“I like it out here,” Woody said, his head down, looking at his shoes. “Nothing to bother you. I bet you’d see Chicago if the world was flat. The Great Plains commence here.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Woody looked up at me, cupping his smoke with one hand. “Do you play football?”
“No,” I said. I thought about asking him something about my mother. But I had no idea what it would be.
“I have been drinking,” Woody said, “but I’m not drunk now.”
The wind rose then, and from behind the house I could hear Major bark once from far away, and I could smell the irrigation ditch, hear it hiss in the field. It ran down from Highwood Creek to the Missouri, twenty miles away. It was nothing Woody knew about, nothing he could hear or smell. He knew nothing about anything that was here. I heard my father say the words, “That’s a real joke,” from inside the house, then the sound of a drawer being opened and shut, and a door closing. Then nothing else.
Woody turned and looked into the dark toward where the glow of Great Falls rose on the horizon, and we both could see the flashing lights of a plane lowering to land there. “I once passed my brother in the Los Angeles airport and didn’t even recognize him,” Woody said, staring into the night. “He recognized me, though. He said, ‘Hey, bro, are you mad at me, or what?’ I wasn’t mad at him. We both had to laugh.”
Woody turned and looked at the house. His hands were still in his pockets, his cigarette clenched between his teeth, his arms taut. They were, I saw, bigger, stronger arms than I had thought. A vein went down the front of each of them. I wondered what Woody knew that I didn’t. Not about my mother — I didn’t know anything about that and didn’t want to — but about a lot of things, about the life out in the dark, about coming out here, about airports, even about me. He and I were not so far apart in age, I knew that. But Woody was one thing, and I was another. And I wondered how I would ever get to be like him, since it didn’t necessarily seem so bad a thing to be.
“Did you know your mother was married before?” Woody said.
“Yes,” I said. “I knew that.”
“It happens to all of them, now,” he said. “They can’t wait to get divorced.”
“I guess so,” I said.
Woody dropped his cigarette into the gravel and toed it out with his black-and-white shoe. He looked up at me and smiled the way he had inside the house, a smile that said he knew something he wouldn’t tell, a smile to make you feel bad because you weren’t Woody and never could be.
It was then that my father came out of the house. He still had on his plaid hunting coat and his wool cap, but his face was as white as snow, as white as I have ever seen a human being’s face to be. It was odd. I had the feeling that he might’ve fallen inside, because he looked roughed up, as though he had hurt himself somehow.
My mother came out the door behind him and stood in the floodlight at the top of the steps. She was wearing the powder-blue dress Pd seen through the window, a dress I had never seen her wear before, though she was also wearing a car coat and carrying a suitcase. She looked at me and shook her head in a way that only I was supposed to notice, as if it was not a good idea to talk now.
My father had his hands in his pockets, and he walked right up to Woody. He did not even look at me. “What do you do for a living?” he said, and he was very close to Woody. His coat was close enough to touch Woody’s shirt.
“I’m in the Air Force,” Woody said. He looked at me and then at my father. He could tell my father was excited.
“Is this your day off, then?” my father said. He moved even closer to Woody, his hands still in his pockets. He pushed Woody with his chest, and Woody seemed willing to let my father push him.
“No,” he said, shaking his head.
I looked at my mother. She was just standing, watching. It was as if someone had given her an order, and she was obeying it. She did not smile at me, though I thought she was thinking about me, which made me feel strange.
“What’s the matter with you?” my father said into Woody’s face, right into his face — his voice tight, as if it had gotten hard for him to talk. “Whatever in the world is the matter with you? Don’t you understand something?” My father took a revolver pistol out of his coat and put it up under Woody’s chin, into the soft pocket behind the bone, so that Woody’s whole face rose, but his arms stayed at his sides, his hands open. “I don’t know what to do with you,” my father said. “I don’t have any idea what to do with you. I just don’t.” Though I thought that what he wanted to do was hold Woody there just like that until something important took place, or until he could simply forget about all this.
My father pulled the hammer back on the pistol and raised it tighter under Woody’s chin, breathing into Woody’s face — my mother in the light with her suitcase, watching them, and me watching them. A half a minute must’ve gone by.
And then my mother said, “Jack, let’s stop now. Let’s just stop.”
My father stared into Woody’s face as if he wanted Woody to consider doing something — moving or turning around or anything on his own to stop this — that my father would then put a stop to. My father’s eyes grew narrowed, and his teeth were gritted together, his lips snarling up to resemble a smile. “You’re crazy, aren’t you?” he said. “You’re a goddamned crazy man. Are you in love with her, too? Are you, crazy man? Are you? Do you say you love her? Say you love her! Say you love her so I can blow your fucking brains in the sky.”
“All right,” Woody said. “No. It’s all right.”
“He doesn’t love me, Jack. For God’s sake,” my mother said. She seemed so calm. She shook her head at me again. I do not think she thought my father would shoot Woody. And I don’t think Woody thought so. Nobody did, I think, except my father himself. But I think he did, and was trying to find out how to.
My father turned suddenly and glared at my mother, his eyes shiny and moving, but with the gun still on Woody’s skin. I think he was afraid, afraid he was doing this wrong and could mess all of it up and make matters worse without accomplishing anything.
“You’re leaving,” he yelled at her. “That’s why you’re packed. Get out. Go on.”
“Jackie has to be at school in the morning,” my mother said in just her normal voice. And without another word to any one of us, she walked out of the floodlamp light carrying her bag, turned the corner at the front porch steps and disappeared toward the olive trees that ran in rows back into the wheat.
My father looked back at me where I was standing in the gravel, as if he expected to see me go with my mother toward Woody’s car. But I hadn’t thought about that — though later I would. Later I would think I should have gone with her, and that things between them might’ve been different. But that isn’t how it happened.
“You’re sure you’re going to get away now, aren’t you, mister?” my father said into Woody’s face. He was crazy himself, then. Anyone would’ve been. Everything must have seemed out of hand to him.
“I’d like to,” Woody said. “I’d like to get away from here.”
“And I’d like to think of some way to hurt you,” my father said and blinked his eyes. “I feel helpless about it.” We all heard the door to Woody’s car close in the dark. “Do you think that I’m a fool?” my father said.
“No,” Woody said. “I don’t think that.”
“Do you think you’re important?”
“No,” Woody said. “I’m not.”
My father blinked again. He seemed to be becoming someone else at that moment, someone I didn’t know. “Where are you from?”
And Woody closed his eyes. He breathed in, then out, a long sigh. It was as if this was somehow the hardest part, something he hadn’t expected to be asked to say.