SOURCE: Leder, Priscilla. “Men with Women: Gender Relations in Richard Ford's Rock Springs.” In Perspectives on Richard Ford, edited by Huey Guagliardo, pp. 97-120. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

[In the following essay, Leder investigates notions of gender in Ford's Rock Springs, paying particular attention to the concept of voice.]

But I did not, as I waited, want to think about only myself. I realized that was all I had ever really done, and that possibly it was all you could ever do, and that it would make you bitter and lonesome and useless. So I tried to think instead about [her].

—“Children” 96

In a New York Times Book Review article, Vivian Gornick identifies Richard Ford as a creator of the latest version of “a certain kind of American story that is characterized by a laconic surface and a tight-lipped speaking voice.” Like Hemingway fifty years ago, Ford employs narrators who “[have] been made inarticulate by modern life” (1) to express the isolation and loneliness of modern experience. Relationships between men and women serve to dramatize this experience for Ford, as they did for Hemingway. According to Gornick, though Ford has replaced Hemingway's “allegorical” women characters with characters who are men's “fellow victims,” his depictions of relations between men and women remain limited and unvarying, “irreducible in the writing” (32). In fact, relationships between men and women in Ford vary widely, though they share one central underlying theme: women seem mysteriously self-contained and serene, while men struggle to come to terms with their experience. The stories in Rock Springs develop this theme through a range of variations.

Ford's men and women characters are “fellows” in their quest for connection, what Ford calls “affection,” and in their capacity for recklessness, especially with drink and/or sex. In dialogue, both men and women can be cryptic, banal, or insightful depending on the situation. Unlike men, however, women do not tell their own stories. The defining point of view in Ford's work, usually a first-person narrator, is always male. In Ford's longer works, with their extensive reflective passages, that point of view dominates the reader's attention. Since the short stories of necessity rely mostly on action and dialogue, the men and women characters command more equal access to the reader's consciousness. Thus, the stories provide the best venue for examining the dynamics of male/female relationships in Ford's fiction.

As Gornick recognizes, that fiction comprehends essential elements of the modern—alienated characters whose inconclusive actions and flat, vernacular language express their meaningless lives. Gornick's references to narrators who have been “made inarticulate,” and “fellow victims” (my emphasis) imply that Ford's characters lack freedom, that they inhabit a world of unchanging despair. However, Ford's particular version of modernity creates a variable world which holds possibilities for characters, and for readers as well. For example, as David Crouse points out in “Resisting Reduction,” the inconclusive endings of some of the stories in Rock Springs raise questions rather than closing off possibilities, “forc[ing] the reader to reflect” (56). In Ford's flat, vernacular sentences, syntactical innovation unfolds from commonplace phrases, revealing new possibilities in the most ordinary language. Finally, Ford's familiar characters behave and reflect as if they do have choices, especially about their own attitudes. When they struggle with questions of responsibility, they invite readers to consider their own responsibilities.

Relationships between men and women also contain multiple possibilities. Even the one unvarying difference between them—the dominance of the male point of view—is undercut by the men's obvious limitations. Often, male narrators reveal those limitations through their attempts to define not only women characters but also the whole range of experience, including themselves. In contrast, the women characters appear mysterious and powerful in their relative silence. Perhaps because of that silence, the women often seem more self-assured and emotionally autonomous than the men do.

In the stories of Rock Springs, men look to women for affection and reassurance, which they often do not find. Rather, they learn the extent of their own vulnerability. Only very rarely can they accept that vulnerability as part of their human condition. Sometimes, they defend themselves by asserting power in traditionally male ways, a project which always fails. Most often, they take refuge in words—in “explanations” or in flat, limited verbal formulas. Those formulas typify Ford's particular modernism: on the one hand, their empty futility evokes the meaninglessness of modern existence; on the other, their familiarity engages readers. We can recognize, even laugh at, the banality of a statement like “[Love] was about never being in that place you said you'd never be in,” but we also know the uses of such banalities (“Sweethearts” 68). When we can think of nothing else to say, we tell despairing people that “everything will be all right.”

Women characters teach men about their vulnerability in different ways. First, mothers indirectly push their sons towards maturity by asserting their own sexuality and desire for freedom. Later, as sex partners, women who seem emotionally self-sufficient bring uncertain men to a sense of themselves and their condition. Men who seek excitement and/or instant status through lawless behavior encounter women who dwell comfortably in places of danger, something the men learn that they cannot do. Other women distance themselves from risky behavior, affirming the importance of responsibility. Interestingly, these responsible women most often provide the affection that men always seek but seldom find.

The variety of these roles reveals the realistic range of Ford's women characters, who seem limited only insofar as they do not tell their own stories. Because Ford's narrators are so often limited themselves, we see through them and their illusions about the women they encounter, which adds to the depth and realism of the women characters. Ultimately, relations between men and women in Ford are “irreducible” only because the women contain the mystery which draws the men towards self-knowledge. The stories in Rock Springs reveal the many variations Ford plays on this process of self-discovery.

To give coherence to that process, I shall construct a life history for the Ford protagonist in all his manifestations by considering the stories according to the age and life situation of their main characters. The adolescent protagonists of “Great Falls,” “Optimists,” and “Communist” confront the mystery of their mothers' sexuality and their fathers' potential for violence by striving for a detachment which will allow them to deal with what they have witnessed. In “Children” the older adolescent narrator moves into the adult world of sexuality and potential violence. Like the protagonist of “Winterkill,” he experiences stereotypical male behavior through a peer who is both friend and rival. In “Empire,” “Going to the Dogs,” and “Rock Springs,” the protagonist tests the power of his detachment by trying to manipulate his world and, through encounters with women, learns the limitations of that power. In the most “hopeful” of Ford's stories, “Sweethearts” and “Fireworks,” the narrators witness the limitations of stereotypical male behavior in another man, and, through relationships with women, feel reassured of their connection to others.

