Richard Ford - Wildlife

And then for a while I walked out into Great Falls.

It was late afternoon, and I knew it would not be light much longer, and that it would turn cold once the light had fallen, and I would not want to be out then but would want to be someplace else: on a bus going away from there, or in a hotel room in another town, or at home with my mother waiting for whatever would happen to us next. I did not know what that could possibly be.

Great Falls was a town where I did not know the streets well, so that I walked first to my school on Second Street, where there were still people inside and the lights were on even though school was out for the day. Boys were running on the track at the south end of the building, and the football team was scattered on the long playing field in their white practice jerseys, going through their drills in the chill breeze. I waited and watched them, listened to the sounds of clapping and shoulder pads hitting and their voices until I thought I might be noticed on the sidewalk at the edge of the grass. Someone would remember I’d played for a while and that I’d quit. And I didn’t want to think about what someone else thought. So I walked all the way down Second Avenue North to the park by the river, then down the stream past the tennis courts and the archery targets to the Fifteenth Street Bridge and out onto the pedestrians’ walk, where I took the clasp knife Warren Miller had given me — two days before, though it seemed like a month — and dropped it over the rail to where I couldn’t see it strike the flat water.

From the bridge I could see the silver oil refinery tanks and the light towers at the baseball field where the Great Falls team played. I could see the fairgrounds and the smelter stack and the hot-rod course in Black Eagle, and the three white elevators Warren Miller owned or at least had an interest in, and where my mother said she wanted to work or had already worked or soon would if any of that was a true story. And beyond were the open prairies, flat and treeless as far away as I could see, all the way to Minneapolis and St. Paul, my father had told me.

Below the bridge two men were fishing, two tall Negroes standing on the dry flats casting spinner spoons into the current. Two young white women sat on the grass on a blanket watching them, talking and laughing. The women had on slacks. No one was catching fish, and it did not seem to me like a good day to catch fish. The men were from the air base, I thought, and today was their time off. I doubted if they cared about the fish. They cared about the girls who, I thought, were town girls or Air Force girls, or nurses at the hospital, or waitresses who had their own days off together and were spending it this way, with these men. They seemed to be enjoying themselves.

I walked back up Fifteenth Street, under the trees that lined it, all the way to Tenth Avenue South and turned east and walked away from town. I thought that I would walk as far as the air base fence and watch the bombers take off toward the DEW Line or the Pacific — wherever they went. It was a thing I’d done with my father the spring before, after work, the big planes only lighted shadows that shot ahead of their big noises and disappeared into the stars and night.

Now seemed to be a time — the first one in my life — when I needed to know exactly what to do, and out of all the choices I had I wanted to choose the right thing, and start in that direction. So as I walked out the busy street past the air base strip joints and the car dealerships and the motels with their winter rates already on display, I began to arrange my thinking. My mother was going to marry Warren Miller soon; we would live in another house in Great Falls, and my father would probably move away to some other town, back to Lewiston, maybe. I understood why she liked Warren: because he knew things. He knew more things than my father did, and he was older. I wondered if there had been other men in my mother’s life before, or other women in my father’s, people I didn’t know about. But I decided that there hadn’t been because I would have known it — being there as I was all the time, with them. And then I wondered what would happen if my father had an accident where he was, or lost his memory, or never came back home. How would that be? Or if my mother didn’t come home today and I never saw her again. Would anyone understand anything then?

When I got to Thirty-eighth Street, I crossed over to the south side and walked along the bar fronts there. Cars were parking in front of the bars, and men and women were getting out to go in and drink. Behind the bars were sheds and then rows of small new houses built on new streets, and beyond that an empty drive-in movie and a railroad spur and then the town stopped and the fields of winter wheat began.

So, I wondered, were my mother and father separated now? Was that what this meant? My father leaves the house. My mother has another man come to visit her. I knew you could know the words but not match them with the life. But to be able to do it right said something about you. And I didn’t know if my judgment was good enough, or exactly what was good or bad. Though there must be times, I thought, when there was no right thing to know , just as there were times when there was no right thing to do. ‘Limbo’ was the word my mother had used, and that is where I was now — in limbo, between the cares of other people with only my own cares to show me what to do.

I had walked as far as the base fence, which was across Tenth Avenue. Beyond it were apartments and the golf course where my father had taught lessons, and then the wide landing strip and the control tower and the flat low buildings of the base. Light was going out of the sky in the east. One jet took off as I watched, and the day seemed gray and over with. In an hour it would be full dark and much colder, and I would want to be at home.

On the side of the street toward town was a bar called the Mermaid, and cars were there, and on the roof was a neon sign with a green mermaid shining in the dull afternoon light. It was a place where airmen went, and my father had taken me there on the days he’d taught golf at the base. I knew what it was like inside there now, knew what color the light was, how the air smelled, knew the voices of the airmen — low and soft as if they knew secrets. As I walked past the bar a black Mercury drove in and parked, and the two Negroes I had seen fishing an hour ago, back in town, were inside. Their car, I saw, had a tag from another state — a yellow tag — and they were alone. The white girls who had been with them were gone, and the men were laughing as they got out. One put his long arm around the other man’s shoulders. ‘Oh, I couldn’t help it. No, no,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t help myself.’ They both laughed again, and the one who had talked looked at me and smiled as they walked past me, and said, ‘Don’t worry, son, we’re not going to kill anybody in here.’ Then they both laughed out loud and went inside the door to the Mermaid and disappeared.

And then I began to walk home. I had wanted to leave that day, but I saw that I couldn’t, because my parents were there still and I was too young. And even though I couldn’t help them by staying, we belonged together in some way I couldn’t change. I remembered as I walked through the cold evening toward the rising lights of Great Falls, a town that was not my home and never would be, that my mother had asked me in the middle of the night before if I had a plan for her. And I didn’t have a plan, though if I’d had one it would be that both of them could live longer than I would and be happier than I was. Death was less terrible at that moment than being alone, even though I was not alone and hoped I wouldn’t be, and even though it was a childish thought. I realized at that moment that I was crying and didn’t know I was, wouldn’t have guessed it. I was only walking home, I thought, trying to think about things, all the things in my life, just as they were.