Richard Ford - Wildlife

When we walked into the house that night the telephone was ringing. It was eleven-thirty. My mother went straight back into the kitchen and answered it. It was my father calling from the forest fire.

‘Yes, Jerry. How are you?’ I heard my mother say. I could see her standing at the kitchen table. She was winding the phone cord around her finger and looking at me through the door as she talked to him. She looked taller than she had looked in Warren Miller’s house. Her face looked different, more businesslike, less ready to smile. I stood and watched her as if I was going to talk next, although I knew I wasn’t going to.

‘Well, that’s very good, honey,’ my mother said. ‘It is. I’m relieved to know that.’ She nodded, still watching me. I knew she wasn’t thinking about me, maybe wouldn’t even have known I was the person she was looking at. ‘Well, what a thing to see,’ she said. ‘My God.’ She looked around her and found the cup she had been drinking whiskey out of before we’d left earlier that evening, and stood holding it as she talked. ‘Well, is it possible to breathe at all?’ she said. ‘That’s what I’ve wanted to know. That seemed important.’

Then my father talked for a while. I could hear his voice buzzing in the receiver from all the way across the room.

‘Uh-huh,’ she said. ‘Uh-huh.’ She was just holding the empty cup. She even turned it up a last time and let the few drops drain into her mouth while she listened. Then she set it down beside her on the table. ‘Yes. You reach your limits. I know that. You have to adapt,’ she said. ‘How can it happen so fast? My God.’ My father talked again, and my mother looked out at me and pointed with her finger toward the hallway, and she mouthed the words, ‘Go to bed.’

I wasn’t going to get to talk to my father that night, though I wished I could’ve gotten on the line and told him that I missed him, that we both did, and we wished he’d come home tonight. But that was not what my mother wanted, and I did what she said because I didn’t want there to be an argument late at night with my father on the phone, and her drunk and in love with another man.

My mother didn’t talk to my father much longer. From my room I could hear a word she would say, then she would lower her voice and talk. I didn’t hear my name mentioned or Warren Miller’s or the air base job she had applied for that day. I heard the words ‘spontaneous’ and ‘lie’ and ‘private’ and ‘sweet’. That was all. And in a few minutes I heard the receiver put down, and a cabinet door open and the sound of glass touching glass.

I was already in bed when my mother came in my room. The ceiling light was still on, and I thought she would turn if off for me. She had another glass of whiskey with her. I had never seen her drink so much as she had on that day and that night. She had not been a drinker before.

‘Your father says hello to his only son,’ she said, and took a drink. ‘He said he saw a bear catch on fire. Isn’t that something?’ I was just listening to her. ‘He said it had climbed a tree to get away and the fire exploded in the branches all around it. The poor bear jumped out completely on fire and ran away. That’s a thing to remember, isn’t it?’

‘Did he say he was coming home,’ I asked. I was thinking, lying in my bed, that it might be snowing where he was, and that the fire would go out by itself.

‘He may stay on a while longer,’ my mother said. ‘I didn’t ask for the vital details. Are you proud of him? Are you coming to that conclusion?’

‘Yes. I am,’ I said.

‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’d like you to be. I wouldn’t talk you out of it.’

‘Are you proud of him?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ my mother said. ‘Do you remember when we got very close to the fire when we went up there? And you got out and went over to it — I guess I wanted you to experience it. But when you came back, I told you that the whole fire was just a lot of little separate fires? And once in a while they blew up together and destroyed everything?’ She stuck her finger in her glass, then put her finger in her mouth. ‘Well, I guess I think nothing’s that important by itself,’ she said softly.

‘I believe that,’ I said, though I didn’t believe she had answered my question about my father.

‘It is right,’ my mother said, and was irritated. ‘I know what’s right, for God’s sake. I’ve just never thrown myself into anything like that before.’ She took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. She stared out my window into the night. ‘What would you think if I killed someone — would you be embarrassed?’ She looked at me, and I knew she wasn’t thinking of killing anyone.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would. I wouldn’t like it.’

‘Well. All right, then,’ my mother said. ‘That’s out. I have to figure out something else. Something more interesting.’

‘Are you proud of Dad,’ I asked. ‘You didn’t answer that.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘No. Not much. You shouldn’t let that bother you, though — you know, sweetheart? It’s not very important who I’m proud of. Myself. I should just want to be proud of myself. That’s all. You have to put your trust into something else now.’ She smiled at me. ‘I was just wondering why I thought I had to take you with me tonight. We do strange things sometimes. I don’t know who I was showing to whom. You probably don’t even care about it. It’s just one thing, not a lot of things.’

‘I thought you wanted me to go with you,’ I said.

‘Well, that’s right. You’re right.’ She smiled at me again and pushed her fingers back through her hair.

‘Did Warren tell you his story about seeing the geese from the airplane?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Isn’t that a wonderful story?’ my mother said. ‘It’s baloney, of course. He just thinks things up and says them.’ She turned the light off. ‘It’s diverting, though,’ she said, and then she said good night and closed the door behind her.

And I lay in bed for just a little time, thinking before I went to sleep that Warren Miller didn’t seem like the kind of man to make a story up. He seemed like the kind of man things happened to, the way my mother had said, and who did the wrong things and tried to act as if he didn’t by acting better, a man my father might’ve said had bad character. I wondered what my father had said about me tonight, if he was mad at me, and if I’d done something wrong and was trying to act as if I hadn’t. As I slipped down into sleep I thought I could hear my mother dialing the telephone. I waited, and could feel myself alive while the ringing went on and someone answered somewhere — Warren Miller, I thought, no one else. I heard his voice, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes.’ Then it was silent and I went to sleep.

At two o’clock that night I came awake. Down the hall, I heard the toilet running, and I could hear someone jiggling the handle to make the running stop. I listened to the noise of the metal on the tank and the water running through the pipes, and I got out of bed and went to the door of my room and stepped out into the dark hall where I could not be seen. And I waited there until the bathroom door opened and the light cast onto the floor and Warren Miller came out, turned back and clicked off the bathroom light, and then walked in the direction of my mother’s room. He was naked. In the light I saw his legs and his chest which were covered with hair. I saw his penis, and when he turned I saw the scars on the back of his legs, where the barbed wire had hit him. It looked to me like skin that had been shot with a shotgun. He was wearing his glasses, and as he walked toward my mother’s room I saw how he limped, that one leg, his right one, would not straighten and for that reason made him dip to the side and made his other leg, his good one, throw out farther ahead in a way that made the limp be worse. His white body shone in the dark hallway as he went away from me, and I stood in my tee shirt and underpants as he opened the door to my mother’s room — where there was no light — and heard her soft voice from inside say, ‘Be quiet, now. Just be quiet.’ The door closed, then, and I heard her bed squeeze down under his weight. I heard my mother sigh, and I heard Warren Miller cough and clear his throat. I was cold there, my back to the hall closet door. My legs were cold and my feet and hands were. But I didn’t want to move from there because I wanted to know what else would go on and felt that something would.