ABSENT MOTHERS

The youngest of Ford's adolescent protagonists, Jackie Russell in “Great Falls” is in his early teens. After warning the reader that “[t]his is not a happy story” (29), the adult Jackie recounts the incident which precipitates his parents' separation: his father finds his mother with another man and threatens the other man with a pistol. The narrator confines himself scrupulously to the perceptions and thoughts of his adolescent self until the very end of the story, thus emphasizing his confusion and his sense of displacement from the shelter of his united family. Throughout the story, his descriptions of the landscape and of the family's solitary house “out of town” (30) emphasize isolation and loneliness.

Despite the isolation, the bleak landscape seems to teem with life when Jackie describes the hunting and fishing “expeditions” he shares with his father, Jack. Though Jackie recounts these in detail, he seems ambivalent about them. “I thought even then,” he reflects, “with as little as I knew, that these were opportunities other boys would dream of having but probably never would. And I don't think that I was wrong in that” (30). Jackie undercuts his own statement of appreciation by emphasizing not what he feels, but what “other boys would dream.” Nowhere in his extensive accounts of catching fish and shooting ducks does he express intrinsic pleasure in the activity.

Jackie's account typifies Ford's ironic treatment of stereotypical male adventure. Though his laconic style often evokes Hemingway's, Ford consistently undermines Hemingway's depiction of hunting and fishing as ritualized, almost sacramental struggles between worthy adversaries. Rather, hunting and fishing expeditions go wrong and/or result in mindless slaughter. Jackie's father does not “know limits,” either legal or ecological. He catches a hundred fish in a weekend, and puts out corn and decoys to attract as many as sixty ducks at a time. Then, Jackie recalls: “I would stand and shine a seal-beam car light out onto the pond, and he would stand up beside me and shoot all the ducks that were there, on the water if he could, but flying and getting up as well. … [H]e could kill or wound thirty ducks in twenty seconds' time” (31). Jack sells the ducks (which is illegal), then spends the evening drinking in a bar with friends while his son plays pinball and “waste[s] money in the jukebox” (32).

The flat, neutral language with which Jackie describes his adventures with his father suggests his reluctance to identify fully with him. In addition, his account indirectly prepares readers for the discovery of his mother's adultery and diffuses their potential condemnation of her by inviting them to imagine her evenings alone in an isolated house and by revealing that she married Jack, a former air force sergeant, expecting that they would “see the world together” (30). Jackie's mother resembles many of Ford's women characters in that her motives must be surmised; she says little to explain herself. Her conversations with her husband take place off stage, and she is upstairs when her husband and son return home to find a young airman, Woody, standing in her kitchen.

No one contradicts Jack when he acts on the assumption that he has interrupted a tryst. Apparently, he asks his wife to leave, for she packs a suitcase and walks out of the house. His behavior towards Woody reveals that he does “know limits” after all: violence seems his only recourse, yet he cannot carry out the violence or imagine what end it would serve. With his loaded pistol under Woody's chin, he declares, “I don't have any idea what to do with you. I just don't” (40). Jack holds Woody at gunpoint until his wife walks away, then reiterates his bafflement: “I'd like to think of some way to hurt you. … I feel helpless about it” (42). Finally, he abandons his assault without resolving it and declares, “I don't want to have to think about you anymore” (43).

Jackie imagines his father as intending to shoot Woody yet afraid of the consequences. “I think he was afraid, afraid he was doing this wrong and could mess all of it up and make matters worse without accomplishing anything” (41). His language reduces the threat by making the shooting sound like an everyday task that must not be “messed up” rather than a choice between life and death. Jackie comprehends his father's frustration and the intensity of his emotions and attempts to diffuse them, even as the young Jackie tries to comfort his father by assuring him that “It'll be all right” (43). His father's paralysis cannot be resolved; it can only be dissipated.

While intense experience overwhelms his father, Jackie's mother “seem[s] so calm,” speaking “in just her normal voice” (41). Like other women characters in Ford's stories, she stands untouched and controlled amidst chaos and change, moving away from her son into the mysterious realm of her own sexuality. She never speaks directly to him during the incident which precipitates her departure. Rather, she twice looks at him and shakes her head “as if it was not a good idea to talk now” (40) and twice waves to him from behind a closed window. Both gestures acknowledge the other person while assuming conditions that preclude communication: we wave when distance, noise, or haste make speech impossible. Perhaps she feels it prudent to keep silent in the face of her husband's volatility, but she hardens the distance between herself and her son by twice leaving without him.

Jackie tries to take some responsibility for the resulting estrangement: “Later I would think I should have gone with her, and that things between them might've been different” (42). His wistful conjecture marks his unexpressed sense of abandonment—he ignores the fact that his mother did not ask him to go with her. In fact, she implicitly assigns him to his father with the reminder that “Jackie has to be at school in the morning” (41). In their last conversation, she tells Jackie “I'd like a less domestic life, is all” (47). During that encounter, she begins to emerge for him as a sexual being rather than as a nurturer. After being invited to compliment her, he notices that she looks pretty in a different way, as if “she could be different about things. Even about me” (46).

Though she essentially abandons Jackie, he seems to accept her behavior as he accepts his father's. However, he does not try to imagine what she feels as he tries to imagine what his father feels. Rather, he ponders an unanswered question about her: Woody tells him she has been married and divorced before, but she denies it. This secret embodies her essential mystery—a mystery which distances her from her son and allows her to move serenely through disruptive events.

