Rock Springs

Optimists

All of this that I am about to tell happened when I was only fifteen years old, in 1959, the year my parents were divorced, the year when my father killed a man and went to prison for it, the year I left home and school, told a lie about my age to fool the Army, and then did not come back. The year, in other words, when life changed for all of us and forever — ended, really, in a way none of us could ever have imagined in our most brilliant dreams of life.

My father was named Roy Brinson, and he worked on the Great Northern Railway, in Great Falls, Montana. He was a switch-engine fireman, and when he could not hold that job on the seniority list, he worked the extra-board as a hostler, or as a hostler’s helper, shunting engines through the yard, onto and off the freight trains that went south and east. He was thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old in 1959, a small, young-appearing man, with dark blue eyes. The railroad was a job he liked, because it paid high wages and the work was not hard, and because you could take off days when you wanted to, or even months, and have no one to ask you questions. It was a union shop, and there were people who looked out for you when your back was turned. “It’s a workingman’s paradise,” my father would say, and then laugh.

My mother did not work then, though she had worked — at waitressing and in the bars in town — and she had liked working. My father thought, though, that Great Falls was coming to be a rougher town than it had been when he grew up there, a town going downhill, like its name, and that my mother should be at home more, because I was at an age when trouble came easily. We lived in a rented two-story house on Edith Street, close to die freight yards and the Missouri River, a house where from my window at night I could hear the engines as they sat throbbing, could see their lights move along the dark rails. My mother was at home most of her time, reading or watching television or cooking meals, though sometimes she would go out to movies in the afternoon, or would go to the YWCA and swim in the indoor pool. Where she was from — in Havre, Montana, much farther north — there was never such a thing as a pool indoors, and she thought that to swim in the winter, with snow on the ground and the wind howling, was the greatest luxury. And she would come home late in the afternoon, with her brown hair wet and her face flushed, and in high spirits, saying she felt freer.

The night that I want to tell about happened in November. It was not then a good time for railroads — not in Montana especially — and for firemen not at all, anywhere. It was the featherbed time, and everyone knew, including my father, that they would — all of them — eventually lose their jobs, though no one knew exactly when, or who would go first, or, clearly, what the future would be. My father had been hired out ten years, and had worked on coal-burners and oil-burners out of Forsythe, Montana, on the Sheridan spur. But he was still young in the job and low on the list, and he felt that when the cut came young heads would go first. “They’ll do something for us, but it might not be enough,” he said, and I had heard him say that other times — in the kitchen, with my mother, or out in front, working on his motorcycle, or with me, fishing the whitefish flats up the Missouri. But I do not know if he truly thought that or in fact had any reason to think it. He was an optimist. Both of them were optimists, I think.

I know that by the end of summer in that year he had stopped taking days off to fish, had stopped going out along the coulee rims to spot deer. He worked more then and was gone more, and he talked more about work when he was home: about what the union said on this subject and that, about court cases in Washington, D.C., a place I knew nothing of, and about injuries and illnesses to men he knew, that threatened their livelihoods, and by association with them, threatened his own — threatened, he must’ve felt, our whole life.

Because my mother swam at the YWCA she had met people there and made friends. One was a large woman named Esther, who came home with her once and drank coffee in the kitchen and talked about her boyfriend and laughed out loud for a long time, but who I never saw again. And another was a woman named Penny Mitchell whose husband, Boyd, worked for the Red Cross in Great Falls and had an office upstairs in the building with the YWCA, and who my mother would sometime play canasta with on the nights my father worked late. They would set up a card table in the living room, the three of them, and drink and eat sandwiches until midnight. And I would lie in bed with my radio tuned low to the Calgary station, listening to a hockey match beamed out over the great empty prairie, and could hear the cards snap and laughter downstairs, and later I would hear footsteps leaving, hear the door shut, the dishes ratde in the sink, cabinets close. And in a while the door to my room would open and the light would fall inside, and my mother would set a chair back in. I could see her silhouette. She would always say, “Go back to sleep, Frank.” And then the door would shut again, and I would almost always go to sleep in a minute.

