by Richard Ford
“I know it,” I said.
“But you need to be trusted. Or you aren’t anything. Do you know that too?”
We were close to each other. I couldn’t see the lights of town or the motel or anything more. Nothing moved.
“I know that, I guess,” I said. It was whiskey talking.
“Warm me up then, Les,” Nola said. “Warm. Warm.”
“You’ll get warm,” I said.
“I’ll think about Florida.”
“I’ll make you warm,” I said.
What I thought I heard at first was a train. So many things can sound like a train when you live near trains. This was a woo sound, you would say. Like a train. And I lay and listened for a long time, thinking about a train and its light shining through the darkness along the side of some mountain pass north of there and about something else I don’t even remember now. And then Troy came around to my thinking, and I knew dien that the woo sound had been him.
Nola Foster said, “It’s Mr. Wheels. He’s caught a fish, maybe. Or else drowned.”
“Yes,” I said. I sat up and looked out the window but could see nothing. It had become foggy in just that little time, and tomorrow, I thought, would be warm again, though it was cold now. Nola and I had not even taken off our clothes to do what we’d done.
“Let me see,” I said.
I got out and walked into the fog to where I could only see fog and hear the river running. Troy had not made a wooing sound again, and I thought to myself, There is no trouble here. Nothing’s wrong.
Though when I walked a ways up the sandy bank, I saw Troy’s chair come visible in the fog. And he was not in it, and I couldn’t see him. And my heart went then. I heard it go click in my chest. And I thought: This is the worst. What’s happened here will be the worst. And I called out, “Troy. Where are you? Call out now.”
And Troy called out, “Here I am, here.”
I went for the sound, ahead of me, which was not out in the river but on the bank. And when I had gone farther, I saw him, out of his chair, of course, on his belly, holding on to his fishing rod with both hands, the line out into the river as though it meant to drag him to the water.
“Help me!” he yelled. “I’ve got a huge fish. Do something to help me.”
“I will,” I said. Though I didn’t see what I could do. I would not dare to take the rod, and it would only have been a mistake to take the line. Never give a straight pull to the fish, is an old rule. So that my only choice was to grab Troy and hold him until the fish was either in or lost, just as if Troy was a part of a rod I was fishing with.
I squatted in the cold sand behind him, put my heels down and took up his legs, which felt like matchsticks, and began to hold him there away from the water.
But Troy suddenly twisted toward me. “Turn me loose, Les. Don’t be here. Go out. It’s snagged. You’ve got to go out.”
That’s crazy,” I said. “It’s too deep there.”
“It’s not deep,” Troy yelled. “I’ve got it in close now.”
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“Oh, Christ, Les, go get it. I don’t want to lose it.”
I looked a moment at Troy’s face then, in the dark. His glasses were gone off of him. His face was wet. And he had the look of a desperate man, a man who has nothing to hope for but, in some strange way, everything in the world to lose.
“Stupid. This is stupid,” I said, because it seemed to me to be. But I got up, walked to the edge and stepped out into the cold water.
Then, it was at least a month before the runoff would begin in the mountains, and the water I stepped in was cold and painful as broken glass, though the wet parts of me numbed at once, and my feet felt like bricks bumping the bottom.
Troy had been wrong all the way about the depth. Because when I stepped out ten yards, keeping touch of his line with the back of my hand, I had already gone above my knees, and on the bottom I felt large rocks, and there was a loud rushing around me that suddenly made me afraid.
But when I had gone five more yards, and the water was on my thighs and hurting, I hit the snag Troy’s fish was hooked to, and I realized then I had no way at all to hold a fish or catch it with my numbed hands. And that all I could really hope for was to break the snag and let the fish slip down into the current and hope Troy could bring it in, or that I could go back and beach it.
“Can you see it, Les?” Troy yelled out of the dark. “Goddamn it.”
“It isn’t easy,” I said, and I had to hold the snag then to keep my balance. My legs were numb. And I thought: This might be the time and the place I die. What an odd place it is. And what an odd reason for it to happen.
“Hurry up,” Troy yelled.
