Rock Springs

by Richard Ford

  “Poor old Lou,” Lois said and came around the bar with a pink drink she’d poured out of the blender.

  “Poor Lou what?” Starling said.

  Lois sat down beside him on a bar stool and lit a cigarette. “Oh, his stomach’s all shot and he’s got an ulcer. He said he worries too much.” She blew out the match and stared at it. “You want to hear what he drinks?”

  “Who cares what a dope like Reiner drinks out of a glass,” Starling said.

  Lois looked at him, then stared at the mirror behind the bar. The smoky mirror showed two people sitting at a bar alone. A slow country tune started to play, a tune Starling liked, and he liked the way—with the gin around it—it seemed to ease him away from his own troubles. “So tell me what Reiner drinks,” he said.

  “Wodka,” Lois said matter-of-factly. “That’s the way he says it. Wodka. Like Russian. Wodka with coconut milk—a Hawiian Russian. He say it’s for his stomach, which he says is better though it’s still a wreck. He’s a walking pharmacy. And he’s gotten a lot fatter, too, and his eyes bulge, and he wears a full Cleveland now. I don’t know.” Lois shook her head and smoked her cigarette. “He’s got a cute girlfriend, though, this Jackie, from Del Rio Beach. She looks like Little Bo Peep.”

  Starling tried to picture Reiner. Louie Reiner had been a large, handsome man at one time, with thick eyebrows and penetrating black eyes. A sharp dresser. He was sorry to hear Reiner was fat and bug-eyed and wore a leisure suit. It was bad luck if that was the way you looked to the world.

  “How was it, seeing Louie? Was it nice?” He stared at himself in the smoky mirror. He hadn’t gotten fat, thank God.

  “No,” Lois said and dragged on her cigarette. “He was nice. Grown-up and what have you. But it wasn’t nice. He didn’t look healthy, and he still talked the same baloney, which was all before Jackie arrived, naturally.”

  “All what baloney?”

  “You know that stuff, Eddie. Everybody makes themselves happy or unhappy. You don’t leave one woman for another woman, you do it for yourself. If you can’t make it with one, make it with all of them—that baloney he was always full of. Take the tour. Go big casino. That stuff. Reiner stuff.”

  “Reiner’s big casino, all right,” Starling said. “I guess he wanted you to go off with him.”

  “Oh sure. He said he was off to Miami next week to arrest some poor soul. He said I ought to go, and we could stay at the Fontainebleau or the Eden Roc or one of those sharp places.”

  “What about me?” Starling said. “Did I come? Or did I stay here? What about little Jackie?”

  “Louie didn’t mention either one of you, isn’t that funny? I guess it slipped his mind.” Lois smiled and put her arm on Starling’s arm. “It’s just baloney, Eddie. Trashy talk.”

  “I wish he was here now,” Starling said. “I’d use a beer bottle on him.”

  “I know it, hon. But you should’ve heard what this little girlfriend said. It was a riot. She’s a real Ripley’s.”

  “She’d need to be,” Starling said.

  “Really. She said if Louie ran around on her she was going to sleep with a black man. She said she already had one picked out. She really knew how to work Louie. She said Louie had a house full of these cheap Italian carpets, and nobody to sell them to. That was his big deal he needed a partner for, by the way—not a very big market over here, I guess. She said Louie was thinking of selling them in Idaho. Good luck with that, I said. She said—and this would’ve made you laugh, Eddie, it would’ve truly—she said it’s a doggy-dog world out there. Doggy-dog. She was real cute. When she said that, Louie got down on the floor and barked like a dog. He dropped his pistol out of his whatever-you-call-it, his scabbard, and his beeper”—Lois was laughing—“he was like a big animal down on the floor of the bar.”

  “I’m sorry I missed it.”

  “Louie can be funny,” Lois said.

  “Maybe you should’ve married him, then.”

  “I did marry him.”

  “Too bad you didn’t stay married to him instead of me. I don’t have a beeper.”

