by Richard Ford
Things seldom end in one event. In the morning I went to school on the bus as usual, and my father drove in to the air base in his car. We had not said very much about all that had happened. Harsh words, in a sense, are all alike. You can make them up yourself and be right. I think we both believed that we were in a fog we couldn’t see through yet, though in a while, maybe not even a long while, we would see lights and know something.
In my third-period class that day a messenger brought a note for me that said I was excused from school at noon, and I should meet my mother at a motel down 10th Avenue South—a place not so far from my school—and we would eat lunch together.
It was a gray day in Great Falls that day. The leaves were off the trees and the mountains to the east of town were obscured by a low sky. The night before had been cold and clear, but today it seemed as if it would rain. It was the beginning of winter in earnest. In a few days there would be snow everywhere.
The motel where my mother was staying was called the Tropicana, and was beside the city golf course. There was a neon parrot on the sign out front, and the cabins made a U shape behind a little white office building. Only a couple of cars were parked in front of cabins, and no car was in front of my mother’s cabin. I wondered if Woody would be here, or if he was at the air base. I wondered if my father would see him there, and what they would say.
I walked back to cabin 9. The door was open, though a DO NOT DISTURB sign was hung on the knob outside. I looked through the screen and saw my mother sitting on the bed alone. The television was on, but she was looking at me. She was wearing the powder-blue dress she had had on the night before. She was smiling at me, and I liked the way she looked at that moment, through the screen, in shadows. Her features did not seem as sharp as they had before. She looked comfortable where she was, and I felt like we were going to get along, no matter what had happened, and that I wasn’t mad at her—that I had never been mad at her.
She sat forward and turned the television off. “Come in, Jackie,” she said, and I opened the screen door and came inside. “It’s the height of grandeur in here, isn’t it?” My mother looked around the room. Her suitcase was open on the floor by the bathroom door, which I could see through and out the window onto the golf course, where three men were playing under the milky sky. “Privacy can be a burden, sometimes,” she said, and reached down and put on her high-heeled shoes. “I didn’t sleep very well last night, did you?”
“No,” I said, though I had slept all right. I wanted to ask her where Woody was, but it occurred to me at that moment that he was gone now and wouldn’t be back, that she wasn’t thinking in terms of him and didn’t care where he was or ever would be.
“I’d like a nice compliment from you,” she said. “Do you have one of those to spend?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m glad to see you.”
“That’s a nice one,” she said and nodded. She had both her shoes on now. “Would you like to go have lunch? We can walk across the street to the cafeteria. You can get hot food.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not really hungry now.”
“That’s okay,” she said and smiled at me again. And, as I said before, I liked the way she looked. She looked pretty in a way I didn’t remember seeing her, as if something that had had a hold on her had let her go, and she could be different about things. Even about me.
“Sometimes, you know,” she said, “I’ll think about something I did. Just anything. Years ago in Idaho, or last week, even. And it’s as if I’d read it. Like a story. Isn’t that strange?”
“Yes,” I said. And it did seem strange to me because I was certain then what the difference was between what had happened and what hadn’t, and knew I always would be.
“Sometimes,” she said, and she folded her hands in her lap and stared out the little side window of her cabin at the parking lot and the curving row of other cabins. “Sometimes I even have a moment when I completely forget what life’s like. Just altogether.” She smiled. “That’s not so bad, finally. Maybe it’s a disease I have. Do you think I’m just sick and I’ll get well?”
“No. I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I hope so.” I looked out the bathroom window and saw the three men walking down the golf course fairway carrying golf clubs.
“I’m not very good at sharing things right now,” my mother said. “I’m sorry.” She cleared her throat, and then she didn’t say anything for almost a minute while I stood there. “I will answer anything you’d like me to answer, though. Just ask me anything, and I’ll answer it the truth, whether I want to or not. Okay? I will. You don’t even have to trust me. That’s not a big issue with us. We’re both grown-ups now.”
And I said, “Were you ever married before?”
My mother looked at me strangely. Her eyes got small, and for a moment she looked the way I was used to seeing her—sharp-faced, her mouth set and taut. “No,” she said. “Who told you that? That isn’t true. I never was. Did Jack say that to you? Did your father say that? That’s an awful thing to say. I haven’t been that bad.”
“He didn’t say that,” I said.
“Oh, of course he did,” my mother said. “He doesn’t know just to let things go when they’re bad enough.”
“I wanted to know that,” I said. “I just thought about it. It doesn’t matter.”
“No, it doesn’t,” my mother said. “I could’ve been married eight times. I’m just sorry he said that to you. He’s not generous sometimes.”
“He didn’t say that,” I said. But I’d said it enough, and I didn’t care if she believed me or didn’t. It was true that trust was not a big issue between us then. And in any event, I know now that the whole truth of anything is an idea that stops existing finally.
“Is that all you want to know, then?” my mother said. She seemed mad, but not at me, I didn’t think. Just at things in general. And I sympathized with her. “Your life’s your own business, Jackie,” she said. “Sometimes it scares you to death it’s so much your own business. You just want to run.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“I’d like a less domestic life, is all.” She looked at me, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t see what she meant by that, though I knew there was nothing I could say to change the way her life would be from then on. And I kept quiet.
