Rock Springs

Children

Claude Phillips was a half-Blackfeet Indian, and his father, Sherman, was a full-blood, and in 1961 our families rented out farm houses from the bank in Great Falls — the homes of wheat farmers gone bust on the prairie east of Sunburst, Montana. People were going broke even then, and leaving. Claude Phillips and I were seventeen, and in a year from the day I am going to tell about, in May, I would be long gone from there myself, and so would Claude.

Where all of this took place was in that remote part of Montana near the Canada border and west of the Sweetgrass Hills. That is called the Hi-line, there, and it is an empty, lonely place if you are not a wheat farmer. I make this a point only because I have thought possibly it was the place itself, as much as the time in our lives or our characters, that took part in the small things that happened and made them memorable.

Claude Phillips was a small boy with long arms who boxed in the same amateurs club I boxed in — up in Sweetgrass and across the border in Canada, wherever we could box. He was ten months younger than I was, but he was hard-nosed and had fight courage. His real mother was his father’s first wife, and was Irish, and Claude did not look like an Indian — his cheeks wore more color in them and his eyes were gray. His father had later married another woman — an Indian, an Assiniboin, named Hazel Tevitts — whom Claude did not talk about. I didn’t know much about their life then, only that it didn’t seem much different from mine. You did not learn much of other people in that locality, and though Claude and I were friends, I would not say I knew him very well, because there was no chance for it.

Claude’s father had stayed the night in the motel in town and called Claude in the morning and told him to come down there at noon. On the way Claude stopped at my house — just out of the blue — and said I should come along. We were due to be in school that day, but my father worked on the Great Northern as a brakeman in Shelby, and was usually gone two nights together, and my mother was gone for good by then, though we didn’t know that. But I did not go to school so much, as a result, and when Claude drove up in the yard, I just got in with him and we rode to town.

“What’re we going in for?” I said when we were out on the Nine Mile Road, riding across the tops of the wheat prairies.

“Sherman’s brought a woman in,” Claude said. He was smoking a cigarette clenched in his teeth. “That’s typical. He likes to put something on display.”

“What does your mother think about it?” I said. We referred to Hazel as Claude’s mother even though she wasn’t.

“She married a gash hound. She’s a Catholic,” Claude said. “Maybe she can see the future. Maybe she thinks it’s superior.” He shook his head and put his arms up around the steering wheel as if he was thinking about that. “There might not be actual words for what Hazel thinks, yet. This ought to be funny.” He grinned.

“I’ll still have a look,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

“Sure you will. Then you’ll just have to give her a pumping, right?” Claude flexed up the muscle of his right arm.

“I might have to,” I said.

“That’s typical, too,” he said. Claude was wearing the yellow silk jacket his father had brought back from the war, one with a red dragon coiled around a map of Korea on the back, and I died there embroidered under it in red. He reached inside it and brought out a half-pint bottle of Canadian gin. “Rocket fuel,” he said. “Sherman forgets where he hides it.” He handed the bottle over to me. “Fire up your missile.”

I took a big drink and swallowed it. I didn’t like whiskey and had not drunk it much, and when it went down I had to look out the car window. The wheat fields running by were two inches up and green then as far as you could see. The only trees alive were the olive breaks planted in rows on the rises and out distant, alongside some house or a quonset where a farm still ran. The little town of Sunburst was ahead, lower than where we were driving. I could see the grain elevator and the narrow collection of houses down one side of the railroad spur.

Claude said suddenly, “Maybe Sherman’s going to give her to us.” He held the bottle up and took a drink. “He doesn’t care what happens. He’s been in Deer Lodge twice already. Twice / know of.”

“For what?” I said.

“Stealing and fighting. Then fighting and stealing. He stole two cows once, and they caught him there. Then he stole two trucks and beat a guy up for fun. He went down for that.”

“I don’t need to beat anybody up,” I said.

“There’s Mr. Conscience talking now,” Claude said. “Have another drink, Mr. Conscience.” He had another drink of the gin, then I took another one, then he threw the bottle in the back, where the seat of his Buick had been torn out and the floor boarded in with plywood. Two fishing rods were rattling back in the dust.

“Who is this woman,” I asked, feeling the gin tightening my scalp.

“He brought her over in the caboose last night from Havre. He dead-headed her in. She’s Canadian. I didn’t actually catch her name.” Claude laughed, and we both laughed about it, and then we were down among the first poor houses of Sunburst.

Sunburst had one paved street, which was the Canada highway, and the rest dirt streets. There was the elevator, a cafe, an implement company, a sawdust burner, one bar and the motel. It was the show-up for the Shelby crews that worked the GN going south. A switch engine hauled in a caboose and three cars two times a day, switched out the elevator spur, and took the crews back and forth to the main line. A green bull-pen shack was across the tracks, and my father’s brown truck sat parked beside it with other crew trucks.

The motel was a little cottage camp across the highway — six white cottages and a skinny gravel lot. The closest cabin had a sign on top that said rooms for tourists, and there was only one car, with an Alberta plate, parked at the cabin nearest the street.

Claude drove in the lot and gunned his engine. I saw a woman look out through the blinds of the office cabin. I wondered if she would know me if she saw me. Claude and I did not go to school in this town, but at the Consolidated in Sweetgrass.

Claude honked the horn and his father stepped out of one of the cabins. “Here comes the great lady’s man,” he said. “The big Indian.” Claude grinned. We were both a little drunk now. He revved the engine again and kicked out gravel.

