Rock Springs (6 page)

“You're leaving,” he yelled at her. “That's why you're packed. Get out. Go on.”

“Jackie has to be at school in the morning,” my mother said in just her normal voice. And without another word to any one of us, she walked out of the floodlamp light carrying
her bag, turned the corner at the front porch steps and disappeared toward the olive trees that ran in rows back into the wheat.

My father looked back at me where I was standing in the gravel, as if he expected to see me go with my mother toward Woody's car. But I hadn't thought about that—though later I would. Later I would think I should have gone with her, and that things between them might've been different. But that isn't how it happened.

“You're sure you're going to get away now, aren't you, mister?” my father said into Woody's face. He was crazy himself, then. Anyone would've been. Everything must have seemed out of hand to him.

“I'd like to,” Woody said. “I'd like to get away from here.”

“And I'd like to think of some way to hurt you,” my father said and blinked his eyes. “I feel helpless about it.” We all heard the door to Woody's car close in the dark. “Do you think that I'm a fool?” my father said.

“No,” Woody said. “I don't think that.”

“Do you think you're important?”

“No,” Woody said. “I'm not.”

My father blinked again. He seemed to be becoming someone else at that moment, someone I didn't know. “Where are you from?”

And Woody closed his eyes. He breathed in, then out, a long sigh. It was as if this was somehow the hardest part, something he hadn't expected to be asked to say.

“Chicago,” Woody said. “A suburb of there.”

“Are your parents alive?” my father said, all the time with his blue magnum pistol pushed under Woody's chin.

“Yes,” Woody said. “Yessir.”

“That's too bad,” my father said. “Too bad they have to know what you are. I'm sure you stopped meaning anything
to them a long time ago. I'm sure they both wish you were dead. You didn't know that. But I know it. I can't help them out, though. Somebody else'll have to kill you. I don't want to have to think about you anymore. I guess that's it.”

My father brought the gun down to his side and stood looking at Woody. He did not back away, just stood, waiting for what I don't know to happen. Woody stood a moment, then he cut his eyes at me uncomfortably. And I know that I looked down. That's all I could do. Though I remember wondering if Woody's heart was broken and what any of this meant to him. Not to me, or my mother, or my father. But to him, since he seemed to be the one left out somehow, the one who would be lonely soon, the one who had done something he would someday wish he hadn't and would have no one to tell him that it was all right, that they forgave him, that these things happen in the world.

Woody took a step back, looked at my father and at me again as if he intended to speak, then stepped aside and walked away toward the front of our house, where the wind chime made a noise in the new cold air.

My father looked at me, his big pistol in his hand. “Does this seem stupid to you?” he said. “All this? Yelling and threatening and going nuts? I wouldn't blame you if it did. You shouldn't even see this. I'm sorry. I don't know what to do now.”

“It'll be all right,” I said. And I walked out to the road. Woody's car started up behind the olive trees. I stood and watched it back out, its red taillights clouded by exhaust. I could see their two heads inside, with the headlights shining behind them. When they got into the road, Woody touched his brakes, and for a moment I could see that they were talking, their heads turned toward each other, nodding. Woody's head and my mother's. They sat that way for a few seconds, then drove slowly off. And I wondered what they had
to say to each other, something important enough that they had to stop right at that moment and say it. Did she say,
I love you?
Did she say,
This is not what I expected to happen?
Did she say,
This is what I've wanted all along?
And did he say,
I'm sorry for all this
, or
I'm glad
, or
None of this matters to me?
These are not the kinds of things you can know if you were not there. And I was not there and did not want to be. It did not seem like I should be there. I heard the door slam when my father went inside, and I turned back from the road where I could still see their taillights disappearing, and went back into the house where I was to be alone with my father.

T
hings seldom end in one event. In the morning I went to school on the bus as usual, and my father drove in to the air base in his car. We had not said very much about all that had happened. Harsh words, in a sense, are all alike. You can make them up yourself and be right. I think we both believed that we were in a fog we couldn't see through yet, though in a while, maybe not even a long while, we would see lights and know something.

In my third-period class that day a messenger brought a note for me that said I was excused from school at noon, and I should meet my mother at a motel down 10th Avenue South—a place not so far from my school—and we would eat lunch together.

It was a gray day in Great Falls that day. The leaves were off the trees and the mountains to the east of town were obscured by a low sky. The night before had been cold and clear, but today it seemed as if it would rain. It was the beginning of winter in earnest. In a few days there would be snow everywhere.

The motel where my mother was staying was called the
Tropicana, and was beside the city golf course. There was a neon parrot on the sign out front, and the cabins made a U shape behind a little white office building. Only a couple of cars were parked in front of cabins, and no car was in front of my mother's cabin. I wondered if Woody would be here, or if he was at the air base. I wondered if my father would see him there, and what they would say.

I walked back to cabin 9. The door was open, though a
DO NOT DISTURB
sign was hung on the knob outside. I looked through the screen and saw my mother sitting on the bed alone. The television was on, but she was looking at me. She was wearing the powder-blue dress she had had on the night before. She was smiling at me, and I liked the way she looked at that moment, through the screen, in shadows. Her features did not seem as sharp as they had before. She looked comfortable where she was, and I felt like we were going to get along, no matter what had happened, and that I wasn't mad at her—that I had never been mad at her.

She sat forward and turned the television off. “Come in, Jackie,” she said, and I opened the screen door and came inside. “It's the height of grandeur in here, isn't it?” My mother looked around the room. Her suitcase was open on the floor by the bathroom door, which I could see through and out the window onto the golf course, where three men were playing under the milky sky. “Privacy can be a burden, sometimes,” she said, and reached down and put on her high-heeled shoes. “I didn't sleep very well last night, did you?”

