Authors: Richard Ford
He took a package of cigarettes out of his jacket—Export ‘A’s, the same ones Florence smoked. He lit one and blew smoke against the cold plate glass, where it swam against the snowy background. He was feeling a need to say something, to be personable and to act as if he was interested in me and my question. Though what could’ve been more unnatural to him? A fifteen-year-old boy who was completely unknown to him. Possibly it seemed good to him I was American. Possibly he saw himself in me, the way Florence said. But what could it have mattered to a man like him?
The way Remlinger smoked his cigarette—holding it between the fingers of his left hand in a V, his eyes averted—made him look older, his skin less smooth. His profile was more angular than when he looked straight at me. His neck with the birthmark was thinner. Some vacancy had taken over for a moment. The corners of his thin lips flickered upward beside the V. “You’re the young son of bank robbers and desperadoes,” he said and blew smoke onto the glass away from me. “You don’t want your life just to be about that, and only that, isn’t that right?”
“Yes, sir.” Berner had said that no one ever believed her about our parents, and she was going to quit believing it herself.
“You want your
self
to be about other things.” He was speaking very precisely again. “
More
, ideally.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
He licked his lips and raised his chin as if something had just changed again in his thinking. “Do you ever read biographies?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. Though I’d only read the thumbnail ones in the
World Book
. Einstein. Gandhi. Madame Curie. I’d made school reports about them. But he meant real biographies, the thick ones on his book shelf I wasn’t supposed to know about. Napoleon. U. S. Grant. Marcus Aurelius. I wanted to read those, and someday felt I would.
“My thought is,” Remlinger said, “people who hold a lot inside and have to hold a lot inside should be interested in what great generals do. They always understand what fate’s about.” He seemed pleased and spoke more confidently. “They know plans work out very, very rarely, and failure’s the rule. They know what it is to be unimaginably bored. And they know all about death.” He stared at me inquisitively across the table. The space knitted between his eyebrows. He seemed to want this to be the answer to my question about why he was here. He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express. He wasn’t going to answer my question now.
Remlinger took his wallet out of his jacket and laid a paper bill on the table top to pay. The bill was red, nothing like American money. He was suddenly eager to go—to get back in the Buick and drive at great speeds over the prairie, hitting whatever he wanted to hit.
“I don’t like America much,” he said, standing. “We don’t hear a lot about it, up here.” Two people at the counter looked around at him, tall and blond and handsome and peculiar. One of the policemen also turned and looked. Remlinger didn’t notice. “It’s strange to be so close to it,” he said. “I think that all the time.” He meant to America. “A hundred twenty miles. Does it seem very different to you? Up here?”
“No, sir,” I said. “It seems the same.” It did.
“Well. That’s good then,” he said. “You’ve adapted already. I suppose that’s why I’m where I am. I’ve adapted. Though I’d love to travel abroad someday. To Italy. I love maps. Do you like maps?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Well. It’s not as if there’s a race we have to win, is there?”
“No, sir,” I said.
He didn’t say more than that. The idea that he would travel abroad seemed strange. As unusual and out of place as he was, he also seemed to belong there. It was still my childish view that people belonged where I found them. We left the café. I was never there again.
I
CAN’T MAKE WHAT FOLLOWS NEXT SEEM REASONABLE
or logical, based on what anyone would believe they knew about the world. However, as Arthur Remlinger said, I was the son of bank robbers and desperadoes, which was his way of reminding me that no matter the evidence of your life, or who you believe you are, or what you’re willing to take credit for or draw your vital strength and pride from—anything at all can follow anything at all.
IT WAS THE CASE
that Charley Quarters soon related to me significant assertions about Arthur Remlinger—about crimes he’d committed and a desperate flight from authority, about his tendency to violent moods and volatile dispositions that served little notice. Charley was dismissive of him, and felt no loyalty to conceal this information. Remlinger was not a man who prized loyalties, he said, or respected much in the world. Knowing the truth about such a person could never be a bad thing for what it might save you from.
