Rock Springs

by Richard Ford

  I took a drink and gave the bottle back to him, holding the whiskey in my mouth until it stopped burning and I could swallow it a little at a time. When we turned out the road to Highwood, the lights of Great Falls sank below the horizon, and I could see the small white lights of farms, burning at wide distances in the dark.

  “What do you worry about, Jackie,” my father said. “Do you worry about girls? Do you worry about your future sex life? Is that some of it?” He glanced at me, then back at the road.

  “I don’t worry about that,” I said.

  “Well, what then?” my father said. “What else is there?”

  “I worry if you’re going to die before I do,” I said, though I hated saying that, “or if Mother is. That worries me.”

  “It’d be a miracle if we didn’t,” my father said, with the half-pint held in the same hand he held the steering wheel. I had seen him drive that way before. “Things pass too fast in your life, Jackie. Don’t worry about that. If I were you, I’d worry we might not.” He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don’t remember him ever smiling at me that way again.

  We drove on out behind the town of Highwood and onto the flat field roads toward our house. I could see, out on the prairie, a moving light where the farmer who rented our house to us was disking his field for winter wheat. “He’s waited too late with that business,” my father said and took a drink, then threw the bottle right out the window. “He’ll lose that,” he said, “the cold’ll kill it.” I did not answer him, but what I thought was that my father knew nothing about farming, and if he was right it would be an accident. He knew about planes and hunting game, and that seemed all to me.

  “I want to respect your privacy,” he said then, for no reason at all that I understood. I am not even certain he said it, only that it is in my memory that way. I don’t know what he was thinking of. Just words. But I said to him, I remember well, “It’s all right. Thank you.”

  We did not go straight out the Geraldine Road to our house. Instead my father went down another mile and turned, went a mile and turned back again so that we came home from the other direction. “I want to stop and listen now,” he said. “The geese should be in the stubble.” We stopped and he cut the lights and engine, and we opened the car windows and listened. It was eight o’clock at night and it was getting colder, though it was dry. But I could hear nothing, just the sound of air moving lightly through the cut field, and not a goose sound. Though I could smell the whiskey on my father’s breath and on mine, could hear the motor ticking, could hear him breathe, hear the sound we made sitting side by side on the car seat, our clothes, our feet, almost our hearts beating. And I could see out in the night the yellow lights of our house, shining through the olive trees south of us like a ship on the sea. “I hear them, by God,” my father said, his head stuck out the window. “But they’re high up. They won’t stop here now, Jackie. They’re high flyers, those boys. Long gone geese.”

  There was a car parked off the road, down the line of wind-break trees, beside a steel thresher the farmer had left there to rust. You could see moonlight off the taillight chrome. It was a Pontiac, a two-door hard-top. My father said nothing about it and I didn’t either, though I think now for different reasons.

  The floodlight was on over the side door of our house and lights were on inside, upstairs and down. My mother had a pumpkin on the front porch, and the wind chime she had hung by the door was tinkling. My dog, Major, came out of the quonset shed and stood in the car lights when we drove up.

  “Let’s see what’s happening here,” my father said, opening the door and stepping out quickly. He looked at me inside the car, and his eyes were wide and his mouth drawn right.

  We walked in the side door and up the basement steps into the kitchen, and a man was standing there—a man I had never seen before, a young man with blond hair, who might’ve been twenty or twenty-five. He was tall and was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and beige slacks with pleats. He was on the other side of the breakfast table, his fingertips just touching the wooden tabletop. His blue eyes were on my father, who was dressed in hunting clothes.

  “Hello,” my father said.

  “Hello,” the young man said, and nothing else. And for some reason I looked at his arms, which were long and pale. They looked like a young man’s arms, like my arms. His short sleeves had each been neatly rolled up, and I could see the bottom of a small green tattoo edging out from underneath. There was a glass of whiskey on the table, but no bottle.

  “What’s your name?” my father said, standing in the kitchen under the bright ceiling light. He sounded like he might be going to laugh.

  “Woody,” the young man said and cleared his throat. He looked at me, then he touched the glass of whiskey, just the rim of the glass. He wasn’t nervous, I could tell that. He did not seem to be afraid of anything.

  “Woody,” my father said and looked at the glass of whiskey. He looked at me, then sighed and shook his head. “Where’s Mrs. Russell, Woody? I guess you aren’t robbing my house, are you?”

  Woody smiled. “No,” he said. “Upstairs. I think she went upstairs.”

  “Good,” my father said, “that’s a good place.” And he walked straight out of the room, but came back and stood in the doorway. “Jackie, you and Woody step outside and wait on me. Just stay there and I’ll come out.” He looked at Woody then in a way I would not have liked him to look at me, a look that meant he was studying Woody. “I guess that’s your car,” he said.

  “That Pontiac.” Woody nodded.

  “Okay. Right,” my father said. Then he went out again and up the stairs. At that moment the phone started to ring in the living room, and I heard my mother say, “Who’s that?” And my father say, “It’s me. It’s Jack.” And I decided I wouldn’t go answer the phone. Woody looked at me, and I understood he wasn’t sure what to do. Run, maybe. But he didn’t have run in him. Though I thought he would probably do what I said if I would say it.