  “I like what you have got, though, sweetheart.” She squeezed his arm. “Nobody would love me like you do, you know I think that. Reiner was just my mistake, but I can laugh at him today because I don’t have to live with him. You’re such a big mamma’s boy, you don’t want anybody to have any fun.”

  “I’d like to have a little fun,” Starling said. “Let’s go where there’s some fun.”

  Lois leaned and kissed him on the cheek. “You smell awfully nice.” She smiled at him. “Come on and dance with me, Ed. Justice demands that you dance with me. You have that light step. It’s nice when you do.”

  Lois walked out onto the little dance floor and took Starling’s hand. He stood close to her and they danced to the slow music on the jukebox, holding together the way they had when he’d first known her. He felt a little drunk. A buzz improved a thing, he thought, made a good moment out of nothing.

  “You’re a natural dancer, Eddie,” Lois said softly. “Remember us dancing at Powell’s on the beach, with everybody watching us?”

  “You like having men think about you?” Starling said.

  “Oh, sure. I guess.” Lois’s cheek was against his cheek. “It makes me feel like I’m in a movie, sometimes, you know? Everybody does that, don’t they?”

  “I never do.”

  “Don’t you ever wonder what your ex thinks about you? Old Jan. That was a long time ago, I guess.”

  “Bygones are bygones to me,” Starling said. “I don’t think about it”

  “You’re such a literal, Eddie. You get lost in the lonely crowd, I think sometimes. That’s why I want to be nice and make you happy.” She held him close to her so that her hard, flat hips were next to his. “Isn’t this nice? It’s nice to dance with you.”

  Starling saw now that the bar was decorated with red, white, and blue crepe paper—features he’d missed. Little curlicues and ribbons and stars hung from the dark rafters and down off the shaded green bar lights and the beer signs and the framed pictures behind the back bar. This was festive, he thought. Lois had fixed it, it showed her hand. Before long a crowd would be in, the lights would go up and shine out, the music would be turned up loud. It would be a good time. “That’s nice,” Starling said.

  “I just love this,” Lois said. Her head was on his shoulder. “I just love this so much.”

  On the highway toward home, Starling passed the hippies he had seen at the campground. They were heading in now, the women on the rear seats, the men driving fast, leaning as if the wind blew them back.

  In town, a big fireworks display staged by a shopping mall was beginning. Catherine wheels and star bursts and blue-and-pink sprays were going off in the twilight. Cars were stopped along the road, and people with children sat on their hoods, drinking beer and watching the sky. It was nearly dark and rain had begun to threaten.

  “Everything’s moved out to the malls now,” Lois said, “including the fireworks.” She had been dozing and now she leaned against her door, staring back toward the lights.

  “I wouldn’t care to work in one,” Starling said, driving.

  Lois said nothing.

  “You know what I was just thinking about?” she said after a while.

  “Tell me,” Starling said.

  “Your mother,” Lois said. “Your mother was a sweet old lady, you know that? I liked her very much. I remember she and I would go to the mall and buy her a blouse. Just some blouse she could’ve bought in Bullock’s in San Francisco, but she wanted to buy it here to be sweet and special.” Lois smiled about it. “Remember when we bought fireworks?”

  Starling’s mother had liked fireworks. She liked to hear them pop so she could laugh. Starling remembered having fireworks one year in the time since he’d been married to Lois. When was that? he thought. A time lost now.

  “Remember she held the little teenies right in her fingers and let them go off? That tickled
her so much.”

  “That was her trick,” Eddie said. “Rex taught her that.”

  “I guess he did,” Lois said. “But you know, I don’t blame you, really, for being such a mamma’s boy, Eddie. Not with your mamma—unlike mine, for instance. She’s why you’re as nice as you are.”

  “I’m selfish,” Starling said. “I always have been. I’m capable of lying, stealing, cheating.”

  Lois patted him on the shoulder. “You’re generous, though, too.”

  Rain was starting in big drops that looked like snow on the windshield. Lights from their subdivision glowed out under the lowered sky ahead.

  “This weird thing happened today,” Starling said. “I can’t quit thinking about it.”