Unable fully to identify with his father's violence, excluded from the mystery of his mother, Jackie focuses on Woody. He associates Woody with himself, and his fluctuating image of Woody reveals his anxiety and his search for a way to deal with the changes he experiences. When he first sees Woody, he notices “his arms, which were long and pale. They looked like a young man's arms, like my arms” (36). Later, as he and Woody stand outside while the parents talk, he looks again: “They were, I saw, bigger, stronger arms than I had thought” (39). To the narrator, Woody is both young and vulnerable like himself and potentially powerful, as he would like to be. Unlike the violent father, Woody exudes an urbane detachment; Jackie admires him for knowing “about a lot of things, about the life out in the dark, about coming out here, about airports, even about me” (39). The detached urbanity which so impresses Jackie carries with it a kind of isolation. Woody tells the narrator, “‘I once passed my brother in the Los Angeles airport and didn't even recognize him’” (39). “Knowing” the world may bring with it the inability to know others.

Through his identification with Woody, Jackie begins to develop the detached reflection which both sustains and limits the Ford protagonist. He thinks of Woody as, like himself, “the one left out somehow, the one who would be lonely soon,” and then imagines that Woody, comfortless in his isolation, will have “no one to tell him that it was all right, that they forgave him, that these things happen in the world” (43). In imagining those reassuring formulas, Jackie reveals both their power and their limitation. To offer or to accept such comfort is to take refuge in words and the illusory resolution they provide.

In a series of unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions, the adult Jackie ponders the incident that ended his parents' marriage and made him feel as if his life had “turned suddenly.” He finds resolution in a formula of his own which generalizes and universalizes the behavior which still baffles him: “it is just low-life, some coldness in us all, some helplessness that causes us to misunderstand life when it is pure and plain” (49). For Jackie, as for other Ford protagonists, growing up involves rejecting a possible identity with the potentially violent father and acknowledging the mystery of the mother's sexuality through “explanations” such as this one—formulas which distance him from others even as they allow him to accept and even forgive them.

Like Jackie, the fifteen-year-old narrator of “Optimists” witnesses an incident which leads to his parents' separation and changes him and his life irrevocably. His railroad-worker father returns home early, describing for his wife, his son, and a visiting couple the disturbing accidental death of a hobo. The other man, Boyd, responds with an inexplicably vicious verbal assault on the distraught father, who in turn strikes Boyd a single powerful blow that kills him. The boy, Frank, modifies the incident in his account to the police to make his father seem less culpable, withholding his sense that his father has hit Boyd “to kill him.” Though it helps his father, Frank's suppression of his knowledge signals his withdrawal from the man who taught him that “you can hit a man in a lot of ways” (179). He begins to see his father as “a man who made mistakes, as a man who could hurt people, ruin lives, risk their happiness. A man who did not understand enough” (183). The man who can “understand enough” can avoid being caught up in violence—and Frank, like the other young Ford protagonists, learns to aspire to be such a man.

The incident eventually estranges Frank from his mother as much as from his father, perhaps because, like Jackie, he comes to associate his mother's mysterious sexuality with his father's violence. Dorothy in “Optimists” seems calm, “very certain about things then, very precise” (184). Yet the story hints that she may be the cause of the crisis. In puzzling over Boyd's unaccountable antipathy towards him, the father speculates “‘Maybe he was in love with you, Dorothy. … Maybe that's what the trouble was’” (184). Dorothy's relationship with Boyd, like Jackie's mother's first marriage, remains a mystery.

Her own “explanation” of the incident is equally cryptic. In talking to Frank, she presents it as a stroke of fate, a “coincidence,” and offers a story from her childhood. On a “nature tour” with her father's girlfriend, she watched a flock of ducks take off from a frozen creek “‘all except for one that stayed on the ice, where its feet were frozen, I guess’” (187). Her account of the incident, like other short narratives related by Ford's women characters, ostensibly explains and reveals but actually confronts the male character, and the reader, with inexplicable sudden death and/or male sexual misconduct. The girlfriend, an Assiniboin whom the mother labels “[j]ust some squaw” (186), supplies the term “coincidence” (187). Like the father's choice of a lover from another culture, the term seems not to fit—we can only guess at what two components “coincided” to bring about the deaths of Boyd or the trapped duck. Unlike the formulas with which men assert their “understanding”—formulas like Jackie's “it is just low-life”—the women's “coincidence” simply acknowledges and even deepens the mystery.

Women possess the mystery of life and death, which eludes the “understanding” men attempt to exert in order to protect themselves from “coincidence” and to cope with its consequences. Both Frank and Jackie seem traumatized by their adolescent encounters with their mothers' mystery, perhaps because their mothers appear to withdraw into it rather than nurturing their sons. (Frank's mother does try to comfort him, but she stares away from him out the window, smoking a cigarette, as she tells the cryptic story of the duck abandoned to “coincidence.”) The space between Frank and his mother widens into time: the adult Frank reports that it has been “fifteen years, I think, since I [have] seen her, though I am forty-three years old now, and possibly it was longer” (188).

In both “Great Falls” and “Optimists” the distance between mother and son constitutes a mystery in itself: readers never learn who avoids whom, only that mother and son encounter each other occasionally by chance, through the “coincidence” which moves in and through women. While these chance meetings reinforce some sort of connection (Jackie says, “I can say, at least, that we know each other”), they provide no new understanding (49). In a chance encounter with her son in a grocery store, Frank's mother revives the enigma central to Boyd's death by literally going out of her way to deny any relationship between herself and Boyd. Then, they part in a way that seems like abandonment: she kisses Frank through an open car window and holds him “for a moment that seemed like a long time before she turned away, finally, and left me there alone” (191). She leaves with the man who was with her in the grocery store. Thus, for Frank as for the adult Jackie, who reports seeing his mother “with one man or other,” the mother's sexuality continues to draw her away from her son and into some unknown realm.

