Rock Springs (29 page)

And what I felt was only that I had somehow been pushed out into the world, into the real life then, the one I hadn't lived yet. In a year I was gone to hard-rock mining and no-paycheck jobs and not to college. And I have thought more than once about my mother saying that I had not been raised by crazy people, and I don't know what that could mean or what difference it could make, unless it means that love is a reliable commodity, and even that is not always true, as I have found out.

Late on the night that all this took place I was in bed when I heard my mother say, “Come outside, Les. Come and hear this.” And I went out onto the front porch barefoot and in my underwear, where it was warm like spring, and there was a spring mist in the air. I could see the lights of the Fairfield Coach in the distance, on its way up to Great Falls.

And I could hear geese, white birds in the sky, flying. They made their high-pitched sound like angry yells, and though I couldn't see them high up, it seemed to me they were everywhere. And my mother looked up and said, “Hear them?” I could smell her hair wet from the shower. “They leave with the moon,” she said. “It's still half wild out here.”

And I said, “I hear them,” and I felt a chill come over my bare chest, and the hair stood up on my arms the way it does before a storm. And for a while we listened.

“When I first married your father, you know, we lived
on a street called Bluebird Canyon, in California. And I thought that was the prettiest street and the prettiest name. I suppose no one brings you up like your first love. You don't mind if I say that, do you?” She looked at me hopefully.

“No,” I said.

“We have to keep civilization alive somehow.” And she pulled her little housecoat together because there was a cold vein in the air, a part of the cold that would be on us the next day. “I don't feel part of things tonight, I guess.”

“It's all right,” I said.

“Do you know where I'd like to go?”

“No,” I said. And I suppose I knew she was angry then, angry with lite, but did not want to show me that.

“To the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Wouldn't that be something? Would you like that?”

“I'd like it,” I said. And my mother looked off for a minute, as if she could see the Straits of Juan de Fuca out against the line of mountains, see the lights of things alive and a whole new world.

“I know you liked him,” she said after a moment. “You and I both suffer fools too well.”

“I didn't like him too much,” I said. “I didn't really care.”

“He'll fall on his face. I'm sure of that,” she said. And I didn't say anything because I didn't care about Glen Baxter anymore, and was happy not to talk about him. “Would you tell me something if I asked you? Would you tell me the truth?”

“Yes,” I said.

And my mother did not look at me. “Just tell the truth,” she said.

“All right,” I said.

“Do you think I'm still very feminine? I'm thirty-two years old now. You don't know what that means. But do you think I am?”

And I stood at the edge of the porch, with the olive trees before me, looking straight up into the mist where I could not see geese but could still hear them flying, could almost feel the air move below their white wings. And I felt the way you feel when you are on a trestle all alone and the train is coming, and you know you have to decide. And I said, “Yes, I do.” Because that was the truth. And I tried to think of something else then and did not hear what my mother said after that.

And how old was I then? Sixteen. Sixteen is young, but it can also be a grown man. I am forty-one years old now, and I think about that time without regret, though my mother and I never talked in that way again, and I have not heard her voice now in a long, long time.

I am grateful to the following publications in which these stories originally appeared:
Esquire:
“Rock Springs”, 'Winterkill”, “Fireworks” and “Sweethearts”;
Anteaeus:
“Communist”;
The New Yorker:
“Optimists” and “Children”;
Granta:
“Empire” and “Great Falls”; Tri-Quarterly: “Going to the Dogs”.

I wish to express my appreciation to the National Endowment for the Arts for its generous support. And I wish, aswell, to express my thanks to Gary L. Fisketjon and L. Rust Hills for their editorial advice, and for their indispensable encouragement as I wrote these stories.

RF

A Note on the Author

Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944. He has published six novels and three collections of stories, including
The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Wildlife, A Multitude of Sins
and most recently
The Lay of the Land. Independence Day
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction.

By the Same Author

NOVELS

A Piece of My Heart

The Ultimate Good Luck

The Sportswriter

Wildlife

Independence Day

The Lay of the Land

Canada

SHORT FICTION

Women with Men: Three Stories

A Multitude of Sins

First published in Great Britain by Collins Harvill 1988

This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 1979, 1982, 1983, 1986, 1987 by Richard Ford

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

These stories first appeared in the following magazines: ‘Going to the Dogs' (
Triquarterly
, 1979); ‘Rock Springs' (
Esquire
, 1982); ‘Winterkill' (
Esquire
, 1983); ‘Fireworks' (
Esquire
, 1982); ‘Communist' (
Antaeus
, 1984); ‘Sweethearts' (
Esquire
, 1986); ‘Empire' (
Granta
, 1986); ‘Great Falls' (
Granta
, 1987); ‘Children' (
New Yorker
, 1987); ‘Optimists' (
New Yorker
, 1987)

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Bedford Square, London W1D 3QY

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781408835098

www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award

‘The best novel out of America in many years … simply a masterpiece' John Banville,
Guardian

‘It is nothing less than the story of the 20th century itself … Eloquently, with awkward grace, in his novels about an ordinary man, Ford has created an extraordinary epic'
The Times

After the disintegration of his family, the ruin of his career and an affair with a much younger woman, Frank Bascombe decides that the surest route to a ‘normal' American life is to become an estate agent in Haddam, New Jersey. Frank blunders through the suburban citadels of the Eastern Seaboard and avoids engaging in life until the sudden, cataclysmic events of a Fourth-of-July weekend with his son jolt him back.

