Canada: A Novel Part 3

My mother had shoved over into the driver's seat after my father had parked behind the bank. She'd pushed the seat far forward so her feet would reach. She was waiting with the engine started when he came out the alley with his canvas bag. He got straight into the back seat, crouched under a blanket, and she pulled slowly away so nothing that had gone on in the bank would seem to have anything to do with a white-and-red Chevrolet Bel Air with North Dakota plates, idling out of town toward the west.

She wrote that when she pulled to the corner of Main Street, ready to turn left, she saw nothing she didn't expect to see down the block at the bank. A woman was just walking in. No alarms were going, no sheriffs or state police arriving, or people running out shouting "robbery!" They would get away with it, she thought. She'd soon be looking at a new life that didn't include our father or Great Falls, Montana.

According to their plan, she drove back toward the Montana line, with my father hiding in the back, and onto the b.u.mpy farm track through the barley fields, to the cottonwoods and the stream where they'd stopped less than an hour before. My father got out in the dust and heat, shucked off his jumpsuit and tennis shoes and, in his undershorts, stuffed the money (he already knew there was less than he'd intended to steal) into the s.p.a.ce behind the back seat. He crammed the jumpsuit, shoes, his gun, the cap and the blanket, and the green-and-white North Dakota license plates into the blue bag, along with several dusty rocks, and put it in the stream. The bag didn't sink, only eddied off in a tuft of yellow foam and disappeared. But he believed this was as good as sinking it, since n.o.body would be out there to see it. He then put his jeans back on, his white s.h.i.+rt and boots, reattached his Montana plates. My mother drove them back up to the highway, and turned left in the direction of the border, and they put it all behind them.

In Glendive they stopped in at the Yellowstone Motel. Our father went inside their room, collected the clothing they'd left. He walked up to the motel office, spoke to the room clerk-who was not the clerk who'd checked him in the evening before. When he paid-in cash-he joked about the sky now being full of satellites and soon everybody would know everything everybody did-which later struck the room clerk as a strange thing to say. My father walked back down to the cabin, carried my mother's little suitcase to the Chevrolet, where she was waiting. He got in the driver's seat and drove them away toward Great Falls. Everything had gone according to my mother's simple plan. If they'd entertained conscious thoughts about being caught-and they should've-it's possible those thoughts might've left their minds as they drove home, rendering them relieved and happy, while they thought about Berner and me waiting for them, and for a better life to commence for all of us.

Chapter 18.

Three things I've thought about-having to do with the aftermath of their armed robbery and with our parents becoming criminals headed very soon to jail.

One was that they'd always been very different from each other. My sister and I acknowledged this over the years we were growing up. These stark differences-in personality, appearance, outlook, temperament (I've described them)-made up opposite ends of the continuum that measured out my and Berner's lives. We were both composed of these human traits that made them different-some represented in me, some in Berner-though that didn't make us any more similar. I was optimistic, but not as optimistic as our father. I was cautious, but not as adamant and skeptical as our mother could be. Berner looked like my mother but was taller, even at fifteen-five foot eight. She had a sweet side, like our father, but she guarded it and mostly acted as if it wasn't there, which I'd say was like our mother. We were both reasonably smart like our mother. But Berner was practical, which wasn't true of either of our parents. She was also moody and defeatable, as both of them could be, and at some point she tended to accept defeat and destiny, which I have never done.

But when our parents came back from robbing the North Dakota bank, and we were all once again in our house-before the police detectives came-my sister and I noticed almost immediately how our mother and father seemed less different from each other. They were much more in agreement, much less given to sighing or bickering with each other, or being each other's adversary or opposite-something that had never been true until they left and came back that way. I decided this newfound bond had formed even before they left, on the night they were in such high spirits-as if, as I said, it had been remembered, an old affinity rising again and holding them, so that they were less like ends of a continuum and more just two people who'd once gotten married because they liked each other.

G.o.d knows what could've been going on in their brains in the days immediately after the robbery. Stolen money was somewhere in our house. They must've felt conspicuous, and that they were now in a hostile world (whereas a day before they'd been invisible). Previous life, which they'd grown impatient with for their private reasons, must've seemed bewilderingly and abruptly out of reach-the raft having drifted out too far, the balloon ascended. The past was cruelly ended, the future jeopardized. Though this may also be what joined them: an unexpected mutual awareness of consequence. Neither of them had been richly imbued with that. Lacking an awareness of consequence might've been their greatest flaw. Though each of them had reasons to know that acts had results.