Les in “Communist,” another adolescent protagonist, also undergoes an incident which highlights his mother's sexuality along with male violence. Older than his counterparts at sixteen, he feels not so much abandoned as pushed into male adulthood and confronted with the isolation it can bring. He has already had “a few boxing bouts” and met “some girlfriends from that” (217). When he goes goose hunting with Glen, his widowed mother's boyfriend, he actually fires rather than assisting as Jackie does. The hunt (which may be illegal) seems another example of mindless slaughter, as Glen and Les fire into a huge flock of geese rising from a lake. Unlike Jackie, Les expresses strong emotions about hunting: his awe at the beauty of the rising flock mingles with his sense of power at his ability to destroy them. He thinks, “I could kill as many as the times I could shoot,” and a few seconds later he hears a goose fall and land “with an awful sound, a noise a human would make” (227). This tension between male power and compassion intensifies when his mother comes to observe the hunters and geese.

Aileen, the mother, has been critical of hunting and hostile towards Glen, who has reappeared after a long absence. She remarks pointedly that “‘[g]eese mate for life. … I hope you know that. They're special birds’” (219). When she finally joins the hunters, she admires the beauty of the geese in flight, but she also seems more tolerant of hunting and praises the hunters for the six geese they have killed. Les points out a seventh, wounded goose, swimming near the shore but unable to fly. Inexplicably, Glen refuses to retrieve the goose when Aileen asks him to, and pulls Les back roughly when he tries to do so. Aileen walks away, pronouncing a final condemnation on Glen: “‘You don't have a heart, Glen,’ she said. ‘There's nothing to love in you. You're just a son of a bitch, that's all’” (231).

In championing the goose, Aileen rejects the fatalism of the women of “Optimists” and “Great Falls.” Rather, she displays responsibility and what Ford calls affection, even though it might be futile (what would they do with the wounded goose?). This opens up a new possibility for the maturing protagonist, one that Les soon has the opportunity to exercise. Glen pulls a handgun and kills the wounded goose, shooting it repeatedly like an enraged assassin. Then he offers the handgun to Les, saying, “‘Don't you want to shoot me? … I'm ready for it right now.’” His gesture associates the solitary, disabled goose with himself, a Vietnam veteran who drinks “most of the time.” As in “Optimists,” the wounded bird evokes the man overtaken by anger and violence. Les, though he wants to hit Glen—”hit him as hard in the face as I could, and see him on the ground bleeding and crying and pleading for me to stop”—resists his own anger and opts for his mother's responsibility. Les sees Glen as “scared” of “something soft in himself.” Partly because he identifies with Glen, he begins to feel “how sad and remote the world was to me” (232). He takes on the lonely burden of male responsibility, where violence destroys but compassion risks vulnerability.

Later, his mother introduces him to another sort of disturbing responsibility by very seriously and deliberately asking him, “‘Do you think I'm still very feminine? I'm thirty-two years old now. You don't know what that means. But do you think I am?’” (234). The question makes Les feel “the way you feel when you are on a trestle all alone and the train is coming, and you know you have to decide.” He knows that “that means” he must acknowledge his mother as a sexual being—that she is asking his opinion as a sexual man. He answers affirmatively, but then tries “to think of something else” (235). In this case, the mother's sexuality does not drive her to abandon her son, but it separates them nevertheless.

“Optimists” represents the final example of the process by which the boy loses his nurturing mother. Through that process, he also learns to mistrust the aggressiveness of the traditional male role and to trust the power of language, which both mediates and isolates. In subsequent stories, Ford's protagonists continue to explore both male aggression (which usually fails) and the possibilities of words. In addition, they begin to seek the elusive “affection” and nurturing through relationships with women and male friends rather than with parents.

INDIFFERENT NYMPHS

In “Children,” seventeen-year-old George experiences male aggression vicariously through his friend Claude, and confronts sexuality in the sixteen-year-old runaway Lucy. Claude's father, a Blackfoot whose rough manner and prison record make him seem “dangerous,” has brought Lucy to town and spent the night with her in a motel, then assigned his son to keep her out of sight, bribing him with “shut-up money.” Claude initially sees Lucy as a symbol of his own powerlessness in the face of his father's moral carelessness and reacts with childish spite: “‘I think we should kill her … just to piss him off’” (75). Throughout the day, as the boys take Lucy fishing, Claude alternately exchanges taunts with her, admires her sexually, and tries to show off before her. Later, after he has had sex with her, he becomes protective and proprietary, suggesting that they drive Lucy to the bus station in Great Falls rather than return her to his father, and saying, “‘I wish I could marry her. I wish I was old’” (97). Though his attitude towards her changes, Claude always imagines Lucy in the light of his own ego. He remains traditionally male, and his aggressive fishing, like all male adventures in Ford's short stories, ends abruptly when he is cut by a whitefish fin.

Lucy embodies the mythic association between women and nature, both of which invite conquest. George's narration repeatedly describes her green dress with the clichéd epithet “as green as grass” (81). Like nature, she can never be fully explained; her motives, George thinks, are “a mystery” (80). Paradoxically, she seems most mysterious and self-contained when most vulnerable. She responds to Claude's adolescent taunt “‘I bet you'd fuck a pig in knickers’” by asking, “‘You want me to take my dress off?’” (93) and then takes off all of her clothes. Her naked body, like nature, eludes any formula the boys might apply to her. Looking at her, George thinks: “she was already someone who could be by herself in the world. And neither Claude nor I were anything like that” (94).

In George's experience, he and Claude cannot “be by [themselves] in the world” precisely because they need Lucy to develop and sustain their male identities. Lucy senses this, at one point asking them, “‘Are you boys men now?’” (82). Their encounter with her develops their capacity for friendship by forcing them to deal with jealousy and competition, which they do, successfully. Claude's experience with Lucy makes him see himself as someone who could marry and love a woman, and perhaps it tempers his aggression: When he gives her a fish to kill, Lucy throws both the fish and Claude's knife into the creek. Later, he imagines himself loving Lucy as his father cannot. When Claude expresses this, George feels his “own life, exactly at that instant, begin to go by [him]” (98). With Claude, he enters into the inexorable cycle of reproduction, aging, and death, drawn in by Lucy, the light that marks the beginning.

