by Richard Ford
“Does this mean we’re not going?” Berner said.
“Most of the rides were already shut down,” our father answered.
“No, they were not,” Berner said. “I could see in. You were driving. Or trying to.”
“I didn’t care about the rides,” I said. Hot refinery fumes filled the inside of the car.
“P-U-stink,” Berner said, and rolled up her window as we went past the maze of pipes and giant valves and bulk tanks, and men in silver hard hats moving around on catwalks and metal scaffolds, and the long flame from the vent pipes licking the gusty air. The refinery stood between Smelter Avenue and the river. We were headed for the Fifteenth Street Bridge, which would take us back across into Great Falls.
“I wanted to see the bee exhibit,” I said hopelessly and felt heartsick. It was one more thing I wouldn’t get to learn.
“Bees are smarter than we are,” Berner announced. The found money was bulging, lopsided in my pants front. Berner looked around at me again and smirked. She always pretended to know things I didn’t and belittle me.
“Bees are like the people out here in Montana, if you ask me,” our father said, angling to turn onto the bridge. “They’re all one way. Worker bees. Spiritless. A bunch of hobnobby Swedes and Norskies and Germans who managed not to get bombed to smithereens. They’re all tight like Jews. I’ve sold cars to ’em.” He sometimes said he’d bombed the Japs so Jews could run pawn shops. I was tempted to tell him that the organism of the hive was not the individual bee, and humans could learn a big lesson from them. But I didn’t want to draw attention to myself when I had the money in my pants.
“Where’re we going,” Berner said.
Our father was checking behind us in the mirror. “We’ll go out to the base. Watch the jets take off.” We’d done this every place we ever lived. He thought it was recreational. His eyes found me to see how I would take this in instead of going to the fair, which was now a bust. His eyebrows flickered, as if this was a joke Berner wasn’t included in. I didn’t smile back.
“Mother’s got her bag half packed up,” Berner said. “Where’s she going?”
We were out onto the old WPA bridge. Our father sniffed, pinched his nostrils, then sniffed again. His eyes flickered toward the mirror, not at me. “I’m just married to your mother, okay? I can’t read her every thought or know every single detail about her. She loves you very much. Just like I do.” He was agitated. He added, “I’ve got some bothers of my own right now that would occupy a wild beast’s attention. I don’t get everything perfect every time, I realize.”
“Where’d you go when you left?” Berner looked straight at him, her freckled face pale, as if she was getting carsick. Our father looked in the rearview yet again. I looked to see what was behind us. A black Ford was there with two men in the front seat wearing suits. They were talking to each other. One was laughing. I couldn’t remember if it was the car I’d seen at the fairgrounds, but I believed it was.
“Your mother might have to take you kids on a trip,” he said. “Don’t let it worry you.”
“Did you hear what I said to you?” Berner said.
“Yes, I did.” Our father clicked on his turn blinker as we were about to depart the bridge and intended to go east toward the base. But he suddenly speeded up, drove straight off the bridge, went another block, and turned right on Seventh toward downtown, and onto a pretty shaded street of white frame houses—nicer than ours—with more substantial elms and oaks and better-tended lawns and a redbrick school. I didn’t know who lived here. Possibly the chess club boys whose fathers were lawyers. I’d never been in this part of town, though Great Falls wasn’t very big. It was a town, not a city.
I looked behind us. The black Ford had turned and was still there, the two men still talking. We weren’t going to the base to watch jets either.
“What’d you do with your pistol?” I said.
My father’s eyes shot up at me, then back at the Ford. “What do you know about that?”
“I looked in your drawer.”
He sighed in a frustrated way. “You oughtn’t do that. That’s my private affairs.” He wasn’t angry. He never got angry with us. We hadn’t done anything anyway.
“Why is it private? What makes it private?” Berner said.
“Do you children know what making sense means?” His eyes kept running up to the rearview. We’d come all the way down Seventh to the river again. Whitecaps were still lathering the water’s wide surface. Across the river was the fair, the tops of the Zephyr and the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster visible under the skating clouds. Nothing had been taken down. We could’ve been there.
My father suddenly twisted around in the driver’s seat, though he was driving, and glared at me. I clutched my hands over the lump of money in my pants. The world would crack open if he saw it—I thought so, anyway. His eyes burned into me. His features—I could only see the right side—his cheek, his chin, his mouth, one eyebrow, they all seemed to be in motion. It frightened me. He wasn’t watching where he was going. I’d forgotten what he’d said.
“I asked you a question. Do you know what making sense means?”
We’d talked about this subject earlier when he was polishing his boots. The game of chess made sense. You just had to wait to see what the sense was. He wouldn’t be interested in that. “Yes,” I said.
He gaped back around at the street. We were passing the back of the Cascade County jail. “What’d you say?” My voice hadn’t been very loud.
“Yes, sir,” I said, louder. “I do.”
He looked around at me again, as if he still hadn’t heard me. His breath was stale. He blinked at me. He seemed changed.
“Why don’t you ask me?” Berner said, her chin up, defiant. “I know all about it.”
