Rock Springs

  “Lying is it, then,” she said. “That’s shameful. You lied because you’re ashamed. There isn’t any out to this. It’s a game, and you lost it.”

  “You’re not ashamed of anything, are you?”

  “Yes I am,” she said. “I’m ashamed of leaving home without saying anything to anybody. And of spending the night with Sherman at that motel. That’s just two days of things. I’ll give you a second chance. Are you ashamed of being out here with me—whatever kind of person I am? That’s easy, isn’t it?”

  “I haven’t done anything to you I’m ashamed of,” I said, though I wanted to think of something I might be ashamed of—that I’d hurt someone or hated them or been glad a terrible thing had happened. It seemed wrong to know nothing about that. I looked at Claude, who was throwing his line onto the current, his bobber catching the sluice and riding it. In forty-five minutes we would lose daylight, and it would be colder. After that we’d take Lucy back to the motel for Claude’s father, if he remembered. My own father would never even know I had been here, wouldn’t know about this day. I felt on my own, which was not so unusual. “I was glad when my mother left,” I said.

  “Why?” Lucy said.

  “We didn’t need her. She didn’t need us, either.” Neither of those things was true, but I could say them, and it didn’t bother me to hear them.

  “Where is she now?” Lucy said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t care.”

  Though just from her voice then I could tell this didn’t matter to her. Shame didn’t mean any more to her than some other way you could feel on a day—like feeling tired or cold or crying. It went away, finally. And I thought that I would like to feel that way about shame if I could.

  Lucy took her sunglasses off. She reached over and put her hands on my arm and kissed my arm above the wrist. It was a strange thing for her to do. “What he said about your parents was a lie,” she said. “It was too harsh. If they’re happy, you’ll be the same way. I bet my parents are happy I’m gone. I don’t even blame them.” I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know what kind of people they could’ve been—some man who’d gone across the border to stay out of the war. “Why don’t you kiss me?” Lucy said. “Just for a minute?”

  I looked at Claude. I saw he had another fish on but wasn’t yelling about it. He was just pulling it in.

  “He can see us,” she said. “I don’t care. Let him.” She pushed her face up into my face and kissed me. She kissed me hard and opened her mouth too wide and put her tongue in mine, then pushed me on the grass and onto her stockings and her shoes. “Just do this,” she said. “Kiss me back. Kiss me all you want to. I like that.”

  And I kissed her, put both my arms around her and felt her skinny back and her sides and up to her breasts and her face and her hair, and held her on top of me, pushing against me until my heart beat hard, and I thought my breath would stop. “You boys,” she whispered to me, “I love you boys. I wish 1 was staying with you tonight. You’re so wonderful.”

  But I knew that wasn’t what she meant. It was just a thing to say, and nothing was wrong with it at all. “You’re wonderful,” I said. “I love you.”

  “You’re drunk,” I heard Claude call out. “You’re both fuck drunk.”

  I was on my back and my mouth was dry. Lucy pulled away from me and looked at him. “Don’t act jealously,” she said, then reached for her can of beer and took a drink.

  “I’m down here fishing,” Claude said. “Come look at this. It’s a great fish.”

  “Let’s let him have something,” Lucy said and stood up, though I didn’t want her to leave but to kiss me again, to stay. But she got up and started down barefoot to where Claude was kneeling in the grass. “Let’s see your poor fish,” she said.

  Claude had another whitefish in the grass. The one I’d killed was dry and lying beside it, and the second one was smaller, but it was bright and bending in the grass. Claude had his hand on it and his spring-knife ready to pry out the hook himself.

  “It’s smaller,” he said, “but it’s prettier. It’s livelier.”

  Lucy looked down at the fish. She said, “That’s a picture of helplessness, I guess, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a whitefish,” Claude said as the fish tried to twist free under his hand. “They’re the best. And it’s helpless. Right. You bet it is,”

  “What a surprise that must be,” Lucy said, watching the fish struggle. “For the fish. Everything just goes crazy at once. I wonder what it thinks.”

