Women with Men (13 page)

“Are you sorry you didn't marry him?” I said. I thought she was wrong about my father, of course. He cared about things as much as anybody did, and more than Doris did, I felt sure.

“Put it like this,” Doris said, and she smiled at me in a sweet way, a way that could make you like her. “If I had married him, then we wouldn't have you here, would we? Everything'd be different.” She tapped me on the knee. “So there's good to everything. That's a belief Seventh-Day Adventists hold.” She scratched her fingernails on my knee and smiled at me again,
and we drove on into town, where it was snowing still, and almost dark except for lights down the main street.

CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS
were already up in Shelby, strings of red and green and white lights hung across the three intersections, and little Christmas trees on top of the traffic lights. Plenty of cars and trucks were on the streets in the snow, and all the stores looked open. We drove past a big lighted Albertson's, where the parking lot was full of vehicles and people carrying packages. I saw a drugstore and a card shop and a western-wear on the main street, all with their lights on and customers moving around the aisles inside.

“Something's physically odd about Shelby, don't you think?” Doris said, driving slowly along and looking out at the business signs and Thanksgiving cutouts in the store windows. “It has a foreignness. It just seems pointless somehow up here. Maybe it's being so close to Canada. I don't know.”

“Maybe I can get out and go buy something now,” I said. I'd seen a Redwing store and thought about buying my mother a pair of shoes, though I didn't know her size. I remembered some green high heels I'd seen her wear, and it surprised me that I didn't remember more than that.

“You want to eat Chinese food in town, or dine in the dining car?” Doris said.

“I'd rather eat on the train,” I said, because I wanted to get out of the car.

“I want you to enjoy yourself when you're under my protection.”

“I'm enjoying myself,” I said. We were stopped at a light, and I turned and looked back. I wanted to get back to the card store before it got too far away.

“Can you find the train station by yourself?” Doris glanced at the traffic in the rearview mirror.

“I'll ask somebody,” I said, and opened the door and slid out onto the snowy pavement.

“Don't ask an Indian,” Doris said loudly. “They lie like snakes. Ask a Swede. They don't know what a lie is. That's why they make the good husbands.”

“I will,” I said, and closed the car door while she was talking.

People were on the sidewalk and going in and out of stores. There were plenty of cars and noises for a small town, although the snow had softened everything. It was like a Saturday night in Great Falls, and I walked in a hurry down the block in the direction we'd just come from. For some reason, I didn't see the card shop where I thought it would be and didn't see the western-wear shop, though there was a Chinese restaurant and a bar, and then the drugstore, where I went in to look.

The air was warm and smelled like Halloween candy inside. A lot of customers were in the store, and I walked down the three aisles, looking for something my mother might like to receive from me and trying to think of what I knew she liked. There was a section that had pink and blue boxes of candy, and a wall that had perfume, and a long row of cards with Thanksgiving messages. I went around the center section twice, then looked at the back of the store, where the pharmacist was and where there were footbaths and sickroom articles. I thought about something for her hair—shampoo or hair spray, but I knew she bought those for herself. Then I saw there was a glass display of watches with mirrored shelves you rotated by pushing a silver button at the bottom. The watches were all around thirty dollars, and what my father had given me was fifty, and I thought a watch would be better than perfume because my mother wouldn't use it up, and I liked the
way the watches looked revolving behind the glass, and I was relieved to have almost decided so fast. My mother had a watch, I remembered, but it had been broken since sometime in the spring.

I walked around the store one more time to look at anything I'd missed or to find something else I wanted, but I didn't see anything but magazines and books. Some boys my age, wearing their maroon-and-gold Shelby jackets, were standing looking at magazines and talking to two girls. They all looked at me when I went by but didn't say anything, though I knew I wouldn't have played football against them in Great Falls, because Shelby was too small. My own football jacket was at home in a back room in a box, and wouldn't have been warm enough for that night. The girls said something when I had gone by, though none of them seemed to register seeing me.

