Wildlife (3 page)

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 come 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.

The job I found was in the photographer’s studio on Third Avenue. It was a place that took airmen’s photographs, and engagement and class pictures, and what I did was clean up when school was over, replace bulbs in the photographer’s lamps, and rearrange the backdrops and posing furniture for the next day.

I finished with that work by five o’clock, and sometimes I would walk home past the YWCA and slip through the
back door and down into the long tiled pool room where my mother taught her classes of adults until five, and from five to six was free to teach privately and be paid for it. I would stand at the far end behind the tiers of empty bleachers and watch her, hear her voice, which seemed happy and lively, encouraging and giving instruction. She would stand on the side in her black bathing suit, her skin pale, and make swimming motions with her arms for her students standing in the shallow water. Mostly they were old women, and old men with speckled bald heads. From time to time they ducked their faces into the water and made the swimming motions my mother made–slow, jerky grasps–without really swimming or ever moving, just staying still, standing and pretending. ‘It’s so easy,’ I would hear my mother say in her bright voice, her arms working the thick air as she talked. ‘Don’t be afraid of it. It’s all fun. Think about all you’ve missed.’ She’d smile at them when their faces were up, dripping and blinking, some of them coughing. And she would say, ‘Watch me now.’ Then she’d pull down her bathing cap, point her hands over her head to a peak, bend her knees and dive straight in, coasting for a moment, then breaking the surface and swimming with her arms bent and her fingers together, cutting the water in easy reaching motions to the far side and back again. The old people–ranchers, I thought, and the divorced wives of farmers–watched her in envy and silence. And I watched, thinking as I did that someone else who saw my mother, not me or my father, but someone who had never seen her before, would think something different. They would think: ‘Here is a woman whose life is happy’; or ‘Here is a woman with a nice figure to her credit’; or ‘Here is a woman I wish I could know better, though I never will.’ And I thought to myself that my father was not a stupid man, and that love was permanent, even though sometimes it seemed to recede and leave no trace at all.

On the first Tuesday in October, the day before the World Series began, my father came back to the house after dark. It was chill and dry outside, and when he came in the back door his eyes were bright and his face was flushed and he seemed as if he had been running.

‘Look who’s here now,’ my mother said, though in a nice way. She was cutting tomatoes at the sink board and looked around at him and smiled.

‘I’ve got to pack a bag,’ my father said. ‘I won’t have dinner here tonight, Jean.’ He went straight back to their room. I was sitting beside the radio waiting to turn on some baseball news, and I could hear him opening a closet door and shoving coat hangers.

My mother looked at me, then she spoke toward the hallway in a calm voice. ‘Where are you going, Jerry?’ She was holding a paring knife in her hand.

‘I’m going to that fire,’ my father said loudly from the bedroom. He was excited. ‘I’ve been waiting for my chance. I just heard thirty minutes ago that there’s a place. I know it’s unexpected.’

‘Do you know anything about fires?’ My mother kept watching the empty doorway as if my father was standing in it. ‘I know about them,’ she said. ‘My father was an estimator. Do you remember that?’

‘I had to make some contacts in town,’ my father said. I knew he was sitting on the bed putting on different shoes. The overhead light was on and his bag was out. ‘It’s not easy to get this job.’

‘Did you hear me?’ my mother said. She had an impatient look on her face. ‘I said you don’t know anything about fires. You’ll get burned up.’ She looked at the back door, which he’d left partway open, but she didn’t go to close it.

‘I’ve been reading about fires in the library,’ my father said. He came down the hall and went into the bathroom, where he turned on the light and opened the
medicine cabinet. ‘I think I know enough not to get killed.’

‘Could you have said something to me about this?’ my mother said.

I heard the medicine cabinet close and my father stepped into the kitchen doorway. He looked different. He looked like he was sure that he was right.