Wildlife

Chapter 2

After that night in early September things began to move more quickly in our life and to change. Our life at home changed. The life my mother and father lived changed. The world, for as little as I’d thought about it or planned on it, changed. When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what’s in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again — which is a loss. But to shield yourself — as I didn’t do — seems to be an even greater error, since what’s lost is the truth of your parents’ life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in.

On the night my father came home from losing his job at the Wheatland Club, he told my mother about it straight out and they both acted as if it was a kind of joke. My mother did not get mad or seem upset or ask him why he had gotten fired. They both laughed about it. When we ate supper my mother sat at the table and seemed to be thinking. She said she could not get a job substituting until the term ended, but she would go to the school board and put her name in. She said other people would come to my father for work when it was known he was free, and that this was an opportunity in disguise — the reason we had come here — and that Montanans did not know gold when they saw it. She smiled at him when she said that. She said I could get a job, and I said I would. She said maybe she should become a banker, though she would need to finish college for that. And she laughed. Finally she said, ‘You can do other things, Jerry. Maybe you’ve played enough golf for this lifetime.’

After dinner, my father went into the living room and listened to the news from a station we could get from Salt Lake after dark, and went to sleep on the couch still wearing his golf clothes. Late in the night they went into their room and closed the door. I heard their voices, talking. I heard my mother laugh again. And then my father laughed and said, loudly, still laughing, ‘Don’t threaten me. I can’t be threatened.’ And later on my mother said, ‘You’ve just had your feelings hurt, Jerry, is all.’ After a while I heard the bathtub running with water, and I knew my father was sitting in the bathroom talking to my mother while she took her bath, which was a thing he liked doing. And later I heard their door close and their light click off and the house become locked in silence.

And then for a time after that my father did not seem to take an interest in working. In a few days the Wheatland Club called — a man who was not Clarence Snow said someone had made a mistake. I talked to the man, who gave me the message to give to my father, but my father did not call back. The air base called him, but again he did not accept. I know he did not sleep well. I could hear doors close at night and glasses tapping together. Some mornings I would look out my bedroom window and he would be in the backyard in the chill air practicing with a driver, hitting a plastic ball from one property line to the next, walking in his long easy gait as if nothing was bothering him. Other days he would take me on long drives after school, to Highwood and to Belt and Geraldine, which are the towns east of Great Falls, and let me drive the car on the wheat prairie roads where I could be no danger to anyone. And once we drove across the river to Fort Benton and sat in the car and watched golfers playing on the tiny course there above the town.

Eventually, my father began to leave the house in the morning like a man going to a job. And although we did not know where he went, my mother said she thought he went downtown, and that he had left jobs before and that it was always scary for a while, but that finally he would stand up to things and go back and be happy. My father began to wear different kinds of clothes, khaki pants and flannel shirts, regular clothes I saw people wearing, and he did not talk about golf any more. He talked some about the fires, which still burned late in September in the canyons above Allen Creek and Castle Reef — names I knew about from the Tribune. He talked in a more clipped way then. He told me the smoke from such fires went around the world in five days and that the amount of timber lost there would’ve built fifty thousand homes the size of ours. One Friday he and I went to the boxing matches at the City Auditorium and watched boys from Havre fight boys from Glasgow, and afterward in the street outside we could each see the night glow of the fires, pale in the clouds just as it had been in the summer. And my father said, ‘It could rain up in the canyons now, but the fire wouldn’t go out. It would smolder then start again.’ He blinked as the boxing crowd shoved around us. ‘But here we are,’ he said, and smiled, ‘safe in Great Falls.’

It was during this time that my mother began to look for a job. She left an application at the school board. She worked two days at a dress shop, then quit. ‘I’m lacking in powerful and influential friends,’ she said to me as if it was a joke. Though it was true that we did not know anyone in Great Falls. My mother knew the people at the grocery store and the druggist’s, and my father had known people at the Wheatland Club. But none of them ever came to our house. I think we might’ve gone someplace new earlier in their life, just picked up and moved away. But no one mentioned that. There was a sense that we were all waiting for something. Out of doors, the trees were through with turning yellow and leaves were dropping onto the cars parked at the curb. It was my first autumn in Montana, and it seemed to me that in our neighborhood the trees looked like an eastern state would and not at all the way I’d thought Montana would be. No trees is what I’d expected, only open prairie, the land and sky joining almost out of sight.

‘I could get a job teaching swimming,’ my mother said to me on a morning when my father left early and I was looking through the house for my school books. She was standing drinking coffee, looking out the front window, dressed in her yellow bathrobe. ‘A lady at the Red Cross said I could teach privately if I’d teach a class, too.’ She smiled at me and crossed her arms. ‘I’m still a lifesaver.’

