Richard Ford - Women with Men

Doris put her hands in her lap and shivered and stamped her feet and put her chin down and blew ice smoke. I just sat. I put my hands in my pockets and tried to be still until I could feel the air start to blow warm. The front of my coat was still wet.

“Double shivers,” Doris said, pushing her chin farther down into her coat. She looked pale, as if she'd been sick, and her face seemed small and her eyes tired. “You know when you watch TV on New Year's Day and all the soap-opera characters stop in the middle of their programs and turn to the camera and wish you Happy New Year's? Did you ever see that?”

“No,” I said, because I had never watched soap operas.

“Well, they do it. Take my word for it. But it's my favorite moment of the whole year for the soaps. They just step out for a second, then they step right back in and go on. It's wonderful. I watch it religiously.”

“We watch football that day — when we have a TV,” I said, and clenched my toes down, because I was cold and couldn't help wondering if exhaust fumes were getting inside. I tried to feel if I was getting sleepy, but I wasn't. My jaw was still stiff, and I could feel my heart beating hard in my chest as if I'd been running, and my legs were tingling above my knees.

“Is that what you care about — football?” Doris said after a while.

“No,” I said. “Not anymore.”

“You're just ready to start life now, I guess.”

“I already started it,” I said.

“You certainly did tonight.” Doris reached for the schnapps bottle, where she'd left it on the floor, and unscrewed the cap and took a drink. “I've got a sour taste,” she said. “You want to drink a toast to poor old Barney?” She handed the bottle to me, and I could smell it.

“No, thanks,” I said, and didn't take it.

“Honor the poor dead and our absent friends,” she said, then took another drink. The heater was blowing warmer now.

“Why did you say to the police that he was in the bathroom?” I said.

Doris held the bottle up to the depot lights. “I didn't mean that to happen. If they'd spoken to him in the Indian tongue, none of it would've ever taken place. They just didn't speak it. It was a matter of mutual distrust.” She said something then in what must've been the Indian tongue — something that sounded like reading words backward, not like something you heard wrong or mistook the meaning of. “Do you know what that means?”

“No,” I said.

“It means: ‘Come out with your hands up and I won't kill you,’ in the Gros Ventre language. Or it means something like that. They don't really have a word for ‘hands up.’ Barney could've understood that if he'd been a Gros Ventre.”

“Why'd you tell them that, though?” I said, because I thought Barney might've survived if he hadn't gotten trapped in there and maybe gotten scared. He could be in jail now, asleep, instead of dead.

“I didn't mean him to get shot.” Doris looked at me as if she was surprised. “Do you think I'm rotten because I did that?”

“No,” I said, though that wasn't exactly the truth.

“He murdered his wife. I'm sure about that. They'll find her someplace over in Browning tonight, beat to death or stabbed or burned up in a ditch. That's what happens. She probably had a boyfriend. The police were already looking for him, I knew that the instant he sat down beside me. People get a smell on them.” She blew more ice breath in the air. “I don't think the heater's working.” She turned the knob around and back. “Feel my hands.” She put her small hands together and shoved them toward me, and they were cold and hard-feeling. “They're my prettiest feature, I believe,” Doris said, looking at her own hands. She looked at my hands then, and touched the place where her wedding ring had worked into my knuckle. “Your skin's your nicest feature,” she said, and looked at my face. “You look like your mother, and you have your father's skin. You'll probably look like him eventually.” She pushed closer to me. “I'm so cold, baby,” she said, holding her two hands still clasped together against my chest and putting her face against my cheek. The skin on her face was cold and stiff and not very soft, and the frames of her glasses were cold too. There was a smell of sweat in her hair. “I feel numb, and you're so warm. Your face is warm.” She kept her cheek against my cheek, so I could feel that mine was warm. “You need to warm me up,” she whispered. “Are you brave enough to do that? Or are you a coward on that subject?” She put her hands around my neck and below my collar, and I didn't know what to do with my hands, though I put them around her and began to pull her close to me and felt her weight come against my weight and her legs press on my cold legs. I felt her ribs and her back — hard, the way they'd felt when we'd been on the floor in the bar. I felt her breathing under her coat, could smell on her breath what she'd just been drinking. I closed my eyes, and she said to me, almost as if she was sorry about something, “Oh, my. You've just got everything, don't you? You've just got everything.”

“What?” I said. “What is it?”

And she said, “No, no. Oh, no, no.” That was all she said. And then she didn't talk to me anymore.

ON THE TRAIN, I sat facing Doris as the empty, dark world went by outside our compartment in a snowy stream. She had washed her face and cleaned her glasses and put on perfume, and her face had color in it. She looked nice, though the front of her red dress had stains from where we'd had to lie down on the bar floor in the wet. We sat and looked out the window for a while, not talking, and I saw that she had taken off her stockings and her earrings, and that her hands were pretty. Her fingers were long and thin, and there was no polish on her fingernails. They looked natural.

In the depot I had called my father. I thought I should tell him about Barney and what had happened and say that I was all right, though I knew I could explain it wrong and he could decide to come and get me, and I wouldn't get to Seattle, or ever get to see my mother.

The phone rang a long time, and when my father answered it he seemed out of breath, as if he'd been running or had come in from outside. “It's snowing in Montana, bud,” he said, catching his wind. I heard him stamp his feet on the floor. “It feels like you've been gone a long time already.”

“We're still in Shelby,” I said. “It's snowing here too.” Doris was at the ticket desk, talking to the woman I had talked to — Betty. I knew they were talking about Barney. There were other people in the waiting room now, with suitcases and paper packages, and it was noisy. “We saw a man get shot up in a bar tonight,” I said to my father, just like that.

“What is it?” my father said, as though he hadn't heard me right. “What's it you said?”

“The police did it.”

“Where's Doris?” my father said. “Put her on.” And I knew that what I'd said had shocked him. “Where are you?” he said, and his voice sounded scared.

“In Shelby,” I said. “In the depot. I was on the floor with Doris. Nothing happened to us.”

“Where's she now, son?” my father said and suddenly seemed very calm. “Let me speak to her now.”

“She's talking to somebody,” I said. “She can't come to the phone.”

“Are the police there?” my father said, and I knew he was thinking right then about coming up and getting me and taking me back. But it was snowing too hard, and the train would get there before he could.

“We were in the Oil City bar,” I said, and I said it calmly. “It wasn't somebody we knew. It was an Indian.”

“What in the world's going on now?” my father said, and he said this loudly, so that I wondered if he'd had a drink. “Was she with somebody?”