It was on a night that Penny and Boyd Mitchell were in our house that trouble came about. My father had been working his regular bid-in job on the switch engine, plus a helper’s job off the extra-board — a practice that was illegal by the railroad’s rules, but ignored by the union, who could see bad times coming and knew there would be nothing to help it when they came, and so would let men work if they wanted to. I was in the kitchen, eating a sandwich alone at the table, and my mother was in the living room playing cards with Penny and Boyd Mitchell. They were drinking vodka and eating the other sandwiches my mother had made, when I heard my father’s motorcycle outside in the dark. It was eight o’clock at night, and I knew he was not expected home until midnight.

“Roy’s home,” I heard my mother say. “I hear Roy. That’s wonderful.” I heard chairs scrape and glasses tap.

“Maybe he’ll want to play,” Penny Mitchell said. “We can play four-hands.”

I went to the kitchen door and stood looking through the dining room at the front. I don’t think I knew something was wrong, but I think I knew something was unusual, something I would want to know about firsthand.

My mother was standing beside the card table when my father came inside. She was smiling. But I have never seen a look on a man’s face that was like the look on my father’s face at that moment. He looked wild. His eyes were wild. His whole face was. It was cold outside, and the wind was coming up, and he had ridden home from the train yard in only his flannel shirt. His face was red, and his hair was strewn around his bare head, and I remember his fists were clenched white, as if there was no blood in them at all.

“My God,” my mother said. “What is it, Roy? You look crazy.” She turned and looked for me, and I knew she was thinking that this was something I might not need to see. But she didn’t say anything. She just looked back at my father, stepped toward him and touched his hand, where he must’ve been coldest. Penny and Boyd Mitchell sat at the card table, looking up. Boyd Mitchell was smiling for some reason.

“Something awful happened,” my father said. He reached and took a corduroy jacket off the coat nail and put it on, right in the living room, then sat down on the couch and hugged his arms. His face seemed to get redder then. He was wearing black steel-toe boots, the boots he wore every day, and I stared at them and felt how cold he must be, even in his own house. I did not come any closer.

“Roy, what is it?” my mother said, and she sat down beside him on the couch and held his hand in both of hers.

My father looked at Boyd Mitchell and at his wife, as if he hadn’t known they were in the room until then. He did not know them very well, and I thought he might tell them to get out, but he didn’t.

“I saw a man be killed tonight,” he said to my mother, then shook his head and looked down. He said, “We were pushing into that old hump yard on Ninth Avenue. A cut of coal cars. It wasn’t even an hour ago. I was looking out my side, the way you do when you push out a curve. And I could see this one open boxcar in the cut, which isn’t unusual. Only this guy was in it and was trying to get off, sitting in the door, scooting. I guess he was a hobo. Those cars had come in from Glasgow tonight. And just the second he started to go off, the whole cut buckled up. It’s a thing that’ll happen. But he lost his balance just when he hit the gravel, and he fell backwards underneath. I looked right at him. And one set of trucks rolled right over his foot.” My father looked at my mother then. “It hit his foot,” he said.

“My God,” my mother said and looked down at her lap.

My father squinted. “But then he moved, he sort of bucked himself like he was trying to get away. He didn’t yell, and I could see his face. I’ll never forget that. He didn’t look scared, he just looked like a man doing something that was hard for him to do. He looked like he was concentrating on something. But when he bucked he pushed back, and the other trucks caught his hand.” My father looked at his own hands then, and made fists out of them and squeezed them.

“What did you do?” my mother said. She looked terrified.

“I yelled out. And Sherman stopped pushing. But it wasn’t that fast.”

“Did you do anything then,” Boyd Mitchell said.

“I got down,” my father said, “and I went up there. But here’s a man cut in three pieces in front of me. What can you do? You can’t do very much. I squatted down and touched his good hand. And it was like ice. His eyes were open and roaming all up in the sky.”

“Did he say anything?” my mother said.

“He said, ‘Where am I today?’ And I said to him, ‘It’s all right, bud, you’re in Montana. You’ll be all right.’ Though, my God, he wasn’t. I took my jacket off and put it over him. I didn’t want him to see what had happened.”

“You should’ve put tourniquets on,” Boyd Mitchell said gruffly, “That could’ve helped. That could’ve saved his life.”

My father looked at Boyd Mitchell then as if he had forgotten he was there and was surprised that he spoke. “I don’t know about that,” my father said. “I don’t know anything about those things. He was already dead. A boxcar had run over him. He was breathing, but he was already dead to me.”