The sequel to
The Sportswriter
and the first novel to win the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year,
Independence Day
is a landmark in American Literature.

Buy this book at
www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

‘Ford's sheer mastery of the short-story form is jaw-dropping'
Guardian

‘Ten sexy, grown-up stories about marriage and adultery, passion and infidelity, disappointment and revenge. Ford is a smooth master of his art'
Financial Times

With perhaps his fiercest intensity to date, Richard Ford, America's most unflinching chronicler of modern life, is drawn to amorous relationships inside, out and to the sides of marriage. In these extraordinary stories all human relations, our entire sense of right and wrong, are put into vivid and unforgettable play.

‘Ford's is the voice of twentieth-century America; funny, human, sad and real' Eileen Battersby,
Irish Times

‘Now in its full maturity, his writing rolls and twists with complexities and sadness and humour; his characters may not often have lives they call their own, but his sentences always do'
Observer

Buy this book at
www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

‘This is quality writing in the highest American tradition of Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck'
The Times

‘Superb … Brutally real and at the same time haunting … One of those rare surprises that come along every few years'
Jim Harrison

Robard Hughes has raced across the country in pursuit of a woman, and Sam Newell is hunting for the missing part of himself. On an uncharted island on the Mississippi, both these godless pilgrims find what they have been searching for in an explosion of shocking violence. The novel that launched the career of one of America's late-twentieth-century masters,
A Piece of My Heart
is a
tour de force
that does justice to Ford's diverse literary gifts: his unerring eye for detail, his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, and his sharp understanding of human nature.

‘I am enormously delighted to make the acquaintance of this muscular American writer, whose glowering prose, in hot mode or in cool, throbs with the weight of the vast continent he lovingly embraces'
Independent

Buy this book at
www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

‘Ford is a masterful writer'
Raymond Carver

‘A devastating chronicle of contemporary alienation'
New York Times

‘Richard Ford's sportswriter is a rare bird in life and nearly extinct in fiction'
Tobias Wolff

At dawn on Good Friday every year, Frank Bascombe and his wife meet to pay their respects at the grave of their firstborn. This year Frank plans to spend the Easter weekend with a new girlfriend while on assignment for his magazine. What might have been an idyllic adventure becomes a succession of calamities that extinguish almost all the carefully nourished equilibrium of a man grappling with the failure of love and the death of his son.

The end and the aftermath of a marriage, the emotional dislocation and the discovery of a new life while in the embrace of troubled memories of the old have seldom been more harrowingly plotted.
The Sportswriter
is also a wistful, very funny and always human illumination of domestic and sexual anguish through the story of Frank Bascombe, its hero, the sportswriter.

Buy this book at
www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

'His prose has a taut, cinematic quality that bathes his story with the same hot, mercilessly white light that scorches Mexico'
New York Times

‘Ford's taut, compelling prose is as piercingly clear as a police siren. No other storyteller writes about the alienated and uncommitted with such mastery'
Sunday Times

Harry Quinn and his girlfriend Rae head to Oaxaca, Mexico, to spring Rae's brother Sunny from jail and protect him from the sinister drug dealer he is suspected of having double-crossed. But instead of a simple jailbreak, Harry and Rae fall into a nightmarish series of entanglements with expat whores and Zapotec Indians. The Cocaine Era's answer to Graham Greene, this exquisitely choreographed novel tracks Rae's and Harry's inexorable descent into the Mexican underworld, where only a stroke of ultimate good luck can keep them alive.

‘So hard-boiled and tough that it might have been written on the back of a trench coat. A grand
Maltese Falcon
of a novel'
Stanley Elkin

Buy this book at
www.bloomsbury.com/richardford

‘Every sentence Ford writes, illuminates … His prose is strong, clear and satisfying, resonant with the bleak rhythms of unrewarded lives'
Sunday Times

‘Ford's book observes the human animal with friendship, understanding, and an almost clinical detachment'
Independent on Sunday

In the autumn of 1960, Joe Brinson and his parents move to the edge of the Rocky Mountains to cash in on the promise of the American frontier, to seize a future as broad as the sweep of the Montana prairies. But when Joe's father leaves home to fight the forest fires that have raged since the summer, and his mother meets an older man, Joe finds his life changing too suddenly, blazing into unrecognisable pieces like the forests surrounding them.

‘Ford writes carefully and with simplicity that is not deceptive but extremely difficult to achieve, about powerless, uninformed people and their surroundings, in close-up'
Victoria Glendinning,
The Times

‘What is satisfying in
Wildlife
is its density. This is proper storytelling, lean and taut. And it is real, grown-up life. Ford captures perfectly the loneliness that can only be had in families'
New Statesman