The second subject didn't come into my thinking until I'd read my mother's chronicle-decades after she'd taken her life in prison-when I learned my father wanted me, not her, to be his accomplice. I wanted to know then: Would he have explained to me that he intended to hold up a bank and wanted me to help him? What words would he have chosen to bring this matter up to a fifteen-year-old? Would he have come in my room where I was waking up on Thursday morning and asked to have a private talk and imparted it then? Would he have waited until we were in the car heading east through the Musselsh.e.l.l and brought this outlandish subject up then? Would he have told me just as we were driving into Creekmore? Or would he have never told me, just used me as camouflage, left me sitting in the car behind the bank, waiting for him to reappear, knowing nothing?

And if he had told me, what could I have answered? No? Would no have been possible? (In theory it would've.) Of course, I'd have said yes, or at least would've said nothing and gone with him. I was not rebellious or mouthy like my sister. I loved him and wanted to see things his way. And if I'd become his accomplice, what would've changed between us after that? Everything, most likely. Would I have grown up all in one day? Would my life have been ruined? Would we have been more like brothers than father and son? Would I be a criminal now instead of a school teacher? All possible.

Which begs another question: what would've happened if we'd been caught together-captured and put in jail; or set upon by police like Bonnie and Clyde, shot to death and laid out for pictures? "Man and son commit bank robbery. Both are killed." This is a line of thinking he didn't treat himself to, and a fate my mother saved me from.

And if the two of them hadn't gotten caught, would that have spelled the end of it for them as bank robbers? Which is the third thing I've wondered about. For our mother, definitely yes-as far as you can know such matters. She had her purpose for doing it once-at least by my reasoning: to leave her unsatisfactory life behind. If that purpose had been achieved, there's no doubt she'd have begun her new life (with Berner and me) somewhere else. She was only thirty-four. It's not far-fetched to think of her as a teacher in a small college somewhere-less alienated, probably unmarried, in basic agreement with her lot-her bank robbery left far behind.

For my father, it's much less possible to be sure. He had a taste for bank robbery, or believed he did. If the robbery had worked out, his nature-as I said-was to think it would always work out and could probably be improved on. At least one more time. He also always believed-although proof mounted that he was mistaken-that he didn't seem like the sort of man to rob a bank. This was, of course, his great misunderstanding.

Chapter 19.

When they arrived home, It was after seven on Friday night. They seemed tired and distracted but relieved to be home. I was excited and began to tell them how Berner and I'd pa.s.sed the two days-what had happened, what we'd seen, what we thought about. The Indians had made several more trips past our house. The telephone had rung numerous times but we hadn't answered it. Berner and I had eaten leftover spaghetti and boiled eggs and made toast. We'd played chess, watched The Untouchables, Ernie Kovacs, the news. I'd mowed the lawn and observed the bees working on the zinnias beside the garage. We'd sat on the porch swing at night and watched the sky-glow. I'd heard noises from the State Fair, then going on not far from our house-the announcer's loudspeaker voice at the Wild West Rodeo and the chuck wagon race, the cheering crowd. A calliope. A man's amplified voice laughing.

Our parents had things on their minds and were preoccupied with each other. It was as if they were taking care not to make the other irritated. Our mother took a bath, then went in the kitchen and cooked French toast and sliced ham. Our father liked breakfast for supper and believed it was good for digestion. He went out to the street and drove the car around to the alley in back of the house-a thing he didn't often do, since he was proud of the Bel Air the way he'd been of the demonstrators he'd tried and failed to sell. He also locked it and brought the key inside instead of leaving it in the ignition as usual.

When we sat down at the dinner table, our father announced that the business deal they'd gone away to investigate was something a person would be crazy to get involved in. Oil wells, he said, profoundly-then smiled and shook his head as if it had been a pathetic idea. Our mother had pointed this out, he said. It had been wise to take her. She had a sharp business mind. He said he now intended to throw himself full-time into learning the farm and ranch sales game. It was steady. Opportunity would soon come along by which we could own land of our own. We were staying in Great Falls. Berner and I could plan on school in two weeks. He intended to make Bargamian an offer for our house. It was a "Craftsman house," and they weren't made anymore, he said. It needed painting a new color and new wallpaper, and he wished it had a front "foy-yay" and a fireplace. But it had other elegant touches-the medallion in the living room ceiling being one. He admired the house's symmetry and solid lines. The outside light was nice through the living room windows-which was true-and it was cool in summer. It reminded him of "the dog-trot" he'd grown up in in Alabama. But there'd be no more thought of moving. Which made me relieved, though it may not have affected Berner, since she'd already decided to run away with Rudy Patterson and put everything she knew of life behind her.

