father said.
‘Your attitude toward things changes,’ my mother said.
‘I know that,’ my father said. ‘I’m aware of that.’
My mother put her hands down beside her on the couch. It was the first time she had moved in several minutes. She must’ve thought the worst part of this time was over with, and it’s possible that for her it was.
‘I don’t want you to be mad at me,’ my father said, ‘just because I went to a fire. Do you understand?’