Canada (14 page)

When we sat down at the dinner table, our father announced that the business deal they’d gone away to investigate was something a person would be crazy to get involved in. Oil wells, he said, profoundly—then smiled and shook his head as if it had been a pathetic idea. Our mother had pointed this out, he said. It had been wise to take her. She had a sharp business mind. He said he now intended to throw himself full-time into learning the farm and ranch sales game. It was steady. Opportunity would soon come along by which we could own land of our own. We were staying in Great Falls. Berner and I could plan on school in two weeks. He intended to make Bargamian an offer for our house. It was a “Craftsman house,” and they weren’t made anymore, he said. It needed painting a new color and new wallpaper, and he wished it had a front “foy-yay” and a fireplace. But it had other elegant touches—the medallion in the living room ceiling being one. He admired the house’s symmetry and solid lines. The outside light was nice through the living room windows—which was true—and it was cool in summer. It reminded him of “the dog-trot” he’d grown up in in Alabama. But there’d be no more thought of moving. Which made me relieved, though it may not have affected Berner, since she’d already decided to run away with Rudy Patterson and put everything she knew of life behind her.

I had noticed my father hadn’t returned home with the blue bag he’d left with the morning before and didn’t mention losing. He was finicky in the military way about things he owned. When I’d looked again in his sock drawer for his pistol, it was gone again. I decided that on his business trip something must’ve happened that made him not bring his pistol back. I couldn’t imagine what. I also noticed that after we’d eaten supper and he’d assured us we’d be staying in Great Falls, he sat down in the living room, still in his boots and white shirt and jeans, and turned on the TV to
Summer Playhouse
, and talked to my mother through the door to the kitchen, where she was washing dishes. He told her he really felt at home in Great Falls, but he was sure he’d be happy back in Alabama, too. There was a benefit to being near kinfolks. To which she answered that it was never a bad idea to stay close to where you came from. Many people lived their whole lifetimes fighting that idea. He was very lucky, she said, to be figuring this out when he was still young.

All of it was a lie, of course—what they were proclaiming, how they were acting toward each other, what they wanted us to believe, how they painted the future. They were embroidering the surface of the acts they’d committed, seeking to dress it up, give good appearance to what they’d hoped would be the result. Events, though, aren’t the same as what you make up. Our parents were running ahead of disaster. But they’d come to a familiar, still place, where everything was where they’d left it—including Berner and me—where it looked the same and under other circumstances still might’ve been the same. They might’ve thought
they
were the same, able to go forward in their previous ways. Their same old problems were there. Their same desires. That there was calamitous consequence to be dealt with now, events in motion, coming to take them over and stamp their lives as finished, simply hadn’t fully dawned on them. They could still make themselves think, act, talk in the old ways. They’re both forgivable for that, even likable—for being charmed by one last taste of the life they’d tossed away.

Chapter 20

O
N SATURDAY MORNING I WOKE TO THE SOUND OF
my mother speaking on the telephone. She was insisting on something and waved me away when I walked down the hall to the toilet, past where the telephone sat in its nook in the wall. My father didn’t seem to be in the house. The car was gone from where he’d put it in back. A change in the weather had occurred overnight. The house was now cool and breezy, and the front and back doors were left open. Pale clouds you could see through the kitchen window hurried over from the west, and the light had turned a yellow-green. The curtains billowed, and the elms in our yard and in the park across the street sawed back and forth as if rain was coming. Our pile of cast-off clothes still lay on the back porch awaiting the St. Vincent de Paul truck. Inside, the house seemed fresh and almost calm in spite of the breezes. It felt like a morning in which something significant was expected in the afternoon.

When she left off talking, my mother announced she was walking to the Italian’s on Central, where she bought our groceries. Berner was still asleep. I could go if I wanted to, which made me happy. I didn’t spend enough time with my mother, in my estimation. She spent more time with Berner.

