Wildlife Read Free Page B

got home, and what that would be like.
    ‘Do you know what happens,’ he said, ‘when the very thing you wanted least to happen happens to you?’ We were sitting in the glow of the little grocery store. Traffic was moving behind us along Central Avenue, people going home from work, people with things they liked to do on their minds, things they looked forward to.
    ‘No,’ I said. I was thinking about throwing the javelin at that moment, a high arching throw into clear air, coming down like an arrow, and of my father throwing it when he was my age.
    ‘Nothing at all does,’ he said, and he was quiet for several seconds. He raised his knees and held his beer can with both hands. ‘We should probably go on a crime spree. Rob this store or something. Bring everything down on top of us.’
    ‘I don’t want to do that,’ I said.
    ‘I’m probably a fool,’ my father said, and shook his beer can until the beer fizzed softly inside. ‘It’s just hard to see my opportunities right this minute.’ He didn’t say anything else for a while. ‘Do you love your dad?’ he said in a normal voice, after some time had passed.
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    ‘Do you think I’ll take good care of you?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so.’
    ‘I will,’ he said.
    My father shut the car door and sat a moment looking out the windshield at the grocery, where people were inside moving back and forth behind the plate-glass windows. ‘Choices don’t always feel exactly like choices,’ he said. He started the car then, and he put his hand on my hand just like you would on a girl’s. ‘Don’t be worried about things,’ he said. ‘I feel calm now.’
    ‘I’m not worried,’ I said. And I wasn’t, because I thought things would be fine. And even though I waswrong, it is still not so bad a way to set your mind toward the unknown just when you are coming into the face of it.

Chapter 2
    After that night in early September things began to move more quickly in our life and to change. Our life at home changed. The life my mother and father lived changed. The world, for as little as I’d thought about it or planned on it, changed. When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what’s in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again–which is a loss. But to shield yourself–as I didn’t do–seems to be an even greater error, since what’s lost is the truth of your parents’ life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in.
    On the night my father came home from losing his job at the Wheatland Club, he told my mother about it straightout and they both acted as if it was a kind of joke. My mother did not get mad or seem upset or ask him why he had gotten fired. They both laughed about it. When we ate supper my mother sat at the table and seemed to be thinking. She said she could not get a job substituting until the term ended, but she would go to the school board and put her name in. She said other people would come to my father for work when it was known he was free, and that this was an opportunity in disguise–the reason we had come here–and that Montanans did not know gold when they saw it. She smiled at him when she said that. She said I could get a job, and I said I would. She said maybe she should become a banker, though she would need to finish college for that. And she laughed. Finally she said, ‘You can do other things, Jerry. Maybe you’ve played enough golf for this lifetime.’
    After dinner, my father went into the living room and listened to the news from a station we could get from Salt Lake after dark, and went to sleep on the couch still wearing his golf clothes. Late in the night they went into their room and closed the door. I heard their voices, talking. I heard my mother laugh again. And then my father