Wildlife (8 page)

‘Why are we going to do that?’ I said.

‘Because,’ my mother said. She put her ring finger through the little cup handle and looked at the cup on the table. She spoke very clearly, and in my memory very slowly. ‘This fire could go on for a long time. Your father may want a new life. I don’t know. I have to be smart about things. I have to think about who pays bills. I have to think about the rent here. Things are different now in case you haven’t noticed. You can get drawn in over your head if you don’t look out. You can lose your peace of mind.’

‘I don’t think that’s true,’ I said, because I thought my father was gone working to put out a fire, and would soon be back. My mother was going too far. She was saying the wrong words and did not even believe them herself.

‘I don’t mind saying that,’ my mother said. ‘He’s not lacking. I told you that before.’ She kept her finger through the cup handle, but did not lift it. She looked tense and tired and unhappy sitting there, trapped in the way she saw the world and her life–a bad way. ‘Maybe we just shouldn’t have moved up here,’ she said. ‘Maybe we should’ve stayed in Lewiston. You can make so many adjustments you don’t know what’s what anymore.’ She wasn’t happy to be saying
these words because she did not like to rearrange things, even in her thoughts. And as far as I knew, she hadn’t had to do that in her life. She raised the cup and took a drink of the whiskey. ‘I suppose you think I’m the horrible one now, don’t you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t.’

‘Well, that’s right,’ my mother said, ‘I’m not. It’d be nice if somebody was in the wrong for a change. It’d make everybody feel better.’

‘I wouldn’t feel better,’ I said.

‘Okay. Then not you,’ my mother said, and nodded. ‘Joe chooses for his only choice in the world to do the absolutely correct best thing. Good luck to him.’ She looked around at me and the expression on her face was an expression of dislike, one I hadn’t seen before but knew right away. Later I would see it turned toward other people. But the first time was looking at me and was because she believed she’d done all she could that was correct and the best thing, and it had only gotten her left with me. And I couldn’t do anything that mattered. Though if I could I would’ve had my father be there, or Warren Miller, or somebody who had the right words that would take the place of hers, anybody she could speak to without just hearing her own voice in a room and having to go to the trouble of pretending she did not feel absolutely alone.

At seven o’clock that night my mother and I drove across the river to Warren Miller’s house to eat dinner with him. My mother wore a bright green dress and high heels that were the same color, and she had taken her hair down out of the French bun and put on perfume.

‘This is my desperation dress,’ she said to me when I was waiting for her in the living room, and where I could see her through the bathroom door in front of the mirror. ‘Your father should see me wearing this,’ she said, brushing her
hair back with her fingers. ‘He’d approve of it. Inasmuch as he paid for it.’

‘He’d like it,’ I said.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I’m sure he would too.’ She drank the last of her cup of whiskey and left it in the sink as we went out the back door.

In the car she was in a good humor, and I was, too, because of it. We drove through the middle of Great Falls, past the Masonic Temple where no lights were on, and past the Pheasant Lounge across Central, where the neon sign hung out dimly in the night. It was cold now, and my mother had not worn a coat and was cold herself, though she said she wanted to feel the air to get her bearings.

She drove us down to Gibson Park and along the river so that we passed the Helen Apartments, which was a long four-story redbrick building I had never seen before but where several windows were lighted and in one or two I could see someone sitting by a lamp reading a newspaper.

‘How do
you
feel,’ my mother asked, looking over at me. ‘Out of reach? I wouldn’t be surprised.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I feel fine.’ I was looking out at the Helen Apartments as we drove past them. They did not seem like bad places to me. Maybe our life would be better there.

‘Sometimes’–my mother straightened her bare arms toward the steering wheel and looked ahead toward Black Eagle, across the river–‘if you can just get a little distance on your fate, things seem okay. I like that. It’s a relief to me.’

‘I know it,’ I said, because I felt relieved just at that moment.

‘Keep your distance,’ she said. ‘Then everybody–girls included–will think you’re smart. And maybe you will be.’ She reached down to turn on the radio. ‘Let’s have some mood music,’ she said. I remember very distinctly there was a man’s voice speaking in a foreign language, which I guessed was French. He was speaking very fast, and seemed
very far away. ‘Canada,’ my mother said. ‘We live near Canada now. My God.’ She clicked the radio off. ‘I can’t stand Canada tonight,’ she said. ‘Sorry. We’ll have Canada later.’ And we turned and drove on across the Fifteenth Street Bridge and up into Black Eagle.

