Rock Springs (10 page)

“So, all right now,” Sherman said when the woman arrived. I could see through the window that she wasn't a woman but a girl. She was older than we were, but not by very much. “This is Claude,” Sherman said. “He's my son. This is his close friend George, who's not going. Claude's going to take you fishing.” He looked across the street at the switch engine. “This is Lucy.”

The girl just stood there, holding her folded paper sack. She was tall and pretty and pale-skinned, and she didn't seem happy.

“You don't want to go fishing with us,” Claude said. He had not made a move to let her in.

“Let her get in,” I said. “She wants to go.”

The girl bent and looked in the back where there was no seat. A crate was there with a jack, the two rods, and a jumper set.

“Fm not riding in that back,” the girl said, and looked at me.

“Let her in front,” I told Claude.

I don't think he wanted the girl in the car. And I didn't know why, because I wanted her in. Maybe he had thought his father had an Indian woman, and he wasn't sure what to do now.

Claude opened the door, and when he stood up I could see that the girl was taller than he was. I didn't think that kind of thing mattered though, because Claude had already whipped boys with his fists who were bigger than he was.

When the girl got in she had to pull her knees up. She was wearing stockings, and her green shoes were the kind without toes.

“Hello, George,” she said, and smiled. I could smell Sherman's aftershave.

“Hello,” I said.

“Don't cause me any fucking trouble, or FU break you up,” Sherman said. And before Claude could get in, Sherman was starting back to the motel in his bedroom slippers, his ponytail swinging down his back.

“You're a real odd match,” Lucy said when Claude had gotten in the driver's seat. “You don't look like each other.”

“Who do I look like?” Claude said. He was angry.

“Some Greek,” Lucy said. She looked around Claude as Sherman disappeared into the motel room and closed the door. “Maybe your mother, though,” she said as an afterthought.

“Where's she now?” Claude said. “My mother.” He started the car.

The girl looked at him from behind her glasses. “At home. I guess. Wherever you live.”

“No. She's dead,” Claude said. “Are those my father's glasses?”

“He gave them to me. Do you want them back?”

“Are you divorced?” Claude said.

“I'm not old enough,” the girl said. “I'm not even married yet.”

“How old
are
you?” Claude said.

“Twenty, nineteen. How does that sound?” She looked at me and smiled. She had small teeth and her breath had beer on it. “How old do I look?”

“Eight,” Claude said. “Or maybe a hundred.”

“Are we going fishing, today?” she said.

“We talk about things we don't intend to do,” Claude said. He hit the motor then, and snapped the clutch, and we went swerving out of the lot onto the hardtop, heading out of Sunburst and back onto the green wheat prairie.

C
laude drove out the Canada highway eight miles, then off on the county road that went between the fields and past my house toward the west mountains a hundred miles away, where there was still snow and it was cold. My house flashed by in back of its belt of olive trees—just a square gray two-story house, unprotected toward the east. Claude was driving to Mormon Creek, I knew, though we were only doing what his father had told us to and not anything on our own. We were only boys, and nothing about us would interest a woman, or even a girl the age of this girl. You aren't ignorant of that fact when it is true about you,
and sometimes when it isn't. And there was a strange feeling of suspense in me then—that once we were there I did not know what would happen and possibly nothing good would.

“That's a pretty green dress,” Claude said as he drove. The girl had not been saying anything. None of us had, though she seemed to have her mind on something—getting back to the motel maybe, or getting back where she'd come from.

“It's not for this season,” she said, staring out at the new fields where the air was tawny. “It's already too dry to farm.”

“Where are you from?” I said.

“In Sceptre, Saskatchewan,” she said, “where it looks just like this. A little town and a bunch of houses. The rest knifed up with these farms.” She said
house
the way Canadians do, but otherwise she did not talk that way.

“What did your family do?” Claude said. “Are they a bunch of cheddar-head Swedes?” He seemed to expect everything she said to make him mad.