  Lois slid over by him. She put her head on his shoulder and her hand inside his thigh. “I knew something had happened, Eddie. You can’t hide anything. The truth is just on you.”

  “There’s no truth to this,” Starling said. “Just the phone rang when I was leaving, and it was this kid, Jeff. He was in some kind of mess. I didn’t know who he was, but he thought I was his father. He wanted me to accept charges.”

  “You didn’t, did you?”

  Starling looked toward the subdivision. “No. I should have, though. It’s on my mind now that I should’ve helped him. I’d just finished talking to Reiner.”

  “He might’ve been in Rangoon, for Christ’s sake,” Lois said. “Or Helsinki. You don’t know where he was. It could’ve cost you five hundred dollars, then you couldn’t have helped him anyway. You were smart, is what I think.”

  “It wouldn’t matter, though. I could’ve given him some advice. He said somebody was in jail. It’s just on my mind now, it’ll go away.”

  “Get a good job and then accept charges from Istanbul,” Lois said and smiled.

  “I just wonder who he was,” Starling said. “For some reason I thought he was over in Reno—isn’t that odd? Just a voice.”

  “It’d be worse if he was in Reno,” Lois said. “Are you sorry you don’t have one of your own?” Lois looked over at him strangely.

  “One what?”

  “A son. Or, you know. Didn’t you tell me you almost had one? There was something about that, with Jan.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Starling said. “We were idiots.”

  “Some people claim they make your life hold together better, though,” Lois said. “You know?”

  “Not if you’re broke they don’t,” Starling said. “All they do is make you sorry.”

  “Well, we’ll just float on through life together, then, how’s that?” Lois put her hand high on his leg. “No blues today, hon, okay?”

  They were at the little dirt street where the ranchette was, at the far end. A fireworks hut had been built in the front yard of the first small house, a chain of bright yellow bulbs strung across the front. An elderly woman was standing in the hut, her face expressionless. She had on a sweater and was holding a little black poodle. All the fireworks but a few Roman candles had been sold off the shelves.

  “I never thought I’d live where people sold fireworks right in their front yards,” Lois said and faced front. Starling peered into the lighted hut. The rain was coming down in a slow drizzle, and water shone off the oiled street. He felt the urge to gesture to the woman, but didn’t. “You could just about say we lived in a place where you wouldn’t want to live if you could help it. Funny, isn’t it? That just happens to you.” Lois laughed.

  “I guess it’s funny,” Starling said. “It’s true.”

  “Whafd you dream up for dinner, Eddie? I’ve built up a hunger all of a sudden.”

  “I forgot about it,” Starling said. “There’s some macaroni.”

  “Whatever,” Lois said. “It’s fine.”

  Starling pulled into the gravel driveway. He could see the pony standing out in the dark where the fenced weed lot extended to the side of the house. The pony looked like a ghost, its white eyes unmoving in the rain.

  “Tell me something,” Starling said. “If I ask you something, will you tell me?”

  “If there’s something to tell,” Lois said. “Sometimes there isn’t anything, you know. But go ahead.”

  “What happened with you and Reiner?” he said. “All that Reno stuff. I never asked you about that. But I want to know.”

  “That’s easy,” Lois said and smiled at him in the dark car. “I just realized I didn’t love Reiner, that’s all. Period. I realized I loved you, and I didn’t want to be married to somebody I didn’t love. I wanted to be married to you. It isn’t all that complicated or important.” Lois put her arms around his neck and hugged him hard. “Don’t be cloudy now, sweet. You’ve just had some odd luck is all. Things’ll get better. You’ll get back. Let me make you happy. Let me show you something to be happy, baby doll.” Lois slid across the seat against the door and went down into her purse. Starling could hear wind chimes in the rain. “Let me just show you,” Lois said.

  Starling couldn’t see. Lois opened the door out into the drizzle, turned her back to him and struck a match. He could see it brighten. And then there was a sparkling and hissing, and then a brighter one, and Starling smelled the harsh burning and the smell of rain together. Then Lois closed the door and danced out before the car into the rain with the sparklers, waving her arms round in the air, smiling widely and making swirls and patterns and star-falls for him that were brilliant and illuminated the night and the bright rain and the little dark house behind her and, for a moment, caught the world and stopped it, as though something sudden and perfect had come to earth in a furious glowing for him and for him alone—Eddie Starling—and only he could watch and listen. And only he would be there, waiting, when the light was finally gone.

