“Maybe if I’m drunk enough someday I’ll tell you about how we got apart,” Arlene said. She opened the glove box and got out a package of cigarettes and closed the latch with her foot. “Nothing should surprise anyone, though, when the sun goes down. I’ll just say that. It’s all just melodrama.” She thumped the pack against the heel of her hand and put her feet up on the dash. And I thought about poor Bobby, being frisked and handcuffed out in the yard of the jail and being led away to become a prisoner, like a piece of useless machinery. I didn’t think anyone could blame him for anything he ever thought or said or became after that. He could die in jail and we would still be outside and free. “Would you tell me something if I asked you?” Arlene said, opening her package of cigarettes. “Your word’s worth something, isn’t it?”
“To me it is,” I said.
She looked over at me and smiled because that was a question she had asked me before, and an answer I had said. She reached across the car seat and squeezed my hand, then looked down the gravel road to where the Clark Fork went north and the receding fog had changed the colors of the trees and made them greener and the moving water a darker shade of blue-black.
“What do you think when you get in bed with me every night? I don’t know why I want to know that. I just do,” Arlene said. “It seems important to me.”
And in truth I did not have to think about that at all, because I knew the answer, and had thought about it already, had wondered, in fact, if it was in my mind because of the time in my life it was, or because a former husband was involved, or because I had a daughter to raise alone, and no one else I could be absolutely sure of.
“I just think,” I said, “here’s another day that’s gone. A day I’ve had with you. And now it’s over.”
“There’s some loss in that, isn’t there?” Arlene nodded at me and smiled.
“I guess so,” I said.
“It’s not so all-bad though, is it? There can be a next day.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“We don’t know where any of this is going, do we?” she said, and she squeezed my hand tight.
“No,” I said. And I knew that was not a bad thing at all, not for anyone, in any life.
“You’re not going to leave me for some other woman, now, are you? You’re still my sweetheart. I’m not crazy, am I?”
“I never thought that,” I said.
“It’s your hole card, you know,” Arlene said. “You can’t leave twice. Bobby proved that.” She smiled at me again.
And I knew she was right about that, though I did not want to hear about Bobby anymore for a while. He and I were not alike. Arlene and I had nothing to do with him. Though I knew, then, how you became a criminal in the world and lost it all. Somehow, and for no apparent reason, your decisions got tipped over and you lost your hold. And one day you woke up and you found yourself in the very situation you said you would never ever be in, and you did not know what was most important to you anymore. And after that, it was all over. And I did not want that to happen to me — did not, in fact, think it ever would. I knew what love was about. It was about not giving trouble or inviting it. It was about not leaving a woman for the thought of another one. It was about never being in that place you said you’d never be in. And it was not about being alone. Never that. Never that.
Children
Claude Phillips was a half-Blackfeet Indian, and his father, Sherman, was a full-blood, and in 1961 our families rented out farm houses from the bank in Great Falls — the homes of wheat farmers gone bust on the prairie east of Sunburst, Montana. People were going broke even then, and leaving. Claude Phillips and I were seventeen, and in a year from the day I am going to tell about, in May, I would be long gone from there myself, and so would Claude.
Where all of this took place was in that remote part of Montana near the Canada border and west of the Sweetgrass Hills. That is called the Hi-line, there, and it is an empty, lonely place if you are not a wheat farmer. I make this a point only because I have thought possibly it was the place itself, as much as the time in our lives or our characters, that took part in the small things that happened and made them memorable.
Claude Phillips was a small boy with long arms who boxed in the same amateurs club I boxed in — up in Sweetgrass and across the border in Canada, wherever we could box. He was ten months younger than I was, but he was hard-nosed and had fight courage. His real mother was his father’s first wife, and was Irish, and Claude did not look like an Indian — his cheeks wore more color in them and his eyes were gray. His father had later married another woman — an Indian, an Assiniboin, named Hazel Tevitts — whom Claude did not talk about. I didn’t know much about their life then, only that it didn’t seem much different from mine. You did not learn much of other people in that locality, and though Claude and I were friends, I would not say I knew him very well, because there was no chance for it.
Claude’s father had stayed the night in the motel in town and called Claude in the morning and told him to come down there at noon. On the way Claude stopped at my house — just out of the blue — and said I should come along. We were due to be in school that day, but my father worked on the Great Northern as a brakeman in Shelby, and was usually gone two nights together, and my mother was gone for good by then, though we didn’t know that. But I did not go to school so much, as a result, and when Claude drove up in the yard, I just got in with him and we rode to town.
“What’re we going in for?” I said when we were out on the Nine Mile Road, riding across the tops of the wheat prairies.
“Sherman’s brought a woman in,” Claude said. He was smoking a cigarette clenched in his teeth. “That’s typical. He likes to put something on display.”
“What does your mother think about it?” I said. We referred to Hazel as Claude’s mother even though she wasn’t.
“She married a gash hound. She’s a Catholic,” Claude said. “Maybe she can see the future. Maybe she thinks it’s superior.” He shook his head and put his arms up around the steering wheel as if he was thinking about that. “There might not be actual words for what Hazel thinks, yet. This ought to be funny.” He grinned.
“I’ll still have a look,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
“Sure you will. Then you’ll just have to give her a pumping, right?” Claude flexed up the muscle of his right arm.
“I might have to,” I said.
“That’s typical, too,” he said. Claude was wearing the yellow silk jacket his father had brought back from the war, one with a red dragon coiled around a map of Korea on the back, and I died there embroidered under it in red. He reached inside it and brought out a half-pint bottle of Canadian gin. “Rocket fuel,” he said. “Sherman forgets where he hides it.” He handed the bottle over to me. “Fire up your missile.”
I took a big drink and swallowed it. I didn’t like whiskey and had not drunk it much, and when it went down I had to look out the car window. The wheat fields running by were two inches up and green then as far as you could see. The only trees alive were the olive breaks planted in rows on the rises and out distant, alongside some house or a quonset where a farm still ran. The little town of Sunburst was ahead, lower than where we were driving. I could see the grain elevator and the narrow collection of houses down one side of the railroad spur.
Claude said suddenly, “Maybe Sherman’s going to give her to us.” He held the bottle up and took a drink. “He doesn’t care what happens. He’s been in Deer Lodge twice already. Twice / know of.”
“For what?” I said.