However, my mother said very little on our walk. At the Italian’s she bought a
Tribune
—something I’d never seen her do, since she maintained no interest in what went on in the town. On the way, I attempted to introduce some subjects of concern to me. My Schwinn was old and had been bought used in Mississippi and didn’t fit me anymore. A Raleigh was what I’d been thinking about—an English bike, with thin tires, hand brakes, gears, and a basket behind the seat. I wanted to carry my books and chess men to school when I started. I hadn’t been allowed to ride to school before, but I assumed I would be now. I reminded her that I planned to construct a single-box bee hive in the backyard, and expected to do that before spring, when the bees I was ordering from Georgia would arrive. There’d be benefits from that. Pollination of the hollyhocks. Honey—which we could all share—was useful for allergies, which would be good for Berner. Plus, it would be educational, since the bees were very organized and purposeful, and I’d be able to write school reports about what I learned, as I had about the smelting process and the Salk vaccine—which Berner and I’d both had. I reminded her that the State Fair was still going on, and I hoped to visit the bee exhibit. Today was the last day. She told me, however, that my father would have to see about all that—she was busy. She reminded me that she didn’t like fairs. They were dangerous. People who worked there were known to kidnap children—which I thought she was making up. Clothes were on her mind. Berner needed different undergarments. I wasn’t growing up very fast, but Berner was growing up much faster—which I’d noticed and my mother said was natural. I could wear my clothes from last year one more season. I didn’t feel like I was getting any of my important points across.

When we were in front of our house, the doors to the Lutherans were swung open and activity was going on inside. Under the wind-whipped trees, my mother looked up through the arch of moving limbs and observed that the air had a seam of cold in it now (which I couldn’t feel). She was sorry about it. We’d see some snow on the western peaks soon. Fall would be on us before we knew it.

When we came back inside, my mother made tea and a baloney sandwich and went out on the front steps in the breezy sunlight and read the newspaper. She had the big Stromberg-Carlson going in the living room, which wasn’t customary. She was on the lookout for word about their robbery, wanting to hear if news had made it as far as Great Falls—though I didn’t know that. Later in the day I looked through the paper to find out the closing hours at the fair. I wouldn’t have noticed anything, and I have no memory of a robbery being described. None of it had happened in my life yet.

However, I was very aware that the Indians had stopped driving past our house and staring hatefully in at us. The phone had stopped ringing. A black-and-white police car drove by two or three times that morning, and I know my mother saw it. I observed nothing to be wrong. The only thing I was conscious of was a sensation—and I couldn’t have described it—of movement taking place around me. Nothing was visible at the surface of life, and it was the surface of life that I knew about. But children in families have this sensation of movement. It can signify someone is taking care of them, that things are being invisibly looked after, and nothing bad is likely to happen. Or it can mean something else. It’s the sensation you have if you’re brought up right—which Berner and I thought we were.

By noon, our father hadn’t returned and my mother got dressed to go somewhere—which also never happened on Saturday. She put on the suit she sometimes wore to teach school—a thick green wool outfit with large pale pink plaids—nothing you’d wear in the summer. She put on stockings and black shoes with slightly high heels. Dressed and walking around inside the house, finding her purse, she looked stiff and uncomfortable. Her suit seemed to scratch at her, and her shoes made loud noises on the floor. She’d puffed up her hair in the bathroom mirror, so it looked spongy and made her features small, almost hidden, which she must’ve wanted. When Berner saw her, she said, “I’ve seen it all now,” and went back in her bedroom and closed the door.

I stood in the living room and asked my mother where she was going. I was still feeling those sensations of things moving around me. The chance of rain had already come and gone, as mostly happened. The day had turned humid and bright and steely hot. My mother told me she was being picked up by her friend Mildred Remlinger—the school nurse where she taught and who she rode with every day when classes were in session, but who she never saw after the summer started. I had never met Mildred, but my mother said Mildred was encountering personal problems she needed to discuss with another woman. She wouldn’t be gone long. Berner and I could eat the rest of the baloney if we got hungry. She’d cook dinner.