George does not seize his own opportunity to have sex with Lucy and remains relatively passive through most of the day. Rather than act out as Claude does, he engages in the kind of reflection and explanation with which the Ford protagonist typically confronts experience. As Claude and Lucy have sex, he thinks: “She was pushing everything out. She was just an average girl” (95). “Pushing everything out,” like many such comments in Ford's works, seems at once apt and cryptic. Does it mean that she is putting fantasies and emotions into action? If so, she behaves much as Claude does, trying on adult behavior. However, Claude and (vicariously) George respond to her, while she initiates action from inside herself, hence her apparent self-possession.

In characterizing Lucy, George at once likens her to himself and his friend, acknowledges her power, and tries to diffuse that power by leveling her into an “average girl.” These thoughts fail to satisfy him, perhaps because he recognizes them as attempts to mediate her emotional impact upon him. He tries to think differently, to draw upon the power of language to create empathy: “But I did not, as I waited, want to think about only myself. I realized that was all I had ever really done, and that possibly it was all you could ever do, and that it would make you bitter and lonesome and useless. So I tried to think instead about Lucy” (96). In expressing this desire, George articulates the complex process through which Ford's narrators use language to come to terms with the world. Though language may inevitably serve to distance us from others, may always fail, we continue to imagine that it might also help us to connect, to express affection.

Trying to think about Lucy, George thinks instead about his mother, who has left him and his father and at the time of the story is “gone for good … though we didn't know that” (70). There, too, he encounters only mystery, imagining his mother behaving like Lucy, yet thinking such a picture must be “wrong.” For George, as for the rest of Ford's adolescent protagonists, the loss of the mother's nurturing is associated with her sexuality. As the oldest of those protagonists, George begins to imagine replacing that loss through his own sexuality, rediscovering his mother in the women he meets. In a process typical of Ford's adult narrators, he seeks self-knowledge through an encounter with a woman who seems to embody the mysterious autonomy he desires for himself.

The thirty-seven-year-old narrator of “Winterkill,” Les Snow, resembles the adolescent protagonists, partly because he has been laid off and his life, like theirs, seems a matter of waiting. In addition, he has lost his mother's nurturing because of her sexuality: he has come back to live with her and found her living with a boyfriend with whom he does not get along, though, he assures the reader, “I do not blame him for that” (149). In “Winterkill,” as in “Children,” two male buddies encounter a woman. Les's friend and neighbor, Troy, and the woman, Nola, seem as marginal as Les himself: Troy is confined to a wheelchair; Nola is widowed, left with only two thousand dollars. All three seek diversion in bars: “Just drunks, you'd think, and be right” (159).

In a scene reminiscent of “Children,” Les and Nola have sex in Troy's Checker cab while Troy fishes. Holding Nola, Les thinks of his mother and her boyfriend snuggled warm in bed and tries to warm himself and Nola. Though it may warm them temporarily, their intimacy yields no lasting meaning. “‘I'll do this, you know … and not even care about it. Just do a thing. It means nothing more than how I feel at this time,’” Nola says (162). Like Lucy, she seems intact in her mystery, acting on her own impulses rather than responding to others. Like the mother, she offers no permanent shelter. Rather, her isolation and mystery evoke a kind of danger, as she tells a story of death and betrayal. She has learned that her fatally sick husband has a mistress, and her wildly emotional response has led immediately to his final heart attack. Though she has loved him, she had begun to anticipate his death and thus seems somehow to have precipitated it.

She seems a danger to Troy and Les as well, not only to their friendship but also through coincidence: while she and Les seek warmth in the cab, Troy hooks what feels like a huge fish, strong enough to pull him out of his chair. At Troy's request, Les wades into the swift, freezing water to retrieve the kill. In a typical Ford twist on male adventure, the “fish” turns out to be a dead deer, and once again, the wounded/dead animal corresponds to the defeated man. Troy looks “as though it was him who had washed up there and was finished” (166). Les's dangerous act brings only pain, as Troy weeps in bitterness at the obvious irony of his catch. Even that intense bitterness seems diminished by nature, as “the river's rushing” (167) drowns out Troy's voice.

As the story comes to an end, the intensity of the characters' experiences—sex, danger, despair—dissipates rather than builds. The three eat together; Troy takes Nola back to the bar; Les walks, thinks, and finally at dawn hears Troy and Nola return and enter Troy's flat. Les concludes “that we had all had a good night finally. Nothing had happened that hadn't turned out all right” (170). As if to complete the symmetry of the events, Les goes out to fish. His act and his pronouncements transform the potentially disruptive events of the previous night into a ritual—a kind of ironic baptism which, perhaps temporarily, sustains the hapless trio. Les, at least, comes to feel “that though my life at that moment seemed to have taken a bad turn and paused, it still meant something to me as a life” (169-170).

THE BURNING BUSH

Les must mediate the potential danger he confronts in order to use it; nevertheless, the danger embodied by Nola provides a passage to a kind sage on a train from Spokane to Minot the scene for a series of encounters with women who embody danger. In each case, sex with the woman provides a means of confronting the mystery of mortality—an expression of the human need to feel powerful and in control despite our helplessness in the face of death.

As the journey begins, Vic's wife, Marge, completes a game-book quiz which purports to predict how long people will live, asking her husband the questions as she answers them herself. As the reader later learns, the quiz carries an ironic poignancy: a year earlier Marge has become ill as the result of a tumor. Her doctors predict that the tumor is cancerous and that she will “probably die”; however, she recovers completely after surgery. The quiz asks: “‘Do you feel protective often, or do you often feel in need of protection?’” (111). Vic answers “both,” which turns out to be the best answer, but which leaves open the question explored by the story—when should one be “protective” by trying to escape or shut out the reality of death and danger, and when should one acknowledge them by being open and vulnerable to them?

