Authors: Richard Ford
He turned to reinsert his knife into its little sheath without wiping the meat grease off. “I’ve had my fill-up now,” he said. He’d had two pieces and a half. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, then stubbed his cigarette on the sole of his boot, licked the stub and put it in his shirt pocket. He coughed to cover up a belch. “I could go right to sleep,” he said. He covered his mouth again. “I gotta go get some money, though.”
“Where’re you going to get that?” Berner said. She hadn’t said much. We’d been watching Rudy like he was an animal in a cage.
“If I told you, you’d be my accomplices, and you’d go to jail.” He stood up and walked back into the living room, patting his belly as if he’d eaten a three-course meal instead of a piece of frozen steak. He put a fresh cigarette to his lips and lit it from a paper matchbook out of the same pocket. He seemed to be looking around for something. He reminded me of my father when he came back from his business trip. Berner and I were still sitting at the table, watching him like spectators. Probably Rudy had a decent heart and had suffered because his parents didn’t love him. He wouldn’t have hurt anybody. But he seemed undependable and erratic. His mouth, when he wasn’t smiling, sank in toward his little teeth and made him look deceitful, like somebody we shouldn’t know, even if we weren’t his accomplices. Rudy was a person I could imagine being a ward of the state, being imprisoned in some empty, windswept landscape where there’d be barbed wire and terrible things would happen to him, and escape would be impossible. I still had on my father’s class ring. Two rearing gold mustangs. I wished it could be magic and make my father appear and take control of things that were happening to Berner and me. Of course, he was the cause of all of it.
“Do you want to stay here tonight, or not?” Berner said in a brazen voice—which was an outlandish thing. Not a thing you could say.
“That’s not a good idea,” I said.
“I don’t think it is either.” Rudy was still inspecting things in the living room, not giving Berner’s invitation any credit. He was for sure looking for something he could sell at some pawn shop out by the base. But there wasn’t anything in our house to sell. My father’s tunic. The Glenn Miller records. The metronome, which he wouldn’t have recognized. He could’ve been looking for the money we had. Only he wouldn’t have known about it. “Somebody might come looking for me. It wouldn’t be good if I was here.” He frowned at me as if we agreed, and put his thumbs under his belt.
“You’re here now,” Berner said, irritably. “What’s the difference?”
“The difference is nobody’s come.” He was again studying my father’s Air Force discharge, framed beside President Roosevelt—which the policeman had also done. If he wanted them, he could take them. I just wanted him to leave before somebody did come.
“My old man hates Roosevelt,” Rudy said. He pronounced it “Roo” to rhyme with “zoo.” He looked around at me as if he wanted my opinion. “He sold the country down a muddy river, he thinks. His wife’s a Commie and feels sorry for everybody, especially niggers.” I hadn’t heard that word spoken much. A boy at school whose father was a doctor said it. Our father had never said it. He didn’t hate people, and neither did we.
“Are you staying here or are you going?” Berner said sharply. She stood up at the table and picked up Rudy’s plate.
“I’m on the night shift tonight,” he said, as if he wanted to be casual about things. I thought he might take down the picture of President Roosevelt and carry it away. He walked over to the table at the end of the couch, picked up his paper sack of remaining beers and walked to the front door. A car passed our house and sounded its horn. It was after eleven. Somebody shouted out in the warm summer night. “Yoo-hoo-hoo. Jailbirds. You jailbirds. Jailbirds. Yoo-hoo-hoo.” The car honked again. Someone laughed. Then the car accelerated and noisily whooshed away.
“We’ll never see you again. Is that it?” Berner frowned, holding Rudy’s plate. “That’d be all right with me.”
“I’ll be back and you know it,” Rudy said. He wanted to seem like a grown man to us. Like I said, his red hair and his cigarettes and his scuffed-up arms and knuckles worked in his favor. “You and me’ll get out of here for good. I’m a man of my word.”
“You’re not a man,” Berner said. “You’re sixteen.”
“I won’t be next week. You won’t have to wait long to know all about that.” Rudy lost his big smile. He stood holding the glass doorknob, as if he was apologizing, and we were passing judgment on him. Which we were. “You just have to be patient.” He pulled the door back.