“Good!” He glared at her as if she was thwarting him. “I’ll tell you, though, just in case.” He sawed his hand across his mouth and back up through his hair. “It means you accept things. If you understand, then you accept. If you accept, you understand.” He fired an angry look at Berner, then his eyes flashed to the mirror again. The black Ford was there. The two men in suits. They looked to me like school principals, or salesmen.
We were driving toward the Central Avenue Bridge through the business section of town. Bars. The Rexall. Woolworth’s. A tall office building at the bottom of which was the hobby shop where I bought my chess men. The city auditorium. There wasn’t much traffic. All the people were at the fair for half-price. Our house was just across the river in its little shabby neighborhood.
“I don’t think what you said is right,” Berner declared. She looked around at me and fattened her cheeks. She looked old, like a school teacher. She liked defying him and wanted to give herself another excuse to run away.
“Well, you’re wrong,” our father said. “You’re just wrong.”
“I don’t understand things,” Berner said, “but I accept them. And I don’t accept things, but I understand them.” She folded her arms tightly and stared out the window at the river moving along under the bridge we were now on. “You don’t make sense. That’s all. And you know it.”
Our father smiled oddly and shook his head. “Do you two children think I’m being mean to you? Is that it?” He regarded the mirror again to find out if the black car was still behind us—if it had made the turn onto the bridge. It had.
Neither of us said anything. I didn’t understand why he’d even ask that. They were never mean to us. “Because I’m not,” he said. “I just want you to learn an important lesson about life. Some things you have to accept and understand—even if they don’t make sense at first. You have to make them make sense. That’s what grown-ups do.”
“I’ll choose not to grow up in that case,” Berner said spitefully. Our father was talking, I realized, about the money stuffed in my pants. He was saying one thing and meaning another. He’d seen me find it—in the mirror—or seen me stuff it down, when he’d looked around at me. What he wa
s trying to tell me to do, before we got home, was to put it back where I’d found it, accept what I couldn’t understand about where it came from. The worst thing would be for me to still have it down my pants when we drove up to our house and for it to have to be explained. Putting it back was what made sense. Once it was back, everything would be fine.
“I don’t see any reason for you to start crying,” our father said. Berner’s arms were folded tight across her belly and she was staring fiercely out her window. “Nobody’s done anything bad to you, sister.”
“I’m not your sister,” she said angrily. “And I’m not crying.”
“Well, yes you are, too. But you shouldn’t be.” He looked at her, then back at the street. Central Avenue was leading us home.
At a certain point in our life Berner had stopped crying altogether, as if she couldn’t stand to cry and hated how it made people—me, in particular—act toward her. She got angry instead. But I could tell she was crying because she put her little finger to the corner of either eye and breathed in deeply. There was no boo-hooing or sobbing or yowling like when we were children. I hadn’t cried in longer than I could remember—longer than her. Our mother never cried. Though once our father had cried when he was watching a war movie on TV.
This was the only chance I’d have—with my father concentrating on Berner—to transfer the money packet back below the seat. I hunched forward as if I was tying my shoe and wrestled the packet out of my pants and crammed the wad back into the seat crevice where it fell out of my grip and made me feel, in the next second, a hundred percent better and lighter. When I looked up at the rearview mirror, my father was staring a hole in me again.
“What’re you doing?” he said. Berner cast an aggrieved look at me as if I’d betrayed her. Her face was stricken. She turned away and looked out at the street again.
“Tying my shoe,” I said. Our street was approaching. The crown of the elms and box elders in the park rocked in the breeze, the Lutherans’ low belfry barely in sight among them.
“Ask your sister why she’s standing on her lip.” Our father clumsily reached a hand over and patted Berner on her shoulder. She didn’t look at him. “I don’t have any idea. I swear to God. Maybe she’ll reveal it to you. Will you tell Dell, sweetheart, why you’re crying? I’m not a mean man. I don’t want you to think I am.”
“People cry because they’re miserable.” Berner spit her words.
We were making our turn at the park. “Miserable?” It always shocked him when people didn’t feel exactly the way he felt about something.
I’d looked again out the back window. The Ford with the two men had followed us through the turn past the Lutherans. Our father swerved suddenly to the curb, as if he wanted to get out of the black car’s way. The Ford slid slowly by. The two men looked in at us. One was talking and the other was nodding. They drove to the corner, turned on the west side of the park and carried on slowly up to Central. I realized they were the police, but had no idea why they’d be following us. The money stuffed behind the seat didn’t enter my thinking.
“Who do you think those two palookas are?” our father said, watching the Ford merge out onto Central. His fists were gripping the steering wheel. His jaw muscles were knotting as if he was working up to say something else. We sat silently in front of our house. White confetti from the Lutherans’ wedding blew across the pavement onto our grass.
“Maybe,” my father said. He stopped and smacked his lips and smiled at Berner who was still staring away, miserable. He turned to me, but I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. “I was about to say those fellas are probably Mormon missionaries. They’re wearing suits and ties. Maybe they’ve got a book they want us to read. I should’ve stopped and talked to them. That could’ve been interesting. Don’t you think?” This meant he wanted us to think the men were a joke and we shouldn’t give any thought to them. “Whadda ya say, sister?” It was his Dixie talk. He thought people liked it. His eyebrows danced up, and he shot me a look that meant we were again in cahoots and Berner wasn’t. It was a look I always liked.
