Wildlife (7 page)

‘Maybe they’re in there,’ I said.

‘They’re not
they
,’ my mother said. ‘It’s just Mr Miller. He lives there alone. He had a wife but she left him, I guess. And his mother lived there, but she died.’

‘When were you in there?’ I said.

‘I never was,’ my mother said, and she seemed tired. She had driven a long way that afternoon and night, and things had not been easy for her since yesterday. ‘I looked it up in the phone book, that’s all,’ she said. ‘I should’ve just called. But it’ll be okay now. He doesn’t live like a rich man, does he? Just this plain house on a plain street.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t.’

‘He certainly is, though,’ my mother said. ‘He has holdings. Those elevators. And an Oldsmobile agency. Farms. It’s hard to think about.’ She put the car into gear, but sat then there in the darkness as if she was trying to remember something or figure something out. ‘I feel like I need to wake up,’ she said, and smiled at me. ‘But I don’t know what from. Or to. That’s a big change.’ She took a deep breath and let it out, then let the car idle down the street into the night toward home. And I wondered, as we turned and
started back toward the street that crossed the river, what she had needed to ask Warren Miller at nine at night, something that couldn’t wait but then did. And why, since it seemed to me that someone was at home there, wouldn’t she just go to the door and ask what she wanted–probably something about her job that started the next day–and then go home just as we were doing, in the regular way that people did things, the way I understood them?

In the morning my mother got up and dressed for work and left the house before I ever got out of bed. From my room, I could hear her moving around the house, her footsteps on the hard floor, and it seemed to me she was in a hurry, that maybe she did not want to see me. I stayed in bed listening until I heard the car start cold in the driveway, idle a few minutes while she came back in the house, then drive away down Eighth Street.

For a while after that I heard the furnace going on and off in the cellar, and the sound of cars passing in the street, and the sound of birds walking the eaves of our house, tapping and fluttering as distinctly as if they were in the room with me. Light was up, and the air outside my window looked clear and clean. But I felt tired. I could feel my lungs as if a weight was pressing on them, and I could hear myself breathe down in my chest and my skin felt tight. It was a
sick feeling to have, and I wondered if it would go away in a day or if it was the beginning of some real illness.

For several minutes I thought I wouldn’t go to school that day, that I would stay at home and sleep, or go on a walk through town as I had other times, or go to my job early or go fishing in the river. Or I thought I could walk over to the Oldsmobile agency on Tenth Avenue and have a look. No one knew me. I could ask a question or several questions of someone–about Warren Miller, about what kind of man he was; was he married, did he have children, what were his holdings? I tried to remember the day when I had met him, a day with my father at the Wheatland Club. What had he said to me? What had I said to him, if anything? What my father had said, what the weather had been like. I tried to guess whether my mother had known him for a long time or a little. Not that it mattered–any of these facts–or would change anything. They would just fill in so that if suddenly my life changed I could have something to think about.

When I’d lain in bed a while, thinking things in this way, the phone rang in the kitchen. I thought it would be my mother telling me to go to school, and I almost didn’t answer it. But I did, still in my pajamas, and it was my father calling home from the fire.

‘Hello, Joe,’ he said to me in a loud voice. ‘What’s going on over there?’

‘I’m going to school,’ I said.

‘Where’s your mother? I’d like to talk to her.’ The connection began to be not very good.

‘She’s not here,’ I said. ‘She went to town.’

‘Is she mad at me?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s not.’

‘I hope she’s not,’ he said. Then he didn’t say anything for a few seconds and it sounded as though a truck was starting up behind him. I heard voices shouting, and I thought he must be calling from the restaurant where we’d
been last night. ‘We don’t have any control over anything here now,’ my father said loudly over the noise. ‘We just watch everything burn. That’s all. It exhausts you. I’m stiff all over from it.’

‘Are you coming home,’ I asked.

‘I saw a bear that caught on fire, Joe,’ my father said, still loud. ‘You wouldn’t have believed it. It just blew up around him in one instant. A live bear in a hemlock tree. I swear. He hit the ground squalling. It was like balled lightning.’

