Wildlife

Chapter 3

When I got home the lights were still on in our house. My mother was watching television in her bedroom, still dressed, and drinking a glass of beer. When I came in the door she looked at me as if I was my father and whatever she thought about him she thought about me, too.

‘Is he gone off to fight the big fire now?’ she said. She was almost casual in the way she said this. She reached and put down her glass on the bed table.

‘He got on a bus,’ I said.

‘Just like a school-boy,’ she said. She looked at her glass of beer.

‘He told me he hadn’t intended to cause any trouble.’

‘I’m sure it’s true,’ my mother said. ‘He has very beautiful intentions. What’s your opinion?’

‘I think it’s all right,’ I said.

My mother reached for her glass and took a drink out of it and shook her head while she swallowed. ‘What about me?’ she said, and rested her glass on her stomach. People on the television were laughing. A fat man was running around a small man and being chased by a dog. I didn’t feel comfortable being in the room at that moment. ‘Maybe he’s going to leave me. Maybe we’re on our own right now.’

‘I don’t think he’s going to do that,’ I said.

‘We haven’t been very intimate lately. You might as well hear that.’

I did not say anything.

‘You probably think I’m making too big a deal out of this, don’t you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re thinking,’ I said.

‘Nobody really wants to please you, that’s all.’ She shook her head as if it was almost a joke. ‘That’s all. They want to please themselves. If you’re happy with that, then everything’s great. If you aren’t, too bad. That’s important,’ my mother said. ‘It’s the key to everything.’ She put her head back on the pillow and stared up at the light globe in the ceiling. ‘Happiness. Sadness. The works. You’re happy if—’

Just at that moment the phone started to ring in the kitchen. I turned to go answer it, but my mother said, ‘Let’s don’t answer that.’ The phone kept ringing, loud and with a hard metal sound where it sat on the table, as if something urgent was waiting to be said by whoever was calling. But we were not going to hear it. I must’ve looked nervous because my mother smiled at me, a smile she had smiled at me all my life. ‘Who do you think it is?’ she said. The phone quit ringing and the house was completely silent except for the TV.

‘Maybe it was Dad,’ I said.

‘Maybe it was,’ she said.

‘It could’ve been a wrong number, too,’ I said, though I thought the phone call was my father and I felt afraid because I hadn’t answered it.

‘We’ll never know now,’ my mother said. ‘But. What I was saying.’ She took a last drink of her beer. ‘You’re happy if the thing you naturally want makes the other person happy. If it’s not that way, then I don’t know. I guess you’re in limbo.’

‘Where’s that?’ I said, because I had never heard that word before.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s the place where nobody wants to be. It’s the middle where you can’t feel the sides and nothing happens. Like now.’

For a moment I felt the phone was about to start ringing again, felt a current go through the lines of the house, as if the lines were part of me, alive and surging with a message. But it didn’t ring, and the feeling in me died out.

‘Tomorrow might be a better day,’ my mother said. ‘Now’s not so hot.’ She reached and turned off the lamp beside her bed. ‘Turn off my light, Joe,’ she said. I switched off the overhead light. ‘And go to bed, too,’ she said, lying there in her clothes in the light from the television. ‘Something’ll happen to make things seem different.’

‘I hope so,’ I said.

My mother turned over and faced the wall. I thought she went to sleep at that instant, because she didn’t say anything else to me. And I went to my room down the hall, and in a short time afterward I went to sleep myself.

The next day I went to school as I would on any other day, but my mother told me as I was leaving that she was going out that morning to look for a better job than teaching swimming classes.

‘I don’t want to be poor,’ she said. She was standing at the bathroom sink in her petticoat, putting black pins in her hair. ‘We might have to move into a smaller place,’ she said. ‘I thought of that. Would you mind that?’

‘I think Dad will be back,’ I said.

‘Do you?’ she said. ‘Is that your best opinion on the subject?’ She looked at me where I was in the hall, holding my coat and my school books under my arm. It was warm in the house. The bathroom heater was turned up high, and I could see the little blue flames.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is.’ I was surprised she was thinking about these changes already.