Sherman Philips was a large dark man with a big belly. He walked bent forward and took very small steps. He had on a long-sleeved white shirt, and his black hair was slicked back and tied in a long ponytail. He wore glasses and a pair of bedroom slippers with no socks. I didn’t see how any woman would like how he looked. He drank a lot, is what my father said, and sometimes had been seen carrying a loaded gun.

“Clear conscience is no conscience,” Claude said to his father out the car window. He was still smiling.

Sherman leaned on the car door and looked in at me. His big face had pockmarks, and a scar below his left ear. I had never been this close to him. He had narrow eyes and he was clean shaven. A pack of cigarettes was in his pocket, and I could smell his aftershave.

“You two’re drunk as monkeys,” he said in a mean way.

“No, we’re not drunk at all,” Claude said.

I could hear Claude’s father breathe in his chest. The lines in his face behind his glasses were deep lines. He looked back over his shoulder at the cabin. Behind the screen in the shadows, there was a blond woman in a green dress watching us, but who didn’t want us to see her.

“I’ve got to get home right now,” Claude’s father said. “You understand? Hazel thinks I’m in Havre.”

“Maybe you are,” Claude said. “Maybe we’re all in Havre. What’s her name.” He was looking at the cabin door where the blond woman was.

“Lucy,” Sherman said, and breathed in deeply. “She’s a nice girl.”

“She likes you, though, I guess,” Claude said. “Maybe she’ll like us.”

Sherman stood up and looked down the row of cabins to the office, where a phone booth was outside. The woman was gone from the office window, and I thought that she probably knew Claude’s father because he had been here before, and that probably she knew all the railroad men — including my father.

“I’m going to bring her out here,” Sherman said.

“You going to give her to us as a present?” Claude said.

And Sherman suddenly reached his big hand through the window and caught Claude’s hair in the back and twisted it. Claude’s hair was as short as mine, for boxing, but Sherman had enough of it to hurt. He had a big silver and turquoise ring on his index finger that pushed into Claude’s scalp.

“You’re not funny. You’re clucks. You’re stupid clucks.” Sherman forced Claude’s head almost out the window. He seemed dangerous to me, then — just suddenly. He was an Indian, and I wanted to get out of the car.

Sherman opened the door, pulled Claude out by his hair and away from the car, and put his big face down into Claude’s face and said something I didn’t hear. I looked the other way, at my father’s Dodge truck parked over beside the bull-pen. I didn’t think he would be back until late tonight. He stayed in Shelby in the bars sometimes, and went home with women. I wondered where my mother was right at that moment. California? Hawaii? I wondered if she was having a good time.

“Okay now, wise ass?” I heard Sherman say. “How’s that, now?” He still had Claude’s hair, but had raised his voice as if he wanted me to hear, too. Claude was much smaller than his father, and he had not said anything. “I’ll just break your goddamn arm, now,” Sherman said and grabbed Claude up closer, then pushed him away. Sherman glared over at me in the car, then turned and walked back toward the cabin he’d come out of.

Claude got back in the car and turned off the engine. “So fuck him,” he said. His face was red, and he put both his hands in his lap. He didn’t try to touch the back of his head, he just stared out at the Polar Bar, beside the motel. A little red Polar bear sign was shining dimly in the sunlight. A man came out the side door wearing a cowboy hat. He looked at us sitting in the car, then walked around the side of the building and disappeared. No one else was in town that I could see. I didn’t say anything for a few moments.

Finally I said, “What’re we doing?” The car engine was ticking.

Claude stared ahead still. “We’re taking her off somewhere and bringing her back tonight. He doesn’t want her out in the street where people’ll see her. He’s an asshole.”

Behind the cabin screen I could see Claude’s father in his white shirt. He was kissing the woman in the green dress, his big arms wrapped around her. One leg was hooked behind her so he could get all of her against him and hold her. I could hardly see the woman at all.

“I think we should kill her,” Claude said, “just to piss him off.”

“What will happen to her?”

“I don’t know. What’s going to happen to you? Maybe you two’ll get married. Or maybe you’ll kill each other. Who cares?”

The screen opened and Sherman came out again. He looked bigger. He walked in his short steps across the lot, the sun gleaming off his glasses. He had dollar bills in his hand.

“This is shut-up money,” he said when he looked in the window again. He stuffed the bills down in Claude’s shirt pocket. “So shut up.” He looked across at me. “Go the hell home, George. Your old man’s cooking dinner. He needs you home.”

I didn’t smile at him, but I did not talk back either.

“I’ll take him home,” Claude said.

“He’ll spew this.”

“No, he won’t,” Claude said.

“I don’t spew anything,” I said.

Claude’s father glared at me. “Don’t talk toward me now, George. Just don’t begin that.”

I looked at him, and I wanted him to know what I was thinking: that I was sorry Claude had to be his son. I wanted the woman inside the cabin to come with us, though, and I wanted Sherman to leave. I knew Claude would not take me home.

Sherman motioned toward the cabin door, and for a few seconds nothing happened, then the screen opened and the woman came out. She closed the cabin door behind her and walked across the lot carrying a paper sack. She was wearing a man’s sunglasses and was thin and flat-chested and wore green high heels. I wasn’t sure how old she was. Claude and I watched her while Sherman policed up and down the street to see who was watching us. The woman in the office was not at the window. A car drove by the motel going north. A switch engine had started shunting grain cars out to the elevator, and I could smell diesel. Nobody was paying attention to any of this.