“No,” I said, though I had slept all right. I wanted to ask her where Woody was, but it occurred to me at that moment that he was gone now and wouldn't be back, that she wasn't thinking in terms of him and didn't care where he was or ever would be.

“I'd like a nice compliment from you,” she said. “Do you have one of those to spend?”

“Yes,” I said. “I'm glad to see you.”

“That's a nice one,” she said and nodded. She had both her shoes on now. “Would you like to go have lunch? We can walk across the street to the cafeteria. You can get hot food.”

“No,” I said. “I'm not really hungry now.”

“That's okay,” she said and smiled at me again. And, as I said before, I liked the way she looked. She looked pretty in a way I didn't remember seeing her, as if something that had had a hold on her had let her go, and she could be different about things. Even about me.

“Sometimes, you know,” she said, “I'll think about something I did. Just anything. Years ago in Idaho, or last week, even. And it's as if I'd read it. Like a story. Isn't that strange?”

“Yes,” I said. And it did seem strange to me because I was certain then what the difference was between what had happened and what hadn't, and knew I always would be.

“Sometimes,” she said, and she folded her hands in her lap and stared out the little side window of her cabin at the parking lot and the curving row of other cabins. “Sometimes I even have a moment when I completely forget what life's like. Just altogether.” She smiled. “That's not so bad, finally. Maybe it's a disease I have. Do you think I'm just sick and I'll get well?”

“No. I don't know,” I said. “Maybe. I hope so.” I looked out the bathroom window and saw the three men walking down the golf course fairway carrying golf clubs.

“I'm not very good at sharing things right now,” my mother said. “I'm sorry.” She cleared her throat, and then she didn't say anything for almost a minute while I stood there. “I
will
answer anything you'd like me to answer, though. Just ask me anything, and I'll answer it the truth, whether I want to or not. Okay? I will. You don't even have to trust me. That's not a big issue with us. We're both grown-ups now.”

And I said, “Were you ever married before?”

My mother looked at me strangely. Her eyes got small, and for a moment she looked the way I was used to seeing her—sharp-faced, her mouth set and taut. “No,” she said. “Who told you that? That isn't true. I never was. Did Jack say that to you? Did your father say that? That's an awful thing to say. I haven't been that bad.”

“He didn't say that,” I said.

“Oh, of course he did,” my mother said. “He doesn't know just to let things go when they're bad enough.”

“I wanted to know that,” I said. “I just thought about it. It doesn't matter.”

“No, it doesn't,” my mother said. “I could've been married eight times. I'm just sorry he said that to you. He's not generous sometimes.”

“He didn't say that,” I said. But I'd said it enough, and I didn't care if she believed me or didn't. It was true that trust was not a big issue between us then. And in any event, I know now that the whole truth of anything is an idea that stops existing finally.

“Is that all you want to know, then?” my mother said. She seemed mad, but not at me, I didn't think. Just at things in general. And I sympathized with her. “Your life's your own business, Jackie,” she said. “Sometimes it scares you to death it's so much your own business. You just want to run.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“I'd like a less domestic life, is all.” She looked at me, but I didn't say anything. I didn't see what she meant by that, though I knew there was nothing I could say to change the way her life would be from then on. And I kept quiet.

In a while we walked across 10th Avenue and ate lunch in the cafeteria. When she paid for the meal I saw that she had my father's silver-dollar money clip in her purse and that there was money in it. And I understood that he had been to see her
already that day, and no one cared if I knew it. We were all of us on our own in this.

When we walked out onto the street, it was colder and the wind was blowing. Car exhausts were visible and some drivers had their lights on, though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon. My mother had called a taxi, and we stood and waited for it. I didn't know where she was going, but I wasn't going with her.

“Your father won't let me come back,” she said, standing on the curb. It was just a fact to her, not that she hoped I would talk to him or stand up for her or take her part. But I did wish then that I had never let her go the night before. Things can be fixed by staying; but to go out into the night and not come back hazards life, and everything can get out of hand.

My mother's taxi came. She kissed me and hugged me very hard, then got inside the cab in her powder-blue dress and high heels and her car coat. I smelled her perfume on my cheeks as I stood watching her. “I used to be afraid of more things than I am now,” she said, looking up at me, and smiled. “I've got a knot in my stomach, of all things.” And she closed the cab door, waved at me, and rode away.

I
walked back toward my school. I thought I could take the bus home if I got there by three. I walked a long way down 10th Avenue to Second Street, beside the Missouri River, then over to town. I walked by the Great Northern Hotel, where my father had sold ducks and geese and fish of all kinds. There were no passenger trains in the yard and the loading dock looked small. Garbage cans were lined along the edge of it, and the door was closed and locked.

As I walked toward school I thought to myself that my life had turned suddenly, and that I might not know exactly how or which way for possibly a long time. Maybe, in fact, I might never know. It was a thing that happened to you—I knew that—and it had happened to me in this way now. And as I walked on up the cold street that afternoon in Great Falls, the questions I asked myself were these: why wouldn't my father let my mother come back? Why would Woody stand in the cold with me outside my house and risk being killed? Why would he say my mother had been married before, if she hadn't been? And my mother herself—why would she do what she did? In five years my father had gone off to Ely, Nevada, to ride out the oil strike there, and been killed by accident. And in the years since then I have seen my mother from time to time—in one place or another, with one man or other—and I can say, at least, that we know each other. But I have never known the answer to these questions, have never asked anyone their answers. Though possibly it—the answer—is simple: it is just low-life, some coldness in us all, some helplessness that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain, makes our existence seem like a border between two nothings, and makes us no more or less than animals who meet on the road—watchful, unforgiving, without patience or desire.