The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Nine

I parked in the dark shadow of the maple tree in front of Beth’s house.

“You want me to wait or catch air?” I said.

“Come on in. She’s got some beer in the icebox.”

“This is your caper, daddy-o. I’m going to rain-check this one.”

He walked across the lawn and the dead leaves onto the wood porch. Under the door light, his body looked small and white. He had to lean against the wall for balance when he knocked again.

I guess I wanted to see Buddy ruin himself with Beth, but as I looked at him there, dissipated, his head crawling with snakes, the unfulfilled rut still in his loins, I wished I could get him back in the car and home again.

Beth opened the door, and I heard Buddy’s voice in its strained and careful attempt to sound sober. But the words came too fast, as though they had been rehearsed and pulled out like a piece of tape.

“Somebody burned out the old man’s barn this morning, and we were cruising around and decided to drop by.”

She didn’t open the screen, and there was a quiet moment while she said something to him, and then his arms went up in the air and he started to rock on both feet in the shadowy light.

“They’re my boys, too, ain’t they?” he said, and his voice became louder after a few seconds of silence. “I mean what the hell they have to go to bed so early for, anyway?” Then another pause while Beth spoke.

“You keep listening to that goddamn psychologist and they’re going to grow up in Warm Springs.” Another pause.

“I’ll roll out the whole fucking neighborhood if I want to. We’ll give all these straight cats something to talk about over their breakfast cereal for a week.”

I saw Beth open the screen, then latch it and turn off the porch light. I waited fifteen minutes in the darkness of the maple tree and listened to a hillbilly radio station in Spokane, then decided to go to the Oxford for a chicken-fried steak and a cup of coffee and leave Buddy to his self-flagellation.

But then the light came on again, and Beth stepped out on the porch in a pair of blue jeans and a denim shirt bleached almost white with Clorox. Her blue-black hair hung in a tangle on her shoulders, and her bare feet looked as cold as ivory in the light. She motioned at me, a gentle gesture of the fingers as though she were saying good-bye to someone, and I walked across the dry, stiff grass and dead leaves toward her with a quickening in my heart and emptiness in my legs that confirmed altogether too quickly what had been in my mind all day while I had let Buddy tear his chemistry apart with whiskey and guilt.

“Help me put him upstairs. I don’t want the children to see him,” she said.

Buddy was leaned back against the couch in the lamplight, his knees wide apart; his head rolled about on his shoulders like a balloon that wanted to break its string. He was talking at the far wall as though there were someone standing in front of him.

I tried to lift him by one arm, and he slapped at me with his hand, his hair over his eyes and ears.

“What the shit you doing, man?” he said. “You trying to get me kicked out of two places in one day?”

“We got to go to bed. Your old man wants us to finish the fence line by the slough tomorrow,” I said, though I should have known better than to patronize a drunk, particularly Buddy.

“Well, cool. Louisiana Zeno is looking out for the old man’s Angus after he went through the flames.” He tried to raise his head and focus on my face, but the effort was too much.

“What did he take today?” Beth said.

“Just a lot of booze.”

“No, he’s been using dope again, hasn’t he?”

I heard the boys’ voices shouting in the backyard. Beth shook him again by the shoulder.

“Get up,” she said. “Straighten up your head and stand.”

Buddy fell sideways against the arm of the couch, with one wrist bent back against his thigh. His face was as bloodless and empty as a child’s. The back screen slammed, and Beth walked hurriedly into the kitchen and told the children to stay outside. She returned with a wet towel in her hand and pressed it into Buddy’s face.

“Goddamn,” he said, his head rolling back.

“Walk to the stairs,” she said. “Lean forward and hold on to my arm. Damn you, Buddy, they’re not going to see you like this.”

“Come on, partner, let’s get up,” I said, and wondered at my pretense toward friendship.

We stood him up between us, like a collapsing gargoyle, and walked him toward the staircase. His head hit the banister once, his knees knocked like wood into the steps, and I had to grab his belt and pull with all my weight to keep him from rolling backward down to the first floor.

