Richard Ford - Rock Springs

“I don’t see why you have to have them on,” Claude said. Then he drove off the bridge and turned onto the post mill road downstream, the Buick bucking and rocking over the bumps.

“It’s too bright,” she said and pulled the hem of her dress over her knees. It was a wool dress, as green as grass, and it felt hot against me. “What’s the fun out here,” she said. “That’s a well-kept secret.”

“You are,” Claude said. “The blond bombshell. You’re our reward for being able to put up with you.”

“Good luck for that party.” She clutched her paper bag. Her fingers were short and pink, and her fingernails were clean and not bitten, just a regular girl’s hands. “Where’s your mother and father?” she said to me.

“His old man runs the rails. He’s a gash hound, too,” Claude said as we drove in under the cottonwoods that grew to the creek bank. “His mother already hit the road. This is wild country up here. Nobody’s safe.” Claude looked at me in a disgusted way, but he knew I didn’t like that talk. I didn’t think that was true of my father, and he did not know my mother — though what he said about her was what I thought. It was not unusual that people left that part of Montana. She had never liked it, and neither my father nor me ever blamed her.

“Are you boys men now?” Lucy said and put her glasses back on. “Am I supposed to think that, now that we’re out here?”

“It doesn’t matter what you think,” I said. I opened the door and got out.

“At least somebody accepts truth,” Lucy said.

“George’ll say anything to get on your pretty side,” Claude said. “Him and me are different. Aren’t we, George?”

But I had already started toward the creek and couldn’t hear what the girl said back, though she and Claude were in the car together for a little while. I heard him say, “Hope means wait to me,” and laugh, and I heard his door slam, with her left inside.

Claude took his casting rod to the creek bank with his jelly jar of white maggots, and tied up a cork-and-hook rig, then went to the shallows where sawdust from the mill had laid a warm-water bottom and a sluice down the center of the creek. Sometimes we had caught fifteen whitcfish in a school there, when they’d fed. One after another. You could put your bait where they were and bring one back. They were big fish and steady fighters, and Claude liked them because they were easy to catch.

It was three o’clock then, and warm, but I did not want to fish. I did not like the waiting of fishing. Pd hunted for birds with my father, walked them up out of the rosebush thickets. But I did not care so much for fishing, and not for whitefish at all.

Claude had taken off his yellow jacket, and the girl had brought it back up — walking on the toes of her shoes — and spread it in the sun, then sat facing the creek. She raised her dress to her knees and took off her shoes and stockings and pushed up her sleeves. She’d unbuttoned her front enough to let sun on her neck and leaned on one elbow, smoking a cigarette, blowing the smoke in the warm air.

“I wish I could play the piano,” she said when I walked up from the bank. “Do you play one?”

“No,” I said. My mother had played a piano when we’d lived in Great Falls. She played Dixieland in the house we’d rented there.

“Out here makes me think about that,” she said. “I’d like to go in somebody’s house and sit down and play some song.” She blew smoke out the side of her mouth. She still had on Sherman’s sunglasses. Her long legs were so white they looked gray, and thin enough that her calf bones stood out. She had shaved them above her knees, and I could see where the blond hair began. She looked at me as if she wanted me to say something else, but I had nothing else to say. “Do you ever have the dream that somebody you know is leading you into a river and just when you’re knee-deep, you step in a hole and you fall under. Then you jump in your sleep, it scares you so much?”

“I have that,” I said. “Sometimes.”

“Everybody probably does,” she said.

I sat beside her on the grass, and we watched Claude. He was casting out toward the car body and walking his bobber down through the sluice. Now and then he’d look back at us and make a phony gesture of having a fish on his line, and then he would ignore us. I could smell the cotton-woods and the sawdust air from the mill.

“Do you have a suitcase full of your clothes?” I said.

“Where?” she said. She was smoking another cigarette.

“I don’t know. Someplace else.”

“I just left,” the girl said. “I wanted to take a trip suddenly — to someplace warmer. I’m not sure I had this in mind, though.” She looked at Claude, who had looked up at us again then turned around. Whitefish made little dimples on the flat water, seizing insects I could not even see. It was not a good sign for the rig Claude was using; though at any time fish can do another thing and you will begin to catch them. “His father’s not so terrible,” she said and touched her nylon stockings, which were in a pile on the grass. She lifted one up with her little finger. “You certainly wouldn’t think he’d sit in the dark in the middle of the night and pray in a motel. But he does. He’s nice, really. He’s pretty big, too. His son’s scrawny.”

I tried to think about Sherman praying but couldn’t think of what he’d want to pray for or hope to have come to him. “Where’d you meet him?”

“At the Trails End Bar in Havre, where I was too young to get in, or should’ve been. You get in odd situations sometimes.”

“How old are you?”

She widened her eyes at me. “You’re now a criminal. I’m just sixteen, though I look older than that, I know it. Some day I’ll regret it.” She reached for her paper sack and brought out a can of beer, a cold hot dog, and a red transistor radio. “I’ve accumulated this much so far.”

“When did you leave home?”

“Exactly one night before last,” she said. “I didn’t think I could trust anybody up there — maybe I was wrong. Who knows?” When she opened the beer it spewed up her arm. She took a drink and handed it to me, and I drank some. “Drinking distances you,” she said. “I would like to see the Space Needle, still.” She picked up the little radio, leaning on her elbow, and stared at it. “Batteries are my next assignment. For this thing.” She thumped it with her finger as if she wanted that to turn it on. “I’m not going to eat this either.” She picked up the hot dog and tossed it in the grass.

“You didn’t want to come out here, did you?” I said.

“I didn’t want to stay back in that room. Sunburst? Is that what that place is called? You accept help where you get it, I guess.”

“Uh-oh, now. Uh-oh,” Claude shouted. His rod was curved over, and his line was cutting around the water this way and that. “Here, now. Here he is,” Claude said, and looked over his shoulder and wound in on the reel. “This is the big whitefish,” he yelled.

Lucy sat up and watched. Claude had walked into the shallows in his shoes, holding his rod up as the fish toured around him. “Look how excited he gets,” she said and took a drink of her warm beer. “A monkey could catch a whitefish. They’re trash fish. He’s stupid.”

I saw the fish shine through the surface, then turn down in the cold water. It was a big fish, you could tell by how deep it took the line. I knew Claude wanted to get it in to show.

“He’s going to break that one off,” Lucy said, “and I bet he doesn’t have another hook.” And I thought he would break it off myself. I’d seen him break off big fish before.