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 a.s.sured us we'd be staying in Great Falls, he sat down in the living room, still in his boots and white s.h.i.+rt and jeans, and turned on the TV to Summer Playhouse, and talked to my mother through the door to the kitchen, where she was was.h.i.+ng 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 a.s.sumed 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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 cla.s.ses 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-which 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 circ.u.mstances 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 sungla.s.ses 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 munic.i.p.al 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 pa.s.s 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 s.h.i.+t 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 s.e.x at that point. I only knew what I'd heard.

For a while we stood in the weeds by the river, where gra.s.shoppers and flies flitted and buzzed around the edge of the hissing, s.h.i.+ning 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 gra.s.shopper 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 pa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 b.u.mper. "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 sungla.s.ses, 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 gra.s.s 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 t.u.r.d."

She'd said things like that to me before. Called me a t.u.r.d. 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.

"n.o.body'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 Sat.u.r.day farm report. He had on his regular Sat.u.r.day attire-rubber sandals and Bermudas and a red-flowered Hawaiian s.h.i.+rt that showed his coiled snake tattoo on his forearm. It spelled the name of the Mitch.e.l.l 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 went 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 b.a.l.l.s 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?"

"Yes, sir," I said, though I didn't.

"My friend, whose name was Buddy Inkster, made him quit, of course. He went straight home and told his mother. And do you know what his mother said?" My father blinked at me and tilted his head inquiringly.

"No, sir."

"She said, *Buddy, you tell that ole man to cut that stuff out!'"

My sister began running her bath water. Even with the fan going I was hot in my clothes. I'd begun sweating under my s.h.i.+rt collar. The bathroom door closed and went locked.

"Do you know what his mother was saying?" My father picked up the shoe-polish lid and carefully squeezed it back on with two fingers. It made a soft click. "Now, of course, if that happened, he'd-I mean the old sawbones-he'd be put in jail and people would be out after him with pitchforks and torches. You know?" I didn't know. A car honked outside on the street, its motor revved, then it roared away. My father didn't seem to hear it. "Well, she was saying that Inkster should learn to live with things and go on about his business. Do you understand that?"

"I think so." It was what I'd thought.

"Bad things can just happen to you," my father said. "And you live on through them." He was trying to make his story have an effect on me. He seemed to be saying you can miss important parts of what people do and say, but you still have to rely on yourself to understand them. What I thought he was really telling me, though-not quite using those words-was that something bad might be approaching me, and I needed to figure out my own ways to get through it. He wanted me to be responsible for Berner, too. Which was why he told me and not her, and only proved he didn't know Berner nearly as well as he didn't know me.

"Do you and your sister think about what you should do with your lives?" His eyes looked dry and tired. His fingertips were smudged with polish. He was wiping them off finger by finger on his flannel rag. He seemed to be addressing me from a distance now.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"So. What do you think?" he said. "About the future."

"I want to be a lawyer," I said, for no reason except that a boy in the chess club said his father was one.

"I wish you could hurry up, then," he said and appraised his fingernails after his cleaning job on them. Black was still under their edges. "You have to find ways to make everything make sense." He smiled faintly. "Make a hierarchy. Some things are more important than others. It may not be what you expect." He turned his gaze out the front window onto SW First. Lutherans were mingling under the trees in the park across from their church. The wedding was letting out. People were fanning themselves with their hats and paper fans, and laughing. My mother was just exiting Mildred Remlinger's Ford at the curb. In her green-and-pink plaid wool suit, she looked tiny and unhappy. She didn't say anything back into the car, just closed its door and began walking up toward the front porch. Mildred's car drove away. "Here comes trouble," my father said. I expected him to say I mustn't discuss our conversation with her. He often said that, as if we had significant secrets-which I didn't think we did. But he didn't say that. Which made me understand that our conversation had been agreed to by them, though I hadn't understood what it was really about: them being caught, and what Berner and I would do after.

My father smiled at me his conspirator's smile. He stood up from the table. "She's going to have everything all figured out," he said. "You wait and see. She's a smart cookie. Smarter than I am by a long way." He went to open the door for her. Our conversation ended there. We didn't have another one like it.

Chapter 22.

You hear stories about people who've committed bad crimes. Suddenly they decide to confess it all, turn themselves in to the authorities, get everything off their conscience-the burden, the harm, the shame, the self-hatred. They make a clean breast of things before going off to jail. As if guilt was the worst thing in the world to them.