‘Fine. I’ll remember that,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ She glanced at me with pins in her mouth and her hands in her hair, and nodded. ‘You’re a very trusting boy. You wouldn’t be a very good lawyer. You don’t want to be a lawyer, though, do you?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘What do you want to be?’

This was something we had not precisely talked about for a long time, and I did not have my answer ready. ‘I’d like to work on a railroad someplace,’ I said.

‘That’s not very good,’ my mother said. ‘You have to find a better profession. When you come back today have a better answer.’ My mother looked at herself in the mirror. ‘We went to college,’ she said. ‘Your father and I both. But you wouldn’t know it.’ She stared at herself, wrinkled her nose. ‘Handsome is as handsome does, I guess,’ she said. ‘You’re wasting your life standing here watching me, sweetheart. Go to school.’ And I went to school just as she said.

When I came back home at three o’clock — it was not a day that I worked at the photographer’s studio — there was a car parked across the street from our house, a pink, four-door Oldsmobile I did not know, and a man was in our living room, a man I did not know either.

The man stood up when I came in the front door. He and my mother had been sitting in chairs, not very close together. My mother’s hair was fixed with the black pins she had been putting in that morning, and the man had on a suit and a tie. It was still warm in the house and they were both drinking bottles of beer. My mother had her shoes off and was in her stocking feet.

‘Why, hello Joe,’ she said. She seemed surprised. She smiled up at me and did not look at the man who was in the room with her. ‘I guess you didn’t work today.’ She moved her hand toward the man to point him out. ‘This is Mr Miller. This is my son, Joe Brinson, Warren.’

‘I already know Joe,’ the man said. He stepped toward me with his hand out, and I saw that he had a limp in his leg, not a bad one, just a limp that made him pull to one side the way it would if one leg was shorter than the other. It was his left leg he limped toward, and it did not seem to hurt him because he smiled when he shook my hand. He was a tall, bulky man who wore glasses, and he was older than my father — fifty maybe. His hair was thin and combed straight back on his head. He looked like someone I’d seen before but couldn’t remember. I didn’t think I’d ever heard his name. Warren Miller.

When Warren Miller had my hand in his own big hand, he held it for a moment as though he wanted me to know he meant it. His skin was warm and he had a big ring on, a gold ring with a red stone. He was wearing shiny black cowboy boots.

‘I’m happy to see you, son,’ he said. I could smell him, smell something like tobacco and hair oil on his clothes.

‘I’m happy to see you,’ I said.

‘Where do you know Joe from?’ my mother said, still smiling. She looked at me and winked.

‘I know his father,’ Warren Miller said. He stood back and put his hands on his hips so that his coat pushed back and showed his big chest. His skin was very pale and he was over six feet. He seemed to be inspecting me. ‘His father’s a hell of a golfer. I played with him at the Wheatland Club on two occasions, and he parted us all from our money. Joe was there waiting for him.’

‘Do you remember that time, Joe?’ my mother said.

‘Yes,’ I said. But I didn’t remember. Warren Miller was looking at me as though he knew I didn’t remember.

‘Now your father’s out fighting this fire, is that right?’ Warren Miller said. He smiled as if there was something he liked about that. He kept his big hands on his hips.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he is.’

‘That’s what he told us,’ my mother said.

‘Well. That’s wonderful,’ Warren Miller said. ‘That’s very good. Do you wish you could go out and fight it yourself? You probably do.’

‘Yes sir,’ I said.

‘I think he actually does, Warren, as crazy as it seems,’ my mother said, still seated, looking up at us. ‘He and his dad think alike about most things these days.’

‘There’s not enough around to kill us, I guess,’ Warren Miller said. ‘I’ve felt that way. Men understand that.’

‘Men don’t understand much,’ my mother said. ‘It’s not their long suit. They don’t wake up crying, either. Women take care of that.’

‘I never heard that before,’ Warren Miller said, ‘have you, Joe? I’ve waked up crying plenty of times. Songjin was a place I did that.’ He looked around at my mother. I think he wanted to say something more about this subject, but all he said was, ‘Korea.’