‘That sounds good,’ I said.

‘I could teach your dad the backstroke again,’ she said. My mother had taught me to swim, and she was good at that. She had tried to teach my father the backstroke when we lived in Lewiston, but he had tried and failed at it, and she had made a joke about it afterward. ‘The lady said people want to swim in Montana. Why do you think that is? These things always signify a meaning.’

‘What does it mean?’ I said, holding my school books.

She hugged her arms and turned herself a little back and forth as she stood in the window frame watching out. ‘Oh, that we’re all going to be washed away in a big flood. Though I don’t believe that. So. Some of us will not be washed away and will float to the top. That’s better, isn’t it?’ She took a drink of coffee.

‘It should have a happy ending for the right people,’ I said.

‘That’s easy,’ she said. ‘Everyone doesn’t do it that way, though.’ She turned and walked back into the kitchen then to start my breakfast before school.

In the days after that, my mother went to work at the YWCA in Great Falls, at the brick building on Second Street North, near the courthouse. She walked to work from our house and carried her swimming suit in a vanity case, with a lunch to eat and some makeup articles for when she came home in the afternoon. My father said he was glad if she wanted to work there, and that I should find a job, too, which I had not done. But he didn’t mention himself working or how he was spending his days or what he thought about our future or any plans he had made for things. He seemed out of reach to me, as if he had discovered a secret he didn’t want to tell. Once, when I walked home from football practice, I saw him inside the Jack ’n Jill cafe, sitting at the counter drinking coffee and eating a piece of pie. He was wearing a red plaid shirt and a knitted cap, and he hadn’t shaved. A man I didn’t know was sitting on a stool beside him, reading the Tribune. They seemed to be together. Another time, on a day when the wind was blowing hard, I saw him walking away from the courthouse wearing a woolen jacket and carrying a book. He turned the corner at the library and disappeared, and I did not follow him. And one other time I saw him go into a bar called the Pheasant Lounge where I thought Great Falls city policemen went. This was at noon, and I was on my lunch hour and couldn’t stay to see more.

When I told my mother that I had seen him these times she said, ‘He just hasn’t had a chance to get established yet. This will be all right finally. There’s no lack in him.’

But I did not think things were all right. I don’t believe my mother knew more than I did then. She was simply surprised, and she trusted him and thought she could wait longer. But I wondered if my parents had had troubles that I didn’t know about, or if they had always had their heads turned slightly away from each other and I hadn’t noticed. I know that when they shut the door to their bedroom at night and I was in my bed waiting for sleep, listening to the wind come up, I would hear their door open and close quietly, and my mother come out and make a bed for herself on the couch in the living room. Once I heard my father say, as she was leaving, ‘You’ve changed your thinking now, haven’t you, Jean?’ And my mother say, ‘No.’ But then the door closed and she did not say anything else. I do not think I was supposed to know about this, and I don’t know what they could’ve said to each other or done during that time. There was never yelling or arguing involved in it. They simply did not stay together at night, although during the day when I was present and life needed to go on normally there was nothing to notice between them. Coming and going was all. Nothing to make you think there was trouble or misunderstanding. I simply know there was, and that my mother for her own reasons began to move away from my father then.

After a time I quit playing football. I wanted to find a job, though I thought that when spring came, if we were still in Great Falls, I would try to throw the javelin as my father had said. I had taken the book, Track and Field for Young Champions, out of the library, and had found the equipment cage in the school basement and inspected the two wooden javelins there, where they were stored against the concrete wall in the shadows. They were slick and polished and thicker than I thought they’d be. Though when I picked one up, it was light and seemed to me perfect for the use it had. And I thought that I would be able to throw it, and that it might be a skill — even if it was a peculiar one — that I might someday excel at in a way my father would like.

I had not made friends in Great Falls. The boys on the football team lived farther downtown and across the river in Black Eagle. I had had friends in Lewiston, in particular a girlfriend named Iris, who went to the Catholic school and who I had exchanged letters with for several weeks when we had come to Great Falls in the spring. But she had gone to Seattle for the summer and had not written to me. Her father was an Army officer, and it could be her family had moved. I had not thought about her in a while, did not care about her really. It should’ve been a time when I cared about more things — a new girlfriend, or books — or when I had an idea of some kind. But I only cared about my mother and my father then, and in the time since then I have realized that we were not a family who ever cared about much more than that.

The job I found was in the photographer’s studio on Third Avenue. It was a place that took airmen’s photographs, and engagement and class pictures, and what I did was clean up when school was over, replace bulbs in the photographer’s lamps, and rearrange the backdrops and posing furniture for the next day.

