Wildlife (17 page)

‘You did?’ he said. ‘Did you stay all night?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We didn’t. We left and went home.’

‘And that’s all?’ he said.

‘That was all then,’ I said.

‘But did you see your mother do something while I was gone that you wouldn’t like to have to tell me?’ my father said. ‘I know it’s odd to know about this. It’s all probably my fault. I’m sorry.’ He looked at me very hard. I think he didn’t want me to say anything, but he also wanted to know the truth and what part in it I’d played, and what part in it my mother had, and what was right or wrong about it. And I did not say anything else because even though I could see it all in my mind again–all those things that had happened in just three days–I didn’t think I knew everything and did not want to pretend I did, or that what I’d seen was the truth.

‘Maybe it doesn’t require an answer,’ my father said after a while. He looked back at the men playing cards at the end of the room. ‘Did your mother tell you anything?’ my father said. ‘I mean, did she say anything that you remember? Not about what she might’ve done. But just anything. I’d like to know what was on her mind.’

‘She said she wasn’t crazy,’ I said. ‘And she said it’s hard to say no to yourself.’

‘Those are both true,’ my father said, watching the men play cards. ‘I’ve felt those myself. Is that all?’

‘She said everybody had to give up things.’

‘Is that so?’ my father said. ‘That’s good to know about. I wonder what she’s given up?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Maybe she’s decided to give us up. Or just me. That’s probably it.’

The bartender brought my pie and my milk and a fork. He set my father’s glass of whiskey on the bar. But my father was looking the other way. He was thinking, and he sat that way without talking for a long time–maybe three
minutes–while I sat beside him and waited and did not eat any of my pie or do anything. Just sat.

‘I was only there for three days, but it did feel like a long time,’ he finally said. ‘I can certainly sympathize with people.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I touched my fork with my fingers.

But my father turned and looked at me again. ‘I think you must have seen your mother with this Miller, didn’t you? Not just about dinner, I mean.’

His voice was very calm, so I just said, ‘Yes, I did.’

‘Where were they?’ my father said, looking at me.

‘In the house,’ I said.

‘In our house?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. And I don’t know why I told him that. He didn’t make me do it. I just did. It must’ve seemed natural at that moment.

‘Well, I’m sorry, Joe,’ my father said. ‘I know that wasn’t what you expected.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said.

‘Well, no,’ my father said. ‘It’s not all right. But it’ll have to become all right with you somehow.’

He turned around away from me, then he picked up his glass of whiskey. ‘I don’t have to drink, but I just want to right now,’ he said. He drank down a little of what he had and put it down. ‘When you’re finished with your pie,’ he said, ‘we’ll go out for a ride.’

While I ate my pie, my father got up and went to the restroom. Then he came out and he made a phone call at the back of the bar. I watched him, but I couldn’t hear what he said or who he was talking to. I thought possibly he was talking to my mother, talking about what I had just told him, maybe saying that he would not be bringing me home that night, or telling her to leave home herself, or how disappointed he was with her. I thought each of those
things, though he did not talk long. When he came back, he had a five-dollar bill in his hand, and he put that on the bar and said to me, ‘Let’s clear our heads.’ And we walked outside, where it was snowing lightly again. People were waiting in line down the street to go into the Auditorium. But he did not notice them and we got in the car and drove up Central away from downtown.

My father drove all the way out to Fifteenth Street. We did not talk much. He pulled into a gas station and got out, and I sat and listened as he talked to the man who filled up the car. They talked about the snow, which the attendant said would be turning to rain then ice, and about the fire in Allen Creek, which my father said he had been fighting until that very afternoon, and which he and the attendant both believed would now go out. The man checked the oil and the tires, then he opened the trunk to do something I couldn’t see. He said something to my father about needing a new taillight, and then my father paid him and got in and we drove back out onto the street.

We drove down Central again to the middle of Great Falls by the train stations and the city park and the river where I’d already walked that day, and past the Helen Apartments where my mother was moving. My father did not seem to notice them, or to notice much of anything. He was just driving, I thought, with no particular destination while his mind was working on whatever he had to think about: my mother, me, what would happen to all of us. As we went father out toward the east, I could see the lights of the football stadium shining in the snowy sky. It was Friday night and a game was being played. Great Falls and Billings. I was glad not to be involved in it.

