Rock Springs

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.

“Yes I do,” I said, and looked at her.

My mother frowned at me. “Why do you?”

“Why does he need a reason?” Glen Baxter said and grinned.

“I want him to have one, that’s why.” She looked at me oddly. “I think Glen’s drunk, Les.”

“No, I’m not drinking,” Glen said, which was hardly ever true. He looked at both of us, and my mother bit down on the side of her lower lip and stared at me in a way to make you think she thought something was being put over on her and she didn’t like you for it. She was very pretty, though when she was mad her features were sharpened and less pretty by a long way. “All right, then I don’t care,” she said to no one in particular. “Hunt, kill, maim. Your father did that too.” She turned to go back inside.

“Why don’t you come with us, Aileen?” Glen was smiling still, pleased.

“To do what?” my mother said. She stopped and pulled a package of cigarettes out of her dress pocket and put one in her mouth.

“It’s worth seeing.”

“See dead animals?” my mother said.

“These geese are from Siberia, Aileen,” Glen said. “They’re not like a lot of geese. Maybe I’ll buy us dinner later. What do you say?”

“Buy what with?” my mother said. To tell the truth, I didn’t know why she was so mad at him. I would’ve thought she’d be glad to see him. But she just suddenly seemed to hate everything about him.

“I’ve got some money,” Glen said. “Let me spend it on a pretty girl tonight.”

“Find one of those and you’re lucky,” my mother said, turning away toward the front door.

“I already found one,” Glen Baxter said. But the door slammed behind her, and he looked at me then with a look I think now was helplessness, though I could not see a way to change anything.

My mother sat in the backseat of Glen’s Nash and looked out the window while we drove. My double gun was in the seat between us beside Glen’s Belgian pump, which he kept loaded with five shells in case, he said, he saw something beside the road he wanted to shoot. I had hunted rabbits before, and had ground-sluiced pheasants and other birds, but I had never been on an actual hunt before, one where you drove out to some special place and did it formally. And I was excited. I had a feeling that something important was about to happen to me, and that this would be a day I would always remember.

My mother did not say anything for a long time, and neither did I. We drove up through Great Falls and out the other side toward Fort Benton, which was on the benchland where wheat was grown.

“Geese mate for life,” my mother said, just out of the blue, as we were driving. “I hope you know that. They’re special birds.”

“I know that,” Glen said in the front seat. “I have every respect for them.”

“So where were you for three months?” she said. “I’m only curious.”

“I was in the Big Hole for a while,” Glen said, “and after that I went over to Douglas, Wyoming.”

“What were you planning to do there?” my mother asked.

“I wanted to find a job, but it didn’t work out.”

“I’m going to college,” she said suddenly, and this was something I had never heard about before. I turned to look at her, but she was staring out her window and wouldn’t see me.

“I knew French once,” Glen said. “Rose’s pink. Rouge’s red.” He glanced at me and smiled. “I think that’s a wise idea, Aileen. When are you going to start?”

“I don’t want Les to think he was raised by crazy people all his life,” my mother said.

“Les ought to go himself,” Glen said.

“After I go, he will.”

“What do you say about that, Les?” Glen said, grinning.

“He says it’s just fine,” my mother said.

“It’s just fine,” I said.

Where Glen Baxter took us was out onto the high flat prairie that was disked for wheat and had high, high mountains out to the east, with lower heartbreak hills in between. It was, I remember, a day for blues in the sky, and down in the distance we could see the small town of Floweree, and the state highway running past it toward Fort Benton and the Hi-line. We drove out on top of the prairie on a muddy dirt road fenced on both sides, until we had gone about three miles, which is where Glen stopped.

“All right,” he said, looking up in the rearview mirror at my mother. “You wouldn’t think there was anything here, would you?”

“We’re here,” my mother said. “You brought us here.”

“You’ll be glad though,” Glen said, and seemed confident to me. I had looked around myself but could not see anything. No water or trees, nothing that seemed like a good place to hunt anything. Just wasted land. “There’s a big lake out there, Les,” Glen said. “You can’t see it now from here because it’s low. But the geese are there. You’ll see.”

“It’s like the moon out here, I recognize that,” my mother said, “only it’s worse.” She was staring out at the flat wheatland as if she could actually see something in particular, and wanted to know more about it. “How’d you find this place?”