“He farmed,” she said. “Then he worked in a tractor shop in Leader. In the fall he cleans geese. He's up to that right now.”

“What do you mean, he cleans geese?” Claude said. He smiled a mean smile at her, then at me.

“Hunters bring geese they shoot. It's just out on the open prairie there. And they leave them at our garage. My father dips 'em to get the feathers out, then guts 'em and wraps 'em. It's easy. He's an American. He's from Wyoming. He was against the draft.”

“He plucks 'em, you mean—right?” Claude said, driving. “Is that what you mean he does?”

“They smell better than this car does. I wouldn't have known you two were Indians if it wasn't for this car. This is a reservation beater is what we call these.”

“That's what
we
call them,” Claude said. “And we call those motels where you were at whorehouses.”

“What do you call that guy I was with?” Lucy said.

“Do you think George looks like an Indian?” Claude said. “I think George is a Sioux, don't you?” He smiled at me. “George isn't a goddamn Indian. I am.”

“An Indian's a bump in the road to me,” she said.

“That's true,” Claude said. And something about her had made him feel better. I didn't believe that this girl was a whore though, and I didn't believe she thought she was, or that he did. Claude's father did, but he was wrong. I just didn't know why she would come over from Havre in the middle of the night and end up out here with us. It was a mystery.

We started down the steep car path to Mormon Creek bottom, where the water was high but not too muddy to shine. Across the bridge and a hundred yards downstream was a sawmill that had made fence posts but had been wrecked. Behind it was a pitch clay bluff the creek had cut, and beyond that were shallows and a cottonwood swale. On the near side was a green willow bank and a rusted car body that had been caught in the willow roots. It was a place Claude and I had fished for whitefish.

“Not much of a lumber place,” Lucy said.

“That's why the sawyers did so great,” Claude said.

“Which way's west?”

“That is,” I said, pointing to where the white peaks of mountains could just be seen above the coulee rim.

She looked back the other way. “And what're those mountains back there?”

“Those're hills,” Claude said. “We keep them separate in this country.”

“It is a nice atmosphere though,” she said. “I like to be oriented to the light.”

“You can't see light with those glasses,” Claude said.

She turned to face me. “I see George here. I see well enough. He's nicer than you are so far. He's not an asshole.”

“Why don't you take those glasses off?” Claude said. We were crossing the low bridge over Mormon Creek. The Buick clattered and shimmied on the boards. I looked down. I could see through the clear surface to gravel.

“Where does
this
water go?” Lucy was looking around me.

“Up,” I said. “To the Milk River. It goes north.”

“Did Sherman bust you, is that the trouble?” Claude said. He stopped us right on the bridge, and grabbed at the glasses, tried taking them off Lucy's face. “You got a big busted eye?”

“No,” Lucy said. And she took off the glasses and looked at me first, then Claude. She had blue eyes and blond eyebrows the color of her hair. And what she was hiding was not a black eye, but that she had been crying. Not when she'd been with us, but when she woke up, maybe, and saw where she was, or who she was with, or what the day looked like ahead of her.

“I don't see why you have to have them on,” Claude said. Then he drove off the bridge and turned onto the post mill road downstream, the Buick bucking and rocking over the bumps.

“It's too bright,” she said and pulled the hem of her dress over her knees. It was a wool dress, as green as grass, and it felt hot against me. “What's the fun out here,” she said. “That's a well-kept secret.”

“You are,” Claude said. “The blond bombshell. You're our reward for being able to put up with you.”

“Good luck for that party.” She clutched her paper bag. Her fingers were short and pink, and her fingernails were clean and not bitten, just a regular girl's hands. “Where's
your
mother and father?” she said to me.

