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  I had noticed my father hadn’t returned home with the blue bag he’d left with the morning before and didn’t mention losing. He was finicky in the military way about things he owned. When I’d looked again in his sock drawer for his pistol, it was gone again. I decided that on his business trip something must’ve happened that made him not bring his pistol back. I couldn’t imagine what. I also noticed that after we’d eaten supper and he’d assured us we’d be staying in Great Falls, he sat down in the living room, still in his boots and white shirt and jeans, and turned on the TV to Summer Playhouse, and talked to my mother through the door to the kitchen, where she was washing dishes. He told her he really felt at home in Great Falls, but he was sure he’d be happy back in Alabama, too. There was a benefit to being near kinfolks. To which she answered that it was never a bad idea to stay close to where you came from. Many people lived their whole lifetimes fighting that idea. He was very lucky, she said, to be figuring this out when he was still young.

  All of it was a lie, of course—what they were proclaiming, how they were acting toward each other, what they wanted us to believe, how they painted the future. They were embroidering the surface of the acts they’d committed, seeking to dress it up, give good appearance to what they’d hoped would be the result. Events, though, aren’t the same as what you make up. Our parents were running ahead of disaster. But they’d come to a familiar, still place, where everything was where they’d left it—including Berner and me—where it looked the same and under other circumstances still might’ve been the same. They might’ve thought they were the same, able to go forward in their previous ways. Their same old problems were there. Their same desires. That there was calamitous consequence to be dealt with now, events in motion, coming to take them over and stamp their lives as finished, simply hadn’t fully dawned on them. They could still make themselves think, act, talk in the old ways. They’re both forgivable for that, even likable—for being charmed by one last taste of the life they’d tossed away.

  Chapter 20

  On Saturday morning I woke to the sound of my mother speaking on the telephone. She was insisting on something and waved me away when I walked down the hall to the toilet, past where the telephone sat in its nook in the wall. My father didn’t seem to be in the house. The car was gone from where he’d put it in back. A change in the weather had occurred overnight. The house was now cool and breezy, and the front and back doors were left open. Pale clouds you could see through the kitchen window hurried over from the west, and the light had turned a yellow-green. The curtains billowed, and the elms in our yard and in the park across the street sawed back and forth as if rain was coming. Our pile of cast-off clothes still lay on the back porch awaiting the St. Vincent de Paul truck. Inside, the house seemed fresh and almost calm in spite of the breezes. It felt like a morning in which something significant was expected in the afternoon.

  When she left off talking, my mother announced she was walking to the Italian’s on Central, where she bought our groceries. Berner was still asleep. I could go if I wanted to, which made me happy. I didn’t spend enough time with my mother, in my estimation. She spent more time with Berner.

  However, my mother said very little on our walk. At the Italian’s she bought a Tribune—something I’d never seen her do, since she maintained no interest in what went on in the town. On the way, I attempted to introduce some subjects of concern to me. My Schwinn was old and had been bought used in Mississippi and didn’t fit me anymore. A Raleigh was what I’d been thinking about—an English bike, with thin tires, hand brakes, gears, and a basket behind the seat. I wanted to carry my books and chess men to school when I started. I hadn’t been allowed to ride to school before, but I assumed I would be now. I reminded her that I planned to construct a single-box bee hive in the backyard, and expected to do that before spring, when the bees I was ordering from Georgia would arrive. There’d be benefits from that. Pollination of the hollyhocks. Honey—which we could all share—was useful for allergies, which would be good for Berner. Plus, it would be educational, since the bees were very organized and purposeful, and I’d be able to write school reports about what I learned, as I had about the smelting process and the Salk vaccine—which Berner and I’d both had. I reminded her that the State Fair was still going on, and I hoped to visit the bee exhibit. Today was the last day. She told me, however, that my father would have to see about all that—she was busy. She reminded me that she didn’t like fairs. They were dangerous. People who worked there were known to kidnap children—which I thought she was making up. Clothes were on her mind. Berner needed different undergarments. I wasn’t growing up very fast, but Berner was growing up much faster—which I’d noticed and my mother said was natural. I could wear my clothes from last year one more season. I didn’t feel like I was getting any of my important points across.