“That’s only for a licensed doctor to decide,” Boyd Mitchell said. “You’re morally obligated to do all you can.” And I could tell from his tone of voice that he did not like my father. He hardly knew him, but he did not like him. I had no idea why. Boyd Mitchell was a big, husky, red-faced man with curly hair — handsome in a way, but with a big belly — and I knew only that he worked for the Red Cross, and that my mother was a friend of his wife’s, and maybe of his, and that they played cards when my father was gone.

My father looked at my mother in a way I knew was angry. “Why have you got these people over here now, Dorothy? They don’t have any business here.”

“Maybe that’s right,” Penny Mitchell said, and she put down her hand of cards and stood up at the table. My mother looked around the room as though an odd noise had occurred inside of it and she couldn’t find the source.

“Somebody definitely should’ve done something,” Boyd Mitchell said, and he leaned forward on the table toward my father. “That’s all there is to say.” He was shaking his head no. “That man didn’t have to die.” Boyd Mitchell clasped his big hands on top of his playing cards and stared at my father. “The unions’ll cover this up, too, I guess, won’t they? That’s what happens in these things.”

My father stood up then, and his face looked wide, though it looked young, still. He looked like a young man who had been scolded and wasn’t sure how he should act. “You get out of here,” he said in a loud voice. “My God. What a thing to say. I don’t even know you.”

“I know you, though,” Boyd Mitchell said angrily. “You’re another featherbedder. You aren’t good to do anything. You can’t even help a dying man. You’re bad for this country, and you won’t last.”

“Boyd, my goodness,” Penny Mitchell said. “Don’t say that. Don’t say that to him.”

Boyd Mitchell glared up at his wife. “I’ll say anything I want to,” he said. “And he’ll listen, because he’s helpless. He can’t do anything.”

“Stand up,” my father said. “Just stand up on your feet.” His fists were clenched again.

“All right, I will,” Boyd Mitchell said. He glanced up at his wife. And I realized that Boyd Mitchell was drunk, and it was possible that he did not even know what he was saying, or what had happened, and that words just got loose from him this way, and anybody who knew him knew it. Only my father didn’t. He only knew what had been said.

Boyd Mitchell stood up and put his hands in his pockets. He was much taller than my father. He had on a white Western shirt and whipcords and cowboy boots and was wearing a big silver wristwatch. “All right,” he said. “Now I’m standing up. What’s supposed to happen?” He weaved a little. I saw that.

And my father hit Boyd Mitchell then, hit him from across the card table — hit him with his right hand, square into the chest, not a lunging blow, just a hard, hitting blow that threw my father off balance and made him make a chuffing sound with his mouth. Boyd Mitchell groaned, “Oh,” and fell down immediately, his big, thick, heavy body hitting the floor already doubled over. And the sound of him hitting the floor in our house was like no sound I had ever heard before. It was the sound of a man’s body hitting a floor, and it was only that. In my life I have heard it other places, in hotel rooms and in bars, and it is one you do not want to hear.

You can hit a man in a lot of ways, I know that, and I knew that then, because my father had told me. You can hit a man to insult him, or you can hit a man to bloody him, or to knock him down, or lay him out. Or you can hit a man to kill him. Hit him that hard. And that is how my father hit Boyd Mitchell — as hard as he could, in the chest and not in the face, the way someone might think who didn’t know about it.

“Oh my God,” Penny Mitchell said. Boyd Mitchell was lying on his side in front of the TV, and she had gotten down on her knees beside him. “Boyd,” she said. “Are you hurt? Oh, look at this. Stay where you are, Boyd. Stay on the floor.”

“Now then. All right,” my father said. “Now. All right.” He was standing against the wall, over to the side of where he had been when he hit Boyd Mitchell from across the card table. Light was bright in the room, and my father’s eyes were wide and touring around. He seemed out of breath and both his fists were clenched, and I could feel his heart beating in my own chest. “All right, now, you son of a bitch,” my father said, and loudly. I don’t think he was even talking to Boyd Mitchell. He was just saying words that came out of him.

“Roy,” my mother said calmly. “Boyd’s hurt now. He’s hurt.” She was just looking down at Boyd Mitchell. I don’t think she knew what to do.

