Rock Springs

Great Falls

This is not a happy story. I warn you.

My father was a man named Jack Russell, and when I was a young boy in my early teens, we lived with my mother in a house to the east of Great Falls, Montana, near the small town of Highwood and the Highwood Mountains and the Missouri River. It is a flat, treeless benchland there, all of it used for wheat farming, though my father was never a farmer, but was brought up near Tacoma, Washington, in a family that worked for Boeing.

He — my father — had been an Air Force sergeant and had taken his discharge in Great Falls. And instead of going home to Tacoma, where my mother wanted to go, he had taken a civilian’s job with the Air Force, working on planes, which was what he liked to do. And he had rented the house out of town from a farmer who did not want it left standing empty.

The house itself is gone now — I have been to the spot. But the double row of Russian olive trees and two of the outbuildings are still standing in the milkweeds. It was a plain, two-story house with a porch on the front and no place for the cars. At the time, I rode the school bus to Great Falls every morning, and my father drove in while my mother stayed home.

My mother was a tall pretty woman, thin, with black hair and slightly sharp features that made her seem to smile when she wasn’t smiling. She had grown up in Wallace, Idaho, and gone to college a year in Spokane, then moved out to the coast, which is where she met Jack Russell. She was two years older than he was, and married him, she said to me, because he was young and wonderful looking, and because she thought they could leave the sticks and see the world together — which I suppose they did for a while. That was the life she wanted, even before she knew much about wanting anything else or about the future.

When my father wasn’t working on airplanes, he was going hunting or fishing, two things he could do as well as anyone. He had learned to fish, he said, in Iceland, and to hunt ducks up on the DEW line — stations he had visited in the Air Force. And during the time of this — it was 1960—he began to take me with him on what he called his “expeditions.” I thought even then, with as little as I knew, that these were opportunities other boys would dream of having but probably never would. And I don’t think that I was wrong in that.

It is a true thing that my father did not know limits. In the spring, when we would go east to the Judith River Basin and camp up on the banks, he would catch a hundred fish in a weekend, and sometimes more than that. It was all he did from morning until night, and it was never hard for him. He used yellow corn kernels stacked onto a #4 snelled hook, and he would rattle this rig-up along the bottom of a deep pool below a split-shot sinker, and catch fish. And most of the time, because he knew the Judith River and knew how to feel his bait down deep, he could catch fish of good size.

It was the same with ducks, the other thing he liked. When the northern birds were down, usually by mid-October, he would take me and we would build a cattail and wheat-straw blind on one of the tule ponds or sloughs he knew about down the Missouri, where the water was shallow enough to wade. We would set out his decoys to the leeward side of our blind, and he would sprinkle corn on a hunger-line from the decoys to where we were. In the evenings when he came home from the base, we would go and sit out in the blind until the roosting flights came and put down among the decoys — there was never calling involved. And after a while, sometimes it would be an hour and full dark, the ducks would find the corn, and the whole raft of them — sixty, sometimes — would swim in to us. At the moment he judged they were close enough, my father would say to me, “Shine, Jackie,” and I would stand and shine a seal-beam car light out onto the pond, and he would stand up beside me and shoot all the ducks that were there, on the water if he could, but flying and getting up as well. He owned a Model 11 Remington with a long-tube magazine that would hold ten shells, and with that many, and shooting straight over the surface rather than down onto it, he could kill or wound thirty ducks in twenty seconds’ time. I remember distinctly the report of that gun and the flash of it over the water into the dark air, one shot after another, not even so fast, but measured in a way to hit as many as he could.

What my father did with the ducks he killed, and the fish, too, was sell them. It was against the law then to sell wild game, and it is against the law now. And though he kept some for us, most he would take — his fish laid on ice, or his ducks still wet and bagged in the burlap corn sacks — down to the Great Northern Hotel, which was still open then on Second Street in Great Falls, and sell them to the Negro caterer who bought them for his wealthy customers and for the dining car passengers who came through. We would drive in my father’s Plymouth to the back of the hotel — always this was after dark — to a concrete loading ramp and lighted door that were close enough to the yards that I could sometimes see passenger trains waiting at the station, their car lights yellow and warm inside, the passengers dressed in suits, all bound for someplace far away from Montana — Milwaukee or Chicago or New York City, unimaginable places to me, a boy fourteen years old, with my father in the cold dark selling illegal game.

