Wildlife

Chapter 7

We drove down to Central Avenue to where there were cafes and some bars I could get a meal in. It had gone on snowing in tiny flakes that swirled in front of the headlights, but the pavement was already damp and shining with water, and the snow had begun to turn to rain by the time we were downtown, so that it seemed more like spring in eastern Washington than the beginning of winter in Montana.

In the car my father acted like things weren’t so bad. He told me he would take me to a movie if I wanted to go to one, or that we could go stay in a hotel for the night. The Rainbow, he’d heard, was a good place. He mentioned that the Yankees were playing well in the World Series so far, but that he hoped Pittsburgh would win. He also said that bad things happened and adults knew it, but that they finally passed by, and I should not think we were all just an accumulation of our worst errors because we were all better than we thought, and that he loved my mother and she loved him, and that he had made mistakes himself and that we all deserved better. And I knew he believed he would make life right between them again.

‘Things can surprise you. I’m aware of that,’ he said to me as we drove down Central in the cold car. ‘When I was in Choteau I saw a moose, if you can believe that. Right down in the middle of town. The fire had driven it out of where it normally roamed. Everybody was amazed.’

‘What happened to it?’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t know that,’ my father said. ‘Some of them wanted to shoot it but some others didn’t. I didn’t hear about it later. Maybe it did okay.’

We drove down to the end of Central and parked in front of a bar that had bright lights inside, and walls that were painted white and very high ceilings. It was called The Presidential, and I could see through the windows from the street that men were playing cards at two tables in the back, but no one was at the bar drinking. I had looked into this bar on my walks through town and thought that railroad men went there because it was near the train stations and the railroad hotels. ‘This is a fine place here,’ my father said. ‘They have good food and you can hear yourself think a thought.’

The bar was a long, narrow room and had framed pictures of two or three presidents on the wall. Roosevelt was one. Lincoln was another. We sat at the bar, and I ordered navy bean soup and a pasty pie. My father ordered a glass of whiskey and a beer. I had not eaten since morning and I was hungry, though as I sat at the bar with my father I couldn’t help wondering what my mother was doing. Was she packing her suitcase? Was she talking on the telephone to Warren Miller or to someone else? Was she sitting on her bed crying? None of those seemed exactly right. And I decided that when I had eaten my meal, I would ask my father to take me back home. He would understand someone wanting to do that, I thought, especially for your mother, at a bad time.

‘A lot of what’s burned, you know, is just understory.’ My father’s hand was on his glass of whiskey, and he was looking at the scarred skin on the back of it. ‘You’ll be able to go in there next spring. You’ll live in a house one of these days made of that timber. A fire’s not always such a bad thing.’ He looked at me and smiled.

‘Were you afraid out there,’ I asked. I was eating my pasty pie.

‘Yes, I was. We only were digging back trenches, but I was afraid. Anything can go on. If you had an enemy he could kill you and no one would know it. I had to stop a man from running straight into the fire once. I dragged him down.’ My father took a drink of his beer and rubbed one hand over the other one. ‘Look at my hands,’ he said. ‘I had smooth hands when I played golf.’ He rubbed his hand harder. ‘Are you proud of me now?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. And that was true. I had told my mother that I was, and I was.

I heard poker chips clatter in the back of the room and a chair squeak as someone got up. ‘You can’t quit now, I’m winning,’ someone said and people laughed.

‘I’d like to live up on the eastern front,’ my father said. ‘That would be a nicer life than down here. Get out of Great Falls.’ His mind was just running then; whatever he thought, he said. It was a strange night in his life.

‘I’d like to live up there,’ I said, though I had never been closer to the eastern front than when I had gone with my mother two days before, and everything there had been on fire.

‘Do you think your mother would take a chance on it?’ he said.

‘She might,’ I said. My father nodded, and I knew he was thinking about the eastern front, someplace where it was not likely he’d be suited for things and my mother wouldn’t be either. They’d lived in houses in towns all their lives and made good with that. He was just taking his mind off the things that he didn’t like and couldn’t help.

My father ordered another glass of whiskey but no beer. I asked for a glass of milk and piece of pie. He turned around on his stool and looked at the men in the back who were playing cards. No one else was in the bar. It was seven o’clock and people would not come in until later when shifts let off.