  “Let’s just go outside,” I said.

  And he said, “All right.”

  Woody and I walked outside and stood in the light of the floodlamp above the side door. I had on my wool jacket, but Woody was cold and stood with his hands in his pockets, and his arms bare, moving from foot to foot. Inside, the phone was ringing again. Once I looked up and saw my mother come to the window and look down at Woody and me. Woody didn’t look up or see her, but I did. I waved at her, and she waved back at me and smiled. She was wearing a powder-blue dress. In another minute the phone stopped ringing.

  Woody took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it. Smoke shot through his nose into the cold air, and he sniffed, looked around the ground and threw his match on the gravel. His blond hair was combed backwards and neat on the sides, and I could smell his aftershave on him, a sweet, lemon smell. And for the first time I noticed his shoes. They were two-tones, black with white tops and black laces. They stuck out below his baggy pants and were long and polished and shiny, as if he had been planning on a big occasion. They looked like shoes some country singer would wear, or a salesman. He was handsome, but only like someone you would see beside you in a dime store and not notice again.

  “I like it out here,” Woody said, his head down, looking at his shoes. “Nothing to bother you. I bet you’d see Chicago if the world was flat. The Great Plains commence here.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Woody looked up at me, cupping his smoke with one hand. “Do you play football?”

  “No,” I said. I thought about asking him something about my mother. But I had no idea what it would be.

  “I have been drinking,” Woody said, “but I’m not drunk now.”

  The wind rose then, and from behind the house I could hear Major bark once from far away, and I could smell the irrigation ditch, hear it hiss in the field. It ran down from Highwood Creek to the Missouri, twenty miles away. It was nothing Woody
knew about, nothing he could hear or smell. He knew nothing about anything that was here. I heard my father say the words, “That’s a real joke,” from inside the house, then the sound of a drawer being opened and shut, and a door closing. Then nothing else.

  Woody turned and looked into the dark toward where the glow of Great Falls rose on the horizon, and we both could see the flashing lights of a plane lowering to land there. “I once passed my brother in the Los Angeles airport and didn’t even recognize him,” Woody said, staring into the night. “He recognized me, though. He said, ‘Hey, bro, are you mad at me, or what?’ I wasn’t mad at him. We both had to laugh.”

  Woody turned and looked at the house. His hands were still in his pockets, his cigarette clenched between his teeth, his arms taut. They were, I saw, bigger, stronger arms than I had thought. A vein went down the front of each of them. I wondered what Woody knew that I didn’t. Not about my mother—I didn’t know anything about that and didn’t want to—but about a lot of things, about the life out in the dark, about coming out here, about airports, even about me. He and I were not so far apart in age, I knew that. But Woody was one thing, and I was another. And I wondered how I would ever get to be like him, since it didn’t necessarily seem so bad a thing to be.

  “Did you know your mother was married before?” Woody said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I knew that.”

  “It happens to all of them, now,” he said. “They can’t wait to get divorced.”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  Woody dropped his cigarette into the gravel and toed it out with his black-and-white shoe. He looked up at me and smiled the way he had inside the house, a smile that said he knew something he wouldn’t tell, a smile to make you feel bad because you weren’t Woody and never could be.

  It was then that my father came out of the house. He still had on his plaid hunting coat and his wool cap, but his face was as white as snow, as white as I have ever seen a human being’s face to be. It was odd. I had the feeling that he might’ve fallen inside, because he looked roughed up, as though he had hurt himself somehow.

  My mother came out the door behind him and stood in the floodlight at the top of the steps. She was wearing the powder-blue dress Pd seen through the window, a dress I had never seen her wear before, though she was also wearing a car coat and carrying a suitcase. She looked at me and shook her head in a way that only I was supposed to notice, as if it was not a good idea to talk now.

  My father had his hands in his pockets, and he walked right up to Woody. He did not even look at me. “What do you do for a living?” he said, and he was very close to Woody. His coat was close enough to touch Woody’s shirt.

  “I’m in the Air Force,” Woody said. He looked at me and then at my father. He could tell my father was excited.

  “Is this your day off, then?” my father said. He moved even closer to Woody, his hands still in his pockets. He pushed Woody with his chest, and Woody seemed willing to let my father push him.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head.

  I looked at my mother. She was just standing, watching. It was as if someone had given her an order, and she was obeying it. She did not smile at me, though I thought she was thinking about me, which made me feel strange.

  “What’s the matter with you?” my father said into Woody’s face, right into his face—his voice tight, as if it had gotten hard for him to talk. “Whatever in the world is the matter with you? Don’t you understand something?” My father took a revolver pistol out of his coat and put it up under Woody’s chin, into the soft pocket behind the bone, so that Woody’s whole face rose, but his arms stayed at his sides, his hands open. “I don’t know what to do with you,” my father said. “I don’t have any idea what to do with you. I just don’t.” Though I thought that what he wanted to do was hold Woody there just like that until something important took place, or until he could simply forget about all this.