Berner said, “This is where it’s got me so far.” She turned and walked into the kitchen.
“Don’t let anybody else in here, Dell,” Rudy said, ignoring her. “They’ll come get you if they can.”
“My mother already told us that,” I said.
Rudy removed his cigarette from his mouth, cleared his throat, blew smoke into the room, took a quick, almost surprised look around at whatever he’d decided not to take. Then he stepped out the door and closed it hard. Berner had already begun washing dishes in the sink. I expected this would be the last I’d see of Rudy Patterson, and I was glad. He hadn’t helped anything. And although there was no way I could know it, that is what turned out to be true.
T
HAT NIGHT, SUNDAY NIGHT, BERNER AND I
straightened the house, washed the dishes, emptied the butts and peanut hulls and beer bottles, and the mud from when the police had been there—all that had made the house feel crappy. We put away the Niagara Falls puzzle and the card table and placed my globe back on my dresser, hung our father’s Air Force jacket back in the closet and put our mother’s suitcase and Berner’s back where they belonged, and my pillowcase in my room.
We didn’t talk very much. Berner concluded she’d never see Rudy again, that people like him luckily exited your life—at least in her experience (which was nothing). He didn’t love her, and she wasn’t in love with him for that matter. I said I liked him well enough, but she’d be better off not running away and staying here until our parents came back. I was trying to assert myself as the man in the house, taking charge of things no one could control.
MY ROOM
had grown chilly with the sun gone from the roof. I turned off the attic fan and lay in the broken moonlight and concentrated on my parents. I wanted to make my heart be calm. It’d been beating hard all that day, as if I’d been running around and around a track.
Our parents were changing again in my thinking, sliding together, not as if they’d found their love again, but as if they were only one person and had relinquished their distinguishing details. This wasn’t true; they were whoever they were. And if the day had been shocking and confusing to me, it had been much worse for them. Still, feeling this way—that they were less distinct in my mind—was a relief. As I said, I may have lost part of my mind for that day. Losing your mind is probably never what you think it’ll be.
What we were supposed to do the next morning, or all the next day, I wasn’t sure. If someone came, we would just stay in the house. If Mildred Remlinger came, she’d tell us what we were expected to do. Several times when I was in bed, the telephone rang. Berner went out once to answer it, in case it was Rudy calling. But I could tell no one was there when she said hello. Then she didn’t answer it again.
At some point I went nearly to sleep—my heart still strangely pounding. Then I was aware Berner had come in the room and gotten into my bed—the second time in one week. As I said, we hadn’t slept in the same bed since we’d lived in Great Falls. But I’d missed her when our parents had moved her to her own room, and I was happy she’d come back. I’d have never climbed in bed with her. She’d have thrown a tantrum or made fun of me. But I was very glad not to be alone.
She’d been crying and smelled like her tears and like cigarettes. She wasn’t wearing any clothes, which was a shock. Her skin was cold, and she squeezed close to me in my pajamas. Crying had made her colder. She took my hand and held it against her belly. “Warm me up,” she said. “I can’t sleep.” She snuffed her nose and sighed. “I drank that whiskey. It keeps you up.” She pushed close to me. I smelled soap on her, and Vicks and toothpaste and smoke in her hair. She pushed her bumpy face into my neck, her cheeks were damp and cool, and her nose was stoppered up.
“I was asleep,” I lied.
“Go back, then,” she said. “I won’t bother you.” A train whistle sounded in the night. My arms were folded. She gripped my hand.
“I’m going to run away by myself,” she whispered, close to my ear. She cleared her throat and swallowed and sucked back her nose. “I’m crazy,” she said. “I don’t care what I do.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. I lay beside her, breathing. Then she kissed me, suddenly, hard on my neck, underneath my ear and shoved in closer to me. I didn’t mind her kissing me. It made me feel safe. She let go of my hand and moved hers, which was rough and bony. “I wanted to do it tonight with Rudy,” she said. “But I’ll do it with you.”
“All right,” I said. I wanted to. I didn’t care.
“It won’t last that long. We did it already, in his car. You should know about it, anyway.”
“I don’t know about it at all,” I said.
“Then you’re perfect. It won’t even matter. You’ll forget about it.”
