Sig came back to town in October. Most years he was gone all winter. It was a good way to live if you could manage. Get the hell out before the cold came and the night-time settled in for a month. Snow just everywhere. October was pretty though. Cold enough to quiet the streets and the sky was still bright and clear. When I saw Sig come out of the Copper Corner he was holding his boots in one hand and lighting a cigarette with the other, smiling back into the bar at someone. I thought maybe it was Erin. She’d kick him out for not wearing his boots and he’d leave rather than put them on. Go and drink on the corner. Smile at the women walking by and make them think twice about how their life was going.
I stopped at the corner and waited. I didn’t want to see him, didn’t want to talk to him. I never knew what the hell to say. I don’t think he did either but that never stopped him talking. He walked away, on down toward Front Street, cigarette smoke curling out thickly behind him, only wearing his jeans and a thin, faded green work shirt and the wind cracked through the trees, cold and hard, but he didn’t notice. It was going to get cold soon, I thought. Already the nights were dropping toward zero.
The way he smoked that cigarette made me want one. When he was gone, out of sight somewhere near the river, I crossed the street and went into the Copper Corner. Erin grinned at me like she had some joke she was keeping to herself. She looked good enough to make me nervous and I sat down at the bar and remembered last year, when we got together for a few weeks. Even after all that I was still nervous around her and she knew it. I think she liked it too. And I was nervous because she was only twenty and with almost as many years between us there was some kind of responsibility to it that worried me.
She brought over a bottle of Bud and opened it. “You see Sig?”
I nodded.
“He looked good.”
I nodded again and took my beer over to the telephone booth near the pool table. Benny was sitting at the back table. He might have been sleeping. His grey hair was long again and fell across his face but I nodded to him anyway Erin kept loading the beer fridge and the bottles clinked into each other, the sound loud in the empty bar. She looked up at me. She wasn’t laughing at me anymore.
I called my mom and when she answered I took a drink.
“Sig’s back,” I said.
She was quiet for a minute. “In October?”
My father came north when he was fourteen and met my mother. She was married at the time and once she told me they both had things to get away from but I didn’t know what she meant. I never heard about what made him move up. When I was little, about seven or eight, he used to take me out to Winter Lake and we’d spend a few days out there, checking the water, and he’d tell me about the dreams he used to have as a kid. He called them visions but I think he meant the same thing. There was always a lot of gold involved, gold that no one had found yet. So, of course, I thought that was why he had moved. When he used pebbles to show me what gold was worth in weight, I thought it made sense, gold was the kind of thing to move for. Years later, when he had gone away for a while, my mother mentioned the limp and the blank spells that he had arrived with. I thought they were from rodeoing, but my mother told me, no, he had had them long before he ever got on a horse, before she met him even.
They met at the Copper Corner, too. My mother had been tending bar there for nearly ten years when my father came in asking for whisky and she had to kick him out for being under age and he told her that was fine, he would leave, so long as she came with him. And she did. She didn’t care that he was nearly still a kid and less than a year later I came along.
They had trouble finding a place to live and spent their first year lakeside, sleeping out and checking the water, checking the silt, and come winter they got caught a few times sleeping in hunting cabins that were only used on the weekends and once, just before I was born, they stayed in a farmhouse that was falling apart and too dangerous to live in because the roof was sagging under the weight of snow and winter, and my father found an old Colt revolver under the floorboards. He had it next to him when they were woken up by the cops and he got sent to jail for a few months, staying so long mostly because no one really knew what to do with him. The gun was stolen and had been used in a murder six years earlier, when he would have been eight. He was still in jail when I was born, but he had found a few small scraps of gold that he had given to my mother and it was enough to get her a place in town and see her through until he was out.
Afterward, a few people let him lie about his age so that he could get work here and there, as a janitor, as a bartender, doing whatever was needed on a ranch or farm. But between the blank spells and his wandering off in the night after another dream he never kept a job long, and, in the end spent too much time lakeside, looking for gold, until someone told him that he could make good prize money jumping off a running horse to bring down a steer. And he was the same with my mother. There one night and gone the next, letting her worry and in the end she realized he was still a kid and she was on her own. Well, on her own with me. I don’t know if that made it better or worse.
— Michael Caleb Tasker was born in Montreal, Canada, and spent his childhood in New Orleans and Buenos Aires. He has worked as a journalist, university lecturer, ranch hand and his fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Adelaide, Australia.