I'm willing to say now that guilt has less to do with it than you might think. Rather, the intolerable problem is of everything suddenly being so confused: the clear path back to the past being cluttered and unfollowable; how the person once felt being now completely changed from how he feels today. And time itself: how the hours of the day and night advance so oddly-first fast, then hardly pa.s.sing at all. Then the future becoming as confused and impenetrable as the past itself. What a person becomes in such a situation is paralyzed-caught in one long, sustained, intolerable present.

Who wouldn't want to stop that-if he could? Make the present give way to almost any future at all. Who wouldn't admit everything just to gain release from the terrible present? I would. Only a saint wouldn't.

Another black-and-white police car cruised past our house several times that Sat.u.r.day. The uniformed driver seemed to take careful notice of our house. Our father went to the front window several times and looked out. "Okay. I see you," he said more than once. He and our mother had been friendly and talkative to each other the day before. Now, though, they operated around each other in a way I was more used to. Our father seemed to have not enough to do. She, on the other hand, was purposeful. Not much was talked about. I attempted to interest Berner in "the positional concept" and in the "aggressive sacrifice," which I'd been reading about and demonstrated to her on my bed, with my roll-up board. She said she didn't feel good and I couldn't understand because it was about life and wasn't a game.

Since our mother had come home from seeing Miss Remlinger, she'd gotten busy again in the house. She washed a load of clothes in the tub washer and hung them on the pulley line in the backyard-standing on a wood box to reach the clothespin sack. She cleaned the bathtub-which Berner always left dirty-and swept the front porch where the wind had blown grit into the cracks. She washed the dishes that had been left in the sink the night before. Our father went out in the backyard and sat in one of the lawn chairs and stared at the afternoon sky and practiced the eye exercises he'd learned in the Air Force. After a while he came in and brought the card table out of the hall closet and set it up in the living room and got down a jigsaw puzzle and sat in front of it with the pieces spread across the table top. He liked puzzles and believed they asked a special intelligence. He'd also done several paint-by-numbers pictures over the years, which he'd put briefly on display, then placed in the same closet and never looked at again.

He pulled up a dining room chair for anybody who wanted to collaborate on the puzzle, and began getting the pieces spread out and turned over, and studying them and fitting the obvious ones together like tiny islands. He asked Berner if she wanted to work on it, because it would make her feel better. But she said no. It was the puzzle that formed a painting of Niagara Falls, painted by Frederic E. Church. It showed the great, rus.h.i.+ng green water melting over low red rocks and turning white and yellow as it fell into the white-aired chasm. We'd put it together many times, and it naturally made me remember our mother's photograph of her parents and her, who'd been underneath the falls in a boat. It was our father's favorite because it was dramatic. It represented the Hudson River School of painting, the box said, which made no sense to me because the box also said it was the Niagara River-not the Hudson. I always wondered if there wasn't a formula for joining the pieces so you could put the whole puzzle together in an hour or less. Figuring out the picture every time and searching for the right pieces seemed like the hardest way of doing it. Plus, I didn't know why you'd want to do it more than once. It wasn't like chess, which could seem the same every time you played, but the number of different moves you could make was endless.

For a while I stood beside our father and pointed out purple-and-blue sky pieces and the parts that were clearly the river. Berner asked our mother if she could be allowed to leave the house and go for a walk, because the fan was bothering her sinuses, but both of them said she couldn't.

Our mother spent a good period of time again on the telephone in the hall-something my father pretended not to pay attention to. She finally took the phone on the long cord into their bedroom and closed the door. I could make out her buzzing voice underneath the rattle of the fan. "No, we wouldn't be doing this under ordinary circ.u.mstances, but . . . ," I heard her say. And ". . . No reason to think that'll last forever . . ." was something else. These bits of conversation spoken to who I didn't know made our father, sitting in the living room piecing together Niagara Falls, seem strange to me-as if our mother was his mother, too, and had to look after him as well as us.

After a while I went to my room and lay on my bed. Berner came in and closed the door and announced that, in her view, our parents were crazy. She said that after our mother had finished talking on the telephone she'd come out to the kitchen, and she-Berner-had gone and looked in their room as if she could detect who our mother had been talking to. Our mother's suitcase was lying open on her twin bed, articles of her clothes already in it. She went out and asked why the suitcase was there, and our mother said we'd soon be taking a trip. She didn't say to where. Berner asked if our father would be going, and our mother had said he certainly could if he wanted to, but probably he wouldn't. Berner said this conversation made her feel sick to her stomach and want to throw up-though she didn't-and after a while it made her want to run away from home and right then get married to Rudy Patterson. I thought I wasn't going to be invited to go with them on that trip.