“I came once on the wheat push,” Glen said.

“And I’m sure the owner told you just to come back and hunt anytime you like and bring anybody you wanted. Come one, come all. Is that it?”

“People shouldn’t own land anyway,” Glen said. “Anybody should be able to use it.”

“Les, Glen’s going to poach here,” my mother said. “I just want you to know that, because that’s a crime and the law will get you for it. If you’re a man now, you’re going to have to face the consequences.”

“That’s not true,” Glen Baxter said, and looked gloomily out over the steering wheel down the muddy road toward the mountains. Though for myself I believed it was true, and didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything at that moment except seeing geese fly over me and shooting them down.

“Well, I’m certainly not going out there,” my mother said. “I like towns better, and I already have enough trouble.”

“That’s okay,” Glen said. “When the geese lift up you’ll get to see them. That’s all I wanted. Les and me’ll go shoot them, won’t we, Les?”

“Yes,” I said, and I put my hand on my shotgun, which had been my father’s and was heavy as rocks.

“Then we should go on,” Glen said, “or we’ll waste our light.”

We got out of the car with our guns. Glen took off his canvas shoes and put on his pair of black irrigators out of the trunk. Then we crossed the barbed wire fence, and walked out into the high, tilled field toward nothing. I looked back at my mother when we were still not so far away, but I could only see the small, dark top of her head, low in the backseat of the Nash, staring out and thinking what I could not then begin to say.

On the walk toward the lake, Glen began talking to me. I had never been alone with him, and knew little about him except what my mother said — that he drank too much, or other times that he was the nicest man she had ever known in the world and that someday a woman would marry him, though she didn’t think it would be her. Glen told me as we walked that he wished he had finished college, but that it was too late now, that his mind was too old. He said he had liked the Far East very much, and that people there knew how to treat each other, and that he would go back some day but couldn’t go now. He said also that he would like to live in Russia for a while and mentioned the names of people who had gone there, names I didn’t know. He said it would be hard at first, because it was so different, but that pretty soon anyone would learn to like it and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, and that Russians treated Americans who came to live there like kings. There were Communists everywhere now, he said. You didn’t know them, but they were there. Montana had a large number, and he was in touch with all of them. He said that Communists were always in danger and that he had to protect himself all the time. And when he said that he pulled back his VFW jacket and showed me the butt of a pistol he had stuck under his shirt against his bare skin. “There are people who want to kill me right now,” he said, “and I would kill a man myself if I thought I had to.” And we kept walking. Though in a while he said, “I don’t think I know much about you, Les. But I’d like to. What do you like to do?”

“I like to box,” I said. “My father did it. It’s a good thing to know.”

“I suppose you have to protect yourself too,” Glen said.

“I know how to,” I said.

“Do you like to watch TV,” Glen asked, and smiled.

“Not much.”

“I love to,” Glen said. “I could watch it instead of eating if I had one.”

I looked out straight ahead over the green tops of sage that grew to the edge of the disked field, hoping to see the lake Glen said was there. There was an airishness and a sweet smell that I thought might be the place we were going, but I couldn’t see it. “How will we hunt these geese?” I said.

“It won’t be hard,” Glen said. “Most hunting isn’t even hunting. It’s only shooting. And that’s what this will be. In Illinois you would dig holes in the ground and hide and set out your decoys. Then the geese come to you, over and over again. But we don’t have time for that here.” He glanced at me. “You have to be sure the first time here.”

“How do you know they’re here now,” I asked. And I looked toward the Highwood Mountains twenty miles away, half in snow and half dark blue at the bottom. I could see the little town of Floweree then, looking shabby and dimly lighted in the distance. A red bar sign shone. A car moved slowly away from the scattered buildings.

“They always come November first,” Glen said.

“Are we going to poach them?”

“Does it make any difference to you,” Glen asked.

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Well then, we aren’t,” he said.

We walked then for a while without talking. I looked back once to see the Nash far and small in the flat distance. I couldn’t see my mother, and I thought that she must’ve turned on the radio and gone to sleep, which she always did, letting it play all night in her bedroom. Behind the car the sun was nearing the rounded mountains southwest of us, and I knew that when the sun was gone it would be cold. I wished my mother had decided to come along with us, and I thought for a moment of how little I really knew her at all.

