by Richard Ford
“To me it is,” I said.
She looked over at me and smiled because that was a question she had asked me before, and an answer I had said. She reached across the car seat and squeezed my hand, then looked down the gravel road to where the Clark Fork went north and the receding fog had changed the colors of the trees and made them greener and the moving water a darker shade of blue-black.
“What do you think when you get in bed with me every night? I don’t know why I want to know that. I just do,” Arlene said. “It seems important to me.”
And in truth I did not have to think about that at all, because I knew the answer, and had thought about it already, had wondered, in fact, if it was in my mind because of the time in my life it was, or because a former husband was involved, or because I had a daughter to raise alone, and no one else I could be absolutely sure of.
“I just think,” I said, “here’s another day that’s gone. A day I’ve had with you. And now it’s over.”
“There’s some loss in that, isn’t there?” Arlene nodded at me and smiled.
“I guess so,” I said.
“It’s not so all-bad though, is it? There can be a next day.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“We don’t know where any of this is going, do we?” she said, and she squeezed my hand tight.
“No,” I said. And I knew that was not a bad thing at all, not for anyone, in any life.
“You’re not going to leave me for some other woman, now, are you? You’re still my sweetheart. I’m not crazy, am I?”
“I never thought that,” I said.
“It’s your hole card, you know,” Arlene said. “You can’t leave twice. Bobby proved that.” She smiled at me again.
And I knew she was right about that, though I did not want to hear about Bobby anymore for a while. He and I were not alike. Arlene and I had nothing to do with him. Though I knew, then, how you became a criminal in the world and lost it all. Somehow, and for no apparent reason, your decisions got tipped over and you lost your hold. And one day you woke up and you found yourself in the very situation you said you would never ever be in, and you did not know what was most important to you anymore. And after that, it was all over. And I did not want that to happen to me—did not, in fact, think it ever would. I knew what love was about. It was about not giving trouble or inviting it. It was about not leaving a woman for the thought of another one. It was about never being in that place you said you’d never be in. And it was not about being alone. Never that. Never that.
Children
Claude Phillips was a half-Blackfeet Indian, and his father, Sherman, was a full-blood, and in 1961 our families rented out farm houses from the bank in Great Falls—the homes of wheat farmers gone bust on the prairie east of Sunburst, Montana. People were going broke even then, and leaving. Claude Phillips and I were seventeen, and in a year from the day I am going to tell about, in May, I would be long gone from there myself, and so would Claude.
Where all of this took place was in that remote part of Montana near the Canada border and west of the Sweetgrass Hills. That is called the Hi-line, there, and it is an empty, lonely place if you are not a wheat farmer. I make this a point only because I have thought possibly it was the place itself, as much as the time in our lives or our characters, that took part in the small things that happened and made them memorable.
Claude Phillips was a small boy with long arms who boxed in the same amateurs club I boxed in—up in Sweetgrass and across the border in Canada, wherever we could box. He was ten months younger than I was, but he was hard-nosed and had fight courage. His real mother was his father’s first wife, and was Irish, and Claude did not look like an Indian—his cheeks wore more color in them and his eyes were gray. His father had later married another woman—an Indian, an Assiniboin, named Hazel Tevitts—whom Claude did not talk about. I didn’t know much about their life then, only that it didn’t seem much different from mine. You did not learn much of other people in that locality, and though Claude and I were friends, I would not say I knew him very well, because there was no chance for it.
Claude’s father had stayed the night in the motel in town and called Claude in the morning and told him to come down there at noon. On the way Claude stopped at my house—just out of the blue—and said I should come along. We were due to be in school that day, but my father worked on the Great Northern as a brakeman in Shelby, and was usually gone two nights together, and my mother was gone for good by then, though we didn’t know that. But I did not go to school so much, as a result, and when Claude drove up in the yard, I just got in with him and we rode to town.
“What’re we going in for?” I said when we were out on the Nine Mile Road, riding across the tops of the wheat prairies.
“Sherman’s brought a woman in,” Claude said. He was smoking a cigarette clenched in his teeth. “That’s typical. He likes to put something on display.”
“What does your mother think about it?” I said. We referred to Hazel as Claude’s mother even though she wasn’t.
“She married a gash hound. She’s a Catholic,” Claude said. “Maybe she can see the future. Maybe she thinks it’s superior.” He shook his head and put his arms up around the steering wheel as if he was thinking about that. “There might not be actual words for what Hazel thinks, yet. This ought to be funny.” He grinned.
“I’ll still have a look,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
“Sure you will. Then you’ll just have to give her a pumping, right?” Claude flexed up the muscle of his right arm.
“I might have to,” I said.
“That’s typical, too,” he said. Claude was wearing the yellow silk jacket his father had brought back from the war, one with a red dragon coiled around a map of Korea on the back, and I died there embroidered under it in red. He reached inside it and brought out a half-pint bottle of Canadian gin. “Rocket fuel,” he said. “Sherman forgets where he hides it.” He handed the bottle over to me. “Fire up your missile.”