I finished with that work by five o’clock, and sometimes I would walk home past the YWCA and slip through the back door and down into the long tiled pool room where my mother taught her classes of adults until five, and from five to six was free to teach privately and be paid for it. I would stand at the far end behind the tiers of empty bleachers and watch her, hear her voice, which seemed happy and lively, encouraging and giving instruction. She would stand on the side in her black bathing suit, her skin pale, and make swimming motions with her arms for her students standing in the shallow water. Mostly they were old women, and old men with speckled bald heads. From time to time they ducked their faces into the water and made the swimming motions my mother made — slow, jerky grasps — without really swimming or ever moving, just staying still, standing and pretending. ‘It’s so easy,’ I would hear my mother say in her bright voice, her arms working the thick air as she talked. ‘Don’t be afraid of it. It’s all fun. Think about all you’ve missed.’ She’d smile at them when their faces were up, dripping and blinking, some of them coughing. And she would say, ‘Watch me now.’ Then she’d pull down her bathing cap, point her hands over her head to a peak, bend her knees and dive straight in, coasting for a moment, then breaking the surface and swimming with her arms bent and her fingers together, cutting the water in easy reaching motions to the far side and back again. The old people — ranchers, I thought, and the divorced wives of farmers — watched her in envy and silence. And I watched, thinking as I did that someone else who saw my mother, not me or my father, but someone who had never seen her before, would think something different. They would think: ‘Here is a woman whose life is happy’; or ‘Here is a woman with a nice figure to her credit’; or ‘Here is a woman I wish I could know better, though I never will.’ And I thought to myself that my father was not a stupid man, and that love was permanent, even though sometimes it seemed to recede and leave no trace at all.

On the first Tuesday in October, the day before the World Series began, my father came back to the house after dark. It was chill and dry outside, and when he came in the back door his eyes were bright and his face was flushed and he seemed as if he had been running.

‘Look who’s here now,’ my mother said, though in a nice way. She was cutting tomatoes at the sink board and looked around at him and smiled.

‘I’ve got to pack a bag,’ my father said. ‘I won’t have dinner here tonight, Jean.’ He went straight back to their room. I was sitting beside the radio waiting to turn on some baseball news, and I could hear him opening a closet door and shoving coat hangers.

My mother looked at me, then she spoke toward the hallway in a calm voice. ‘Where are you going, Jerry?’ She was holding a paring knife in her hand.

‘I’m going to that fire,’ my father said loudly from the bedroom. He was excited. ‘I’ve been waiting for my chance. I just heard thirty minutes ago that there’s a place. I know it’s unexpected.’

‘Do you know anything about fires?’ My mother kept watching the empty doorway as if my father was standing in it. ‘I know about them,’ she said. ‘My father was an estimator. Do you remember that?’

‘I had to make some contacts in town,’ my father said. I knew he was sitting on the bed putting on different shoes. The overhead light was on and his bag was out. ‘It’s not easy to get this job.’

‘Did you hear me?’ my mother said. She had an impatient look on her face. ‘I said you don’t know anything about fires. You’ll get burned up.’ She looked at the back door, which he’d left partway open, but she didn’t go to close it.

‘I’ve been reading about fires in the library,’ my father said. He came down the hall and went into the bathroom, where he turned on the light and opened the medicine cabinet. ‘I think I know enough not to get killed.’

‘Could you have said something to me about this?’ my mother said.

I heard the medicine cabinet close and my father stepped into the kitchen doorway. He looked different. He looked like he was sure that he was right.

‘I should’ve done that,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t.’ He had his shaving bag in his hand.

‘You’re not going out there.’ My mother looked at my father across the kitchen, across over my head in fact, and seemed to smile. ‘This is a stupid idea,’ she said, and shook her head.

‘No it’s not,’ my father said.

‘It isn’t your business,’ my mother said, and pulled up the front of her blue apron and wiped her hands on it, though I don’t think her hands were wet. She was nervous. ‘You don’t have to do this. I’m working now.’

‘I know you are,’ my father said. He turned and went back into the bedroom. I wanted to move from where I was but I didn’t know where a better place was to be, because I wanted to hear what they would say. ‘We’re going to dig firebreaks up there,’ he said from the bedroom. I heard the locks on his bag snap closed. He appeared again in the doorway, holding a gladstone bag, a bag his father had given him when he had gone away to college. ‘You’re not in any danger,’ he said.

‘I might die while you’re gone,’ my mother said. She sat down at the metal table and stared at him. She was angry. Her mouth looked hardened. ‘You have a son here,’ she said.