  Communist

  My mother once had a boyfriend named Glen Baxter. This was in 1961. We—my mother and I—were living in the little house my father had left her up the Sun River, near Victory, Montana, west of Great Falls. My mother was thirty-two at the time. I was sixteen. Glen Baxter was somewhere in the middle, between us, though I cannot be exact about it.

  We were living then off the proceeds of my father’s life insurance policies, with my mother doing some part-time waitressing work up in Great Falls and going to the bars in the evenings, which I know is where she met Glen Baxter. Sometimes he would come back with her and stay in her room at night, or she would call up from town and explain that she was staying with him in his little place on Lewis Street by the GN yards. She gave me his number every time, but I never called it. I think she probably thought that what she was doing was terrible, but simply couldn’t help herself. I thought it was all right, though. Regular life it seemed, and still does. She was young, and I knew that even then.

  Glen Baxter was a Communist and liked hunting, which he talked about a lot. Pheasants. Ducks. Deer. He killed all of them, he said. He had been to Vietnam as far back as then, and when he was in our house he often talked about shooting the animals over there—monkeys and beautiful parrots—using military guns just for sport. We did not know what Vietnam was then, and Glen, when he talked about that, referred to it only as “the Far East.” I think now he must’ve been in the CIA and been disillusioned by something he saw or found out about and been thrown out, but that kind of thing did not matter to us. He was a tall, dark-eyed man with short black hair, and was usually in a good humor. He had gone halfway through college in Peoria, Illinois, he said, where he grew up. But when he was around our life he worked wheat farms as a ditcher, and stayed out of work winters and in the bars drinking with women like my mother, who had work and some money. It is not an uncommon life to lead in Montana.

  What I want to explain happened in November. We had not been seeing Glen Baxter for some time. Two months had gone by. My mother knew other men, but she came home most days from work and stayed inside watching television in her bedroom and drinking beers. I asked about Glen once, and she said only that she didn’t know where he was, and I assumed they had had
a fight and that he was gone off on a flyer back to Illinois or Massachusetts, where he said he had relatives. I’ll admit that I liked him. He had something on his mind always. He was a labor man as well as a Communist, and liked to say that the country was poisoned by the rich, and strong men would need to bring it to life again, and I liked that because my father had been a labor man, which was why we had a house to live in and money coming through. It was also true that I’d had a few boxing bouts by then—just with town boys and one with an Indian from Choteau—and there were some girlfriends I knew from that. I did not like my mother being around the house so much at night, and I wished Glen Baxter would come back, or that another man would come along and entertain her somewhere else.

  At two o’clock on a Saturday, Glen drove up into our yard in a car. He had had a big brown Harley-Davidson that he rode most of the year, in his black-and-red irrigators and a baseball cap turned backwards. But this time he had a car, a blue Nash Ambassador. My mother and I went out on the porch when he stopped inside the olive trees my father had planted as a shelter belt, and my mother had a look on her face of not much pleasure. It was starting to be cold in earnest by then. Snow was down already onto the Fairfield Bench, though on this day a chinook was blowing, and it could as easily have been spring, though the sky above the Divide was turning over in silver and blue clouds of winter.

  “We haven’t seen you in a long time, I guess,” my mother said coldly.

  “My little retarded sister died,” Glen said, standing at the door of his old car. He was wearing his orange VFW jacket and canvas shoes we called wino shoes, something I had never seen him wear before. He seemed to be in a good humor. “We buried her in Florida near the home.”

  “That’s a good place,” my mother said in a voice that meant she was a wronged party in something.

  “I want to take this boy hunting today, Aileen,” Glen said. “There’re snow geese down now. But we have to go right away, or they’ll be gone to Idaho by tomorrow.”

  “He doesn’t care to go,” my mother said.