Authors: Richard Ford
Berner, by this time, had begun not to be so easy to get along with. We had not been in the same classes since grade school because it was considered unhealthy for twins to be together all the time—though we’d always helped each other with our schoolwork and done well. She stayed in her room much of the time now, read movie magazines she bought at the Rexall, and
Peyton Place
and
Bonjour Tristesse
, which she smuggled home and would not say from where. She watched her fish in her aquarium, and listened to music on the radio and had no friends—which was true of me also. I didn’t mind being away from her and having a separate life with my own interests and thoughts about the future. Berner and I were fraternal twins—she was six minutes older—and looked nothing alike. She was tall, bony, awkward, freckled all over—left-handed where I was right-handed—with warts on her fingers, pale gray-green eyes like our mother’s and mine, and pimples, and a flat face and a soft chin that wasn’t pretty. She had wiry brown hair parted in the middle and a sensuous mouth like our father’s, though she had little hair anywhere else—on her legs or arms—and had no chest to speak of, which was true of our mother as well. She usually wore pants and a jumper dress over them that made her look larger than she was. She sometimes wore white lace gloves to cover up her hands. She also had allergies for which she carried a Vicks torpedo inhaler in her pocket, and her room always smelled like Vicks when you came near her door. To me, she resembled a combination of our parents: my father’s height and my mother’s looks. I sometimes found myself thinking of Berner as an older boy. Other times I wished she looked more like me so she’d be nicer to me, and we could be closer. Though I never wanted to look like her.
I, on the other hand, was smaller and trim with straight brown hair parted wide on the side, and smooth skin with very few pimples—“pretty” features more like our father’s, but delicate like our mother. Which I liked, as I liked the way our mother dressed me—in khaki pants and clean, ironed shirts and oxford shoes from the Sears catalog. Our parents made jokes about Berner and me coming from the postman or the milkman and being “oddments.” Though they only, I felt, meant Berner. In recent months, Berner had become sensitive about how she looked, and acted more and more disaffected—as if something had gone wrong in her life in a short amount of time. At one moment in my memory, she’d been an ordinary, freckle-faced, cute, happy little girl who had a wonderful smile and could make funny faces that had made us all laugh. But she now acted skeptical about life, which made her sarcastic and skillful at spotting my defects, but mostly made her seem angry. She didn’t even like her name—which I did like and thought it made her unique.
AFTER MY FATHER
had sold Oldsmobiles for a month, he was involved in a minor rear-end traffic accident while he was driving too fast in his demonstrator, and was also back on the base where he had no business being. After that, he began to sell Dodges and brought home a beautiful two-tone brown-and-white Coronet hardtop with what was called push-button drive and electric windows and swivel seats, and also stylish fins, gaudy red tail-lights and a long whipping antenna. This car likewise sat in front of our house for a period of three weeks. Berner and I got in it and played the radio, and my father took us on more drives and we let the air rush in with all four windows down. On several occasions he drove out the Bootlegger Trail and let us drive and taught us to back up and how to turn the wheels correctly for skidding on ice. Unfortunately he didn’t sell any Dodges and came to the conclusion that in a place like Great Falls—a rough country town of only fifty thousand, brimming with frugal Swedes and suspicious Germans, and only a small percentage of moneyed people who might be willing to spend their money on fancy cars—he was in the wrong business. He quit that then and took a job selling and trading used cars on a lot out near the base. Airmen were always in money scrapes and getting divorced and being sued and married again and put in jail and needing cash. They bought and traded automobiles as a form of currency. You could make money being the middle man—a position he liked. Plus the airmen would be apt to do business with a former officer, who understood their special problems and didn’t look down on them the way other townspeople did.
