Authors: Richard Ford
I was relieved it wasn’t the police. I had a strong feeling, however, they’d soon be back. The older detective had said so. I went to the front window and looked out. Our street and the park were empty in the dappled sunlight. The Lutheran church was locked up. Shade fell across our lawn in a pretty way. In the park, the fat young deaf boy from up the street who I’d seen before was throwing a stick for a black Labrador dog. It ran, picked up the stick, then brought it back and dropped it at the boy’s feet. He petted the dog’s head and said something to it. No police cars were there. Occasionally the boy would turn almost secretly and look at our house.
I walked to the kitchen window and looked out to where our father’s car was. But it was gone. The space it had occupied beside the garage was like a box of air the Chevrolet had been in a moment before, then vanished from. I instantly opened the silverware drawer and expected to find nothing. But there were the two stacks of twenties under the plastic tray, which let me know I wasn’t dreaming and these goings-on were really happening.
I picked up the pieces of the broken dish my mother had dropped earlier and put them in the trash under the sink. They were all large pieces and didn’t require a broom. In a little while Berner came in the kitchen. She seemed—in her elephant pajamas—unfazed, as if being in the house this way was better, and she’d been waiting for this time and intended to make the most of it.
“They pulled his car away. A big wrecker truck came,” she said and looked out the front window. “Nice big ole doggy.” She watched the boy throwing his stick in the park. I wanted to move the money. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. “I don’t think anybody’s coming,” Berner said. She scratched her behind below her pajama-bottom waist, while she stared out at the boy with his dog. Her hair was bushy and disheveled from sleeping on it. “That means we can do whatever we want to.”
“Why?” I said.
Her lips made a mean smile, and she squinted at me and breathed out the way she did when she was acting superior. “I’ll do whatever I want,” she said. “Whatever you do will be what you want.” She pointed her finger at her ear and made a circle, then pointed it at me. “You’re loony,” she said. She often said that.
“What’re you going to do?”
“I don’t know.” She opened the refrigerator door, looked inside and closed it back. “It won’t be nothing. I’ve done nothing enough. Rudy wants to get married.”
“You can’t,” I said. I knew you couldn’t do that. We were fifteen. She’d already told me she didn’t want to get married. She’d said it yesterday.
“Some places they’ll let you. We’ll go to Salt Lake City, Utah. It’s better than here. Though he’s not in the church now.”
I was disgusted to hear this. It made everything about me and everything I thought feel flimsy. Standing in our kitchen in her pajamas, talking about getting married to Rudy, she cast a shadow on me and whatever I thought—as if my fate had to be like hers, and you could tear my plans apart like wet tissue and watch them disappear.
Only, I didn’t feel that way about myself and my plans. I could feel my own outline now. I would be myself no matter what else happened. My heart went calm then, which I thought was a positive sign. If I’d really felt all was lost and my life was over because I was tied to my sister, I don’t know what I would’ve done. Except I’d have had very little chance of going on from that moment.
“I won’t be getting married right off the bat,” Berner said. She turned and peered out the window again. Suddenly she whipped around with a big distorted smile. “Mother told me I have to take care of you.” Tears all at once sprang from her eyes. It’s possible I was starting to cry, too. We both had reasons to. But she cut hers off. “I hate their goddamn guts,” she said.
“You don’t have to run away,” I said. It was an awful feeling we had.
“Yes, I do,” she said. “I . . .” I wanted to put my arms around her. It seemed like the most natural thing to do if I was going to be in control of everything. The telephone started ringing in the hall—loud, jangling miserable rings that destroyed the quiet in the house. And that’s how the moment passed—Berner and me almost holding on to each other, the phone ringing, and nothing else taking notice of us.