Warren Miller’s house was the only one on his street with a porch light shining. And once we had stopped across the street from it, I could see that all the lights inside were burning, and the house–set up above the street–looked warm inside like a place where a party was going on or was ready to begin. Warren Miller’s pink Oldsmobile was parked halfway up the driveway, and farther down the street I could see the blue light of the Italian steakhouse. In front of Warren’s car, in the shadows beside the house, I saw there was a motorboat on a trailer, the smooth white hull pointed up.

‘It’s all lit up in there, isn’t it?’ my mother said. She seemed pleased by the lights. She turned the rearview mirror toward her and opened her eyes very wide, closed them and opened them again as if she’d been asleep. I wondered what she would say if I told her I didn’t want to go in Warren Miller’s house, and that I wanted to walk back home over the bridge. I thought she would make me go anyway, and this was something I had no choice in. ‘Well,’ she said, turning the mirror back in the dark. ‘Handsome is as handsome looks, too. Are you going inside with me? You don’t have to. You can go home.’

‘No.’ And I was surprised by that. ‘I’m hungry,’ I said.

‘Great,’ my mother said. She opened the car door onto the cold night’s air, and together we got out to go inside the house.

Warren Miller opened the front door before we were all the way up the front steps. He had a white dish towel tucked inside his belt front like an apron. He was wearing a white
shirt, suit pants and cowboy boots, and he was smiling, not so much in a happy way as in a serious one. He seemed older to me and bigger than he had the day before, and his limp seemed worse. His eyeglasses were shining and his thin black hair was slicked back and gleaming. He was not handsome at all, and did not look like a man who read poetry or played golf or who had a lot of money or holdings. But I knew those things were all true.

‘You look like a beauty pageant queen, Jeanette,’ he said to my mother on the steps. He talked loudly, much louder than he had the day before. He was framed in the lighted doorway, and inside the house on a table by the door, I could see a glass he had been drinking out of.

‘I was–on one occasion,’ my mother answered. And she walked right by him through the door. ‘Where’s the heater in here? I’m frozen,’ I heard her say, then she disappeared inside.

‘You have to say the nice things to women,’ Warren Miller said to me, and he put his large hand on my shoulder again. We were in the doorway, and I could smell whatever he was drinking on his breath. ‘Do you always say them to your mother?’

‘Yes sir,’ I said. ‘I try to.’

‘Are you looking after her welfare?’ I could hear him breathe down in his chest. His eyes were watery blue behind his glasses.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do that.’

‘You can’t trust anybody.’ He gripped my shoulder hard. ‘You can’t even trust yourself. You’re no damn good, are you? I can tell. I’m part Indian.’ He laughed when he said that.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I guess I’m not.’ And I laughed, too. Then, holding my shoulder, he pushed me through the door and into the house.

Inside, the air was very warm and thick with cooking smells. Every light I could see was turned on, and the doors
to all the rooms were open so that from the middle of the living room you could see into two bedrooms where there were double beds and, farther on, into a bathroom that had white tiles. Everything in the house was neat and clean, and everything seemed old-fashioned to me. The wallpaper had pale orange flowers in it. All the tables had white lace doilies under the lamps, and the pictures were all framed in heavy, dark-looking wood. It was nice furniture–I knew that–but it was old and curved, with fat legs. It seemed unusual for a man to live here. It was nothing like we had. Our furniture was not all the same. And the walls in our house were painted and did not have wallpaper.

Warren Miller limped through the living room back into the kitchen where he was cooking, but right away brought my mother a big drink of what he was drinking, which must’ve been gin. My mother stood over the floor furnace for a minute or two, holding her drink, then she smiled at me and began to walk around the house looking at pictures on top of the piano, and picking up and examining whatever was on the tables, while I sat on the stiff, wool-covered couch and did nothing but wait. Warren Miller had told us he was cooking Italian chicken, and I was ready to eat it.

Walking around Warren Miller’s house my mother looked pretty in her green dress and green shoes. I remember that very well. She had gotten warm standing over the furnace, and her face was pink. She was smiling as she looked around, touching things as if she liked everything that was there.

