They looked like shoes some country singer would wear, or a salesman. He was handsome, but only like someone you would see beside you in a dime store and not notice again.

“I like it out here,” Woody said, his head down, looking at his shoes. “Nothing to bother you. I bet you’d see Chicago if the world was flat. The Great Plains commence here.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Woody looked up at me, cupping his smoke with one hand. “Do you play football?”

“No,” I said. I thought about asking him something about my mother. But I had no idea what it would be.

“I have been drinking,” Woody said, “but I’m not drunk now.”

The wind rose then, and from behind the house I could hear Major bark once from far away, and I could smell the irrigation ditch, hear it hiss in the field. It ran down from Highwood Creek to the Missouri, twenty miles away. It was nothing Woody knew about, nothing he could hear or smell. He knew nothing about anything that was here. I heard my father say the words, “That’s a real joke,” from inside the house, then the sound of a drawer being opened and shut, and a door closing. Then nothing else.

Woody turned and looked into the dark toward where the glow of Great Falls rose on the horizon, and we both could see the flashing lights of a plane lowering to land there. “I once passed my brother in the Los Angeles airport and didn’t even recognize him,” Woody said, staring into the night. “He recognized me, though. He said, ‘Hey, bro, are you mad at me, or what?’ I wasn’t mad at him. We both had to laugh.”

Woody turned and looked at the house. His hands were still in his pockets, his cigarette clenched between his teeth, his arms taut. They were, I saw, bigger, stronger arms than I had thought. A vein went down the front of each of them. I wondered what Woody knew that I didn’t. Not about my mother—I didn’t know anything about that and didn’t want to—but about a lot of things, about the life out in the dark, about coming out here, about airports, even about me. He and I were not so far apart in age, I knew that. But Woody was one thing, and I was another. And I wondered how I would ever get to be like him, since it didn’t necessarily seem so bad a thing to be.

“Did you know your mother was married before?” Woody said.

“Yes,” I said. “I knew that.”

“It happens to all of them, now,” he said. “They can’t wait to get divorced.”

“I guess so,” I said.

Woody dropped his cigarette into the gravel and toed it out with his black-and-white shoe. He looked up at me and smiled the way he had inside the house, a smile that said he knew something he wouldn’t tell, a smile to make you feel bad because you weren’t Woody and never could be.

It was then that my father came out of the house. He still had on his plaid hunting coat and his wool cap, but his face was as white as snow, as white as I have ever seen a human being’s face to be. It was odd.