‘Do you know what happens,’ he said, ‘when the very thing you wanted least to happen happens to you?’ We were sitting in the glow of the little grocery store. Traffic was moving behind us along Central Avenue, people going home from work, people with things they liked to do on their minds, things they looked forward to.
‘No,’ I said. I was thinking about throwing the javelin at that moment, a high arching throw into clear air, coming down like an arrow, and of my father throwing it when he was my age.
‘Nothing at all does,’ he said, and he was quiet for several seconds. He raised his knees and held his beer can with both hands. ‘We should probably go on a crime spree. Rob this store or something. Bring everything down on top of us.’
‘I don’t want to do that,’ I said.
‘I’m probably a fool,’ my father said, and shook his beer can until the beer fizzed softly inside. ‘It’s just hard to see my opportunities right this minute.’ He didn’t say anything else for a while. ‘Do you love your dad?’ he said in a normal voice, after some time had passed.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Do you think I’ll take good care of you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so.’
‘I will,’ he said.
My father shut the car door and sat a moment looking out the windshield at the grocery, where people were inside moving back and forth behind the plate-glass windows. ‘Choices don’t always feel exactly like choices,’ he said. He started the car then, and he put his hand on my hand just like you would on a girl’s. ‘Don’t be worried about things,’ he said. ‘I feel calm now.’
‘I’m not worried,’ I said. And I wasn’t, because I thought things would be fine. And even though I was wrong, it is still not so bad a way to set your mind toward the unknown just when you are coming into the face of it.
Chapter 2
After that night in early September things began to move more quickly in our life and to change. Our life at home changed. The life my mother and father lived changed. The world, for as little as I’d thought about it or planned on it, changed. When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what’s in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again — which is a loss. But to shield yourself — as I didn’t do — seems to be an even greater error, since what’s lost is the truth of your parents’ life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in.
On the night my father came home from losing his job at the Wheatland Club, he told my mother about it straight out and they both acted as if it was a kind of joke. My mother did not get mad or seem upset or ask him why he had gotten fired. They both laughed about it. When we ate supper my mother sat at the table and seemed to be thinking. She said she could not get a job substituting until the term ended, but she would go to the school board and put her name in. She said other people would come to my father for work when it was known he was free, and that this was an opportunity in disguise — the reason we had come here — and that Montanans did not know gold when they saw it. She smiled at him when she said that. She said I could get a job, and I said I would. She said maybe she should become a banker, though she would need to finish college for that. And she laughed. Finally she said, ‘You can do other things, Jerry. Maybe you’ve played enough golf for this lifetime.’
After dinner, my father went into the living room and listened to the news from a station we could get from Salt Lake after dark, and went to sleep on the couch still wearing his golf clothes. Late in the night they went into their room and closed the door. I heard their voices, talking. I heard my mother laugh again. And then my father laughed and said, loudly, still laughing, ‘Don’t threaten me. I can’t be threatened.’ And later on my mother said, ‘You’ve just had your feelings hurt, Jerry, is all.’ After a while I heard the bathtub running with water, and I knew my father was sitting in the bathroom talking to my mother while she took her bath, which was a thing he liked doing. And later I heard their door close and their light click off and the house become locked in silence.
And then for a time after that my father did not seem to take an interest in working. In a few days the Wheatland Club called — a man who was not Clarence Snow said someone had made a mistake. I talked to the man, who gave me the message to give to my father, but my father did not call back. The air base called him, but again he did not accept. I know he did not sleep well. I could hear doors close at night and glasses tapping together. Some mornings I would look out my bedroom window and he would be in the backyard in the chill air practicing with a driver, hitting a plastic ball from one property line to the next, walking in his long easy gait as if nothing was bothering him. Other days he would take me on long drives after school, to Highwood and to Belt and Geraldine, which are the towns east of Great Falls, and let me drive the car on the wheat prairie roads where I could be no danger to anyone. And once we drove across the river to Fort Benton and sat in the car and watched golfers playing on the tiny course there above the town.
Eventually, my father began to leave the house in the morning like a man going to a job. And although we did not know where he went, my mother said she thought he went downtown, and that he had left jobs before and that it was always scary for a while, but that finally he would stand up to things and go back and be happy. My father began to wear different kinds of clothes, khaki pants and flannel shirts, regular clothes I saw people wearing, and he did not talk about golf any more. He talked some about the fires, which still burned late in September in the canyons above Allen Creek and Castle Reef — names I knew about from the Tribune. He talked in a more clipped way then. He told me the smoke from such fires went around the world in five days and that the amount of timber lost there would’ve built fifty thousand homes the size of ours. One Friday he and I went to the boxing matches at the City Auditorium and watched boys from Havre fight boys from Glasgow, and afterward in the street outside we could each see the night glow of the fires, pale in the clouds just as it had been in the summer. And my father said, ‘It could rain up in the canyons now, but the fire wouldn’t go out. It would smolder then start again.’ He blinked as the boxing crowd shoved around us. ‘But here we are,’ he said, and smiled, ‘safe in Great Falls.’
It was during this time that my mother began to look for a job. She left an application at the school board. She worked two days at a dress shop, then quit. ‘I’m lacking in powerful and influential friends,’ she said to me as if it was a joke. Though it was true that we did not know anyone in Great Falls. My mother knew the people at the grocery store and the druggist’s, and my father had known people at the Wheatland Club. But none of them ever came to our house. I think we might’ve gone someplace new earlier in their life, just picked up and moved away. But no one mentioned that. There was a sense that we were all waiting for something. Out of doors, the trees were through with turning yellow and leaves were dropping onto the cars parked at the curb. It was my first autumn in Montana, and it seemed to me that in our neighborhood the trees looked like an eastern state would and not at all the way I’d thought Montana would be. No trees is what I’d expected, only open prairie, the land and sky joining almost out of sight.
‘I could get a job teaching swimming,’ my mother said to me on a morning when my father left early and I was looking through the house for my school books. She was standing drinking coffee, looking out the front window, dressed in her yellow bathrobe. ‘A lady at the Red Cross said I could teach privately if I’d teach a class, too.’ She smiled at me and crossed her arms. ‘I’m still a lifesaver.’