IN THE END
, he didn’t stay long at that job either. Though on two or three occasions he took Berner and me out to the car lot to show us around. There was nothing for us to do there but wander among the rows of cars, in the shattering, hot breeze, under the flapping pennants and the silver flashers-on-wires, gazing at the passing base traffic from between the car hoods baking in the Montana sun. “Great Falls is a used car town, not a new car town,” our father said, standing hands on hips on the steps of the little wooden office where the salesmen waited for customers. “New cars put everybody in the poorhouse. A thousand dollars is gone the second you drive off the lot.” At about this time—late June—he said he was thinking of taking a driving trip down to Dixie, to see how things looked there, among the “left backs.” My mother told him this was a trip he’d make on his own and without his children, which annoyed him. She said she didn’t want to get close to Alabama. Mississippi had been enough. The Jewish situation was worse than for coloreds, who at least belonged there. In her view, Montana was better because no one even knew what a Jewish person was—which ended their discussion. Our mother’s attitude toward being Jewish was that sometimes it was a burden, and other times it distinguished her in a way she accepted. But it was never good in all ways. Berner and I didn’t know what a Jewish person was, except our mother was one, which by ancient rules made us officially Jews, which was better than being from Alabama. We should consider ourselves “non-observant,” or “deracinated,” she said. This meant we celebrated Christmas and Thanksgiving and Easter and the Fourth of July all the same, and didn’t attend a church, which was fine because there wasn’t a Jewish one in Great Falls anyway. Someday it might mean something, but it didn’t have to be now.
When our father had tried to sell used cars for a month, he came home one day with a used car that he’d bought for himself, and had traded away our ’52 Mercury for—a white-and-red ’55 Bel Air Chevrolet, bought off the lot where he’d been working. “A good deal.” He said he’d arranged to begin a new job selling farms and ranch land—something he admitted he knew nothing about but was signed up to take a course on in the basement of the YMCA. The other men in the company would help him. His father had been a timber estimator, so he was confident he had a good feel for things “out in the wilds”—better than he did for things in town. Plus, when Kennedy was elected in November, a period of buoyancy would dawn, and the first thing people would want to do was buy land. They weren’t making more of it, he said, even though there seemed to be a lot of it around there. The percentages in selling used cars, he’d learned, were stacked against anybody but the dealer. He didn’t know why he had to be the last person to find these things out. Our mother agreed.
We, of course, didn’t know it then, my sister and I, but the two of them must’ve realized that they’d begun to draw away from each other during this time—after he’d left the Air Force and was supposedly finding himself in the world—and to recognize they saw each other differently, possibly begun to understand that the differences between them weren’t going away but were getting larger. All the congested, preoccupying, tumultuous, moving around base after base and raising two children on the fly, years of it, had allowed them to put off noticing what they should’ve noticed at the beginning—and it was probably more her than him: that what had seemed small had become something she, at least, didn’t like now. His optimism, her alienated skepticism. His southernness, her immigrant Jewishness. His lack of education, her preoccupation with it and sense of unfulfillment. When they realized it (or when she did)—again, this was after my father accepted his discharge and forward motion changed—they each began to experience a tension and foreboding peculiar to each of them and not shared by the other. (This was recorded in various things my mother wrote, and in her chronicle.) If things had been allowed to follow the path thousands of other lives follow—the everyday path toward ordinary splitting up—she could’ve just packed Berner and me up, put us on the train out of Great Falls and headed us to Tacoma, where she was from, or to New York or Los Angeles. If that had happened, each of them would’ve had a chance at a good life out in the wide world. My father might’ve gone back to the Air Force, since leaving it had been hard for him. He could’ve married someone else. She could’ve returned to school once Berner and I had gone to college. She could’ve written poems, followed her early aspirations. Fate would’ve dealt them improved hands.
And yet if they were telling this story, it would naturally be a different one, in which they were the principals in the events that were coming, and my sister and I the spectators—which is one thing children are to their parents. The world doesn’t usually think about bank robbers as having children—though plenty must. But the children’s story—which mine and my sister’s is—is ours to weigh and apportion and judge as we see it. Years later in college, I read that the great critic Ruskin wrote that composition is the arrangement of unequal things. Which means it’s for the composer to determine what’s equal to what, and what matters more and what can be set to the side of life’s hurtling passage onward.
M
OST OF WHAT I KNOW THAT WENT ON NEXT—
from the middle of the summer, 1960—I know mostly from various unreliable sources: from what I read in the
Great Falls Tribune
, which carried stories about our parents that made it seem that there was something fantastic and hilarious about what they did. I know other things from the chronicle my mother wrote while she was in the Golden Valley County jail, in North Dakota, awaiting trial, and later in the North Dakota State Penitentiary in Bismarck. I know a few things from what people told me at the time. And, of course, I know some particulars because we were there in the house with them and observed them—as children do—as things changed from ordinary, peaceful and good, to bad, then worse, and then to as bad as could be (though no one got killed until later).