The caterer was a tall, stooped-back man in a white jacket, who my father called “Professor Ducks” or “Professor Fish,” and the Professor referred to my father as “Sarge.” He paid a quarter per pound for trout, a dime for whitefish, a dollar for a mallard duck, two for a speckle or a blue goose, and four dollars for a Canada. I have been with my father when he took away a hundred dollars for fish he’d caught and, in the fall, more than that for ducks and geese. When he had sold game in that way, we would drive out 10th Avenue and stop at a bar called The Mermaid which was by the air base, and he would drink with some friends he knew there, and they would laugh about hunting and fishing while I played pinball and wasted money in the jukebox.

It was on such a night as this that the unhappy things came about. It was in late October. I remember the time because Halloween had not been yet, and in the windows of the houses that I passed every day on the bus to Great Falls, people had put pumpkin lanterns, and set scarecrows in their yards in chairs.

My father and I had been shooting ducks in a slough on the Smith River, upstream from where it enters on the Missouri. He had killed thirty ducks, and we’d driven them down to the Great Northern and sold them there, though my father had kept two back in his corn sack. And when we had driven away, he suddenly said, “Jackie, let’s us go back home tonight. Who cares about those hard-dicks at The Mermaid. I’ll cook these ducks on the grill. We’ll do something different tonight.” He smiled at me in an odd way. This was not a thing he usually said, or the way he usually talked. He liked The Mermaid, and my mother — as far as I knew — didn’t mind it if he went there.

“That sounds good,” I said.

“We’ll surprise your mother,” he said. “We’ll make her happy.”

We drove out past the air base on Highway 87, past where there were planes taking off into the night. The darkness was dotted by the green and red beacons, and the tower light swept the sky and trapped planes as they disappeared over the flat landscape toward Canada or Alaska and the Pacific.

“Boy-oh-boy,” my father said — just out of the dark. I looked at him and his eyes were narrow, and he seemed to be thinking about something. “You know, Jackie,” he said, “your mother said something to me once I’ve never forgotten. She said, ‘Nobody dies of a broken heart.’ This was somewhat before you were born. We were living down in Texas and we’d had some big blow-up, and that was the idea she had. I don’t know why.” He shook his head.

He ran his hand under the seat, found a half-pint bottle of whiskey, and held it up to the lights of the car behind us to see what there was left of it. He unscrewed the cap and took a drink, then held the bottle out to me. “Have a drink, son,” he said. “Something oughta be good in life.” And I felt that something was wrong. Not because of the whiskey, which I had drunk before and he had reason to know about, but because of some sound in his voice, something I didn’t recognize and did not know the importance of, though I was certain it was important.

I took a drink and gave the bottle back to him, holding the whiskey in my mouth until it stopped burning and I could swallow it a little at a time. When we turned out the road to Highwood, the lights of Great Falls sank below the horizon, and I could see the small white lights of farms, burning at wide distances in the dark.

“What do you worry about, Jackie,” my father said. “Do you worry about girls? Do you worry about your future sex life? Is that some of it?” He glanced at me, then back at the road.

“I don’t worry about that,” I said.

“Well, what then?” my father said. “What else is there?”

“I worry if you’re going to die before I do,” I said, though I hated saying that, “or if Mother is. That worries me.”

“It’d be a miracle if we didn’t,” my father said, with the half-pint held in the same hand he held the steering wheel. I had seen him drive that way before. “Things pass too fast in your life, Jackie. Don’t worry about that. If I were you, I’d worry we might not.” He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don’t remember him ever smiling at me that way again.

We drove on out behind the town of Highwood and onto the flat field roads toward our house. I could see, out on the prairie, a moving light where the farmer who rented our house to us was disking his field for winter wheat. “He’s waited too late with that business,” my father said and took a drink, then threw the bottle right out the window. “He’ll lose that,” he said, “the cold’ll kill it.” I did not answer him, but what I thought was that my father knew nothing about farming, and if he was right it would be an accident. He knew about planes and hunting game, and that seemed all to me.

“I want to respect your privacy,” he said then, for no reason at all that I understood. I am not even certain he said it, only that it is in my memory that way. I don’t know what he was thinking of. Just words. But I said to him, I remember well, “It’s all right. Thank you.”

