Free Vintage Ford by Richard Ford Page B

act. Or so it seemed to me. Silent events, of course, always occur between our urges and our actions. But I didn’t know what event had occurred, only that one had, and I could feel it. My father seemed tired now, and to be considering something. Renard Junior was no longer calling ducks, but was just sitting at his end staring at the misty sky, which was turning a dense, warm luminous red at the horizon, as if a fire was burning at the far edge of the marsh. Shooting in the other blinds had stopped. A small plane inched across the sky. I heard a dog bark. I saw a fish roll in the water in front of the blind. I thought I saw an alligator. Mosquitoes appeared, which is never unusual in Louisiana.
    â€œWhat do you do in St. Louis,” I said to my father. It was the thing I wanted to know.
    â€œWell,” my father said thoughtfully. He sniffed, “Golf. I play quite a bit of golf. Francis has a big house across from a wonderful park. I’ve taken it up.” He felt his forehead, where a mosquito had landed on a black mud stain that was there. He rubbed it and looked at his fingertips.
    â€œWill you practice law up there?”
    â€œOh lord no,” he said and shook his head and sniffed again. “They requested me to leave the firm here. You know that.”
    â€œYes,” I said. His breathing was easier. His face seemed calm. He looked handsome and youthful. Whatever silent event that had occurred had passed off of him, and he seemed settled about it. I thought I might talk about going to Lawrenceville. Duck blinds were where people had such conversations. Though it would’ve been better, I thought, if we’d been alone, and didn’t have Renard Junior to overhear us. “I’d like to ask you . . .” I began.
    â€œTell me about your girlfriend situation,” my father interrupted me. “Tell me the whole story there.”
    I knew what he meant by that, but there wasn’t a story. I was in military school, and there were only other boys present, which was not a story to me. If I went to Lawrenceville, I knew there could be a story. Girls would be nearby. “There isn’t any story . . .” I started to say, and he interrupted me again.
    â€œLet me give you some advice.” He was rubbing his index finger around the muzzle of his Italian shotgun. “Always try to imagine how you’re going to feel
after
you fuck somebody
before
you fuck somebody.
Comprendes?
There’s the key to everything. History. Morality. Philosophy. You’ll save yourself a lot of misery.” He nodded as if this wisdom had just become clear to him all over again. “Maybe you already know that,” he said. He looked above the front of the blind where the sky had turned to fire, then looked at me in a way to seem honest and to say (so I thought) that he liked me. “Do you ever find yourself saying things in conversations that you absolutely don’t believe?” He reached with his two fingers and plucked a mosquito off my cheek. “Do you?” he said distractedly. “Do ya, do ya?”
    I thought of conversations I’d had with Dubinion, and some I’d had with my mother. They were that kind of conversation— memorable if only for the things I didn’t say. But what I said to my father was “no.”
    â€œConvenience must not matter to you much then,” he said in a friendly way.
    â€œI don’t know if it does or not,” I said because I didn’t know what convenience meant. It was a word I’d never had a cause to use.
    â€œWell, convenience matters to me very much. Too much, I think,” my father said. I, of course, thought of my mother’s assessment of him—that he was not better than most men. I assumed that caring too much for convenience led you there, and that my fault in later life could turn out to be the same one because he was my father. But I decided, at that moment, to see to it that