Rock Springs

by Richard Ford

  “Yes I do,” I said, and looked at her.

  My mother frowned at me. “Why do you?”

  “Why does he need a reason?” Glen Baxter said and grinned.

  “I want him to have one, that’s why.” She looked at me oddly. “I think Glen’s drunk, Les.”

  “No, I’m not drinking,” Glen said, which was hardly ever true. He looked at both of us, and my mother bit down on the side of her lower lip and stared at me in a way to make you think she thought something was being put over on her and she didn’t like you for it. She was very pretty, though when she was mad her features were sharpened and less pretty by a long way. “All right, then I don’t care,” she said to no one in particular. “Hunt, kill, maim. Your father did that too.” She turned to go back inside.

  “Why don’t you come with us, Aileen?” Glen was smiling still, pleased.

  “To do what?” my mother said. She stopped and pulled a package of cigarettes out of her dress pocket and put one in her mouth.

  “It’s worth seeing.”

  “See dead animals?” my mother said.

  “These geese are from Siberia, Aileen,” Glen said. “They’re not like a lot of geese. Maybe I’ll buy us dinner later. What do you say?”

  “Buy what with?” my mother said. To tell the truth, I didn’t know why she was so mad at him. I would’ve thought she’d be glad to see him. But she just suddenly seemed to hate everything about him.

  “I’ve got some money,” Glen said. “Let me spend it on a pretty girl tonight.”

  “Find one of those and you’re lucky,” my mother said, turning away toward the front door.

  “I already found one,” Glen Baxter said. But the door slammed behind her, and he looked at me then with a look I think now was helplessness, though I could not see a way to change anything.

  My mother sat in the backseat of Glen’s Nash and looked out the window while we drove. My double gun was in the seat between us beside Glen’s Belgian pump, which he kept loaded with five shells in case, he said, he saw something beside the road he wanted to shoot. I had hunted rabbits before, and had ground-sluiced pheasants and other birds, but I had never been on an actual hunt before, one where you drove out to some special place and did it formally. And I was excited. I had a feeling that something important was about to happen to me, and that this would be a day I would always remember.

  My mother did not say anything for a long time, and neither did I. We drove up through Great Falls and out the other side toward Fort Benton, which was on the benchland where wheat was grown.

  “Geese mate for life,” my mother said, just out of the blue, as we were driving. “I hope you know that. They’re special birds.”

  “I know that,” Glen said in the front seat. “I have every respect for them.”

  “So where were you for three months?” she said. “I’m only curious.”

  “I was in the Big Hole for a while,” Glen said, “and after that I went over to Douglas, Wyoming.”

  “What were you planning to do there?” my mother asked.

  “I wanted to find a job, but it didn’t work out.”

  “I’m going to college,” she said suddenly, and this was something I had never heard about before. I turned to look at her, but she was staring out her window and wouldn’t see me.

  “I knew French once,” Glen said. “Rose’s pink. Rouge’s red.” He glanced at me and smiled. “I think that’s a wise idea, Aileen. When are you going to start?”

  “I don’t want Les to think he was raised by crazy people all his life,” my mother said.

  “Les ought to go himself,” Glen said.

  “After I go, he will.”

  “What do you say about that, Les?” Glen said, grinning.

  “He says it’s just fine,” my mother said.

  “It’s just fine,” I said.

  Where Glen Baxter took us was out onto the high flat prairie that was disked for wheat and had high, high mountains out to the east, with lower heartbreak hills in between. It was, I remember, a day for blues in the sky, and down in the distance we could see the small town of Floweree, and the state highway running past it toward Fort Benton and the Hi-line. We drove out on top of the prairie on a muddy dirt road fenced on both sides, until we had gone about three miles, which is where Glen stopped.

  “All right,” he said, looking up in the rearview mirror at my mother. “You wouldn’t think there was anything here, would you?”

  “We’re here,” my mother said. “You brought us here.”