I took a big drink and swallowed it. I didn’t like whiskey and had not drunk it much, and when it went down I had to look out the car window. The wheat fields running by were two inches up and green then as far as you could see. The only trees alive were the olive breaks planted in rows on the rises and out distant, alongside some house or a quonset where a farm still ran. The little town of Sunburst was ahead, lower than where we were driving. I could see the grain elevator and the narrow collection of houses down one side of the railroad spur.
Claude said suddenly, “Maybe Sherman’s going to give her to us.” He held the bottle up and took a drink. “He doesn’t care what happens. He’s been in Deer Lodge twice already. Twice / know of.”
“For what?” I said.
“Stealing and fighting. Then fighting and stealing. He stole two cows once, and they caught him there. Then he stole two trucks and beat a guy up for fun. He went down for that.”
“I don’t need to beat anybody up,” I said.
“There’s Mr. Conscience talking now,” Claude said. “Have another drink, Mr. Conscience.” He had another drink of the gin, then I took another one, then he threw the bottle in the back, where the seat of his Buick had been torn out and the floor boarded in with plywood. Two fishing rods were rattling back in the dust.
“Who is this woman,” I asked, feeling the gin tightening my scalp.
“He brought her over in the caboose last night from Havre. He dead-headed her in. She’s Canadian. I didn’t actually catch her name.” Claude laughed, and we both laughed about it, and then we were down among the first poor houses of Sunburst.
Sunburst had one paved street, which was the Canada highway, and the rest dirt streets. There was the elevator, a cafe, an implement company, a sawdust burner, one bar and the motel. It was the show-up for the Shelby crews that worked the GN going south. A switch engine hauled in a caboose and three cars two times a day, switched out the elevator spur, and took the crews back and forth to the
main line. A green bull-pen shack was across the tracks, and my father’s brown truck sat parked beside it with other crew trucks.
The motel was a little cottage camp across the highway—six white cottages and a skinny gravel lot. The closest cabin had a sign on top that said rooms for tourists, and there was only one car, with an Alberta plate, parked at the cabin nearest the street.
Claude drove in the lot and gunned his engine. I saw a woman look out through the blinds of the office cabin. I wondered if she would know me if she saw me. Claude and I did not go to school in this town, but at the Consolidated in Sweetgrass.
Claude honked the horn and his father stepped out of one of the cabins. “Here comes the great lady’s man,” he said. “The big Indian.” Claude grinned. We were both a little drunk now. He revved the engine again and kicked out gravel.
Sherman Philips was a large dark man with a big belly. He walked bent forward and took very small steps. He had on a long-sleeved white shirt, and his black hair was slicked back and tied in a long ponytail. He wore glasses and a pair of bedroom slippers with no socks. I didn’t see how any woman would like how he looked. He drank a lot, is what my father said, and sometimes had been seen carrying a loaded gun.
“Clear conscience is no conscience,” Claude said to his father out the car window. He was still smiling.
Sherman leaned on the car door and looked in at me. His big face had pockmarks, and a scar below his left ear. I had never been this close to him. He had narrow eyes and he was clean shaven. A pack of cigarettes was in his pocket, and I could smell his aftershave.
“You two’re drunk as monkeys,” he said in a mean way.
“No, we’re not drunk at all,” Claude said.
I could hear Claude’s father breathe in his chest. The lines in his face behind his glasses were deep lines. He looked back over his shoulder at the cabin. Behind the screen in the shadows, there was a blond woman in a green dress watching us, but who didn’t want us to see her.
“I’ve got to get home right now,” Claude’s father said. “You understand? Hazel thinks I’m in Havre.”
“Maybe you are,” Claude said. “Maybe we’re all in Havre. What’s her name.” He was looking at the cabin door where the blond woman was.
“Lucy,” Sherman said, and breathed in deeply. “She’s a nice girl.”
“She likes you, though, I guess,” Claude said. “Maybe she’ll like us.”
Sherman stood up and looked down the row of cabins to the office, where a phone booth was outside. The woman was gone from the office window, and I thought that she probably knew Claude’s father because he had been here before, and that probably she knew all the railroad men—including my father.
“I’m going to bring her out here,” Sherman said.
“You going to give her to us as a present?” Claude said.
And Sherman suddenly reached his big hand through the window and caught Claude’s hair in the back and twisted it. Claude’s hair was as short as mine, for boxing, but Sherman had enough of it to hurt. He had a big silver and turquoise ring on his index finger that pushed into Claude’s scalp.
“You’re not funny. You’re clucks. You’re stupid clucks.” Sherman forced Claude’s head almost out the window. He seemed dangerous to me, then—just suddenly. He was an Indian, and I wanted to get out of the car.
Sherman opened the door, pulled Claude out by his hair and away from the car, and put his big face down into Claude’s face and said something I didn’t hear. I looked the other way, at my father’s Dodge truck parked over beside the bull-pen. I didn’t think he would be back until late tonight. He stayed in Shelby in the bars sometimes, and went home with women. I wondered where my mother was right at that moment. California? Hawaii? I wondered if she was having a good time.
