Part 9 (1/2)

”You'll see. It'll be a surprise. It'll be wonderful.” Our mother smiled through the bars and nodded. ”I'm saving you two. Mildred's coming. I'm surprised she hasn't already.”

A young man in a tan suit and carrying a briefcase entered through the two sets of barred doors, let in by another deputy. He came in our direction but stopped at our father's cell. One of my father's hands extended out, and the man grabbed it and shook it. My father laughed and said, ”O-kay, o-kay.” Seeing this man talking to my father made me realize my parents had less to do with each other now. This may have been why my mother felt light. Something had left her. A weight.

”Don't you think you children should go home?” our mother said through the bars. A beam of late-morning sunlight penetrated down into her cell. She let go of our hands and smiled. We hadn't been there two minutes. We hadn't said anything that made any difference. I don't know what we expected.

”Don't you love us?” Berner said, fighting her tears. I looked at Berner and took her hand. She seemed desperate about everything.

”Of course I do,” our mother said. ”That oughtn't worry you. You can rely on that.” She reached one small hand up to touch Berner's face, but Berner didn't move closer. Our mother left her hand there in the air for a moment.

”Are you going to commit suicide?” I said. The red sign was right there. I couldn't ignore it. I'd never said that word before saying it to my mother.

”Of course not.” She shook her head. She looked up at the windows behind us. This was a lie. She did do it in the North Dakota State Penitentiary and probably had already made mention of it in the jail that day. ”I told you,” she said. ”I had some weak feelings before.”

The man in the tan suit, who'd been speaking to our father, said, ”Well, all right. You just sit tight here. I'll have a word with your better half now.” His briefcase snapped shut. He'd been exhibiting some papers and having our father sign them.

”She's got a federal case against me.” My father's voice echoed down the line of cells.

”I'll bet she does. A lot of people do.” The young man laughed and began walking toward us, his boots. .h.i.tting sharp knocks on the concrete.

The deputy stepped close to Berner and me from behind and said, ”This is your parents' lawyer now, kids. We better let him get a word with your mom in private. Come back and see them later. I'll let you in.”

Berner looked at the man approaching and instantly stopped crying. Our mother smiled at the two of us. Tears were in her eyes. I saw that.

”I've decided I'm going to write something.” She nodded at me as if this was news I'd like.

”What is it?” I asked. The deputy put his hand on my shoulder. He was pulling me away.

”I'm not sure what it'll be yet,” she said. ”It'll be a tragic-comedy, whatever it is. You'll have to tell me what you think. You're a smart boy.”

”Did you rob a bank?” Berner said. Our mother didn't acknowledge this. The deputy moved Berner and me away from her cell so she could have her words with the lawyer. She wouldn't be there much longer. I never saw her again, though I didn't know I wouldn't at the time. I would've said more than I did say if I'd known that. I was sorry Berner asked her about the bank, since it had embarra.s.sed her.

On our way out, we again pa.s.sed the cell where our father was. He was lying on his busted cot in his sock feet, holding a sheaf of papers, reading. We must've crossed his light because he turned, half sat up and gaped at us. ”Okay?” he said and flapped the papers toward us. ”Did you get to see your mother?” The deputy kept us moving along.

I said, ”Yes, sir,” as we pa.s.sed his cell door.

”That's good then. I know it made her happy,” he said. ”Did you tell her you loved her?”

I hadn't said that, but I should've.

”We did,” Berner said.

”There you go,” he said.

That was all we had time to say. I've thought many times, since I never saw him again either, that it was better than saying what was true.

Chapter 38.

It's a good measure of how insignificant we were, and of the kind of place Great Falls was, that no one came to see about us, or to get us and transport us to someplace safe. No juvenile authorities. No police. No guardians to take responsibility for our welfare. No one ever searched the house while I was there. And when no one does that-notices you-then people and things quickly get forgotten and drift away. Which is what we did. My father was wrong about many things; but about Great Falls he wasn't. People there didn't want to know us. They were willing to let us disappear if we would.