Glen walked with me another quarter-mile, crossed another barbed wire fence where sage was growing, then went a hundred yards through wheatgrass and spurge until the ground went up and formed a kind of long hillock bunker built by a farmer against the wind. And I realized the lake was just beyond us. I could hear the sound of a car horn blowing and a dog barking all the way down in the town, then the wind seemed to move and all I could hear then and after then were geese. So many geese, from the sound of them, though I still could not see even one. I stood and listened to the high-pitched shouting sound, a sound I had never heard so close, a sound with size to it — though it was not loud. A sound that meant great numbers and that made your chest rise and your shoulders tighten with expectancy. It was a sound to make you feel separate from it and everything else, as if you were of no importance in the grand scheme of things.

“Do you hear them singing,” Glen asked. He held his hand up to make me stand still. And we both listened. “How many do you think, Les, just hearing?”

“A hundred,” I said. “More than a hundred.”

“Five thousand,” Glen said. “More than you can believe when you see them. Go see.”

I put down my gun and on my hands and knees crawled up the earthwork through the wheatgrass and thistle, until I could see down to the lake and see the geese. And they were there, like a white bandage laid on the water, wide and long and continuous, a white expanse of snow geese, seventy yards from me, on the bank, but stretching far onto the lake, which was large itself — a half-mile across, with thick tules on the far side and wild plums farther and the blue mountain behind them.

“Do you see the big raft?” Glen said from below me, in a whisper.

“I see it,” I said, still looking. It was such a thing to see, a view I had never seen and have not since.

“Are any on the land?” he said.

“Some are in the wheatgrass,” I said, “but most are swimming.”

“Good,” Glen said. “They’ll have to fly. But we can’t wait for that now.”

And I crawled backwards down the heel of land to where Glen was, and my gun. We were losing our light, and the air was purplish and cooling. I looked toward the car but couldn’t see it, and I was no longer sure where it was below the lighted sky.

“Where do they fly to?” I said in a whisper, since I did not want anything to be ruined because of what I did or said. It was important to Glen to shoot the geese, and it was important to me.

“To the wheat,” he said. “Or else they leave for good. I wish your mother had come, Les. Now she’ll be sorry.”

I could hear the geese quarreling and shouting on the lake surface. And I wondered if they knew we were here now. “She might be,” I said with my heart pounding, but I didn’t think she would be much.

It was a simple plan he had. I would stay behind the bunker, and he would crawl on his belly with his gun through the wheatgrass as near to the geese as he could. Then he would simply stand up and shoot all the ones he could close up, both in the air and on the ground. And when all the others flew up, with luck some would turn toward me as they came into the wind, and then I could shoot them and turn them back to him, and he would shoot them again. He could kill ten, he said, if he was lucky, and I might kill four. It didn’t seem hard.

“Don’t show them your face,” Glen said. “Wait till you think you can touch them, then stand up and shoot. To hesitate is lost in this.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll try it.”

“Shoot one in the head, and then shoot another one,” Glen said. “It won’t be hard.” He patted me on the arm and smiled. Then he took off his VFW jacket and put it on the ground, climbed up the side of the bunker, cradling his shotgun in his arms, and slid on his belly into the dry stalks of yellow grass out of my sight.

Then, for the first time in that entire day, I was alone. And I didn’t mind it. I sat squat down in the grass, loaded my double gun and took my other two shells out of my pocket to hold. I pushed the safety off and on to see that it was right. The wind rose a little, scuffed the grass and made me shiver. It was not the warm chinook now, but a wind out of the north, the one geese flew away from if they could.

Then I thought about my mother, in the car alone, and how much longer I would stay with her, and what it might mean to her for me to leave. And I wondered when Glen Baxter would die and if someone would kill him, or whether my mother would marry him and how I would feel about it. And though I didn’t know why, it occurred to me that Glen Baxter and I would not be friends when all was said and done, since I didn’t care if he ever married my mother or didn’t.