It was also the case (I couldn’t have formed these words then and knew them only in some uncreated part of myself) that Arthur Remlinger looked on me as he did on everyone—from an inner existence that was only his and bore almost no resemblance to mine. Mine simply wasn’t a fact to him. Whereas his existence was the most immediate and paid for—its primary quality being that it embodied an absence, one he was aware of and badly wanted to fill. (It was obvious from the moment you came near him.) He encountered it over and over, to the point that it was, in his view, the central problem of being himself; and was, in mine, what made him compelling and so inconsistent—this unsuccessful striving to fill an absence. What he wanted (I concluded this later, since he wanted something or I wouldn’t have been there) was proof—from me or by me—that he’d succeeded in filling his absence. He wanted confirmation he’d done it and deserved not to be punished more for the grave errors he’d committed. When he ignored me those weeks I was in Partreau, trying not to believe I’d be alone forever, it was because he wasn’t sure I’d be dependable to give him what he wanted—not until I’d accommodated myself to my own bad circumstances, put my own tragedies enough behind me to entertain his. He needed me to be his “special son”—though only for a moment, since he knew what bad things were coming to him. He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they’re substantial, that they’re not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.
I was only fifteen then, and used to believing what people told me—sometimes more than I believed what was in my heart. If I’d been older, if I’d been seventeen and just that much more experienced, if I’d had more than uncreated ideas about the world, I might’ve known that the feelings I was experiencing—being drawn to Remlinger, allowing my feelings for my parents to go below the waves of my thinking—that these feelings signified bad things coming to me as well. But I was too young and too far outside the boundaries of the little I knew. I’d felt something like these sensations at the time my parents planned and committed their robbery—when we’d cleaned the house, and Berner and I had waited for them to come back, and later when I’d been ready to get on the train to Seattle and forget about high school. But I didn’t connect those feelings to my feelings now, or recognize they meant the same thing. I lacked skills for that kind of connecting. Though why do we ever let ourselves be drawn to people no one else would see as good or wholesome, but only as dangerous and unpredictable? I’ve thought over and over, in the years since then, how purely unfortunate it was to have become enmeshed with Arthur Remlinger so soon after my parents were put in prison. Still, it’s something any person needs to do—to recognize the feeling when something around you isn’t good, when there are threats—to remember that you’ve felt this sensation before, and that it means you’re out on some empty expanse all by yourself and you’re exposed, and caution needs to be exerted.
WHAT I DID
, of course, instead of exhibiting caution, was let myself be “taken up” by Arthur Remlinger, and by Florence La Blanc, as if being taken up by them was the most natural and logical consequence of my mother sending me away after the calamity of her own bad fortune. It went on for only a brief time. But I entered into it thoroughly, as a child can—since, again, part of me was still a child.
I
N THE EARLY DAYS OF OCTOBER, AFTER I WAS SETTLED
into my tiny closet room in the Leonard, I saw a great deal of Arthur Remlinger—as if I’d suddenly become his favorite boy, and he couldn’t have enough of me. I still performed the duties I’d been assigned, and enjoyed them. I scouted geese with Charley in the evenings, rose at four and transported the Sports out to the dark wheat fields, situated the decoys, made loose talk with the shooters, then took up my position to glass the falling geese.
However, when I wasn’t occupied with these duties, Arthur Remlinger made a claim for my hours. I was happy about it, since I hadn’t connected the feelings I mentioned before and had no caution (or not enough), and had decided I liked him and found him interesting—a man I felt I could emulate at a later time. As Florence had said, he was educated, had good manners, dressed well, was experienced, was an American, and seemed to like me. And as I said, I’d decided my mother had intended I’d be taken up by strangers and had approved of it as a way to start my life in a new direction.