Berner and I walked home that Monday by a different route. We felt different now-possibly we each felt freer in our own way. We walked up to Central past the post office and down toward the river, along by the bars and p.a.w.n shops, a bowling alley, the Rexall, and the hobby shop where I'd bought my chess men and my bee magazines. The street was bustling and noisy with traffic. But, again, I didn't feel anyone staring at us. School hadn't started. We weren't out of place. A boy and his sister walking back across the bridge in the sunny breeze, the river sweet and rank on a late morning in August-no one would think: These are those kids whose parents went to jail. They need to be looked after and protected.

We stopped at the railing in the middle of the bridge and watched pelicans glide and soar above the river's current. Swans floated at the near bank where a skim of yellow dust rocked on the surface. We watched two people paddle a canoe downstream toward the smelter stack and the Fifteenth Street Bridge. On the walk Berner had worn her sungla.s.ses and been silent-no talk about our mother and father. At the railing, with the Missouri sliding beneath us, her hair rose and fell in the puff of dry breeze, her hands gripping the iron barrier, as if the bridge might become a train and pull away. She seemed young, too young to run away and be on her own. We were fifteen. But our ages really didn't matter. These were the true facts we were facing, and age doesn't figure into that.

It's odd, though, what makes you think about the truth. It's so rarely involved in the events of your life. I quit thinking about the truth for a time then. Its finer points seemed impossible to find among the facts. If there was a hidden design, living almost never shed light on it. Much easier to think about chess-the true character of the men always staying the way they were intended, a higher power moving everything around. I wondered, for just that moment, if we-Berner and I-were like that: small, fixed figures being ordered around by forces greater than ourselves. I decided we weren't. Whether we liked it or even knew it, we were accountable only to ourselves now, not to some greater design. If our characters were truly fixed, they would have to be revealed later.

It's been my habit of mind, over these years, to understand that every situation in which human beings are involved can be turned on its head. Everything someone a.s.sures me to be true might not be. Every pillar of belief the world rests on may or may not be about to explode. Most things don't stay the way they are very long. Knowing this, however, has not made me cynical. Cynical means believing that good isn't possible; and I know for a fact that good is. I simply take nothing for granted and try to be ready for the change that's soon to come.

And by then I was well on my way to knowing how to subordinate one thing to another-a lesson the game of chess teaches you, and does so almost immediately. The events that made all the difference to our parents' lives were becoming secondary to the events carrying me onward from that August day. Learning this unsimple fact has been what this telling has been about up to now-that and seeing our parents more clearly. I believe that's why I felt freed when Berner and I stood on the bridge that day, why my heart was beating hard with exhilaration. That may have been the elusive truth and why I let my father's ring drop into the river and didn't afterward think much about it.

Best to leave us on the bridge that morning, better than to think of me at home, watching from the porch as Berner not long after, walked away down our shady street and out of my life, toward wherever hers would take her. To concentrate on Berner leaving would make all this seem to be about loss-which isn't how I think about it to this very day. I think of it as being about progress, and the future, which aren't always easy to see when you're so close to both of them.

Chapter 39.

What happened was, Mildred Remlingler drove up to our house in her battered old brown Ford, came straight up the walk, up the steps and knocked on the front door, behind which I was waiting alone. She came right inside and told me to pack my bag-which, of course, I didn't have. I had only the pillowcase still containing my few possessions. She asked where my sister Berner was. I told her she'd left the day before. Mildred looked around the living room and said this would have to be Berner's choice now, wherever she was, because we didn't have time to go and look for her. Juvenile officials representing the State of Montana would be coming there soon, looking for Berner and me to take us into custody. It was a miracle, she said, they hadn't come already.

Then with me in the car seat beside her, Mildred drove us out of Great Falls that late morning of August 30, 1960, and straight north up the 87 highway in the direction our father had taken Berner and me not so long before, when we saw the Indian houses and the trailer where the beef was killed, and where he may have gained a first inkling he and our mother were headed for trouble.

Mildred didn't much speak at first, as Great Falls settled into the landscape behind us. She must've felt I understood exactly what was happening to me, or else that there was no way to explain it, and we should be quiet and I should cause no one any trouble.