And I wanted to hurry. Except when I ran the line as far as where the snag was, I felt something there that was not a fish and not the snag but something else entirely, some thing I thought I recognized, though I am not sure why. A man, I thought. This is a man.
Though when I reached farther into the snag branches and woods scruff, deeper into the water, what I felt was an animal. With my fingers I touched its hard rib-side, its legs, its short slick coat. I felt to its neck and head and touched its nose and teeth, and it was a deer, though not a big deer, not even a yearling. And I knew when I found where Troy’s dace had gone up in the neck flesh, that he had hooked a deer already snagged here, and that he had pulled himself out of his chair trying to work it free.
“What is it? I know it’s a big Brown. Don’t tell me, Les, don’t even tell me.”
“I’ve got it,” I said. “I’ll bring it in.”
“Sure, hell yes,” Troy said out of the fog.
It was not so hard to work the deer off the snag brush and float it up free. Though once I did, it was dangerous to get turned in the current on numb legs, and hard to keep from going down, and I had to hold on to the deer to keep balance enough to heave myself into the slower water. And as I did that, I thought: In the Clark Fork many people drown doing less dangerous things than I am doing.
“Throw it way far up,” Troy shouted when he could see me. He had righted himself on the sand and was sitting up like a little doll. “Get it way up safe.”
“It’s safe,” I said. I had the deer beside me, floating, but I knew Troy couldn’t see it.
“What did I catch?” Troy yelled.
“Something unusual,” I said, and with effort I hauled the little deer a foot up onto the sand, dropped it, and put my cold hands under my arms. I heard a car door close back where I had come from, up the riverbank.
“What is that?” Troy said and put his hand out to touch the deer’s side. He looked up at me. “I can’t see without my glasses.”
“It’s a deer,” I said.
Troy moved his hand around on the deer, then looked at me again in a painful way.
“What is it?” he said.
“A deer,” I said. “You caught a dead deer.”
Troy looked back at the little deer for a moment, and stared as if he did not know what to say about it. And sitting on the wet sand, in the foggy night, he all at once looked scary to me, as though it was him who had washed up there and was finished. “I don’t see it,” he said and sat there.
“It’s what you caught,” I said. “I thought you’d want to see it.”
“It’s crazy, Les,” he said. “Isn’t it?” And he smiled at me in a wild, blind-eyed way.
“It’s unusual,” I said.
“I never shot a deer before.”
“I don’t believe you shot this one,” I said.
He smiled at me again, but then suddenly he gasped back a sob, something I had never seen before. “Goddamn it,” he said. “Just goddamn it.”
“It’s an odd thing to catch,” I said, standing above him in the grimy fog.
“I can’t change a fucking tire,” he said and sobbed. “But I’ll catch a fucking deer with my fucking fishing rod.”
“Not everyone can say that,” I said.
“
Why would they want to?” He looked up at me crazy again, and broke his spinning rod into two pieces with only his hands. And I knew he must’ve been drunk still, because I was still drunk a little, and that by itself made me want to cry. And we were there for a time just silent.
“Who killed a deer?” Nola said. She had come behind me in the cold and was looking. I had not known, when I heard the car door, if she wasn’t starting back up to town. But it was too cold for that, and I put my arm around her because she was shivering. “Did Mr. Wheels kill it?”
“It drowned,” Troy said.
“And why is that?” Nola said and pushed closer to me to be warm, though that was all.
“They get weak and they fall over,” I said. “It happens in the mountains. This one fell in the water and couldn’t get up.”
“So a gimp man can catch it on a fishing rod in a shitty town,” Troy said and gasped with bitterness. Real bitterness. The worst I have ever heard from any man, and I have heard bitterness voiced, though it was a union matter then.
“Maybe it isn’t so bad,” Nola said.
“Hah!” Troy said from the wet ground. “Hah, hah, hah.” And I wished that I had never shown him the deer, wished I had spared him that, though the river’s rushing came up then and snuffed his sound right out of hearing, and drew it away from us into the foggy night beyond all accounting.
