I took a drink and gave the bottle back to him, holding the whiskey in my mouth until it stopped burning and I could swallow it a little at a time. When we turned out the road to Highwood, the lights of Great Falls sank below the horizon, and I could see the small white lights of farms, burning at wide distances in the dark.
“What do you worry about, Jackie,” my father said. “Do you worry about girls? Do you worry about your future sex life? Is that some of it?” He glanced at me, then back at the road.
“I don’t worry about that,” I said.
“Well, what then?” my father said. “What else is there?”
“I worry if you’re going to die before I do,” I said, though I hated saying that, “or if Mother is. That worries me.”
“It’d be a miracle if we didn’t,” my father said, with the half-pint held in the same hand he held the steering wheel. I had seen him drive that way before. “Things pass too fast in your life, Jackie. Don’t worry about that. If I were you, I’d worry we might not.” He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don’t remember him ever smiling at me that way again.
We drove on out behind the town of Highwood and onto the flat field roads toward our house. I could see, out on the prairie, a moving light where the farmer who rented our house to us was disking his field for winter wheat. “He’s waited too late with that business,” my father said and took a drink, then threw the bottle right out the window. “He’ll lose that,” he said, “the cold’ll kill it.” I did not answer him, but what I thought was that my father knew nothing about farming, and if he was right it would be an accident. He knew about planes and hunting game, and that seemed all to me.
“I want to respect your privacy,” he said then, for no reason at all that I understood. I am not even certain he said it, only that it is in my memory that way. I don’t know what he was thinking of. Just words. But I said to him, I remember well, “It’s all right. Thank you.”
We did not go straight out the Geraldine Road to our house. Instead my father went down another mile and turned, went a mile and turned back again so that we came home from the other direction. “I want to stop and listen now,” he said. “The geese should be in the stubble.” We stopped and he cut the lights and engine, and we opened the car windows and listened. It was eight o’clock at night and it was getting colder, though it was dry. But I could hear nothing, just the sound of air moving lightly through the cut field, and not a goose sound. Though I could smell the whiskey on my father’s breath and on mine, could hear the motor ticking, could hear him breathe, hear the sound we made sitting side by side on the car seat, our clothes, our feet, almost our hearts beating. And I could see out in the night the yellow lights of our house, shining through the olive trees south of us like a ship on the sea. “I hear them, by God,” my father said, his head stuck out the window. “But they’re high up. They won’t stop here now, Jackie. They’re high flyers, those boys. Long gone geese.”
There was a car parked off the road, down the line of wind-break trees, beside a steel thresher the farmer had left there to rust. You could see moonlight off the taillight chrome. It was a Pontiac, a two-door hard-top. My father said nothing about it and I didn’t either, though I think now for different reasons.
The floodlight was on over the side door of our house and lights were on inside, upstairs and down. My mother had a pumpkin on the front porch, and the wind chime she had hung by the door was tinkling. My dog, Major, came out of the quonset shed and stood in the car lights when we drove up.
“Let’s see what’s happening here,” my father said, opening the door and stepping out quickly. He looked at me inside the car, and his eyes were wide and his mouth drawn right.
We walked in the side door and up the basement steps into the kitchen, and a man was standing there — a man I had never seen before, a young man with blond hair, who might’ve been twenty or twenty-five. He was tall and was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and beige slacks with pleats. He was on the other side of the breakfast table, his fingertips just touching the wooden tabletop. His blue eyes were on my father, who was dressed in hunting clothes.
“Hello,” my father said.
“Hello,” the young man said, and nothing else. And for some reason I looked at his arms, which were long and pale. They looked like a young man’s arms, like my arms. His short sleeves had each been neatly rolled up, and I could see the bottom of a small green tattoo edging out from underneath. There was a glass of whiskey on the table, but no bottle.
“What’s your name?” my father said, standing in the kitchen under the bright ceiling light. He sounded like he might be going to laugh.
“Woody,” the young man said and cleared his throat. He looked at me, then he touched the glass of whiskey, just the rim of the glass. He wasn’t nervous, I could tell that. He did not seem to be afraid of anything.
“Woody,” my father said and looked at the glass of whiskey. He looked at me, then sighed and shook his head. “Where’s Mrs. Russell, Woody? I guess you aren’t robbing my house, are you?”
Woody smiled. “No,” he said. “Upstairs. I think she went upstairs.”
“Good,” my father said, “that’s a good place.” And he walked straight out of the room, but came back and stood in the doorway. “Jackie, you and Woody step outside and wait on me. Just stay there and I’ll come out.” He looked at Woody then in a way I would not have liked him to look at me, a look that meant he was studying Woody. “I guess that’s your car,” he said.
“That Pontiac.” Woody nodded.
“Okay. Right,” my father said. Then he went out again and up the stairs. At that moment the phone started to ring in the living room, and I heard my mother say, “Who’s that?” And my father say, “It’s me. It’s Jack.” And I decided I wouldn’t go answer the phone. Woody looked at me, and I understood he wasn’t sure what to do. Run, maybe. But he didn’t have run in him. Though I thought he would probably do what I said if I would say it.
“Let’s just go outside,” I said.
And he said, “All right.”
Woody and I walked outside and stood in the light of the floodlamp above the side door. I had on my wool jacket, but Woody was cold and stood with his hands in his pockets, and his arms bare, moving from foot to foot. Inside, the phone was ringing again. Once I looked up and saw my mother come to the window and look down at Woody and me. Woody didn’t look up or see her, but I did. I waved at her, and she waved back at me and smiled. She was wearing a powder-blue dress. In another minute the phone stopped ringing.
Woody took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it. Smoke shot through his nose into the cold air, and he sniffed, looked around the ground and threw his match on the gravel. His blond hair was combed backwards and neat on the sides, and I could smell his aftershave on him, a sweet, lemon smell. And for the first time I noticed his shoes. They were two-tones, black with white tops and black laces. They stuck out below his baggy pants and were long and polished and shiny, as if he had been planning on a big occasion. They looked like shoes some country singer would wear, or a salesman. He was handsome, but only like someone you would see beside you in a dime store and not notice again.