‘I guess I should’ve known about all this happening,’ my father said, facing the other way. ‘There’s always someone else involved somewhere. Even if it’s just in your mind. You can’t control your mind, I know that. Probably you shouldn’t try.’ I sat without saying anything because I thought he was going to ask me something I did not want to answer. ‘Has this been going on for some time?’ my father said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘You get into these things and they seem like your whole life,’ my father said. ‘You can’t see out of them. I’m understanding about that.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said again.

‘It’s the money,’ my father said. ‘That’s the big part of it. That’s the way families break up. There’s not enough money. I’m surprised about this Miller, though,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t seem like a man who’d do that. I’ve played golf with him. He has a limp of some kind. I think I won some money once off him.’

‘He said that,’ I said.

‘Do you know him?’ And my father looked at me.

‘I did meet him,’ I said. ‘I met him once.’

‘Isn’t he a married man himself?’ my father said. ‘I thought he was.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He isn’t. He was.’

‘When did you happen to meet him?’ my father said.

And suddenly I felt afraid — afraid of my father, and of what I would say. Because I felt if I said the wrong thing something in me would be ruined and I would never be the same again. I wanted to get up from my seat at that instant and leave. But I couldn’t. I was there with my father, and there was no place I could go that would be far enough away. And what I decided was that what people believed — that I knew nothing about my mother and Warren Miller, for example — didn’t matter as much as it mattered what the truth was. And I decided that that’s what I would tell if I had to tell anything and if I knew the truth, no matter what I’d thought before when I was not face to face with it.

Though I think that was the wrong thing to have done, and my father would have thought so too if he’d had the chance to choose, which he didn’t. Only I did. It was because of me.

My father turned on the barstool and looked at me, his eyes small and hard-looking. He wanted me to tell him the truth. I knew that. But he did not know what the truth would be.

‘I met him at our house,’ I said.

‘When did this take place,’ my father asked.

‘Yesterday,’ I said. ‘Two days ago.’

‘What happened? What happened then?’

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘And you never met him again?’ my father said.

‘I met him at his house,’ I said.

‘Why did you go there?’ My father was watching me. Maybe he hoped I was lying, and he would catch me at it, lying maybe to make my mother look worse, for some reason he imagined in which I would want to do something for him, to make him feel better by taking his side. ‘Did you go to his house alone?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I went with Mother. We had our dinner over there.’

‘You did?’ he said. ‘Did you stay all night?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We didn’t. We left and went home.’

‘And that’s all?’ he said.

‘That was all then,’ I said.

‘But did you see your mother do something while I was gone that you wouldn’t like to have to tell me?’ my father said. ‘I know it’s odd to know about this. It’s all probably my fault. I’m sorry.’ He looked at me very hard. I think he didn’t want me to say anything, but he also wanted to know the truth and what part in it I’d played, and what part in it my mother had, and what was right or wrong about it. And I did not say anything else because even though I could see it all in my mind again — all those things that had happened in just three days — I didn’t think I knew everything and did not want to pretend I did, or that what I’d seen was the truth.

‘Maybe it doesn’t require an answer,’ my father said after a while. He looked back at the men playing cards at the end of the room. ‘Did your mother tell you anything?’ my father said. ‘I mean, did she say anything that you remember? Not about what she might’ve done. But just anything. I’d like to know what was on her mind.’

‘She said she wasn’t crazy,’ I said. ‘And she said it’s hard to say no to yourself.’

‘Those are both true,’ my father said, watching the men play cards. ‘I’ve felt those myself. Is that all?’

‘She said everybody had to give up things.’

‘Is that so?’ my father said. ‘That’s good to know about. I wonder what she’s given up?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Maybe she’s decided to give us up. Or just me. That’s probably it.’

The bartender brought my pie and my milk and a fork. He set my father’s glass of whiskey on the bar. But my father was looking the other way. He was thinking, and he sat that way without talking for a long time — maybe three minutes — while I sat beside him and waited and did not eat any of my pie or do anything. Just sat.

‘I was only there for three days, but it did feel like a long time,’ he finally said. ‘I can certainly sympathize with people.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I touched my fork with my fingers.

But my father turned and looked at me again. ‘I think you must have seen your mother with this Miller, didn’t you? Not just about dinner, I mean.’

His voice was very calm, so I just said, ‘Yes, I did.’

‘Where were they?’ my father said, looking at me.

‘In the house,’ I said.

‘In our house?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. And I don’t know why I told him that. He didn’t make me do it. I just did. It must’ve seemed natural at that moment.

‘Well, I’m sorry, Joe,’ my father said. ‘I know that wasn’t what you expected.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said.

