Wildlife Read Free Page A

doesn’t have to have a reason.’ He slid the white shoes under the chair and stood up. ‘Wait in here,’ he said. And I knew he was mad, but did not want me to know he was. He liked to make you believe everything was fine and for everybody to be happy if they could be. ‘Is that okay?’ he said.
    ‘It’s okay,’ I said.
    ‘Think about some pretty girls while I’m gone,’ he said, and smiled at me.
    Then he walked, almost strolling, out of the little pro shop and up toward the clubhouse, leaving me by myself with the racks of silver golf clubs and new leather bags and shoes and boxes of balls–all the other tools of my father’s trade, still and silent around me like treasures.
    When my father came back in twenty minutes he was walking faster than when he’d left. He had a piece of yellow paper stuck up in his shirt pocket, and his face looked tight. I was sitting on the chair Clarence Snow had sat on. My father picked up his white shoes off the green carpet, put them under his arm, then walked to the cash register and began taking money out of the trays.
    ‘We should go,’ he said in a soft voice. He was putting money in his pants pocket.
    ‘Did he fire you,’ I asked.
    ‘Yes he did.’ He stood still for a moment behind the open cash register as if the words sounded strange to him, or had other meanings. He looked like a boy my own age doing something he shouldn’t be doing and trying to do it casually. Though I thought maybe Clarence Snow had told him to clean out the cash register before he left and all that money was his to keep. ‘Too much of a good living, I guess,’ he said. Then he said, ‘Look around here, Joe. See if you see anything you want.’ He looked around at the clubs and the leather golf bags and shoes, the sweaters and clothes in glass cases. All things that cost a lot of money, things my father liked. ‘Just take it,’ he said. ‘It’s yours.’
    ‘I don’t want anything,’ I said.
    My father looked at me from behind the cash register. ‘You don’t want anything? All this expensive stuff?’
    ‘No,’ I said.
    ‘You’ve got good character, that’s your problem. Not that it’s much of a problem.’ He closed the cash register drawer. ‘Bad luck’s got a sour taste, doesn’t it?’
    ‘Yes sir,’ I said.
    ‘Do you want to know what he said to me?’ My father leaned on the glass countertop with his palms down. He smiled at me, as if he thought it was funny.
    ‘What?’ I said.
    ‘He said he didn’t require an answer from me, but he thought I was stealing things. Some yokel lost a wallet out on the course, and they couldn’t figure anybody else who could do it. So I was elected.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not a stealer. Do you know it? That’s not me.’
    ‘I know it,’ I said. And I didn’t think he was. I thought I was more likely to be a stealer than he was, and I wasn’t one either.
    ‘I was too well liked out here, that’s my problem,’ he said. ‘If you help people they don’t like you for it. They’re like Mormons.’
    ‘I guess so,’ I said.
    ‘When you get older,’ my father said. And then he seemed to stop what he was about to say. ‘If you want to know the truth don’t listen to what people tell you,’ was all he said.
    He walked around the cash register, holding his white shoes, his pants pockets full of money. ‘Let’s go now,’ he said. He turned off the light when he got to the door, held it open for me, and we walked out into the warm summer night.
    When we’d driven back across the river into Great Falls and up Central, my father stopped at the grocery a block from our house, went in and bought a can of beer and came back and sat in the car seat with the door open. It had become cooler with the sun gone and felt like a fall night, although it was dry and the sky was light blue and full of stars. I could smell beer on my father’s breath and knew he was thinking about the conversation he would have withmy mother when we