Rock Springs (23 page)

A
ll this happened by ten o'clock. At midnight my mother and I drove down to the city jail and got my father out. I stayed in the car while my mother went in—sat and watched the high windows of the jail, which were behind wire mesh and bars. Yellow lights were on there, and I could hear voices and see figures move past the lights, and twice someone called out, “Hello, hello. Marie, are you with me?” And then it was quiet, except for the cars that drove slowly past ours.

On the ride home, my mother drove and my father sat and stared out at the big electrical stacks by the river, and the lights of houses on the other side, in Black Eagle. He had on a checked shirt someone inside had given him, and his hair was neatly combed. No one said anything, but I did not understand why the police would put anyone in jail because he had killed a man and in two hours let him out again. It was a
mystery to me, even though I wanted him to be out and for our life to resume, and even though I did not see any way it could and, in fact, knew it never would.

Inside our house, all the lights were burning when we got back. It was one o'clock and there were still lights in some neighbors' houses. I could see a man at the window across the street, both his hands to the glass, watching out, watching us.

My mother went into the kitchen, and I could hear her running water for coffee and taking down cups. My father stood in the middle of the living room and looked around, looking at the chairs, at the card table with cards still on it, at the open doorways to the other rooms. It was as if he had forgotten his own house and now saw it again and didn't like

“I don't feel I know what he had against me,” my father said. He said this to me, but he said it to anyone, too. “You'd think you'd know what a man had against you, wouldn't you, Frank?”

“Yes,” I said. “I would.” We were both just standing together, my father and I, in the lighted room there. We were not about to do anything.

“I want us to be happy here now,” my father said. “I want us to enjoy life. I don't hold anything against anybody. Do you believe that?”

“I believe that,” I said. My father looked at me with his dark blue eyes and frowned. And for the first time I wished my father had not done what he did but had gone about things differendy. I saw him as a man who made mistakes, as a man who could hurt people, ruin lives, risk their happiness. A man who did not understand enough. He was like a gambler, though I did not even know what it meant to be a gambler then.

“It's such a quickly changing time now,” my father said. My mother, who had come into the kitchen doorway, stood
looking at us. She had on a flowered pink apron, and was standing where I had stood earlier that night. She was looking at my father and at me as if we were one person. “Don't you think it is, Dorothy?” he said. “All this turmoil. Everything just flying by. Look what's happened here.”

My mother seemed very certain about things then, very precise. “You should've controlled yourself more,” she said. “That's all.”

“I know that,” my father said. “I'm sorry. I lost control over my mind. I didn't expect to ruin things, but now I think I have. It was all wrong.” My father picked up the vodka bottle, unscrewed the cap and took a big swallow, then put the bottle back down. He had seen two men killed tonight. Who could've blamed him?

“When I was in jail tonight,” he said, staring at a picture on the wall, a picture by the door to the hallway. He was just talking again. “There was a man in the cell with me. And I've never been in jail before, not even when I was a kid. But this man said to me tonight, ‘I can tell you've never been in jail before just by the way you stand up straight. Other people don't stand that way. They stoop. You don't belong in jail. You stand up too straight.'” My father looked back at the vodka bottle as if he wanted to drink more out of it, but he only looked at it. “Bad things happen,” he said, and he let his open hands tap against his legs like clappers against a bell. “Maybe he was in love with you, Dorothy,” he said. “Maybe that's what the trouble was.”

And what I did then was stare at the picture on the wall, the picture my father had been staring at, a picture I had seen every day. Probably I had seen it a thousand times. It was two people with a baby on a beach. A man and a woman sitting in the sand with an ocean behind. They were smiling at the camera, wearing bathing suits. In all the times I had seen it I'd thought that it was a picture in which I was the baby, and
the two people were my parents. But I realized as I stood there, that it was not me at all; it was my father who was the child in the picture, and the parents there were his parents—two people Fd never known, and who were dead—and the picture was so much older than I had thought it was. I wondered why I hadn't known that before, hadn't understood it for myself, hadn't always known it. Not even that it mattered. What mattered was, I felt, that my father had fallen down now, as much as the man he had watched fall beneath the train just hours before. And I was as helpless to do anything as he had been. I wanted to tell him that I loved him, but for some reason I did not.

