Richard Ford: Rock Springs

Edna and I had started down from Kalispell, heading for Tampa-St. Pete where I still had some friends from the old glory days who wouldn’t turn me in to the police. I had managed to scrape with the law in Kalispell over several bad checks — which is a prison crime in Montana. And I knew Edna was already looking at her cards and thinking about a move, since it wasn’t the first time I’d been in law scrapes in my life. She herself had already had her own troubles, losing her kids and keeping her ex-husband, Danny, from breaking in her house and stealing her things while she was at work, which was really why I had moved in in the first place, that and needing to give my little daughter, Cheryl, a better shake in things.

I don’t know what was between Edna and me, just beached by the same tides when you got down to it. Though love has been built on frailer ground than that, as I well know. And when I came in the house that afternoon, I just asked her if she wanted to go to Florida with me, leave things where they sat, and she said, “Why not? My datebook’s not that full.”

Edna and I had been a pair eight months, more or less man and wife, some of which time I had been out of work, and some when I’d worked at the dog track as a lead-out and could help with the rent and talk sense to Danny when he came around. Danny was afraid of me because Edna had told him I’d been in prison in Florida for killing a man, though that wasn’t true. I had once been in jail in Tallahassee for stealing tires and had gotten into a fight on the county farm where a man had lost his eye. But I hadn’t done the hurting, and Edna just wanted the story worse than it was so Danny wouldn’t act crazy and make her have to take her kids back, since she had made a good adjustment to not having them, and I already had Cheryl with me. I’m not a violent person and would never put a man’s eye out, much less kill someone. My former wife, Helen, would come all the way from Waikiki Beach to testify to that. We never had violence, and I believe in crossing the street to stay out of trouble’s way. Though Danny didn’t know that.

But we were half down through Wyoming, going toward 1-80 and feeling good about things, when the oil light flashed on in the car I’d stolen, a sign I knew to be a bad one.

I’d gotten us a good car, a cranberry Mercedes I’d stolen out of an ophthalmologist’s lot in Whitefish, Montana. I stole it because I thought it would be comfortable over a long haul, because I thought it got good mileage, which it didn’t, and because I’d never had a good car in my life, just old Chevy junkers and used trucks back from when I was a kid swamping citrus with Cubans.

The car made us all high that day. I ran the windows up and down, and Edna told us some jokes and made faces. She could be lively. Her features would light up like a beacon and you could see her beauty, which wasn’t ordinary. It all made me giddy, and I drove clear down to Bozeman, then straight on through the park to Jackson Hole. I rented us the bridal suite in the Quality Court in Jackson and left Cheryl and her little dog, Duke, sleeping while Edna and I drove to a rib barn and drank beer and laughed till after midnight.

It felt like a whole new beginning for us, bad memories left behind and a new horizon to build on. I got so worked up, I had a tattoo done on my arm that said famous times, and Edna bought a Bailey hat with an Indian feather band and a little turquoise-and-silver bracelet for Cheryl, and we made love on the seat of the car in the Quality Court parking lot just as the sun was burning up on the Snake River, and everything seemed then like the end of the rainbow.

It was that very enthusiasm, in fact, that made me keep the car one day longer instead of driving it into the river and stealing another one, like I should’ve done and had done before.

Where the car went bad there wasn’t a town in sight or even a house, just some low mountains maybe fifty miles away or maybe a hundred, a barbed-wire fence in both directions, hardpan prairie, and some hawks riding the evening air seizing insects.

I got out to look at the motor, and Edna got out with Cheryl and the dog to let them have a pee by the car. I checked the water and checked the oil stick, and both of them said perfect.

“What’s that light mean, Earl?” Edna said. She had come and stood by the car with her hat on. She was just sizing things up for herself.

“We shouldn’t run it,” I said. “Something’s not right in the oil.”

She looked around at Cheryl and Little Duke, who were peeing on the hardtop side-by-side like two little dolls, then out at the mountains, which were becoming black and lost in the distance. “What’re we doing?” she said. She wasn’t worried yet, but she wanted to know what I was thinking about.

“Let me try it again.”

“That’s a good idea,” she said, and we all got back in the car.

When I turned the motor over, it started right away and the red light stayed off and there weren’t any noises to make you think something was wrong. I let it idle a minute, then pushed the accelerator down and watched the red bulb. But there wasn’t any light on, and I started wondering if maybe I hadn’t dreamed I saw it, or that it had been the sun catching an angle off the window chrome, or maybe I was scared of something and didn’t know it.

“What’s the matter with it, Daddy?” Cheryl said from the backseat. I looked back at her, and she had on her turquoise bracelet and Edna’s hat set back on the back of her head and that little black-and-white Heinz dog on her lap. She looked like a little cowgirl in the movies.

“Nothing, honey, everything’s fine now,” I said.

“Little Duke tinkled where I tinkled,” Cheryl said, and laughed.

“You’re two of a kind,” Edna said, not looking back. Edna was usually good with Cheryl, but I knew she was tired now. We hadn’t had much sleep, and she had a tendency to get cranky when she didn’t sleep. “We oughta ditch this damn car first chance we get,” she said.

“What’s the first chance we got?” I asked, because I knew she’d been at the map.

“Rock Springs, Wyoming,” Edna said with conviction. “Thirty miles down this road.” She pointed out ahead.

I had wanted all along to drive the car into Florida like a big success story. But I knew Edna was right about it, that we shouldn’t take crazy chances. I had kept thinking of it as my car and not the ophthalmologist’s, and that was how you got caught in these things.

“Then my belief is we ought to go to Rock Springs and negotiate ourselves a new car,” I said. I wanted to stay upbeat, like everything was panning out right.

“That’s a great idea,” Edna said, and she leaned over and kissed me hard on the mouth.

“That’s a great idea,” Cheryl said. “Let’s pull on out of here right now.”

The sunset that day I remember as being the prettiest I’d ever seen. Just as it touched the rim of the horizon, it all at once fired the air into jewels and red sequins the precise likes of which I had never seen before and haven’t seen since. The West has it all over everywhere for sunsets, even Florida, where it’s supposedly flat but where half the time trees block your view.

“It’s cocktail hour,” Edna said after we’d driven awhile. “We ought to have a drink and celebrate something.” She felt better thinking we were going to get rid of the car. It certainly had dark troubles and was something you’d want to put behind you.

Edna had out a whiskey bottle and some plastic cups and was measuring levels on the glove-box lid. She liked drinking, and she liked drinking in the car, which was something you got used to in Montana, where it wasn’t against the law, but where, strangely enough, a bad check would land you in Deer Lodge Prison for a year.