Wildlife

  ‘I need to have a talk with you, Jerry,’ Clarence Snow said. He glanced at me and sniffed his nose.

  ‘That’s fine,’ my father said. ‘Can it wait till tomorrow?’

  ‘No it can’t,’ Clarence Snow said. ‘Would you come up to the office?’

  ‘I certainly will,’ my father said. He had his golf shoes off and he raised one foot and rubbed it, then squeezed his toes down. ‘The tools of ignorance,’ he said, and smiled at me.

  ‘This won’t take much time,’ Clarence Snow said. Then he walked out the front door, leaving my father and me alone in the lighted shop.

  My father sat back in his folding chair, stretched his legs in front of him, and wiggled his toes in his yellow socks. ‘He’ll fire me,’ he said. ‘That’s what this’ll be.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’ I said. And it shocked me.

  ‘You don’t know about these things, son,’ my father said. ‘I’ve been fired before. These things have a feel to them.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe he thinks I fucked his wife,’ my father said. I hadn’t heard him say that kind of thing before, and it shocked me, too. He was staring out the window into the dark. ‘Of course, I don’t know if he has a wife.’ My father began putting on his street shoes, which were black loafers, shiny and new and thick-soled. ‘Maybe I won some money from one of his friends. He doesn’t have to have a reason.’ He slid the white shoes under the chair and stood up. ‘Wait in here,’ he said. And I knew he was mad, but did not want me to know he was. He liked to make you believe everything was fine and for everybody to be happy if they could be. ‘Is that okay?’ he said.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said.

  ‘Think about some pretty girls while I’m gone,’ he said, and smiled at me.

  Then he walked, almost strolling, out of the little pro shop and up toward the clubhouse, leaving me by myself with the racks of silver golf clubs and new leather bags and shoes and boxes of balls–all the other tools of my father’s trade, still and silent around me like treasures.

  When my father came back in twenty minutes he was walking faster than when he’d left. He had a piece of yellow paper stuck up in his shirt pocket, and his face looked tight. I was sitting on the chair Clarence Snow had sat on. My father picked up his white shoes off the green carpet, put them under his arm, then walked to the cash register and began taking money out of the trays.

  ‘We should go,’ he said in a soft voice. He was putting money in his pants pocket.

  ‘Did he fire you,’ I asked.

  ‘Yes he did.’ He stood still for a moment behind the open cash register as if the words sounded strange to him, or had other meanings. He looked like a boy my own age doing something he shouldn’t be doing and trying to do it casually. Though I thought maybe Clarence Snow had told him to clean out the cash register before he left and all that money was his to keep. ‘Too much of a good living, I guess,’ he said. Then he said, ‘Look around here, Joe. See if you see anything you want.’ He looked around at the clubs and the leather golf bags and shoes, the sweaters and clothes in glass cases. All things that cost a lot of money, things my father liked. ‘Just take it,’ he said. ‘It’s yours.’

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ I said.

  My father looked at me from behind the cash register. ‘You don’t want anything? All this expensive stuff?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve got good character, that’s your problem. Not that it’s much of a problem.’ He closed the cash register drawer. ‘Bad luck’s got a sour taste, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ I said.

  ‘Do you want to know what he said to me?’ My father leaned on the glass countertop with his palms down. He smiled at me, as if he thought it was funny.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘He said he didn’t require an answer from me, but he thought I was stealing things. Some yokel lost a wallet out on the course, and they couldn’t figure anybody else who could do it. So I was elected.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not a stealer. Do you know it? That’s not me.’

  ‘I know it,’ I said. And I didn’t think he was. I thought I was more likely to be a stealer than he was, and I wasn’t one either.

  ‘I was too well liked out here, that’s my problem,’ he said. ‘If you help people they don’t like you for it. They’re like Mormons.’

  ‘I guess so,’ I said.

  ‘When you get older,’ my father said. And then he seemed to stop what he was about to say. ‘If you want to know the truth don’t listen to what people tell you,’ was all he said.

  He walked around the cash register, holding his white shoes, his pants pockets full of money. ‘Let’s go now,’ he said. He turned off the light when he got to the door, held it open for me, and we walked out into the warm summer night.

  When we’d driven back across the river into Great Falls and up Central, my father stopped at the grocery a block from our house, went in and bought a can of beer and came back and sat in the car seat with the door open. It had become cooler with the sun gone and felt like a fall night, although it was dry and the sky was light blue and full of stars. I could smell beer on my father’s breath and knew he was thinking about the conversation he would have with my mother when we got home, and what that would be like.

  ‘Do you know what happens,’ he said, ‘when the very thing you wanted least to happen happens to you?’ We were sitting in the glow of the little grocery store. Traffic was moving behind us along Central Avenue, people going home from work, people with things they liked to do on their minds, things they looked forward to.

  ‘No,’ I said. I was thinking about throwing the javelin at that moment, a high arching throw into clear air, coming down like an arrow, and of my father throwing it when he was my age.

  ‘Nothing at all does,’ he said, and he was quiet for several seconds. He raised his knees and held his beer can with both hands. ‘We should probably go on a crime spree. Rob this store or something. Bring everything down on top of us.’

  ‘I don’t want to do that,’ I said.

  ‘I’m probably a fool,’ my father said, and shook his beer can until the beer fizzed softly inside. ‘It’s just hard to see my opportunities right this minute.’ He didn’t say anything else for a while. ‘Do you love your dad?’ he said in a normal voice, after some time had passed.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Do you think I’ll take good care of you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so.’

  ‘I will,’ he said.

  My father shut the car door and sat a moment looking out the windshield at the grocery, where people were inside moving back and forth behind the plate-glass windows. ‘Choices don’t always feel exactly like choices,’ he said. He started the car then, and he put his hand on my hand just like you would on a girl’s. ‘Don’t be worried about things,’ he said. ‘I feel calm now.’

  ‘I’m not worried,’ I said. And I wasn’t, because I thought things would be fine. And even though I was wrong, it is still not so bad a way to set your mind toward the unknown just when you are coming into the face of it.

  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 co
me 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.