‘Warren’s borrowing a book from me, Joe,’ my mother said, and she got up. ‘I’ll go get it right now.’ She went back into the bedroom. She kept her books stacked on the floor of the closet behind her shoes.

‘That’s correct,’ Warren Miller said, and I guess he was talking about the book then. He looked back at me. ‘Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing just to know you’re alive,’ he said, but in a soft voice, a voice I didn’t think he wanted my mother to hear.

‘I understand,’ I said, because I did understand that. I thought it was what my father had been talking about the night before, standing in the dark waiting to get on the bus.

‘Everybody doesn’t know that,’ Warren Miller said. ‘I can guarantee you that much.’ He reached down in his pants pocket and came up with something he held in his big hand. ‘Let me give you a present, Joe,’ he said. When he opened his hand there was a small knife in it, a slender clasp knife made of silver. On the side of the case in tiny blocked letters, it said BURMA-1943. ‘Some trouble isn’t worth getting into, though,’ he said. ‘This’ll remind you which to choose.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. I took the knife, which was warm and hard and heavier than I thought it would be. I felt for a moment that I shouldn’t be taking it. Only I wanted it, and I liked Warren Miller for giving it to me. I knew he would not tell my mother about it, and neither would I.

‘People do everything eventually, I guess,’ I heard my mother say from the other room. I heard the closet door close and her footsteps on the floor. She appeared in the door to the hall. ‘Did you hear what I said?’ She had a small book in her hand, and she was smiling. ‘Are you two plotting against me?’ she said.

‘We’re shooting the breeze,’ Warren Miller said. I let the silver knife slip into my pocket.

‘I hope so,’ my mother said. ‘Here.’ She held the book out to him. ‘From my private library. Ex Libris Jeanette,’ she said.

‘What is it?’ Warren Miller said. He took the book and looked at its cover, which was dark blue.

‘It’s what you asked me for,’ my mother said. ‘The selected poems of William Wordsworth. “Getting and spending we lay waste all our powers.” That’s what I remember.’

‘I remember that,’ Warren Miller said. He held the book in both his hands and looked down at the cover.

‘I taught Mr Miller how to swim recently,’ my mother said. ‘Now he’d like to learn to read poetry.’ She smiled at him and sat back down in her armchair. ‘He’s going to give me a job in his grain elevator, too,’ she said.

‘I am,’ Warren Miller said. ‘That’s right.’

‘Mr Miller owns a grain elevator,’ my mother said. ‘He has three of them, actually. I bet you’ve seen them, sweetheart.’ She looked around toward the back of our house and pointed her arm over behind her head. ‘They’re across the river. Those big white ones. They’re what we have as a skyline out here. They’re probably full of oats, like Warren.’

‘What is in them.’ I asked.

‘Wheat,’ Warren Miller said. ‘Though this isn’t a good year for it. It’s too hot.’

‘It’s too dry,’ my mother said, ‘in case we didn’t notice. That’s why we have big fires now.’

‘That’s correct,’ Warren Miller said, and he looked uncomfortable. He kept the slender book in one hand and moved closer to the front door. It gave me an odd feeling that he was here, and that he was in his fifties and knew my mother. I tried to think about him wearing a bathing suit. ‘I’ve got to see a man about a dog,’ he said. He put his hand with the big gold and red ring on my shoulder. I could feel it on my shoulder bone. ‘I’m glad I saw you, Joe,’ he said.

‘I’m glad you did, too,’ my mother said. She didn’t get up. She seemed strange, as if something had affected her and she wanted to pretend it hadn’t.

‘Come to see me tomorrow, Jeanette. All right?’ Warren Miller said. He limped when he moved toward the door.

‘All right,’ my mother said, ‘I will. Joe, open the door for Mr Miller.’

And I did that, with my school books in my hand and the silver knife he had given me in my pocket.

‘I hope I’ll see you again,’ Warren Miller said to me.

‘You probably will,’ my mother said.

We watched Warren Miller as he limped down our front steps and out past the wooden gate to his Oldsmobile, parked in the dry leaves across the street.

‘He’s a nice man,’ my mother said, sitting and looking at me when I had shut the door. ‘Doesn’t he seem nice to you?’