‘Well, no,’ my father said. ‘It’s not all right. But it’ll have to become all right with you somehow.’

He turned around away from me, then he picked up his glass of whiskey. ‘I don’t have to drink, but I just want to right now,’ he said. He drank down a little of what he had and put it down. ‘When you’re finished with your pie,’ he said, ‘we’ll go out for a ride.’

While I ate my pie, my father got up and went to the restroom. Then he came out and he made a phone call at the back of the bar. I watched him, but I couldn’t hear what he said or who he was talking to. I thought possibly he was talking to my mother, talking about what I had just told him, maybe saying that he would not be bringing me home that night, or telling her to leave home herself, or how disappointed he was with her. I thought each of those things, though he did not talk long. When he came back, he had a five-dollar bill in his hand, and he put that on the bar and said to me, ‘Let’s clear our heads.’ And we walked outside, where it was snowing lightly again. People were waiting in line down the street to go into the Auditorium. But he did not notice them and we got in the car and drove up Central away from downtown.

My father drove all the way out to Fifteenth Street. We did not talk much. He pulled into a gas station and got out, and I sat and listened as he talked to the man who filled up the car. They talked about the snow, which the attendant said would be turning to rain then ice, and about the fire in Allen Creek, which my father said he had been fighting until that very afternoon, and which he and the attendant both believed would now go out. The man checked the oil and the tires, then he opened the trunk to do something I couldn’t see. He said something to my father about needing a new taillight, and then my father paid him and got in and we drove back out onto the street.

We drove down Central again to the middle of Great Falls by the train stations and the city park and the river where I’d already walked that day, and past the Helen Apartments where my mother was moving. My father did not seem to notice them, or to notice much of anything. He was just driving, I thought, with no particular destination while his mind was working on whatever he had to think about: my mother, me, what would happen to all of us. As we went father out toward the east, I could see the lights of the football stadium shining in the snowy sky. It was Friday night and a game was being played. Great Falls and Billings. I was glad not to be involved in it.

‘I said a fire can be a good thing, didn’t I?’ my father said. ‘Most people don’t believe that.’ He seemed in better spirits driving, as if he had thought of something that made him feel better. ‘It’s sure surprising how fast the world can turn backwards, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is.’

‘Three days, if I’m not wrong,’ he said. ‘Maybe things were not as solid as I thought. I guess that’s evident.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘That’s evident.’ He looked at me, and he was smiling. He put his hand on my shoulder and could feel my bones. ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘once you face it, the worst is all behind you. Things start to improve then. Going to the fire just had a bad effect on your mother. That’s all.’

‘Did you ever like being there?’ I said. And this was something I’d wanted to know.

‘Oh,’ my father said. ‘My attitude changed. First it was mysterious. Then it was exciting. Then I felt helpless about it. I felt bottled up before I went,’ he said. ‘I stopped feeling that way.’

‘Did you have a girlfriend out there,’ I asked, because that was what my mother had said two nights ago.

‘No I didn’t,’ he said. ‘There were women there. I saw women fight each other, in fact. I saw them fight like men.’

And that seemed strange to me — two women fighting. Though it was an exciting thought, and I realized how odd it was for me to talk this way with my father, and for us both to know what we knew about my mother and to feel the way we did about it, which was not so bad at all. It seemed like a reckless, exciting feeling to me, and I liked it.

‘Does your mother’s boyfriend live in Black Eagle on Prospect Street?’ my father said as he drove along. Up ahead of us was the bridge to Black Eagle and beyond it the white grain elevators, lighted in the misting, snowy air. ‘You said you were there, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘So you know where he lives?’ my father said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s where it is.’

‘All right,’ my father said. ‘Let’s go by there.’

He turned left onto the Fifteenth Street Bridge and we drove over the Missouri River and into Black Eagle, where there were only lights of houses against the bluff hills, and the snowy night up behind it like a curtain.

We drove halfway up the hill and turned right. It was eight o’clock at night, and many of the houses we passed had their porch lights on, and lights shining inside. My father seemed to know where he was going because he only looked now and then at the house numbers. Down the street I began to see the blue light of the Italian steakhouse. I could not see people in the street or any cars parked outside, and if it had not been Friday I would’ve thought it was closed.

‘It’s not a glamorous street, is it?’ my father said.

‘No, it isn’t,’ I said, watching the houses.

‘That’s surprising,’ he said. ‘I guess nobody sees through the eyes of a rich man.’ He was quiet then for a moment as he drove slowly down Warren Miller’s street. ‘I wish I could get your mother to back out on this.’

