Richard Ford - Wildlife

From down the hill I heard the eleven o’clock shift whistle. Men at the oil refinery were going home, and I was tired and wanted Warren Miller to be out of our life, since he didn’t seem to have a place in it.

I got out of the car into the cold street and looked at the house. I thought my mother would come out the door at any minute, but there was no movement there. The porch light was off, but the yellow light inside was still lit. I thought I heard music, boogie-woogie music — a piano and some horns — but I couldn’t be sure. It could’ve been from the Italian place. I waited a minute, just watching the house. I didn’t know how much time had gone by since my mother had gone inside. I heard a switch engine in the freight yards down the hill. Several more cars drove past me. Finally I walked across the street and up the steps, then stopped halfway and listened. The music was louder and coming from Warren Miller’s living room. I wanted to shout for my mother to come out, or to come to the window and give me a signal. But I didn’t want to shout out ‘Mother’ or ‘Jeanette’.

I walked up the front steps onto the porch, and instead of going to the door and knocking, I went to the front window, through which I could see inside the living room. I saw the table with our dishes still on it. I saw the door to the kitchen was open and the doors to both bedrooms, and beyond them the bathroom where I had been and where the light shone on the white tiles. And I saw my mother and Warren Miller. They were standing in the middle of the living room, right where they’d been when they were dancing. And I think I almost did not see them. If I’d gone back to the car then I wouldn’t have seen them at all, or would not have remembered it. The coat my mother had been wearing was lying on the floor, and she had her bare arms around Warren Miller’s neck and was kissing him and putting her hands in his hair, standing in the middle of the bright room. Warren Miller had pulled my mother’s green dress up from behind her so that you could see where her stockings were held by white elastic straps, and you could see her white underpants. And even though he had his cigar in his hand, held between his fingers, he was holding my mother outside her underwear, and pulling her toward him so hard that he picked her up off the floor and held her against him while he kissed her and she kissed him.

I stood at the window and watched what they did — which was no more than I have said — until my mother’s feet touched the floor again, and I thought they might stop kissing suddenly and both turn and look at me, where I was perfectly visible through the window glass. I did not even want to stop them, or make them do what they didn’t want to do. I just wanted to keep watching until whatever was supposed to happen did happen. Though when my mother’s feet touched the floor I moved to the side, and when I was away from the window I could not move back into it again. I was afraid they would see me. And I simply turned around and walked back down the steps and across the street to the car, got in the driver’s seat, and waited for my mother to finish what she was doing there and come out so we could go home.

In not very much time the front door of the house opened and my mother walked out, not wearing the coat, just in her green dress. She walked straight down the steps. I didn’t see Warren Miller. The door stayed open only for a moment, and then it closed. The porch light did not come on again, though I saw a light go off inside the house.

My mother hurried across the street and got into the car beside me and shivered when she closed the door. ‘He needs a nicer house,’ she said. She crossed her arms together in front of her and she shivered again and shook her head. I could smell the sweet greasy odor of the red hair tonic that was in Warren Miller’s bathroom. ‘Aren’t you cold?’ she said. ‘It’s getting colder. It’ll snow next, and then what?’

‘It’s not supposed to,’ I said. I hadn’t started the car yet. We were just sitting in the dark.

‘Good,’ she said and blew on the back of her hands. ‘I surprised myself. I had a good time. Did you have one, too?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did,’ though that was a lie.

‘I didn’t want that old coat, though. I just didn’t.’ She put her hands to her face. ‘My cheeks are hot.’ She turned and looked into the back seat as if she expected to see someone there, then she looked at me in the dark. ‘Did you like him?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not too much.’

‘Are you sorry you came, then? Is that what you’re telling me?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I haven’t thought about that.’ I touched the key and turned it to start the car. The heater fan came on, blowing cold air.

‘Well, think about it,’ she said.

‘I will.’

‘What will you think about me after I’m dead?’ she said. ‘Maybe you haven’t thought about that yet, either.’

‘I’ve thought about that,’ I said, and I switched off the heater.

‘And? What’s my verdict? I can take it if it’s guilty.’

‘I’d miss you,’ I said, ‘I know that.’

‘Warren says he means it about taking you up in his airplane,’ she said. ‘He says you can learn all of Morse code in one afternoon’s lesson. I always wanted to know that. I could send secret messages to people in other places.’

‘Why did his wife leave him,’ I asked. It was all I could think of to say.

‘I don’t know about it,’ my mother said. ‘He isn’t handsome at all. Though of course men have more ways to be handsome. Unlike women. Do you think you’re handsome?’ When she said this she looked straight at me. We were just sitting in the car, in front of Warren Miller’s house, in the dark, talking. ‘You look like your dad. Do you think he’s handsome?’

‘I think he is,’ I said.

‘I think he is, too,’ my mother said. ‘I’ve always thought he was very handsome.’ She put the palm of her hand to the cold window glass beside her, then held it against her cheek. ‘It’s lonely up here, isn’t it? Do you think it’s lonely?’

‘Right now I do,’ I said.

‘It’s not so much a matter of being alone or wanting somebody who’s not there, is it? It’s being with people who aren’t appropriate enough. I think that’s right.’

‘May-be,’ I said.

‘And you’re with me.’ My mother smiled at me. ‘I guess I’m not very appropriate. It’s too bad. Too bad for me, I mean.’

‘I think you’re appropriate,’ I said. I looked up at Warren Miller’s house and saw that all the lights were turned off in the front room. A single light was burning from the side window. He was in his bedroom, and I could think of him bent over at the closet door, taking off his boots, his hand on the blue wallpaper for balance. Maybe, I thought, he was not to blame for kissing my mother and holding her dress up over her hips. Maybe that’s all he could do. Maybe no one was to blame for that, or for much of what happened to anyone.

‘Why don’t we drive away now?’ my mother said to me. ‘Do you feel all right?’

‘I feel fine,’ I said.

‘I know you drank some wine.’

‘I feel all right,’ I said. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Oh, well,’ my mother said. ‘How do I feel? I’m afraid of becoming somebody else now, I guess. Somebody very new and different. That’s probably how the world works. We just don’t know it until it happens. “Ha-ha,” I guess is what we should say. “Ha-ha.” ’ She smiled at me again.

Then I drove off down the street away from Warren Miller’s house, thinking that the world was becoming different for me, too, and in a hurry. I could feel it, like a buzz all around me, exactly like my father told me the world felt to him when it began to change.