Wildlife

by Richard Ford

  ‘How was that?’ she said, and looked at me.

  ‘It’s loud,’ I said. My hands and legs still felt hot.

  ‘Did it appeal to you?’ my mother said.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it scared me.’ And that is the feeling I’d had when it was all around me.

  ‘It’s just a lot of small fires that once in a while blow together. Don’t be afraid now,’ my mother said. ‘You just needed to see what your father finds so entrancing. Do you understand it?’

  ‘No,’ I said, and I thought my father might’ve been surprised by such a fire and want to come home.

  ‘I don’t understand either,’ my mother said. ‘It’s not mysterious at all.’

  ‘Maybe he was surprised,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sure he was,’ my mother said. ‘I’m sorry we both can’t sympathize with him.’ She started the car and drove us on.

  In the meadow was a tent camp where there were trucks and temporary lights strung on lines between wooden poles. Fires were beside the road. Small ones. People were moving inside the camp–mostly men, I thought, brought there to fight the fire. Some I could see lying on cots inside tents that had their flaps left open. Some were standing and talking. Others were sitting in trucks. A small dark airplane with a white star on its tail section was sitting farther out in the meadow. Straight across the road that we were on and still ahead of us was a small service station where more trucks were, and a white-lighted CAFE sign hung out in the early evening darkness. We passed a sign that said that this was Truly, Montana, though it was hard to tell what made it a town. It only seemed to be a separate place because all around it a fire was burning.

  ‘This is quite a place,’ my mother said, watching out the windshield as we drove into the little town of Truly. She motioned toward the tent camp. ‘That’s the stage-up over there,’ she said, ‘where everyone leaves and comes back. It’s just smoke all the time up here. You’re never out of it.’

  ‘Do you think we can drive in and find Dad?’

  ‘No we can’t,’ my mother said abruptly. ‘He’s fresh out. They’ll keep him up there till he drops. Then he’ll come down, if he’s alive enough. I’m not going to look for him. Are you hungry?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. But I was watching the hillside and only half listening. I watched a tall spruce tree catch fire high in the dark. A spark had found it, and it exploded in a bright, steepling yellow flame that leaped and shot out bits of fire into the night toward other trees, and swirled its own white smoke, flaming and then dying quickly as the wind on the hillside–a wind that did not blow where we were–changed and died. It all happened in an instant, and I knew it was dangerous though in a beautiful way. And I understood, just as I sat there in the car with my mother, what I thought dangerous was: it was a thing that did not seem able to hurt you, but quickly and deceivingly would. Though I didn’t understand why my father would risk danger, unless it was that he didn’t care about life much, or unless there was something in losing it that was satisfying, which didn’t seem like anything I remembered anybody ever having said to me.

  In the cafe we sat in a booth by the window so we could both see across the road to the fire camp and the fire itself, which turned the sky red above the ridge lines so that you knew that beyond where you could see there was more fire and men fighting it.

  My mother ordered fried chicken for both of us, and as we sat waiting, a truck stopped in front of the cafe, and fifteen or so men got off the back of it, wearing heavy canvas clothing and boots, their faces blackened with fire soot, and moving as if they were stiff and tired. The men were all big men with heavy gaits and they all came inside the cafe together and sat at four of the tables without talking. The two women who were the waitresses went around the tables asking if the men wanted what they usually had–fried steaks and potatoes–and they all said yes, then sat drinking their water and talking softly while they waited. They were young men–older than I was, but still young. And there was a smell that came from them and went all through the room. The smell of cold ashes, a smell that came right out of their clothes and stayed in the air, as if the men had just walked right out of the fire itself and had been burned by it and this was what was left of them.

  My mother had glanced at the men when they sat down, then looked back out the window at the lighted stage camp beyond our car, and up onto the ridge and hillside which was on fire in small blazes like campfires. She ordered a can of beer and drank it out of the can as she stared out.

  ‘I think it’s just because he lost his job,’ she said. When she said that she looked at the men who were at the tables across the room. ‘It made him go crazy. I feel sorry for him. I actually do.’ She looked back out the window into the night.

  ‘He’s all right,’ I said, and I know I was thinking that these other men were all right. They were here eating supper, and probably my father was too, somewhere else. He was on his own, and that was all, and you did not have to be crazy to want to be on your own, or so I thought at the time.

  ‘Is that what you believe?’ my mother said, holding her beer can in both hands, her elbows on the table top.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is.’

  ‘Well, I think he has a woman out there is what I think. Probably it’s an Indian woman. A squaw. She’s probably married, too.’ My mother said this as if she was accusing me and I was going to have to answer for it. Something about me must’ve reminded her of my father. ‘I read that women were out there,’ she said.

  ‘I saw some who were going,’ I said. One of the men seated at the firefighters’ tables looked at my mother. She had raised her voice a little.

  ‘Well, why do you think men do things?’ my mother said. ‘They either go crazy or it’s a woman. Or it’s both. You don’t know anything. How could you? You haven’t done anything.’ She stared back at the man who was looking at her, and touched the red kerchief around her neck. But when she looked at me she was smiling. ‘It’s nature’s way,’ she said to me. ‘That can be part of your education, to learn what nature’s way is.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. Two more of the firefighters looked at us, and one of them smiled and cleared his throat. I wished I knew what nature’s way was, because all that was happening in our family did not not seem to be natural or normal.