W
HAT WAS LEFT OF SUNDAY IS A PART THAT’S
not very clear. I remember everything feeling free inside the house and the house feeling comfortable with just the two of us in it. We ate some food out of the refrigerator—cold spaghetti and an apple. We ate looking out the front window at the park in the late afternoon shade. Cars drove by. One or two slowed and people inside leaned into the windows and looked at Berner and me standing there. One person waved and we both waved back. I didn’t understand what anybody could possibly know about us. It was forward thinking of our mother to discourage us from assimilating, since if anybody—someone from the chess club—had come to gawk at us, I’d have been humiliated. And worse, because I hadn’t done anything personally to feel humiliated about except have parents.
Before it got dark, Berner and I took a walk around the block, against our mother’s instruction that we not leave the house. We did it because we could. No one noticed us. All the neighbors’ houses were silent and shut up looking on Sunday afternoon. The neighborhood seemed nicer than I’d always thought it was.
We came back and sat on the front steps and watched the sky turn purple and the moon come up and a few lights prickle on in our neighbors’ windows. I noticed a paper kite that had been caught high up in the tree limbs in the park. I wondered how you’d get it down. We expected any moment for a car to drive up and strangers to tell us we had to go with them someplace. But no one came.
We didn’t talk much about our parents. We both assumed, as we sat on the steps watching bats flit around the darkening trees in front of the humped moon, and pale stars showed up in the eastern sky, that they’d done what they were accused of doing. It had been too dramatic not to be true. They had gone away overnight—which they’d never done before. The pistol had disappeared. There was the money, and the Indians calling us and driving by. I may even have briefly wanted it to be true—whether I could’ve said so or not—as if by robbing a bank our father had supplied himself with something he’d been lacking. What it meant about our mother was a more difficult question. It could also be true that Berner and I, for that afternoon, may have lost the part of our minds that makes you fully aware of what’s happening to you when it’s happening. Why else would we have become calm, and taken a walk? Why else would I have thought my father was more substantial because he’d robbed a bank and broken our lives apart? It doesn’t make much sense. Neither one of us thought to ask
why
had they robbed a bank,
why
had that ever seemed like a good idea. To us, it had just become a fact of life.
WHEN WE FINALLY WENT IN
, it was full dark. Mosquitoes were in the air. Moths fluttered at the windows, and the cicadas were humming. Sunday night traffic on Central had all but stopped. We locked the doors and pulled the curtains and turned off the porch light. No matter what Berner thought, I believed someone would come and get us—the police or the juvenile officials, and that the police would search the house. We decided we’d let no one in—as if we were the man and the wife who lived there.
I went to the kitchen and got the money and told Berner where it’d come from. I didn’t know if she’d seen it the day before, but she said she hadn’t. She said she thought it was money our parents had stolen and we should hide it or else put it down the toilet. We counted it out at the dining room table and it was five hundred dollars. Berner then changed her mind and said we should divide it and each decide what to do with our half. We’d be accused anyway, because we had it, so we should keep it. She said there might even be more hidden in the house, and we should find it before the police came. We went in our parents’ bedroom and looked in our mother’s purse, inside their drawers and under their mattresses, in their clothes closet, inside their shoes, and up on the closet shelves where there were older shoes and sweaters and my father’s Air Force hat. We found no more packets of money, though our mother had thirty dollars folded in her change purse. We also found what she had called her “Jewish book,” which I’d seen but didn’t know anything about. It was small and had what she’d said was Hebrew writing in it and was in her bottom dresser drawer with some baby pictures of us and a View-Master with a Taj Mahal card and her eyeglass prescriptions and some artists’ pencils and her poems and her journal, which we still wouldn’t have dared to read. The book had a name I couldn’t pronounce when she’d said it and began with an “H.” I’d never asked more about it. It occurred to me there was no place in a house a person could hide anything where no one would find it, and that the police were professional at finding things. Our house had no cellar, and again I was unwilling to go in the attic on account of it being hot and the home of snakes and hornets. We couldn’t guess where more money was, and we eventually stopped looking.
