Rock Springs by Richard Ford

in that back,” the girl said, and looked at me.
    â€œLet her in front,” I told Claude.
    I don’t think he wanted the girl in the car. And I didn’t know why, because I wanted her in. Maybe he had thought his father had an Indian woman, and he wasn’t sure what to do now.
    Claude opened the door, and when he stood up I could see that the girl was taller than he was. I didn’t think that kind of thing mattered though, because Claude had already whipped boys with his fists who were bigger than he was.
    When the girl got in she had to pull her knees up. She was wearing stockings, and her green shoes were the kind without toes.
    â€œHello, George,” she said, and smiled. I could smell Sherman’s aftershave.
    â€œHello,” I said.
    â€œDon’t cause me any fucking trouble, or FU break you up,” Sherman said. And before Claude could get in, Sherman was starting back to the motel in his bedroom slippers, his ponytail swinging down his back.
    â€œYou’re a real odd match,” Lucy said when Claude had gotten in the driver’s seat. “You don’t look like each other.”
    â€œWho do I look like?” Claude said. He was angry.
    â€œSome Greek,” Lucy said. She looked around Claude as Sherman disappeared into the motel room and closed the door. “Maybe your mother, though,” she said as an afterthought.
    â€œWhere’s she now?” Claude said. “My mother.” He started the car.
    The girl looked at him from behind her glasses. “At home. I guess. Wherever you live.”
    â€œNo. She’s dead,” Claude said. “Are those my father’s glasses?”
    â€œHe gave them to me. Do you want them back?”
    â€œAre you divorced?” Claude said.
    â€œI’m not old enough,” the girl said. “I’m not even married yet.”
    â€œHow old
are
you?” Claude said.
    â€œTwenty, nineteen. How does that sound?” She looked at me and smiled. She had small teeth and her breath had beer on it. “How old do I look?”
    â€œEight,” Claude said. “Or maybe a hundred.”
    â€œAre we going fishing, today?” she said.
    â€œWe talk about things we don’t intend to do,” Claude said. He hit the motor then, and snapped the clutch, and we went swerving out of the lot onto the hardtop, heading out of Sunburst and back onto the green wheat prairie.
    C laude drove out the Canada highway eight miles, then off on the county road that went between the fields and past my house toward the west mountains a hundred miles away, where there was still snow and it was cold. My house flashed by in back of its belt of olive trees—just a square gray two-story house, unprotected toward the east. Claude was driving to Mormon Creek, I knew, though we were only doing what his father had told us to and not anything on our own. We were only boys, and nothing about us would interest a woman, or even a girl the age of this girl. You aren’t ignorant of that fact when it is true about you,and sometimes when it isn’t. And there was a strange feeling of suspense in me then—that once we were there I did not know what would happen and possibly nothing good would.
    â€œThat’s a pretty green dress,” Claude said as he drove. The girl had not been saying anything. None of us had, though she seemed to have her mind on something—getting back to the motel maybe, or getting back where she’d come from.
    â€œIt’s not for this season,” she said, staring out at the new fields where the air was tawny. “It’s already too dry to farm.”
    â€œWhere are you from?” I said.
    â€œIn Sceptre, Saskatchewan,” she said, “where it looks just like this. A little town and a bunch of houses. The rest knifed up with these farms.” She said
house
the way Canadians do, but otherwise she did not talk that way.
    â€œWhat did your family