‘He does all right.’

‘He can swim very nicely. You’d be surprised — for a big man. He fought in two wars but never learned to swim. Isn’t that odd? You’re not supposed to be able to do that.’ She looked up at the ceiling as if she was thinking about it. ‘I said I could explain everything, didn’t I? But I can’t.’

I looked out the front window at the Oldsmobile, which was parked where it had been. Warren Miller was sitting in the driver’s seat looking at our house. I lifted my hand and waved at him. But he couldn’t see me. He sat there and looked for a time longer, then he started the car and drove away.

At five o’clock my mother came into my room where I was setting out a problem for my geometry class in school. She had taken a nap after Warren Miller had left, and then taken a bath and talked on the phone. When she came in my room she was dressed in a way that was new to me. She had on blue jeans and a white western shirt and some blue-colored cowboy boots I had known her to have but had never seen her wear. She had a red kerchief around her neck, tied in a knot.

‘Do you like this particular get-up?’ she said, and looked down at the toes of her boots.

‘It looks nice,’ I said.

‘Thank you very much.’ She looked at herself in the mirror over my chest of drawers, across the room. ‘I used to dress like this all the time in eastern Washington,’ she said. ‘In the last century.’ She took hold of the doorknob and turned it gently as she stood there. ‘I used to stand behind the bull chutes at the rodeos and hope some cowboy would approve of me. It made my father very mad. He wanted me to go to college, which is where I did go. And where I want you to go, incidentally.’

‘I want to go,’ I said. I had given some thought to that, already, but I hadn’t thought about a profession yet. I hoped she wouldn’t ask me about that again for a while.

‘Southern Cal’s very good,’ my mother said. She looked out my window, stooping a little as if she wanted to see out toward the west. ‘That’s where I want you to go. Or Harvard. They’re both good schools.’

‘I’d go there,’ I said. I didn’t know where either of these schools was located or why they were good. I’d only heard their names before.

‘I’ve never taken you to the rodeos, I guess,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ She was leaning against the door to my room, looking at me lying on the bed with my books and papers. She was thinking about something that had nothing to do with me, I thought. Maybe she was thinking about my father. ‘Western boys are supposed to go to rodeos. However. I used to race barrels in Briscoe. I certainly did do that. Against other girls. And I wore this get-up. I did it for the sole and simple reason of attracting attention to myself. They used to call us chute beauties. Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that an impressive thing to know about your mother? That she was a chute beauty?’

‘Dad told me about that,’ I said. ‘He likes it.’

‘Did he? Does he? That’s good. It’s probably nice to know your parents were once not your parents. It seems merciful to me at this moment.’

‘I knew that, too,’ I said.

‘Well, good for you,’ my mother said. She walked around my bed and stood looking out the window, across our sunny yard toward the river and the oil refinery, and farther away toward the hazy sky behind which was the fire my father was fighting. ‘Would you like to take a drive?’ she said, putting her fingers on the glass as though she wanted to push it. ‘I’d like to see the fire. I think you can drive right to where it is. I read that in the paper. You can consider it the beginning of your higher education.’

‘I’d like to see it,’ I said, and closed my geometry book.

‘Maybe we’ll see something astounding that you’ll always remember,’ my mother said, her fingers still on the window glass. ‘That certainly doesn’t happen every day. At least not at my age it doesn’t. Although maybe at your age it does.’

‘How old are you,’ I asked because I realized I did not know how old she or my father was.

‘Thirty-seven,’ my mother said, and looked at me sharply. ‘Does that seem like the wrong age? Would you like it better if I said fifty? Would that make you feel better?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Thirty-seven’s all right.’

‘Don’t you feel protected enough?’

‘I haven’t thought about that, I guess,’ I said.

‘I won’t be this age forever,’ she said, ‘so don’t start. It’d just confuse you.’ She smiled and shook her head. I thought she was going to laugh, but she didn’t laugh. She just walked out of the room and off into her own bedroom to get ready to go.