“I wish I was a long way from here,” Berner said mournfully. “I wish I was in California or Russia.”
“We all wish that sometime, sweetheart,” our father said. “You and your mother seem to wish it more than most. You two’ll have to discuss it.” He twisted around to me. I expected him to say something, but he just smiled his big white-tooth smile, as if a battle had been lost. He popped open his car door and went on talking as he got out. “We’re catching things on the upward stroke here, you two. We’ve put up with a bunch of hooey long enough.”
Berner frowned, then sneered, as if he was contemptible and pathetic, which I didn’t agree with, even if we hadn’t gone to the fair.
“There you go,” my father said outside the car, as if I’d answered him. “That’s all I need to know.” He leaned into the doorway where Berner and I were inside. Wind gusted up the street, swirling confetti and bending the tree tops more. Rich rain smell flooded in. It was going to storm. “You kids, get out now,” my father said. “This is where we live. There’s nothing we can do about it. Home sweet home. At least for now.”
Chapter 25
When we came in, our father announced he was dead tired and went into his and our mother’s room and lay across his empty bed with the ceiling light on, still in his clothes and boots, and went straight to sleep, one arm over his eyes.
As the day slowly ended the neighbors’ windows lit up and it began to rain—softly, then harder—picking up wind and sheeting rain drops against the windows. Chill breeze pushed through the house, ballooning the curtains and unsettling the newspaper on the dining room table. Our mother closed the windows and drew the curtains that were already damp, and turned on table lamps and put my father’s shoe-shine kit away.
She didn’t have much to say and seemed business-like. She cooked supper in the kitchen and didn’t speak about Miss Remlinger or the calling she’d done or ask where we’d gone with our father. I informed her, however, that we’d left with the promise of visiting the fair, but it’d been too crowded. I didn’t stray into finding the money under the seat or Berner crying and wanting to go to Russia, or the two policemen following us. I felt I should put all that off until later.
Berner, as usual, went in her room when we got home and closed the door without saying anything to anyone. Her radio was tuned low to music, and I could hear her moving around, scraping metal clothes hangers in her closet and talking to her fish, which must’ve made her feel less lonely. I believed she was packing clothes for her getaway. I wouldn’t be able to talk her out of it, and I couldn’t tell our parents. It was the way we’d always done things. Twins didn’t cause one another trouble. But if she ran away I thought she’d come back. Nobody would hold it against her.
I sat in my own room with the window cracked open, feeling the shush of wind as the light fell, rain slashing the house shingles and spattering inside. There was no thunder or lightning, just whipping summer rain. From time to time it would stop, and through the wall I could hear my father snoring, and my mother in the kitchen and crows up in the wet tree limbs, squawking and hopping around, resettling themselves before the rain began again. I gave thought to the fair shutting down, rain drenching the sawdust and the tents and exhibits, workers dismantling the rides, loading them on trucks, and the bee exhibit and the gun display locked up and taken away. I got down my World Book letter “B” and read about bees. Everything in the hive was an ideal, orderly world where the queen was honored and sacrificed for. If this didn’t happen, everything fell into confusion. Bees, as I’d read before, were the key to everything human, because they responded perfectly to their environment and to other bees. This was something specific I could write a report about right at the start of school and get off on a good footing. I put a pencil in at the page and closed the volume. I’d be more relaxed when school started and my father was back to work and my mother was teaching.
&nbs
p; After a while my father’s sleepy voice began speaking in low tones. His sock feet bumped the floor. The noise of dishes and pots and pans were clattering in the kitchen. My mother spoke, also in low tones. “. . . A fish in deep water,” our father said. “. . . In the best of all worlds . . . ,” she said. I wondered if they would talk about the money behind the car seat, or how my father’s pistol had gotten lost, or where they’d gone, or my mother’s suitcase on the bed. Lying on my own bed in the soft night breeze, rain dampening the bottom of my bedspread, the line of hall light below my door, such questions swirled around. They were very close to me, then just as suddenly very far away, so that I grabbed the sides of my mattress and held it. I felt the way I felt when I’d been sick with scarlet fever, years before, and couldn’t completely be awake. My mother had come in and sat by my bed and laid a cool finger on my temple. My father had stood in the doorway—tall, shadowy. “How is he?” he’d said. “Maybe we should take him.” “He’ll be all right,” my mother said. I’d pulled the spread up to my chin and squeezed.
I listened to an owl out in the dark. I wanted to think my thoughts through again. But there was no holding back sleep. And so for a time I let it all rush away from me.
Chapter 26
“Do you want your supper?” my mother said softly, leaning over me. Her glasses lens caught light from somewhere behind her. Her palm was on my cheek; her fingers smelled of soap. She brushed my hair, held the helix of my ear lightly between her thumb and forefinger. I’d twisted into my sheets and couldn’t move my arms. My hands were asleep. “You’re very hot,” she said. “Do you feel sick?” She went to the foot of my bed and touched the bedspread. “It rained in on you.”