Vic and Marge are traveling to Minot to provide “protection” in the form of support for Marge's sister, Pauline, who has become distraught at the arrest of her boyfriend and “cut her wrists … and bled all over the dog” (116). Though this attempt would never have proved fatal, Vic knows that “[d]eath was not an idle notion to Pauline,” who “had taken an overdose once, back in the old wild days” (115). In those wild days Vic felt attracted to Pauline, when her “inflamed look” made him feel “like being in a car going down a hill out of control in the dark” (116). To experience Pauline's sexual power is to participate in her deliberate openness to death and danger—for Vic, to risk a delicious destruction. The more responsible Marge remarks that Pauline “makes life stop when she wants it to,” acknowledging the power inherent in her risk-taking, but renounces that power for herself: “‘I guess I wouldn't want to be like her,’” and Vic responds, “‘You're not like her. … You're sympathetic’” (147). Caught up in risk-taking, people like Pauline lose the opportunity for affection—other people fade in the light of the flame of danger.

Vic has only one date with Pauline before meeting and marrying he again encounters death and danger through Cleo, the wild younger sister of his next-door neighbor. Cleo identifies herself with an entire realm of death and danger—an outlaw motorcycle gang named Satan's Diplomats. Although she presents herself as their victim, her accounts of coercion, threats, and kidnapping carry a certain disturbing relish. For instance, to show Vic the “involuntary” “tattoo of a Satan's head she had on her ass[,] [s]he pulled up her shorts and turned her back to him from across the table, and smiled when she did it” (128). The smile and the provocative gesture belie the distress associated with an “involuntary” tattoo.

Though he listens to Cleo's melodramatic troubles, he balks at talking about his own—his feeling that “[h]e loved Marge, and if she died his life would be over. … [H]e'd go out in the woods and hang himself so no one but animals would ever find him” (129). In remaining silent about Marge, Vic allows himself to imagine that sharing brandy and sex with Cleo will help him forget his anxieties and comfort her as well. However, their actual encounter brings no comfort. Rather, it plunges him into an underworld nightmare. Partly inspired by demonic television images from the rock channel Cleo has insisted on leaving on (without the sound), Vic dreams that he has hanged himself only to learn that Marge will survive and “it was too late for him. All was lost and ruined forever” (132). Sex with Cleo constitutes a descent into Hades, not a temporary respite from death and danger. Like the story of Orpheus, Vic's dream ends in the loss of the beloved. In a reverse of the myth, Vic remains in the world of the dead while Marge ascends into the light “smiling out of a sunny window” (132).

In the real-life aftermath of his dream, he receives a phone call threatening Marge's life. The caller, who identifies himself as “the devil,” reports that Cleo has died, but Vic thinks he hears her voice in the background. Cleo dwells in the realm of death and danger, remains in the fire (as evident from her wild red hair) without being consumed. In seeking oblivion—“protection” from death with Cleo—Vic has only increased his and Marge's vulnerability. When he realizes this, he takes refuge in the kind of platitude that Ford's narrators often evoke for protection. Things you do pass away and are gone, and you need only to outlive them for your life to be better, steadily better. This is what you can count on” (136). This combination of stoical acceptance (with its echo of Ecclesiastes) and American optimism (“steadily better”) represents the limits of human possibility in the face of death for the Ford protagonist. One must at once accept and remain somehow “cheerful.”

Women characters more readily accept death and danger, even dwell within its realm as Cleo seems to do. Having recalled Pauline and Cleo, and thinking of Marge asleep in a roomette as the train rolls on towards Minot, Vic moves yet again into the risk and refuge of a woman's body. Sergeant Doris Benton, one of a group of soldiers on the train, first flirts with Vic and finally takes him back to her roomette for vodka and sex. As a soldier, Sergeant Benton embodies both reactions to death and danger—she protects the country and makes herself vulnerable in order to do so. In addition, she seems allied to a realm of mystery because she is stoned on marijuana during part of her encounter with Vic.

Unable to sleep, Vic joins Doris to escape the boredom of having “nothing to do but stare at a dark, cheerless landscape” (137). But despite the pleasure of the encounter, he wakes and thinks for a moment that “possibly he was dead, that this is how it would feel” (145). Doris affords no escape from the void, for she carries the void within herself: “[Y]ou can do a thing and have it mean nothing but what you feel that minute” (143). Once again, a woman contains the mystery and offers neither escape from it nor a solution to it.

Reunited with Marge, Vic begins to come to terms with the mystery. Out the window of the train, he sees that a “wide fire was burning on the open prairie” (146). The actual peril of the fire recalls the symbolic danger of Pauline's “inflamed look” and Cleo's red hair. Like her sister[s], Marge resonates with death and danger; the sight of the fire drives her to her “remotest thoughts,” rather than to thoughts of their own possible danger, which concerns Vic. Unlike the other women, however, Marge reassures and nurtures him. He accepts the peril of death, not only outside the train in the flames but inside, in the form of the scar from Marge's surgery. “This can do it, he thought, this can finish you, this small thing” (148). He feels “dizzy and insufficient” but “calmed,” protected from the heat and light of the fire only by the window shade, conscious yet accepting of its presence all around him.

Vic, in his encounters with women, confronts the death and danger he vainly desires to control. “Lloyd,” his comic counterpart in “Going to the Dogs,” wants to manipulate the world around him in order to realize the American dream of wealth and success. But two women deer hunters easily manipulate him, teaching him the futility of his dreams of power. After his business schemes have failed and his wife has abandoned him and sold their car, Lloyd imagines stiffing his landlord for the rent and taking the train to Florida. The deer hunters foil his plans: while Bonnie seduces him, Phyllis steals his ticket and money, leaving him to realize that “it was only the beginning of bad luck” (108).

