by Richard Ford
My mother seemed very certain about things then, very precise. “You should’ve controlled yourself more,” she said. “That’s all.”
“I know that,” my father said. “I’m sorry. I lost control over my mind. I didn’t expect to ruin things, but now I think I have. It was all wrong.” My father picked up the vodka bottle, unscrewed the cap and took a big swallow, then put the bottle back down. He had seen two men killed tonight. Who could’ve blamed him?
“When I was in jail tonight,” he said, staring at a picture on the wall, a picture by the door to the hallway. He was just talking again. “There was a man in the cell with me. And I’ve never been in jail before, not even when I was a kid. But this man said to me tonight, ‘I can tell you’ve never been in jail before just by the way you stand up straight. Other people don’t stand that way. They stoop. You don’t belong in jail. You stand up too straight.’” My father looked back at the vodka bottle as if he wanted to drink more out of it, but he only looked at it. “Bad things happen,” he said, and he let his open hands tap against his legs like clappers against a bell. “Maybe he was in love with you, Dorothy,” he said. “Maybe that’s what the trouble was.”
And what I did then was stare at the picture on the wall, the picture my father had been staring at, a picture I had seen every day. Probably I had seen it a thousand times. It was two people with a baby on a beach. A man and a woman sitting in the sand with an ocean behind. They were smiling at the camera, wearing bathing suits. In all the times I had seen it I’d thought that it was a picture in which I was the baby, and the two people were my parents. But I realized as I stood there, that it was not me at all; it was my father who was the child in the picture, and the parents there were his parents—two people Fd never known, and who were dead—and the picture was so much older than I had thought it was. I wondered why I hadn’t known that before, hadn’t understood it for myself, hadn’t always known it. Not even that it mattered. What mattered was, I felt, that my father had fallen down now, as much as the man he had watched fall beneath the train just hours before. And I was as helpless to do anything as he had been. I wanted to tell him that I loved him, but for some reason I did not.
Later in the night I lay in my bed with the radio playing, listening to news that was far away, in Calgary and in Saskatoon, and even farther, in Regina and Winnipeg—cold, dark cities I knew I would never see in my life. My window was raised above the sill, and for a long time I had sat and looked out, hearing my parents talk softly down below, hearing their footsteps, hearing my father’s steel-toed boots strike the floor, and then their bed-springs squeeze and then be quiet. From out across the sliding river I could hear trucks—stock trucks and grain trucks heading toward Idaho, or down toward Helena, or into the train yards where my father hosded engines. The neighborhood houses were dark again. My father’s motorcycle sat in the yard, and out in the night air I felt I could hear even the falls themselves, could hear every sound of them, sounds that found me and whirled and filled my room—could even feel them, cold and wintry, so that warmth seemed like a possibility I would never know again.
After a time my mother came in my room. The light fell on my bed, and she set a chair inside. I could see that she was looking at me. She closed the door, came and turned off my radio, then took her chair to the window, closed it, and sat so that I could see her face silhouetted against the streetlight. She lit a cigarette and did not look at me, still cold under the covers of my bed.
“How do you feel, Frank,” she said, smoking her cigarette.
“I feel all right,” I said.
“Do you think your house is a terrible house now?”
“No,” I said.
“I hope not,” my mother said. “Don’t feel it is. Don’t hold anything against anyone. Poor Boyd. He’s gone.”
“Why do you think that happened?” I said, though I didn’t think she would answer, and wondered if I even wanted to know.
My mother blew smoke against the window glass, then sat and breathed. “He must’ve seen something in your father he just hated. I don’t know what it was. Who knows? Maybe your father felt the same way.” She shook her head and looked out into the streetlamp light. “I remember once,” she said. “I was still in Havre, in the thirties. We were living in a motel my father part-owned out Highway Two, and my mother was around then, but wasn’t having any of us. My father had this big woman named Judy Belknap as his girlfriend. She was an Assiniboin. Just some squaw. But we used to go on nature tours when he couldn’t put up with me anymore. She’d take me. Way up above the Milk River. All this stuff she knew about, animals and plants and ferns—she’d tell me all that. And once we were sitting watching some gadwall ducks on the ice where a creek had made a little turn-out. It was getting colder, just like now. And Judy just all at once stood up and clapped. Just clapped her hands. And all these ducks got up, all except for one that stayed on the ice, where its feet were frozen, I guess. It didn’t even try to fly. It just sat. And Judy said to me, ‘It’s just a coincidence, Dottie. It’s wildlife. Some always get left back.’ And that seemed to leave her satisfied for some reason. We walked back to the car after that. So,” my mother said. “Maybe that’s what this is. Just a coincidence.”
She raised the window again, dropped her cigarette out, blew the last smoke from her throat, and said, “Go to sleep, Frank. You’ll be all right. We’ll all survive this. Be an optimist.”
When I was asleep that night, I dreamed. And what I dreamed was of a plane crashing, a bomber, dropping out of the frozen sky, bouncing as it hit the icy river, sliding and turning on the ice, its wings like knives, and coming into our house where we were sleeping, leveling everything. And when I sat up in bed I could hear a dog in the yard, its collar jingling, and I could hear my father crying, “Boo-hoo-hoo, boo-hoo-hoo,”—like that, quietly—though afterward I could never be sure if I had heard him crying in just that way, or if all of it was a dream, a dream I wished I had never had.
