“Yes, sir,” I said, though I didn’t.
“My friend, whose name was Buddy Inkster, made him quit, of course. He went straight home and told his mother. And do you know what his mother said?” My father blinked at me and tilted his head inquiringly.
“No, sir.”
“She said, ‘Buddy, you tell that ole man to cut that stuff out!’”
My sister began running her bath water. Even with the fan going I was hot in my clothes. I’d begun sweating under my shirt collar. The bathroom door closed and went locked.
“Do you know what his mother was saying?” My father picked up the shoe-polish lid and carefully squeezed it back on with two fingers. It made a soft click. “Now, of course, if that happened, he’d—I mean the old sawbones—he’d be put in jail and people would be out after him with pitchforks and torches. You know?” I didn’t know. A car honked outside on the street, its motor revved, then it roared away. My father didn’t seem to hear it. “Well, she was saying that Inkster should learn to live with things and go on about his business. Do you understand that?”
“I think so.” It was what I’d thought.
“Bad things can just happen to you,” my father said. “And you live on through them.” He was trying to make his story have an effect on me. He seemed to be saying you can miss important parts of what people do and say, but you still have to rely on yourself to understand them. What I thought he was really telling me, though—not quite using those words—was that something bad might be approaching me, and I needed to figure out my own ways to get through it. He wanted me to be responsible for Berner, too. Which was why he told me and not her, and only proved he didn’t know Berner nearly as well as he didn’t know me.
“Do you and your sister think about what you should do with your lives?” His eyes looked dry and tired. His fingertips were smudged with polish. He was wiping them off finger by finger on his flannel rag. He seemed to be addressing me from a distance now.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“So. What do you think?” he said. “About the future.”
“I want to be a lawyer,” I said, for no reason except that a boy in the chess club said his father was one.
“I wish you could hurry up, then,” he said and appraised his fingernails after his cleaning job on them. Black was still under their edges. “You have to find ways to make everything make sense.” He smiled faintly. “Make a hierarchy. Some things are more important than others. It may not be what you expect.” He turned his gaze out the front window onto SW First. Lutherans were mingling under the trees in the park across from their church. The wedding was letting out. People were fanning themselves with their hats and paper fans, and laughing. My mother was just exiting Mildred Remlinger’s Ford at the curb. In her green-and-pink plaid wool suit, she looked tiny and unhappy. She didn’t say anything back into the car, just closed its door and began walking up toward the front porch. Mildred’s car drove away. “Here comes trouble,” my father said. I expected him to say I mustn’t discuss our conversation with her. He often said that, as if we had significant secrets—which I didn’t think we did. But he didn’t say that. Which made me understand that our conversation had been agreed to by them, though I hadn’t understood what it was really about: them being caught, and what Berner and I would do after.
My father smiled at me his conspirator’s smile. He stood up from the table. “She’s going to have everything all figured out,” he said. “You wait and see. She’s a smart cookie. Smarter than I am by a long way.” He went to open the door for her. Our conversation ended there. We didn’t have another one like it.
Chapter 22
You hear stories about people who’ve committed bad crimes. Suddenly they decide to confess it all, turn themselves in to the authorities, get everything off their conscience—the burden, the harm, the shame, the self-hatred. They make a clean breast of things before going off to jail. As if guilt was the worst thing in the world to them.
I’m willing to say now that guilt has less to do with it than you might think. Rather, the intolerable problem is of everything suddenly being so confused: the clear path back to the past being cluttered and unfollowable; how the person once felt being now completely changed from how he feels today. And time itself: how the hours of the day and night advance so oddly—first fast, then hardly passing at all. Then the future becoming as confused and impenetrable as the past itself. What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed—caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present.
Who wouldn’t want to stop that—if he could? Make the present give way to almost any future at all. Who wouldn’t admit everything just to gain release from the terrible present? I would. Only a saint wouldn’t.
* * *
Another black-and-white police car cruised past our house several times that Saturday. The uniformed driver seemed to take careful notice of our house. Our father went to the front window several times and looked out. “Okay. I see you,” he said more than once. He and our mother had been friendly and talkative to each other the day before. Now, though, they operated around each other in a way I was more used to. Our father seemed to have not enough to do. She, on the other hand, was purposeful. Not much was talked about. I attempted to interest Berner in “the positional concept” and in the “aggressive sacrifice,” which I’d been reading about and demonstrated to her on my bed, with my roll-up board. She said she didn’t feel good and I couldn’t understand because it was about life and wasn’t a game.
Since our mother had come home from seeing Miss Remlinger, she’d gotten busy again in the house. She washed a load of clothes in the tub washer and hung them on the pulley line in the backyard—standing on a wood box to reach the clothespin sack. She cleaned the bathtub—which Berner always left dirty—and swept the front porch where the wind had blown grit into the cracks. She washed the dishes that had been left in the sink the night before. Our father went out in the backyard and sat in one of the lawn chairs and stared at the afternoon sky and practiced the eye exercises he’d learned in the Air Force. After a while he came in and brought the card table out of the hall closet and set it up in the living room and got down a jigsaw puzzle and sat in front of it with the pieces spread across the table top. He liked puzzles and believed they asked a special intelligence. He’d also done several paint-by-numbers pictures over the years, which he’d put briefly on display, then placed in the same closet and never looked at again.
