Canada

by Richard Ford

  Just after nine o’clock, a knock sounded at the front door. Of course, we thought it was the police and turned off the light in the bedroom. I crawled down the hall on my hands and knees—in my father’s tunic—then crawled around to the kitchen. No one could see me through the front door glass. I got to the kitchen window and looked over the sill into the dark front yard, where the moon hung above the canopy of leaves and limbs, and the empty basketball backboard across the street cast shadows in the street lights. Rudy Patterson was standing on the front walk, tall and long armed and looking up at the sky, smoking a cigarette and holding a paper sack, waiting to be let in. He was talking to someone I couldn’t see. I thought he might be singing. The porch light wasn’t turned on.

  I knew he was coming to take Berner away with him—that it was all planned. I’d be left in the house alone to face whatever happened and fend for myself. They were on their way to Salt Lake or San Francisco. That’s what she’d decided. I didn’t know what to do, but I didn’t intend to let him in. I wanted the door locked and to stay in the house with Berner. I didn’t think it would be better for her to run away. The same was true for me.

  She had come to the hallway door and looked around the corner, as if she didn’t care who saw her. “Who’s that?” she said.

  I said, “It’s Rudy. He can’t come in. Mother said no one could come in.”

  “I forgot about him,” she said and moved out of the hallway. “I told him to come. He can come in. Don’t be stupid. He and I are in love.” She went straight to the front door and let Rudy Patterson into our house.

  No matter how I’d felt when I saw Rudy standing out on the moonlit walk, when he came in our house he—at least for a time—changed everything. He was not the sort of boy you’d expect to have a good effect. But when he came in the door, time stopped and our lives stopped with it. Everything outside disappeared, as if the future and the past had come to their ends at once and it was just the three of us.

  Rudy was immediately loud when he got inside. He walked around our living room, smoking his cigarette and inspecting things. The same things I’d taken a tally of earlier that day. The piano. The pictures on the wall. My father’s discharge. My mother’s suitcase and my pillowcase with my possessions inside. He seemed older and bigger than the last time I saw him, when we’d shot baskets in the park and Berner sat and watched us. He was only sixteen and had wild, curly red hair and long, red-freckled arms and big hands with hair already on the backs, and his little mustache that Berner didn’t like. He had veins in his biceps below his T-shirt sleeves, and scratched, scuffed-up knuckles, as if he’d been crawling on rocks or possibly fighting. He wore dirty tight black dungarees with a wide belt and a brass buckle and a little scabbard knife on the side and thick black ankle boots—the kind men wore at the air base or where his father worked at the refinery. He bore little resemblance to the boy my sister had been friendly with in the summer and who I’d liked because he was nice to me. Something unusual had happened to him since the last time I saw him. I had no idea what.

  But I still liked him and saw now, how my sister might decide to run away with him. He seemed mysterious and dangerous. I considered it might be a good idea to run away with them myself, and not face tomorrow and all it would probably contain.

  As he was roaming the room, Rudy carried on talking. He’d never been inside our house. Possibly it made him nervous and act in an exaggerated way. He’d been drinking, too. In his paper sack he had three bottles of Pabst beer, plus a cellophane bag of peanuts in-the-hull, which he ate and left the hulls on our father’s Niagara Falls puzzle. He also had a half pint of Evan Williams whiskey in his back pocket, which he referred to as “the pete.” He made a considerable presence in our house, which was already in a strange state.

  Rudy knew about our parents being in jail and us being alone. It was Rudy Berner had been talking to when I woke up, and she had told him. He said his own father and stepmother didn’t get along at all and that Mormons were crazy, anyway. He didn’t believe what they believed. Mormons had invented a secret language, he said, that they only spoke to each other. They planned to enslave Catholics and Jews, and Negroes were to be sent to Africa or else executed. Washington, D.C., would be burned to the ground. If you left the Mormon Church, they hunted you down and brought you back in chains. He took “the pete” out, pulled a drink off of it, smacked his lips, then shockingly handed it to Berner, who pulled a drink, then handed it to me and I pulled one. I swallowed mine down all at once and had to clench my teeth to keep from choking. It made my throat constrict and burn all the way to my stomach, and hurt more there. Berner took another drink. She’d done it before. She didn’t scowl, and afterward she patted her lips with her fingers as if she’d liked it. Rudy then gave her a cigarette, which he lighted and she smoked and held away from herself between her thumb and middle finger. This was in the living room of our house! Twelve hours ago our parents had been there. Their rules had governed our behavior and determined everything we did. Now they were gone, and so were their rules. It was a dizzying feeling. I felt I had a rough idea, then, about what the rest of my life would be.