“Oh, no,” Penny Mitchell said in an excited voice. “Look up, Boyd. Look up at Penny. You’ve been hurt.” She had her hands flat on Boyd Mitchell’s chest, and her skinny shoulders close to him. She wasn’t crying, but I think she was hysterical and couldn’t cry.

All this had taken only five minutes, maybe even less time. I had never even left the kitchen door. And for that reason I walked out into the room where my father and mother were, and where Boyd and Penny Mitchell were both of them on the floor. I looked down at Boyd Mitchell, at his face. I wanted to see what had happened to him. His eyes had cast back up into their sockets. His mouth was open, and I could see his big pink tongue inside. He was breathing heavy breaths, and his fingers — the fingers on both his hands — were moving, moving in the way a man would move them if he was nervous or anxious about something. I think he was dead then, and I think even Penny Mitchell knew he was dead, because she was saying, “Oh please, please, please, Boyd.”

That is when my mother called the police, and I think it is when my father opened the front door and stepped out into the night.

All that happened next is what you would expect to happen. Boyd Mitchell’s chest quit breathing in a minute, and he turned pale and cold and began to look dead right on our living-room floor. He made a noise in his throat once, and Penny Mitchell cried out, and my mother got down on her knees and held Penny’s shoulders while she cried. Then my mother made Penny get up and go into the bedroom — hers and my father’s — and lie on the bed. Then she and I sat in the brightly lit living room, with Boyd Mitchell dead on the floor, and simply looked at each other — maybe for ten minutes, maybe for twenty. I don’t know what my mother could’ve been thinking during that time, because she did not say. She did not ask about my father. She did not tell me to leave the room. Maybe she thought about the rest of her life then and what that might be like after tonight. Or maybe she thought this: that people can do the worst things they are capable of doing and in the end the world comes back to normal. Possibly, she was just waiting for something normal to begin to happen again. That would make sense, given her particular character.

Though what I thought myself, sitting in that room with Boyd Mitchell dead, I remember very well, because I have thought it other times, and to a degree I began to date my real life from that moment and that thought. It is this: that situations have possibilities in them, and we have only to be present to be involved. Tonight was a very bad one. But how were we to know it would turn out this way until it was too late and we had all been changed forever? I realized though, that trouble, real trouble, was something to be avoided, inasmuch as once it has passed by, you have only yourself to answer to, even if, as I was, you are the cause of nothing.

In a little while the police arrived to our house. First one and then two more cars with their red lights turning in the street. Lights were on in the neighbors’ houses — people came out and stood in the cold in their front yards watching, people I didn’t know and who didn’t know us. “It’s a circus now,” my mother said to me when we looked through the window. “We’ll have to move somewhere else. They won’t let us alone.”

An ambulance came, and Boyd Mitchell was taken away on a stretcher, under a sheet. Penny Mitchell came out of the bedroom and went with them, though she did not say anything to my mother, or to anybody, just got in a police car and left into the dark.

Two policemen came inside, and one asked my mother some questions in the living room, while the other one asked me questions in the kitchen. He wanted to know what I had seen, and I told him. I said Boyd Mitchell had cursed at my father for some reason I didn’t know, then had stood up and tried to hit him, and that my father had pushed Boyd, and that was all. He asked me if my father was a violent man, and I said no. He asked if my father had a girlfriend, and I said no. He asked if my mother and father had ever fought, and I said no. He asked me if I loved my mother and father, and I said I did. And then that was all.

I went out into the living room then, and my mother was there, and when the police left we stood at the front door, and there was my father outside, standing by the open door of a police car. He had on handcuffs. And for some reason he wasn’t wearing a shirt or his corduroy jacket but was bare-chested in the cold night, holding his shirt behind him. His hair looked wet to me. I heard a policeman say, “Roy, you’re going to catch cold,” and then my father say, “I wish I was a long way from here right now. China maybe.” He smiled at the policeman. I don’t think he ever saw us watching, or if he did he didn’t want to admit it. And neither of us did anything, because the police had him, and when that is the case, there is nothing you can do to help.

All this happened by ten o’clock. At midnight my mother and I drove down to the city jail and got my father out. I stayed in the car while my mother went in — sat and watched the high windows of the jail, which were behind wire mesh and bars. Yellow lights were on there, and I could hear voices and see figures move past the lights, and twice someone called out, “Hello, hello. Marie, are you with me?” And then it was quiet, except for the cars that drove slowly past ours.