“So, all right now,” Sherman said when the woman arrived. I could see through the window that she wasn’t a woman but a girl. She was older than we were, but not by very much. “This is Claude,” Sherman said. “He’s my son. This is his close friend George, who’s not going. Claude’s going to take you fishing.” He looked across the street at the switch engine. “This is Lucy.”

The girl just stood there, holding her folded paper sack. She was tall and pretty and pale-skinned, and she didn’t seem happy.

“You don’t want to go fishing with us,” Claude said. He had not made a move to let her in.

“Let her get in,” I said. “She wants to go.”

The girl bent and looked in the back where there was no seat. A crate was there with a jack, the two rods, and a jumper set.

“Fm not riding in that back,” the girl said, and looked at me.

“Let her in front,” I told Claude.

I don’t think he wanted the girl in the car. And I didn’t know why, because I wanted her in. Maybe he had thought his father had an Indian woman, and he wasn’t sure what to do now.

Claude opened the door, and when he stood up I could see that the girl was taller than he was. I didn’t think that kind of thing mattered though, because Claude had already whipped boys with his fists who were bigger than he was.

When the girl got in she had to pull her knees up. She was wearing stockings, and her green shoes were the kind without toes.

“Hello, George,” she said, and smiled. I could smell Sherman’s aftershave.

“Hello,” I said.

“Don’t cause me any fucking trouble, or FU break you up,” Sherman said. And before Claude could get in, Sherman was starting back to the motel in his bedroom slippers, his ponytail swinging down his back.

“You’re a real odd match,” Lucy said when Claude had gotten in the driver’s seat. “You don’t look like each other.”

“Who do I look like?” Claude said. He was angry.

“Some Greek,” Lucy said. She looked around Claude as Sherman disappeared into the motel room and closed the door. “Maybe your mother, though,” she said as an afterthought.

“Where’s she now?” Claude said. “My mother.” He started the car.

The girl looked at him from behind her glasses. “At home. I guess. Wherever you live.”

“No. She’s dead,” Claude said. “Are those my father’s glasses?”

“He gave them to me. Do you want them back?”

“Are you divorced?” Claude said.

“I’m not old enough,” the girl said. “I’m not even married yet.”

“How old are you?” Claude said.

“Twenty, nineteen. How does that sound?” She looked at me and smiled. She had small teeth and her breath had beer on it. “How old do I look?”

“Eight,” Claude said. “Or maybe a hundred.”

“Are we going fishing, today?” she said.

“We talk about things we don’t intend to do,” Claude said. He hit the motor then, and snapped the clutch, and we went swerving out of the lot onto the hardtop, heading out of Sunburst and back onto the green wheat prairie.

Claude drove out the Canada highway eight miles, then off on the county road that went between the fields and past my house toward the west mountains a hundred miles away, where there was still snow and it was cold. My house flashed by in back of its belt of olive trees — just a square gray two-story house, unprotected toward the east. Claude was driving to Mormon Creek, I knew, though we were only doing what his father had told us to and not anything on our own. We were only boys, and nothing about us would interest a woman, or even a girl the age of this girl. You aren’t ignorant of that fact when it is true about you, and sometimes when it isn’t. And there was a strange feeling of suspense in me then — that once we were there I did not know what would happen and possibly nothing good would.

“That’s a pretty green dress,” Claude said as he drove. The girl had not been saying anything. None of us had, though she seemed to have her mind on something — getting back to the motel maybe, or getting back where she’d come from.

“It’s not for this season,” she said, staring out at the new fields where the air was tawny. “It’s already too dry to farm.”

“Where are you from?” I said.

“In Sceptre, Saskatchewan,” she said, “where it looks just like this. A little town and a bunch of houses. The rest knifed up with these farms.” She said house the way Canadians do, but otherwise she did not talk that way.

“What did your family do?” Claude said. “Are they a bunch of cheddar-head Swedes?” He seemed to expect everything she said to make him mad.

“He farmed,” she said. “Then he worked in a tractor shop in Leader. In the fall he cleans geese. He’s up to that right now.”

“What do you mean, he cleans geese?” Claude said. He smiled a mean smile at her, then at me.

“Hunters bring geese they shoot. It’s just out on the open prairie there. And they leave them at our garage. My father dips ’em to get the feathers out, then guts ’em and wraps ’em. It’s easy. He’s an American. He’s from Wyoming. He was against the draft.”

“He plucks ’em, you mean — right?” Claude said, driving. “Is that what you mean he does?”

“They smell better than this car does. I wouldn’t have known you two were Indians if it wasn’t for this car. This is a reservation beater is what we call these.”

“That’s what we call them,” Claude said. “And we call those motels where you were at whorehouses.”

“What do you call that guy I was with?” Lucy said.

“Do you think George looks like an Indian?” Claude said. “I think George is a Sioux, don’t you?” He smiled at me. “George isn’t a goddamn Indian. I am.”

“An Indian’s a bump in the road to me,” she said.

“That’s true,” Claude said. And something about her had made him feel better. I didn’t believe that this girl was a whore though, and I didn’t believe she thought she was, or that he did. Claude’s father did, but he was wrong. I just didn’t know why she would come over from Havre in the middle of the night and end up out here with us. It was a mystery.

We started down the steep car path to Mormon Creek bottom, where the water was high but not too muddy to shine. Across the bridge and a hundred yards downstream was a sawmill that had made fence posts but had been wrecked. Behind it was a pitch clay bluff the creek had cut, and beyond that were shallows and a cottonwood swale. On the near side was a green willow bank and a rusted car body that had been caught in the willow roots. It was a place Claude and I had fished for whitefish.