As I got him over the last step onto the safety of the carpet, my lungs breathless and my good arm weak with strain, I had a quick lesson about the way we as sane and sober people treat the drunk and hopelessly deranged. Considering the amount of acid and booze in his system, and the pathetic behavior in front of his wife on the couch, I had believed that his brain, at that moment, was as soft as yesterday’s ice cream, and as a result I had helped drag him upstairs with the care and dignity that you would show a bag of dirty laundry. But when I stood up for a breath before the last haul into the bedroom, he fixed one dilated, bloodshot eye on me from the floor, the other closed in the angry squint of a prizefighter who has just received a murderous leathery shot, and said:

“You really go for the balls when you win, Zeno.”

I put him facedown on the bed with his head slightly over the edge so the blood would stay in his brain and he wouldn’t become sick. Downstairs, a moment later, I heard him hit the floor.

“There’s nothing you can do for him,” Beth said.

“I’ll get him back on the bed.”

“If he wakes up, he’ll wake up fighting. I know Buddy when he’s like this. He chooses the people closest to him to help him destroy himself. Take a beer out of the icebox while I get the boys ready for bed.”

“I’d better go.”

“Stay. I want to talk with you.”

The boys came in from the backyard, their faces flushed with cold and play, and drank glasses of powdered milk at the kitchen table. Then they went up the stairs with their eyes fixed curiously on me.

“I bet you still don’t believe I used to pitch against Marty Marion,” I said.

“My daddy says you’re a guitar player that was in jail with him,” the younger boy said over the banister.

Learn one day not to try to con kids, Paret, I thought.

“Upstairs, and I don’t want to hear any feet walking around,” Beth said.

The boys trudged up to their room as though they were being sent to a firing squad.

“What’s this about Frank’s barn?” Beth said.

“Somebody set fire to it this morning and burned it to the ground.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“We couldn’t get one of the Appaloosas out.”

“Does Frank know who it was?”

“He might, but I don’t think he would tell anyone if he does. He seems to play a pretty solitary game.”

“Yes, and it’s the type that eventually damages everybody around him.”

“That hasn’t been my impression about him.”

“He draws an imaginary line that nobody else knows about, and when someone steps over it, you’d better watch out for Frank Riordan.”

“How long did you and Buddy live with him?”

I didn’t know that they had, but at this point I simply guessed it as an obvious fact.

“Long enough for Buddy to have to make choices between his own family and his father,” she said.

I avoided the flash in her eyes and looked blankly around at the worn furniture and wondered how I got into this subject. I could think of nothing to say.

“Why did he use dope today?” she asked.

“I guess the fire set off some strange things in his head. I don’t know. Sometimes people see the same thing differently.”

“What do you mean?”

“He got wiped out after I followed his old man into the barn and he stayed outside. So I guess he thinks he froze and so he’s a coward. After anything like that, you go back over it in your head and try to understand what you did or didn’t do, but he doesn’t have the experience to see it for what it was.”

She didn’t understand what I was saying, and I wished I hadn’t started to explain.

“Buddy’s not a coward,” I said. “I’ve seen him go up against yard bullies at Angola that would have cut him to pieces in the shower if they had sensed any fear in him. He laid it on pretty heavy in the car this afternoon about the Bronze Star I got in Korea, but what he doesn’t understand is that you go in one direction or the other, or just stand still, for the same reason — you’re too scared to do anything else. It doesn’t have anything to do with what you are.

“Look, I shouldn’t have brought him here. It’s not his fault. He just fried his head today. And I think I better cut.”

“No, I have more beer and some sandwiches in the icebox. Just a minute.”

She walked toward the kitchen with a cigarette in her hand, her thighs and smooth rear end tight against her jeans, and her uncombed hair tangled with light. She came back with a tray and sat on the couch next to me with one bare foot pulled under her leg.

“How did you stay sober while you were carrying around the madman of Ravalli County?” she said, and laughed, and all the anger with Buddy and Frank Riordan was gone.

“I got some good news about my arm this morning. They’re going to saw the cast off next week. I’ll probably have to play finger exercises like a kid for a few days, but I ought to have my act back in gear at the beer joint if that fat sheriff doesn’t nail me and get me violated in the meantime.”

“Have you run into Pat Floyd again?”

“He eased himself out to the ranch yesterday afternoon to show me a spent shell he said he picked up across the river from the pulp mill. I might have my signature burned right into it.”