‘So do I,’ I said.

‘It’s not a good deal for her,’ he said.

‘Not that I can see.’

He stopped the car across the street from Warren’s house, in the place where my mother had parked the night before. I started to think what I had been thinking, sitting here with my mother: that I had no choice but to go inside with her when she went, and that I had gone. Then I stopped thinking that because it seemed like an entirely different subject now, one that had practically nothing to do with what had happened the night before, or any other night. I was with my father now, and everything was different.

Lights were on inside the house, though the porch was dark. Warren’s Oldsmobile sat parked in the steep driveway, behind the powerboat, just as it had been. My father turned off the engine and opened the window and looked out at the house. I could hear piano music. I thought it was coming from Warren Miller’s house, and that Warren was probably playing it as we sat in the dark watching.

‘I’d like to have a look in there, I guess,’ my father said. He turned and looked at me in the dark. ‘What do you think about that?’

‘Okay,’ I said. I looked past him at the house, where I could see no one at the window where the old-fashioned lamp was burning.

‘I’ll come right back, Joe.’

‘All right,’ I said.

He got out of the car, closed the door, and walked across the street and up the concrete steps. I could hear the piano music playing out into the night, and thought I heard someone singing with it. A man. I thought no one would notice my father now unless he wanted them to or unless he rang the doorbell or knocked, and I didn’t think he would do that. I wondered who my father had called from The Presidential bar. My mother? Or Warren Miller, to see if he was at home? Or possibly someone else entirely?

My father walked to the top of the steps and onto the porch. He turned around and looked at the car and then above it at the town lighted beyond the street of houses and the river. Then he walked to the front window and looked inside the house, bent over so he could see. He didn’t try to hide, just stood in the window, looking, so that anybody who would’ve glanced at the window at that moment would’ve seen him.

He did not stay at the window long, just long enough to look around inside at the living room and at whatever he could see through there, the other rooms, the kitchen. Then he turned around and came back down the steps to the street and across to the car where I was sitting, waiting. He did not get in the car with me, only leaned in the window.

‘How do you feel now, son?’ he said. He looked in at me.

‘I feel good,’ I said, though that was not exactly how I felt. I felt nervous to be there, and I wished we could leave.

‘Are you cold?’ he said. He wasn’t talking very loud.

‘No sir,’ I said. I could hear the piano still going inside the house. And I was cold. My arms were cold.

My father turned his head and looked down the street. There was nothing to see. No movement. ‘Maybe I can’t be in love anymore,’ he said, then let out a breath. ‘I’d love to improve things, though. You know?’

‘Yes sir,’ I said. Then I saw Warren Miller. He came right to the window where my father had been looking inside. He stopped a moment and stared out, I thought, at our car, then walked away. He was wearing a white shirt just the way he had the night before. I wondered if my mother was inside the house with him, and if that was what my father had seen when he looked and the reason he’d said what he’d just said. And I decided that she was definitely not inside there, and that she was still at home where we had left her and would find her again if we would just go back.

‘Something’s going to happen,’ my father said, and he tapped his hands, both of them, on the metal window molding. He looked down at the street as if he was thinking. ‘I wish I didn’t feel that way.’

I didn’t say anything for a moment, and then I said, ‘So do I.’

My father breathed out a sigh again. ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘I know that.’ He was quiet for a moment himself while he looked down at the pavement. ‘I just wonder,’ he said, ‘what would have to happen to make me ever leave your mother.’ He looked up at me.

‘Maybe nothing would,’ I said.

‘Nothing I can think of would. That’s right.’ He nodded. ‘Things do have to be able to surprise you,’ he said. ‘This is an odd day, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s an important day.’

‘I guess it is,’ I said.

‘I feel exhausted by it,’ he said. ‘Just exhausted.’

And that is what I felt, too, and he must’ve known it. ‘Maybe we should go back home now,’ I said quietly to him.

‘We should. We certainly should,’ he said. ‘We’ll do that in a minute.’

He stood up then and walked to the back of the car and opened the trunk. I looked back, but I couldn’t see what he was doing and did not hear anything. He didn’t say anything that I could hear. He closed the trunk lid, and when I looked out the side window I saw him. He was hurrying up the concrete steps towards Warren Miller’s white house, where the lights were on and piano music was coming out still. He was carrying something — I didn’t know what, but something I thought he had taken out of the trunk of our car. He held it in both hands in front of him. And I had the feeling I have heard about since then that comes with disaster, the feeling of seeing things from a long way away, as if you were looking at them through a telescope backward, but they are right in front of you, only you are fixed there and helpless. It makes you feel cold, and then it makes you feel warm, as if what you’re afraid of is not going to happen, only then it does and you are all the more unprepared to see it and have it happen to you.