  My father pulled the hammer back on the pistol and raised it tighter under Woody’s chin, breathing into Woody’s face—my mother in the light with her suitcase, watching them, and me watching them. A half a minute must’ve gone by.

  And then my mother said, “Jack, let’s stop now. Let’s just stop.”

  My father stared into Woody’s face as if he wanted Woody to consider doing something—moving or turning around or anything on his own to stop this—that my father would then put a stop to. My father’s eyes grew narrowed, and his teeth were gritted together, his lips snarling up to resemble a smile. “You’re crazy, aren’t you?” he said. “You’re a goddamned crazy man. Are you in love with her, too? Are you, crazy man? Are you? Do you say you love her? Say you love her! Say you love her so I can blow your fucking brains in the sky.”

  “All right,” Woody said. “No. It’s all right.”

  “He doesn’t love me, Jack. For God’s sake,” my mother said. She seemed so calm. She shook her head at me again. I do not think she thought my father would shoot Woody. And I don’t think Woody thought so. Nobody did, I think, except my father himself. But I think he did, and was trying to find out how to.

  My father turned suddenly and glared at my mother, his eyes shiny and moving, but with the gun still on Woody’s skin. I think he was afraid, afraid he was doing this wrong and could mess all of it up and make matters worse without accomplishing anything.

  “You’re leaving,” he yelled at her. “That’s why you’re packed. Get out. Go on.”

  “Jackie has to be at school in the morning,” my mother said in just her normal voice. And without another word to any one of us, she walked out of the floodlamp light carrying her bag, turned the corner at the front porch steps and disappeared toward the olive trees that ran in rows back into the wheat.

  My father looked back at me where I was standing in the gravel, as if he expected to see me go with my mother toward Woody’s car. But I hadn’t thought about that—though later I would. Later I would think I should have gone with her, and that things between them might’ve been different. But that isn’t how it happened.

  “You’re sure you’re going to get away now, aren’t you, mister?” my father said into Woody’s face. He was crazy himself, then. Anyone would’ve been. Everything must have seemed out of hand to him.

  “I’d like to,” Woody said. “I’d like to get away from here.”

  “And I’d like to think of some way to hurt you,” my father said and blinked his eyes. “I feel helpless about it.” We all heard the door to Woody’s car close in the dark. “Do you think that I’m a fool?” my father said.

  “No,” Woody said. “I don’t think that.”

  “Do you think you’re important?”

  “No,” Woody said. “I’m not.”

  My father blinked again. He seemed to be becoming someone else at that moment, someone I didn’t know. “Where are you from?”

  And Woody closed his eyes. He breathed in, then out, a long sigh. It was as if this was somehow the hardest part, something he hadn’t expected to be asked to say.

  “Chicago,” Woody said. “A suburb of there.”

  “Are your parents alive?” my father said, all the time with his blue magnum pistol pushed under Woody’s chin.

  “Yes,” Woody said. “Yessir.”

  “That’s too bad,” my father said. “Too bad they have to know what you are. I’m sure you stopped meaning anything to them a long time ago. I’m sure they both wish you were dead. You didn’t know that. But I know it. I can’t help them out, though. Somebody else’ll have to kill you. I don’t want to have to think about you anymore. I guess that’s it.”

  My father brought the gun down to his side and stood looking at Woody. He did not back away, just stood, waiting for what I don’t know to happen. Woody stood a moment, then he cut his eyes at me uncomfortably. And I know that I looked down. That’s all I could do. Though I remember wondering if Woody’s heart was broken and what any of this meant to him. Not to me, or my mother, or my father. But to him, s
ince he seemed to be the one left out somehow, the one who would be lonely soon, the one who had done something he would someday wish he hadn’t and would have no one to tell him that it was all right, that they forgave him, that these things happen in the world.

  Woody took a step back, looked at my father and at me again as if he intended to speak, then stepped aside and walked away toward the front of our house, where the wind chime made a noise in the new cold air.

  My father looked at me, his big pistol in his hand. “Does this seem stupid to you?” he said. “All this? Yelling and threatening and going nuts? I wouldn’t blame you if it did. You shouldn’t even see this. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do now.”

  “It’ll be all right,” I said. And I walked out to the road. Woody’s car started up behind the olive trees. I stood and watched it back out, its red taillights clouded by exhaust. I could see their two heads inside, with the headlights shining behind them. When they got into the road, Woody touched his brakes, and for a moment I could see that they were talking, their heads turned toward each other, nodding. Woody’s head and my mother’s. They sat that way for a few seconds, then drove slowly off. And I wondered what they had to say to each other, something important enough that they had to stop right at that moment and say it. Did she say, I love you? Did she say, This is not what I expected to happen? Did she say, This is what I’ve wanted all along? And did he say, I’m sorry for all this, or I’m glad, or None of this matters to me? These are not the kinds of things you can know if you were not there. And I was not there and did not want to be. It did not seem like I should be there. I heard the door slam when my father went inside, and I turned back from the road where I could still see their taillights disappearing, and went back into the house where I was to be alone with my father.