‘So,’ Warren Miller called out from the kitchen, ‘how’s your old man doing, Joe?’ He was talking loud, and we couldn’t see him, though we could hear him cooking, rattling pans and making noises. I wished I could’ve seen inside the kitchen, but I couldn’t.

‘He’s doing fine,’ I said.

‘Joe just talked to him on the telephone,’ my mother said loudly.

‘Did he say it was a tragedy out there? That’s what they usually say. Everything’s a tragedy when they can’t put it out.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He didn’t say it was.’

‘Did he say he was coming home soon?’ Warren Miller said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He didn’t mention that.’ On the table beside me was a cold cigar butt in an ashtray, and under it the book my mother had lent to him.

‘Women are fighting this fire,’ my mother said. ‘I read that in the paper.’ She was standing, holding a framed photograph of a smiling woman with a dark upper lip. She had picked it up off the piano.

‘Women are better at it than men,’ Warren Miller said. He appeared limping out of the kitchen door, holding three stacked plates with silverware on top of them. He still had the towel stuffed in his pants. ‘They know what you’re supposed to run from.’

‘You can’t run away from everything,’ my mother said, and she turned the frame so Warren could see it as he put the plates down on the dining table, which had an expensive-looking white tablecloth over it and was on one side of the living room. ‘Who’s this pictured?’ my mother said.

‘That’s my wife,’ Warren said. ‘Formerly. She knew when to run.’

‘I’m sure she regrets it, too.’ My mother put the picture back down where it had been, and took a drink of her drink.

‘She hasn’t decided to call up to say so yet. But maybe she will. I’m not dead yet,’ Warren said. He looked at my mother and smiled the way he’d smiled at me out on the front steps, as if something wasn’t funny.

‘Life, life, life, life,’ my mother said. ‘Life’s long.’ She suddenly walked across to where Warren Miller was standing beside the dining room table, put her hands on his cheeks, still holding her glass, and kissed him right on the mouth. ‘You poor old thing,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s nice enough to you.’ She took another big drink of her gin, then
looked at me on the couch. ‘You don’t mind it if I give Mr Miller an innocent kiss, do you, Joe?’ she said. She was drunk and she wasn’t acting the way she ordinarily would. She looked at Warren Miller again. He had a red smear of her lipstick on his mouth. ‘Is something waiting to begin or has it already happened?’ she said, because neither of us had said anything. We hadn’t moved.

‘Everything’s in front of us,’ Warren Miller said. He looked at me and grinned. ‘I’ve got a big dago dinner cooked up in there,’ he said, starting to limp toward the kitchen. ‘We have to get this boy fed, Jeanette, or he won’t be happy.’

‘Not that he’s happy now,’ my mother said, holding her empty glass. She looked at me again and touched both corners of her mouth with her tongue, then walked straight to the front window of the house where you could see out toward town, and toward our house, empty back on Eighth Street. I don’t know what she thought I was thinking. Dislike or surprise or shock at her, I would guess–for bringing me here or for being here herself, or for kissing Warren Miller in front of me, or for being drunk. But I was only aware at that moment that things felt out of control and I did not know how to bring them back, sitting in Warren Miller’s living room. We would need to go home to do that. And I guessed she was looking out at the dark toward our house because she wanted to be there. I was relieved, though, that my father didn’t know about all this because he wouldn’t have understood it even as well as I did. And I told myself, sitting there, that if I ever had the opportunity to tell him about all this, I wouldn’t do it. I would never do it as long as I lived, because I loved them.

In a little while Warren Miller brought out a big red bowl of what he called chicken cacciatore and a jug of wine in a basket, and we all three sat down at the table with the white
tablecloth and ate. My mother was in an odd mood at first, but she became better, and as she ate she began to find her good spirits again. Warren Miller ate with his napkin tucked into his shirt collar, and my mother said that was the old-fashioned way to eat, and he must’ve learned it in the old West, but that she didn’t want to see me eating that way. Though after a while we all put our napkins in our collars and laughed about it. Nobody talked about the fire. Once Warren Miller looked across the table at me and told me he thought my father had a strong character, and that he fought the circumstances, and that he was a man somebody would be lucky to have working for him, and that when my father came back from the fire he–Warren–would find a job for him, one that had a bright future to it. He said a smart man could make money in the car business, and he and my father would discuss that when the time came.