Lloyd represents Orpheus at another phase of the myth—when he is set upon and killed by the Maenads. Bonnie and Phyllis have killed a deer, which death has fragmented into disconnected images, a lolling tongue, melting snow on its entrails. Like dead animals in Ford's stories, the buck represents the hapless man. Unlike such animals, this deer appears as food—the “deer steak” Lloyd covets but never receives. Instead, Bonnie and Phyllis figuratively consume him. Dressed in a bathrobe and baking a coffeecake, Lloyd seems feminized, vulnerable to the overtures of strangers.

Ford's Maenads also figure as parodic Dianas, unchaste huntresses with camouflage paste on their faces, heavy women made massive by bulky winter clothing. Phyllis, in particular, affects a harsh style of speech that clashes wonderfully with her Arcadian name. The deer, she reports, “ran like a scalded dog … and dropped like a load of shit” (101). Bonnie's speech, though gentler, may be more treacherous; she flatters Lloyd with a compliment that undermines even as it praises: ‘“You've got arms like a wheelchair athlete’” (107). Her compliment gives him the illusion that the spoils of the world are his. “It made me feel reckless, as if I had killed a deer myself and had a lot of ideas to show to the world” (107). (His wife has disparaged his “ideas.”) Together, both big women dwarf his aspirations of easy success. Just as women can inhabit the realm of death and danger, they can live more easily in the zone of risk from which Ford's less law-abiding male narrators imagine they can snatch security.

In “Rock Springs,” another narrator imagines that he can manipulate his way into the American dream of success. More actively larcenous than Lloyd, Earl Middleton steals a cranberry-colored Mercedes in an effort to move himself, his daughter, Cheryl, and his girlfriend, Edna, to a better life in Florida. When the Mercedes breaks down, Earl walks into a trailer park overshadowed by a huge, mysterious plant to ask for help. In one trailer, a middle-aged “Negro” woman allows him to use her phone. Earl finds the woman attractive and feels intrigued by her almost perpetual smile, which persists even as she tells him of her son's death, her grandson's brain damage, and her own and her husband's displacement. Still smiling, she identifies the plant behind them as a gold mine. Her smiling face, which Earl describes as “shining” at one point, evokes the glittering surface of the gold, but her demeanor suggests that something more complicated lies beneath the superficial shine. She looks at Earl with “a look that seemed to want truth” and says in parting, “I just passed you on to whatever's coming to you” (17), as if she might know his fate.

In a sense, the interaction between shining surface and shadowy depths is Earl's fate. In search of his own particular “gold mine,” he confuses surface with reality, the illusion of wealth—stolen cars and rubber checks—with genuine prosperity. He also confuses his acts, “which were oftentimes offender's acts, and [his] ideas, which were as good as the gold they mined there where the bright lights were blazing” (17). His ideas, like the gold he has only heard about, create a glossy surface which he believes reflects his true nature. His acts, which have consequences, actually define him.

When Earl, Edna, and Cheryl take a taxi to the nearby town of Rock Springs, they learn of the corruption beneath the brightly lit white surface of the gold plant: the driver complains that the trailers are full of prostitutes and pimps from New York City, “prosperity's fruit” (20), he bitterly declares. The smiling, shining woman might be the pleasant nurturing creature she appears to be—or she might be a prostitute. The discovery of a metaphorical “gold mine” almost always reveals corruption, a failure of moral responsibility.

Edna suspects the time Earl has spent in the trailer park, asking, “‘Did you find somebody over there in the trailers you'd rather stay with?’” (18). Though unfounded, her suspicions aptly express her growing mistrust of the illusion that she fears that Earl prefers to “stay with.” Earlier, she has told a story which reveals her own growing sense of moral responsibility. Like other stories told by Ford's women characters, it features unexpected death: Edna has won a monkey from a customer in the bar where she works, and, later, warned that monkeys can be dangerous, she has tied the monkey up in such a way that it strangles accidentally during the night. Though she begins the story as an entertaining anecdote, Edna becomes “gloomy all of a sudden, as if she saw some aspect of the story she had never seen before” (7). She calls the story “shameful” and reproaches Earl for trying to comfort her by absolving her of responsibility. The monkey, even though acquired on a roll of the dice like “easy money,” brings with it danger, death, and a responsibility Edna believes she failed to take.

Apprehensive about the consequences of his thefts and lies, she accepts Earl's offer to send her back to Montana. She explains her change of attitude by saying that she no longer likes to go to motels—that the sense of easily purchased freedom and detachment they provide is a “fantasy” she can no longer maintain. Earl, of course, likes motels and readily buys the illusion of security they afford, just as he readily steals the illusion of power and prosperity in the form of expensive cars. In the parking lot of the motel he looks for a car to steal, noting that the owners of one car have “the very same things I would have in my car if I had a car” (26). Just as he identifies with the owners of the car, he invites the reader to identify with him. He asks, “[W]hat would you think a man was doing if you saw him in the middle of the night looking in the windows of cars in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn? … Would you think he was anybody like you?” (27). This address to the reader, unique in Ford's short stories, conveys an unusually direct moral admonition—a warning against the “fantasy” of easily purchased happiness and security.

Earl's attempt to connect with the reader has its counterpart in a moment of affection when Edna, having resolved to leave him, says, “None of this is a matter of not loving you, you know that” (25). Ironically, her comforting declaration may come from the same developing sense of responsibility that compels her to leave him. Like Marge in “Empire,” Edna has the stability to offer affection because she has renounced the lure of danger in favor of responsibility.