  “They don’t. Fish don’t think,” Claude said.

  “Don’t they have little perfect spirits?” Lucy looked at me and smiled. She didn’t care about any of this. I could tell.

  “Not this one,” Claude said.

  He moved his hand around to the top of the fish to make a better grip so he could use his knife, but the fish twisted again, and with its top fin it jabbed Claude’s hand into the meat below his thumb.

  “Look at that!” Lucy said.

  And Claude let the fish go and wrung his hand and flung blood on the fish and on his face and on Lucy. He dropped his knife and squeezed his hand where the fish had cut him, his jaws set tight. “Son of a bitch thing, he said. He put his hand in his mouth and sucked it, then looked at it. The wound was small and narrow, and it had begun to seep blood on his wet skin. “Fucking thing,” Claude said. “Fucking fish is dangerous.” He put his hand back in his mouth and sucked the cut again. He looked at Lucy, who was watching him. And for an instant I thought Claude would do something terrible—say something to her or do something to the fish that would make her turn her head away, something he would later be sorry for. I had seen that in him. He was able to do bad things easily.

  But what he did was take his hand out of his mouth and stick it in the grass and lean hard on it to stop the blood. It might’ve been an Indian way. “Who cares,” he said, and he seemed calm. He pushed his hand harder in the grass. The blood had dried already on his face. The fish was still twisting in the grass, its stiff gills trapping air, its scales growing dry and dull. “This is your fish,” Claude said to Lucy. “Do something with it. I don’t want it.” I knew his hand hurt him by the way he talked so quiedy.

  Lucy looked at the fish, and I thought her body, which I was close to, became relaxed somehow, as if something that had been bothering her or that was hard for her suddenly wasn’t.

  “Okay,” Lucy said. “My fish. Let me have that knife.”

  Claude picked the knife up and handed it to her, the blade forward in the dangerous way. “This is sharp,” he said, and as she reached for it, he jabbed it at her, though she only moved her hand out of the way and did not take a step back. “You think we’re handsome?” Claude said. “Us two?”

  “You’re the most handsome boys I ever saw,” Lucy said, “in this particular light.” She put her hand back out for Claude’s knife. “Let me have that.”

  “We could kill you, right now,” Claude said. “Who’d know about it?”

  Lucy looked at me and back at Claude. “That woman in the motel would probably be the first one. I had a talk with her this morning before what’s-his-name came back to life. Not that it matters.”

  Claude smiled at her. “You plan to kill me when I give you this knife?”

  I could see Lucy’s toes twitching in the grass. “No. I’m going to kill my fish,” she said.

  “Okay,” Claude said, and handed her the knife by the blade. Lucy stepped by him and, without getting down on her knees, leaned over and pushed the knife down straight into the fish Claude had caught—pushed it through in the middle behind the gills that were still working, and on into the ground. Then she pulled the knife back far enough to get it out of the ground, picked the fish up by the handle, and flung it off the blade into Mormon Creek. She looked at Claude in a casual way, then threw his knife out into the deep water, where it hit with hardly a splash and disappeared down among the fish.

  She looked around at me. “There
you go,” she said.

  And Claude was smiling at her because I think he didn’t know what else to do. He was sitting on the ground in his wet shoes, and he wasn’t squeezing his hand anymore. “You’ll do anything, won’t you?” he said.

  “I always commit the wrong sins,” she said. “I thought we’d have fun out here. That must prove something.”

  “I bet you’d fuck a pig in knickers,” Claude said, “you Canada girls.”

  “You want me to take my dress off?” she said. “Is that what you mean? I’ll do that. Who cares. That’s what you said.”

  “Do that, then. I’ll watch it,” Claude said. “George can watch. That’ll be okay.” I thought about kissing her then, sitting on Claude’s jacket in the grass, and I was ready to watch her take her dress off.