We did not go straight out the Geraldine Road to our house. Instead my father went down another mile and turned, went a mile and turned back again so that we came home from the other direction. “I want to stop and listen now,” he said. “The geese should be in the stubble.” We stopped and he cut the lights and engine, and we opened the car windows and listened. It was eight o’clock at night and it was getting colder, though it was dry. But I could hear nothing, just the sound of air moving lightly through the cut field, and not a goose sound. Though I could smell the whiskey on my father’s breath and on mine, could hear the motor ticking, could hear him breathe, hear the sound we made sitting side by side on the car seat, our clothes, our feet, almost our hearts beating. And I could see out in the night the yellow lights of our house, shining through the olive trees south of us like a ship on the sea. “I hear them, by God,” my father said, his head stuck out the window. “But they’re high up. They won’t stop here now, Jackie. They’re high flyers, those boys. Long gone geese.”

There was a car parked off the road, down the line of wind-break trees, beside a steel thresher the farmer had left there to rust. You could see moonlight off the taillight chrome. It was a Pontiac, a two-door hard-top. My father said nothing about it and I didn’t either, though I think now for different reasons.

The floodlight was on over the side door of our house and lights were on inside, upstairs and down. My mother had a pumpkin on the front porch, and the wind chime she had hung by the door was tinkling. My dog, Major, came out of the quonset shed and stood in the car lights when we drove up.

“Let’s see what’s happening here,” my father said, opening the door and stepping out quickly. He looked at me inside the car, and his eyes were wide and his mouth drawn right.

We walked in the side door and up the basement steps into the kitchen, and a man was standing there — a man I had never seen before, a young man with blond hair, who might’ve been twenty or twenty-five. He was tall and was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and beige slacks with pleats. He was on the other side of the breakfast table, his fingertips just touching the wooden tabletop. His blue eyes were on my father, who was dressed in hunting clothes.

“Hello,” my father said.

“Hello,” the young man said, and nothing else. And for some reason I looked at his arms, which were long and pale. They looked like a young man’s arms, like my arms. His short sleeves had each been neatly rolled up, and I could see the bottom of a small green tattoo edging out from underneath. There was a glass of whiskey on the table, but no bottle.

“What’s your name?” my father said, standing in the kitchen under the bright ceiling light. He sounded like he might be going to laugh.

“Woody,” the young man said and cleared his throat. He looked at me, then he touched the glass of whiskey, just the rim of the glass. He wasn’t nervous, I could tell that. He did not seem to be afraid of anything.

“Woody,” my father said and looked at the glass of whiskey. He looked at me, then sighed and shook his head. “Where’s Mrs. Russell, Woody? I guess you aren’t robbing my house, are you?”

Woody smiled. “No,” he said. “Upstairs. I think she went upstairs.”

“Good,” my father said, “that’s a good place.” And he walked straight out of the room, but came back and stood in the doorway. “Jackie, you and Woody step outside and wait on me. Just stay there and I’ll come out.” He looked at Woody then in a way I would not have liked him to look at me, a look that meant he was studying Woody. “I guess that’s your car,” he said.

“That Pontiac.” Woody nodded.

“Okay. Right,” my father said. Then he went out again and up the stairs. At that moment the phone started to ring in the living room, and I heard my mother say, “Who’s that?” And my father say, “It’s me. It’s Jack.” And I decided I wouldn’t go answer the phone. Woody looked at me, and I understood he wasn’t sure what to do. Run, maybe. But he didn’t have run in him. Though I thought he would probably do what I said if I would say it.

“Let’s just go outside,” I said.

And he said, “All right.”

Woody and I walked outside and stood in the light of the floodlamp above the side door. I had on my wool jacket, but Woody was cold and stood with his hands in his pockets, and his arms bare, moving from foot to foot. Inside, the phone was ringing again. Once I looked up and saw my mother come to the window and look down at Woody and me. Woody didn’t look up or see her, but I did. I waved at her, and she waved back at me and smiled. She was wearing a powder-blue dress. In another minute the phone stopped ringing.

Woody took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it. Smoke shot through his nose into the cold air, and he sniffed, looked around the ground and threw his match on the gravel. His blond hair was combed backwards and neat on the sides, and I could smell his aftershave on him, a sweet, lemon smell. And for the first time I noticed his shoes. They were two-tones, black with white tops and black laces. They stuck out below his baggy pants and were long and polished and shiny, as if he had been planning on a big occasion. They looked like shoes some country singer would wear, or a salesman. He was handsome, but only like someone you would see beside you in a dime store and not notice again.

“I like it out here,” Woody said, his head down, looking at his shoes. “Nothing to bother you. I bet you’d see Chicago if the world was flat. The Great Plains commence here.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Woody looked up at me, cupping his smoke with one hand. “Do you play football?”