Then I thought about boxing and what my father had taught me about it. To tighten your fists hard. To strike out straight from the shoulder and never punch backing up. How to cut a punch by snapping your fist inwards, how to carry your chin low, and to step toward a man when he is falling so you can hit him again. And most important, to keep your eyes open when you are hitting in the face and causing damage, because you need to see what you’re doing to encourage yourself, and because it is when you close your eyes that you stop hitting and get hurt badly. “Fly all over your man, Les,” my father said. “When you see your chance, fly on him and hit him till he falls.” That, I thought, would always be my attitude in things.

And then I heard the geese again, their voices in unison, louder and shouting, as if the wind had changed again and put all new sounds in the cold air. And then a boom. And I knew Glen was in among them and had stood up to shoot. The noise of geese rose and grew worse, and my fingers burned where I held my gun too tight to the metal, and I put it down and opened my fist to make the burning stop so I could feel the trigger when the moment came. Boom, Glen shot again, and I heard him shuck a shell, and all the sounds out beyond the bunker seemed to be rising — the geese, the shots, the air itself going up. Boom, Glen shot another time, and I knew he was taking his careful time to make his shots good. And I held my gun and started to crawl up the bunker so as not to be surprised when the geese came over me and I could shoot.

From the top I saw Glen Baxter alone in the wheatgrass field, shooting at a white goose with black tips of wings that was on the ground not far from him, but trying to run and pull into the air. He shot it once more, and it fell over dead with its wings flapping.

Glen looked back at me and his face was distorted and strange. The air around him was full of white rising geese and he seemed to want them all. “Behind you, Les,” he yelled at me and pointed. “They’re all behind you now.” I looked behind me, and there were geese in the air as far as I could see, more than I knew how many, moving so slowly, their wings wide out and working calmly and filling the air with noise, though their voices were not as loud or as shrill as I had thought they would be. And they were so close! Forty feet, some of them. The air around me vibrated and I could feel the wind from their wings and it seemed to me I could kill as many as the times I could shoot — a hundred or a thousand — and I raised my gun, put the muzzle on the head of a white goose, and fired. It shuddered in the air, its wide feet sank below its belly, its wings cradled out to hold back air, and it fell straight down and landed with an awful sound, a noise a human would make, a thick, soft, hump noise. I looked up again and shot another goose, could hear the pellets hit its chest, but it didn’t fall or even break its pattern for flying. Boom, Glen shot again. And then again. “Hey,” I heard him shout, “Hey, hey.” And there were geese flying over me, flying in line after line. I broke my gun and reloaded, and thought to myself as I did: I need confidence here, I need to be sure with this. I pointed at another goose and shot it in the head, and it fell the way the first one had, wings out, its belly down, and with the same thick noise of hitting. Then I sat down in the grass on the bunker and let geese fly over me.

By now the whole raft was in the air, all of it moving in a slow swirl above me and the lake and everywhere, finding the wind and heading out south in long wavering lines that caught the last sun and turned to silver as they gained a distance. It was a thing to see, I will tell you now. Five thousand white geese all in the air around you, making a noise like you have never heard before. And I thought to myself then: this is something I will never see again. I will never forget this. And I was right.

Glen Baxter shot twice more. One he missed, but with the other he hit a goose flying away from him, and knocked it half falling and flying into the empty lake not far from shore, where it began to swim as though it was fine and make its noise.

Glen stood in the stubby grass, looking out at the goose, his gun lowered. “I didn’t need to shoot that one, did I, Les?”

“I don’t know,” I said, sitting on the little knoll of land, looking at the goose swimming in the water.

“I don’t know why I shoot ’em. They’re so beautiful.” He looked at me.

“I don’t know either,” I said.

“Maybe there’s nothing else to do with them.” Glen stared at the goose again and shook his head. “Maybe this is exactly what they’re put on earth for.”

I did not know what to say because I did not know what he could mean by that, though what I felt was embarrassment at the great numbers of geese there were, and a dulled feeling like a hunger because the shooting had stopped and it was over for me now.

Glen began to pick up his geese, and I walked down to my two that had fallen close together and were dead. One had hit with such an impact that its stomach had split and some of its inward parts were knocked out. Though the other looked unhurt, its soft white belly turned up like a pillow, its head and jagged bill-teeth, its tiny black eyes looking as they would if they were alive.