On the ride home, my mother drove and my father sat and stared out at the big electrical stacks by the river, and the lights of houses on the other side, in Black Eagle. He had on a checked shirt someone inside had given him, and his hair was neatly combed. No one said anything, but I did not understand why the police would put anyone in jail because he had killed a man and in two hours let him out again. It was a mystery to me, even though I wanted him to be out and for our life to resume, and even though I did not see any way it could and, in fact, knew it never would.

Inside our house, all the lights were burning when we got back. It was one o’clock and there were still lights in some neighbors’ houses. I could see a man at the window across the street, both his hands to the glass, watching out, watching us.

My mother went into the kitchen, and I could hear her running water for coffee and taking down cups. My father stood in the middle of the living room and looked around, looking at the chairs, at the card table with cards still on it, at the open doorways to the other rooms. It was as if he had forgotten his own house and now saw it again and didn’t like

“I don’t feel I know what he had against me,” my father said. He said this to me, but he said it to anyone, too. “You’d think you’d know what a man had against you, wouldn’t you, Frank?”

“Yes,” I said. “I would.” We were both just standing together, my father and I, in the lighted room there. We were not about to do anything.

“I want us to be happy here now,” my father said. “I want us to enjoy life. I don’t hold anything against anybody. Do you believe that?”

“I believe that,” I said. My father looked at me with his dark blue eyes and frowned. And for the first time I wished my father had not done what he did but had gone about things differendy. I saw him as a man who made mistakes, as a man who could hurt people, ruin lives, risk their happiness. A man who did not understand enough. He was like a gambler, though I did not even know what it meant to be a gambler then.

“It’s such a quickly changing time now,” my father said. My mother, who had come into the kitchen doorway, stood looking at us. She had on a flowered pink apron, and was standing where I had stood earlier that night. She was looking at my father and at me as if we were one person. “Don’t you think it is, Dorothy?” he said. “All this turmoil. Everything just flying by. Look what’s happened here.”

My mother seemed very certain about things then, very precise. “You should’ve controlled yourself more,” she said. “That’s all.”

“I know that,” my father said. “I’m sorry. I lost control over my mind. I didn’t expect to ruin things, but now I think I have. It was all wrong.” My father picked up the vodka bottle, unscrewed the cap and took a big swallow, then put the bottle back down. He had seen two men killed tonight. Who could’ve blamed him?

“When I was in jail tonight,” he said, staring at a picture on the wall, a picture by the door to the hallway. He was just talking again. “There was a man in the cell with me. And I’ve never been in jail before, not even when I was a kid. But this man said to me tonight, ‘I can tell you’ve never been in jail before just by the way you stand up straight. Other people don’t stand that way. They stoop. You don’t belong in jail. You stand up too straight.’” My father looked back at the vodka bottle as if he wanted to drink more out of it, but he only looked at it. “Bad things happen,” he said, and he let his open hands tap against his legs like clappers against a bell. “Maybe he was in love with you, Dorothy,” he said. “Maybe that’s what the trouble was.”

And what I did then was stare at the picture on the wall, the picture my father had been staring at, a picture I had seen every day. Probably I had seen it a thousand times. It was two people with a baby on a beach. A man and a woman sitting in the sand with an ocean behind. They were smiling at the camera, wearing bathing suits. In all the times I had seen it I’d thought that it was a picture in which I was the baby, and the two people were my parents. But I realized as I stood there, that it was not me at all; it was my father who was the child in the picture, and the parents there were his parents — two people Fd never known, and who were dead — and the picture was so much older than I had thought it was. I wondered why I hadn’t known that before, hadn’t understood it for myself, hadn’t always known it. Not even that it mattered. What mattered was, I felt, that my father had fallen down now, as much as the man he had watched fall beneath the train just hours before. And I was as helpless to do anything as he had been. I wanted to tell him that I loved him, but for some reason I did not.