‘I said a fire can be a good thing, didn’t I?’ my father said. ‘Most people don’t believe that.’ He seemed in better spirits driving, as if he had thought of something that made him feel better. ‘It’s sure surprising how fast the world can turn backwards, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is.’

‘Three days, if I’m not wrong,’ he said. ‘Maybe things were not as solid as I thought. I guess that’s evident.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘That’s evident.’ He looked at me, and he was smiling. He put his hand on my shoulder and could feel my bones. ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘once you face it, the worst is all behind you. Things start to improve then. Going to the fire just had a bad effect on your mother. That’s all.’

‘Did you ever like being there?’ I said. And this was something I’d wanted to know.

‘Oh,’ my father said. ‘My attitude changed. First it was mysterious. Then it was exciting. Then I felt helpless about it. I felt bottled up before I went,’ he said. ‘I stopped feeling that way.’

‘Did you have a girlfriend out there,’ I asked, because that was what my mother had said two nights ago.

‘No I didn’t,’ he said. ‘There were women there. I saw women fight each other, in fact. I saw them fight like men.’

And that seemed strange to me–two women fighting. Though it was an exciting thought, and I realized how odd it was for me to talk this way with my father, and for us both to know what we knew about my mother and to feel the way we did about it, which was not so bad at all. It seemed like a reckless, exciting feeling to me, and I liked it.

‘Does your mother’s boyfriend live in Black Eagle on Prospect Street?’ my father said as he drove along. Up ahead of us was the bridge to Black Eagle and beyond it the white grain elevators, lighted in the misting, snowy air. ‘You said you were there, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘So you know where he lives?’ my father said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s where it is.’

‘All right,’ my father said. ‘Let’s go by there.’

He turned left onto the Fifteenth Street Bridge and we drove over the Missouri River and into Black Eagle, where
there were only lights of houses against the bluff hills, and the snowy night up behind it like a curtain.

We drove halfway up the hill and turned right. It was eight o’clock at night, and many of the houses we passed had their porch lights on, and lights shining inside. My father seemed to know where he was going because he only looked now and then at the house numbers. Down the street I began to see the blue light of the Italian steakhouse. I could not see people in the street or any cars parked outside, and if it had not been Friday I would’ve thought it was closed.

‘It’s not a glamorous street, is it?’ my father said.

‘No, it isn’t,’ I said, watching the houses.

‘That’s surprising,’ he said. ‘I guess nobody sees through the eyes of a rich man.’ He was quiet then for a moment as he drove slowly down Warren Miller’s street. ‘I wish I could get your mother to back out on this.’

‘So do I,’ I said.

‘It’s not a good deal for her,’ he said.

‘Not that I can see.’

He stopped the car across the street from Warren’s house, in the place where my mother had parked the night before. I started to think what I had been thinking, sitting here with my mother: that I had no choice but to go inside with her when she went, and that I had gone. Then I stopped thinking that because it seemed like an entirely different subject now, one that had practically nothing to do with what had happened the night before, or any other night. I was with my father now, and everything was different.

Lights were on inside the house, though the porch was dark. Warren’s Oldsmobile sat parked in the steep driveway, behind the powerboat, just as it had been. My father turned off the engine and opened the window and looked out at the house. I could hear piano music. I thought it was coming from Warren Miller’s house, and that Warren was probably playing it as we sat in the dark watching.

‘I’d like to have a look in there, I guess,’ my father said. He turned and looked at me in the dark. ‘What do you think about that?’

‘Okay,’ I said. I looked past him at the house, where I could see no one at the window where the old-fashioned lamp was burning.

‘I’ll come right back, Joe.’

‘All right,’ I said.

He got out of the car, closed the door, and walked across the street and up the concrete steps. I could hear the piano music playing out into the night, and thought I heard someone singing with it. A man. I thought no one would notice my father now unless he wanted them to or unless he rang the doorbell or knocked, and I didn’t think he would do that. I wondered who my father had called from The Presidential bar. My mother? Or Warren Miller, to see if he was at home? Or possibly someone else entirely?

My father walked to the top of the steps and onto the porch. He turned around and looked at the car and then above it at the town lighted beyond the street of houses and the river. Then he walked to the front window and looked inside the house, bent over so he could see. He didn’t try to hide, just stood in the window, looking, so that anybody who would’ve glanced at the window at that moment would’ve seen him.