“His old man runs the rails. He's a gash hound, too,”
Claude said as we drove in under the cottonwoods that grew to the creek bank. “His mother already hit the road. This is wild country up here. Nobody's safe.” Claude looked at me in a disgusted way, but he knew I didn't like that talk. I didn't think that was true of my father, and he did not know my mother—though what he said about her was what I thought. It was not unusual that people left that part of Montana. She had never liked it, and neither my father nor me ever blamed her.

“Are you boys men now?” Lucy said and put her glasses back on. “Am I supposed to think that, now that we're out here?”

“It doesn't matter what you think,” I said. I opened the door and got out.

“At least somebody accepts truth,” Lucy said.

“George'll say anything to get on your pretty side,” Claude said. “Him and me are different. Aren't we, George?”

But I had already started toward the creek and couldn't hear what the girl said back, though she and Claude were in the car together for a little while. I heard him say, “Hope means wait to me,” and laugh, and I heard his door slam, with her left inside.

C
laude took his casting rod to the creek bank with his jelly jar of white maggots, and tied up a cork-and-hook rig, then went to the shallows where sawdust from the mill had laid a warm-water bottom and a sluice down the center of the creek. Sometimes we had caught fifteen whitcfish in a school there, when they'd fed. One after another. You could put your bait where they were and bring one back. They were big fish and steady fighters, and Claude liked them because they were easy to catch.

It was three o'clock then, and warm, but I did not want to fish. I did not like the waiting of fishing. Pd hunted for birds with my father, walked them up out of the rosebush thickets. But I did not care so much for fishing, and not for whitefish at all.

Claude had taken off his yellow jacket, and the girl had brought it back up—walking on the toes of her shoes—and spread it in the sun, then sat facing the creek. She raised her dress to her knees and took off her shoes and stockings and pushed up her sleeves. She'd unbuttoned her front enough to let sun on her neck and leaned on one elbow, smoking a cigarette, blowing the smoke in the warm air.

“I wish I could play the piano,” she said when I walked up from the bank. “Do you play one?”

“No,” I said. My mother had played a piano when we'd lived in Great Falls. She played Dixieland in the house we'd rented there.

“Out here makes me think about that,” she said. “I'd like to go in somebody's house and sit down and play some song.” She blew smoke out the side of her mouth. She still had on Sherman's sunglasses. Her long legs were so white they looked gray, and thin enough that her calf bones stood out. She had shaved them above her knees, and I could see where the blond hair began. She looked at me as if she wanted me to say something else, but I had nothing else to say. “Do you ever have the dream that somebody you know is leading you into a river and just when you're knee-deep, you step in a hole and you fall under. Then you jump in your sleep, it scares you so much?”

“I have that,” I said. “Sometimes.”

“Everybody probably does,” she said.

I sat beside her on the grass, and we watched Claude. He was casting out toward the car body and walking his bobber down through the sluice. Now and then he'd look
back at us and make a phony gesture of having a fish on his line, and then he would ignore us. I could smell the cotton-woods and the sawdust air from the mill.

“Do you have a suitcase full of your clothes?” I said.

“Where?” she said. She was smoking another cigarette.

“I don't know. Someplace else.”

“I just left,” the girl said. “I wanted to take a trip suddenly—to someplace warmer. I'm not sure I had this in mind, though.” She looked at Claude, who had looked up at us again then turned around. Whitefish made little dimples on the flat water, seizing insects I could not even see. It was not a good sign for the rig Claude was using; though at any time fish can do another thing and you will begin to catch them. “His father's not so terrible,” she said and touched her nylon stockings, which were in a pile on the grass. She lifted one up with her little finger. “You certainly wouldn't think he'd sit in the dark in the middle of the night and pray in a motel. But he does. He's nice, really. He's pretty big, too. His son's scrawny.”

I tried to think about Sherman praying but couldn't think of what he'd want to pray for or hope to have come to him. “Where'd you meet him?”

“At the Trails End Bar in Havre, where I was too young to get in, or should've been. You get in odd situations sometimes.”

“How old
are
you?”