  “You’ll be glad though,” Glen said, and seemed confident to me. I had looked around myself but could not see anything. No water or trees, nothing that seemed like a good place to hunt anything. Just wasted land. “There’s a big lake out there, Les,” Glen said. “You can’t see it now from here because it’s low. But the geese are there. You’ll see.”

  “It’s like the moon out here, I recognize that,” my mother said, “only it’s worse.” She was staring out at the flat wheatland as if she could actually see something in particular, and wanted to know more about it. “How’d you find this place?”

  “I came once on the wheat push,” Glen said.

  “And I’m sure the owner told you just to come back and hunt anytime you like and bring anybody you wanted. Come one, come all. Is that it?”

  “People shouldn’t own land anyway,” Glen said. “Anybody should be able to use it.”

  “Les, Glen’s going to poach here,” my mother said. “I just want you to know that, because that’s a crime and the law will get you for it. If you’re a man now, you’re going to have to face the consequences.”

  “That’s not true,” Glen Baxter said, and looked gloomily out over the steering wheel down the muddy road toward the mountains. Though for myself I believed it was true, and didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything at that moment except seeing geese fly over me and shooting them down.

  “Well, I’m certainly not going out there,” my mother said. “I like towns better, and I already have enough trouble.”

  “That’s okay,” Glen said. “When the geese lift up you’ll get to see them. That’s all I wanted. Les and me’ll go shoot them, won’t we, Les?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I put my hand on my shotgun, which had been my father’s and was heavy as rocks.

  “Then we should go on,” Glen said, “or we’ll waste our light.”

  We got out of the car with our guns. Glen took off his canvas shoes and put on his pair of black irrigators out of the trunk. Then we crossed the barbed wire fence, and walked out into the high, tilled field toward nothing. I looked back at my mother when we were still not so far away, but I could only see the small, dark top of her head, low in the backseat of the Nash, staring out and thinking what I could not then begin to say.

  On the walk toward the lake, Glen began talking to me. I had never been alone with him, and knew little about him except what my mother said—that he drank too much, or other times that he was the nicest man she had ever known in the world and that someday a woman would marry him, though she didn’t think it would be her. Glen told me as we walked that he wished he had finished college, but that it was too late now, that his mind was too old. He said he had liked the Far East very much, and that people there knew how to treat each other, and that he would go back some day but couldn’t go now. He said also that he would like to live in Russia for a while and mentioned the names of people who had gone there, names I didn’t know. He said it would be hard at first, because it was so different, but that pretty soon anyone would learn to like it and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, and that Russians treated Americans who came to live there like kings. There were Communists everywhere now, he said. You didn’t know them, but they were there. Montana had a large number, and he was in touch with all of them. He said that Communists were always in danger and that he had to protect himself all the time. And when he said that he pulled back his VFW jacket and showed me the butt of a pistol he h
ad stuck under his shirt against his bare skin. “There are people who want to kill me right now,” he said, “and I would kill a man myself if I thought I had to.” And we kept walking. Though in a while he said, “I don’t think I know much about you, Les. But I’d like to. What do you like to do?”

  “I like to box,” I said. “My father did it. It’s a good thing to know.”

  “I suppose you have to protect yourself too,” Glen said.

  “I know how to,” I said.

  “Do you like to watch TV,” Glen asked, and smiled.

  “Not much.”

  “I love to,” Glen said. “I could watch it instead of eating if I had one.”

  I looked out straight ahead over the green tops of sage that grew to the edge of the disked field, hoping to see the lake Glen said was there. There was an airishness and a sweet smell that I thought might be the place we were going, but I couldn’t see it. “How will we hunt these geese?” I said.

  “It won’t be hard,” Glen said. “Most hunting isn’t even hunting. It’s only shooting. And that’s what this will be. In Illinois you would dig holes in the ground and hide and set out your decoys. Then the geese come to you, over and over again. But we don’t have time for that here.” He glanced at me. “You have to be sure the first time here.”