  Berner sat down in one of the living room chairs and just watched Rudy. His behavior was a kind of performance. He walked around the room saying his parents had threatened him with becoming a ward of the state, and that was the most terrible thing that could happen. It meant you were sent to a big orphanage in Miles City and strangers could adopt you and make you their private property. At his age nobody would adopt him, so he’d be a prisoner left in the foul company of mean ranch boys whose parents had died or had abandoned them, or filthy Indian kids whose parents were perverted. Your life was ruined even if you survived it. This eventuality, I thought, was what our mother was fearful of and why she’d been definite about Berner and me not leaving with anyone but Miss Remlinger.

  The living room soon smelled like Rudy’s cigarettes and whiskey and beer. It had been clean not long before. We would have to clean it up again tomorrow. I went and turned on the attic fan, which began its clatter-racket and drew some smoke away. All the doors and windows were locked shut from when I’d locked them earlier.

  I still was wearing my father’s Air Force tunic, and Rudy said he’d like to try it on. I took it off, and he put it on, and it fit him better than it fit me. It also had an instant effect on him. He walked around our living room some more with his cigarette and his beer, but as if he was an officer, and our house was a staging area for a war he would soon be fighting.

  “I’m ready to shoot down a lot of Commies now,” he said in a made-up official voice as he strutted about. Berner said she was, too. He was drunk, of course. I thought he looked a little silly. Part of his large presence had already begun to fade—though I still liked him. Possibly I was a little drunk myself.

  “Do you have any music we can play?” Rudy said, admiring himself in the smoky glass mirror that hung over the davenport and had been in the house when we got there.

  “He’s got some records,” Berner said, referring to our father.

  “I’d like to hear one,” Rudy said. He set his hands on his hips like pictures of General Patton I’d seen in the World Book.

  Berner went to the phonograph and got out one of our father’s 78s from the cabinet and put it on the turntable—things I’d only seen him do.

  Right away, Glenn Miller’s band started playing one of our father’s favorites. “The Little Brown Jug.” Our father had great respect for Glenn Miller, because he’d died in the service of his country.

  Rudy instantly started dancing around by himself. He swooped and slid across the living room, smiling and dipping his knees and raising and lowering his arms and turning circles—his beer in one hand, his cigarette in the other.

  “You have to dance with me.” He said this to me. He danced over, put his arms around me and pulled me up where I was sitting on the piano bench. He danced me backward, twirled me around, fluttered his fingers, pushed me and p
ulled me, stepped on my feet with his big black boots, smiling and smelling like whiskey and cigarettes, his scuffed hands now and then clutching my shoulder and the middle of my back. I’d never danced before. I didn’t think I was really dancing now. Our mother and father had danced in my memory, but not recently. Their size difference didn’t make that easy. My mother liked Russian ballet and hated “middlebrow ballroom tastes,” which was what my father was accomplished at.

  Berner was frowning at me with her cigarette in her mouth while Rudy and I were whirling around. I enjoyed it. “Quit dancing with your boyfriend,” she said, “and dance with your girlfriend.”

  “I’ve given Dell-boy his big thrill now,” Rudy said, out of breath but smiling wildly. He turned loose of me and began dancing the same way with Berner, who couldn’t dance any better than I could. My head was spinning and I felt a little sick to my stomach. I sat down in the chair where Berner’d been sitting, while they danced around in front of me.

