Rock Springs by Richard Ford Page B

was with, or what the day looked like ahead of her.
    â€œI don’t see why you have to have them on,” Claude said. Then he drove off the bridge and turned onto the post mill road downstream, the Buick bucking and rocking over the bumps.
    â€œIt’s too bright,” she said and pulled the hem of her dress over her knees. It was a wool dress, as green as grass, and it felt hot against me. “What’s the fun out here,” she said. “That’s a well-kept secret.”
    â€œYou are,” Claude said. “The blond bombshell. You’re our reward for being able to put up with you.”
    â€œGood luck for that party.” She clutched her paper bag. Her fingers were short and pink, and her fingernails were clean and not bitten, just a regular girl’s hands. “Where’s
your
mother and father?” she said to me.
    â€œHis old man runs the rails. He’s a gash hound, too,”Claude said as we drove in under the cottonwoods that grew to the creek bank. “His mother already hit the road. This is wild country up here. Nobody’s safe.” Claude looked at me in a disgusted way, but he knew I didn’t like that talk. I didn’t think that was true of my father, and he did not know my mother—though what he said about her was what I thought. It was not unusual that people left that part of Montana. She had never liked it, and neither my father nor me ever blamed her.
    â€œAre you boys men now?” Lucy said and put her glasses back on. “Am I supposed to think that, now that we’re out here?”
    â€œIt doesn’t matter what you think,” I said. I opened the door and got out.
    â€œAt least somebody accepts truth,” Lucy said.
    â€œGeorge’ll say anything to get on your pretty side,” Claude said. “Him and me are different. Aren’t we, George?”
    But I had already started toward the creek and couldn’t hear what the girl said back, though she and Claude were in the car together for a little while. I heard him say, “Hope means wait to me,” and laugh, and I heard his door slam, with her left inside.
    C laude took his casting rod to the creek bank with his jelly jar of white maggots, and tied up a cork-and-hook rig, then went to the shallows where sawdust from the mill had laid a warm-water bottom and a sluice down the center of the creek. Sometimes we had caught fifteen whitcfish in a school there, when they’d fed. One after another. You could put your bait where they were and bring one back. They were big fish and steady fighters, and Claude liked them because they were easy to catch.
    It was three o’clock then, and warm, but I did not want to fish. I did not like the waiting of fishing. Pd hunted for birds with my father, walked them up out of the rosebush thickets. But I did not care so much for fishing, and not for whitefish at all.
    Claude had taken off his yellow jacket, and the girl had brought it back up—walking on the toes of her shoes—and spread it in the sun, then sat facing the creek. She raised her dress to her knees and took off her shoes and stockings and pushed up her sleeves. She’d unbuttoned her front enough to let sun on her neck and leaned on one elbow, smoking a cigarette, blowing the smoke in the warm air.
    â€œI wish I could play the piano,” she said when I walked up from the bank. “Do you play one?”
    â€œNo,” I said. My mother had played a piano when we’d lived in Great Falls. She played Dixieland in the house we’d rented there.
    â€œOut here makes me think about that,” she said. “I’d like to go in somebody’s house and sit down and play some song.” She blew smoke out the side of her mouth. She still had on Sherman’s sunglasses. Her long legs were so white they looked gray, and thin enough that her calf bones stood out. She had shaved them above her knees, and I could see where the