Wildlife (19 page)

‘This is a misunderstanding up here, is what I’ve been
told,’ the fireman said to my father when he was close enough. He looked at my father once and then looked past him at the damaged house where the fronts of most of the boards had been burned black. He did not look at me. He was a tall man, in his sixties. He had on a heavy black asbestos coat and rubber boots, and no hat on. I had seen him before, but I did not remember where.

‘I guess it could’ve been,’ my father said, calmly.

‘It’s your lucky day today,’ the fireman said. He looked at my father again quickly. He was just standing there in front of us, talking. ‘This man who lives here stood up for you. I wouldn’t have myself. I know what you did, and I know what it’s about.’

‘Okay,’ my father said. The fireman looked away again. I knew he hated the thought of both of us, and that it embarrassed him and embarrassed my father, too.

‘You ought to get killed for doing a thing like this,’ the fireman said. ‘I’d kill you if I caught you.’

‘You don’t need to say that. It’s right,’ my father said.

‘Your son’s seen plenty now.’ The fireman looked at me for the first time. He stepped toward me and put his big hand on my shoulder. ‘He won’t forget
you
,’ he said to my father, then he squeezed my shoulder very hard.

‘No, he won’t,’ my father said.

The fireman suddenly laughed out loud, ‘Hah,’ and shook his head. It was a strange thing to do. I almost felt myself smile, though I didn’t want to. And I didn’t. ‘You can’t choose who your old man is,’ he said to me. He was smiling, his hand still on my shoulder, as if we knew a joke together. ‘Mine was a son-of-a-bitch. A soapstone son-of-a-bitch.’

‘That’s too bad,’ my father said.

‘Come down to the fire station next week, son,’ the fireman said to me. ‘I’ll show you how things work.’ He looked at my father again. ‘Your wife’s probably worried about you, bud,’ he said. ‘Take your son home where he belongs.’

‘All right,’ my father said. ‘That’s a good idea.’

‘Your old man ought to be in jail, son,’ the fireman said, ‘but he’s not.’ Then he walked away, back across the yard and down the street to where his red car was and where the younger fireman sat in the driver’s seat waiting. They turned around in the street–just for that moment turning their flashing light on, then switching it off–and drove away.

Across the street a woman stood at her front door watching the two of us–my father and me. She said something to someone who was behind her, someone out of sight inside the house. I could only see her head turn and her lips move, but I couldn’t hear any words.

‘People think they live in eternity, don’t they?’ my father said. Something about the woman across the street made him say that. I don’t know what it was. ‘Everything just goes on forever. Nothing’s final.’ He stood up then. And he seemed stiff, as though he’d been hurt, though he hadn’t been. He stood up straighter, looking out over the houses across the street toward town. A light went off in the house across the street. ‘Wouldn’t that be gratifying,’ he said.

‘I guess so,’ I said. And I stood up, too.

‘This won’t stay important forever, Joe,’ my father said. ‘You’ll forget most of it. I won’t, but you will. I wouldn’t even blame you if you hated me, right now.’

‘I don’t,’ I said. And I didn’t hate him. Not at all. I could not see him very clearly then, but he was my father. Nothing had changed as far as that was concerned. I loved him in spite of it all.

‘You can get carried away with how things were once, and not how you need to make them better,’ my father said. ‘Don’t do that.’ He began to walk in a stiff gait to our car. It was parked where it had been the whole time, on the street in front of Warren Miller’s house. ‘That’s my one piece of good advice to you,’ he said. I heard him take a deep breath and let it out. Far off on another street I heard a siren begin
again, and I thought there must be another fire going. And I started after my father, across the yard where it was not snowing anymore. I knew he was not even thinking about me at that moment, but about some other problem I did not figure in. Though I wondered where we would go next, and where I would spend the night, and what would happen to me tomorrow and the day after that. I must’ve believed that I lived in eternity myself then, that I had no final answers and none were being asked of me. And, in fact, even while I walked away from Warren Miller’s house that night in the cold October air, everything that had just happened was beginning already to fade from my thinking, just as my father said it would. I felt calm and I began to believe that things would not turn out so badly after all. At least I thought they probably would not turn out that way for me.