In a while we walked across 10th Avenue and ate lunch in the cafeteria. When she paid for the meal I saw that she had my father’s silver-dollar money clip in her purse and that there was money in it. And I understood that he had been to see her already that day, and no one cared if I knew it. We were all of us on our own in this.
When we walked out onto the street, it was colder and the wind was blowing. Car exhausts were visible and some drivers had their lights on, though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon. My mother had called a taxi, and we stood and waited for it. I didn’t know where she was going, but I wasn’t going with her.
“Your father won’t let me come back,” she said, standing on the curb. It was just a fact to her, not that she hoped I would talk to him or stand up for her or take her part. But I did wish then that I had never let her go the night before. Things can be fixed by staying; but to go out into the night and not come back hazards life, and everything can get out of hand.
My mother’s taxi came. She kissed me and hugged me very hard, then got inside the cab in her powder-blue dress and high heels and her car coat. I smelled her perfume on my cheeks as I stood watching her. “I used to be afraid of more things than I am now,” she said, looking up at me, and smiled. “I’ve got a knot in my stomach, of all things.” And she closed the cab door, waved at me, and rode away.
I walked back toward my school. I thought I could take the bus home if I got there by three. I walked a long way down 10th Avenue to Second Street, beside the Missouri River, then over to town. I walked by the Great Northern Hotel, where my father had sold ducks and geese and fish of all kinds. There were no passenger trains in the yard and the loading doc
k looked small. Garbage cans were lined along the edge of it, and the door was closed and locked.
As I walked toward school I thought to myself that my life had turned suddenly, and that I might not know exactly how or which way for possibly a long time. Maybe, in fact, I might never know. It was a thing that happened to you—I knew that—and it had happened to me in this way now. And as I walked on up the cold street that afternoon in Great Falls, the questions I asked myself were these: why wouldn’t my father let my mother come back? Why would Woody stand in the cold with me outside my house and risk being killed? Why would he say my mother had been married before, if she hadn’t been? And my mother herself—why would she do what she did? In five years my father had gone off to Ely, Nevada, to ride out the oil strike there, and been killed by accident. And in the years since then I have seen my mother from time to time—in one place or another, with one man or other—and I can say, at least, that we know each other. But I have never known the answer to these questions, have never asked anyone their answers. Though possibly it—the answer—is simple: it is just low-life, some coldness in us all, some helplessness that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain, makes our existence seem like a border between two nothings, and makes us no more or less than animals who meet on the road—watchful, unforgiving, without patience or desire.
Sweethearts
I was standing in the kitchen while Arlene was in the living room saying good-bye to her ex-husband, Bobby. I had already been out to the store for groceries and come back and made coffee, and was drinking it and staring out the window while the two of them said whatever they had to say. It was a quarter to six in the morning.
This was not going to be a good day in Bobby’s life, that was clear, because he was headed to jail. He had written several bad checks, and before he could be sentenced for that he had robbed a convenience store with a pistol—completely gone off his mind. And everything had gone to hell, as you might expect. Arlene had put up the money for his bail, and there was some expensive talk about an appeal. But there wasn’t any use to that. He was guilty. It would cost money and then he would go to jail anyway.
Arlene had said she would drive him to the sheriffs department this morning, if I would fix him breakfast, so he could surrender on a full stomach, and that had seemed all right. Early in the morning Bobby had brought his motorcycle around to the backyard and tied up his dog to the handlebars. I had watched him from the window. He hugged the dog, kissed it on the head and whispered something in its ear, then came inside. The dog was a black Lab, and it sat beside the motorcycle now and stared with blank interest across the river at the buildings of town, where the sky was beginning to turn pinkish and the day was opening up. It was going to be our dog for a while now, I guessed.
Arlene and I had been together almost a year. She had divorced Bobby long before and had gone back to school and gotten real estate training and bought the house we lived in, then quit that and taught high school a year, and finally quit that and just went to work in a bar in town, which is where I came upon her. She and Bobby had been childhood sweethearts and run crazy for fifteen years. But when I came into the picture, things with Bobby were settled, more or less. No one had hard feelings left, and when he came around I didn’t have any trouble with him. We had things we talked about—our pasts, our past troubles. It was not the worst you could hope for.
From the living room I heard Bobby say, “So how am I going to keep up my self-respect. Answer me that. That’s my big problem.”
“You have to get centered,” Arlene said in an upbeat voice. “Be within yourself if you can.”
“I feel like I’m catching a cold right now,” Bobby said. “On the day I enter prison I catch cold.”
“Take Contac,” Arlene said. “I’ve got some somewhere.” I heard a chair scrape the floor. She was going to get it for him.
“I already took that,” Bobby said. “I had some at home.”
“You’ll feel better then,” Arlene said. “They’ll have Contac in prison.”
“I put all my faith in women,” Bobby said softly. “I see now that was wrong.”
“I couldn’t say,” Arlene said. And then no one spoke.
I looked out the window at Bobby’s dog. It was still staring across the river at town as if it knew about something there.
