‘He’s a nice man,’ my mother said, sitting and looking at me when I had shut the door. ‘Doesn’t he seem nice to you?’
‘He does all right.’
‘He can swim very nicely. You’d be surprised — for a big man. He fought in two wars but never learned to swim. Isn’t that odd? You’re not supposed to be able to do that.’ She looked up at the ceiling as if she was thinking about it. ‘I said I could explain everything, didn’t I? But I can’t.’
I looked out the front window at the Oldsmobile, which was parked where it had been. Warren Miller was sitting in the driver’s seat looking at our house. I lifted my hand and waved at him. But he couldn’t see me. He sat there and looked for a time longer, then he started the car and drove away.
At five o’clock my mother came into my room where I was setting out a problem for my geometry class in school. She had taken a nap after Warren Miller had left, and then taken a bath and talked on the phone. When she came in my room she was dressed in a way that was new to me. She had on blue jeans and a white western shirt and some blue-colored cowboy boots I had known her to have but had never seen her wear. She had a red kerchief around her neck, tied in a knot.
‘Do you like this particular get-up?’ she said, and looked down at the toes of her boots.
‘It looks nice,’ I said.
‘Thank you very much.’ She looked at herself in the mirror over my chest of drawers, across the room. ‘I used to dress like this all the time in eastern Washington,’ she said. ‘In the last century.’ She took hold of the doorknob and turned it gently as she stood there. ‘I used to stand behind the bull chutes at the rodeos and hope some cowboy would approve of me. It made my father very mad. He wanted me to go to college, which is where I did go. And where I want you to go, incidentally.’
‘I want to go,’ I said. I had given some thought to that, already, but I hadn’t thought about a profession yet. I hoped she wouldn’t ask me about that again for a while.
‘Southern Cal’s very good,’ my mother said. She looked out my window, stooping a little as if she wanted to see out toward the west. ‘That’s where I want you to go. Or Harvard. They’re both good schools.’
‘I’d go there,’ I said. I didn’t know where either of these schools was located or why they were good. I’d only heard their names before.
‘I’ve never taken you to the rodeos, I guess,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ She was leaning against the door to my room, looking at me lying on the bed with my books and papers. She was thinking about something that had nothing to do with me, I thought. Maybe she was thinking about my father. ‘Western boys are supposed to go to rodeos. However. I used to race barrels in Briscoe. I certainly did do that. Against other girls. And I wore this get-up. I did it for the sole and simple reason of attracting attention to myself. They used to call us chute beauties. Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that an impressive thing to know about your mother? That she was a chute beauty?’
‘Dad told me about that,’ I said. ‘He likes it.’
‘Did he? Does he? That’s good. It’s probably nice to know your parents were once not your parents. It seems merciful to me at this moment.’
‘I knew that, too,’ I said.
‘Well, good for you,’ my mother said. She walked around my bed and stood looking out the window, across our sunny yard toward the river and the oil refinery, and farther away toward the hazy sky behind which was the fire my father was fighting. ‘Would you like to take a drive?’ she said, putting her fingers on the glass as though she wanted to push it. ‘I’d like to see the fire. I think you can drive right to where it is. I read that in the paper. You can consider it the beginning of your higher education.’
‘I’d like to see it,’ I said, and closed my geometry book.
‘Maybe we’ll see something astounding that you’ll always remember,’ my mother said, her fingers still on the window glass. ‘That certainly doesn’t happen every day. At least not at my age it doesn’t. Although maybe at your age it does.’
‘How old are you,’ I asked because I realized I did not know how old she or my father was.
‘Thirty-seven,’ my mother said, and looked at me sharply. ‘Does that seem like the wrong age? Would you like it better if I said fifty? Would that make you feel better?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Thirty-seven’s all right.’
‘Don’t you feel protected enough?’
‘I haven’t thought about that, I guess,’ I said.
‘I won’t be this age forever,’ she said, ‘so don’t start. It’d just confuse you.’ She smiled and shook her head. I thought she was going to laugh, but she didn’t laugh. She just walked out of the room and off into her own bedroom to get ready to go.
We drove in our family Plymouth from Great Falls, west along the Sun River and Route 200, out through the towns of Vaughn and Simms and Fort Shaw and Sun River itself, towns on the bottom edge of the wheat land beyond which were the large mountains. The light that evening was clear autumn light, and everything — the stubble, the witch grass edges, the cottonwood flats below the Fairfield bench — was gold and dry, the color of the sun. Ducks were in the river eddies, and now and then I could see a farmer cutting silage rows through his corn stand. It seemed to me an odd time for a fire to go on. Though out ahead of us, beyond the town of Augusta where the mountains commenced, smoke rose like a screen that drifted northward up the front to Canada, thick and white at the bottom but thinner and drifting above, so that as my mother drove us closer and the peaks became hidden by smoke, it came to seem that there were no mountains, and where the dense smoke began the plains and even the world itself came to an end.
‘Do you know what they call trees in a forest fire,’ my mother asked as she drove through Augusta, where there were only a few buildings — a hotel and some red bar signs, a service station — and a few people on the sidewalk.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Fuel. Trees are fuel. A fox fleeing from a flaming fuel-fed forest fire. Did you ever hear that?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘It was just a funny joke when I was in college,’ she said. ‘Do you know what they call the trees that’re left up when the fire goes by?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘The standing dead,’ my mother said. ‘Don’t they have an interesting terminology for things? My father told me all about it. He felt it was broadening.’
‘What happens to the animals,’ I asked.
‘Oh, they adjust, though the little ones have a hard time. They get confused. Everything happens before they know it. I used to cry about it, but my father said it didn’t help anything. He was right.’
We drove through Augusta and out onto a dirt road that crossed a creek bottom, then went up into the white smoke. It was going nearer to dark then, and the sun was whitish behind the smoke, and north and south of us the evening sky was red and purple.
The fire was out ahead, though we couldn’t see flames yet. Along the way, a few cars were stopped on the roadside and people were standing in the grass or sitting on their car hoods, watching with binoculars or taking pictures. Some had out-of-state tags, and some people were holding flashlights. A few of the cars that had started back had their headlights on.
‘It’s a sickening smell,’ my mother said, and cleared her throat. I didn’t know if she knew where we were going. She was just driving into the smoke. ‘People get drawn to it. They don’t want it to be over.’
‘Why?’ I said, watching up onto the hillside. As the creek bottom grew narrower, I could see small individual yellow fires and longer lines of fire in the dark with barely distinguishable human figures moving in the trees.
‘Oh, I guess.’ My mother seemed annoyed. ‘I guess they think something worse is happening someplace else, so they’re better off with a tragedy they already know. It’s not a generous thought.’