Up on the benchland north and west of the Highwoods, it was nothing but hot yellow wheat and gra.s.shoppers and snakes crossing the highway and the high blue sky, and the Bear's Paw Mountains out ahead, blue and hazy but with bright snow on their peaks. Havre, Montana, was the town farther north. Our father had delivered someone a new Dodge there earlier in the summer, and ridden the Intermountain back to Great Falls. He'd described it as a ”desolate place, down in a big hole. The back of beyond,” where, he said, he'd encountered the flags.h.i.+p of the Polish navy-which was another of his corny jokes. I couldn't imagine why Mildred would be driving us there. On the map Havre was nearly as far north as you could go in Montana, and as far north in the whole country. Canada was just above it. But I was still acting on the trust that adults often do strange things that in the end are revealed as right, after which someone takes care of you. It's a crazy idea and should've seemed crazy to me then, given all that had happened in our family. But I felt I was doing what our mother had planned for me, and for Berner, too. Given my character, that was all I needed to think.

In Havre-which did lie at the bottom of a long hill, with the Great Northern yards, a narrow brown river, and a line of rimrock running along the northern side of the highway-Mildred looked at me across the car seat and told me I was too thin and peaked and was possibly anemic, and I should eat something because I might not run into food the rest of that day. Mildred was a large square-hipped, authoritative woman, with short black curly hair, snapping small dark eyes, red lipstick, a fleshy neck, and powder on her face that masked a bad complexion, though not very well. She and her car both smelled like cigarettes and chewing gum, and her ashtray was full of lipstick b.u.t.ts and matches and spearmint wrappers, though she hadn't smoked while we were driving. My mother had said Mildred had been afflicted with marriage problems and now lived alone. It was hard for me to see how a man would marry her (though I'd sometimes felt that way about our mother). She was large and wasn't pretty at all, and was bossy. Mildred wore a green silky dress with little red triangles printed on it and large red beads, and stiff hosiery with heavy black shoes, and seemed uncomfortable dressed that way. In the window behind her on a wire hanger were her white nurse's costume and cap, which seemed a much more natural thing for her to wear.

In Havre, we drove down the hill to First-which was the main street-and found a sandwich shop across from a bank and the GN depot. We sat at the counter inside, and I ate cold meat loaf and a soft roll with b.u.t.ter and a pickle and lemonade, and felt better. Mildred smoked while I ate and watched me and cleared her throat a lot and talked about having grown up on a beet farm in Michigan and her parents being Seventh Day-ers, and her brother going to Harvard (which I'd heard of), and about how she'd run away with an Air Force boy and ”landed” in Montana. The boy eventually transferred, and she'd stayed on in Great Falls, studied nursing, and married another time before figuring out it wasn't for her-which was when she'd taken Remlinger back as her name. She said she was forty-three, though I'd thought she was sixty or more. At a certain point she turned on her stool and pinched my earlobe and asked if I thought I had a fever or was coming down with something. I didn't, although I felt anxious about where we were going. She said I should go to sleep in the back seat after lunch, and this was what let me know we weren't just going to Havre that day but were traveling farther on.

From Havre, we drove north, across a wooden railroad viaduct over the tracks and the muddy river and along a narrow highway that angled up the rimrock grade high enough to let me look back to the town, low and dismal and bleak in the baking sunlight. I was farther north than I'd ever been and felt barren and isolated, becoming unreachable. Wherever Berner was, I thought, was better than this. But I couldn't make myself ask anything because I realized the answer might've been something I wouldn't like, after which I wouldn't know what to say or do about my life, and would've had to face the fact that I'd made a mistake staying and not going with my sister (although she hadn't asked me).

The land north of Havre was the same as we'd been driving through: dry, unchanging cropland-a sea of golden wheat melting up into the hot unblemished blue sky crossed only by electrical wires. There were very few houses or buildings to signify people lived up there or needed electricity. Low green hills lay far out ahead in the s.h.i.+mmering distance. It was improbable we were going there, since I speculated those hills would be in Canada, which was all that lay ahead of us from my memory of the globe in my room.

Mildred again didn't talk much-just drove. She did smoke one cigarette, but didn't like it and tossed it out the vent. Buzzards hung in the sky, curving and motionless. I believed that if a person were to be lost where we were, buzzards would be the only way you'd be found, but you wouldn't survive.

At a certain point, Mildred took in a deep breath and let it out as if she'd decided something she'd been keeping silent about. She licked her lips and pinched at her nose and cleared her dry throat again.