  ‘Tell me how you feel about your name,’ my mother said after a minute had passed, and in a quieter voice. ‘Do you like it all right? Joe? It’s not an uncommon name. We didn’t want to weigh you down with a fancy name or a middle name. We liked Joe.’

  ‘I like it,’ I said. ‘It’s easy for people to remember.’

  ‘That’s true,’ she said. She glanced back at the night. There were stars in the October sky, and somehow through the white smoke they had become visible. ‘Jeanette,’ she said. ‘I never liked that. It seemed like a waitress’s name.’

  ‘What one would you rather have,’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ my mother said, and drank the last of her beer. Our food was coming now. I could see it in the window to the kitchen, two plates steaming, the top of a woman’s head just visible behind it. ‘Lottie,’ my mother said, and smiled. She pushed her hair up with one hand. ‘There used to be a singer named Lottie. Lottie something. Lottie-da. She was colored, I think. But. How would that be? Lottie?’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ I said. ‘I like Jeanette.’

  ‘Well, that’s sweet,’ my mother said and smiled at me. ‘You have to like me the way I am. Not as Lottie, I guess.’

  Our food came and we ate it and talked about forest fires, that they were like cities or factories, and went on and on by themselves. That there was something good about them, that they replenished where they burned, and that for humans, my mother said, it was sometimes a good thing to be near a thing so uncontrollable and out of all scale that you felt reduced and knew your position in the world. She understood my father in some ways, she said. He wasn’t the kind to go crazy. It was only a hard time in his life, though it was a hard time in hers
too. That was nature’s way, also, she said. People were drawn to things they shouldn’t be. I thought she seemed happy to be there with me and to see the fire, happy to have said all the things we’d said. Then we started home to Great Falls.

  On the drive back, the air had become colder as we went farther east of the fire, and the sky was clear and starry except for the glow the city made low on the horizon. My mother stopped in Augusta and bought two more beers for the road and drank as she drove and did not talk to me much. I thought mostly about my father, then, and about what he would be like when he came back. He had been gone since only the night before, but already the life he left didn’t seem like the same life to me, and when I pictured him coming back, I pictured him getting off the back of a truck like the men at the cafe, although he was not smudged with ashes or stiff or tired, but looked clean and younger than when he had left and did not in fact even look like himself, but like someone else. And I realized that I could not exactly remember his face or his features. I could hear the sound of his voice, but that was all. And the only face I could see was the strange young man I did not think I knew.

  When we had driven back almost to Great Falls and could see down onto the city at night and could see the white grain elevators that Warren Miller owned lighted beside the river, my mother said, ‘Let’s go in a new way.’ And instead of straight in on Central Avenue, she drove us more toward the north side so that we came down into town through Black Eagle, the way you’d come in if you’d driven down from Fort Benton and the Hi-line, and not from the west.

  I didn’t wonder why we’d come this way and did not bother to ask. My mother was a person who did not like doing things always the same way, and would go out of her way to make a drive we took not be dull, or some explanation not the same as it was the last time. ‘Make life intriguing,’ she would say when she turned off some road we knew onto an unknown one, or when she’d buy things in a store, something she had never bought and had no use for. ‘Life’s just small potatoes,’ she’d say; ‘you have to apply yourself.’

  We drove down the long hill that ends at the Missouri River, beyond which is the old part of Great Falls, the part where we lived, where there are parks and tree-lined streets set out by the original builders. But two blocks before the river, my mother turned left and drove down a street of frame houses that were set up on the hillside embankment in rows, overlooking the river and the lights of town. I had been on this street before. Farther down was an Italian steakhouse where I had gone with my father once at night to eat dinner with some men from the Wheatland Club. ‘A smoker,’ he had called it, and only men were there. And I had always thought it was a part of town where only Italians lived.

  My mother did not drive as far as the restaurant, although I could see it there on the dark street, lighted in a blue light with cars parked in front. When we’d gone two blocks, she slowed and opened the window, then stopped in front of a house that sat up above the street and had a steep concrete driveway and a set of steep steps that ran up beside it to the wooden steps of the house. The house was like the other house beside it, white and tall-fronted with one large window and a front door on one side. A light was burning on the porch, and the draperies in the window were drawn open and an old-fashioned yellow lamp sat on a table. It looked like a house where an old person would live.

  My mother sat and looked up at the house for a moment, then rolled her window up.

  ‘Whose house is that,’ I asked.

  ‘It’s Warren’s house,’ my mother said, and sighed. ‘It’s Mr Miller’s house.’ She put her hands on top of the steering wheel but just sat looking down the street toward the restaurant.

  ‘Are we going inside?’

  ‘No, we’re not,’ she said. ‘No one’s home, anyway. I had something to ask Mr Miller, but it can wait.’

  ‘Maybe they’re in there,’ I said.

  ‘They’re not they,’ my mother said. ‘It’s just Mr Miller. He lives there alone. He had a wife but she left him, I guess. And his mother lived there, but she died.’