I passed a section with ladies’ bedroom slippers in clear plastic cases. Pink and yellow and red. They were ten dollars, and one size fit all. But they looked cheap to me. They looked like something Doris would put on. And I went back down to the watch case and pressed the button until I saw one come by that was gold and thin and fine-appearing, with a small face and Roman numerals, which I thought my mother would like. I bought it from a saleslady and had her wrap it in white tissue paper. I paid for it from the bills my father had given me, and put it in my coat pocket and felt that I'd done the right thing in buying a watch. My father would've approved of it, would've thought I had good instinct and had bought a watch for a good price. Then I walked back outside onto the cold sidewalk to begin looking for the train depot.

I remembered from the time I'd been in Shelby with my parents that the train station was behind the main street, in an older part of town, where there were bars they'd visited. I
wasn't sure where this was, but I crossed Main and went between two stores, down an alley away from the Christmas lights and traffic and motel signs, and walked out into a gravel back street, beyond which was the little switchyard and the depot itself on the far side, its windows lit yellow. Down the rails to the right I could see a row of grain gondolas and a moving engine light and, farther on, a car crossing the double tracks. The yard was dark, and it was colder and still snowing. I could hear the switch engine shunting cars, and as I stepped on the ties I looked both ways, east and west, and could see the rails shining out away from me toward where yellow caution lights and, farther on, red lights burned.

The station waiting room was warmer than the drugstore, and there were only a couple of people sitting in the rows of wood benches, though several suitcases were against the wall, and two people were waiting to buy tickets. Doris wasn't in sight. I thought she might be in the bathroom, at the back by the telephone, and I stood by the bags and waited, though I didn't see my suitcase or hers. So that after the other people had finished buying tickets, I decided she wasn't there and walked to the ticket window and asked the lady about her.

“Doris is looking for you, hon,” the lady said, and smiled from behind the metal window. “She bought your tickets and told me to tell you she was in the Oil City. That's across the street back that way.” She pointed toward the rear door of the building. She was an older woman with short, blond hair. She had on a red jacket and a gold name tag that said
Betty.
“Is Doris your mom?” she asked, and began counting out dollar bills in a pile.

“No,” I said. “She's my aunt. I live in Dutton.” And then I said, “Is the train going to be on time?”

“Yes, indeed,” she said, still counting out bills. “The train's always on time. Your aunt'll get you on it, don't worry.” She
smiled at me again. “Dutton rhymes with Nuttin’. I been there before.”

Outside on the concrete platform, I saw Doris's Cadillac in the little gravel lot and, across the street, a dark row of small older buildings that looked like they'd been stores once but were empty now except for three that were bars. They were bars my mother and father had gone into the time I'd been here. At the end of the block a street began, with regular-looking houses on it, and I could see where lights were on in homes and cars were in the driveways, the snow accumulating in the yards. Beyond the corner, a fenced tennis court was barely visible in the dark.

The bars looked closed, though all three had small glass windows with lighted red bar signs and a couple of cars parked outside. When I came across the street I saw that the Oil City was the last one before the empty stores. A cab was stopped in front with its motor running, its driver sitting in the dim light reading a newspaper.

I hadn't been in too many bars, mostly just in Great Falls, when my father was drinking. But I didn't mind going in this one, because I thought I'd been in it once before. My father said a bar wasn't a place anybody ever wanted to go but was just a place you ended up. Though there was something about them I liked, a sense of something expected that stayed alive inside them even if nothing ever happened there at all.

INSIDE THE OIL CITY
it was mostly dark and music was playing and the air smelled sweet and thick. Doris was sitting at the bar, talking to a man beside her, a small man wearing a white plastic hard hat and a canvas work suit and with a ponytail partway down his back. Drinks were in front of them, and the man's work gloves and some dollar bills were on the bar.
He and Doris were talking and looking at each other straight in the eyes. I thought the man looked like an Indian, because of his hair and because there were two or three other Indians in the bar, which was a long, dark, almost empty room with two poker machines, a booth, and a dimly lit jukebox by itself against the wall. Chairs were scattered around, and it was cold, as if there wasn't any heat working.