“Not much of a lumber place,” Lucy said.

“That’s why the sawyers did so great,” Claude said.

“Which way’s west?”

“That is,” I said, pointing to where the white peaks of mountains could just be seen above the coulee rim.

She looked back the other way. “And what’re those mountains back there?”

“Those’re hills,” Claude said. “We keep them separate in this country.”

“It is a nice atmosphere though,” she said. “I like to be oriented to the light.”

“You can’t see light with those glasses,” Claude said.

She turned to face me. “I see George here. I see well enough. He’s nicer than you are so far. He’s not an asshole.”

“Why don’t you take those glasses off?” Claude said. We were crossing the low bridge over Mormon Creek. The Buick clattered and shimmied on the boards. I looked down. I could see through the clear surface to gravel.

“Where does this water go?” Lucy was looking around me.

“Up,” I said. “To the Milk River. It goes north.”

“Did Sherman bust you, is that the trouble?” Claude said. He stopped us right on the bridge, and grabbed at the glasses, tried taking them off Lucy’s face. “You got a big busted eye?”

“No,” Lucy said. And she took off the glasses and looked at me first, then Claude. She had blue eyes and blond eyebrows the color of her hair. And what she was hiding was not a black eye, but that she had been crying. Not when she’d been with us, but when she woke up, maybe, and saw where she was, or who she was with, or what the day looked like ahead of her.

“I don’t see why you have to have them on,” Claude said. Then he drove off the bridge and turned onto the post mill road downstream, the Buick bucking and rocking over the bumps.

“It’s too bright,” she said and pulled the hem of her dress over her knees. It was a wool dress, as green as grass, and it felt hot against me. “What’s the fun out here,” she said. “That’s a well-kept secret.”

“You are,” Claude said. “The blond bombshell. You’re our reward for being able to put up with you.”

“Good luck for that party.” She clutched her paper bag. Her fingers were short and pink, and her fingernails were clean and not bitten, just a regular girl’s hands. “Where’s your mother and father?” she said to me.

“His old man runs the rails. He’s a gash hound, too,” Claude said as we drove in under the cottonwoods that grew to the creek bank. “His mother already hit the road. This is wild country up here. Nobody’s safe.” Claude looked at me in a disgusted way, but he knew I didn’t like that talk. I didn’t think that was true of my father, and he did not know my mother — though what he said about her was what I thought. It was not unusual that people left that part of Montana. She had never liked it, and neither my father nor me ever blamed her.

“Are you boys men now?” Lucy said and put her glasses back on. “Am I supposed to think that, now that we’re out here?”

“It doesn’t matter what you think,” I said. I opened the door and got out.

“At least somebody accepts truth,” Lucy said.

“George’ll say anything to get on your pretty side,” Claude said. “Him and me are different. Aren’t we, George?”

But I had already started toward the creek and couldn’t hear what the girl said back, though she and Claude were in the car together for a little while. I heard him say, “Hope means wait to me,” and laugh, and I heard his door slam, with her left inside.

Claude took his casting rod to the creek bank with his jelly jar of white maggots, and tied up a cork-and-hook rig, then went to the shallows where sawdust from the mill had laid a warm-water bottom and a sluice down the center of the creek. Sometimes we had caught fifteen whitcfish in a school there, when they’d fed. One after another. You could put your bait where they were and bring one back. They were big fish and steady fighters, and Claude liked them because they were easy to catch.

It was three o’clock then, and warm, but I did not want to fish. I did not like the waiting of fishing. Pd hunted for birds with my father, walked them up out of the rosebush thickets. But I did not care so much for fishing, and not for whitefish at all.

Claude had taken off his yellow jacket, and the girl had brought it back up — walking on the toes of her shoes — and spread it in the sun, then sat facing the creek. She raised her dress to her knees and took off her shoes and stockings and pushed up her sleeves. She’d unbuttoned her front enough to let sun on her neck and leaned on one elbow, smoking a cigarette, blowing the smoke in the warm air.

“I wish I could play the piano,” she said when I walked up from the bank. “Do you play one?”

“No,” I said. My mother had played a piano when we’d lived in Great Falls. She played Dixieland in the house we’d rented there.

“Out here makes me think about that,” she said. “I’d like to go in somebody’s house and sit down and play some song.” She blew smoke out the side of her mouth. She still had on Sherman’s sunglasses. Her long legs were so white they looked gray, and thin enough that her calf bones stood out. She had shaved them above her knees, and I could see where the blond hair began. She looked at me as if she wanted me to say something else, but I had nothing else to say. “Do you ever have the dream that somebody you know is leading you into a river and just when you’re knee-deep, you step in a hole and you fall under. Then you jump in your sleep, it scares you so much?”

“I have that,” I said. “Sometimes.”

“Everybody probably does,” she said.

I sat beside her on the grass, and we watched Claude. He was casting out toward the car body and walking his bobber down through the sluice. Now and then he’d look back at us and make a phony gesture of having a fish on his line, and then he would ignore us. I could smell the cotton-woods and the sawdust air from the mill.

“Do you have a suitcase full of your clothes?” I said.

“Where?” she said. She was smoking another cigarette.

“I don’t know. Someplace else.”

“I just left,” the girl said. “I wanted to take a trip suddenly — to someplace warmer. I’m not sure I had this in mind, though.” She looked at Claude, who had looked up at us again then turned around. Whitefish made little dimples on the flat water, seizing insects I could not even see. It was not a good sign for the rig Claude was using; though at any time fish can do another thing and you will begin to catch them. “His father’s not so terrible,” she said and touched her nylon stockings, which were in a pile on the grass. She lifted one up with her little finger. “You certainly wouldn’t think he’d sit in the dark in the middle of the night and pray in a motel. But he does. He’s nice, really. He’s pretty big, too. His son’s scrawny.”

