Richard Ford - Women with Men

I let the shutters down over the wire coops and latched them. Then I stood with my suitcase and watched my father. He was still leaning on Doris's car in the snow. She still had her hand on his wrist. As I watched, she put her cheek against his hand, and my father stood up straight and looked toward the road in front of the house beyond the caraganas. I thought he looked over Doris's car in the direction of Joyce Jensen's trailer. He said something into the window and pulled his hands back and stuck them in his pockets. Then he looked at me and waved his arm in a wide way for me to come on.

“THAT'LL CURL your hair, I'll tell you what,” I heard Doris say when I got close to the car.

“Your aunt Doris is worried about getting stuck in the snow in her limo,” my father said. He stood back a couple of feet from the car and was smiling. Snow was in his hair. “Get her to tell you her joke about Japanese cars. That'll amuse you.”

Doris looked at my father as if he'd surprised her. “We'll wait a couple of years on that,” she said. “I want your dad to ride up to Shelby with us tonight, Larry,” she said through the window. “He claims he has other plans he doesn't care to discuss. I'm sure you'll explain it all to me.”

“I'd have a hard time getting home tonight,” my father said, still smiling. “I'd get in some kind of trouble.”

It was now snowing harder. My father's arms looked cold, and I was cold myself and eager for Doris and me to get going. I went around and put my bag in the backseat and climbed in front, where the heater was on and it was warm and smelled sweet and the radio was turned on low. If my father had plans, he hadn't told me about them, though I thought he would probably go down to visit Joyce Jensen.

“You only get so many of these invitations, then people quit asking,” Doris said. She was smiling, too, but I knew she wanted him to come with us. She patted me on the knee. “How're you, honey bunch?” she said. “Did you take a little happy pill today? I hope so.”

“I just took one,” I said. I could smell her perfume. She had on bright-red earrings and a brown wool coat, under which I could see the hem of a red wool dress. She always wore a lot of red. My father took a few steps farther back from the car.

“You ought to put a sign on your mailbox, Donny,” Doris said out her window. “‘N.H.Y.’—Nothing's Happened Yet. That'd be the truth.”

“We're moving cautiously,” my father said. He leaned down without touching the car and looked in at me. “Explain to your aunt about the atmosphere of mystery out here on the Great Plains.” He was smiling. “She'll get a kick out of that.” Doris pulled the car down into gear. “Say Happy Thanksgiving to my old friends in Seattle,” my father said, looking in at me then, and he had an odd expression, standing in the snow by himself, as if he thought what he'd just said was silly but he hadn't meant it to be.

Doris started the window up as she turned the wheel. “You think you can't make life better, Donny, but you can,” she said. “You two've been out here too many nights alone. It's making you squirrelly.”

“We're working on that, too,” my father said, and he shouted it for some reason. I didn't know what he meant, but what I wished then was that we could get the hell out of there and get on the road to where we were going.

DORIS DECIDED to have a drink before we got to the interstate. She had a little bottle of schnapps under the windshield visor and told me to pour some into a Styrofoam cup from a stack on the backseat floor. On the wet floor with the cups was a cardboard for sale sign, a drinking glass, a padded snow glove, a hairbrush, a bunch of postcards — one showing a bear dancing on a beach ball — and some snapshots of Doris sitting at a desk in an office, wearing a short skirt and smiling up at the camera. They'd been taken at the police department in Great Falls, where Doris worked. Part of a man's sleeve with sergeant's stripes on it was visible in the corner of one of the pictures.

“Those are my glamorous mug shots,” Doris said, holding her schnapps bottle in the hand she held the steering wheel with, “in case I forget who I am — or was — or in case somebody ever found me dead and wondered. I wrote my name on the backs.”

I turned over one of the photographs, and Doris's name was written in ink that had faded. There were other things on the floor — a copy of a magazine called World Conflict, and two or three paperback books with their covers torn off. I took a cup from the stack and gave it to her. “Who do you think'll find you?” I said.

We were going up onto the interstate, and I was pouring schnapps in her cup. The little town of Dutton, where I had been in school since September, sat just on the other side of the highway. Ten streets of houses, two bars, a Sons of Norway, three churches, a grocery, a library, three elevators, and a VFW with an old Sabre jet from Korea mounted as if it were taking off into the snowy sky. All around everywhere else was plow ground being covered in snow.

“Never can tell who'll find you,” Doris said, watching her rearview mirror as we got out onto the highway. “I don't really like Montana,” she said, “and I particularly hate the roads. There's only one way to get anywhere. It's better seen from an airplane.” She straightened her arms toward the steering wheel as if she were taking off in a jet herself. We picked up speed and shot slush behind us. A bead of water entered the windshield through a crack at the top, then froze before it could drip in. “So. What's it about this atmosphere of mystery?”

“He was just reading to me out of a magazine,” I said. “He made it up.”

“I see.” She had a sip of schnapps. “And do you think you understand what the trouble is between your mom and your dad?”

“They don't get along enough right now,” I said. “My mother decided to go to school.” That had been what my mother told me when she left. She was in school in Seattle, learning how to make out income tax forms. She'd be finished by Christmas.

“They know too much about each other,” Doris said. “They have to figure out what the hell difference that makes. Sometimes it's good, but not always.”

“Isn't that supposed to happen?” I said.

“Certainly is,” Doris said and looked up in the mirror again. There were no other cars on the highway, only big tractor-trailers going north, running to get someplace by Thanksgiving. “When I was living with Benny as man and wife, he had many, many things I never understood inside his head. Indian things. Spirits. He believed they came to our house. He believed you had to give your valuables away — or gamble them away, in his particular case. He told me once that he wanted to be buried on a wood platform on a high hill. He believed in all that Indian medicine — which was fine, and I mean it. It was.” Doris rubbed her nose with the heel of her hand, then just stared at the highway, where white mist was collecting like fog.

“What did you say about it?” I said, and looked at her.

“About the wood platform?” she said. “I said, ‘Fine, a wood platform's all right with me. But don't expect me to build it or get you up there, because I'm a Seventh-Day Adventist and we don't believe in platforms.’”

“What did Benny say?” I had only met Benny once, and remembered him as a big, quiet man with black-rimmed glasses who smelled like cigarettes.

“He laughed. He was a Lutheran, of course. Converted by missionaries in Canada or North Dakota someplace. I forget. It might've all been a joke. But he was a tribal member. He was that. Spoke the Indian tongue.”

“Where is he?” I said.

“That's the sixty-four-dollar question.” Doris reached forward and turned down the heater. “Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, is my guess, where Thanksgiving comes later or earlier, one or the other. I still wear a wedding ring.” She held up her ring finger. “But I was on about Don and Jan knowing each other so well. I never had that problem with Benny, and we're still married. In a sense we are, anyway.”