  After “The Little Brown Jug,” the next song was “Stardust,” which was one my father regularly played. Berner and Rudy danced stiffly at arm’s length at first. He maintained a serious expression as if he was concentrating on his footwork. Berner seemed bored. Then they moved in closer, and it was clear they’d been that close before. Berner’s face appeared over Rudy’s shoulder and she had her eyes closed. They were almost the same height and in many ways looked alike—more alike than she and I did. They both had freckles and large bones. Berner’s white tennis shoes slipped around on the rug in clumsy step with Rudy’s boots, both of them holding their cigarettes, Rudy holding his beer. I took another drink out of the Evan Williams bottle, which was on the floor, and again suffered the stomach burning, but the aftermath wasn’t as bad and instantly calmed me, though I hadn’t realized I wasn’t calm. I sat back in the green armchair and watched Berner and Rudy dance together—Rudy in my father’s Air Force tunic, Berner clinging on his neck. I had the feeling someone was almost certainly about to bash in the front door and find us smoking and drinking and carrying on in these ways we shouldn’t be. But I didn’t care. I was happy. I was happy Berner was happy. It was always hard to please her. Just for that moment it was as if I was watching our parents dance, and everything was back the way it was supposed to be.

  After they’d danced to another Glenn Miller song, Rudy’s face got red. He was sweating with my father’s tunic on. He suddenly quit dancing, skinned off the coat and threw it on a chair, and resumed walking around saying he wouldn’t be staying long. Berner stood in the middle of the floor watching him. He said he had a plan to get some money that night, but it’d be best if he didn’t tell us how. (It was stealing, I assumed.) He said he could go to Deer Lodge prison if he got caught in a crime, because he was seventeen. People were watching him, whereas in California there were so many people he wouldn’t stand out the way he did in Great Falls, which he said was a “hell hole,” and he hated it.

  He asked Berner if anything was in the house to eat. All he’d had were his peanuts he’d “lifted” from the Italian’s, and the beer and the whiskey he’d bought from an Indian with money out of his father’s wallet. Berner said there were frozen steaks in the ice box—steaks our father had brought from the base. She could cook one. He said that would be wonderful.

  Rudy and I sat for a time then in the dining room under the overhead light and with the front curtains closed so no one outside could see us. Our family had sat there two days ago. Rudy smoked and alternated his beer and his whiskey. Berner put a frozen steak straight into a frying pan to cook it on the Westinghouse—which was what our father called it. I’d never seen her cook anything and didn’t believe she knew how. I didn’t know how. Rudy had picked up a book of our mother’s off the shelf in the living room—her Arthur Rimbaud poems—from which he read a line or two. “In spicy and drenched lands—at the service of the most monstrous exploitation, industrial and sultry. . . .” I’ve remembered that. Rudy still seemed friendly and mysterious to me. His tangled red hair and veiny arms worked in favor of him seeming out of the ordinary. I didn’t think he was smarter than I was. He didn’t play chess—that I knew about. He didn’t know anything about other places on the globe—which I did. He had no plans to go to college, but was planning to run away. I was fairly sure he’d never read Time or Life or National Geographic. Which didn’t mean he lacked his own intelligence—including wearing a knife on his belt and steel-toe boots and drinking and smoking and having schemes to get his own money and knowing about Mormons, and whatever he and Berner did in his father’s car up by the municipal airport. That amounted to something.

  At the table Rudy said he looked forward to winter in a new climate—which would be California, where his real mother lived. He said his father’d told him he—Rudy—probably should never even have been born, or at least should’ve been born to someone else who had a lot of patience. He put his cigarette into his beer bottle and lit another one (there were no ashtrays in our house), and predicted he’d end up in jail. He didn’t seem to remember that our parents were in jail at that minute and we might be feeling raw about it. He said the whole time he’d lived in Great Falls he’d made no friends, and something was wrong with a town where you didn’t make friends. This had been Berner’s and my experience, also, but I’d believed it had to do with our mother’s fear of fitting in. He looked hard across the table at me, then suddenly did remember the terrible situation Berner and I were facing, and said we hadn’t done anything that he knew of to deserve our predicament. Which was nothing I’d thought anyway. I felt already that if our parents had robbed a bank—no matter what reasons they had for it—the fault was theirs. That was clear enough. Rudy didn’t mention joining the Marines or marrying Berner—which had been talked about before.

