Wildlife (12 page)

My mother didn’t talk to my father much longer. From my room I could hear a word she would say, then she would lower her voice and talk. I didn’t hear my name mentioned or Warren Miller’s or the air base job she had applied for that day. I heard the words ‘spontaneous’ and ‘lie’ and ‘private’ and ‘sweet’. That was all. And in a few minutes I heard the receiver put down, and a cabinet door open and the sound of glass touching glass.

I was already in bed when my mother came in my room. The ceiling light was still on, and I thought she would turn
if off for me. She had another glass of whiskey with her. I had never seen her drink so much as she had on that day and that night. She had not been a drinker before.

‘Your father says hello to his only son,’ she said, and took a drink. ‘He said he saw a bear catch on fire. Isn’t that something?’ I was just listening to her. ‘He said it had climbed a tree to get away and the fire exploded in the branches all around it. The poor bear jumped out completely on fire and ran away. That’s a thing to remember, isn’t it?’

‘Did he say he was coming home,’ I asked. I was thinking, lying in my bed, that it might be snowing where he was, and that the fire would go out by itself.

‘He may stay on a while longer,’ my mother said. ‘I didn’t ask for the vital details. Are you proud of him? Are you coming to that conclusion?’

‘Yes. I am,’ I said.

‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’d like you to be. I wouldn’t talk you out of it.’

‘Are you proud of him?’ I asked.

‘Oh,’ my mother said. ‘Do you remember when we got very close to the fire when we went up there? And you got out and went over to it–I guess I wanted you to experience it. But when you came back, I told you that the whole fire was just a lot of little separate fires? And once in a while they blew up together and destroyed everything?’ She stuck her finger in her glass, then put her finger in her mouth. ‘Well, I guess I think nothing’s that important by itself,’ she said softly.

‘I believe that,’ I said, though I didn’t believe she had answered my question about my father.

‘It
is
right,’ my mother said, and was irritated. ‘I know what’s right, for God’s sake. I’ve just never thrown myself into anything like that before.’ She took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. She stared out my window into the night. ‘What would you think if I killed someone–would you be
embarrassed?’ She looked at me, and I knew she wasn’t thinking of killing anyone.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I would. I wouldn’t like it.’

‘Well. All right, then,’ my mother said. ‘That’s out. I have to figure out something else. Something more interesting.’

‘Are you proud of Dad,’ I asked. ‘You didn’t answer that.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘No. Not much. You shouldn’t let that bother you, though–you know, sweetheart? It’s not very important who I’m proud of. Myself. I should just want to be proud of myself. That’s all. You have to put your trust into something else now.’ She smiled at me. ‘I was just wondering why I thought I had to take you with me tonight. We do strange things sometimes. I don’t know who I was showing to whom. You probably don’t even care about it. It’s just one thing, not a lot of things.’

‘I thought you wanted me to go with you,’ I said.

‘Well, that’s right. You’re right.’ She smiled at me again and pushed her fingers back through her hair.

‘Did Warren tell you his story about seeing the geese from the airplane?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Isn’t that a wonderful story?’ my mother said. ‘It’s baloney, of course. He just thinks things up and says them.’ She turned the light off. ‘It’s diverting, though,’ she said, and then she said good night and closed the door behind her.

And I lay in bed for just a little time, thinking before I went to sleep that Warren Miller didn’t seem like the kind of man to make a story up. He seemed like the kind of man things happened to, the way my mother had said, and who did the wrong things and tried to act as if he didn’t by acting better, a man my father might’ve said had bad character. I wondered what my father had said about me tonight, if he was mad at me, and if I’d done something wrong and was trying to act as if I hadn’t. As I slipped down into sleep I
thought I could hear my mother dialing the telephone. I waited, and could feel myself alive while the ringing went on and someone answered somewhere–Warren Miller, I thought, no one else. I heard his voice, ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes.’ Then it was silent and I went to sleep.

