Richard Ford - Rock Springs

The girl just stood there, holding her folded paper sack. She was tall and pretty and pale-skinned, and she didn’t seem happy.

“You don’t want to go fishing with us,” Claude said. He had not made a move to let her in.

“Let her get in,” I said. “She wants to go.”

The girl bent and looked in the back where there was no seat. A crate was there with a jack, the two rods, and a jumper set.

“Fm not riding in that back,” the girl said, and looked at me.

“Let her in front,” I told Claude.

I don’t think he wanted the girl in the car. And I didn’t know why, because I wanted her in. Maybe he had thought his father had an Indian woman, and he wasn’t sure what to do now.

Claude opened the door, and when he stood up I could see that the girl was taller than he was. I didn’t think that kind of thing mattered though, because Claude had already whipped boys with his fists who were bigger than he was.

When the girl got in she had to pull her knees up. She was wearing stockings, and her green shoes were the kind without toes.

“Hello, George,” she said, and smiled. I could smell Sherman’s aftershave.

“Hello,” I said.

“Don’t cause me any fucking trouble, or FU break you up,” Sherman said. And before Claude could get in, Sherman was starting back to the motel in his bedroom slippers, his ponytail swinging down his back.

“You’re a real odd match,” Lucy said when Claude had gotten in the driver’s seat. “You don’t look like each other.”

“Who do I look like?” Claude said. He was angry.

“Some Greek,” Lucy said. She looked around Claude as Sherman disappeared into the motel room and closed the door. “Maybe your mother, though,” she said as an afterthought.

“Where’s she now?” Claude said. “My mother.” He started the car.

The girl looked at him from behind her glasses. “At home. I guess. Wherever you live.”

“No. She’s dead,” Claude said. “Are those my father’s glasses?”

“He gave them to me. Do you want them back?”

“Are you divorced?” Claude said.

“I’m not old enough,” the girl said. “I’m not even married yet.”

“How old are you?” Claude said.

“Twenty, nineteen. How does that sound?” She looked at me and smiled. She had small teeth and her breath had beer on it. “How old do I look?”

“Eight,” Claude said. “Or maybe a hundred.”

“Are we going fishing, today?” she said.

“We talk about things we don’t intend to do,” Claude said. He hit the motor then, and snapped the clutch, and we went swerving out of the lot onto the hardtop, heading out of Sunburst and back onto the green wheat prairie.

Claude drove out the Canada highway eight miles, then off on the county road that went between the fields and past my house toward the west mountains a hundred miles away, where there was still snow and it was cold. My house flashed by in back of its belt of olive trees — just a square gray two-story house, unprotected toward the east. Claude was driving to Mormon Creek, I knew, though we were only doing what his father had told us to and not anything on our own. We were only boys, and nothing about us would interest a woman, or even a girl the age of this girl. You aren’t ignorant of that fact when it is true about you, and sometimes when it isn’t. And there was a strange feeling of suspense in me then — that once we were there I did not know what would happen and possibly nothing good would.

“That’s a pretty green dress,” Claude said as he drove. The girl had not been saying anything. None of us had, though she seemed to have her mind on something — getting back to the motel maybe, or getting back where she’d come from.

“It’s not for this season,” she said, staring out at the new fields where the air was tawny. “It’s already too dry to farm.”

“Where are you from?” I said.

“In Sceptre, Saskatchewan,” she said, “where it looks just like this. A little town and a bunch of houses. The rest knifed up with these farms.” She said house the way Canadians do, but otherwise she did not talk that way.

“What did your family do?” Claude said. “Are they a bunch of cheddar-head Swedes?” He seemed to expect everything she said to make him mad.

“He farmed,” she said. “Then he worked in a tractor shop in Leader. In the fall he cleans geese. He’s up to that right now.”

“What do you mean, he cleans geese?” Claude said. He smiled a mean smile at her, then at me.

“Hunters bring geese they shoot. It’s just out on the open prairie there. And they leave them at our garage. My father dips ’em to get the feathers out, then guts ’em and wraps ’em. It’s easy. He’s an American. He’s from Wyoming. He was against the draft.”

“He plucks ’em, you mean — right?” Claude said, driving. “Is that what you mean he does?”

“They smell better than this car does. I wouldn’t have known you two were Indians if it wasn’t for this car. This is a reservation beater is what we call these.”

“That’s what we call them,” Claude said. “And we call those motels where you were at whorehouses.”

“What do you call that guy I was with?” Lucy said.

“Do you think George looks like an Indian?” Claude said. “I think George is a Sioux, don’t you?” He smiled at me. “George isn’t a goddamn Indian. I am.”

“An Indian’s a bump in the road to me,” she said.

“That’s true,” Claude said. And something about her had made him feel better. I didn’t believe that this girl was a whore though, and I didn’t believe she thought she was, or that he did. Claude’s father did, but he was wrong. I just didn’t know why she would come over from Havre in the middle of the night and end up out here with us. It was a mystery.

We started down the steep car path to Mormon Creek bottom, where the water was high but not too muddy to shine. Across the bridge and a hundred yards downstream was a sawmill that had made fence posts but had been wrecked. Behind it was a pitch clay bluff the creek had cut, and beyond that were shallows and a cottonwood swale. On the near side was a green willow bank and a rusted car body that had been caught in the willow roots. It was a place Claude and I had fished for whitefish.

“Not much of a lumber place,” Lucy said.

“That’s why the sawyers did so great,” Claude said.

“Which way’s west?”

“That is,” I said, pointing to where the white peaks of mountains could just be seen above the coulee rim.

She looked back the other way. “And what’re those mountains back there?”

“Those’re hills,” Claude said. “We keep them separate in this country.”

“It is a nice atmosphere though,” she said. “I like to be oriented to the light.”

“You can’t see light with those glasses,” Claude said.

She turned to face me. “I see George here. I see well enough. He’s nicer than you are so far. He’s not an asshole.”

“Why don’t you take those glasses off?” Claude said. We were crossing the low bridge over Mormon Creek. The Buick clattered and shimmied on the boards. I looked down. I could see through the clear surface to gravel.

“Where does this water go?” Lucy was looking around me.

“Up,” I said. “To the Milk River. It goes north.”

“Did Sherman bust you, is that the trouble?” Claude said. He stopped us right on the bridge, and grabbed at the glasses, tried taking them off Lucy’s face. “You got a big busted eye?”

“No,” Lucy said. And she took off the glasses and looked at me first, then Claude. She had blue eyes and blond eyebrows the color of her hair. And what she was hiding was not a black eye, but that she had been crying. Not when she’d been with us, but when she woke up, maybe, and saw where she was, or who she was with, or what the day looked like ahead of her.