The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all that’s happened and by all that could and will happen next. I now no longer remember the exact year of my father’s birth, or how old he was when I last saw him, or even when that last time took place. When you’re young, these things seem unforgettable and at the heart of everything. But they slide away and are gone when you are not so young.
My father went to Deer Lodge Prison and stayed five months for killing Boyd Mitchell by accident, for using too much force to hit him. In Montana you cannot simply kill a man in your living room and walk off free from it, and what I remember is that my father pleaded no contest, the same as guilty.
My mother and I lived in our house for the months he was gone. But when he came out and went back on the railroad as a switchman the two of them argued about things, about her wanting us to go someplace else to live—California or Seattle were mentioned. And then they separated, and she moved out. And after that I moved out by joining the Army and adding years to my age, which was sixteen.
I know about my father only that after a time he began to live a life he himself would never have believed. He fell off the railroad, divorced my mother, who would now and then resurface in his life. Drinking was involved in that, and gambling, embezzling money, even carrying a pistol, is what I heard. I was apart from all of it. And when you are the age I was then, and loose on the world and alone, you can get along better than at almost any other time, because it’s a novelty, and you can act for what you want, and you can think that being alone will not last forever. All I know of my father, finally, is that he was once in Laramie, Wyoming, and not in good shape, and then he simply disappeared from view.
A month ago I saw my mother. I was buying groceries at a drive-in store by the interstate in Anaconda, Montana, not far from Deer Lodge itself, where my father had been. It had been fifteen years, I think, since I had
seen her, though I am forty-three years old now, and possibly it was longer. But when I saw her I walked across the store to where she was and I said, “Hello, Dorothy. It’s Frank.”
She looked at me and smiled and said, “Oh, Frank. How are you? I haven’t seen you in a long time. I’m glad to see you now, though.” She was dressed in blue jeans and boots and a Western shirt, and she looked like a woman who could be sixty years old. Her hair was tied back and she looked pretty, though I think she had been drinking. It was ten o’clock in the morning.
There was a man standing near her, holding a basket of groceries, and she turned to him and said, “Dick, come here and meet my son, Frank. We haven’t seen each other in a long time. This is Dick Spivey, Frank.”
I shook hands with Dick Spivey, who was a man younger than my mother but older than me—a tall, thin-faced man with coarse blue-black hair—and who was wearing Western boots like hers. “Let me say a word to Frank, Dick,” my mother said, and she put her hand on Dick’s wrist and squeezed it and smiled at him. And he walked up toward the checkout to pay for his groceries.
“So. What are you doing now, Frank,” my mother asked, and put her hand on my wrist the way she had on Dick Spivey’s, but held it there. “These years,” she said.
“I’ve been down in Rock Springs, on the coal boom,” I said. “I’ll probably go back down there.”
“And I guess you’re married, too.”
“I was,” I said. “But not right now.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “You look fine.” She smiled at me. “You’ll never get anything fixed just right. That’s your mother’s word. Your father and I had a marriage made in Havre—that was our joke about us. We used to laugh about it. You didn’t know that, of course. You were too young. A lot of it was just wrong.”
“It’s a long time ago,” I said. “I don’t know about that.”
“I remember those times very well,” my mother said. “They were happy enough times. I guess something was in the air, wasn’t there? Your father was so jumpy. And Boyd got so mad, just all of a sudden. There was some hopelessness to it, I suppose. All that union business. We were the last to understand any of it, of course. We were trying to be decent people.”
“That’s right,” I said. And I believed that was true of them.
“I still like to swim,” my mother said. She ran her fingers back through her hair as if it were wet. She smiled at me again. “It still makes me feel freer.”
“Good,” I said. “I’m happy to hear that.”
“Do you ever see your dad?”
“No,” I said. “I never do.”
“I don’t either,” my mother said. “You just reminded me of him.” She looked at Dick Spivey, who was standing at the front window, holding a sack of groceries, looking out at the parking lot. It was March, and some small bits of snow were falling onto the cars in the lot. He didn’t seem in any hurry. “Maybe I didn’t appreciate your father enough,” she said. “Who knows? Maybe we weren’t even made for each other. Losing your love is the worst thing, and that’s what we did.” I didn’t answer her, but I knew what she meant, and that it was true. “I wish we knew each other better, Frank,” my mother said to me. She looked down, and I think she may have blushed. “We have our deep feelings, though, don’t we? Both of us.”
“Yes,” I said. “We do.”
“So. I’m going out now,” my mother said. “Frank.” She squeezed my wrist, and walked away through the checkout and into the parking lot, with Dick Spivey carrying their groceries beside her.
But when I had bought my own groceries and paid, and gone out to my car and started up, I saw Dick Spivey’s green Chevrolet drive back into the lot and stop, and watched my mother get out and hurry across the snow to where I was, so that for a moment we faced each other through the open window.
