Richard Ford - Rock Springs

“I know that,” my father said. “I’m sorry. I lost control over my mind. I didn’t expect to ruin things, but now I think I have. It was all wrong.” My father picked up the vodka bottle, unscrewed the cap and took a big swallow, then put the bottle back down. He had seen two men killed tonight. Who could’ve blamed him?

“When I was in jail tonight,” he said, staring at a picture on the wall, a picture by the door to the hallway. He was just talking again. “There was a man in the cell with me. And I’ve never been in jail before, not even when I was a kid. But this man said to me tonight, ‘I can tell you’ve never been in jail before just by the way you stand up straight. Other people don’t stand that way. They stoop. You don’t belong in jail. You stand up too straight.’” My father looked back at the vodka bottle as if he wanted to drink more out of it, but he only looked at it. “Bad things happen,” he said, and he let his open hands tap against his legs like clappers against a bell. “Maybe he was in love with you, Dorothy,” he said. “Maybe that’s what the trouble was.”

And what I did then was stare at the picture on the wall, the picture my father had been staring at, a picture I had seen every day. Probably I had seen it a thousand times. It was two people with a baby on a beach. A man and a woman sitting in the sand with an ocean behind. They were smiling at the camera, wearing bathing suits. In all the times I had seen it I’d thought that it was a picture in which I was the baby, and the two people were my parents. But I realized as I stood there, that it was not me at all; it was my father who was the child in the picture, and the parents there were his parents — two people Fd never known, and who were dead — and the picture was so much older than I had thought it was. I wondered why I hadn’t known that before, hadn’t understood it for myself, hadn’t always known it. Not even that it mattered. What mattered was, I felt, that my father had fallen down now, as much as the man he had watched fall beneath the train just hours before. And I was as helpless to do anything as he had been. I wanted to tell him that I loved him, but for some reason I did not.

Later in the night I lay in my bed with the radio playing, listening to news that was far away, in Calgary and in Saskatoon, and even farther, in Regina and Winnipeg — cold, dark cities I knew I would never see in my life. My window was raised above the sill, and for a long time I had sat and looked out, hearing my parents talk softly down below, hearing their footsteps, hearing my father’s steel-toed boots strike the floor, and then their bed-springs squeeze and then be quiet. From out across the sliding river I could hear trucks — stock trucks and grain trucks heading toward Idaho, or down toward Helena, or into the train yards where my father hosded engines. The neighborhood houses were dark again. My father’s motorcycle sat in the yard, and out in the night air I felt I could hear even the falls themselves, could hear every sound of them, sounds that found me and whirled and filled my room — could even feel them, cold and wintry, so that warmth seemed like a possibility I would never know again.

After a time my mother came in my room. The light fell on my bed, and she set a chair inside. I could see that she was looking at me. She closed the door, came and turned off my radio, then took her chair to the window, closed it, and sat so that I could see her face silhouetted against the streetlight. She lit a cigarette and did not look at me, still cold under the covers of my bed.

“How do you feel, Frank,” she said, smoking her cigarette.

“I feel all right,” I said.

“Do you think your house is a terrible house now?”

“No,” I said.

“I hope not,” my mother said. “Don’t feel it is. Don’t hold anything against anyone. Poor Boyd. He’s gone.”

“Why do you think that happened?” I said, though I didn’t think she would answer, and wondered if I even wanted to know.

My mother blew smoke against the window glass, then sat and breathed. “He must’ve seen something in your father he just hated. I don’t know what it was. Who knows? Maybe your father felt the same way.” She shook her head and looked out into the streetlamp light. “I remember once,” she said. “I was still in Havre, in the thirties. We were living in a motel my father part-owned out Highway Two, and my mother was around then, but wasn’t having any of us. My father had this big woman named Judy Belknap as his girlfriend. She was an Assiniboin. Just some squaw. But we used to go on nature tours when he couldn’t put up with me anymore. She’d take me. Way up above the Milk River. All this stuff she knew about, animals and plants and ferns — she’d tell me all that. And once we were sitting watching some gadwall ducks on the ice where a creek had made a little turn-out. It was getting colder, just like now. And Judy just all at once stood up and clapped. Just clapped her hands. And all these ducks got up, all except for one that stayed on the ice, where its feet were frozen, I guess. It didn’t even try to fly. It just sat. And Judy said to me, ‘It’s just a coincidence, Dottie. It’s wildlife. Some always get left back.’ And that seemed to leave her satisfied for some reason. We walked back to the car after that. So,” my mother said. “Maybe that’s what this is. Just a coincidence.”

She raised the window again, dropped her cigarette out, blew the last smoke from her throat, and said, “Go to sleep, Frank. You’ll be all right. We’ll all survive this. Be an optimist.”

When I was asleep that night, I dreamed. And what I dreamed was of a plane crashing, a bomber, dropping out of the frozen sky, bouncing as it hit the icy river, sliding and turning on the ice, its wings like knives, and coming into our house where we were sleeping, leveling everything. And when I sat up in bed I could hear a dog in the yard, its collar jingling, and I could hear my father crying, “Boo-hoo-hoo, boo-hoo-hoo,”—like that, quietly — though afterward I could never be sure if I had heard him crying in just that way, or if all of it was a dream, a dream I wished I had never had.

The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all that’s happened and by all that could and will happen next. I now no longer remember the exact year of my father’s birth, or how old he was when I last saw him, or even when that last time took place. When you’re young, these things seem unforgettable and at the heart of everything. But they slide away and are gone when you are not so young.

My father went to Deer Lodge Prison and stayed five months for killing Boyd Mitchell by accident, for using too much force to hit him. In Montana you cannot simply kill a man in your living room and walk off free from it, and what I remember is that my father pleaded no contest, the same as guilty.

My mother and I lived in our house for the months he was gone. But when he came out and went back on the railroad as a switchman the two of them argued about things, about her wanting us to go someplace else to live — California or Seattle were mentioned. And then they separated, and she moved out. And after that I moved out by joining the Army and adding years to my age, which was sixteen.

I know about my father only that after a time he began to live a life he himself would never have believed. He fell off the railroad, divorced my mother, who would now and then resurface in his life. Drinking was involved in that, and gambling, embezzling money, even carrying a pistol, is what I heard. I was apart from all of it. And when you are the age I was then, and loose on the world and alone, you can get along better than at almost any other time, because it’s a novelty, and you can act for what you want, and you can think that being alone will not last forever. All I know of my father, finally, is that he was once in Laramie, Wyoming, and not in good shape, and then he simply disappeared from view.