I wanted to ask about something else he’d seen, or something that had happened to him or somebody else. I wanted to ask how dangerous it was. But I was afraid I’d say the wrong thing. So all I said was, ‘How do you feel?’ This was a question I had never asked my father in my life. That was not the way we’d ever talked.

‘I feel good,’ he said. ‘I feel like I’ve been here a year, but I’ve only been here a day.’ Then the truck noise stopped and the connection went dim. ‘Regular life doesn’t exist out here,’ he said. ‘You have to adapt.’

‘I understand,’ I said.

‘Is your mother already stepping out on me?’ my father said, and he was joking. I was sure of that. ‘I tried to call last night,’ he said, ‘but no one answered.’

‘We ate at a cafe,’ I said. ‘We had chicken.’

‘That’s good,’ my father said. ‘Good for you two. I hope you were the one who paid for it.’

‘She paid for us,’ I said. No one had told me not to say where we had been or where my mother was. But I felt like I had a responsibility not to. Flies were crawling on the kitchen window glass where I was looking into the back yard. And I thought that the weather might be turning, and it would get colder and snow, and the fire would be out before long.

‘Tell your mother that I haven’t lost my mind out here yet. Okay?’ There was more static on the line.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I will.’

I heard him laugh, then there was a click on the line, and I could hear my father say, ‘Hello? Hello? Joe, where are you? Oh shoot, now.’

‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’m still here.’ But he couldn’t hear me. Something, I thought, might’ve burned through the line. And when I had listened a moment more to his voice, I said, ‘Good-bye. Yes. Good-bye,’ and said his name. And then I hung up the phone and went to dress myself for school.

That day at my school was an odd day. I remember it very clearly because I arrived late and did not have an excuse from my mother and felt tired and half in a dream, as if I hadn’t slept at all or was on my way to being sick. I missed a test in my English class because I hadn’t done homework from the night before. And in my civics class someone brought that day’s copy of the
Tribune
and read a story aloud from it, which said there was moisture in the air now, and soon it would both rain and snow, and the fire in Allen Creek would go out. After that we had a debate on whether the fire would actually go out–some said it would burn all winter–and if man would cause it or nature would. My teacher, who was a tall half-Indian man, asked us if any of our fathers were fighting the fire, and several people put up their hands. But I didn’t because I didn’t want it known and because it didn’t seem like a normal matter in my life then.

Sitting in my geometry class later, waiting for school to end, it seemed like a cold afternoon out of doors. I tried to think of what was between my mother and Warren Miller now, because something seemed to be. And not because of what they’d said to each other when I was present or said to me or might’ve said that I knew nothing about, but because of what they didn’t say but just presumed, the way you presumed moisture was in the air or that there were no more degrees in a circle than three hundred and sixty.

Though whatever it was, it had been worth a lie. My mother had lied to my father, and I had too. Maybe Warren Miller had lied to someone. And while I knew very well what a lie was, I didn’t know what difference it made when adults did it. Possibly it mattered less for them inasmuch as in their lives, what was and wasn’t so would finally be plain for everyone to see. Whereas for me, because I had done nothing in the world to represent me, it mattered more. And as I sat at my desk in the cool October afternoon, I tried to think of a happy life for myself and a happy and gay life for my parents when all this would be over, as my mother said everything would be. But all I could think of as I sat there was my father saying, ‘Hello? Hello? Joe, where are you?’ And of myself saying, ‘Good-bye.’

When school was over I walked to my job at the photographer’s studio, and then I walked home. The weather was changing and there was a breeze blowing, the kind of windy breeze that eventually turns icy in Montana and blows through your skin as if you were made of paper. I knew the same wind would be blowing that day where the fire was burning, and that it would have consequences there. And I wondered if it might snow in the mountains and thought that it would, and that with luck my father would come home sooner than anyone thought.

When I got in our house my mother was standing at the sink in the kitchen. She was looking out toward where the sun was setting. She had on a blue and white dress that looked like a navy dress. Her hair was tied up in back in what she called a French bun. It was a way she fixed herself that I liked. She had been looking at the newspaper, which was open on the countertop.