  “How do you know they’re here now,” I asked. And I looked toward the Highwood Mountains twenty miles away, half in snow and half dark blue at the bottom. I could see the little town of Floweree then, looking shabby and dimly lighted in the distance. A red bar sign shone. A car moved slowly away from the scattered buildings.

  “They always come November first,” Glen said.

  “Are we going to poach them?”

  “Does it make any difference to you,” Glen asked.

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Well then, we aren’t,” he said.

  We walked then for a while without talking. I looked back once to see the Nash far and small in the flat distance. I couldn’t see my mother, and I thought that she must’ve turned on the radio and gone to sleep, which she always did, letting it play all night in her bedroom. Behind the car the sun was nearing the rounded mountains southwest of us, and I knew that when the sun was gone it would be cold. I wished my mother had decided to come along with us, and I thought for a moment of how little I really knew her at all.

  Glen walked with me another quarter-mile, crossed another barbed wire fence where sage was growing, then went a hundred yards through wheatgrass and spurge until the ground went up and formed a kind of long hillock bunker built by a farmer against the wind. And I realized the lake was just beyond us. I could hear the sound of a car horn blowing and a dog barking all the way down in the town, then the wind seemed to move and all I could hear then and after then were geese. So many geese, from the sound of them, though I still could not see even one. I stood and listened to the high-pitched shouting sound, a sound I had never heard so close, a sound with size to it—though it was not loud. A sound that meant great numbers and that made your chest rise and your shoulders tighten with expectancy. It was a sound to make you feel separate from it and everything else, as if you were of no importance in the grand scheme of things.

  “Do you hear them singing,” Glen asked. He held his hand up to make me stand still. And we both listened. “How many do you think, Les, just hearing?”

  “A hundred,” I said. “More than a hundred.”

  “Five thousand,” Glen said. “More than you can believe when you see them. Go see.”

  I put down my gun and on my hands and knees crawled up the earthwork through the wheatgrass and thistle, until I could see down to the lake and see the geese. And they were there, like a white bandage laid on the water, wide and long and continuous, a white expanse of snow geese, seventy yards from me, on the bank, but stretching far onto the lake, which was large itself—a half-mile across, with thick tules on the far side and wild plums farther and the blue mountain behind them.

  “Do you see the big raft?” Glen said from below me, in a whisper.

  “I see it,” I said, still looking. It was such a thing to see, a view I had never seen and have not since.

  “Are any on the land?” he said.

  “Some are in the wheatgrass,” I said, “but most are swimming.”

  “Good,” Glen said. “They’ll have to fly. But we can’t wait for that now.”

  And I crawled backwards down the heel of land to where Glen was, and my gun. We were losing our light, and the air was purplish and cooling. I looked toward the car but couldn’t see it, and I was no longer sure where it was below the lighted sky.

  “Where do they fly to?” I said in a whisper, since I did not want anything to be ruined because of what I did or said. It was important to Glen to shoot the geese, and it was important to me.

  “To the wheat,” he said. “Or else they leave for good. I wish your mother had come, Les. Now she’ll be sorry.”

  I could hear the geese quarreling and shouting on the lake surface. And I wondered if they knew we were here now. “She might be,” I said with my heart pounding, but I didn’t think she would be much.

  It was a simple plan he had. I would stay behind the bunker, and he would crawl on his belly with his gun through the wheatgrass as near to the geese as he could. Then he would simply stand up and shoot all the ones he could close up, both in the air and on the ground. And when all the others flew up, with luck some would turn toward me as they came into the wind, and then I could shoot them and turn them back to him, and he would shoot them again. He could kill ten, he said, if he was lucky, and I might kill four. It didn’t seem hard.

  “Don’t show them your face,” Glen said. “Wait till you think you can touch them, then stand up and shoot. To hesitate is lost in this.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll try it.”

