‘He’s all right,’ I said, and I know I was thinking that these other men were all right. They were here eating supper, and probably my father was too, somewhere else. He was on his own, and that was all, and you did not have to be crazy to want to be on your own, or so I thought at the time.
‘Is that what you believe?’ my mother said, holding her beer can in both hands, her elbows on the table top.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It is.’
‘Well, I think he has a woman out there is what I think. Probably it’s an Indian woman. A squaw. She’s probably married, too.’ My mother said this as if she was accusing me and I was going to have to answer for it. Something about me must’ve reminded her of my father. ‘I read that women were out there,’ she said.
‘I saw some who were going,’ I said. One of the men seated at the firefighters’ tables looked at my mother. She had raised her voice a little.
‘Well, why do you think men do things?’ my mother said. ‘They either go crazy or it’s a woman. Or it’s both. You don’t know anything. How could you? You haven’t done anything.’ She stared back at the man who was looking at her, and touched the red kerchief around her neck. But when she looked at me she was smiling. ‘It’s nature’s way,’ she said to me. ‘That can be part of your education, to learn what nature’s way is.’
‘All right,’ I said. Two more of the firefighters looked at us, and one of them smiled and cleared his throat. I wished I knew what nature’s way was, because all that was happening in our family did not not seem to be natural or normal.
‘Tell me how you feel about your name,’ my mother said after a minute had passed, and in a quieter voice. ‘Do you like it all right? Joe? It’s not an uncommon name. We didn’t want to weigh you down with a fancy name or a middle name. We liked Joe.’
‘I like it,’ I said. ‘It’s easy for people to remember.’
‘That’s true,’ she said. She glanced back at the night. There were stars in the October sky, and somehow through the white smoke they had become visible. ‘Jeanette,’ she said. ‘I never liked that. It seemed like a waitress’s name.’
‘What one would you rather have,’ I asked.
‘Well,’ my mother said, and drank the last of her beer. Our food was coming now. I could see it in the window to the kitchen, two plates steaming, the top of a woman’s head just visible behind it. ‘Lottie,’ my mother said, and smiled. She pushed her hair up with one hand. ‘There used to be a singer named Lottie. Lottie something. Lottie-da. She was colored, I think. But. How would that be? Lottie?’
‘I don’t like it,’ I said. ‘I like Jeanette.’
‘Well, that’s sweet,’ my mother said and smiled at me. ‘You have to like me the way I am. Not as Lottie, I guess.’
Our food came and we ate it and talked about forest fires, that they were like cities or factories, and went on and on by themselves. That there was something good about them, that they replenished where they burned, and that for humans, my mother said, it was sometimes a good thing to be near a thing so uncontrollable and out of all scale that you felt reduced and knew your position in the world. She understood my father in some ways, she said. He wasn’t the kind to go crazy. It was only a hard time in his life, though it was a hard time in hers too. That was nature’s way, also, she said. People were drawn to things they shouldn’t be. I thought she seemed happy to be there with me and to see the fire, happy to have said all the things we’d said. Then we started home to Great Falls.
On the drive back, the air had become colder as we went farther east of the fire, and the sky was clear and starry except for the glow the city made low on the horizon. My mother stopped in Augusta and bought two more beers for the road and drank as she drove and did not talk to me much. I thought mostly about my father, then, and about what he would be like when he came back. He had been gone since only the night before, but already the life he left didn’t seem like the same life to me, and when I pictured him coming back, I pictured him getting off the back of a truck like the men at the cafe, although he was not smudged with ashes or stiff or tired, but looked clean and younger than when he had left and did not in fact even look like himself, but like someone else. And I realized that I could not exactly remember his face or his features. I could hear the sound of his voice, but that was all. And the only face I could see was the strange young man I did not think I knew.
When we had driven back almost to Great Falls and could see down onto the city at night and could see the white grain elevators that Warren Miller owned lighted beside the river, my mother said, ‘Let’s go in a new way.’ And instead of straight in on Central Avenue, she drove us more toward the north side so that we came down into town through Black Eagle, the way you’d come in if you’d driven down from Fort Benton and the Hi-line, and not from the west.
I didn’t wonder why we’d come this way and did not bother to ask. My mother was a person who did not like doing things always the same way, and would go out of her way to make a drive we took not be dull, or some explanation not the same as it was the last time. ‘Make life intriguing,’ she would say when she turned off some road we knew onto an unknown one, or when she’d buy things in a store, something she had never bought and had no use for. ‘Life’s just small potatoes,’ she’d say; ‘you have to apply yourself.’
We drove down the long hill that ends at the Missouri River, beyond which is the old part of Great Falls, the part where we lived, where there are parks and tree-lined streets set out by the original builders. But two blocks before the river, my mother turned left and drove down a street of frame houses that were set up on the hillside embankment in rows, overlooking the river and the lights of town. I had been on this street before. Farther down was an Italian steakhouse where I had gone with my father once at night to eat dinner with some men from the Wheatland Club. ‘A smoker,’ he had called it, and only men were there. And I had always thought it was a part of town where only Italians lived.
My mother did not drive as far as the restaurant, although I could see it there on the dark street, lighted in a blue light with cars parked in front. When we’d gone two blocks, she slowed and opened the window, then stopped in front of a house that sat up above the street and had a steep concrete driveway and a set of steep steps that ran up beside it to the wooden steps of the house. The house was like the other house beside it, white and tall-fronted with one large window and a front door on one side. A light was burning on the porch, and the draperies in the window were drawn open and an old-fashioned yellow lamp sat on a table. It looked like a house where an old person would live.
My mother sat and looked up at the house for a moment, then rolled her window up.
‘Whose house is that,’ I asked.
‘It’s Warren’s house,’ my mother said, and sighed. ‘It’s Mr Miller’s house.’ She put her hands on top of the steering wheel but just sat looking down the street toward the restaurant.
‘Are we going inside?’
‘No, we’re not,’ she said. ‘No one’s home, anyway. I had something to ask Mr Miller, but it can wait.’
‘Maybe they’re in there,’ I said.
‘They’re not they,’ my mother said. ‘It’s just Mr Miller. He lives there alone. He had a wife but she left him, I guess. And his mother lived there, but she died.’
‘When were you in there?’ I said.
‘I never was,’ my mother said, and she seemed tired. She had driven a long way that afternoon and night, and things had not been easy for her since yesterday. ‘I looked it up in the phone book, that’s all,’ she said. ‘I should’ve just called. But it’ll be okay now. He doesn’t live like a rich man, does he? Just this plain house on a plain street.’