Doris looked in my direction but didn't see me, because she turned back to the Indian in the hard hat and picked up her drink and took a sip. “That's entirely different,” she said loudly. “Caring and minding are entirely different concepts to me. I can care and not mind, and also mind and not care. So fuck you, they're not the same.” She looked toward me again, and she did see me. She was drunk, I knew that. I'd seen her drunk before. “You could be a private dick the way you come sneaking up,” she said, and glanced at the man beside her. “You just missed the Shelby police on a sweep through here. They said they were looking for you.” Doris smiled a big smile, then reached out, took my hand, and pulled me close to her. “The two of us were just discussing absolute values. This is Mr. Barney Bordeaux. We've only been informally introduced. He's in the wine-tasting business. And he's just told me a terrible story about his wife being robbed at gunpoint right here in Shelby, sad to say, and all her money and rings stolen. So he favors honesty as an absolute value under the circumstances.”

Barney frowned at her as if what she'd just said was stupid. He had narrow, dark eyes and a puffy dark Indian face under his white hard hat, which had a green Burlington Northern insignia on the front. “What's this cluck want?” he said, and squinted at me. One of his teeth in front was gone, and he looked like he'd been drinking a long time. He was small and thin and sickly, and had a little mustache at the corners of his
mouth that made him look Chinese. Though he also looked like he could've been handsome at one time but had had something bad happen to him.

“This is my sister's child—Lawrence,” Doris said, letting go of my hand and putting hers on Barney's arm as if she wanted him to stay there. “We're going to Seattle on the train tonight.”

“You forgot to mention that,” Barney said in an unfriendly way.

Doris looked at me and smiled. “Barney just got out of Fort Harrison. So he's celebrating. He hasn't said what he was ill with yet.”

“I'm not ill with anything,” Barney said. He turned straight and looked at himself in the mirror behind the back bar. “I can't see where this is taking me,” I heard him say to himself.

“It's not taking you anywhere,” Doris said. Fort Harrison was the government hospital in Montana. My father had told me crazy Indians and veterans went there and saw doctors free of charge. “I had just said,” Doris went on, “that loyalty was more important than honesty, if honesty meant always having to tell only the strict truth, since there're always different kinds of truth.” She had taken her car coat off and piled it on the stool beside her. Her red wool dress was up above her knees. Her purse was on the bar beside her keys and the dollar bills.

Barney suddenly turned and put his hand right on Doris's knee where her legs were crossed. He smiled and he looked right at me. “You're in trouble when people younger than you are seem smart,” he said, and his smile widened so his missing tooth was evident. I could smell sweat on him, and wine. He laughed out loud then and turned back to the bar.

“Barney's starring in his own movie,” Doris said.

“Where's my suitcase?” I asked, because all at once I thought about it and couldn't see it anywhere. I wanted to put my mother's watch in it.

“Oh, let's see,” Doris said, giving Barney a look to make sure he was paying attention. “I gave that away. A poor penniless colored man came through who'd lost his suitcase and I gave him yours.” She picked up her car keys off the bar and dangled them without even looking at me. Then she reached in her purse, brought out my ticket, which was just a little white card, and handed it to me. “Hold your own,” she said. “That way, you're responsible for yourself.” She took a sip of her drink. She had switched from schnapps to something else. “What about
your
absolute values?” she said to me. “What do
you
think? I'm not sure loyalty's a good one to stay with. I may have to choose something else. Barney thinks honesty. Now you choose one.”

I didn't want to choose one. I didn't know what an absolute value was or why I needed one. Doris was just playing a game, and I didn't want to play it. Though when I thought about it, all I could think of was
cold.
It was cold in the Oil City, and I thought the temperature was still going down outside, and cold was on my mind.

“I don't know one,” I said and thought about leaving.

“Well,” Doris said, “then I'll start for you. You could say ‘love,’ okay? Or you could say ‘beautiful,’ or ‘beauty.’ Or you could probably even say the color ‘red,’ which would be strange.” Doris looked at her lap, at her red dress, then at me standing beside her.
“‘Thought,’”
she said. “You could say that, even though you probably don't do much of it. You just can't say nothing. And you can't say ‘marriage’ or ‘adultery’ or ‘sex.’ They're not absolute enough.” She glanced at Barney and laughed a nasty little laugh.