  Berner came from the kitchen with Rudy’s steak on a white plate she set down in front of him. A knife and fork were laid across it. It was just the steak. Nothing else. It looked hard as a shingle and was curled up at the burned edges where it was fat. It didn’t look good to eat. Berner set her hands on her waist, pushed her hip to the side and frowned at the steak as if she disliked how it looked. “I never cooked anything but soup before,” she said. She pulled a chair out and sat across from Rudy and kept frowning at the steak. Even with the attic fan running, the house was hot. Moisture was standing on Berner’s upper lip. Rudy was also sweating. The burnt-steak odor moved in the air around us.

  “This looks great,” Rudy said. He still had his cigarette in his mouth. I thought he was going to eat and smoke at the same time. He cut right into the steak, but wasn’t able to cut very far. We both sat watching him. He put his table knife down, took his little red-handled scabbard knife out of its sheath and cut right into the steak with ease.

  “It’s perfect,” he said and ate a chunk that I could see was still frozen inside. He chewed vigorously, laying his cigarette on the edge of his plate. Smoke funneled out his nose as he was chewing. He drank a swig of his beer. Then he cut another piece, but turned in his chair before he ate it and looked around the room behind him, where we’d been dancing and drinking whiskey. My father’s tunic was on the chair, the jigsaw puzzle of Niagara Falls was on the card table top littered with peanut hulls. My pillowcase with my belongings and my mother’s suitcase from the morning were where they’d been all day, ever since the police came. Rudy seemed to want to check that everything was the same.

  He turned back to his steak with Berner and me watching him and cut his piece in half. His boots scuffed the floor, as if eating involved effort. He took another drag on his cigarette, raised his chin, delivered a French inhale, then forked the small wedge of steak into his mouth and chewed, smiling as he did it. “I believe”—he cleared his throat and swallowed—“that we could do just as good by ourselves out on the tramp. That’s my view.” I didn’t know what his mind was on about. I didn’t know what “on the tramp” was.

  “Where do your parents think you are, right now,” Berner said. “Do they thi
nk you ran away?”

  “Probably,” Rudy said, chewing forcefully. “If somebody fished me out of the Missouri River, they wouldn’t even come down to see my body.” These words seemed to excite him, and he got up from his chair, his hunting knife in one fist and his cigarette in the other, and executed three or four thrusts in the air over the table. Each time he stabbed the empty air he went, “Ah! Ah! Ah!” and his eyes squinted as if he was striking someone he hated. It wasn’t very impressive.

  He sat back down, cut another piece of his steak and ate it, breathing audibly. He looked at me and grinned. He had a warm smile. “Do you want some of this, Dell? It’s really good.” He pushed his plate toward me, the knife and fork still on it. He kept his hunting knife in front of him in case he might need to stab some things again.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said. Though I was.

  He turned to reinsert his knife into its little sheath without wiping the meat grease off. “I’ve had my fill-up now,” he said. He’d had two pieces and a half. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, then stubbed his cigarette on the sole of his boot, licked the stub and put it in his shirt pocket. He coughed to cover up a belch. “I could go right to sleep,” he said. He covered his mouth again. “I gotta go get some money, though.”

  “Where’re you going to get that?” Berner said. She hadn’t said much. We’d been watching Rudy like he was an animal in a cage.

  “If I told you, you’d be my accomplices, and you’d go to jail.” He stood up and walked back into the living room, patting his belly as if he’d eaten a three-course meal instead of a piece of frozen steak. He put a fresh cigarette to his lips and lit it from a paper matchbook out of the same pocket. He seemed to be looking around for something. He reminded me of my father when he came back from his business trip. Berner and I were still sitting at the table, watching him like spectators. Probably Rudy had a decent heart and had suffered because his parents didn’t love him. He wouldn’t have hurt anybody. But he seemed undependable and erratic. His mouth, when he wasn’t smiling, sank in toward his little teeth and made him look deceitful, like somebody we shouldn’t know, even if we weren’t his accomplices. Rudy was a person I could imagine being a ward of the state, being imprisoned in some empty, windswept landscape where there’d be barbed wire and terrible things would happen to him, and escape would be impossible. I still had on my father’s class ring. Two rearing gold mustangs. I wished it could be magic and make my father appear and take control of things that were happening to Berner and me. Of course, he was the cause of all of it.