What I saw was my father coming to the top of the steps and moving onto the little porch that ran partway along the front of the house. He turned and walked to the very end of the porch, right across in front of the window. I could hear his feet on the porch boards. I heard the faint sound of something being poured out of a bottle. And then I knew what he was doing, or trying to do. The music inside Warren Miller’s house stopped. And it was quiet except for the sound of my father’s boots and the noise of pouring out of a gallon jug, which is what he was holding. He was pouring whatever it was — the gasoline or the kerosene he had bought — out onto the house where the porch boards met the front wall. And I wanted to stop him, but he was moving fast, and I couldn’t move fast enough in the car, just couldn’t seem to work my hands fast or make a noise that would get his attention so I could tell him to stop what he was doing. I saw his silhouette as it passed in front of the window. Then the porch light came on and Warren Miller opened the door just as my father had gotten almost even with it. Warren stepped out onto the lighted porch — I saw his limp. He and my father were standing there together, my father holding the glass gallon jug of gasoline, and Warren holding nothing. It was a strange thing to see. And I thought for an instant that things would be all right, that Warren Miller would take hold of matters, which I knew he could do, and that my father would abandon whatever his plans were — to burn down Warren Miller’s house or to throw his own life and mine and my mother’s away as if they didn’t matter and could just as easily be given up.

‘What’s going on out here, Jerry?’ Warren Miller said, not very loudly. He took a step closer to my father as if he wanted to see better what was happening. And he must’ve smelled gasoline, because he took a step back. Gasoline must’ve been everywhere.

My father stood up straight and said something I could not exactly hear, although it sounded like he said ‘hat on, hat on,’ the same words twice. Then my father squatted down very quickly, exactly in front of Warren Miller, just as if he was about to tie his boot lace. But what he did was strike a match. And I heard Warren say, ‘What in the world, Jerry!’

And then the porch was on fire all around them. The bottle my father was holding was on fire inside and out; the boards where my father and Warren were standing were all on fire. A strip of blue and yellow flame moved in an almost lazy way back to the front wall of the house and then down along the porch to the end, and began to go up the wood siding where my father had first splashed gasoline. The house looked all on fire to me then, or at least the front of it did. I began to move myself out of the car in a hurry, because my father’s boots and the bottoms of his pants were on fire, and he was trying to hit it all out with his hands, and seemed frantic and was jumping.

Warren Miller simply disappeared. I didn’t see him go, but he was gone the instant the flames started. I guessed he was calling for someone to come and help. And my father was left on the front porch alone, trying to keep himself from burning up in the fire he himself had started by some act of jealousy or anger or just insanity — all of which seemed suddenly far in the past and out of any proportion to what was going on.

‘I’m on fire here, Joe,’ my father called out from the porch as I ran up the concrete steps toward him.

‘I know it,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean to do this. I certainly didn’t.’ He seemed both excited and calm at once, even though one of his boots was on fire. He had put out the other boot and the bottom of his pants leg with his hands. And he had moved from the place where he’d set fire to the edge of the porch, so that he was sitting with one leg over the side and the other one, the one with the boot on fire, beside him, and he was hitting it with his bare hand, not very hard but trying to put out the flame. Behind him, the porch was on fire. I could smell it burning and smoking. I could see the wood front of the house in flames, and feel the heat from it on the air.

I took off my jacket when I got to my father, and I put it over his boot foot where it was burning, and I held it down hard and put my arms around it to close out the flames.

‘I can’t really see myself now,’ my father said. ‘That’s good.’ He did not seem excited anymore. His face was very pale, and both his hands looked black as though they’d been burned. He placed them in his lap, and I thought that maybe he didn’t know what he had just done, or that he had burned himself and could not feel it. ‘Your mother’s not in there,’ he said to me very calmly. ‘Don’t worry. I established that.’ Light snow was beginning to collect on both of us.

‘Why did you light this?’ I said, holding on to his foot.

‘To get things back on track, I guess,’ he said, looking down at his hands in his lap. He raised them a little for some reason, then put them back down. Far away I heard a siren begin. Someone had called the fire department about this. ‘My hands don’t hurt,’ my father said.