‘This won’t be for very long,’ my father said. ‘It’ll snow pretty soon, and that’ll be that.’ He looked at me. ‘What do you think, Joe? Is this a bad idea?’

‘No,’ I said. And I said it too fast, without thinking what it meant to my mother.

‘You’d do it, wouldn’t you?’ my father said.

‘Will you like it if your father gets burned up out there, and you never see him again?’ my mother said to me. ‘Then you and I go straight to hell together. How will that be?’

‘Don’t say that, Jean,’ my father said. He put his bag on the kitchen table and came and knelt beside my mother and tried to put his arms around her. But she got up from her chair and walked back to where she had been cutting tomatoes and picked up the knife and pointed it at him, where he was still kneeling beside the empty chair.

‘I’m a grown woman,’ she said, and she was very angry now. ‘Why don’t you act like a grown man, Jerry?’

‘You can’t explain everything,’ my father said.

‘I can explain everything,’ my mother said. She put the knife down and walked out the kitchen door and into the bedroom, the one she had not been sleeping in with my father, and closed the door behind her.

My father looked at me from where he was, still beside her chair. ‘I guess my judgment’s no good now,’ he said. ‘Is that what you think, Joe?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I think it is.’

And I thought his judgment was good, and that going to fight the fire was a good idea even though he might go and get killed because he knew nothing about it. But I did not want to say all of that to him because of how it would make him feel.

My father and I walked from home in the dark down to the Masonic Temple on Central. A yellow Cascade County school bus was parked at the corner of Ninth, and men were standing in groups waiting to go. Some of the men were bums. I could tell by their shoes and their coats. Though some were just regular men who were out of work, I thought, from other jobs. Three women who were going waited together under the streetlight. And inside the bus, in the dark, I could see Indians were in some of the seats. I could see their round faces, their slick hair, the tint of light off their eyeglasses in the darkness. No one would get in with them, and some men were drinking. I could smell whiskey in the night air.

My father put his bag on a stack of bags beside the bus, then came and stood next to me. Inside the Masonic Temple — which had high steps up to a glass center door — all the lights were on. Several men inside were looking out. One, who was the man I had seen with my father in the Jack ’n Jill, held a clipboard and was talking to an Indian man beside him. My father gestured to him.

‘People categorize other people,’ my father said. ‘But you shouldn’t do that. They should teach you that in school.’

I looked at the men around me. Most of them were not dressed warmly enough and were shifting from foot to foot. They looked like men used to work, though they did not seem glad to be going to fight a fire at night. None of them looked like my father, who seemed eager.

‘What will you do out there?’ I said.

‘Work on a fire line,’ my father said. ‘They dig trenches the fire won’t cross. I don’t know much more, to tell you the truth.’ He put his hands in his jacket pockets and blew down into his shirt. ‘I’ve got this hum in my head now. I need to do something about it.’

‘I understand,’ I said.

‘Tell your mother I didn’t mean to make her mad.’

‘I will,’ I said.

‘We don’t want to wake up in our coffins, though, do we? That’d be a rude surprise.’ He put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me close to him and squeezed me and laughed an odd little laugh, as if the idea had actually given him a scare. He looked across Central Avenue at the Pheasant Lounge, the place I had seen him go into the week before. On the red neon sign over the door a big cock pheasant was busting up into the night air, its wings stretched into the darkness — escaping. Some men waiting at the Masonic Temple had begun to go across the street into the bar. ‘I’m only thinking about right this minute now,’ he said. He squeezed my shoulder again, then put his hands back into his jacket pockets. ‘Aren’t you cold?’

‘I’m a little cold,’ I said.

‘Then go back home,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to watch me get on a bus. It might be a long time. Your mother’s probably thinking about you.’

‘All right,’ I said.

‘She doesn’t need to get mad at you. She’s mad enough at me.’

I looked at my father. I tried to see his face in the streetlight. He was smiling and looking at me, and I think he was happy for that moment, happy for me to be with him, happy that he was going to a fire now to risk whatever he cared about risking. It seemed strange to me, though, that he could be a man who played golf for a living and then one day become a man who fought forest fires. But it’s what was happening, and I thought I would get used to it.

‘Are you too old now to give your old dad a kiss?’ my father said. ‘Men love each other, too. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. And he took my cheeks in his hands and kissed me on the mouth, and squeezed my face. His breath smelled sweet to me and his face was rough.

‘Don’t let what your parents do disappoint you,’ he said.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I won’t.’ I felt afraid then for some reason, and I thought if I stayed there I would show him that I was, so I turned around and started back up Central in the dark and the growing cold. When I got to the corner I turned to wave good-bye. But my father was not in sight, and I thought that he had already gotten onto the bus and was waiting in his seat among the Indians.