I tried to think about Sherman praying but couldn’t think of what he’d want to pray for or hope to have come to him. “Where’d you meet him?”

“At the Trails End Bar in Havre, where I was too young to get in, or should’ve been. You get in odd situations sometimes.”

“How old are you?”

She widened her eyes at me. “You’re now a criminal. I’m just sixteen, though I look older than that, I know it. Some day I’ll regret it.” She reached for her paper sack and brought out a can of beer, a cold hot dog, and a red transistor radio. “I’ve accumulated this much so far.”

“When did you leave home?”

“Exactly one night before last,” she said. “I didn’t think I could trust anybody up there — maybe I was wrong. Who knows?” When she opened the beer it spewed up her arm. She took a drink and handed it to me, and I drank some. “Drinking distances you,” she said. “I would like to see the Space Needle, still.” She picked up the little radio, leaning on her elbow, and stared at it. “Batteries are my next assignment. For this thing.” She thumped it with her finger as if she wanted that to turn it on. “I’m not going to eat this either.” She picked up the hot dog and tossed it in the grass.

“You didn’t want to come out here, did you?” I said.

“I didn’t want to stay back in that room. Sunburst? Is that what that place is called? You accept help where you get it, I guess.”

“Uh-oh, now. Uh-oh,” Claude shouted. His rod was curved over, and his line was cutting around the water this way and that. “Here, now. Here he is,” Claude said, and looked over his shoulder and wound in on the reel. “This is the big whitefish,” he yelled.

Lucy sat up and watched. Claude had walked into the shallows in his shoes, holding his rod up as the fish toured around him. “Look how excited he gets,” she said and took a drink of her warm beer. “A monkey could catch a whitefish. They’re trash fish. He’s stupid.”

I saw the fish shine through the surface, then turn down in the cold water. It was a big fish, you could tell by how deep it took the line. I knew Claude wanted to get it in to show.

“He’s going to break that one off,” Lucy said, “and I bet he doesn’t have another hook.” And I thought he would break it off myself. I’d seen him break off big fish before.

Claude brought his rod butt down then, and struck it with the edge of his hand, struck it hard enough that the rod tip snapped. “They hate this,” he shouted, and he smacked his rod butt again. “A fish feels pain.”

The rod dipped, then rose. The line ran out toward the willow bank twenty yards away, then the fish turned on the surface, its white belly visible as Claude began backing it out, and I saw that the fish was falling in the current, losing distance.

“That trick works,” Claude shouted at us. “Pain works. Come see this thing.”

I walked down to where he’d waded back onto the mud bank. The fish was already on its side, finning sideways in the shallows. “It’s huge,” Claude said, hoisting the fish up with his rod. And it was a huge fish, long and deep-chested and silvery as it touched up out of the silt. “You can’t catch this fish every day, can you?” He was sweating and jittery. He wanted Lucy to see the fish. He looked around, but she’d stayed sitting, smoking her cigarette.

“Great,” she said and waved a hand at him. “Catch two more and we can all throw one away.”

Claude smiled a mean smile. “Get it off,” he said, and dragged the big fish back onto the grass where it lay with its gills cupping air. It was not a pretty fish. It was two feet long, and scaly and silver-white. “Use this,” Claude said. He pulled his black spring-knife out of his pocket and clicked down the blade. “Just cut the hook out.”

And I got on my knees in the grass, held the fish across its cold body, and cut up right through the bottom of its gill, using the point of the blade. I opened the cut out, pushed under the hook and dug it loose. The fish made a strangled sound when I put my weight on it, but it didn’t move.

“Hooked in the gills,” Claude said, watching the fish begin to bleed where I’d cut it. “It’ll eat good.”

I stood up and gave Claude his knife. The fish still breathed, but it was too badly cut to live in the water again. It was too worn out and too big. It wouldn’t have lived, I didn’t think, even if I hadn’t cut it.

Claude pinched the hook between his fingers and the knife blade, straightening the point. “I’m going to catch a bigger one,” he said. “They’re out there in rows. I’ll catch every one of them.” Claude looked over his shoulder at Lucy, who was still watching us. He bit his bottom lip. “You’re into something, aren’t you?” He said this in a whisper.

“I hope so,” I said.

“She’s a sweetheart.” He closed the knife on his pants leg. “Things can happen when you’re by yourself, can’t they?” He smiled.

“Tell secrets, now,” Lucy said and looked up at the sky and shook her head.

“It’s not a secret,” Claude yelled. “We don’t have any secrets. We’re friends.”

“Great,” she said. “Then you and Sherman are all alike. You got nothing worth hiding.”

I went back up and sat beside Lucy. Swallows were appearing now, hitting the creek surface and catching the insects that had hatched in the afternoon air.

Lucy was at her red radio, thumbing its little plastic dial back and forth. “I wish this worked,” she said. “We could get some entertainment in the wilderness. We could dance. Do you like dancing?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you have a girlfriend, too?”

“No,” I said, though I did have a girlfriend — in Sweetgrass — a half-Blackfeet girl I had not known very long.

Lucy lay in the grass and stared at where a jet was leaving a trail of white cloud, like a silvery speck inching westward. She had her green dress a little farther up her legs so the sun could be on them. “Do you understand radar, yet?”