‘Good,’ I said. And I let go of his foot and pulled my jacket from on top of it. It looked fine. It did not look like it had been burning even though I could smell the leather and the gasoline that had soaked it. ‘Do you want to get in the car,’ I asked, because that is what I wanted.

‘No,’ he said, ‘That’s not the right thing to do now.’ He turned and looked at the house behind him. There were still flames on the porch and up the boards of the front wall. The bottle he’d had with him had broken. But the fire was dying off from the damp wood and was smoking more than burning, and it did not look to me like the house would burn much more, and would not burn down as I had thought at first. ‘This is all unnecessary,’ my father said, when he turned around to me. ‘Uncalled for. Your mother doesn’t trust me. That’s all. This whole thing is a matter of trust.’ He shook his head and wiggled all ten fingers in his lap as though he was trying to feel them but couldn’t, and it made him nervous, and he wanted to do something to feel them again. They were related in his mind to something important.

Warren Miller came out of the front door of his house in a hurry then. He had put on the coat that went with his suit pants, and he had a woman with him, a tall, slender woman with a long, pale face, who had on a man’s wool overcoat and silver high-heeled shoes. I recognized the shoes as the ones in Warren’s closet. He was moving her in a hurry, with his big limp, down the wooden front steps past where my father and I were, and out onto the driveway away from the house, which he probably thought was burning down but wasn’t. He had his hand in the middle of her back. When he got her out to the sidewalk at the end of the driveway, he turned and he looked at us and at the house which still had some blue flames flickering and smoking on the outside walls, but which was mostly not on fire anymore. People up and down the street had come out of their houses and into their yards, including the two older people from next door, who I recognized and who went across the street to watch from the yard there. I could hear someone, a woman’s voice, yelling, ‘Come see this. You won’t believe it. Oh, my Lord.’ I began to hear sirens closer and the engines of the pumper truck as it came across the bridge with a bell ringing. And I stood there beside my father, waiting to see what would happen.

‘This will turn out better than it seems,’ my father said. He was looking around. He must’ve been amazed at what he’d done, at all the people who were looking at him and at me.

‘It’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘Not that much happened.’

‘I wish it was all right now,’ he said. ‘I wish.’

Warren said something to the tall woman in the man’s coat. I thought it was his coat, though it was not the one my mother had worn. The woman said something to him and looked at my father and me and shook her head. Then Warren Miller began limping toward us, up onto the grass of his own yard in the melting snow. We were just waiting for him, I guess, and for something to happen to us — for the police or the fire department to come, or whatever would happen officially. My father had decided to stay where he was and to take what was coming to him. He had no place to go. This must’ve seemed as good as any other place.

‘You’re a goddamned drunk, aren’t you?’ Warren Miller said, before he even got to us, while he was still limping across his yard. He was mad. I saw that. His voice seemed deeper than it had when I was in his house the night before. His face was pale and damp. ‘God damn it, Jerry,’ he said. ‘You’re all drunked up, and you’ve ruined my house.’

My father didn’t say anything to answer. I don’t know what he could’ve said. But when Warren Miller got to where we were — my father sitting on the edge of the porch and me beside him — he grabbed my father by his shirt front, just grabbed up the front of it, and hit him in the face with his fist, hit him so hard my father rocked backward. Though he didn’t go far back because Warren kept hold of him. Warren pulled his fist back to hit my father in the face again, but I reached up and put my hands over my father’s face, and said very loudly, ‘Don’t do that. Don’t do it again.’

And Warren Miller turned loose of his shirt instantly and put both his hands into his coat pockets. Though he didn’t leave, he stayed where he was, did not even move back a step. His glasses looked dirty and fogged up, and his face was wet and so was his suit coat. He was breathing hard. I looked out where people were standing in the street. Someone there was pointing at us or at Warren Miller, who had hit my father. I saw a boy running across the yards to get to a place where he could see better. I heard sirens coming, and I could taste smoke.

‘God damn it, you have a son here, Jerry,’ Warren Miller said. ‘I don’t know why you’d do a thing like this.’ He was staring at my father, who was blinking his eyes. He wasn’t bleeding and there were no marks on his face where Warren had hit him, but he must’ve been dizzy or sick from it. I wanted to tell Warren to leave, that we were finished, but it was his house we were sitting in front of.

‘Who’s that?’ my father said. He was looking at the woman waiting out on the sidewalk in the long coat and the silver shoes.

