Richard Ford: Wildlife

My father drove all the way out to Fifteenth Street. We did not talk much. He pulled into a gas station and got out, and I sat and listened as he talked to the man who filled up the car. They talked about the snow, which the attendant said would be turning to rain then ice, and about the fire in Allen Creek, which my father said he had been fighting until that very afternoon, and which he and the attendant both believed would now go out. The man checked the oil and the tires, then he opened the trunk to do something I couldn’t see. He said something to my father about needing a new taillight, and then my father paid him and got in and we drove back out onto the street.

We drove down Central again to the middle of Great Falls by the train stations and the city park and the river where I’d already walked that day, and past the Helen Apartments where my mother was moving. My father did not seem to notice them, or to notice much of anything. He was just driving, I thought, with no particular destination while his mind was working on whatever he had to think about: my mother, me, what would happen to all of us. As we went father out toward the east, I could see the lights of the football stadium shining in the snowy sky. It was Friday night and a game was being played. Great Falls and Billings. I was glad not to be involved in it.

‘I said a fire can be a good thing, didn’t I?’ my father said. ‘Most people don’t believe that.’ He seemed in better spirits driving, as if he had thought of something that made him feel better. ‘It’s sure surprising how fast the world can turn backwards, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it is.’

‘Three days, if I’m not wrong,’ he said. ‘Maybe things were not as solid as I thought. I guess that’s evident.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Oh, sure,’ he said. ‘That’s evident.’ He looked at me, and he was smiling. He put his hand on my shoulder and could feel my bones. ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘once you face it, the worst is all behind you. Things start to improve then. Going to the fire just had a bad effect on your mother. That’s all.’

‘Did you ever like being there?’ I said. And this was something I’d wanted to know.

‘Oh,’ my father said. ‘My attitude changed. First it was mysterious. Then it was exciting. Then I felt helpless about it. I felt bottled up before I went,’ he said. ‘I stopped feeling that way.’

‘Did you have a girlfriend out there,’ I asked, because that was what my mother had said two nights ago.

‘No I didn’t,’ he said. ‘There were women there. I saw women fight each other, in fact. I saw them fight like men.’

And that seemed strange to me — two women fighting. Though it was an exciting thought, and I realized how odd it was for me to talk this way with my father, and for us both to know what we knew about my mother and to feel the way we did about it, which was not so bad at all. It seemed like a reckless, exciting feeling to me, and I liked it.

‘Does your mother’s boyfriend live in Black Eagle on Prospect Street?’ my father said as he drove along. Up ahead of us was the bridge to Black Eagle and beyond it the white grain elevators, lighted in the misting, snowy air. ‘You said you were there, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘So you know where he lives?’ my father said.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s where it is.’

‘All right,’ my father said. ‘Let’s go by there.’

He turned left onto the Fifteenth Street Bridge and we drove over the Missouri River and into Black Eagle, where there were only lights of houses against the bluff hills, and the snowy night up behind it like a curtain.

We drove halfway up the hill and turned right. It was eight o’clock at night, and many of the houses we passed had their porch lights on, and lights shining inside. My father seemed to know where he was going because he only looked now and then at the house numbers. Down the street I began to see the blue light of the Italian steakhouse. I could not see people in the street or any cars parked outside, and if it had not been Friday I would’ve thought it was closed.

‘It’s not a glamorous street, is it?’ my father said.

‘No, it isn’t,’ I said, watching the houses.

‘That’s surprising,’ he said. ‘I guess nobody sees through the eyes of a rich man.’ He was quiet then for a moment as he drove slowly down Warren Miller’s street. ‘I wish I could get your mother to back out on this.’

‘So do I,’ I said.

‘It’s not a good deal for her,’ he said.

‘Not that I can see.’

He stopped the car across the street from Warren’s house, in the place where my mother had parked the night before. I started to think what I had been thinking, sitting here with my mother: that I had no choice but to go inside with her when she went, and that I had gone. Then I stopped thinking that because it seemed like an entirely different subject now, one that had practically nothing to do with what had happened the night before, or any other night. I was with my father now, and everything was different.

Lights were on inside the house, though the porch was dark. Warren’s Oldsmobile sat parked in the steep driveway, behind the powerboat, just as it had been. My father turned off the engine and opened the window and looked out at the house. I could hear piano music. I thought it was coming from Warren Miller’s house, and that Warren was probably playing it as we sat in the dark watching.

‘I’d like to have a look in there, I guess,’ my father said. He turned and looked at me in the dark. ‘What do you think about that?’

‘Okay,’ I said. I looked past him at the house, where I could see no one at the window where the old-fashioned lamp was burning.

‘I’ll come right back, Joe.’

‘All right,’ I said.

He got out of the car, closed the door, and walked across the street and up the concrete steps. I could hear the piano music playing out into the night, and thought I heard someone singing with it. A man. I thought no one would notice my father now unless he wanted them to or unless he rang the doorbell or knocked, and I didn’t think he would do that. I wondered who my father had called from The Presidential bar. My mother? Or Warren Miller, to see if he was at home? Or possibly someone else entirely?

My father walked to the top of the steps and onto the porch. He turned around and looked at the car and then above it at the town lighted beyond the street of houses and the river. Then he walked to the front window and looked inside the house, bent over so he could see. He didn’t try to hide, just stood in the window, looking, so that anybody who would’ve glanced at the window at that moment would’ve seen him.

He did not stay at the window long, just long enough to look around inside at the living room and at whatever he could see through there, the other rooms, the kitchen. Then he turned around and came back down the steps to the street and across to the car where I was sitting, waiting. He did not get in the car with me, only leaned in the window.

‘How do you feel now, son?’ he said. He looked in at me.

‘I feel good,’ I said, though that was not exactly how I felt. I felt nervous to be there, and I wished we could leave.

‘Are you cold?’ he said. He wasn’t talking very loud.

‘No sir,’ I said. I could hear the piano still going inside the house. And I was cold. My arms were cold.

My father turned his head and looked down the street. There was nothing to see. No movement. ‘Maybe I can’t be in love anymore,’ he said, then let out a breath. ‘I’d love to improve things, though. You know?’

‘Yes sir,’ I said. Then I saw Warren Miller. He came right to the window where my father had been looking inside. He stopped a moment and stared out, I thought, at our car, then walked away. He was wearing a white shirt just the way he had the night before. I wondered if my mother was inside the house with him, and if that was what my father had seen when he looked and the reason he’d said what he’d just said. And I decided that she was definitely not inside there, and that she was still at home where we had left her and would find her again if we would just go back.