Nola and I pushed the deer back into the river while Troy watched, and then we all three drove up into town and ate chicken-in-the-ruff at the Two Fronts, where the lights were bright and they cooked the chicken fresh for you. I bought a jug of wine and we drank that while we ate, though no one talked. Each of us had done something that night. Something different. That was plain enough. And there was nothing more to talk about.
When we were finished we walked outside, and I asked Nola where she’d like to go. It was only eight o’clock, and there was no place to go but to my little room. She said she wanted to go back to the Top Hat, that she had someone to meet there later, and there was something about the band that night that she liked. She said she wanted to dance.
I told her I was not much for dancing, and she said fine. And when Troy came out from paying, we said good-bye, and she shook my hand and said that she would see me again. Then she and Troy got in the Checker and drove away together down the foggy street, leaving me alone, where I didn’t mind being at all.
For a long time I just walked then. My clothes were wet, but it wasn’t so cold if you kept moving, though it stayed foggy. I walked to the river again and across on the bridge and a long way down into the south part of town on a wide avenue where there were houses with little porches and little yards, all the way, until it became commercial, and bright lights lit the drive-ins and car lots. I could’ve walked then, I thought, clear to my mother’s house twenty miles away. But I turned back, and walked the same way, only on the other side of the street. Though when I got near the bridge, I came past the Senior Citizen Recreation, where there were soft lights on inside a big room, and I could see through a window in the pinkish glow, old people dancing across the floor to a record player that played in the corner. It was a rumba or something like a rumba that was being played, and the old people were dancing the box step, smooth and graceful and courteous, moving across the linoleum like real dancers, their arms on each other’s shoulders like husbands and wives. And it pleased me to see that. And I thought that it was too bad my mother and father could not be here now, too bad they couldn’t come up and dance and go home happy, and have me to watch them. Or even for my mother and Harley Reeves to do that. It didn’t seem like too much to wish for. Just a normal life other people had.
I stood and watched them a while, then I walked back home across the river. Though for some reason I could not sleep that night, and simply lay in bed with the radio turned on to Denver, and smoked cigarettes until it was light. Of course I thought about Nola Foster, that I didn’t know where she lived, though for some reason I thought she might live in Frenchtown, near the pulp plant. Not far. Never-never land, they called that. And I thought about my father, who had once gone to Deer Lodge prison for stealing hay from a friend, and had never recovered from it, though that meant little to me now.
And I thought about the matter of trust. That I would always lie if it would save someone an unhappiness. That was easy. And that I would rather a person mistrust me than dislike me. Though I thought you could always trust me to act a certain way, to be a place, or to say a thing if it ever were to matter. You could predict within human reason what I’d do—that I would not, for example, commit a vicious crime—trust that I would risk my own life for you if I knew it meant enough. And as I lay in the gray light, smoking, while the refrigerator clicked and the switcher in the Burlington Northern yard shunted cars and made their couplings, I thought that though my life at that moment seemed to have taken a bad turn and paused, it still meant something to me as a life, and that before long it would start again in some promising way.
I know I must’ve dozed a little, because I woke suddenly and there was the light. Earl Nightingale was on the radio, and I heard a door close. It was that that woke me.
I knew it would be Troy, and I thought I would step out and meet him, fix coffee for us before he went to bed and slept all day, the way he always did. But when I stood up I heard Nola Foster’s voice. I could not mistake that. She was drunk, and laughing about something. “Mr. Wheels,” she said. Mr. Wheels this, Mr. Wheels that. Troy was laughing. And I heard them come in the little entry, heard Troy’s chair bump the sill. And I waited to see if they would knock on my door. And when they didn’t, and I heard Troy’s door shut and the chain go up, I thought that we had all had a good night finally. Nothing had happened that hadn’t turned out all right. None of us had been harmed. And I put on my pants, then my shirt and shoes, turned off my radio, went into the kitchen where I kept my fishing rod, and with it went out into the warm, foggy morning, using just this once the back door, the quiet way, so as not to see or be seen by anyone.