“Okay now, wise ass?” I heard Sherman say. “How’s that, now?” He still had Claude’s hair, but had raised his voice as if he wanted me to hear, too. Claude was much smaller than his father, and he had not said anything. “I’ll just break your goddamn arm, now,” Sherman said and grabbed Claude up closer, then pushed him away. Sherman glared over at me in the car, then turned and walked back toward the cabin he’d come out of.
Claude got back in the car and turned off the engine. “So fuck him,” he said. His face was red, and he put both his hands in his lap. He didn’t try to touch the back of his head, he just stared out at the Polar Bar, beside the motel. A little red Polar bear sign was shining dimly in the sunlight. A man came out the side door wearing a cowboy hat. He looked at us sitting in the car, then walked around the side of the building and disappeared. No one else was in town that I could see. I didn’t say anything for a few moments.
Finally I said, “What’re we doing?” The car engine was ticking.
Claude stared ahead still. “We’re taking her off somewhere and bringing her back tonight. He doesn’t want her out in the street where people’ll see her. He’s an asshole.”
Behind the cabin screen I could see Claude’s father in his white shirt. He was kissing the woman in the green dress, his big arms wrapped around her. One leg was hooked behind her so he could get all of her against him and hold her. I could hardly see the woman at all.
“I think we should kill her,” Claude said, “just to piss him off.”
“What will happen to her?”
“I don’t know. What’s going to happen to you? Maybe you two’ll get married. Or maybe you’ll kill each other. Who cares?”
The screen opened and Sherman came out again. He looked bigger. He walked in his short steps across the lot, the sun gleaming off his glasses. He had dollar bills in his hand.
“This is shut-up money,” he said when he looked in the window again. He stuffed the bills down in Claude’s shirt pocket. “So shut up.” He looked across at me. “Go the hell home, George. Your old man’s cooking dinner. He needs you home.”
I didn’t smile at him, but I did not talk back either.
“I’ll take him home,” Claude said.
“He’ll spew this.”
“No, he won’t,” Claude said.
“I don’t spew anything,” I said.
Claude’s father glared at me. “Don’t talk toward me now, George. Just don’t begin that.”
I looked at him, and I wanted him to know what I was thinking: that I was sorry Claude had to be his son. I wanted the woman inside the cabin to come with us, though, and I wanted Sherman to leave. I knew Claude would not take me home.
Sherman motioned toward the cabin door, and for a few seconds nothing happened, then the screen opened and the woman came out. She closed the cabin door behind her and walked across the lot carrying a paper sack. She was wearing a man’s sunglasses and was thin and flat-chested and wore green high heels. I wasn’t sure how old she was. Claude and I watched her while Sherman policed up and down the street to see who was watching us. The woman in the office was not at the window. A car drove by the motel going north. A switch engine had started shunting grain cars out to the elevator, and I could smell diesel. Nobody was paying attention to any of this.
“So, all right now,” Sherman said when the woman arrived. I could see through the window that she wasn’t a woman but a girl. She was older than we were, but not by very much. “This is Claude,” Sherman said. “He’s my son. This is his close friend George, who’s not going. Claude’s going to take you fishing.” He looked across the street at the switch engine. “This is Lucy.”
The girl just stood there, holding her folded paper sack. She was tall and pretty and pale-skinned, and she didn’t seem happy.
“You don’t want to go fishing with us,” Claude said. He had not made a move to let her in.
“Let her get in,” I said. “She wants to go.”
The girl bent and looked in the back where there was no seat. A crate was there with a jack, the two rods, and a jumper set.
“Fm not riding in that back,” the girl said, and looked at me.
“Let her in front,�
�� I told Claude.
I don’t think he wanted the girl in the car. And I didn’t know why, because I wanted her in. Maybe he had thought his father had an Indian woman, and he wasn’t sure what to do now.
Claude opened the door, and when he stood up I could see that the girl was taller than he was. I didn’t think that kind of thing mattered though, because Claude had already whipped boys with his fists who were bigger than he was.
When the girl got in she had to pull her knees up. She was wearing stockings, and her green shoes were the kind without toes.
“Hello, George,” she said, and smiled. I could smell Sherman’s aftershave.
“Hello,” I said.
“Don’t cause me any fucking trouble, or FU break you up,” Sherman said. And before Claude could get in, Sherman was starting back to the motel in his bedroom slippers, his ponytail swinging down his back.
“You’re a real odd match,” Lucy said when Claude had gotten in the driver’s seat. “You don’t look like each other.”
“Who do I look like?” Claude said. He was angry.
“Some Greek,” Lucy said. She looked around Claude as Sherman disappeared into the motel room and closed the door. “Maybe your mother, though,” she said as an afterthought.
“Where’s she now?” Claude said. “My mother.” He started the car.
The girl looked at him from behind her glasses. “At home. I guess. Wherever you live.”
“No. She’s dead,” Claude said. “Are those my father’s glasses?”
“He gave them to me. Do you want them back?”
“Are you divorced?” Claude said.
“I’m not old enough,” the girl said. “I’m not even married yet.”
“How old are you?” Claude said.
“Twenty, nineteen. How does that sound?” She looked at me and smiled. She had small teeth and her breath had beer on it. “How old do I look?”
“Eight,” Claude said. “Or maybe a hundred.”