We drove in our family Plymouth from Great Falls, west along the Sun River and Route 200, out through the towns of Vaughn and Simms and Fort Shaw and Sun River itself, towns on the bottom edge of the wheat land beyond which were the large mountains. The light that evening was clear autumn light, and everything — the stubble, the witch grass edges, the cottonwood flats below the Fairfield bench — was gold and dry, the color of the sun. Ducks were in the river eddies, and now and then I could see a farmer cutting silage rows through his corn stand. It seemed to me an odd time for a fire to go on. Though out ahead of us, beyond the town of Augusta where the mountains commenced, smoke rose like a screen that drifted northward up the front to Canada, thick and white at the bottom but thinner and drifting above, so that as my mother drove us closer and the peaks became hidden by smoke, it came to seem that there were no mountains, and where the dense smoke began the plains and even the world itself came to an end.

‘Do you know what they call trees in a forest fire,’ my mother asked as she drove through Augusta, where there were only a few buildings — a hotel and some red bar signs, a service station — and a few people on the sidewalk.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Fuel. Trees are fuel. A fox fleeing from a flaming fuel-fed forest fire. Did you ever hear that?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘It was just a funny joke when I was in college,’ she said. ‘Do you know what they call the trees that’re left up when the fire goes by?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘The standing dead,’ my mother said. ‘Don’t they have an interesting terminology for things? My father told me all about it. He felt it was broadening.’

‘What happens to the animals,’ I asked.

‘Oh, they adjust, though the little ones have a hard time. They get confused. Everything happens before they know it. I used to cry about it, but my father said it didn’t help anything. He was right.’

We drove through Augusta and out onto a dirt road that crossed a creek bottom, then went up into the white smoke. It was going nearer to dark then, and the sun was whitish behind the smoke, and north and south of us the evening sky was red and purple.

The fire was out ahead, though we couldn’t see flames yet. Along the way, a few cars were stopped on the roadside and people were standing in the grass or sitting on their car hoods, watching with binoculars or taking pictures. Some had out-of-state tags, and some people were holding flashlights. A few of the cars that had started back had their headlights on.

‘It’s a sickening smell,’ my mother said, and cleared her throat. I didn’t know if she knew where we were going. She was just driving into the smoke. ‘People get drawn to it. They don’t want it to be over.’

‘Why?’ I said, watching up onto the hillside. As the creek bottom grew narrower, I could see small individual yellow fires and longer lines of fire in the dark with barely distinguishable human figures moving in the trees.

‘Oh, I guess.’ My mother seemed annoyed. ‘I guess they think something worse is happening someplace else, so they’re better off with a tragedy they already know. It’s not a generous thought.’

‘Maybe that’s not right,’ I said. And I thought that because I didn’t see what any of this had to do with my father.

‘Maybe not,’ my mother said, ‘maybe you’re smart and I’m stupid.’

‘Do you like Miller?’ I said. I had wanted to know it in the afternoon, but there hadn’t seemed enough reason to ask, whereas now for some reason there did.

‘Do you mean Mr Miller? Warren?’ my mother said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you like him?’

‘Not very much,’ she said. ‘Things do happen around him, though. He has that feel about him, doesn’t he?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I had the knife he had given me in my pocket, a thing he had given me to make me like him. But that was all that had happened to me where Warren Miller was concerned.

‘He’s going to give me a job to keep his books at his grain elevator,’ my mother said. ‘That’s something. And he’s asked you and me to have supper at his house tomorrow night. Which is lucky because I had plans to open up some cans. Why?’

‘I was interested,’ I said. The truth was I wanted to know what she thought about my father leaving, and I hoped this would get around to that subject. Though it didn’t, and I didn’t know how to make it.

‘It’s always just yourself,’ my mother said. ‘Nothing else.’

‘What does that mean?’ I said.

‘Honey, nothing. I was thinking and talking. It’s a bad habit. You have an inquiring intelligence. Everything will always surprise you. You’ll have a wonderful life.’ She smiled.

‘Don’t they surprise you?’

‘Not much,’ my mother said. ‘Now and then I run upon the unexpected. But that’s all. Look up there now, Joe.’