“I’ve read about it.”

“Don’t you see things that aren’t there? Is that right?”

“They’re still there,” I said, “but they’re out of sight.”

“That’s the thing I liked about fishing when my father used to go with me,” she said, gazing up. “You only saw half what was there. It was a mystery. I liked that.” She pursed up her lips and watched the jet going east. To Germany, I decided. “I don’t mind feeling lonely out here.” She put her hands behind her head and looked at me through Sherman’s dark glasses. “Tell me something shameful you’ve done. That’s an act of faith. You already know something about me, right? Though that wasn’t so bad. I’ve probably done worse.”

Claude yelled from down in the creek. His rod was bent and he had it raised high in both hands, the line shooting upstream. Then suddenly the rod snapped straight and the line fell back on the surface. “There’s his long-line release,” Claude said, then laughed. He was in better spirits just from fishing. “If I didn’t horse ’em, I’d catch ’em,” he said and did not look where we were.

“He’s a fool,” Lucy said. “Indians are fools. I’d hate to have their kids.”

“He’s not,” I said. “He’s not a fool.”

“Okay. I guess I’m too hard on him.”

“He doesn’t care.”

She looked at Claude, who was beginning to rebait his hook, standing to his knees in the creek. “Well,” she said, “you’ll never see me after today, either. What have you done that’s shameful?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I haven’t done anything shameful.”

“Lying is it, then,” she said. “That’s shameful. You lied because you’re ashamed. There isn’t any out to this. It’s a game, and you lost it.”

“You’re not ashamed of anything, are you?”

“Yes I am,” she said. “I’m ashamed of leaving home without saying anything to anybody. And of spending the night with Sherman at that motel. That’s just two days of things. I’ll give you a second chance. Are you ashamed of being out here with me — whatever kind of person I am? That’s easy, isn’t it?”

“I haven’t done anything to you I’m ashamed of,” I said, though I wanted to think of something I might be ashamed of — that I’d hurt someone or hated them or been glad a terrible thing had happened. It seemed wrong to know nothing about that. I looked at Claude, who was throwing his line onto the current, his bobber catching the sluice and riding it. In forty-five minutes we would lose daylight, and it would be colder. After that we’d take Lucy back to the motel for Claude’s father, if he remembered. My own father would never even know I had been here, wouldn’t know about this day. I felt on my own, which was not so unusual. “I was glad when my mother left,” I said.

“Why?” Lucy said.

“We didn’t need her. She didn’t need us, either.” Neither of those things was true, but I could say them, and it didn’t bother me to hear them.

“Where is she now?” Lucy said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t care.”

Though just from her voice then I could tell this didn’t matter to her. Shame didn’t mean any more to her than some other way you could feel on a day — like feeling tired or cold or crying. It went away, finally. And I thought that I would like to feel that way about shame if I could.

Lucy took her sunglasses off. She reached over and put her hands on my arm and kissed my arm above the wrist. It was a strange thing for her to do. “What he said about your parents was a lie,” she said. “It was too harsh. If they’re happy, you’ll be the same way. I bet my parents are happy I’m gone. I don’t even blame them.” I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know what kind of people they could’ve been — some man who’d gone across the border to stay out of the war. “Why don’t you kiss me?” Lucy said. “Just for a minute?”

I looked at Claude. I saw he had another fish on but wasn’t yelling about it. He was just pulling it in.

“He can see us,” she said. “I don’t care. Let him.” She pushed her face up into my face and kissed me. She kissed me hard and opened her mouth too wide and put her tongue in mine, then pushed me on the grass and onto her stockings and her shoes. “Just do this,” she said. “Kiss me back. Kiss me all you want to. I like that.”

And I kissed her, put both my arms around her and felt her skinny back and her sides and up to her breasts and her face and her hair, and held her on top of me, pushing against me until my heart beat hard, and I thought my breath would stop. “You boys,” she whispered to me, “I love you boys. I wish 1 was staying with you tonight. You’re so wonderful.”

But I knew that wasn’t what she meant. It was just a thing to say, and nothing was wrong with it at all. “You’re wonderful,” I said. “I love you.”

“You’re drunk,” I heard Claude call out. “You’re both fuck drunk.”

I was on my back and my mouth was dry. Lucy pulled away from me and looked at him. “Don’t act jealously,” she said, then reached for her can of beer and took a drink.

“I’m down here fishing,” Claude said. “Come look at this. It’s a great fish.”

“Let’s let him have something,” Lucy said and stood up, though I didn’t want her to leave but to kiss me again, to stay. But she got up and started down barefoot to where Claude was kneeling in the grass. “Let’s see your poor fish,” she said.

Claude had another whitefish in the grass. The one I’d killed was dry and lying beside it, and the second one was smaller, but it was bright and bending in the grass. Claude had his hand on it and his spring-knife ready to pry out the hook himself.

“It’s smaller,” he said, “but it’s prettier. It’s livelier.”

Lucy looked down at the fish. She said, “That’s a picture of helplessness, I guess, isn’t it?”

“It’s a whitefish,” Claude said as the fish tried to twist free under his hand. “They’re the best. And it’s helpless. Right. You bet it is,”

“What a surprise that must be,” Lucy said, watching the fish struggle. “For the fish. Everything just goes crazy at once. I wonder what it thinks.”

“They don’t. Fish don’t think,” Claude said.

“Don’t they have little perfect spirits?” Lucy looked at me and smiled. She didn’t care about any of this. I could tell.

“Not this one,” Claude said.