  When we were in front of our house, the doors to the Lutherans were swung open and activity was going on inside. Under the wind-whipped trees, my mother looked up through the arch of moving limbs and observed that the air had a seam of cold in it now (which I couldn’t feel). She was sorry about it. We’d see some snow on the western peaks soon. Fall would be on us before we knew it.

  When we came back inside, my mother made tea and a baloney sandwich and went out on the front steps in the breezy sunlight and read the newspaper. She had the big Stromberg-Carlson going in the living room, which wasn’t customary. She was on the lookout for word about their robbery, wanting to hear if news had made it as far as Great Falls—though I didn’t know that. Later in the day I looked through the paper to find out the closing hours at the fair. I wouldn’t have noticed anything, and I have no memory of a robbery being described. None of it had happened in my life yet.

  However, I was very aware that the Indians had stopped driving past our house and staring hatefully in at us. The phone had stopped ringing. A black-and-white police car drove by two or three times that morning, and I know my mother saw it. I observed nothing to be wrong. The only thing I was conscious of was a sensation—and I couldn’t have described it—of movement taking place around me. Nothing was visible at the surface of life, and it was the surface of life that I knew about. But children in families have this sensation of movement. It can signify someone is taking care of them, that things are being invisibly looked after, and nothing bad is likely to happen. Or it can mean something else. It’s the sensation you have if you’re brought up right—which Berner and I thought we were.

  By noon, our father hadn’t returned and my mother got dressed to go somewhere—which also never happened on Saturday. She put on the suit she sometimes wore to teach school—a thick green wool outfit with large pale pink plaids—nothing you’d wear in the summer. She put on stockings and black shoes with slightly high heels. Dressed and walking around inside the house, finding her purse, she looked stiff and uncomfortable. Her suit seemed to scratch at her, and her shoes made loud noises on the floor. She’d puffed up her hair in the bathroom mirror, so it looked spongy and made her features small, almost hidden, which she must’ve wanted. When Berner saw her, she said, “I’ve seen it all now,” and went back in her bedroom and closed the door.

  I stood in the living room and asked my mother where she was going. I was still feeling those sensations of things moving around me. The chance of rain had already come and gone, as mostly happened. The day had turned humid and bright and steely hot. My mother told me she was being picked up by her friend Mildred Remlinger—the school nurse where she taught and who she rode with every day when classes were in session, but who she never saw after the summer started. I had never met Mildred, but my mother said Mildred was encountering personal problems she needed to discuss with another woman. She wouldn’t be gone long. Berner and I could eat the rest of the baloney if we got hungry. She’d cook dinner.

  Eventually Mildred’s car drove up in front and the horn honked. My mother went hurrying out, down the steps, and got in the car—a brown four-door Ford—whic
h drove away. I thought the odd sensations I was feeling were being created by my mother.

  After a while Berner came out of her room and we ate the baloney and some cheese. Our father still hadn’t come back. Berner said we should take some of the cheese down to the river and feed the ducks and geese, which was something we did. We had little to do if we weren’t in school or in the house with our parents, watching them and being watched by them. Being a child under those circumstances was mostly waiting—for them to do something, or to be older—which seemed a long way away.