Ahead of us at the end of the canyon, the creek bottom road opened into a wide grass meadow beyond which a hill went up sharply, full of small fires in sparse trees.

‘Let’s give you the full treatment,’ my mother said, and she stopped the car right there, still in the narrow canyon where there were patches of fire burning ten yards from the road. She turned off the motor. ‘Open your door,’ she said. ‘See what it feels like.’

I opened my side and stepped out on the road just as she’d told me to. And the fire was all around me, up the hill on both sides and in front of me and behind. The small yellow fires and lines of fire were flickering in the underbrush close enough that I could’ve touched them just by reaching out. There was a sound like wind blowing, and a crack of limbs on fire. I could feel the heat of it all over the front of me, on my legs and my fingers. I smelled the deep, hot piny odor of trees and ground in flames. And what I wanted to do was get away from it before it overcame me.

I got back in the car with my mother and closed the door. It was instantly cooler and quieter.

‘How was that?’ she said, and looked at me.

‘It’s loud,’ I said. My hands and legs still felt hot.

‘Did it appeal to you?’ my mother said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘it scared me.’ And that is the feeling I’d had when it was all around me.

‘It’s just a lot of small fires that once in a while blow together. Don’t be afraid now,’ my mother said. ‘You just needed to see what your father finds so entrancing. Do you understand it?’

‘No,’ I said, and I thought my father might’ve been surprised by such a fire and want to come home.

‘I don’t understand either,’ my mother said. ‘It’s not mysterious at all.’

‘Maybe he was surprised,’ I said.

‘I’m sure he was,’ my mother said. ‘I’m sorry we both can’t sympathize with him.’ She started the car and drove us on.

In the meadow was a tent camp where there were trucks and temporary lights strung on lines between wooden poles. Fires were beside the road. Small ones. People were moving inside the camp — mostly men, I thought, brought there to fight the fire. Some I could see lying on cots inside tents that had their flaps left open. Some were standing and talking. Others were sitting in trucks. A small dark airplane with a white star on its tail section was sitting farther out in the meadow. Straight across the road that we were on and still ahead of us was a small service station where more trucks were, and a white-lighted CAFE sign hung out in the early evening darkness. We passed a sign that said that this was Truly, Montana, though it was hard to tell what made it a town. It only seemed to be a separate place because all around it a fire was burning.

‘This is quite a place,’ my mother said, watching out the windshield as we drove into the little town of Truly. She motioned toward the tent camp. ‘That’s the stage-up over there,’ she said, ‘where everyone leaves and comes back. It’s just smoke all the time up here. You’re never out of it.’

‘Do you think we can drive in and find Dad?’

‘No we can’t,’ my mother said abruptly. ‘He’s fresh out. They’ll keep him up there till he drops. Then he’ll come down, if he’s alive enough. I’m not going to look for him. Are you hungry?’

‘Yes,’ I said. But I was watching the hillside and only half listening. I watched a tall spruce tree catch fire high in the dark. A spark had found it, and it exploded in a bright, steepling yellow flame that leaped and shot out bits of fire into the night toward other trees, and swirled its own white smoke, flaming and then dying quickly as the wind on the hillside — a wind that did not blow where we were — changed and died. It all happened in an instant, and I knew it was dangerous though in a beautiful way. And I understood, just as I sat there in the car with my mother, what I thought dangerous was: it was a thing that did not seem able to hurt you, but quickly and deceivingly would. Though I didn’t understand why my father would risk danger, unless it was that he didn’t care about life much, or unless there was something in losing it that was satisfying, which didn’t seem like anything I remembered anybody ever having said to me.

In the cafe we sat in a booth by the window so we could both see across the road to the fire camp and the fire itself, which turned the sky red above the ridge lines so that you knew that beyond where you could see there was more fire and men fighting it.