Optimists
All of this that I am about to tell happened when I was only fifteen years old, in 1959, the year my parents were divorced, the year when my father killed a man and went to prison for it, the year I left home and school, told a lie about my age to fool the Army, and then did not come back. The year, in other words, when life changed for all of us and forever—ended, really, in a way none of us could ever have imagined in our most brilliant dreams of life.
My father was named Roy Brinson, and he worked on the Great Northern Railway, in Great Falls, Montana. He was a switch-engine fireman, and when he could not hold that job on the seniority list, he worked the extra-board as a hostler, or as a hostler’s helper, shunting engines through the yard, onto and off the freight trains that went south and east. He was thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old in 1959, a small, young-appearing man, with dark blue eyes. The railroad was a job he liked, because it paid high wages and the work was not hard, and because you could take off days when you wanted to, or even months, and have no one to ask you questions. It was a union shop, and there were people who looked out for you when your back was turned. “It’s a workingman’s paradise,” my father would say, and then laugh.
My mother did not work then, though she had worked—at waitressing and in the bars in town—and she had liked working. My father thought, though, that Great Falls was coming to be a rougher town than it had been when he grew up there, a town going downhill, like its name, and that my mother should be at home more, because I was at an age when trouble came easily. We lived in a rented two-story house on Edith Street, close to die freight yards and the Missouri River, a house where from my window at night I could hear the engines as they sat throbbing, could see their lights move along the dark rails. My mother was at home most of her time, reading or watching television or cooking meals, though sometimes she would go out to movies in the afternoon, or would go to the YWCA and swim in the indoor pool. Where she was from—in Havre, Montana,
much farther north—there was never such a thing as a pool indoors, and she thought that to swim in the winter, with snow on the ground and the wind howling, was the greatest luxury. And she would come home late in the afternoon, with her brown hair wet and her face flushed, and in high spirits, saying she felt freer.
The night that I want to tell about happened in November. It was not then a good time for railroads—not in Montana especially—and for firemen not at all, anywhere. It was the featherbed time, and everyone knew, including my father, that they would—all of them—eventually lose their jobs, though no one knew exactly when, or who would go first, or, clearly, what the future would be. My father had been hired out ten years, and had worked on coal-burners and oil-burners out of Forsythe, Montana, on the Sheridan spur. But he was still young in the job and low on the list, and he felt that when the cut came young heads would go first. “They’ll do something for us, but it might not be enough,” he said, and I had heard him say that other times—in the kitchen, with my mother, or out in front, working on his motorcycle, or with me, fishing the whitefish flats up the Missouri. But I do not know if he truly thought that or in fact had any reason to think it. He was an optimist. Both of them were optimists, I think.
I know that by the end of summer in that year he had stopped taking days off to fish, had stopped going out along the coulee rims to spot deer. He worked more then and was gone more, and he talked more about work when he was home: about what the union said on this subject and that, about court cases in Washington, D.C., a place I knew nothing of, and about injuries and illnesses to men he knew, that threatened their livelihoods, and by association with them, threatened his own—threatened, he must’ve felt, our whole life.
Because my mother swam at the YWCA she had met people there and made friends. One was a large woman named Esther, who came home with her once and drank coffee in the kitchen and talked about her boyfriend and laughed out loud for a long time, but who I never saw again. And another was a woman named Penny Mitchell whose husband, Boyd, worked for the Red Cross in Great Falls and had an office upstairs in the building with the YWCA, and who my mother would sometime play canasta with on the nights my father worked late. They would set up a card table in the living room, the three of them, and drink and eat sandwiches until midnight. And I would lie in bed with my radio tuned low to the Calgary station, listening to a hockey match beamed out over the great empty prairie, and could hear the cards snap and laughter downstairs, and later I would hear footsteps leaving, hear the door shut, the dishes ratde in the sink, cabinets close. And in a while the door to my room would open and the light would fall inside, and my mother would set a chair back in. I could see her silhouette. She would always say, “Go back to sleep, Frank.” And then the door would shut again, and I would almost always go to sleep in a minute.