He moved his hand around to the top of the fish to make a better grip so he could use his knife, but the fish twisted again, and with its top fin it jabbed Claude’s hand into the meat below his thumb.

“Look at that!” Lucy said.

And Claude let the fish go and wrung his hand and flung blood on the fish and on his face and on Lucy. He dropped his knife and squeezed his hand where the fish had cut him, his jaws set tight. “Son of a bitch thing, he said. He put his hand in his mouth and sucked it, then looked at it. The wound was small and narrow, and it had begun to seep blood on his wet skin. “Fucking thing,” Claude said. “Fucking fish is dangerous.” He put his hand back in his mouth and sucked the cut again. He looked at Lucy, who was watching him. And for an instant I thought Claude would do something terrible — say something to her or do something to the fish that would make her turn her head away, something he would later be sorry for. I had seen that in him. He was able to do bad things easily.

But what he did was take his hand out of his mouth and stick it in the grass and lean hard on it to stop the blood. It might’ve been an Indian way. “Who cares,” he said, and he seemed calm. He pushed his hand harder in the grass. The blood had dried already on his face. The fish was still twisting in the grass, its stiff gills trapping air, its scales growing dry and dull. “This is your fish,” Claude said to Lucy. “Do something with it. I don’t want it.” I knew his hand hurt him by the way he talked so quiedy.

Lucy looked at the fish, and I thought her body, which I was close to, became relaxed somehow, as if something that had been bothering her or that was hard for her suddenly wasn’t.

“Okay,” Lucy said. “My fish. Let me have that knife.”

Claude picked the knife up and handed it to her, the blade forward in the dangerous way. “This is sharp,” he said, and as she reached for it, he jabbed it at her, though she only moved her hand out of the way and did not take a step back. “You think we’re handsome?” Claude said. “Us two?”

“You’re the most handsome boys I ever saw,” Lucy said, “in this particular light.” She put her hand back out for Claude’s knife. “Let me have that.”

“We could kill you, right now,” Claude said. “Who’d know about it?”

Lucy looked at me and back at Claude. “That woman in the motel would probably be the first one. I had a talk with her this morning before what’s-his-name came back to life. Not that it matters.”

Claude smiled at her. “You plan to kill me when I give you this knife?”

I could see Lucy’s toes twitching in the grass. “No. I’m going to kill my fish,” she said.

“Okay,” Claude said, and handed her the knife by the blade. Lucy stepped by him and, without getting down on her knees, leaned over and pushed the knife down straight into the fish Claude had caught — pushed it through in the middle behind the gills that were still working, and on into the ground. Then she pulled the knife back far enough to get it out of the ground, picked the fish up by the handle, and flung it off the blade into Mormon Creek. She looked at Claude in a casual way, then threw his knife out into the deep water, where it hit with hardly a splash and disappeared down among the fish.

She looked around at me. “There you go,” she said.

And Claude was smiling at her because I think he didn’t know what else to do. He was sitting on the ground in his wet shoes, and he wasn’t squeezing his hand anymore. “You’ll do anything, won’t you?” he said.

“I always commit the wrong sins,” she said. “I thought we’d have fun out here. That must prove something.”

“I bet you’d fuck a pig in knickers,” Claude said, “you Canada girls.”

“You want me to take my dress off?” she said. “Is that what you mean? I’ll do that. Who cares. That’s what you said.”

“Do that, then. I’ll watch it,” Claude said. “George can watch. That’ll be okay.” I thought about kissing her then, sitting on Claude’s jacket in the grass, and I was ready to watch her take her dress off.

And that’s what she did, with Claude on the ground and me standing close to the side of Mormon Creek. She unbuttoned her green dress front, reached down, crossed her arms, and pulled her dress over her head so that she was only in her loose petticoat. And you could tell from her face that she was occupied by something — I don’t know what. She pulled down the loose straps off her shoulders and let her petticoat drop off of her so that she had on only a pink brassiere and pants that looked like the cotton pants I wore. Her legs and stomach were white and soft and a little fat, and I didn’t think she looked as good as when she’d had her dress on. Not as good as I thought would be the case. There were red marks and scratches on her back and down the backs of her legs, which I thought were the marks Sherman had made on her. I thought of them in the motel in Sunburst, under some blanket together, making noise and rolling and grabbing at each other in the dark.

And then she took off the rest. The brassiere first and then the cotton pants. Her breasts were small and up-pointed, and her ass was hardly even there. I didn’t look much at the rest of her. Though I could see then — or so I thought at the time — how young she was by how she stood on her pale thin legs, with her thin arms, and how she turned only at the waist and looked at me, so she could be sure I saw her, too. Like a girl. Younger, maybe even than I was, younger than Claude.

But it did not matter because she was already someone who could be by herself in the world. And neither Claude nor I were anything like that, and we never would be, never if we lived to be old men. Maybe she was born that way, or raised to it or had simply become that in the last two days. But it embarrassed me at that moment — for myself — and I know I looked away from her.

“What’s next?” she said.

“What do you think you’re good for now,” Claude said, sitting in the grass, looking up to her. “Everybody thinks they’re good for something. You must think you are. Or are you just good for nothing?” And he surprised me, because I didn’t think he was taunting her. I think he wanted to know the answer — that something about her seemed odd to him, maybe in the way it seemed to me.

“A lot of this seems a lot alike to me,” she said and sighed. “You can take me back to the motel. I ve had all the fun I’m going to.” She looked around at her clothes on the ground, as if she was trying to decide what to pick up first.