In our father’s monogrammed “P” leather jewelry case, however—which smelled like him—I found his high school ring, bulky and gold with a square blue stone and engraved with a tiny “D” for Demopolis, and two tiny rearing horses on each side, for the Mustangs. He’d said Demopolis meant “where the people lived” in Greek, and he liked it because it signified everyone there was equal. I put the ring on—it only fit my thumb—and decided I’d wear it, since now I wasn’t likely to have one of my own. His gold captain’s bars were in there and his wristwatch, and his blue-and-white Parsons name tag, and his metal dog tags and a paper box containing his war ribbons. Farther back in the closet was his heavy Air Force uniform, cleaned and pressed and ready to put on, though without the ribbons and bars. I put the jacket on. It was much too large for me and too hot to wear in the house. I’d had it on other times, and it was important feeling and I liked it. No money was in the pockets. When our father had put it on in the mornings and left the house for the base, he’d always been in a good humor. That had only been a few months ago. That time was gone now, no matter how not long ago it was.
Berner took out a pair of our mother’s dark wool trousers she only wore in the winter, and held these up for display in front of the door mirror as if they were funny. They were too small for her to put on, though she tried. So she found a pair of flat black cloth shoes our mother had sent away for and squeezed her large bony foot inside and clopped around their bedroom with them half on, heels slapping, saying our mother lacked a sense of style, which wasn’t true. She had a style of her own. We must’ve known our parents wouldn’t be back. We wouldn’t have put on their clothes and laughed and imitated them if life had a chance to be normal again.
Just after nine o’clock, a knock sounded at the front door. Of course, we thought it was the police and turned off the light in the bedroom. I crawled down the hall on my hands and knees—in my father’s tunic—then crawled around to the kitchen. No one could see me through the front door glass. I got to the kitchen window and looked over the sill into the dark front yard, where the moon hung above the canopy of leaves and limbs, and the empty basketball backboard across the street cast shadows in the street lights. Rudy Patterson was standing on the front walk, tall and long armed and looking up at the sky, smoking a cigarette and holding a paper sack, waiting to be let in. He was talking to someone I couldn’t see. I thought he might be singing. The porch light wasn’t turned on.
I knew he was coming to take Berner away with him—that it was all planned. I’d be left in the house alone to face whatever happened and fend for myself. They were on their way to Salt Lake or San Francisco. That’s what she’d decided. I didn’t know what to do, but I didn’t intend to let him in. I wanted the door locked and to stay in the house with Berner. I didn’t think it would be better for her to run away. The same was true for me.
She had come to the hallway door and looked around the corner, as if she didn’t care who saw her. “Who’s that?” she said.
I said, “It’s Rudy. He can’t come in. Mother said no one could come in.”
“I forgot about him,” she said and moved out of the hallway. “I told him to come. He can come in. Don’t be stupid. He and I are in love.” She went straight to the front door and let Rudy Patterson into our house.
NO MATTER HOW
I’d felt when I saw Rudy standing out on the moonlit walk, when he came in our house he—at least for a time—changed everything. He was not the sort of boy you’d expect to have a good effect. But when he came in the door, time stopped and our lives stopped with it. Everything outside disappeared, as if the future and the past had come to their ends at once and it was just the three of us.
Rudy was immediately loud when he got inside. He walked around our living room, smoking his cigarette and inspecting things. The same things I’d taken a tally of earlier that day. The piano. The pictures on the wall. My father’s discharge. My mother’s suitcase and my pillowcase with my possessions inside. He seemed older and bigger than the last time I saw him, when we’d shot baskets in the park and Berner sat and watched us. He was only sixteen and had wild, curly red hair and long, red-freckled arms and big hands with hair already on the backs, and his little mustache that Berner didn’t like. He had veins in his biceps below his T-shirt sleeves, and scratched, scuffed-up knuckles, as if he’d been crawling on rocks or possibly fighting. He wore dirty tight black dungarees with a wide belt and a brass buckle and a little scabbard knife on the side and thick black ankle boots—the kind men wore at the air base or where his father worked at the refinery. He bore little resemblance to the boy my sister had been friendly with in the summer and who I’d liked because he was nice to me. Something unusual had happened to him since the last time I saw him. I had no idea what.