L
ater in the night I lay in my bed with the radio playing, listening to news that was far away, in Calgary and in Saskatoon, and even farther, in Regina and Winnipeg—cold, dark cities I knew I would never see in my life. My window was raised above the sill, and for a long time I had sat and looked out, hearing my parents talk softly down below, hearing their footsteps, hearing my father's steel-toed boots strike the floor, and then their bed-springs squeeze and then be quiet. From out across the sliding river I could hear trucks—stock trucks and grain trucks heading toward Idaho, or down toward Helena, or into the train yards where my father hosded engines. The neighborhood houses were dark again. My father's motorcycle sat in the yard, and out in the night air I felt I could hear even the falls themselves, could hear every sound of them, sounds that found me and whirled and filled my room—could even feel them, cold and wintry, so that warmth seemed like a possibility I would never know again.

After a time my mother came in my room. The light fell on my bed, and she set a chair inside. I could see that she was looking at me. She closed the door, came and turned off my radio, then took her chair to the window, closed it, and sat so that I could see her face silhouetted against the streetlight. She lit a cigarette and did not look at me, still cold under the covers of my bed.

“How do you feel, Frank,” she said, smoking her cigarette.

“I feel all right,” I said.

“Do you think your house is a terrible house now?”

“No,” I said.

“I hope not,” my mother said. “Don't feel it is. Don't hold anything against anyone. Poor Boyd. He's gone.”

“Why do you think that happened?” I said, though I didn't think she would answer, and wondered if I even wanted to know.

My mother blew smoke against the window glass, then sat and breathed. “He must've seen something in your father he just hated. I don't know what it was. Who knows? Maybe your father felt the same way.” She shook her head and looked out into the streetlamp light. “I remember once,” she said. “I was still in Havre, in the thirties. We were living in a motel my father part-owned out Highway Two, and my mother was around then, but wasn't having any of us. My father had this big woman named Judy Belknap as his girlfriend. She was an Assiniboin. Just some squaw. But we used to go on nature tours when he couldn't put up with me anymore. She'd take me. Way up above the Milk River. All this stuff she knew about, animals and plants and ferns—she'd tell me all that. And once we were sitting watching some gadwall ducks on the ice where a creek had made a little turn-out. It was getting colder, just like now. And Judy just all at once stood up and clapped. Just clapped her hands. And all these ducks got up, all
except for one that stayed on the ice, where its feet were frozen, I guess. It didn't even try to fly. It just sat. And Judy said to me, ‘It's just a coincidence, Dottie. It's wildlife. Some always get left back.' And that seemed to leave her satisfied for some reason. We walked back to the car after that. So,” my mother said. “Maybe that's what this is. Just a coincidence.”

She raised the window again, dropped her cigarette out, blew the last smoke from her throat, and said, “Go to sleep, Frank. You'll be all right. We'll all survive this. Be an optimist.”

When I was asleep that night, I dreamed. And what I dreamed was of a plane crashing, a bomber, dropping out of the frozen sky, bouncing as it hit the icy river, sliding and turning on the ice, its wings like knives, and coming into our house where we were sleeping, leveling everything. And when I sat up in bed I could hear a dog in the yard, its collar jingling, and I could hear my father crying, “Boo-hoo-hoo, boo-hoo-hoo,”—like that, quietly—though afterward I could never be sure if I had heard him crying in just that way, or if all of it was a dream, a dream I wished I had never had.

T
he most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all that's happened and by all that could and will happen next. I now no longer remember the exact year of my father's birth, or how old he was when I last saw him, or even when that last time took place. When you're young, these things seem unforgettable and at the heart of everything. But they slide away and are gone when you are not so young.