  The river was only three blocks from our house, in the opposite direction from the Italian’s. Berner wore her sunglasses and her white lace gloves to cover her hands and her warts. On the way, she advised me that Rudy Patterson had told her Castro would soon develop an atomic bomb and the first thing he’d do was blow up Florida. That would start a world war none of us would escape from—which I didn’t believe. She said Rudy had also said Mormons wore special garments that protected them from non-Mormons, and that they were forbidden to take them off. She then told me she’d begun climbing out her bedroom window at night and meeting Rudy, who’d often steal his family’s car. They’d drive up on the rimrock by the municipal airport and park where they could see the lights of town and listen to radio stations from Chicago and Texas and smoke cigarettes. This was where Rudy had digressed about Castro and how he was serious about breaking out of Great Falls. He felt older than his age, already had hair on his chest, and could pass for eighteen. What else they did in the car was what I wanted to know. “We kissed. Nothing nasty,” Berner said. “I don’t like his mouth too much, and that little mustache. He doesn’t smell good. He smells like dirt.” Then she showed me a bruise where her turtleneck covered it. “He gave me this,” she said. “I clobbered him for it. Mother’d shit about it.” I knew what it was. “A tongue tattoo,” a boy at school had called it. He’d had one right where Berner’s was. He said it’d hurt to get it. I didn’t understand why you’d do a thing like that. No one had explained to me about sex at that point. I only knew what I’d heard.

  For a while we stood in the weeds by the river, where grasshoppers and flies flitted and buzzed around the edge of the hissing, shining water. Cars were banging over the Central Avenue Bridge not far away. Midday was hot and still. The smelter always left a bitter, metal taste in the air, and the river itself was metal smelling, though it was cool near the surface. The tall buildings in Great Falls—the Milwaukee Road and the Great Northern depots, the Rainbow Hotel, the First National Bank, the Great Falls Drug Company—were across the river and foreign looking. A bald eagle sailed along just above the flat pavement of river toward Squaw Island and the Anaconda stack—five hundred feet tall and impressive to me—then lit in a tree on the far side and instantly became tiny. Whitefish rose for the yellow cheese balls we floated on the current. Mallards swam close and flapped and squabbled over them as they drifted back toward the bank and the reeds. I trapped a warm grasshopper between my two hands and laid it onto the river film. It circled down the stream trying its wings, trying to rise. Then it disappeared. A big Air Force refueling jet rose into the sky from the base. It banked south and went out of sight before its sound could reach us. I liked Great Falls, but it was never a town I cared much about. I imagined climbing onto the Western Star and riding away to some college—Holy Cross or Lehigh—everything in my life after that being on its way.

  Chapter 21

  When we walked back home, sun beat the tops of our heads. A moist, hot wind up from the south stirred the dust on Central Avenue. Tires of passing cars girdered, and the trees were dusty and brittle-leafed. There was no cold seam in the air.

  The Lutherans were inside having a wedding. Doors, front and side, were opened out and two tall silver fans were positioned to create a circulation. Two men in western hats stood in the churchyard in shirt sleeves, holding their jackets and smoking. A muddy red pickup was parked alone at the church’s curb. Tin cans and silverware and a few old boots were strung to its back bumper. “Just Married—Heaven Bound” and “Poor Girl” were scrawled on the side windows in white.

  Berner and I stopped and she considered the open front door through her sunglasses, as if a bride and groom might come out. We’d never been inside a church.

  “Why would you ever get married?” Berner said and looked disgusted. “You pay for what you can get for free.” She carefully spit down between her tennis shoes onto the grass of our front lawn. I’d never thought to ask that question, though I sometimes believed Berner knew what I thought before I thought it. She was growing up quicker than I was. She didn’t like anything she didn’t understand.

  “Rudy’s parents aren’t even married,” she said. “His real mother lives in San Francisco, which is where he’s headed when he busts out of here. I’m thinking about going with him. You can’t tell them or I’ll strangle you.” She grabbed my arm and pinched me so hard my ears hurt, even with her white gloves. She was much stronger than I was. “I mean it,” she said. “You little turd.”

  She’d said things like that to me before. Called me a turd. A molly-hop. A peter. I didn’t like it, but I thought it meant things were still close between us. It made me feel better than I’d been feeling.

  “I wouldn’t say anything,” I said.