‘What do you mean?’ Warren Miller said. He seemed astonished. ‘That’s none of your business who that is. It’s not your wife.’ He was still angry, I could feel it just being beside him. ‘I’ve got a pistol inside there, Jerry,’ he said. ‘I could shoot you and nobody’d say anything. They’d probably be glad.’

‘I know that,’ my father said, though I was shocked to hear that.

‘How old are you, for God’s sake?’ Warren Miller said.

‘Thirty-nine,’ my father said.

‘Weren’t you a college man? Didn’t you attend a college?’ Warren Miller said.

‘Yes,’ my father said.

Warren Miller turned and looked out in the front yard then. Some cars had stopped and the fire truck was blowing its horn to clear a way down the street. But the fire had put itself out by then. The snow had done it, and there wasn’t any need to have firemen come.

Warren Miller looked at me, his hands still in his pockets. His blue eyes were wide behind his glasses. ‘I knew you were in the house today,’ he said. ‘I could’ve broken in there, but I didn’t want this to get out of hand.’ He shook his head. ‘I ought to beat the hell out of you right now.’ Then he looked at my father again. I think he was trying to decide what to do, and didn’t exactly know what the right thing was. It was a peculiar moment for all of us. ‘You should’ve known about this, Jerry,’ Warren Miller said. ‘God damn you. You can’t stop these things. You can’t go off from home and expect people to just stay put. You can’t blame anybody but yourself. You’re a fool is what you are. And that’s all you are.’

‘Maybe so,’ my father said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He was staring down. Out in the town I could hear other sirens, ones that had nothing to do with us, but with other people in town who were afraid of fires starting.

‘She was throwing things up to see where they’d land,’ Warren Miller said. ‘It was over before you even knew about it. At least as far as I was concerned.’ He turned and looked at the street again.

Headlights from the fire trucks lit the pavement. I could hear the big engines throbbing. In the yard across the street a man was using a hose to wet his roof. Two firemen were walking out of the dark, wearing their big firemen’s hats and coats and boots and holding fire extinguisher cans and flashlights. The flames were all out on the house, now. Some neighbors were talking to the firemen who were on the truck. Someone laughed out loud.

‘What did you think?’ Warren Miller said to my father, who was sitting with his burned hands in his lap, his face beginning to swell from where he’d been punched. ‘Don’t you think this is a pretty big mistake? What do you think all these people think of you? A house-burner like this. In front of his own son. I’d be ashamed.’

‘Maybe they think it was important to me,’ my father said. He wiped his hands over his damp face then, and took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I could hear it go out.

‘They think nothing’s important to you,’ Warren said loudly. ‘They think you wanted to commit suicide, that’s all. They feel sorry for you. You’re out of your mind.’

He turned around and limped out into the front yard where snow was beginning to frost up on the damp grass, and the firemen were halfway up toward the house, pointing their flashlights in front of them and smiling and beginning to talk. They seemed to know Warren Miller. Warren Miller knew people. And we, my father and I, and my mother, didn’t know anyone. We were alone there in Great Falls. Strangers. We only had ourselves to answer for us if things went bad and turned against us as they had done at that moment.

In the end, not very much happened — not what you would expect to happen when one man sets another man’s house on fire and gets caught doing it in front of a street filled with people and at a time when they are afraid of fires. People have been hanged for such a thing as that in Montana.

The two firemen who Warren Miller knew came up and looked at where the fire had burned the porch and around the side of the house. They did not put water on anything, and they didn’t talk to my father or me, though Warren told them that there had been a misunderstanding between himself and my father. Both firemen looked at us then, but just briefly. And then Warren Miller went back down to the street and sat in the back of the chief’s red car. They talked there while we waited. I saw that Warren signed something. The neighbors began to drift away back inside, and the man who had been hosing his house quit and disappeared. The fire trucks left, and the tall woman who had come out of the house with Warren got cold and went and sat in the Oldsmobile and started it to get the heater going. We were the only ones left outside, still sitting on the lighted porch in the cold snowy night. I could smell the smell of burned wood.

My father did not say anything while we waited. He watched the chief’s car, which is what I did, too. Though after a while, maybe fifteen minutes, Warren Miller climbed out of the chief’s car, walked down the sidewalk in front of his own house and up the driveway, where he got in his car, the one he’d been in with my mother and where the woman was waiting on him, and they backed out and drove away down Prospect Street into the night. I didn’t know where they were going, though I never saw him again in my life.