Later in the night I lay in my bed with the radio playing, listening to news that was far away, in Calgary and in Saskatoon, and even farther, in Regina and Winnipeg — cold, dark cities I knew I would never see in my life. My window was raised above the sill, and for a long time I had sat and looked out, hearing my parents talk softly down below, hearing their footsteps, hearing my father’s steel-toed boots strike the floor, and then their bed-springs squeeze and then be quiet. From out across the sliding river I could hear trucks — stock trucks and grain trucks heading toward Idaho, or down toward Helena, or into the train yards where my father hosded engines. The neighborhood houses were dark again. My father’s motorcycle sat in the yard, and out in the night air I felt I could hear even the falls themselves, could hear every sound of them, sounds that found me and whirled and filled my room — could even feel them, cold and wintry, so that warmth seemed like a possibility I would never know again.

After a time my mother came in my room. The light fell on my bed, and she set a chair inside. I could see that she was looking at me. She closed the door, came and turned off my radio, then took her chair to the window, closed it, and sat so that I could see her face silhouetted against the streetlight. She lit a cigarette and did not look at me, still cold under the covers of my bed.

“How do you feel, Frank,” she said, smoking her cigarette.

“I feel all right,” I said.

“Do you think your house is a terrible house now?”

“No,” I said.

“I hope not,” my mother said. “Don’t feel it is. Don’t hold anything against anyone. Poor Boyd. He’s gone.”

“Why do you think that happened?” I said, though I didn’t think she would answer, and wondered if I even wanted to know.

My mother blew smoke against the window glass, then sat and breathed. “He must’ve seen something in your father he just hated. I don’t know what it was. Who knows? Maybe your father felt the same way.” She shook her head and looked out into the streetlamp light. “I remember once,” she said. “I was still in Havre, in the thirties. We were living in a motel my father part-owned out Highway Two, and my mother was around then, but wasn’t having any of us. My father had this big woman named Judy Belknap as his girlfriend. She was an Assiniboin. Just some squaw. But we used to go on nature tours when he couldn’t put up with me anymore. She’d take me. Way up above the Milk River. All this stuff she knew about, animals and plants and ferns — she’d tell me all that. And once we were sitting watching some gadwall ducks on the ice where a creek had made a little turn-out. It was getting colder, just like now. And Judy just all at once stood up and clapped. Just clapped her hands. And all these ducks got up, all except for one that stayed on the ice, where its feet were frozen, I guess. It didn’t even try to fly. It just sat. And Judy said to me, ‘It’s just a coincidence, Dottie. It’s wildlife. Some always get left back.’ And that seemed to leave her satisfied for some reason. We walked back to the car after that. So,” my mother said. “Maybe that’s what this is. Just a coincidence.”

She raised the window again, dropped her cigarette out, blew the last smoke from her throat, and said, “Go to sleep, Frank. You’ll be all right. We’ll all survive this. Be an optimist.”

When I was asleep that night, I dreamed. And what I dreamed was of a plane crashing, a bomber, dropping out of the frozen sky, bouncing as it hit the icy river, sliding and turning on the ice, its wings like knives, and coming into our house where we were sleeping, leveling everything. And when I sat up in bed I could hear a dog in the yard, its collar jingling, and I could hear my father crying, “Boo-hoo-hoo, boo-hoo-hoo,”—like that, quietly — though afterward I could never be sure if I had heard him crying in just that way, or if all of it was a dream, a dream I wished I had never had.

The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all that’s happened and by all that could and will happen next. I now no longer remember the exact year of my father’s birth, or how old he was when I last saw him, or even when that last time took place. When you’re young, these things seem unforgettable and at the heart of everything. But they slide away and are gone when you are not so young.

My father went to Deer Lodge Prison and stayed five months for killing Boyd Mitchell by accident, for using too much force to hit him. In Montana you cannot simply kill a man in your living room and walk off free from it, and what I remember is that my father pleaded no contest, the same as guilty.

My mother and I lived in our house for the months he was gone. But when he came out and went back on the railroad as a switchman the two of them argued about things, about her wanting us to go someplace else to live — California or Seattle were mentioned. And then they separated, and she moved out. And after that I moved out by joining the Army and adding years to my age, which was sixteen.

I know about my father only that after a time he began to live a life he himself would never have believed. He fell off the railroad, divorced my mother, who would now and then resurface in his life. Drinking was involved in that, and gambling, embezzling money, even carrying a pistol, is what I heard. I was apart from all of it. And when you are the age I was then, and loose on the world and alone, you can get along better than at almost any other time, because it’s a novelty, and you can act for what you want, and you can think that being alone will not last forever. All I know of my father, finally, is that he was once in Laramie, Wyoming, and not in good shape, and then he simply disappeared from view.