  And that’s what she did, with Claude on the ground and me standing close to the side of Mormon Creek. She unbuttoned her green dress front, reached down, crossed her arms, and pulled her dress over her head so that she was only in her loose petticoat. And you could tell from her face that she was occupied by something—I don’t know what. She pulled down the loose straps off her shoulders and let her petticoat drop off of her so that she had on only a pink brassiere and pants that looked like the cotton pants I wore. Her legs and stomach were white and soft and a little fat, and I didn’t think she looked as good as when she’d had her dress on. Not as good as I thought would be the case. There were red marks and scratches on her back and down the backs of her legs, which I thought were the marks Sherman had made on her. I thought of them in the motel in Sunburst, under some blanket together, making noise and rolling and grabbing at each other in the dark.

  And then she took off the rest. The brassiere first and then the cotton pants. Her breasts were small and up-pointed, and her ass was hardly even there. I didn’t look much at the rest of her. Though I could see then—or so I thought at the time—how young she was by how she stood on her pale thin legs, with her thin arms, and how she turned only at the waist and looked at me, so she could be sure I saw her, too. Like a girl. Younger, maybe even than I was, younger than Claude.

  But it did not matter because she was already someone who could be by herself in the world. And neither Claude nor I were anything like that, and we never would be, never if we lived to be old men. Maybe she was born that way, or raised to it or had simply become that in the last two days. But it embarrassed me at that moment—for myself—and I know I looked away from her.

  “What’s next?” she said.

  “What do you think you’re good for now,” Claude said, sitting in the grass, looking up to her. “Everybody thinks they’re good for something. You must think you are. Or are you just good for nothing?” And he surprised me, because I didn’t think he was taunting her. I think he wanted to know the answer—that something about her seemed odd to him, maybe in the way it seemed to me.

  “A lot of this seems a lot alike to me,” she said and sighed. “You can take me back to the motel. I ve had all the fun I’m going to.” She looked around at her clothes on the ground, as if she was trying to decide what to pick up first.

  “You don’t have to act that way,” Claude said. “I’m not mad at you.” And his voice seemed strange to me, some soft voice I hadn’t heard him speak in—almost as if he was worried. “No, no,” he said. “You don’t.” I watched him extend his hand and touch her bare ankle, saw her look at him on the ground. I knew what was going to happen after that, and it did not involve me, and I didn’t feel the need to be there for it. Claude had a serious look on his face, a look that said this was for him now. And I just turned and walked back toward the Buick at the edge of the cottonwoods.

  I heard Lucy say, “You can’t ever read other people’s minds, can you? That’s the trouble.” Then I quit listening to them altogether.

  I will say how all of this turned out because in a way it is surprising, and because it did not turn out badly.

  In the car I didn’t wait a long while for them. They were not there long. I thought I wouldn’t watch them, but I did, from the distance of the car. I happen to think it is what she wanted, though it might seem she wouldn’t have. In any case I don’t think she knew what she wanted from me. What we did, I thought, didn’t matter so much. Not to us, or to anyone. She might’ve been with me instead of Claude, or with Claude’s father, or another man none of us knew. She was pushing everything out. She was just an average girl.

  I turned on the car radio and listened to the news from the Canadian station. Snow and bad weather were on their way again, it said, and I could feel the evening grow colder as it went to dark and the air turned blue. Trout moved against the far willow bank—swirling, deep rises that weren’t like other fish, and created in me a feeling of anticipation high up in my chest. It was that way I had felt early in the day, when we’d driven down to this very place to fish. Though the place now seemed different—the creek, the tree line, the millshed—all in new arrangements, in different light.