‘Winter, winter, go away,’ she said, staring out the window. She looked around at me and smiled. ‘You’re not dressed warmly enough. Next you’ll be sick. Then
I’ll
be sick.’ She looked back outside. ‘Did you have a very enjoyable day today at school?’

‘Not a very good one,’ I said. ‘I missed a test. I forgot.’

‘Well. Do better there, then,’ she said. ‘Harvard only has a few places available for boys from the ends of the earth. Somebody else from Great Falls probably expects to go to Harvard, too. And they won’t want to take both of you. I certainly wouldn’t.’

‘Where did you go so early?’ I said. ‘I was awake.’

‘Were you really?’ my mother said. ‘I could’ve driven you to school.’ She moved away from the window and began refolding the newspaper page by page. ‘Oh, I went outwards,’ she said. ‘I saw in this paper this morning a notice for a job teaching math to boys at the air base. Some of them can’t add out there, I guess. So I filled out an application to be industrious. I have an urge to do good all of a sudden.’ She finished folding the paper and pushed it neatly to the side and turned around toward me. I wanted to ask her about going to work for Warren Miller.

‘Dad called this morning,’ I said. ‘I talked to him.’

‘Where was he?’ my mother said. She did not look surprised, only interested.

‘I don’t know. I thought he was at the fire. He didn’t say where he was.’

‘Where did you say I was?’

‘I said you were gone to town. I thought that was right.’ I did not want to tell her he had asked if she was stepping out on him. I knew she wouldn’t like that.

‘You thought I was gone to work for Mr Miller. Is that right?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well, I was. Or I did. I went there and did a few things. It’s just part-time. I still have a son to raise at home, I think.’

‘That’s okay,’ I said. I was glad to hear her say that even if she was only making a joke. ‘Is Miller married?’ I said. And
these were words that just said themselves. I hadn’t planned to say them.

‘I already talked about that,’ my mother said. ‘He was.’ She walked to the refrigerator and took out an ice tray and carried that to the sink and ran water over it. ‘He lived in that house with his mother and his little wife. The three of them. For quite some time, I guess. Then the old lady died–his mother. And not long after that his wife, whose name was Marie LaRose or some such thing, ran off somewhere. To California or Colorado–one of those–with an oil wildcatter. Forty-six years old, and off she goes.’

My mother took a white coffee cup out of the cabinet, put one ice cube in it, then took a full bottle of Old Crow whiskey from under the sink, uncapped it, and poured some into the cup. She was talking while she did this and not looking at me. I wondered if she would tell this all to my father if he asked her, and I decided she probably wouldn’t.

‘Do you feel sorry for him,’ I asked.

‘For Warren Miller?’ my mother said, and she looked at me quickly, then back at her cup on the sink top where she was stirring the ice cube with her finger. ‘Indeed-ee-not. I don’t feel sorry for anybody. I don’t feel sorry for myself, so I don’t see why I should feel sorry for these other people. In particular those I don’t know very well.’ She looked at me again, quickly, then lifted the cup up and leaned forward to take a sip. ‘I made this too full,’ she said before she tasted the whiskey, then she drank some.

‘Dad said they can’t control the fire out there now,’ I said. ‘He said they just watch it.’

‘Well, then, he’s perfect for that. He likes golf.’ She held the cup under the faucet and let water trickle into it. ‘Your father has very pretty hands, have you ever noticed them? They’re like a girl’s. He’ll ruin them fighting forest fires. My father’s hands were like big lug nuts. That’s what he used to say.’

‘He said he hoped you weren’t still mad at him,’ I said.

‘He’s a sweet man,’ my mother said. ‘I’m not mad at him. Did you two have a nice chat about me? All my character flaws on parade? Did he talk about his Indian woman he has out there?’ She carried the ice tray back to the refrigerator. It was almost dark outside, and I snapped the light on in the kitchen. It was a dim light and only made the room seem small and dirty.

‘Turn that off,’ my mother said. She was annoyed at me for having talked about her, which I hadn’t done. She took her cup of whiskey and sat down at the kitchen table. ‘I went out and looked at an apartment today. I looked at those Helen Apartments over on Second. They have a two-bedroom that’s nice. It’s near the river and it’s close to your school, too.’