FOR ALMOST THE WHOLE TIME
my father had been stationed at the base in Great Falls—four years—he’d been involved (though we didn’t know it) in a scheme to provide stolen beef to the officers’ club, for which he received money and fresh steaks we ate at home twice a week. The scheme was well established at the base, handed down from supply officer to supply officer as they passed through their assignments and out. The scheme involved doing illegal business with certain members of the Cree Indian tribe, who lived south of Havre, Montana, on reservation land and were experts at stealing Hereford cows from local ranchers’ herds, butchering the cows in secret, then transporting the beef sides down to the base all in a night’s work. The meat was stored away by the officers’ club manager in the club’s cold box and served to the majors and colonels and the base commander and their wives, who knew nothing about where it came from and didn’t care as long as no one got caught and the beef was good quality—which it was.
Obviously this was a small, penny-ante scheme, which was why it had easily gone on for years and everyone expected it to go on permanently. Only, a misunderstanding arose on the base, and parts of the scheme that involved billing practices in the supply and requisition office came embarrassingly to light, and several Air Force people were disciplined, and my father lost his rank of captain (of which he was proud) and became a first lieutenant again. He may have been one of the parties who caused the swindle to come to light, but that was never stated. The whole episode—which no one in our house ever discussed and Berner and I didn’t know about—almost certainly contributed to his decision to leave the Air Force. It’s possible he was forced to retire, although he received an honorable discharge certificate, which he framed and hung up in our living room above the piano, beside his FDR photograph. The picture was there after our parents were arrested, when my sister and I were alone in the house and no one came to see about us. In several moments during that time, I stood and perused it (“Honorably discharged from the United States Air Force . . . a testimonial of Honest and Faithful Service . . .”) and thought that what it said wasn’t true. I considered taking it with me when I left. But in the end I forgot about it, hanging in our abandoned house for somebody else to make fun of and eventually throw in the trash.
What my father did—and this is in my mother’s chronicle (“A Chronicle of a Crime Committed by a Weak Person” was her title; she may have intended her story to be published someday)—what my father did, while he was unsuccessfully trying to sell Oldsmobiles, then Dodges, and then trading used cars and motorcycles to airmen, was again seek out the Indians south of Havre and try to establish a new business in beef sides. He believed the Indians had lost a profitable outlet for their line of work. And if he could find someone or someplace new to supply meat to, everything could start up again and even be better than before, because the Air Force wouldn’t be involved, and he’d have no one to split his proceeds with. Once again, it was such a third-rate, badly considered connivance that it could’ve been comical had it not been life altering: our father and our tiny, stern Jewish mother in their modest rented house in Great Falls, these hapless Indians and the rustled cows slaughtered in the middle of the night in an old semi-trailer. Common sense should’ve dictated none of this ever take place. But no one had access to common sense.
After realizing he wouldn’t make enough money to support our family while he learned the farm and ranch business—even with his two-hundred-eighty-dollar Air Force pension and my mother’s salary from the Fort Shaw school—my father set out to find someone who could be a new customer for stolen beef, someone he would be the middle man for. There wouldn’t be many such possibilities in Great Falls, he knew. Columbus Hospital. The Rainbow Hotel—where he knew no one. One or two steakhouse clubs he might’ve known about, but which were watched by the police because of illegal gambling. What his eye fell on was the Great Northern Railway, which ran the Western Star passenger train through Great Falls on its way to Seattle, then back in two days to Chicago, and that had a steady need to supply the dining cars with first-class food, coming and going. Our father believed the provider of prime beef could be him, again in association with the Indians near Havre. He knew about an airman who’d sold ducks and wild geese and venison (all illegal) to a Negro who worked for the railroad and was a head waiter in the dining car service. It was to this black man our father paid a visit (went to his house in Black Eagle) and proposed to sell him beef that he (our father) would supply from the Indians he said were his associates.