“No,” I said. I thought about asking him something about my mother. But I had no idea what it would be.

“I have been drinking,” Woody said, “but I’m not drunk now.”

The wind rose then, and from behind the house I could hear Major bark once from far away, and I could smell the irrigation ditch, hear it hiss in the field. It ran down from Highwood Creek to the Missouri, twenty miles away. It was nothing Woody knew about, nothing he could hear or smell. He knew nothing about anything that was here. I heard my father say the words, “That’s a real joke,” from inside the house, then the sound of a drawer being opened and shut, and a door closing. Then nothing else.

Woody turned and looked into the dark toward where the glow of Great Falls rose on the horizon, and we both could see the flashing lights of a plane lowering to land there. “I once passed my brother in the Los Angeles airport and didn’t even recognize him,” Woody said, staring into the night. “He recognized me, though. He said, ‘Hey, bro, are you mad at me, or what?’ I wasn’t mad at him. We both had to laugh.”

Woody turned and looked at the house. His hands were still in his pockets, his cigarette clenched between his teeth, his arms taut. They were, I saw, bigger, stronger arms than I had thought. A vein went down the front of each of them. I wondered what Woody knew that I didn’t. Not about my mother — I didn’t know anything about that and didn’t want to — but about a lot of things, about the life out in the dark, about coming out here, about airports, even about me. He and I were not so far apart in age, I knew that. But Woody was one thing, and I was another. And I wondered how I would ever get to be like him, since it didn’t necessarily seem so bad a thing to be.

“Did you know your mother was married before?” Woody said.

“Yes,” I said. “I knew that.”

“It happens to all of them, now,” he said. “They can’t wait to get divorced.”

“I guess so,” I said.

Woody dropped his cigarette into the gravel and toed it out with his black-and-white shoe. He looked up at me and smiled the way he had inside the house, a smile that said he knew something he wouldn’t tell, a smile to make you feel bad because you weren’t Woody and never could be.

It was then that my father came out of the house. He still had on his plaid hunting coat and his wool cap, but his face was as white as snow, as white as I have ever seen a human being’s face to be. It was odd. I had the feeling that he might’ve fallen inside, because he looked roughed up, as though he had hurt himself somehow.

My mother came out the door behind him and stood in the floodlight at the top of the steps. She was wearing the powder-blue dress Pd seen through the window, a dress I had never seen her wear before, though she was also wearing a car coat and carrying a suitcase. She looked at me and shook her head in a way that only I was supposed to notice, as if it was not a good idea to talk now.

My father had his hands in his pockets, and he walked right up to Woody. He did not even look at me. “What do you do for a living?” he said, and he was very close to Woody. His coat was close enough to touch Woody’s shirt.

“I’m in the Air Force,” Woody said. He looked at me and then at my father. He could tell my father was excited.

“Is this your day off, then?” my father said. He moved even closer to Woody, his hands still in his pockets. He pushed Woody with his chest, and Woody seemed willing to let my father push him.

“No,” he said, shaking his head.

I looked at my mother. She was just standing, watching. It was as if someone had given her an order, and she was obeying it. She did not smile at me, though I thought she was thinking about me, which made me feel strange.

“What’s the matter with you?” my father said into Woody’s face, right into his face — his voice tight, as if it had gotten hard for him to talk. “Whatever in the world is the matter with you? Don’t you understand something?” My father took a revolver pistol out of his coat and put it up under Woody’s chin, into the soft pocket behind the bone, so that Woody’s whole face rose, but his arms stayed at his sides, his hands open. “I don’t know what to do with you,” my father said. “I don’t have any idea what to do with you. I just don’t.” Though I thought that what he wanted to do was hold Woody there just like that until something important took place, or until he could simply forget about all this.

My father pulled the hammer back on the pistol and raised it tighter under Woody’s chin, breathing into Woody’s face — my mother in the light with her suitcase, watching them, and me watching them. A half a minute must’ve gone by.

And then my mother said, “Jack, let’s stop now. Let’s just stop.”

My father stared into Woody’s face as if he wanted Woody to consider doing something — moving or turning around or anything on his own to stop this — that my father would then put a stop to. My father’s eyes grew narrowed, and his teeth were gritted together, his lips snarling up to resemble a smile. “You’re crazy, aren’t you?” he said. “You’re a goddamned crazy man. Are you in love with her, too? Are you, crazy man? Are you? Do you say you love her? Say you love her! Say you love her so I can blow your fucking brains in the sky.”