A month ago I saw my mother. I was buying groceries at a drive-in store by the interstate in Anaconda, Montana, not far from Deer Lodge itself, where my father had been. It had been fifteen years, I think, since I had seen her, though I am forty-three years old now, and possibly it was longer. But when I saw her I walked across the store to where she was and I said, “Hello, Dorothy. It’s Frank.”

She looked at me and smiled and said, “Oh, Frank. How are you? I haven’t seen you in a long time. I’m glad to see you now, though.” She was dressed in blue jeans and boots and a Western shirt, and she looked like a woman who could be sixty years old. Her hair was tied back and she looked pretty, though I think she had been drinking. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

There was a man standing near her, holding a basket of groceries, and she turned to him and said, “Dick, come here and meet my son, Frank. We haven’t seen each other in a long time. This is Dick Spivey, Frank.”

I shook hands with Dick Spivey, who was a man younger than my mother but older than me — a tall, thin-faced man with coarse blue-black hair — and who was wearing Western boots like hers. “Let me say a word to Frank, Dick,” my mother said, and she put her hand on Dick’s wrist and squeezed it and smiled at him. And he walked up toward the checkout to pay for his groceries.

“So. What are you doing now, Frank,” my mother asked, and put her hand on my wrist the way she had on Dick Spivey’s, but held it there. “These years,” she said.

“I’ve been down in Rock Springs, on the coal boom,” I said. “I’ll probably go back down there.”

“And I guess you’re married, too.”

“I was,” I said. “But not right now.”

“That’s fine,” she said. “You look fine.” She smiled at me. “You’ll never get anything fixed just right. That’s your mother’s word. Your father and I had a marriage made in Havre — that was our joke about us. We used to laugh about it. You didn’t know that, of course. You were too young. A lot of it was just wrong.”

“It’s a long time ago,” I said. “I don’t know about that.”

“I remember those times very well,” my mother said. “They were happy enough times. I guess something was in the air, wasn’t there? Your father was so jumpy. And Boyd got so mad, just all of a sudden. There was some hopelessness to it, I suppose. All that union business. We were the last to understand any of it, of course. We were trying to be decent people.”

“That’s right,” I said. And I believed that was true of them.

“I still like to swim,” my mother said. She ran her fingers back through her hair as if it were wet. She smiled at me again. “It still makes me feel freer.”

“Good,” I said. “I’m happy to hear that.”

“Do you ever see your dad?”

“No,” I said. “I never do.”

“I don’t either,” my mother said. “You just reminded me of him.” She looked at Dick Spivey, who was standing at the front window, holding a sack of groceries, looking out at the parking lot. It was March, and some small bits of snow were falling onto the cars in the lot. He didn’t seem in any hurry. “Maybe I didn’t appreciate your father enough,” she said. “Who knows? Maybe we weren’t even made for each other. Losing your love is the worst thing, and that’s what we did.” I didn’t answer her, but I knew what she meant, and that it was true. “I wish we knew each other better, Frank,” my mother said to me. She looked down, and I think she may have blushed. “We have our deep feelings, though, don’t we? Both of us.”

“Yes,” I said. “We do.”

“So. I’m going out now,” my mother said. “Frank.” She squeezed my wrist, and walked away through the checkout and into the parking lot, with Dick Spivey carrying their groceries beside her.

But when I had bought my own groceries and paid, and gone out to my car and started up, I saw Dick Spivey’s green Chevrolet drive back into the lot and stop, and watched my mother get out and hurry across the snow to where I was, so that for a moment we faced each other through the open window.

“Did you ever think,” my mother said, snow freezing in her hair. “Did you ever think back then that I was in love with Boyd Mitchell? Anything like that? Did you ever?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“No, well, I wasn’t,” she said. “Boyd was in love with Penny. I was in love with Roy. That’s how things were. I want you to know it. You have to believe that. Do you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I believe you.”

And she bent down and kissed my cheek through the open window and touched my face with both her hands, held me for a moment that seemed like a long time before she turned away, finally, and left me there alone.