Remlinger instructed me to use his first name and not to call him “sir”—which was new to me. He took me to the chop-suey restaurant and taught me to use chopsticks and drink tea. I caught glimpses of the owner’s daughter, but I’d stopped thinking about her or harboring hopes we’d be friends. Other nights I would eat supper in the Leonard dining room with Arthur and Florence. She brought flowers for the table and offered me forward to the other customers as if I was their relation and we had a history together and Arthur was responsible for me. In this sense he did treat me like his son, as if I actually lived in Fort Royal, in the Leonard, and it was an entirely understandable situation that a boy would do that.
On these occasions, Arthur, dressed in one or another of his handsome tweed suits and polished shoes and a bright tie, spoke more about his highly developed skills as an observer, which he believed suited him for many other walks of life than operating a backwater hotel. He said I should enlarge my own capacities so my future would be assured. He awkwardly produced a small paper notebook with blue-lined pages, which he seemed to have intended for me, and instructed me to keep my thoughts and observations in it, but never to show what I wrote to anyone. If I read it back on a regular basis, he said, I could find out how much was transpiring in the world—“a great deal”—when it might’ve seemed nothing was. In that way, I could appraise and improve the ongoing course of my life. He did this himself, he said.
During this time, he took me on several more driving expeditions—once to Swift Current to pay a debt, another all the way to Medicine Hat to retrieve Florence when her car had broken down. Another time he drove me bouncing out across the prairie back roads to a clay bluff above the Saskatchewan River, where a hand-pull ferry inched across the stream below. With the heater running in the Buick we watched down the river to where thousands of geese were floating and gabbling on the glistening water and had spread out across the curving banks. White gulls circled in the turbulent air above them. Remlinger’s blond hair was always barbered and neatly combed and sheened and impressive, his glasses dangled around his neck, and he smelled of bay rum. In the car, he smoked and talked about Harvard and what a perfect existence it had been. (I had only a dim idea about Harvard and did not even know it was in Boston.) He talked more about his wish for foreign travel—he was also interested in Ireland and Germany—and sometimes about the four-thousand-mile border to America, which he called “the frontier to the States.” The frontier, he said, was not a natural or logical dividing point, and didn’t exist in nature, and should be done away with. Instead it was made to represent erroneous distinctions preserved for venal interests. He was a vigilant proponent of all things in life being natural and inherent. He quoted Rousseau—that God makes all things good, but man had meddled with them and made them evil. He detested what he called “tyrannical government” and churches and all political parties—particularly the Democrats, which had been my father’s favorite (and mine) due to his affection for President Roosevelt, who Remlinger called “the man in the chair,” or “the crippled man,” and who, he believed, had seduced the country and betrayed it to the Jews and the unions. His blue eyes sparkled when he talked on these subjects. They seemed to make him angry, then angrier. He particularly detested the labor unions, which he called “the false messiahs.” These were the issues he’d written his articles about in the pamphlets and magazines stored in the cardboard boxes in my shack:
The Deciding Factor
,
The Free Thinkers
. I mostly didn’t talk when I was with him, only listened, since he asked little or nothing about me—my sister’s name once, where I’d been born, again if I planned to attend college, and how I’d accommodated to my new billet. I didn’t talk about my parents or say that my mother was Jewish. I suppose in the States today, he would be called a radical or a Libertarian, and would be more familiar than he was then on the prairies of Saskatchewan.
However, none of this talking seemed to make him happy, as if talking and talking was also a burden he was bearing. He talked on and on in his nasal voice with his mouth moving animatedly, his eyes blinking and primarily turned away from me, as if I wasn’t there. Sometimes he was enthusiastic, other times angry—which I felt was his way of accommodating himself to the absence he contained. All of which is to say I sympathized with him (in spite of his bad feelings for Jews) and liked the time I spent with him, though I rarely took part or understood much. He was exotic, as exotic as the place where we were. I had never known anyone who was that, just as I’d never been accustomed to think anyone was interesting.