My mother ordered fried chicken for both of us, and as we sat waiting, a truck stopped in front of the cafe, and fifteen or so men got off the back of it, wearing heavy canvas clothing and boots, their faces blackened with fire soot, and moving as if they were stiff and tired. The men were all big men with heavy gaits and they all came inside the cafe together and sat at four of the tables without talking. The two women who were the waitresses went around the tables asking if the men wanted what they usually had — fried steaks and potatoes — and they all said yes, then sat drinking their water and talking softly while they waited. They were young men — older than I was, but still young. And there was a smell that came from them and went all through the room. The smell of cold ashes, a smell that came right out of their clothes and stayed in the air, as if the men had just walked right out of the fire itself and had been burned by it and this was what was left of them.

My mother had glanced at the men when they sat down, then looked back out the window at the lighted stage camp beyond our car, and up onto the ridge and hillside which was on fire in small blazes like campfires. She ordered a can of beer and drank it out of the can as she stared out.

‘I think it’s just because he lost his job,’ she said. When she said that she looked at the men who were at the tables across the room. ‘It made him go crazy. I feel sorry for him. I actually do.’ She looked back out the window into the night.

‘He’s all right,’ I said, and I know I was thinking that these other men were all right. They were here eating supper, and probably my father was too, somewhere else. He was on his own, and that was all, and you did not have to be crazy to want to be on your own, or so I thought at the time.

‘Is that what you believe?’ my mother said, holding her beer can in both hands, her elbows on the table top.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is.’

‘Well, I think he has a woman out there is what I think. Probably it’s an Indian woman. A squaw. She’s probably married, too.’ My mother said this as if she was accusing me and I was going to have to answer for it. Something about me must’ve reminded her of my father. ‘I read that women were out there,’ she said.

‘I saw some who were going,’ I said. One of the men seated at the firefighters’ tables looked at my mother. She had raised her voice a little.

‘Well, why do you think men do things?’ my mother said. ‘They either go crazy or it’s a woman. Or it’s both. You don’t know anything. How could you? You haven’t done anything.’ She stared back at the man who was looking at her, and touched the red kerchief around her neck. But when she looked at me she was smiling. ‘It’s nature’s way,’ she said to me. ‘That can be part of your education, to learn what nature’s way is.’

‘All right,’ I said. Two more of the firefighters looked at us, and one of them smiled and cleared his throat. I wished I knew what nature’s way was, because all that was happening in our family did not not seem to be natural or normal.

‘Tell me how you feel about your name,’ my mother said after a minute had passed, and in a quieter voice. ‘Do you like it all right? Joe? It’s not an uncommon name. We didn’t want to weigh you down with a fancy name or a middle name. We liked Joe.’

‘I like it,’ I said. ‘It’s easy for people to remember.’

‘That’s true,’ she said. She glanced back at the night. There were stars in the October sky, and somehow through the white smoke they had become visible. ‘Jeanette,’ she said. ‘I never liked that. It seemed like a waitress’s name.’

‘What one would you rather have,’ I asked.

‘Well,’ my mother said, and drank the last of her beer. Our food was coming now. I could see it in the window to the kitchen, two plates steaming, the top of a woman’s head just visible behind it. ‘Lottie,’ my mother said, and smiled. She pushed her hair up with one hand. ‘There used to be a singer named Lottie. Lottie something. Lottie-da. She was colored, I think. But. How would that be? Lottie?’

‘I don’t like it,’ I said. ‘I like Jeanette.’

‘Well, that’s sweet,’ my mother said and smiled at me. ‘You have to like me the way I am. Not as Lottie, I guess.’

Our food came and we ate it and talked about forest fires, that they were like cities or factories, and went on and on by themselves. That there was something good about them, that they replenished where they burned, and that for humans, my mother said, it was sometimes a good thing to be near a thing so uncontrollable and out of all scale that you felt reduced and knew your position in the world. She understood my father in some ways, she said. He wasn’t the kind to go crazy. It was only a hard time in his life, though it was a hard time in hers too. That was nature’s way, also, she said. People were drawn to things they shouldn’t be. I thought she seemed happy to be there with me and to see the fire, happy to have said all the things we’d said. Then we started home to Great Falls.