TIES THAT BIND

Another responsible character, Arlene, the wife of “Sweethearts,” comforts her ex-husband, Bobby, even as she rejects his moral irresponsibility. Though she has long been divorced from Bobby and now lives with Russell, the story's narrator, Arlene puts up bail money for Bobby when he is arrested for writing bad checks and then robbing a convenience store. On the morning of the story, Arlene and Russell take Bobby to jail, where he will spend a year. As Bobby struggles with fear, anger, and despair, Arlene both reassures him, saying, “‘You're among friends, though, sweetheart,’” and responds angrily to his resentment of her, reminding him that she wanted to divorce him (55).

Unlike the women characters who dwell in danger, Arlene's autonomy consists in detaching herself from it even as she accepts its reality. On the way to jail, Bobby throws a pistol into the front seat, saying, “‘I thought I might kill Arlene, but I changed my mind’” (62). Russ hides the pistol, but he forgets it until Arlene suggests that they throw it in the river. She tosses the gun out the car window and into the river as casually as a spent cigarette, but Russ defines the gesture as ritual, saying, “Maybe that'll change [Bobby's] luck” (66). For Arlene, avoiding destructive behavior comes naturally, as a part of self-preservation. She explains, “‘It's hard to love pain, if you're me.’” Russ, on the other hand, believes that anyone can become a criminal, as his use of the second person demonstrates: “Somehow, and for no apparent reason, your decisions got tipped over and you lost your hold” (68). Avoiding danger requires luck, not getting “tipped over” by circumstances, and constant vigilance, maintaining your hold.

Russell maintains his hold partly by reciting the verbal formulas which sustain so many of Ford's narrators—words which reassure despite their emptiness. He tells himself he knows what love is about. “It was about never being in that place you said you'd never be in.” This circular, self-referential formula seems a weak bulwark against the forces of circumstances which can so easily tip anyone over. As Russ continues to ruminate, the last words of the story reveal his most important source of strength. “And [love] was not about being alone. Never that. Never that.” Arlene, who can assure Russ that he's still her sweetheart even as she admits, “‘We don't know where any of this is going, do we?’” (68) protects him against a future like Bobby's simply by remaining with him.

Lois, the wife in “Fireworks,” sustains her husband, Eddie, by trying to encourage him even though he has been unemployed for six months. As in “Sweethearts,” her ex-husband—a man who is both rival and counterpart to Eddie—is associated with danger and death. Louie, the ex-husband, shows up at the bar where Lois works. When she calls Eddie to invite him to join them, Lois tells him that Louie has become “‘an extraditer,’” someone who “‘travels the breadth of the country bringing people back here so they can go to jail.’” Though he isn't in uniform, Louie has the modern trappings of power, “‘a gun and a little beeper’” (196). Lois diminishes Louie's success even as she reports it: it's only a “little” beeper, and the man Louie is extraditing has written a forty-seven-dollar bad check.

Over the telephone, Louie tries to engage Eddie in banter: “‘You know what an Italian girl puts behind her ears to make herself more attractive?’” (196) and offers to cut him in on what he presents as a profitable sideline in Italian rugs. Eddie rejects these overtures, convinced that Louie is only interested in Lois. As in other stories, stereotypically male behavior marks an uneasy territory between bonding and rivalry. In “Fireworks,” however, the potential tragedy of “Children” or “Winterkill” becomes comic because of Louie's buffoonish behavior and Lois's descriptions of him. She tells Eddie that he has grown fat and unattractive and that he has “‘a house full of these cheap Italian carpets, and nobody to sell them to’” (209). Even as he resents and feels threatened by Louie, who has asked Lois to go to Florida with him, Eddie regrets hearing about his changed appearance: “It was bad luck if that was the way you looked to the world” (208).

Just as Lois's comments on Louie disparage the threat he represents, her treatment of Eddie helps assuage the fear of failure evoked by Louie's apparent success. As they drive home, observing public and private 4th of July fireworks, she recalls his mother, a “sweet old lady” who loved fireworks. In a gesture, she draws upon the mother's nurturing power to create a ritual conveying power upon Eddie. Lois dances before the car in the rain, waving a pair of sparklers and “making swirls and patterns and star-falls for him that … for a moment, caught the world and stopped it, as though something sudden and perfect had come to earth in a furious glowing for him and for him alone” (214). For a rare moment, Eddie enjoys the full power of women's nurturing.

THINKING ABOUT HER

The return of the mother in a blaze of light illustrates the mythic aspects of the women of Rock Springs: Lucy, flaming Cleo, the temporary heat of Nola in the cab, all shed a magical radiance. But Ford's mythic touches do not transform his women characters into changeless goddesses; readers can see that men characters create that mythic glow. That glow may illuminate a relationship, like the fire outside the train window in “Empire,” or it may blind, like the shining face of the woman in the trailer park. Mythmaking simply forms a part of the difficult process whereby one person tries to think about another.

When George tries to think about Lucy, after first acknowledging that thinking only about yourself is “possibly … all you could ever do” (96), he articulates a modern concern. In a world where individuals have become increasingly isolated and autonomous, can one person imagine the experience of another and regard that other as subject rather than object? In Rock Springs, Ford repeatedly raises this question. His male protagonists' experiences demonstrate how emotional need can shape one person's perceptions of another, and the language with which they describe those experiences reveals the limitations of their understanding.

Ford's emphasis upon the process of trying to think about the other, along with the variety of his women characters and the many traits they share in common with their men, invites readers to see them as subjects even when the men characters cannot. Finally, their gender seems only the embodiment of otherness—the mystery inherent in the effort to comprehend another person, to think about her. Or even him.

Works Cited

Crouse, David. “Resisting Reduction: Closure in Richard Ford's Rock Springs and Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth.” Canadian Literature 146 (1995): 51-64.

Gornick, Vivian. “Tenderhearted Men: Lonesome, Sad and Blue.” New York Times Book Review, 16 September 1990, natl. ed., sec. 7: 14.