He pulled up a dining room chair for anybody who wanted to collaborate on the puzzle, and began getting the pieces spread out and turned over, and studying them and fitting the obvious ones together like tiny islands. He asked Berner if she wanted to work on it, because it would make her feel better. But she said no. It was the puzzle that formed a painting of Niagara Falls, painted by Frederic E. Church. It showed the great, rushing green water melting over low red rocks and turning white and yellow as it fell into the white-aired chasm. We’d put it together many times, and it naturally made me remember our mother’s photograph of her parents and her, who’d been underneath the falls in a boat. It was our father’s favorite because it was dramatic. It represented the Hudson River School of painting, the box said, which made no sense to me because the box also said it was the Niagara River—not the Hudson. I always wondered if there wasn’t a formula for joining the pieces so you could put the whole puzzle together in an hour or less. Figuring out the picture every time and searching for the right pieces seemed like the hardest way of doing it. Plus, I didn’t know why you’d want to do it more than once. It wasn’t like chess, which could seem the same every time you played, but the number of different moves you could make was endless.
For a while I stood beside our father and pointed out purple-and-blue sky pieces and the parts that were clearly the river. Berner asked our mother if she could be allowed to leave the house and go for a walk, because the fan was bothering her sinuses, but both of them said she couldn’t.
Our mother spent
a good period of time again on the telephone in the hall—something my father pretended not to pay attention to. She finally took the phone on the long cord into their bedroom and closed the door. I could make out her buzzing voice underneath the rattle of the fan. “No, we wouldn’t be doing this under ordinary circumstances, but . . . ,” I heard her say. And “. . . No reason to think that’ll last forever . . .” was something else. These bits of conversation spoken to who I didn’t know made our father, sitting in the living room piecing together Niagara Falls, seem strange to me—as if our mother was his mother, too, and had to look after him as well as us.
After a while I went to my room and lay on my bed. Berner came in and closed the door and announced that, in her view, our parents were crazy. She said that after our mother had finished talking on the telephone she’d come out to the kitchen, and she—Berner—had gone and looked in their room as if she could detect who our mother had been talking to. Our mother’s suitcase was lying open on her twin bed, articles of her clothes already in it. She went out and asked why the suitcase was there, and our mother said we’d soon be taking a trip. She didn’t say to where. Berner asked if our father would be going, and our mother had said he certainly could if he wanted to, but probably he wouldn’t. Berner said this conversation made her feel sick to her stomach and want to throw up—though she didn’t—and after a while it made her want to run away from home and right then get married to Rudy Patterson. I thought I wasn’t going to be invited to go with them on that trip.
At four o’clock our mother went in their bedroom to take a nap. When her door was shut, my father came to my room and looked in, then went to Berner’s door. He wondered if we’d like to take a drive over to the fairgrounds, since he’d read admission was half-price the last afternoon and at night there’d be fireworks. He said there wasn’t any reason not to stick our noses in. He smiled in a way I thought of as mischievous and gave the impression he was putting one over on our mother.
I, of course, did want to go very much. There were important, complicated things to be learned. Experts would be demonstrating in a glass-sided hive where the queen bee lived and how to deal with smoke pots so you didn’t get stung to death—which my father had said and worried me.
Berner said she wasn’t interested. Lying on her bed, she said people in school said only smelly Indians went the last day because they were broke and always drunk. She’d seen enough Indians after the carfuls that had come past our house all week while the two of them couldn’t be bothered to stay around.
Our father had put on his polished cowboy boots and a pair of pressed jeans he wore to the land-sales office—though he hadn’t shaved or combed his hair the way he usually did. He was smiling, but he looked strange again, as if his facial features weren’t fixed on their bones right. Standing in Berner’s doorway he told her he regretted the Indians coming by, but they were pacified now. Once his uncle Cleo had invited him to drive with him down to Birmingham. But he’d had a little girlfriend named Patsy at the time. He told Uncle Cleo he couldn’t go because he had a chance to see Patsy. Then the next month Uncle Cleo got killed at a train crossing where the gate didn’t work, and he never saw Uncle Cleo again and always regretted not going with him.
“I don’t see that was your fault,” Berner said from her bed, where she was filing her fingernails. “Maybe Uncle Cleo should’ve been more careful.” She enjoyed bickering with him and feeling superior.
“No doubt about it,” our father said. “I just thought I could go to Birmingham with Uncle Cleo any ole time. And it turned out I couldn’t.”
Berner said something I couldn’t hear because of the fan. I thought she said, “So are you going to get killed if I don’t go?”
“I hope not,” my father said. “I truly hope that doesn’t happen.” Berner had a mouth—I already said that. My father’s word for her was that she had “hauteur.”
“That’s blackmail,” she said. “I don’t want to be blackmailed.”
“Maybe I’m not saying it right,” our father said.
