Wildlife Read Online Free PDF

idea?’
    ‘No,’ I said. And I said it too fast, without thinking what it meant to my mother.
    ‘You’d do it, wouldn’t you?’ my father said.
    ‘Will you like it if your father gets burned up out there, and you never see him again?’ my mother said to me. ‘Then you and I go straight to hell together. How will that be?’
    ‘Don’t say that, Jean,’ my father said. He put his bag on the kitchen table and came and knelt beside my mother and tried to put his arms around her. But she got up from her chair and walked back to where she had been cutting tomatoes and picked up the knife and pointed it at him, where he was still kneeling beside the empty chair.
    ‘I’m a grown woman,’ she said, and she was very angry now. ‘Why don’t you act like a grown man, Jerry?’
    ‘You can’t explain everything,’ my father said.
    ‘I can explain everything,’ my mother said. She put the knife down and walked out the kitchen door and into the bedroom, the one she had not been sleeping in with my father, and closed the door behind her.
    My father looked at me from where he was, still beside her chair. ‘I guess my judgment’s no good now,’ he said. ‘Is that what you think, Joe?’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think it is.’
    And I thought his judgment was good, and that going to fight the fire was a good idea even though he might go and get killed because he knew nothing about it. But I did not want to say all of that to him because of how it would make him feel.
    My father and I walked from home in the dark down to the Masonic Temple on Central. A yellow Cascade County school bus was parked at the corner of Ninth, and men were standing in groups waiting to go. Some of the men were bums. I could tell by their shoes and their coats. Though some were just regular men who were out of work, I thought, from other jobs. Three women who were going waited together under the streetlight. And inside the bus, inthe dark, I could see Indians were in some of the seats. I could see their round faces, their slick hair, the tint of light off their eyeglasses in the darkness. No one would get in with them, and some men were drinking. I could smell whiskey in the night air.
    My father put his bag on a stack of bags beside the bus, then came and stood next to me. Inside the Masonic Temple–which had high steps up to a glass center door–all the lights were on. Several men inside were looking out. One, who was the man I had seen with my father in the Jack ’n Jill, held a clipboard and was talking to an Indian man beside him. My father gestured to him.
    ‘People categorize other people,’ my father said. ‘But you shouldn’t do that. They should teach you that in school.’
    I looked at the men around me. Most of them were not dressed warmly enough and were shifting from foot to foot. They looked like men used to work, though they did not seem glad to be going to fight a fire at night. None of them looked like my father, who seemed eager.
    ‘What will you do out there?’ I said.
    ‘Work on a fire line,’ my father said. ‘They dig trenches the fire won’t cross. I don’t know much more, to tell you the truth.’ He put his hands in his jacket pockets and blew down into his shirt. ‘I’ve got this hum in my head now. I need to do something about it.’
    ‘I understand,’ I said.
    ‘Tell your mother I didn’t mean to make her mad.’
    ‘I will,’ I said.
    ‘We don’t want to wake up in our coffins, though, do we? That’d be a rude surprise.’ He put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me close to him and squeezed me and laughed an odd little laugh, as if the idea had actually given him a scare. He looked across Central Avenue at the Pheasant Lounge, the place I had seen him go into the week before. On the red neon sign over the door a big cock pheasant was busting up into the night air, its wings stretched into thedarkness–escaping. Some men waiting at the Masonic Temple had begun to go across the street into the