At two o’clock that night I came awake. Down the hall, I heard the toilet running, and I could hear someone jiggling the handle to make the running stop. I listened to the noise of the metal on the tank and the water running through the pipes, and I got out of bed and went to the door of my room and stepped out into the dark hall where I could not be seen. And I waited there until the bathroom door opened and the light cast onto the floor and Warren Miller came out, turned back and clicked off the bathroom light, and then walked in the direction of my mother’s room. He was naked. In the light I saw his legs and his chest which were covered with hair. I saw his penis, and when he turned I saw the scars on the back of his legs, where the barbed wire had hit him. It looked to me like skin that had been shot with a shotgun. He was wearing his glasses, and as he walked toward my mother’s room I saw how he limped, that one leg, his right one, would not straighten and for that reason made him dip to the side and made his other leg, his good one, throw out farther ahead in a way that made the limp be worse. His white body shone in the dark hallway as he went away from me, and I stood in my tee shirt and underpants as he opened the door to my mother’s room–where there was no light–and heard her soft voice from inside say, ‘Be quiet, now. Just be quiet.’ The door closed, then, and I heard her bed squeeze down under his weight. I heard my mother sigh, and I heard Warren Miller cough and clear his throat. I was cold there, my back to the hall closet door. My legs were cold and my feet and hands were. But I didn’t want to move from there
because I wanted to know what else would go on and felt that something would.

In the room I heard my mother’s soft voice and Warren Miller’s. I heard the bed squeeze again and make a thumping noise. I heard my mother say, ‘Oh, now,’ not in an excited way, just in a way to not like something. The bed made more noise, and I knew I’d slept through other noises already, and that when I thought I’d heard my mother calling Warren Miller on the telephone that is what I had heard.

I heard his bare feet on the floor, then, limping and sliding. I heard the closet door open and the sound of a coat hanger skidding over metal. I could hear the sounds of clothes moving, and of breathing, and of a shoe-step on the floor in the bedroom. And then my mother’s door opened again, and she and Warren Miller came out together into the hall. He had on the white shirt and trousers he’d been wearing at his house earlier that night, and he was holding his boots. My mother only had on her bathrobe and a pair of shoes I could hear but not see in the darkness. They did not look in my direction; I knew they did not think of me or where I was. They simply walked across the hallway–they were holding hands one behind the other–and into the kitchen and across the floor to the back door. I heard the back door open, and for just a moment I thought my mother was showing him to the back door so he could leave. But then the back door shut quietly, and the screen door shut quietly outside. And the house was silent and empty except for me in the hallway alone and the sound of the water hissing in the tank where Warren had tried to make it stop but been unable to.

I walked to the back door and looked out. In the moonlight I could see nothing but the corner of the old garage at the back of the lot–a garage we did not use–and the shadow of the birch tree on the ground of the side yard. I could not see my mother and Warren Miller. They were gone.

I walked back into my own room and looked out the window toward the street. And I could see Warren Miller then, and my mother. They were on the sidewalk, walking side by side and no longer holding hands. He still had his boots under his arms, and they were hurrying away from the house, almost running, as if they were cold and wanted to get someplace warmer. Together they hurried out into the dark street. They didn’t look either way–my mother held her bathrobe up so she could take longer steps. They did not look back or seem to be saying anything to each other. But I could see from the window that they were hurrying toward a car parked by itself across the street. It was Warren Miller’s pink car sitting in the shadows and collected leaves, unnoticeable there if you were not expecting to see it.

When they got to the car my mother hurried around to the passenger’s side and got in. Warren Miller got in the driver’s side and closed the door after him. The red taillight went on immediately. I saw the interior light snap on, saw them both inside–my mother sitting far across the seat against her door and Warren behind the steering wheel. The motor suddenly came alive and white exhaust blew into the air behind the car. I saw my mother’s face turn toward Warren Miller, and I thought she said something about the light, because the interior light went off then, and the brake lights went out. But the car did not move. It just sat in the darkness across the street. I stood at my window and watched, waiting for it to drive away, for my mother and Warren Miller to go off toward wherever they were going–to his house, or a motel or another city, or to someplace where I would never see either of them again. But that is not what happened. The Oldsmobile stayed where it was with its motor running and its lights off, and my mother and him inside. I could not see them in the dark, and little by little the window glass became clouded from their being there inside together breathing.