He did not stay at the window long, just long enough to look around inside at the living room and at whatever he could see through there, the other rooms, the kitchen. Then he turned around and came back down the steps to the street and across to the car where I was sitting, waiting. He did not get in the car with me, only leaned in the window.

‘How do you feel now, son?’ he said. He looked in at me.

‘I feel good,’ I said, though that was not exactly how I felt. I felt nervous to be there, and I wished we could leave.

‘Are you cold?’ he said. He wasn’t talking very loud.

‘No sir,’ I said. I could hear the piano still going inside the house. And I
was
cold. My arms were cold.

My father turned his head and looked down the street. There was nothing to see. No movement. ‘Maybe I can’t be in love anymore,’ he said, then let out a breath. ‘I’d love to improve things, though. You know?’

‘Yes sir,’ I said. Then I saw Warren Miller. He came right to the window where my father had been looking inside. He stopped a moment and stared out, I thought, at our car, then walked away. He was wearing a white shirt just the way he had the night before. I wondered if my mother was inside the house with him, and if that was what my father had seen when he looked and the reason he’d said what he’d just said. And I decided that she was definitely not inside there, and that she was still at home where we had left her and would find her again if we would just go back.

‘Something’s going to happen,’ my father said, and he tapped his hands, both of them, on the metal window molding. He looked down at the street as if he was thinking. ‘I wish I didn’t feel that way.’

I didn’t say anything for a moment, and then I said, ‘So do I.’

My father breathed out a sigh again. ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘I know that.’ He was quiet for a moment himself while he looked down at the pavement. ‘I just wonder,’ he said, ‘what would have to happen to make me ever leave your mother.’ He looked up at me.

‘Maybe nothing would,’ I said.

‘Nothing I can think of would. That’s right.’ He nodded. ‘Things do have to be able to surprise you,’ he said. ‘This is an odd day, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘It’s an important day.’

‘I guess it is,’ I said.

‘I feel exhausted by it,’ he said. ‘Just exhausted.’

And that is what I felt, too, and he must’ve known it. ‘Maybe we should go back home now,’ I said quietly to him.

‘We should. We certainly should,’ he said. ‘We’ll do that in a minute.’

He stood up then and walked to the back of the car and opened the trunk. I looked back, but I couldn’t see what he was doing and did not hear anything. He didn’t say anything that I could hear. He closed the trunk lid, and when I looked out the side window I saw him. He was hurrying up the concrete steps towards Warren Miller’s white house, where the lights were on and piano music was coming out still. He was carrying something–I didn’t know what, but something I thought he had taken out of the trunk of our car. He held it in both hands in front of him. And I had the feeling I have heard about since then that comes with disaster, the feeling of seeing things from a long way away, as if you were looking at them through a telescope backward, but they are right in front of you, only you are fixed there and helpless. It makes you feel cold, and then it makes you feel warm, as if what you’re afraid of is not going to happen, only then it does and you are all the more unprepared to see it and have it happen to you.

What I saw was my father coming to the top of the steps and moving onto the little porch that ran partway along the front of the house. He turned and walked to the very end of the porch, right across in front of the window. I could hear his feet on the porch boards. I heard the faint sound of something being poured out of a bottle. And then I knew what he was doing, or trying to do. The music inside Warren Miller’s house stopped. And it was quiet except for the sound of my father’s boots and the noise of pouring out of a gallon jug, which is what he was holding. He was pouring whatever it was–the gasoline or the kerosene he had bought–out onto the house where the porch boards met the front wall. And I wanted to stop him, but he was moving fast, and I couldn’t move fast enough in the car, just couldn’t seem to work my hands fast or make a noise that would get his attention so I could tell him to stop what he
was doing. I saw his silhouette as it passed in front of the window. Then the porch light came on and Warren Miller opened the door just as my father had gotten almost even with it. Warren stepped out onto the lighted porch–I saw his limp. He and my father were standing there together, my father holding the glass gallon jug of gasoline, and Warren holding nothing. It was a strange thing to see. And I thought for an instant that things would be all right, that Warren Miller would take hold of matters, which I knew he could do, and that my father would abandon whatever his plans were–to burn down Warren Miller’s house or to throw his own life and mine and my mother’s away as if they didn’t matter and could just as easily be given up.