Richard Ford - Wildlife

‘Go through the bedroom, Jenny,’ Warren Miller said. ‘All the lights are turned on.’

I had never heard anyone call her that before, and I must’ve looked at my mother in a way to let her know I thought there was something surprising about it.

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Joe, accuse me of something that matters,’ she said. She got up, and I could tell she had drunk too much because she kept her hand on the back rail of the chair and looked from me to Warren and back again, still standing, her eyes shining in the light. ‘Put some music on now,’ she said. ‘Some people might care to dance after while.’

‘We will,’ Warren Miller said. ‘That’s a good idea. When you come back we will.’ But he sat still in his chair, holding his cigar over the ashtray. My mother looked at both of us again as if she couldn’t see us clearly, then walked into the bedroom and closed the door behind her.

Warren Miller took a long puff on his cigar and blew the smoke up into the room, then held his cigar half onto the ashtray again. The big gold ring he had on his finger, the one I’d felt yesterday, had a square red stone on the top of it and a white diamond stone in the middle of that. It looked like a thing you would never forget you had on.

‘I own an airplane,’ Warren Miller said to me. ‘Have you ever been up in one of those?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t.’

‘You get a different perspective when you’re up there like that,’ he said. ‘The whole world’s different. Your town becomes just a little bitty town. I’ll take you up with me, and let you handle the controls. Would you like to do that?’

‘I’d like to go sometime,’ I said.

‘You can fly to Spokane and eat lunch and come back. We can take your mother. Would you like that?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. But I thought she would like it.

‘And are you going to go to college like she says,’ Warren Miller asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I hope so.’

‘Where?’ he said. ‘Which one are you aiming at?’

‘Harvard,’ I said. And I wished I knew where Harvard was, and that I had a reason for saying I wanted to go there.

‘It’s a good one,’ Warren Miller said. He reached up and took the jug of red wine in one hand and poured some into his glass. ‘Once,’ he said, and he put the jug down, and he sat a second without saying anything. His hair was gleaming in the light, and he blinked his eyes several times behind his glasses. ‘Once, when I was flying, it was in the fall, like it is now. Only colder, and it wasn’t this dry. I was flying up to look at some poor man’s hailed-on wheat crop where I held a policy. And I could see all these geese flying down from Canada. They were all in their formations, you know. Big V’s.’ He drank half his glass of wine in one gulp and licked his lips. ‘I was up there among them. And do you know what I did?’ He looked at me and put his cigar back in his mouth and crossed his legs so I could see his brown cowboy boots, which were shiny and without any fancy design on them like other boots I’d seen men wear in Montana.

‘No,’ I said, though I thought it would be something I wouldn’t believe, or something impossible, or that no one would do. He was drunk, too, I thought.

‘I opened back my window,’ he said, ‘and I turned off the engine.’ Warren Miller stared at me. ‘Four thousand feet up. And I just listened. They were all right up there around me. And they were honking and honking, way up in the sky where no one ever heard them before except God himself. And I thought to myself, this is like seeing an angel. It’s a great privilege. It was the most wonderful thing I ever did in my life. Ever will do.’

‘Were you afraid?’ I said, because all I could think of was what I would’ve felt and what an airplane would do if its engine was turned off, and how long you could stay up in the air without crashing.

‘I was,’ Warren Miller said. ‘I was afraid. I certainly was. Because I didn’t think about anything. I was just up there. I could’ve been one of those geese, just for that minute. I’d lost all humanity, and I had all these people trusting me on the ground. I had my wife and my mother and four businesses. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about them. I just didn’t even think about them. And then when I did, that’s when it scared me. Do you understand what I’m talking about, Joe?’

‘Yes,’ I said, though I didn’t. I only understood that it meant a great deal to Warren Miller and was supposed to mean something to me.

He sat back in his chair. He had leaned forward when he was telling me about hearing the geese. He picked up his wine glass and drank the rest of what was in it. Far away, behind walls, I could hear water running in pipes. ‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ Warren Miller said.

‘Okay,’ I said.

He poured some wine for me and more for himself. ‘Here’s to the angels,’ he said, ‘and to your old man not getting burned up like a piece of bacon.’

‘Thank you,’ I said for some reason.

He pushed his wine glass toward mine, but they never actually touched before he pulled back and drank half of his again. I took a small drink of mine and I hated the taste, which seemed both sweet and vinegary at the same time, and I put my glass back down. And I felt, just for a moment, with the lights all on and Warren Miller in front of me, breathing a heavy breath that I could smell and that was like the wine and whatever Warren Miller himself smelled like, that I was in a dream, one that would go on and on, and maybe I would never wake up out of it. My life had suddenly become this , which wasn’t awful but wasn’t the way it had been. My mother was out of sight, I was alone, and in that brief instant I missed my father more than I ever missed him again or had before. I know I almost broke down and cried for all the things I didn’t have then and was afraid I wouldn’t have again.

‘Your mother has a nice frame,’ Warren Miller said. He held his glass in one hand and he touched his cold cigar with the other. He seemed very big to me. ‘I admire her very much. She puts herself forward nicely in the world.’

‘I think so, too,’ I said.

‘That’s what you should do.’ Warren Miller made a fist with his right hand and held it up so that his big gold ring with the red-ruby stone faced out at me. ‘What do you think this is?’ he said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

He pushed the fist closer to me then. ‘It’s the Scottish Rite,’ he said. ‘I’m a Thirty-third Degree Mason.’ His fist was wide and thick and packed-looking. It looked like a fist that had not ever hit anything, because everything would get out of its way if it could. ‘You can touch it,’ he said.

I put my finger on the ring, onto the smoothed red stone and then on the diamond that was embedded in it. On the gold were tiny carvings I couldn’t make out.

‘It’s the all-seeing eye,’ Warren Miller said, and kept his fist out as if he had detached it from his body. ‘Is your father a Mason?’

‘No,’ I said, though I didn’t know if he was or not. I didn’t know what Warren Miller was talking about, but I thought it was because he was drunk.

‘You aren’t Catholic, are you?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We don’t go to a church.’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said, peering at me from behind his glasses. ‘You should be in touch with a group of boys your own age. Would you like to do that? I’d be happy to arrange it.’

‘That would be fine.’ I heard a door open and close, heard more water running in the pipes.

‘Boys need a start into life,’ Warren Miller said. ‘It’s not always easy. Luck plays a part in it.’