“One’s still out there,” I said, and motioned where the one goose was swimming in circles on the water.
“Okay,” my mother said and put her hand over her eyes to look. “Where is it?”
Glen Baxter looked at me then with a strange smile, a smile that said he wished I had never mentioned anything about the other goose. And I wished I hadn’t either. I looked up in the sky and could see the lines of geese by the thousands shining silver in the light, and I wished we could just leave and go home.
“That one’s my mistake there,” Glen Baxter said and grinned. “I shouldn’t have shot that one, Aileen. I got too excited.”
My mother looked out on the lake for a minute, then looked at Glen and back again. “Poor goose.” She shook her head. “How will you get it, Glen?”
“I can’t get that one now,” Glen said.
My mother looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“I’m going to leave that one,” Glen said.
“Well, no. You can’t leave one,” my mother said. “You shot it. You have to get it. Isn’t that a rule?”
“No,” Glen said.
And my mother looked from Glen to me. “Wade out and get it, Glen,” she said in a sweet way, and my mother looked young then, like a young girl, in her flimsy short-sleeved waitress dress and her skinny, bare legs in the wheatgrass.
“No.” Glen Baxter looked down at his gun and shook his head. And I didn’t know why he wouldn’t go, because it would’ve been easy. The lake was shallow. And you could tell that anyone could’ve walked out a long way before it got deep, and Glen had on his boots.
My mother looked at the white goose, which was not more than thirty yards from the shore, its head up, moving in slow circles, its wings settled and relaxed so you could see the black tips. “Wade out and get it, Glenny, won’t you, please?” she said. “They’re special things.”
“You don’t understand the world, Aileen,” Glen said. “This can happen. It doesn’t matter.”
“But that’s so cruel, Glen,” she said, and a sweet smile came on her lips.
“Raise up your own arms, ‘Leeny,” Glen said. “I can’t see any angel’s wings, can you, Les?” He looked at me, but I looked away.
“Then you go on and get it, Les,” my mother said. “You weren’t raised by crazy people.” I started to go, but Glen Baxter suddenly grabbed me by my shoulder and pulled me back hard, so hard his fingers made bruises in my skin that I saw later.
“Nobody’s going,” he said. “This is over with now.”
And my mother gave Glen a cold look then. “You don’t have a heart, Glen,” she said. “There’s nothing to love in you. You’re just a son of a bitch, that’s all.”
And Glen Baxter nodded at my mother, then, as if he understood something he had not understood before, but something that he was willing to know. “Fine,” he said, “that’s fine.” And he took his big pistol out from against his belly, the big blue revolver I had only seen part of before and that he said protected him, and he pointed it out at the goose on the water, his arm straight away from him, and shot and missed. And then he shot and missed again. The goose made its noise once. And then he hit it dead, because there was no splash. And then he shot it three times more until the gun was empty and the goose’s head was down and it was floating toward the middle of the lake where it was empty and dark blue. “Now who has a heart?” Glen said. But my mother was not there when he turned around. She had already started back to the car and was almost lost from sight in the darkness. And Glen smiled at me then and his face had a wild look on it. “Okay, Les?” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“There’re limits to everything, right?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“Your mother’s a beautiful woman, but she’s not the only beautiful woman in Montana.” And I did not say anything. And Glen Baxter suddenly said, “Here,” and he held the pistol out at me. “Don’t you want this? Don’t you want to shoot me? Nobody thinks they’ll die. But I’m ready for it right now.” And I did not know what to do then. Though it is true that what I wanted to do was to hit him, hit him as hard in the face as I could, and see him on the ground bleeding and crying and pleading for me to stop. Only at that moment he looked scared to me, and I had never seen a grown man scared before — though I have seen one since — and I felt sorry for him, as though he was already a dead man. And I did not end up hitting him at all.
A light can go out in the heart. All of this happened years ago, but I still can feel now how sad and remote the world was to me. Glen Baxter, I think now, was not a bad man, only a man scared of something he’d never seen before — something soft in himself — his life going a way he didn’t like. A woman with a son. Who could blame him there? I don’t know what makes people do what they do, or call themselves what they call themselves, only that you have to live someone’s life to be the expert.
My mother had tried to see the good side of things, tried to be hopeful in the situation she was handed, tried to look out for us both, and it hadn’t worked. It was a strange time in her life then and after that, a time when she had to adjust to being an adult just when she was on the thin edge of things. Too much awareness too early in life was her problem, I think.
And what I felt was only that I had somehow been pushed out into the world, into the real life then, the one I hadn’t lived yet. In a year I was gone to hard-rock mining and no-paycheck jobs and not to college. And I have thought more than once about my mother saying that I had not been raised by crazy people, and I don’t know what that could mean or what difference it could make, unless it means that love is a reliable commodity, and even that is not always true, as I have found out.
Late on the night that all this took place I was in bed when I heard my mother say, “Come outside, Les. Come and hear this.” And I went out onto the front porch barefoot and in my underwear, where it was warm like spring, and there was a spring mist in the air. I could see the lights of the Fairfield Coach in the distance, on its way up to Great Falls.
And I could hear geese, white birds in the sky, flying. They made their high-pitched sound like angry yells, and though I couldn’t see them high up, it seemed to me they were everywhere. And my mother looked up and said, “Hear them?” I could smell her hair wet from the shower. “They leave with the moon,” she said. “It’s still half wild out here.”
And I said, “I hear them,” and I felt a chill come over my bare chest, and the hair stood up on my arms the way it does before a storm. And for a while we listened.
“When I first married your father, you know, we lived on a street called Bluebird Canyon, in California. And I thought that was the prettiest street and the prettiest name. I suppose no one brings you up like your first love. You don’t mind if I say that, do you?” She looked at me hopefully.
“No,” I said.
“We have to keep civilization alive somehow.” And she pulled her little housecoat together because there was a cold vein in the air, a part of the cold that would be on us the next day. “I don’t feel part of things tonight, I guess.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“Do you know where I’d like to go?”
“No,” I said. And I suppose I knew she was angry then, angry with lite, but did not want to show me that.
“To the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Wouldn’t that be something? Would you like that?”
“I’d like it,” I said. And my mother looked off for a minute, as if she could see the Straits of Juan de Fuca out against the line of mountains, see the lights of things alive and a whole new world.
“I know you liked him,” she said after a moment. “You and I both suffer fools too well.”