Eventually Mildred’s car drove up in front and the horn honked. My mother went hurrying out, down the steps, and got in the car—a brown four-door Ford—which drove away. I thought the odd sensations I was feeling were being created by my mother.

After a while Berner came out of her room and we ate the baloney and some cheese. Our father still hadn’t come back. Berner said we should take some of the cheese down to the river and feed the ducks and geese, which was something we did. We had little to do if we weren’t in school or in the house with our parents, watching them and being watched by them. Being a child under those circumstances was mostly waiting—for them to do something, or to be older—which seemed a long way away.

The river was only three blocks from our house, in the opposite direction from the Italian’s. Berner wore her sunglasses and her white lace gloves to cover her hands and her warts. On the way, she advised me that Rudy Patterson had told her Castro would soon develop an atomic bomb and the first thing he’d do was blow up Florida. That would start a world war none of us would escape from—which I didn’t believe. She said Rudy had also said Mormons wore special garments that protected them from non-Mormons, and that they were forbidden to take them off. She then told me she’d begun climbing out her bedroom window at night and meeting Rudy, who’d often steal his family’s car. They’d drive up on the rimrock by the municipal airport and park where they could see the lights of town and listen to radio stations from Chicago and Texas and smoke cigarettes. This was where Rudy had digressed about Castro and how he was serious about breaking out of Great Falls. He felt older than his age, already had hair on his chest, and could pass for eighteen. What else they did in the car was what I wanted to know. “We kissed. Nothing nasty,” Berner said. “I don’t like his mouth too much, and that little mustache. He doesn’t smell good. He smells like dirt.” Then she showed me a bruise where her turtleneck covered it. “He gave me this,” she said. “I clobbered him for it. Mother’d shit about it.” I knew what it was. “A tongue tattoo,” a boy at school had called it. He’d had one right where Berner’s was. He said it’d hurt to get it. I didn’t understand why you’d do a thing like that. No one had explained to me about sex at that point. I only knew what I’d heard.

For a while we stood in the weeds by the river, where grasshoppers and flies flitted and buzzed around the edge of the hissing, shining water. Cars were banging over the Central Avenue Bridge not far away. Midday was hot and still. The smelter always left a bitter, metal taste in the air, and the river itself was metal smelling, though it was cool near the surface. The tall buildings in Great Falls—the Milwaukee Road and the Great Northern depots, the Rainbow Hotel, the First National Bank, the Great Falls Drug Company—were across the river and foreign looking. A bald eagle sailed along just above the flat pavement of river toward Squaw Island and the Anaconda stack—five hundred feet tall and impressive to me—then lit in a tree on the far side and instantly became tiny. Whitefish rose for the yellow cheese balls we floated on the current. Mallards swam close and flapped and squabbled over them as they drifted back toward the bank and the reeds. I trapped a warm grasshopper between my two hands and laid it onto the river film. It circled down the stream trying its wings, trying to rise. Then it disappeared. A big Air Force refueling jet rose into the sky from the base. It banked south and went out of sight before its sound could reach us. I liked Great Falls, but it was never a town I cared much about. I imagined climbing onto the Western Star and riding away to some college—Holy Cross or Lehigh—everything in my life after that being on its way.

Chapter 21

W
HEN WE WALKED BACK HOME, SUN BEAT THE
tops of our heads. A moist, hot wind up from the south stirred the dust on Central Avenue. Tires of passing cars girdered, and the trees were dusty and brittle-leafed. There was no cold seam in the air.

The Lutherans were inside having a wedding. Doors, front and side, were opened out and two tall silver fans were positioned to create a circulation. Two men in western hats stood in the churchyard in shirt sleeves, holding their jackets and smoking. A muddy red pickup was parked alone at the church’s curb. Tin cans and silverware and a few old boots were strung to its back bumper. “Just Married—Heaven Bound” and “Poor Girl” were scrawled on the side windows in white.

Berner and I stopped and she considered the open front door through her sunglasses, as if a bride and groom might come out. We’d never been inside a church.