Wildlife by Richard Ford Read Free Book Online Page B

right,’ I said. And I thought that because I didn’t see what any of this had to do with my father.
    ‘Maybe not,’ my mother said, ‘maybe you’re smart and I’m stupid.’
    ‘Do you like Miller?’ I said. I had wanted to know it in the afternoon, but there hadn’t seemed enough reason to ask, whereas now for some reason there did.
    ‘Do you mean Mr Miller? Warren?’ my mother said.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Do you like him?’
    ‘Not very much,’ she said. ‘Things do happen around him, though. He has that feel about him, doesn’t he?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I had the knife he had given me in my pocket, a thing he had given me to make me like him. But that was all that had happened to me where Warren Miller was concerned.
    ‘He’s going to give me a job to keep his books at his grain elevator,’ my mother said. ‘That’s something. And he’s asked you and me to have supper at his house tomorrownight. Which is lucky because I had plans to open up some cans. Why?’
    ‘I was interested,’ I said. The truth was I wanted to know what she thought about my father leaving, and I hoped this would get around to that subject. Though it didn’t, and I didn’t know how to make it.
    ‘It’s always just yourself,’ my mother said. ‘Nothing else.’
    ‘What does that mean?’ I said.
    ‘Honey, nothing. I was thinking and talking. It’s a bad habit. You have an inquiring intelligence. Everything will always surprise you. You’ll have a wonderful life.’ She smiled.
    ‘Don’t they surprise you?’
    ‘Not much,’ my mother said. ‘Now and then I run upon the unexpected. But that’s all. Look up there now, Joe.’
    Ahead of us at the end of the canyon, the creek bottom road opened into a wide grass meadow beyond which a hill went up sharply, full of small fires in sparse trees.
    ‘Let’s give you the full treatment,’ my mother said, and she stopped the car right there, still in the narrow canyon where there were patches of fire burning ten yards from the road. She turned off the motor. ‘Open your door,’ she said. ‘See what it feels like.’
    I opened my side and stepped out on the road just as she’d told me to. And the fire was all around me, up the hill on both sides and in front of me and behind. The small yellow fires and lines of fire were flickering in the underbrush close enough that I could’ve touched them just by reaching out. There was a sound like wind blowing, and a crack of limbs on fire. I could feel the heat of it all over the front of me, on my legs and my fingers. I smelled the deep, hot piny odor of trees and ground in flames. And what I wanted to do was get away from it before it overcame me.
    I got back in the car with my mother and closed the door. It was instantly cooler and quieter.
    ‘How was that?’ she said, and looked at me.
    ‘It’s loud,’ I said. My hands and legs still felt hot.
    ‘Did it appeal to you?’ my mother said.
    ‘No,’ I said, ‘it scared me.’ And that is the feeling I’d had when it was all around me.
    ‘It’s just a lot of small fires that once in a while blow together. Don’t be afraid now,’ my mother said. ‘You just needed to see what your father finds so entrancing. Do you understand it?’
    ‘No,’ I said, and I thought my father might’ve been surprised by such a fire and want to come home.
    ‘I don’t understand either,’ my mother said. ‘It’s not mysterious at all.’
    ‘Maybe he was surprised,’ I said.
    ‘I’m sure he was,’ my mother said. ‘I’m sorry we both can’t sympathize with him.’ She started the car and drove us on.
    In the meadow was a tent camp where there were trucks and temporary lights strung on lines between wooden poles. Fires were beside the road. Small ones. People were moving inside the camp–mostly men, I thought, brought there to fight the fire. Some I could see lying on cots inside tents that had their flaps left open. Some were standing and talking. Others were