“All right,” Woody said. “No. It’s all right.”

“He doesn’t love me, Jack. For God’s sake,” my mother said. She seemed so calm. She shook her head at me again. I do not think she thought my father would shoot Woody. And I don’t think Woody thought so. Nobody did, I think, except my father himself. But I think he did, and was trying to find out how to.

My father turned suddenly and glared at my mother, his eyes shiny and moving, but with the gun still on Woody’s skin. I think he was afraid, afraid he was doing this wrong and could mess all of it up and make matters worse without accomplishing anything.

“You’re leaving,” he yelled at her. “That’s why you’re packed. Get out. Go on.”

“Jackie has to be at school in the morning,” my mother said in just her normal voice. And without another word to any one of us, she walked out of the floodlamp light carrying her bag, turned the corner at the front porch steps and disappeared toward the olive trees that ran in rows back into the wheat.

My father looked back at me where I was standing in the gravel, as if he expected to see me go with my mother toward Woody’s car. But I hadn’t thought about that — though later I would. Later I would think I should have gone with her, and that things between them might’ve been different. But that isn’t how it happened.

“You’re sure you’re going to get away now, aren’t you, mister?” my father said into Woody’s face. He was crazy himself, then. Anyone would’ve been. Everything must have seemed out of hand to him.

“I’d like to,” Woody said. “I’d like to get away from here.”

“And I’d like to think of some way to hurt you,” my father said and blinked his eyes. “I feel helpless about it.” We all heard the door to Woody’s car close in the dark. “Do you think that I’m a fool?” my father said.

“No,” Woody said. “I don’t think that.”

“Do you think you’re important?”

“No,” Woody said. “I’m not.”

My father blinked again. He seemed to be becoming someone else at that moment, someone I didn’t know. “Where are you from?”

And Woody closed his eyes. He breathed in, then out, a long sigh. It was as if this was somehow the hardest part, something he hadn’t expected to be asked to say.

“Chicago,” Woody said. “A suburb of there.”

“Are your parents alive?” my father said, all the time with his blue magnum pistol pushed under Woody’s chin.

“Yes,” Woody said. “Yessir.”

“That’s too bad,” my father said. “Too bad they have to know what you are. I’m sure you stopped meaning anything to them a long time ago. I’m sure they both wish you were dead. You didn’t know that. But I know it. I can’t help them out, though. Somebody else’ll have to kill you. I don’t want to have to think about you anymore. I guess that’s it.”

My father brought the gun down to his side and stood looking at Woody. He did not back away, just stood, waiting for what I don’t know to happen. Woody stood a moment, then he cut his eyes at me uncomfortably. And I know that I looked down. That’s all I could do. Though I remember wondering if Woody’s heart was broken and what any of this meant to him. Not to me, or my mother, or my father. But to him, since he seemed to be the one left out somehow, the one who would be lonely soon, the one who had done something he would someday wish he hadn’t and would have no one to tell him that it was all right, that they forgave him, that these things happen in the world.

Woody took a step back, looked at my father and at me again as if he intended to speak, then stepped aside and walked away toward the front of our house, where the wind chime made a noise in the new cold air.

My father looked at me, his big pistol in his hand. “Does this seem stupid to you?” he said. “All this? Yelling and threatening and going nuts? I wouldn’t blame you if it did. You shouldn’t even see this. I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do now.”

“It’ll be all right,” I said. And I walked out to the road. Woody’s car started up behind the olive trees. I stood and watched it back out, its red taillights clouded by exhaust. I could see their two heads inside, with the headlights shining behind them. When they got into the road, Woody touched his brakes, and for a moment I could see that they were talking, their heads turned toward each other, nodding. Woody’s head and my mother’s. They sat that way for a few seconds, then drove slowly off. And I wondered what they had to say to each other, something important enough that they had to stop right at that moment and say it. Did she say, I love you? Did she say, This is not what I expected to happen? Did she say, This is what I’ve wanted all along? And did he say, I’m sorry for all this, or I’m glad, or None of this matters to me? These are not the kinds of things you can know if you were not there. And I was not there and did not want to be. It did not seem like I should be there. I heard the door slam when my father went inside, and I turned back from the road where I could still see their taillights disappearing, and went back into the house where I was to be alone with my father.

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 dock 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.