I stayed at my window and watched the car for a few minutes more. And nothing happened, nothing that I could see, though I supposed I knew what was happening. Just the thing you would think, nothing surprising. One car came down Eighth Street and did not slow down or notice. Its headlights passed over the clouded windows and illuminated the engine exhaust. But I couldn’t see either my mother or Warren Miller inside. I wondered if they were in danger of suffocating because of the exhaust filtering back into the car. It was a thing you read about. And I decided that they were. But they knew about that and would have to worry about it themselves. If they died where they were and for the reasons they were there, it would be their fault, and I couldn’t help them. And after a few minutes of standing at the cold window, watching the car and its exhaust, I closed my curtain and walked back through the house where I was alone.

From my room I walked into the hall and down to the bathroom. Water was still running in the toilet, and I picked up the lid off the tank, stuck my bare arm down into the cold water until I could feel the slick rubber stopper at the bottom. I held it down until the water stopped running, and my arm felt hard and cold. I waited a minute, it must’ve been, with my hand in the water so that I was sure the stopper would hold, then I dried my arm and replaced the lid, and tried to think what I should do next–if I should get in bed again and go to sleep, or if I should go in the kitchen and read with the light on, or put on my clothes and walk out into the night away from where my mother was in Warren Miller’s car, and maybe not come back, or come back in two days, or call from someplace, or never call.

What I did was to go into the kitchen where my mother’s bottle of whiskey was still on the countertop in the dark, and got the flashlight from under the sink. I turned the flashlight on and went with it–shining back down the hall–and into my mother’s room where the curtains were drawn
shut and the bed was tumbled all around, and a pillow and part of the sheet were on the floor. There was an odd smell in the air there–the smell of my mother’s perfume and some other smell also that was like hand lotion, and that wasn’t sweet but I thought I knew from someplace but couldn’t remember where. I shined the light around–at the clock turned toward the wall by the bed, at the closet door, which was open and my mother’s clothes pushed out, at her green dress and green shoes and stockings, which were lying on the one chair. There was nothing in particular I wanted to find, or anything I thought would be secret. It was just my mother’s room, with her belongings in it, and nothing she was doing now would make anything there be different or special.

There was no sign of my father in the room, I did notice that–as though he had never lived there. His golf bag was gone. The pictures that he had left on the bureau top were gone. The leather box where he kept his cuff links was put away someplace, some drawer, and the books he kept on the golf game and teaching golf were down off the top of the bureau where he’d had them standing and lined up. There was only a framed picture of him on the wall beside the window, almost hidden by the curtain. Maybe my mother had overlooked that. I shined my flashlight on its glass. In the picture my father was wearing a pair of light-colored pants and light-colored shoes and a white short-sleeved shirt. He was standing alone on some golf course, holding a driver, looking down the open fairway and smiling, ready to hit the ball that was at his feet. And he was young in the picture, his face looked young and his hair was short and his arms looked strong. He looked like a man who knew what he was doing. He could hit the ball out of sight any time he got ready, and was just making sure things were the way he wanted them to be. ‘That’s the way you play this game,’ he had said when he showed me the picture the first time, when I was ten or twelve. ‘Like you know what you’re doing
every second. Clear your mind out. You don’t have a care in the world. Then everything you hit goes in the hole. It’s when you have a lot on your mind, Joe, that you leave everything short. There’s no mystery to it.’ It was my father’s favorite picture of himself, taken when he and my mother were first married and I was not even dreamed up. As I shined my flashlight on that picture then, onto my father’s clean smiling face without a care in the world, I was glad he wasn’t here now to know about any of this. I was glad he was where he was, and hoped it somehow could be all over and done with before he came home to find everything in his life and my life and my mother’s, too, out of all control and out of all sense.