“All right,” I said.
“I promise you,” she whispered. “It’s not even important.”
And that’s enough to tell. It doesn’t bear repeating. It meant little, what we did, except to us, and only for the time. Later in the night Berner woke and sat up and looked at me and said (because I was awake), “You’re not Rudy.”
“No,” I said. “I’m Dell.”
“Well, then,” she said. “I just wanted to say good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” I said. “Where are you going?”
She smiled at me—my sister—then she went to sleep again with my arms around her in case she was cold or scared.
I
T WAS STRANGE TO WAKE UP IN THE HOUSE WITH OUR
parents not in it. We’d waked up without them there not that long before—when they’d gone away to rob the bank—but this time, Monday, everything was different. They were in jail—we assumed they were—and we had no idea what would happen to the two of us.
I slept all the way to eight—until my room was steamy from sunlight and I woke up sweaty. The hall fan was going again. Berner wasn’t in my bed. The sheets beside me were cold as if she hadn’t been there for some time. Through the walls traffic hummed on Central. An airplane took off up the hill at the airport. It occurred to me Berner had left, and I would have to make my way through the day alone.
She was in the kitchen, however, when I got dressed. She had re-cooked the steak from last night and eaten part of it and left a square on a plate for me—which I ate with cold milk. The house still smelled like beer and cigarettes. I thought we should take the garbage out before it got hotter.
Berner had dressed in her Bermuda shorts, which she hardly ever wore and that showed her hairless freckled legs and long feet. She had on tennis shoes and a sailor blouse and had taken a shower. She’d brushed her hair back and held it with a red rubber band. There was no talking about what had happened in the night. She didn’t seem unhappy about it, and neither was I. We weren’t the same people we had been, and that was good in my view.
“We have to go to see them,” Berner said, washing her plate and mine in the sink, staring out the window at the side yard—the badminton net, the neighbor’s house, one pole of the clothesline. “If we don’t, they’ll get taken someplace, and we’ll never see them.” With her wet fingers she picked up a newspaper off the counter and dropped it on the table where I sat. “Somebody left us a nice present inside the porch screen.”
It was the day’s
Tribune
, folded to display pictures of our parents—two separate ones, side by side—taken in jail. They were each holding a white card that said “Cascade County Jail,” with a number underneath it. Our father’s black hair was disheveled, though he was smiling. Our mother’s mouth was tense and turned down in a way I’d never seen her look. She was wearing her glasses and her eyes were close together and were opened wide and staring out, as if she was gazing at a terrible scene. The headline read “N.D. Bank Robbers.” Whoever left the paper had straight-pinned a handwritten note to the top of the page that said: “Thought you’d like to see this. I’m sure you’re very proud.”
I was surprised anybody would leave this for us. It made my hands tremble when I saw it. Our parents had robbed the Agricultural National Bank in Creekmore, North Dakota, last Friday morning, the story said. A gun had been involved. The sum of $2,500 was taken. Our parents had fled to Great Falls and been arrested in a rental house on the west side of town. Our father, whose name was put in quotation marks (“Beverly,” as was our mother’s, “Neeva”), was described as an “Alabama native” who was discharged from the Air Force and had been watched for some time by the Great Falls police on suspicion of committing crimes that involved Indians from the Rocky Boy reservation. Our mother was described as being from “Washington State” and as teaching school in Fort Shaw. She had no prior arrests, but an investigation of her citizenship was under way. They were to be extradited to North Dakota in the coming week. No mention was made of any children.
Berner was letting water drain out of the sink. “They’re just liars. Like everybody else,” she said.
I couldn’t remember anything they’d lied about. Then I thought of the gun. It was a terrible surprise to read this in the newspaper—almost as bad as to know about it. “Extradited” was a word I knew from TV. It meant they wouldn’t come back. The packet of money was probably what they’d stolen, and we shouldn’t keep it.
“If we go to the jail, they’ll grab us,” Berner said matter-of-factly. She walked to the front window that looked out on the street and the park. Morning light was sharp and bright on the top of a car parked in front of the Lutherans. Fluffy clouds ran along above the trees against the perfect sky. “We still have to go, of course. Even if they are liars.”