  ‘When were you in there?’ I said.

  ‘I never was,’ my mother said, and she seemed tired. She had driven a long way that afternoon and night, and things had not been easy for her since yesterday. ‘I looked it up in the phone book, that’s all,’ she said. ‘I should’ve just called. But it’ll be okay now. He doesn’t live like a rich man, does he? Just this plain house on a plain street.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t.’

  ‘He certainly is, though,’ my mother said. ‘He has holdings. Those elevators. And an Oldsmobile agency. Farms. It’s hard to think about.’ She put the car into gear, but sat then there in the darkness as if she was trying to remember something or figure something out. ‘I feel like I need to wake up,’ she said, and smiled at me. ‘But I don’t know what from. Or to. That’s a big change.’ She took a deep breath and let it out, then let the car idle down the street into the night toward home. And I wondered, as we turned and started back toward the street that crossed the river, what she had needed to ask Warren Miller at nine at night, something that couldn’t wait but then did. And why, since it seemed to me that someone was at home there, wouldn’t she just go to the door and ask what she wanted–probably something about her job that started the next day–and then go home just as we were doing, in the regular way that people did things, the way I understood them?

  Chapter 4

  In the morning my mother got up and dressed for work and left the house before I ever got out of bed. From my room, I could hear her moving around the house, her footsteps on the hard floor, and it seemed to me she was in a hurry, that maybe she did not want to see me. I stayed in bed listening until I heard the car start cold in the driveway, idle a few minutes while she came back in the house, then drive away down Eighth Street.

  For a while after that I heard the furnace going on and off in the cellar, and the sound of cars passing in the street, and the sound of birds walking the eaves of our house, tapping and fluttering as distinctly as if they were in the room with me. Light was up, and the air outside my window looked clear and clean. But I felt tired. I could feel my lungs as if a weight was pressing on them, and I could hear myself breathe down in my chest and my skin felt tight. It was a sick feeling to have, and I wondered if it would go away in a day or if it was the beginning of some real illness.

  For several minutes I thought I wouldn’t go to school that day, that I would stay at home and sleep, or go on a walk through town as I had other times, or go to my job early or go fishing in the river. Or I thought I could walk over to the Oldsmobile agency on Tenth Avenue and have a look. No one knew me. I could ask a question or several questions of someone–about Warren Miller, about what kind of man he was; was he married, did he have children, what were his holdings? I tried to remember the day when I had met him, a day with my father at the Wheatland Club. What had he said to me? What had I said to him, if anything? What my father had said, what the weather had been like. I tried to guess whether my mother had known him for a long time or a little. Not that it mattered–any of these facts–or would change anything. They would just fill in so that if suddenly my life changed I could have something to think about.

  When I’d lain in bed a while, thinking things in this way, the phone rang in the kitchen. I thought it would be my mother telling me to go to school, and I almost didn’t answer it. But I did, still in my pajamas, and it was my father calling home from the fire.

  ‘Hello, Joe,’ he said to me in a loud voice. ‘What’s going on over there?’

  ‘I’m going to school,’ I said.

  ‘Where’s your mother? I’d like to talk to her.’ The connection began to be not very good.

  ‘She’s not here,’ I said. ‘She went to town.’

  ‘Is she mad at me?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s not.’

  ‘I hope she’s not,’ he said. Then he didn’t say anything for a few seconds and it sounded as thou
gh a truck was starting up behind him. I heard voices shouting, and I thought he must be calling from the restaurant where we’d been last night. ‘We don’t have any control over anything here now,’ my father said loudly over the noise. ‘We just watch everything burn. That’s all. It exhausts you. I’m stiff all over from it.’

  ‘Are you coming home,’ I asked.

  ‘I saw a bear that caught on fire, Joe,’ my father said, still loud. ‘You wouldn’t have believed it. It just blew up around him in one instant. A live bear in a hemlock tree. I swear. He hit the ground squalling. It was like balled lightning.’

  I wanted to ask about something else he’d seen, or something that had happened to him or somebody else. I wanted to ask how dangerous it was. But I was afraid I’d say the wrong thing. So all I said was, ‘How do you feel?’ This was a question I had never asked my father in my life. That was not the way we’d ever talked.

  ‘I feel good,’ he said. ‘I feel like I’ve been here a year, but I’ve only been here a day.’ Then the truck noise stopped and the connection went dim. ‘Regular life doesn’t exist out here,’ he said. ‘You have to adapt.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘Is your mother already stepping out on me?’ my father said, and he was joking. I was sure of that. ‘I tried to call last night,’ he said, ‘but no one answered.’

  ‘We ate at a cafe,’ I said. ‘We had chicken.’

  ‘That’s good,’ my father said. ‘Good for you two. I hope you were the one who paid for it.’

  ‘She paid for us,’ I said. No one had told me not to say where we had been or where my mother was. But I felt like I had a responsibility not to. Flies were crawling on the kitchen window glass where I was looking into the back yard. And I thought that the weather might be turning, and it would get colder and snow, and the fire would be out before long.

  ‘Tell your mother that I haven’t lost my mind out here yet. Okay?’ There was more static on the line.