  “Nobody’d listen, anyway,” she said and sneered at me. “Mr. Chess Man. That’s who you are.” She went up the steps into the house.

  Our father was sitting at the dining room table, applying Cat’s Paw to his black cowboy boots. I’d seen him do it to his Air Force shoes a hundred times. His wooden polish kit was open on top of the Tribune my mother’d been reading. He’d also been paring his fingernails. The half-moon slivers were scattered on the paper.

  He had taken the globe off my dresser and set it on the table in front of him. The room smelled sweet with the polish. He’d turned on KMON for the Saturday farm report. He had on his regular Saturday attire—rubber sandals and Bermudas and a red-flowered Hawaiian shirt that showed his coiled snake tattoo on his forearm. It spelled the name of the Mitchell he’d dropped bombs out of. Old Viper. He had another one on his shoulder: Air Force wings, which hadn’t been earned by being a pilot—something he’d always been disappointed about.

  He put on a big smile for me. He’d looked glum and concentrated when we came in. He didn’t act like he felt well. He hadn’t shaved, but his eyes were gleaming the way they had when he’d come back from his first business trip.

  Berner kept on walking through the room and didn’t stop. “I got hot,” she said. “I’m going to sit in a cold tub, then feed my fish.” No one had turned on the attic fan, but Berner did when she went down the hall. Air began moving. I heard her door close.

  “I want to talk to you,” my father said, carrying on with his rag and his paste polish. “Take a seat here.”

  I wasn’t used to being completely alone with him, even though I was supposed to spend more time with him and less with my mother. Normally she was close by. He always wanted to engage in a serious discussion when he got me alone. It usually had to do with wanting me to know he loved us, and that he was always working for our welfare, and that he had a personal stake in our individual futures—about which he was never specific. It always made me feel he didn’t know Berner and me very well, because we took those things for granted.

  I sat beside the clutter of rags and blackened toothbrushes and the round Cat’s Paw tin. The globe was turned around to show the United States. “I certainly wish I could take you to the State Fair.” He stared straight at my eyes, as if he was saying something that meant something else. Or as if I was caught in a lie, and he was trying to make me understand the importance of not lying. I didn’t lie at that particular time.

  “Today’s the last day it’s on,” I said. The announcement was in the paper he was cleaning his shoes on. He’d probably seen it, which was why he’d brought it up. “We could still go.”

  He looked out the window as a car wen
t past, then looked at the globe. “I know that,” he said. “I just don’t feel top flight today.”

  Once in Mississippi we’d gone to a traveling county fair that set up its tents not far from where we lived. He and I went one night. I threw rubber balls at rag dolls with red pigtails, but didn’t knock any over. Then I shot a rifle loaded with corks and knocked over some swimming ducks and won a packet of sweet chalky lozenges. My father left me while he went in a tent for a show I wasn’t old enough to see. I stood outside on the sawdust, listening to people’s voices and the music of the rides and the sound of laughter from the fun house. The sky was yellowed by the carnival lights. When my father came out with a crowd of other men, he said that had been an experience, but said nothing else. We rode the Dodge-em cars together and ate taffy, then went home. I’d never been to another fair and hadn’t cared much for that one. Boys in the chess club had said the Montana Fair showcased livestock and poultry and agriculture and was useless. But I was still interested in the bees.

  My father breathed out through his nose as he worked polish into his boot leather. He had a forceful smell, stronger than the Cat’s Paw—an acrid odor that I believed had to do with not feeling good. He sat back, put down his cloth and rubbed his hands over his face as if his hands had water in them, then pushed them back through his hair, which released more of the odor. He squeezed his eyes closed and opened them.

  “You know when I was a little boy in Alabama, I had a friend down the street from us. And one of our neighbors, this old doctor, had his office in his house, and he invited my friend in one day. This old doctor tried some foolishness with my friend that wasn’t right.” My father’s gleamy-dark eyes focused down on the polish tin, then rose to me dramatically. “You understand what I mean?”