Richard Ford - Wildlife

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re not. I’m not bored.’

‘Do you know how Warren injured his leg,’ my mother asked. She pulled a strand of damp hair away from her forehead and fanned her face some more.

‘No,’ I said, and I sat down where I’d been sitting at the dinner table, beside Warren Miller.

‘Well, would you care to?’ she said.

‘I guess so,’ I said.

‘Well. He was hit from behind by a big roll of barbed wire when he was wading across the Smith River up to his rear end. Isn’t that right, Warren? It was underwater, and you didn’t see it coming. Is that what you said?’

‘That’s right,’ Warren Miller said. He looked a little uncomfortable at my mother’s telling this.

‘And the lesson is what?’ My mother smiled. ‘Warren seems to think we need to learn a lesson from everything. The world should keep it in mind.’

‘Something’s always up there that can take you away,’ Warren Miller said, seated at the dinner table, his big legs crossed in front of him.

‘Or not,’ my mother said.

‘Or not — that’s right, too,’ Warren said, and smiled at my mother. He liked her. I could tell that was true.

‘Joe and I have to go home now, Warren,’ my mother said, and she stood up. ‘I’m irritable all of a sudden and Joe’s bored.’

‘I had hopes you’d stay all night,’ Warren Miller said, his hands on his knees, smiling. ‘It’s gotten colder. And you’re drunk.’

‘I am drunk,’ my mother said. She looked at the old piano behind her, and set the music down on the little stand. ‘That’s not a crime yet, is it?’ She looked at me. ‘Did you know Warren could play the piano, sweetheart? He’s very talented. You should be like him.’

‘There’s another bedroom,’ Warren Miller said, and pointed to the other room, where the light was on and the foot of another bed was visible.

‘I never intended to stay here all night,’ my mother said. She looked around the little living room as if she was looking for a coat to wear outside. ‘Joe’s a very good driver. His father taught him.’

‘You have to put something on,’ Warren Miller said. He stood up and went limping off into the other bedroom, the one I hadn’t been in.

‘Warren’s going to give me one of his wife’s wraps, I believe,’ my mother said, and looked annoyed. ‘You don’t mind driving, do you? I’m sorry. I am drunk.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind.’

‘Combat experience,’ my mother said. ‘That’s what my mother used to call it when my father would get drunk and roar in and start making demands. You’ll get a big promotion someday. Which is to say, you’ll be grown up and can leave.’

Warren Miller limped back into the room, holding a man’s brown coat. ‘This’ll do a good job,’ he said. He came and held the coat while my mother put it on. She buttoned all three buttons, and when she did she looked like someone else — not a man, but like somebody I didn’t know.

‘Don’t you have one of your mother’s coats?’ my mother said.

‘I gave them away to the poor,’ Warren said.

‘Did you give your wife’s away, too?’ She smiled at him.

‘Maybe I’ll just throw them away,’ he said.

‘Don’t do that,’ my mother said. ‘She might be waiting upstream. You never know.’

‘I hope not,’ Warren said. And suddenly he took my mother’s shoulders, pulled her to him and kissed her on the mouth right in front of me. And I did not like that. My mother pulled away as if she hadn’t liked it either. She started toward the front door.

‘Come on, the fun’s over here, Joe,’ she said.

I followed her, though I glanced at Warren Miller, and he had a look on his face I didn’t like. He was angry, and I could see him breathing under his white shirt. He looked like somebody who could hurt you and who would if he lost his temper or had a reason. I didn’t like him, and in fact I never liked him again. What I wanted to do was get away from him, get out into the night with my mother, and go home.

It was cold in the car when we got inside. I sat behind the wheel and put my hands on it, waiting for my mother to find the keys, which were on the seat. The wheel was cold and hard to move. Down the street the blue light at the Italian place was still shining like a haze.

‘My heart’s just pounding away,’ my mother said. ‘Switch on the light in here.’ I turned on the inside light and she bent over looking for the keys and finally found them in the crack of the seat. ‘I drank too much,’ she said. ‘That makes your heart race.’ She handed me the keys. Then she said, ‘Stay here, Joe. I don’t want to wear this coat home.’

She opened the door, got out, and went back across the street and up the concrete steps to where the lights were still on in the window. I watched while she rang the bell, then waited. Warren Miller came to the door and she stepped inside already taking the coat off. I saw them walk past the window. He had hold of her arm, and they were talking. Then I couldn’t see them anymore.

I sat there in the cold car with the lights turned off and waited, watching down the street. I watched as a group of men came outside the Italian restaurant and walked into the empty street. They stood and talked to each other with their hands in their pockets, then one of the men hit another one in the arm as a joke, and then they all left in different directions. Car lights went on at the curb farther down the street, then the cars drove away. I sat still as one passed by me. In a minute a man and a woman came out together, dressed in heavy winter coats. They walked out into the street the way the others had, and stood talking. Then the man walked with the woman to a car and opened the door. He kissed her, then she got inside and started the engine and drove away. The man found his car farther down the street and drove away, too, in the opposite direction.

I looked up at Warren Miller’s house and tried to guess how long I’d waited and how long I would have to wait, and what my mother was saying about the coat and not wearing it. I didn’t see how it mattered, and what I believed she was saying to him was that she didn’t like being kissed, and especially not like that, in front of me, and that she would not stand for it again. I wondered what Warren Miller did with his boat, which I could see in the driveway nosed up, wondered what body of water he put it in and if I would ever get to go in it, or in his airplane — to Spokane — or if I would ever see him again. And for some reason it seemed to me that I wouldn’t, and for that reason I wished I’d put the silver knife he’d given me back in the drawer with the other two. I had no use for it now and I thought I would throw it away when I had the chance, throw it in the river when we drove back across on the way home. And something about that thought, about Warren Miller and the way he looked the last time I’d seen him, through the window of his house, with my mother in the living room, made me remember him — a large smiling man my father had taught to play golf, someone whose name I hadn’t remembered or hadn’t said anything to, only saw, maybe through a window or inside a car, or at a distance hitting a golf ball. I had only that part of a memory.

I wondered if there was some pattern or an order to things in your life — not one you knew but that worked on you and made events when they happened seem correct, or made you confident about them or willing to accept them even if they seemed like wrong things. Or was everything just happening all the time, in a whirl without anything to stop it or cause it — the way we think of ants, or molecules under the microscope, or the way others would think of us, not knowing our difficulties, watching us from another planet?