Wildlife by Richard Ford Read Free Book Online

nicely. You’d be surprised–for a big man. He fought in two wars but never learned to swim. Isn’t that odd? You’re not supposed to be able to do that.’ She looked up at the ceiling as if she was thinking about it. ‘I said I could explain everything, didn’t I? But I can’t.’
    I looked out the front window at the Oldsmobile, which was parked where it had been. Warren Miller was sitting in the driver’s seat looking at our house. I lifted my hand and waved at him. But he couldn’t see me. He sat there and looked for a time longer, then he started the car and drove away.
    At five o’clock my mother came into my room where I was setting out a problem for my geometry class in school. She had taken a nap after Warren Miller had left, and then taken a bath and talked on the phone. When she came in my room she was dressed in a way that was new to me. She had on blue jeans and a white western shirt and some blue-colored cowboy boots I had known her to have but had never seen her wear. She had a red kerchief around her neck, tied in a knot.
    ‘Do you like this particular get-up?’ she said, and looked down at the toes of her boots.
    ‘It looks nice,’ I said.
    ‘Thank you very much.’ She looked at herself in the mirror over my chest of drawers, across the room. ‘I used to dress like this all the time in eastern Washington,’ she said. ‘In the last century.’ She took hold of the doorknob andturned it gently as she stood there. ‘I used to stand behind the bull chutes at the rodeos and hope some cowboy would approve of me. It made my father very mad. He wanted me to go to college, which is where I did go. And where I want you to go, incidentally.’
    ‘I want to go,’ I said. I had given some thought to that, already, but I hadn’t thought about a profession yet. I hoped she wouldn’t ask me about that again for a while.
    ‘Southern Cal’s very good,’ my mother said. She looked out my window, stooping a little as if she wanted to see out toward the west. ‘That’s where I want you to go. Or Harvard. They’re both good schools.’
    ‘I’d go there,’ I said. I didn’t know where either of these schools was located or why they were good. I’d only heard their names before.
    ‘I’ve never taken you to the rodeos, I guess,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ She was leaning against the door to my room, looking at me lying on the bed with my books and papers. She was thinking about something that had nothing to do with me, I thought. Maybe she was thinking about my father. ‘Western boys are supposed to go to rodeos. However. I used to race barrels in Briscoe. I certainly did do that. Against other girls. And I wore this get-up. I did it for the sole and simple reason of attracting attention to myself. They used to call us chute beauties. Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t that an impressive thing to know about your mother? That she was a chute beauty?’
    ‘Dad told me about that,’ I said. ‘He likes it.’
    ‘Did he? Does he? That’s good. It’s probably nice to know your parents were once not your parents. It seems merciful to me at this moment.’
    ‘I knew that, too,’ I said.
    ‘Well, good for you,’ my mother said. She walked around my bed and stood looking out the window, across our sunny yard toward the river and the oil refinery, and farther away toward the hazy sky behind which was the fire my fatherwas fighting. ‘Would you like to take a drive?’ she said, putting her fingers on the glass as though she wanted to push it. ‘I’d like to see the fire. I think you can drive right to where it is. I read that in the paper. You can consider it the beginning of your higher education.’
    ‘I’d like to see it,’ I said, and closed my geometry book.
    ‘Maybe we’ll see something astounding that you’ll always remember,’ my mother said, her fingers still on the window glass. ‘That certainly doesn’t happen every day. At least not at my age it doesn’t. Although maybe