On the drive back, the air had become colder as we went farther east of the fire, and the sky was clear and starry except for the glow the city made low on the horizon. My mother stopped in Augusta and bought two more beers for the road and drank as she drove and did not talk to me much. I thought mostly about my father, then, and about what he would be like when he came back. He had been gone since only the night before, but already the life he left didn’t seem like the same life to me, and when I pictured him coming back, I pictured him getting off the back of a truck like the men at the cafe, although he was not smudged with ashes or stiff or tired, but looked clean and younger than when he had left and did not in fact even look like himself, but like someone else. And I realized that I could not exactly remember his face or his features. I could hear the sound of his voice, but that was all. And the only face I could see was the strange young man I did not think I knew.

When we had driven back almost to Great Falls and could see down onto the city at night and could see the white grain elevators that Warren Miller owned lighted beside the river, my mother said, ‘Let’s go in a new way.’ And instead of straight in on Central Avenue, she drove us more toward the north side so that we came down into town through Black Eagle, the way you’d come in if you’d driven down from Fort Benton and the Hi-line, and not from the west.

I didn’t wonder why we’d come this way and did not bother to ask. My mother was a person who did not like doing things always the same way, and would go out of her way to make a drive we took not be dull, or some explanation not the same as it was the last time. ‘Make life intriguing,’ she would say when she turned off some road we knew onto an unknown one, or when she’d buy things in a store, something she had never bought and had no use for. ‘Life’s just small potatoes,’ she’d say; ‘you have to apply yourself.’

We drove down the long hill that ends at the Missouri River, beyond which is the old part of Great Falls, the part where we lived, where there are parks and tree-lined streets set out by the original builders. But two blocks before the river, my mother turned left and drove down a street of frame houses that were set up on the hillside embankment in rows, overlooking the river and the lights of town. I had been on this street before. Farther down was an Italian steakhouse where I had gone with my father once at night to eat dinner with some men from the Wheatland Club. ‘A smoker,’ he had called it, and only men were there. And I had always thought it was a part of town where only Italians lived.

My mother did not drive as far as the restaurant, although I could see it there on the dark street, lighted in a blue light with cars parked in front. When we’d gone two blocks, she slowed and opened the window, then stopped in front of a house that sat up above the street and had a steep concrete driveway and a set of steep steps that ran up beside it to the wooden steps of the house. The house was like the other house beside it, white and tall-fronted with one large window and a front door on one side. A light was burning on the porch, and the draperies in the window were drawn open and an old-fashioned yellow lamp sat on a table. It looked like a house where an old person would live.

My mother sat and looked up at the house for a moment, then rolled her window up.

‘Whose house is that,’ I asked.

‘It’s Warren’s house,’ my mother said, and sighed. ‘It’s Mr Miller’s house.’ She put her hands on top of the steering wheel but just sat looking down the street toward the restaurant.

‘Are we going inside?’

‘No, we’re not,’ she said. ‘No one’s home, anyway. I had something to ask Mr Miller, but it can wait.’

‘Maybe they’re in there,’ I said.

‘They’re not they,’ my mother said. ‘It’s just Mr Miller. He lives there alone. He had a wife but she left him, I guess. And his mother lived there, but she died.’

‘When were you in there?’ I said.

‘I never was,’ my mother said, and she seemed tired. She had driven a long way that afternoon and night, and things had not been easy for her since yesterday. ‘I looked it up in the phone book, that’s all,’ she said. ‘I should’ve just called. But it’ll be okay now. He doesn’t live like a rich man, does he? Just this plain house on a plain street.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t.’

‘He certainly is, though,’ my mother said. ‘He has holdings. Those elevators. And an Oldsmobile agency. Farms. It’s hard to think about.’ She put the car into gear, but sat then there in the darkness as if she was trying to remember something or figure something out. ‘I feel like I need to wake up,’ she said, and smiled at me. ‘But I don’t know what from. Or to. That’s a big change.’ She took a deep breath and let it out, then let the car idle down the street into the night toward home. And I wondered, as we turned and started back toward the street that crossed the river, what she had needed to ask Warren Miller at nine at night, something that couldn’t wait but then did. And why, since it seemed to me that someone was at home there, wouldn’t she just go to the door and ask what she wanted — probably something about her job that started the next day — and then go home just as we were doing, in the regular way that people did things, the way I understood them?