“What’s happened to the hunters out here?” I heard a voice speak. It was my mother, standing in her pink dress on the knoll above us, hugging her arms. She was smiling though she was cold. And I realized that I had lost all thought of her in the shooting. “Who did all this shooting? Is this your work, Les?”

“No,” I said.

“Les is a hunter, though, Aileen,” Glen said. “He takes his time.” He was holding two white geese by their necks, one in each hand, and he was smiling. He and my mother seemed pleased.

“I see you didn’t miss too many,” my mother said and smiled. I could tell she admired Glen for his geese, and that she had done some thinking in the car alone. “It was wonderful, Glen,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like that. They were like snow.”

“It’s worth seeing once, isn’t it?” Glen said. “I should’ve killed more, but I got excited.”

My mother looked at me then. “Where’s yours, Les?”

“Here,” I said and pointed to my two geese on the ground beside me.

My mother nodded in a nice way, and I think she liked everything then and wanted the day to turn out right and for all of us to be happy. “Six, then. You’ve got six in all.”

“One’s still out there,” I said, and motioned where the one goose was swimming in circles on the water.

“Okay,” my mother said and put her hand over her eyes to look. “Where is it?”

Glen Baxter looked at me then with a strange smile, a smile that said he wished I had never mentioned anything about the other goose. And I wished I hadn’t either. I looked up in the sky and could see the lines of geese by the thousands shining silver in the light, and I wished we could just leave and go home.

“That one’s my mistake there,” Glen Baxter said and grinned. “I shouldn’t have shot that one, Aileen. I got too excited.”

My mother looked out on the lake for a minute, then looked at Glen and back again. “Poor goose.” She shook her head. “How will you get it, Glen?”

“I can’t get that one now,” Glen said.

My mother looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“I’m going to leave that one,” Glen said.

“Well, no. You can’t leave one,” my mother said. “You shot it. You have to get it. Isn’t that a rule?”

“No,” Glen said.

And my mother looked from Glen to me. “Wade out and get it, Glen,” she said in a sweet way, and my mother looked young then, like a young girl, in her flimsy short-sleeved waitress dress and her skinny, bare legs in the wheatgrass.

“No.” Glen Baxter looked down at his gun and shook his head. And I didn’t know why he wouldn’t go, because it would’ve been easy. The lake was shallow. And you could tell that anyone could’ve walked out a long way before it got deep, and Glen had on his boots.

My mother looked at the white goose, which was not more than thirty yards from the shore, its head up, moving in slow circles, its wings settled and relaxed so you could see the black tips. “Wade out and get it, Glenny, won’t you, please?” she said. “They’re special things.”

“You don’t understand the world, Aileen,” Glen said. “This can happen. It doesn’t matter.”

“But that’s so cruel, Glen,” she said, and a sweet smile came on her lips.

“Raise up your own arms, ‘Leeny,” Glen said. “I can’t see any angel’s wings, can you, Les?” He looked at me, but I looked away.

“Then you go on and get it, Les,” my mother said. “You weren’t raised by crazy people.” I started to go, but Glen Baxter suddenly grabbed me by my shoulder and pulled me back hard, so hard his fingers made bruises in my skin that I saw later.

“Nobody’s going,” he said. “This is over with now.”

And my mother gave Glen a cold look then. “You don’t have a heart, Glen,” she said. “There’s nothing to love in you. You’re just a son of a bitch, that’s all.”

And Glen Baxter nodded at my mother, then, as if he understood something he had not understood before, but something that he was willing to know. “Fine,” he said, “that’s fine.” And he took his big pistol out from against his belly, the big blue revolver I had only seen part of before and that he said protected him, and he pointed it out at the goose on the water, his arm straight away from him, and shot and missed. And then he shot and missed again. The goose made its noise once. And then he hit it dead, because there was no splash. And then he shot it three times more until the gun was empty and the goose’s head was down and it was floating toward the middle of the lake where it was empty and dark blue. “Now who has a heart?” Glen said. But my mother was not there when he turned around. She had already started back to the car and was almost lost from sight in the darkness. And Glen smiled at me then and his face had a wild look on it. “Okay, Les?” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“There’re limits to everything, right?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“Your mother’s a beautiful woman, but she’s not the only beautiful woman in Montana.” And I did not say anything. And Glen Baxter suddenly said, “Here,” and he held the pistol out at me. “Don’t you want this? Don’t you want to shoot me? Nobody thinks they’ll die. But I’m ready for it right now.” And I did not know what to do then. Though it is true that what I wanted to do was to hit him, hit him as hard in the face as I could, and see him on the ground bleeding and crying and pleading for me to stop. Only at that moment he looked scared to me, and I had never seen a grown man scared before — though I have seen one since — and I felt sorry for him, as though he was already a dead man. And I did not end up hitting him at all.