There are several letters my mother wrote me in the time after that–1960 and ’61. In one she said, ‘Try not to think of your life as being different from other boys’ lives, Joe. That would be a help.’ In another she said, ‘You may think that I am the unconventional one in this, but your father is very unconventional. I am not very much.’ And in another she said, ‘I am wondering if my own parents ever saw the world as I do now. We are always looking for absolutes and not finding them. You get an itch for the real thing, and you are not one yourself. Love, at least, seems very permanent to me.’

This was at a time, I believe, when she was living in Portland, Oregon, and was hoping to find a job. Her letters had ‘The Davenport Hotel’ letterhead on them, although for some reason I did not think she was staying there. I did
not know very much about her at all during that time and actually thought of her as lost to us, forever.

It is possible, and I have thought this over the years since then, that my father must’ve felt that all forward motion in his life had come to a stop that night at Warren Miller’s house, and that Warren was right–that my father wished Warren would come out and shoot him right there. And that was why he didn’t run away. When things in your life turn against you and do it all at once, as it happened to my father, there must be a strong desire to end it for yourself, to give life back and let other, stronger people–people like Warren Miller–carry it on to wherever it will go. Or at least there is a desire to become a smaller part of something larger in life, something that will take charge of you as though you were a child. My mother may have felt the same way about things.

I wondered, in the days that followed, when my mother was moving to the Helen Apartments and then out of there in a hurry, and out of town, if I would ever see the world as
I
had seen it before then, when I did not even know I saw it. Or if you just got used to parting with things, and because you were young you parted with them faster; or if in fact none of that thinking was important at all, and things stayed mostly the same in spite of small changes, so that when you faced the worst and went past it what you found there was nothing. Nothing has its own badness, but it does not last forever. And what there is to learn from almost any human experience is that your own interests do not usually come first where other people are concerned–even the people who love you–and that is all right. It can be lived with.

The fire my father had left home to fight did not die out easily, but lasted a long time–not the way anyone would think, that a fire is just a thing that can be put out. It did not threaten towns, but it smoldered all winter, and then in the spring it blew up again in a smaller way and smoke we could
feel in our eyes was in the air, though my father did not go out to fight it.

In the spring when I was back in school, I tried to throw the javelin, but I was no good at it and did not throw it far. Not far enough. So I quit. My father said that he and I would start to golf again when the weather improved, and in time we did, and in general I felt that my life
was
like other boys’ lives. I did not have friends. I had met a girl I liked but I did not know what to do where she was concerned, did not know a place to go with her, and didn’t have a car to take her anywhere. In truth, I did not have a life except for the life at home with my father. But that did not seem unusual to me then, or even now.

In early March, Warren Miller died. I read about it in the newspaper. The story said a ‘lengthy illness’ was the cause and did not go on further, except that he died at home. I realized he must’ve thought he was sick and dying when he knew my mother. And I wondered if she had known that, or if she had ever seen him again after that night in our house. I decided that she had–maybe in Portland, where she was, or some other town. I tried to imagine what they talked about and decided it was only what all of us already knew. I think she loved him. She certainly said she did, and I think she loved my father too. There is an old saying that when you have two you really have none. And that is what I finally thought about my mother, wherever she was, in whatever city, doing whatever she was doing alone. She had none, and I was sorry for her for that to be so.

My father did not seem unhappy to me. I do not think he heard from my mother, even though I received letters at home. I think he believed she was not making a new start in life but was continuing something onward, and that he should do the same thing. He found a job selling insurance for a while in the winter, and when that did not go well enough he took a job at a sporting goods store in the middle of town and sold golf clubs and tennis rackets and baseball
mitts. For a time in the spring he had two wire cages behind our house, cages he’d built himself, and kept a rabbit and a pheasant and a small speckled partridge he actually found in the street. And life went on for us on a different scale from how it had gone on. On a smaller human scale. There is no doubting that. But it went on. We survived it.

And then at the end of March, in 1961, just as it was beginning to be spring, my mother came back from wherever she had been. In a while she and my father found a way to settle the difficulties that had been between them. And though they may both have felt that something had died between them, something they may not even have been aware of until it was gone and disappeared from their lives forever, they must’ve felt–both of them–that there was something of themselves, something important, that could not live at all in any other way but by their being together, much as they had been before. I do not know exactly what that something was. But that is how our life resumed after then, for the little time that I was at home. And for many years after that. They lived together–that was their life–and alone. Though God knows there is still much to it that I myself, their only son, cannot fully claim to understand.

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