Then Berner said something else I didn’t make out. But I knew she’d relented by the complaining tone in her voice. I heard the floorboards squeeze in her room. She couldn’t resist him when he focused in on her. Only our mother could. We loved both of them, for what it mattered. This shouldn’t get lost in the telling. We always loved them.
Chapter 23
We drove up third street, along the river, past where Berner and I’d walked and fed the ducks. The sky had come unsettled again and windy, moving smells around. Flat, purple-bottomed clouds slid up out of the south. Whitecaps danced on the river surface and gulls soared in the damp breeze. There’d be a thunderstorm. It had been trying to all day. Fall was starting—our mother had been right.
I was thinking, in the back seat, not about the bee demonstration, but about the tent where the State Police exhibited their weapons for citizens’ inspection. Some chess club members had speculated about the bazooka and the box of hand grenades and the Thompson submachine gun that would be on display there. There’d been conjecture about what uses the police would ever put these weapons to. The thinking revolved around Indians, who were considered a criminal element, and Communists, who plotted against America. I’d looked a third time in my father’s sock drawer to find out if his pistol was there. It wasn’t. I fantasized he’d shot someone (possibly the man Mouse) and disposed of the gun by throwing it in the river.
Berner sat in front and acted sullen about coming with us—which I didn’t appreciate. There was traffic near the fairgrounds entrance. Twice our father looked in the rearview mirror and said, “Okay, who’s that following so close behind us, Dell?” This was a game. I’d look through the rear window, but there wouldn’t be anything. This time, however, I noticed the same black car twice. As we drove along outside the whitewashed fairgrounds fence, I saw the tops of the rides inside—the Ferris wheel, the Zephyr (which had been described to me at school), the curved top of the roller coaster with a train of cars snaking over and shooting down, with people waving and shouting. Music and crowd noise and loudspeaker voices were jumbled in the windy air the way I’d heard them at home—including women’s voices reading out bingo numbers. The wind carried the aroma of sawdust and manure and something sweeter. It excited me to want to hurry inside before the gate shut. My jaw ached from clenching it, and my toes were tingling. Traffic, though, was clogged up by old beaters and rez jalopies full of kids and by people who were clearly Indians, walking single file along the roadside toward the pedestrian entrance.
It was just at that instant—when we were next in line to turn into the big entrance gate—that I found the packet of money. In nervousness, I’d pushed my hand into the crease between the back seat cushions and into the cool space below the seat, and my left hand made contact with something I pulled out at once. It was a packet of U.S. bills bound in a white paper sleeve, on which was stamped the words AGRICULTURAL NATIONAL BANK, CREEKMORE, NORTH DAKOTA. I was astounded. I said “Oh,” loud enough to make my father instantly look at me in the driver’s mirror. I stared right into his eyes, which were holding me prisoner. “What’d you see?” he said. “Did you see something behind us?” His mouth was moving below his eyes, but his voice was separate. I thought he might turn around and look at me—which Berner did. She looked straight at the packet of money, then immediately faced forward. “Did you see the goddamn cops?” my father said.
“No,” I said.
People were honking behind us. We’d come to a complete stop when we were supposed to be turning left into the fairgrounds. Inside the gate, cars were parking on the grass, beyond which were the rides and the midway. A deputy was signaling us to go forward. Other cars were driving out and there was another deputy waving them on. It was a confusion.
“What the hell is it, then?” My father was irritated, glaring into the rearview, and not moving ahead.
“A bee,” I said. “A bee stung me.” It was all I could think of to say.
I stuffed the bills down the front of my jeans. Berner turned around halfway and sneered at me, as if I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to. My heart began pounding. I don’t know why I didn’t say I found a lot of money. What’s it doing in here? Instead, I acted as if I’d stolen the money, or someone had, and I shouldn’t get caught with it, but that it would go away if it was out of sight.
“Goddamn cops,” our father said. “Spoil everything.” He glared again into the mirror, at whoever was behind us. And instead of turning in front of the deputy and driving us into the fairgrounds, he mashed the accelerator and we spurted on down Third without turning. I didn’t know why he was worried about the police.
“Where’re we going?” I said, the white fence hurrying past.
“We’ll go next year,” my father said. “It’s too crowded in there. They’re letting every squaw in. And it’s about to rain.”
“No, it’s not,” I said.
“I thought you liked Indians,” Berner said in her haughty voice.
“I do,” our father said. “Just not today.”
“If not today, when, then?” She said this only to taunt him.
“When I’m good and ready,” he said. And that was the end of the fair.
Chapter 24
We drove down to smelter avenue and Black Eagle. My father’s eyes were fastened to the rearview as if he’d seen something he needed to get away from, which I guessed was the reason we weren’t going to the fair. He pushed his fingers up through his hair and rubbed the back of his neck above his shirt collar. He looked at me because I was boring a hole in him with being angry. We were driving toward the smelter stack and the refinery, which kept its lights on day and night and had gas outlets spewing yellow flames. It stank when you got close to it. Rudy had said his father smelled like the refinery all the time, which was one reason his mother had moved to San Francisco.