A light can go out in the heart. All of this happened years ago, but I still can feel now how sad and remote the world was to me. Glen Baxter, I think now, was not a bad man, only a man scared of something he’d never seen before — something soft in himself — his life going a way he didn’t like. A woman with a son. Who could blame him there? I don’t know what makes people do what they do, or call themselves what they call themselves, only that you have to live someone’s life to be the expert.

My mother had tried to see the good side of things, tried to be hopeful in the situation she was handed, tried to look out for us both, and it hadn’t worked. It was a strange time in her life then and after that, a time when she had to adjust to being an adult just when she was on the thin edge of things. Too much awareness too early in life was her problem, I think.

And what I felt was only that I had somehow been pushed out into the world, into the real life then, the one I hadn’t lived yet. In a year I was gone to hard-rock mining and no-paycheck jobs and not to college. And I have thought more than once about my mother saying that I had not been raised by crazy people, and I don’t know what that could mean or what difference it could make, unless it means that love is a reliable commodity, and even that is not always true, as I have found out.

Late on the night that all this took place I was in bed when I heard my mother say, “Come outside, Les. Come and hear this.” And I went out onto the front porch barefoot and in my underwear, where it was warm like spring, and there was a spring mist in the air. I could see the lights of the Fairfield Coach in the distance, on its way up to Great Falls.

And I could hear geese, white birds in the sky, flying. They made their high-pitched sound like angry yells, and though I couldn’t see them high up, it seemed to me they were everywhere. And my mother looked up and said, “Hear them?” I could smell her hair wet from the shower. “They leave with the moon,” she said. “It’s still half wild out here.”

And I said, “I hear them,” and I felt a chill come over my bare chest, and the hair stood up on my arms the way it does before a storm. And for a while we listened.

“When I first married your father, you know, we lived on a street called Bluebird Canyon, in California. And I thought that was the prettiest street and the prettiest name. I suppose no one brings you up like your first love. You don’t mind if I say that, do you?” She looked at me hopefully.

“No,” I said.

“We have to keep civilization alive somehow.” And she pulled her little housecoat together because there was a cold vein in the air, a part of the cold that would be on us the next day. “I don’t feel part of things tonight, I guess.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“Do you know where I’d like to go?”

“No,” I said. And I suppose I knew she was angry then, angry with lite, but did not want to show me that.

“To the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Wouldn’t that be something? Would you like that?”

“I’d like it,” I said. And my mother looked off for a minute, as if she could see the Straits of Juan de Fuca out against the line of mountains, see the lights of things alive and a whole new world.

“I know you liked him,” she said after a moment. “You and I both suffer fools too well.”

“I didn’t like him too much,” I said. “I didn’t really care.”

“He’ll fall on his face. I’m sure of that,” she said. And I didn’t say anything because I didn’t care about Glen Baxter anymore, and was happy not to talk about him. “Would you tell me something if I asked you? Would you tell me the truth?”

“Yes,” I said.

And my mother did not look at me. “Just tell the truth,” she said.

“All right,” I said.

“Do you think I’m still very feminine? I’m thirty-two years old now. You don’t know what that means. But do you think I am?”

And I stood at the edge of the porch, with the olive trees before me, looking straight up into the mist where I could not see geese but could still hear them flying, could almost feel the air move below their white wings. And I felt the way you feel when you are on a trestle all alone and the train is coming, and you know you have to decide. And I said, “Yes, I do.” Because that was the truth. And I tried to think of something else then and did not hear what my mother said after that.

And how old was I then? Sixteen. Sixteen is young, but it can also be a grown man. I am forty-one years old now, and I think about that time without regret, though my mother and I never talked in that way again, and I have not heard her voice now in a long, long time.