Rock Springs by Richard Ford Read Free Book Online Page A

ditch, hear it hiss in the field. It ran down from Highwood Creek to the Missouri, twenty miles away. It was nothing Woody knew about, nothing he could hear or smell. He knew nothing about anything that was here. I heard my father say the words, “That’s a real joke,” from inside the house, then the sound of a drawer being opened and shut, and a door closing. Then nothing else.
    Woody turned and looked into the dark toward where the glow of Great Falls rose on the horizon, and we both could see the flashing lights of a plane lowering to land there.“I once passed my brother in the Los Angeles airport and didn’t even recognize him,” Woody said, staring into the night. “He recognized
me
, though. He said, ‘Hey, bro, are you mad at me, or what?’ I wasn’t mad at him. We both had to laugh.”
    Woody turned and looked at the house. His hands were still in his pockets, his cigarette clenched between his teeth, his arms taut. They were, I saw, bigger, stronger arms than I had thought. A vein went down the front of each of them. I wondered what Woody knew that I didn’t. Not about my mother—I didn’t know anything about that and didn’t want to—but about a lot of things, about the life out in the dark, about coming out here, about airports, even about me. He and I were not so far apart in age, I knew that. But Woody was one thing, and I was another. And I wondered how I would ever get to be like him, since it didn’t necessarily seem so bad a thing to be.
    â€œDid you know your mother was married before?” Woody said.
    â€œYes,” I said. “I knew that.”
    â€œIt happens to all of them, now,” he said. “They can’t wait to get divorced.”
    â€œI guess so,” I said.
    Woody dropped his cigarette into the gravel and toed it out with his black-and-white shoe. He looked up at me and smiled the way he had inside the house, a smile that said he knew something he wouldn’t tell, a smile to make you feel bad because you weren’t Woody and never could be.
    It was then that my father came out of the house. He still had on his plaid hunting coat and his wool cap, but his face was as white as snow, as white as I have ever seen a human being’s face to be. It was odd. I had the feeling that he might’ve fallen inside, because he looked roughed up, as though he had hurt himself somehow.
    My mother came out the door behind him and stood in the floodlight at the top of the steps. She was wearing the powder-blue dress Pd seen through the window, a dress I had never seen her wear before, though she was also wearing a car coat and carrying a suitcase. She looked at me and shook her head in a way that only I was supposed to notice, as if it was not a good idea to talk now.
    My father had his hands in his pockets, and he walked right up to Woody. He did not even look at me. “What do you do for a living?” he said, and he was very close to Woody. His coat was close enough to touch Woody’s shirt.
    â€œI’m in the Air Force,” Woody said. He looked at me and then at my father. He could tell my father was excited.
    â€œIs this your day off, then?” my father said. He moved even closer to Woody, his hands still in his pockets. He pushed Woody with his chest, and Woody seemed willing to let my father push him.
    â€œNo,” he said, shaking his head.
    I looked at my mother. She was just standing, watching. It was as if someone had given her an order, and she was obeying it. She did not smile at me, though I thought she was thinking about me, which made me feel strange.
    â€œWhat’s the matter with you?” my father said into Woody’s face, right into his face—his voice tight, as if it had gotten hard for him to talk. “Whatever in the world is the matter with you? Don’t you understand something?” My father took a revolver pistol out of his coat and put it up under