  “Shoot one in the head, and then shoot another one,” Glen said. “It won’t be hard.” He patted me on the arm and smiled. Then he took off his VFW jacket and put it on the ground, climbed up the side of the bunker, cradling his shotgun in his arms, and slid on his belly into the dry stalks of yellow grass out of my sight.

  Then, for the first time in that entire day, I was alone. And I didn’t mind it. I sat squat down in the grass, loaded my double gun and took my other two shells out of my pocket to hold. I pushed the safety off and on to see that it was right. The wind rose a little, scuffed the grass and made me shiver. It was not the warm chinook now, but a wind out of the north, the one geese flew away from if they could.

  Then I thought about my mother, in the car alone, and how much longer I would stay with her, and what it might mean to her for me to leave. And I wondered when Glen Baxter would die and if someone would kill him, or whether my mother would marry him and how I would feel about it. And though I didn’t know why, it occurred to me that Glen Baxter and I would not be friends when all was said and done, since I didn’t care if he ever married my mother or didn’t.

  Then I thought about boxing and what my father had taught me about it. To tighten your fists hard. To strike out straight from the shoulder and never punch backing up. How to cut a punch by snapping your fist inwards, how to carry your chin low, and to step toward a man when he is falling so you can hit him again. And most important, to keep your eyes open when you are hitting in the face and causing damage, because you need to see what you’re doing to encourage yourself, and because it is when you close your eyes that you stop hitting and get hurt badly. “Fly all over your man, Les,” my father said. “When you see your chance, fly on him and hit him till he falls.” That, I thought, would always be my attitude in things.

  And then I heard the geese again, their voices in unison, louder and shouting, as if the wind had changed again and put all new sounds in the cold air. And then a boom. And I knew Glen was in among them and had stood up to shoot. The noise of geese rose and grew worse, and my fingers burned where I held my gun too tight to the metal, and I put it down and opened my
fist to make the burning stop so I could feel the trigger when the moment came. Boom, Glen shot again, and I heard him shuck a shell, and all the sounds out beyond the bunker seemed to be rising—the geese, the shots, the air itself going up. Boom, Glen shot another time, and I knew he was taking his careful time to make his shots good. And I held my gun and started to crawl up the bunker so as not to be surprised when the geese came over me and I could shoot.

  From the top I saw Glen Baxter alone in the wheatgrass field, shooting at a white goose with black tips of wings that was on the ground not far from him, but trying to run and pull into the air. He shot it once more, and it fell over dead with its wings flapping.

  Glen looked back at me and his face was distorted and strange. The air around him was full of white rising geese and he seemed to want them all. “Behind you, Les,” he yelled at me and pointed. “They’re all behind you now.” I looked behind me, and there were geese in the air as far as I could see, more than I knew how many, moving so slowly, their wings wide out and working calmly and filling the air with noise, though their voices were not as loud or as shrill as I had thought they would be. And they were so close! Forty feet, some of them. The air around me vibrated and I could feel the wind from their wings and it seemed to me I could kill as many as the times I could shoot—a hundred or a thousand—and I raised my gun, put the muzzle on the head of a white goose, and fired. It shuddered in the air, its wide feet sank below its belly, its wings cradled out to hold back air, and it fell straight down and landed with an awful sound, a noise a human would make, a thick, soft, hump noise. I looked up again and shot another goose, could hear the pellets hit its chest, but it didn’t fall or even break its pattern for flying. Boom, Glen shot again. And then again. “Hey,” I heard him shout, “Hey, hey.” And there were geese flying over me, flying in line after line. I broke my gun and reloaded, and thought to myself as I did: I need confidence here, I need to be sure with this. I pointed at another goose and shot it in the head, and it fell the way the first one had, wings out, its belly down, and with the same thick noise of hitting. Then I sat down in the grass on the bunker and let geese fly over me.