  But I did not, as I waited, want to think about only myself. I realized that was all I had ever really done, and that possibly it was all you could ever do, and that it would make you bitter and lonesome and useless. So I tried to think instead about Lucy. But I had no idea where to begin. I thought about my mother, someplace far off—on a flyer, is how my father had described it. He thought she would walk back into our house one day, and that life would start all over. But I was accustomed to the idea that things ended and didn’t start up again—it is not a hard lesson to learn when that is all around you. And I only, at that moment, wondered if she’d ever lied to me, and if so, what about, wondered if she was someplace with a boy like me or Claude Philips. I put a picture in my mind that she was, though I thought it was wrong.

  After a while the two of them walked back up to the car. It was dark and Lucy had her shoes and her stockings and her sack, and Claude had his fishing rod and his one fish he put behind the seat. They were drinking another beer, and for a minute or so they were quiet. But then Lucy said, just in a passing way, straightening her green dress, “I hope you aren’t what you wear.”

  “You are judged by it, though,” I said. Then that tension was over, and we all seemed to know what was happening to us.

  We got in the car and drove around over the wheat prairie roads at night, drove by my house, where it was still dark, then by Claude’s, where there were yellow lights and smoke out the chimney, and we could see figures through the windows. His father’s truck was parked against the house side. Claude honked as we passed, but didn’t stop.

  We drove down into Sunburst, stopped at the Polar Bar, and bought a package of beer. When Claude was inside, Lucy said to me that she hoped to rise in the world someday. She asked me in what situations I would tell her a lie, and I said not any, then she kissed me again while we sat waiting in sight of the dark train yard and the grain elevator, ribboned in its lights, and the empty motel where I had seen her first that day. The sky was growing marbly against the moon, and she said she hated a marble sky. The air in the truck was cold, and I wondered if Sherman was already on his way to town.

  When Claude came back with the beers, we all sat and drank one, and then he said we should drive Lucy to Great Falls, a hundred miles away, and forget all about Sherman. And that is what we did. We drove her there that night, took her to the bus station in the middle of town, where Claude and I gave her all the money we had and what Sherman had given him as the shut-up money. And we left her there, just at midnight, going toward what and where neither of us knew or even talked about.

  On the drive back up along the Great Northern tracks we passed a long train coming north, sparks popping off its brakeshoes and out its journal boxes, the lighted caboose seeming to move alone and unaided through the dark. Snow was beginning to mist in the black air.

  “Sherman wouldn’t have come back.” Claude was watching the train as it raced along beside us. “She wanted to stay with me. She admitted that. I wish I could marry her. I w
ish I was old.”

  “You could be old,” I said, “and it could still be the same way.”

  “Don’t belittle me now,” Claude said. “Don’t do that.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not.”

  “And don’t belittle her.” And I thought Claude was a fool then, and this was how you knew what a fool was—someone who didn’t know what mattered to him in the long run. “I wonder what she’s thinking about,” Claude said, driving.

  “She’s thinking about you,” I said. “Or about your old man.”

  “He could never love a woman like I can,” Claude said and smiled at me. “Never in his life. It’s a shame.”

  “That’s right. He couldn’t,” I said, even though I thought that shame was something else. And I felt my own life, exactly at that instant, begin to go by me—fast and plummeting—almost without my notice.

  Claude raised his fist and held it out like a boxer in the dark of the car. “I’m strong and I’m invincible,” he said. “Nothing’s on my conscience.” I don’t know why he said that. He was just lost in his thinking. He held his fist up in the dark for a long time as we drove on toward north. And I wondered then: what was I good for? What was terrible about me? What was best? Claude and I couldn’t see the world and what would happen to us in it—what we would do, where we would go. How could we? Outside was a place that seemed not even to exist, an empty place you could stay in for a long time and never find a thing you admired or loved or hoped to keep. And we were unnoticeable in it—both of us. Though I did not want to say that to him. We were friends. But when you are older, nothing you did when you were young matters at all. I know that now, though I didn’t know it then. We were simply young.

  Going to the Dogs

  My wife had just gone out West with a groom from the local dog track, and I was waiting around the house for things to clear up, thinking about catching the train to Florida to change my luck. I already had my ticket in my wallet.