“Did you ever think,” my mother said, snow freezing in her hair. “Did you ever think back then that I was in love with Boyd Mitchell? Anything like that? Did you ever?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“No, well, I wasn’t,” she said. “Boyd was in love with Penny. I was in love with Roy. That’s how things were. I want you to know it. You have to believe that. Do you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I believe you.”
And she bent down and kissed my cheek through the open window and touched my face with both her hands, held me for a moment that seemed like a long time before she turned away, finally, and left me there alone.
Fireworks
Eddie Starling sat at the kitchen table at noon reading through the newspaper. Outside in the street some neighborhood kids were shooting off firecrackers. The Fourth of July was a day away, and every few minutes there was a lot of noisy popping followed by a hiss, then a huge boom loud enough to bring down an airplane. It was giving him the jitters, and he wished some parent would go out and haul the kids inside.
Starling had been out of work six months—one entire selling season and part of the next. He had sold real estate, and had never been off work any length of time in his life. Though he had begun to wonder, after a certain period of not working, if you couldn’t simply forget how to work, forget the particulars, lose the reasons for it. And once that happened, it could become possible never to hold another job as long as you lived. To become a statistic: the chronically unemployed. The thought worried him.
Outside in the street he heard what sounded like kids’ noises again. They were up to something suspicious, and he stood up to look out just when the phone rang.
“What’s new on the home front?” Lois’s voice said. Lois had gone back to work tending bar near the airport and always tried to call up in good spirits.
“Status quo. Hot.” Starling walked to the window, holding the receiver, and peered out. In the middle of the street some kids he’d never seen before were getting ready to blow up a tin can using an enormous firecracker. “Some kids are outside blowing up something.”
“Anything good in the paper?”
“Nothing promising.”
“Well,” Lois said. “Just be patient, hon. I know it’s hot. Listen, Eddie, do you remember those priests who were always setting fire to themselves on TV? Exactly when were they? We were trying to remember here. Was it ‘68 or ‘72? Nobody could remember to save their life.”
“Sixty-eight was Kennedy,” Starling said. “They weren’t just setting themselves on fire for TV, though. They were in Asia.”
“Okay. But when was Vietnam exactly?”
The kids lit the firecracker under the can and went running away down the street, laughing. For a moment Starling stared directly at the can, but just then a young woman came out of the house across the street. As she stepped into her yard the can went boom, and the woman leaped back and put her hands into her hair.
“Christ, what was that!” Lois said. “It sounded like a bomb.”
“It was those kids.”
“The scamps,” Lois said. “I guess they’re hot, too, though.”
The woman was very thin—too thin to be healthy, Starling thought. She was in her twenties and had on dull yellow shorts and no shoes. She walked out into the street and yelled something vicious at the kids, who were far down the street now. Starling knew nothing more about her than he did about anybody else in the neighborhood. The name on the mailbox had been taped over before he and Lois had moved in. A man lived with the woman and worked on his car in the garage late at night.
The woman walked slowly back across her little yard to her house. At the top step she turned and looked at Starling’s house. He stared at her, and the woman went inside and closed the door.
“Eddie, take a guess who’s here,” Lois said.
“Who’s where?”
“In the bar. One wild guess.”
“Arthur Godfrey,” Starling said.
“Arthur Godfrey. That’s great,” Lois said. “No, it’s Louie. He just waltzed in the door. Isn’t that amazing?”
Louie Reiner was
Lois’s previous husband. Starling and Reiner had been business acquaintances of a sort before Lois came along, and had co-brokered some office property at the tail end of the boom.
Reiner had been in real estate then, along with everybody else. Reiner and Lois had stayed married six weeks, then they had gone over to Reno and gotten an annulment. A year later, Lois married Starling. That had all been in ‘76, and Lois didn’t talk about it or about Reiner anymore. Louie had disappeared somewhere—he’d heard Europe. He didn’t feel like he had anything against Louie now, though he wasn’t particularly happy he was around.
“Just take a guess what Louie’s doing?” Lois said. Water had started to run where Lois was.
“Who knows. Washing dishes. How should I know?”
Lois repeated what Starling said and some people laughed. He heard Louie’s voice saying, “Well excuuuse me.”
“Seriously, Ed. Louie’s an extraditer.” Lois laughed. Hah.
“What’s that mean?” Starling said.
“It means he travels the breadth of the country bringing people back here so they can go to jail. He just brought a man back from Montana who’d done nothing more than pass a forty-seven-dollar bad check, which doesn’t seem worth it to me. Louie isn’t in uniform, but he’s got a gun and a little beeper.”
“What’s he doing there?” Starling said.
“His girlfriend’s coming in at the airport from Florida,” Lois said. “He’s a lot fatter than he used to be, too, though he wouldn’t like me to say that, would you, Louie?” Starling heard Reiner say “Excuuuse me” again. “Do you want to talk to him?”
“I’m busy right now.”
“Busy doing what, eating lunch? You’re not busy.”
“I’m fixing dinner,” Starling lied.
“Talk to Louie, Eddie.”
Starling wanted to hang up. He wished Reiner would go back to wherever he came from.