The door to the back bedroom opened then, and my daughter Cherry came out wearing her little white nightgown with red valentines on it. be mine was on all the valentines. She was still asleep, though she was up. Bobby’s voice had waked her up.
“Did you feed my fish?” she said and stared at me. She was barefoot and holding a doll, and looked pretty as a doll herself.
“You were asleep already,” I said.
She shook her head and looked at the open living-room door. “Who’s that?” she said.
“Bobby’s here,” I said. “He’s talking to Arlene.”
Cherry came over to the window where I was and looked out at Bobby’s dog. She liked Bobby, but she liked his dog better. “There’s Buck,” she said. Buck was the dog’s name. A tube of sausage was lying on the sink top and I wanted to cook it, for Bobby to eat, and then have him get out. I wanted Cherry to go to school, and for the day to flatten out and hold fewer people in it. Just Arlene and me would be enough.
“You know, Bobby, sweetheart,” Arlene said now in the other room, “in our own lifetime we’ll see the last of the people who were born in the nineteenth century. They’ll all be gone soon. Every one of them.”
“We should’ve stayed together, I think,” Bobby whispered. I was not supposed to hear that, I knew. “I wouldn’t be going to prison if we’d loved each other.”
“I wanted to get divorced, though,” Arlene said.
“That was a stupid idea.”
“Not for me it wasn’t,” Arlene said. I heard her stand up.
“It’s water over the bridge now, I guess, isn’t it?” I heard Bobby’s hands hit his knees three times in a row.
“Let’s watch TV,” Cherry said to me, and went and turned on the little set on the kitchen table. There was a man talking on a news show.
“Not loud,” I said. “Keep it soft.”
“Let’s let Buck in,” she said. “Buck’s lonely.”
“Leave Buck outside,” I said.
Cherry looked at me without any interest. She left her doll on top of the TV. “Poor Buck,” she said. “Buck’s crying. Do you hear him?”
“No,” I said. “I can’t hear him.”
Bobby ate his eggs and stared out the window as if he was having a hard time concentrating on what he was doing. Bobby is a handsome small man with thick black hair and pale eyes. He is likable, and it is easy to see why women would like him. This morning he was dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt and boots. He looked like somebody on his way to jail.
He stared out the back window for a long time and then he sniffed and nodded. “You have to face that empty moment, Russ.” He cut his eyes at me. “How often have you done that?”
“Russ’s done that, Bob,” Arlene said. “We’ve all done that now. We’re adults.”
“Well, that’s where I am right now,” Bobby said. “I’m at the empty moment here. I’ve lost everything.”
“You’re among friends, though, sweetheart.” Arlene smiled. She was smoking a cigarette.
“I’m calling you up. Guess who I am,” Cherry said to Bobby. She had her eyes squeezed tight and her nose and mouth pinched up together. She was moving her head back and forth.
“Who are you?” Bobby said and smiled.
“I’m the bumblebee.”
“Can’t you fly?” Arlene said.
“No. My wings are much too short and I’m too fat.” Cherry opened her eyes at us suddenly.
“Well, you’re in big trouble then,” Arlene said.
“A turkey can go forty-five miles an hour,” Cherry said and looked shocked.
“Go change your clothes,” I said.
&nb
sp; “Go ahead now, sweetheart.” Arlene smiled at her. “I’ll come help you.”
Cherry squinted at Bobby, then went back to her room. When she opened her door I could see her aquarium in the dark against the wall, a pale green light with pink rocks and tiny dots of fish.
Bobby ran his hands back through his hair and stared up at the ceiling. “Okay,” he said, “here’s the awful criminal now, ready for jail.” He looked at us then, and he looked wild, as wild and desperate as I have ever seen a man look. And it was not for no reason.
“That’s off the wall,” Arlene said. “That’s just completely boring. I’d never be married to a man who was a fucking criminal.” She looked at me, but Bobby looked at me too.
“Somebody ought to come take her away,” Bobby said. “You know that, Russell? Just put her in a truck and take her away. She always has such a wonderful fucking outlook. You wonder how she got in this fix here.” He looked around the little kitchen, which was shabby and white. At one time Arlene’s house had been a jewelry store, and there was a black security camera above the kitchen door, though it wasn’t connected now.
“Just try to be nice, Bobby,” Arlene said.
“I just oughta slap you,” Bobby said, and I could see his jaw muscles tighten, and I thought he might slap her then. In the bedroom I saw Cherry standing naked in the dark, sprinkling food in her aquarium. The light made her skin look the color of water.
“Try to calm down, Bob,” I said and stayed put in my chair. “We’re all your friends.”
“I don’t know why people came out here,” Bobby said. “The West is fucked up. It’s ruined. I wish somebody would take me away from here.”
“Somebody’s going to, I guess,” Arlene said, and I knew she was mad at him and I didn’t blame her, though I wished she hadn’t said that.
Bobby’s blue eyes got small, and he smiled at her in a hateful way. I could see Cherry looking in at us. She had not heard this kind of talk yet. Jail talk. Mean talk. The kind you don’t forget. “Do you think I’m jealous of you two?” Bobby said. “Is that it?”