It was then that my father said, very calmly, ‘They’re probably going to arrest me. A fireman can arrest you, too. They’re qualified. I’m sorry about all of this.’

One of the two firemen got out of the chief’s car then. He was the older of the two who had come up and looked at the house. He was smoking a cigarette and he threw it in the grass as he walked up on the yard to where we were still sitting on the edge of the porch. We both knew not to leave, though no one had said that.

‘This is a misunderstanding up here, is what I’ve been told,’ the fireman said to my father when he was close enough. He looked at my father once and then looked past him at the damaged house where the fronts of most of the boards had been burned black. He did not look at me. He was a tall man, in his sixties. He had on a heavy black asbestos coat and rubber boots, and no hat on. I had seen him before, but I did not remember where.

‘I guess it could’ve been,’ my father said, calmly.

‘It’s your lucky day today,’ the fireman said. He looked at my father again quickly. He was just standing there in front of us, talking. ‘This man who lives here stood up for you. I wouldn’t have myself. I know what you did, and I know what it’s about.’

‘Okay,’ my father said. The fireman looked away again. I knew he hated the thought of both of us, and that it embarrassed him and embarrassed my father, too.

‘You ought to get killed for doing a thing like this,’ the fireman said. ‘I’d kill you if I caught you.’

‘You don’t need to say that. It’s right,’ my father said.

‘Your son’s seen plenty now.’ The fireman looked at me for the first time. He stepped toward me and put his big hand on my shoulder. ‘He won’t forget you,’ he said to my father, then he squeezed my shoulder very hard.

‘No, he won’t,’ my father said.

The fireman suddenly laughed out loud, ‘Hah,’ and shook his head. It was a strange thing to do. I almost felt myself smile, though I didn’t want to. And I didn’t. ‘You can’t choose who your old man is,’ he said to me. He was smiling, his hand still on my shoulder, as if we knew a joke together. ‘Mine was a son-of-a-bitch. A soapstone son-of-a-bitch.’

‘That’s too bad,’ my father said.

‘Come down to the fire station next week, son,’ the fireman said to me. ‘I’ll show you how things work.’ He looked at my father again. ‘Your wife’s probably worried about you, bud,’ he said. ‘Take your son home where he belongs.’

‘All right,’ my father said. ‘That’s a good idea.’

‘Your old man ought to be in jail, son,’ the fireman said, ‘but he’s not.’ Then he walked away, back across the yard and down the street to where his red car was and where the younger fireman sat in the driver’s seat waiting. They turned around in the street — just for that moment turning their flashing light on, then switching it off — and drove away.

Across the street a woman stood at her front door watching the two of us — my father and me. She said something to someone who was behind her, someone out of sight inside the house. I could only see her head turn and her lips move, but I couldn’t hear any words.

‘People think they live in eternity, don’t they?’ my father said. Something about the woman across the street made him say that. I don’t know what it was. ‘Everything just goes on forever. Nothing’s final.’ He stood up then. And he seemed stiff, as though he’d been hurt, though he hadn’t been. He stood up straighter, looking out over the houses across the street toward town. A light went off in the house across the street. ‘Wouldn’t that be gratifying,’ he said.

‘I guess so,’ I said. And I stood up, too.

‘This won’t stay important forever, Joe,’ my father said. ‘You’ll forget most of it. I won’t, but you will. I wouldn’t even blame you if you hated me, right now.’

‘I don’t,’ I said. And I didn’t hate him. Not at all. I could not see him very clearly then, but he was my father. Nothing had changed as far as that was concerned. I loved him in spite of it all.

‘You can get carried away with how things were once, and not how you need to make them better,’ my father said. ‘Don’t do that.’ He began to walk in a stiff gait to our car. It was parked where it had been the whole time, on the street in front of Warren Miller’s house. ‘That’s my one piece of good advice to you,’ he said. I heard him take a deep breath and let it out. Far off on another street I heard a siren begin again, and I thought there must be another fire going. And I started after my father, across the yard where it was not snowing anymore. I knew he was not even thinking about me at that moment, but about some other problem I did not figure in. Though I wondered where we would go next, and where I would spend the night, and what would happen to me tomorrow and the day after that. I must’ve believed that I lived in eternity myself then, that I had no final answers and none were being asked of me. And, in fact, even while I walked away from Warren Miller’s house that night in the cold October air, everything that had just happened was beginning already to fade from my thinking, just as my father said it would. I felt calm and I began to believe that things would not turn out so badly after all. At least I thought they probably would not turn out that way for me.