My father went to Deer Lodge Prison and stayed five months for killing Boyd Mitchell by accident, for using too much force to hit him. In Montana you cannot simply kill a man in your living room and walk off free from it, and what I remember is that my father pleaded no contest, the same as guilty.

My mother and I lived in our house for the months he was gone. But when he came out and went back on the railroad as a switchman the two of them argued about things, about her wanting us to go someplace else to live—California or Seattle were mentioned. And then they separated, and she moved out. And after that I moved out by joining the Army and adding years to my age, which was sixteen.

I know about my father only that after a time he began to live a life he himself would never have believed. He fell off the railroad, divorced my mother, who would now and then resurface in his life. Drinking was involved in that, and gambling, embezzling money, even carrying a pistol, is what I heard. I was apart from all of it. And when you are the age I was then, and loose on the world and alone, you can get along better than at almost any other time, because it's a novelty, and you can act for what you want, and you can think that being alone will not last forever. All I know of my father, finally, is that he was once in Laramie, Wyoming, and not in good shape, and then he simply disappeared from view.

A month ago I saw my mother. I was buying groceries at a drive-in store by the interstate in Anaconda, Montana, not far from Deer Lodge itself, where my father had been. It had been fifteen years, I think, since I had seen her, though I am forty-three years old now, and possibly it was longer. But when I saw her I walked across the store to where she was and I said, “Hello, Dorothy. It's Frank.”

She looked at me and smiled and said, “Oh, Frank. How are you? I haven't seen you in a long time. I'm glad to see
you now, though.” She was dressed in blue jeans and boots and a Western shirt, and she looked like a woman who could be sixty years old. Her hair was tied back and she looked pretty, though I think she had been drinking. It was ten o'clock in the morning.

There was a man standing near her, holding a basket of groceries, and she turned to him and said, “Dick, come here and meet my son, Frank. We haven't seen each other in a long time. This is Dick Spivey, Frank.”

I shook hands with Dick Spivey, who was a man younger than my mother but older than me—a tall, thin-faced man with coarse blue-black hair—and who was wearing Western boots like hers. “Let me say a word to Frank, Dick,” my mother said, and she put her hand on Dick's wrist and squeezed it and smiled at him. And he walked up toward the checkout to pay for his groceries.

“So. What are you doing now, Frank,” my mother asked, and put her hand on my wrist the way she had on Dick Spivey's, but held it there. “These years,” she said.

“I've been down in Rock Springs, on the coal boom,” I said. “I'll probably go back down there.”

“And I guess you're married, too.”

“I was,” I said. “But not right now.”

“That's fine,” she said. “You look fine.” She smiled at me. “You'll never get anything fixed just right. That's your mother's word. Your father and I had a marriage made in Havre—that was our joke about us. We used to laugh about it. You didn't know that, of course. You were too young. A lot of it was just wrong.”

“It's a long time ago,” I said. “I don't know about that.”

“I remember those times very well,” my mother said. “They were happy enough times. I guess something
was
in the air, wasn't there? Your father was so jumpy. And Boyd got so mad, just all of a sudden. There was some hopelessness to it, I
suppose. All that union business. We were the last to understand any of it, of course. We were trying to be decent people.”

“That's right,” I said. And I believed that was true of them.

“I still like to swim,” my mother said. She ran her fingers back through her hair as if it were wet. She smiled at me again. “It still makes me feel freer.”

“Good,” I said. “I'm happy to hear that.”

“Do you ever see your dad?”

“No,” I said. “I never do.”

“I don't either,” my mother said. “You just reminded me of him.” She looked at Dick Spivey, who was standing at the front window, holding a sack of groceries, looking out at the parking lot. It was March, and some small bits of snow were falling onto the cars in the lot. He didn't seem in any hurry. “Maybe I didn't appreciate your father enough,” she said. “Who knows? Maybe we weren't even made for each other. Losing your love is the worst thing, and that's what we did.” I didn't answer her, but I knew what she meant, and that it was true. “I wish we knew each other better, Frank,” my mother said to me. She looked down, and I think she may have blushed. “We have our deep feelings, though, don't we? Both of us.”