“You don’t have to act that way,” Claude said. “I’m not mad at you.” And his voice seemed strange to me, some soft voice I hadn’t heard him speak in — almost as if he was worried. “No, no,” he said. “You don’t.” I watched him extend his hand and touch her bare ankle, saw her look at him on the ground. I knew what was going to happen after that, and it did not involve me, and I didn’t feel the need to be there for it. Claude had a serious look on his face, a look that said this was for him now. And I just turned and walked back toward the Buick at the edge of the cottonwoods.

I heard Lucy say, “You can’t ever read other people’s minds, can you? That’s the trouble.” Then I quit listening to them altogether.

I will say how all of this turned out because in a way it is surprising, and because it did not turn out badly.

In the car I didn’t wait a long while for them. They were not there long. I thought I wouldn’t watch them, but I did, from the distance of the car. I happen to think it is what she wanted, though it might seem she wouldn’t have. In any case I don’t think she knew what she wanted from me. What we did, I thought, didn’t matter so much. Not to us, or to anyone. She might’ve been with me instead of Claude, or with Claude’s father, or another man none of us knew. She was pushing everything out. She was just an average girl.

I turned on the car radio and listened to the news from the Canadian station. Snow and bad weather were on their way again, it said, and I could feel the evening grow colder as it went to dark and the air turned blue. Trout moved against the far willow bank — swirling, deep rises that weren’t like other fish, and created in me a feeling of anticipation high up in my chest. It was that way I had felt early in the day, when we’d driven down to this very place to fish. Though the place now seemed different — the creek, the tree line, the millshed — all in new arrangements, in different light.

But I did not, as I waited, want to think about only myself. I realized that was all I had ever really done, and that possibly it was all you could ever do, and that it would make you bitter and lonesome and useless. So I tried to think instead about Lucy. But I had no idea where to begin. I thought about my mother, someplace far off — on a flyer, is how my father had described it. He thought she would walk back into our house one day, and that life would start all over. But I was accustomed to the idea that things ended and didn’t start up again — it is not a hard lesson to learn when that is all around you. And I only, at that moment, wondered if she’d ever lied to me, and if so, what about, wondered if she was someplace with a boy like me or Claude Philips. I put a picture in my mind that she was, though I thought it was wrong.

After a while the two of them walked back up to the car. It was dark and Lucy had her shoes and her stockings and her sack, and Claude had his fishing rod and his one fish he put behind the seat. They were drinking another beer, and for a minute or so they were quiet. But then Lucy said, just in a passing way, straightening her green dress, “I hope you aren’t what you wear.”

“You are judged by it, though,” I said. Then that tension was over, and we all seemed to know what was happening to us.

We got in the car and drove around over the wheat prairie roads at night, drove by my house, where it was still dark, then by Claude’s, where there were yellow lights and smoke out the chimney, and we could see figures through the windows. His father’s truck was parked against the house side. Claude honked as we passed, but didn’t stop.

We drove down into Sunburst, stopped at the Polar Bar, and bought a package of beer. When Claude was inside, Lucy said to me that she hoped to rise in the world someday. She asked me in what situations I would tell her a lie, and I said not any, then she kissed me again while we sat waiting in sight of the dark train yard and the grain elevator, ribboned in its lights, and the empty motel where I had seen her first that day. The sky was growing marbly against the moon, and she said she hated a marble sky. The air in the truck was cold, and I wondered if Sherman was already on his way to town.

When Claude came back with the beers, we all sat and drank one, and then he said we should drive Lucy to Great Falls, a hundred miles away, and forget all about Sherman. And that is what we did. We drove her there that night, took her to the bus station in the middle of town, where Claude and I gave her all the money we had and what Sherman had given him as the shut-up money. And we left her there, just at midnight, going toward what and where neither of us knew or even talked about.

On the drive back up along the Great Northern tracks we passed a long train coming north, sparks popping off its brakeshoes and out its journal boxes, the lighted caboose seeming to move alone and unaided through the dark. Snow was beginning to mist in the black air.

“Sherman wouldn’t have come back.” Claude was watching the train as it raced along beside us. “She wanted to stay with me. She admitted that. I wish I could marry her. I wish I was old.”

“You could be old,” I said, “and it could still be the same way.”

“Don’t belittle me now,” Claude said. “Don’t do that.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

“And don’t belittle her.” And I thought Claude was a fool then, and this was how you knew what a fool was — someone who didn’t know what mattered to him in the long run. “I wonder what she’s thinking about,” Claude said, driving.

“She’s thinking about you,” I said. “Or about your old man.”

“He could never love a woman like I can,” Claude said and smiled at me. “Never in his life. It’s a shame.”

“That’s right. He couldn’t,” I said, even though I thought that shame was something else. And I felt my own life, exactly at that instant, begin to go by me — fast and plummeting — almost without my notice.

Claude raised his fist and held it out like a boxer in the dark of the car. “I’m strong and I’m invincible,” he said. “Nothing’s on my conscience.” I don’t know why he said that. He was just lost in his thinking. He held his fist up in the dark for a long time as we drove on toward north. And I wondered then: what was I good for? What was terrible about me? What was best? Claude and I couldn’t see the world and what would happen to us in it — what we would do, where we would go. How could we? Outside was a place that seemed not even to exist, an empty place you could stay in for a long time and never find a thing you admired or loved or hoped to keep. And we were unnoticeable in it — both of us. Though I did not want to say that to him. We were friends. But when you are older, nothing you did when you were young matters at all. I know that now, though I didn’t know it then. We were simply young.