Her eyes passed over mine with a gathering concern, then lowered to the ashtray, where she picked up her cigarette.

“Can you go back to prison?” she said.

“If I left that shell and my print is on it. It might not get me time here, but it could be enough for my P.O. to have me sent back to Louisiana.”

When I saw her expression and realized the casual tone of my voice, I also realized something about the impropriety of speaking out of one’s own cynical experience to people who are not prepared for it.

“Buddy thinks he’s just trying to turn on the butane and get me to jump,” I said.

“Pat Floyd will put you away,” she said.

The seriousness of her voice made something drop inside me.

“Well, you said he wasn’t a hillbilly cop.” But the detachment that I wanted to show in my voice wasn’t there.

“What do you plan to do?”

“Nothing. What the hell can I do? I can sweat this fat man or run, and if I run, I have another three to pull in Angola for sure. I figure I’ll hang around and let Gordo Deficado do his worst.”

“He can do it, Iry.”

“I’ve known some bad men, too.”

She poured some of her beer into my glass and lit another cigarette from my pack.

“I’ve got to roll, kiddo. I’ve burned up too much of your evening,” I said.

“Buddy will need a ride home tomorrow. There’s no point in making two trips.” She looked away from me, and I saw the nervous touch of her finger on the cigarette.

“I don’t want to cause an inconvenience.”

“Oh, shit,” she said, and stood up from the couch and turned off the lamp on the table. In the darkness, she paused momentarily, listening for a sound from upstairs, then began to undress. She unsnapped her blue jeans and pushed them to her ankles, then pulled off her denim shirt and tried to reach for the back of her bra. In her hurried movement, with the glow of the kitchen light against her white stomach, she looked like an embarrassed contortionist in front of an audience of dolts.

My heart was beating, and I felt the heat come into my face when I looked at her bare legs, her white line of swollen stomach above the elastic of her panties, and her wonderful soft breasts pressing against her bra. I looked up the stairs, where my friend was asleep after his day of dissipation, and before I could reflect on whether my quick glance was a matter of concern for Buddy or personal caution for myself, I looked back at Beth again and felt all the weak ache of two years stiffen into an erection.

I rose uncomfortably from the couch in a bent position and unfastened her bra, and she turned toward me and put her arms around my neck as though she wanted to hide her huge white breasts. I pulled her close, with my face in her hair, and kissed her ear and ran both my hands over the small of her back, down inside her panties and over her butt and thighs. I felt like a gorilla bent in an ugly position over a pale statue. I smelled her blue-black hair, her perfume, the dried perspiration on her neck, her breath, and I felt the backs of my thighs start to shake.

She took her arms away and slipped her panties down over her thighs, then stepped out of them.

“Sit on the couch,” she said.

Her body was silhouetted like a soft white sculpture in the glow of light from the kitchen. I undressed and sat back on the couch, and then she moved over me. She moaned once in her woman’s fecund way, her eyes widened, and she spread her fingers across my back.

Then I felt it grow inside of me, too early and beyond any attempt at control, and when it burst away in that heart-twisting moment, she leaned forward and held my head to her breasts as she might a child’s.

In the morning we all had breakfast at the kitchen table, and the sky outside was blue and clear over the elm and maple trees, and the sun shone brightly through the window. The two boys were talking happily about a football game at school, and Beth turned the hash browns and eggs in the skillet as though she were fixing breakfast on any ordinary morning. But I could feel the tension in her whenever she looked toward me and Buddy at once. He was badly hungover, his hand shaking on his cigarette, the eyes puffed and dim and still focused inward on some barrel of snakes out of yesterday. His plate went cold in front of him, and finally he dropped his cigarette in his coffee and rested his forehead on the palm of his hand.

“Boy, I really got one this time,” he said.

I didn’t want to look at him, because I not only felt an awful guilt toward him but also that sense of primitive victory in making a cuckold out of a rival, particularly one who was coming apart while you had it all intact.

“Try some tomato juice,” Beth said.

“You got any ups? Or some of those diet pills will do it,” he said.

“Don’t take anything else,” she said.

He remained with his head in his palm and breathed irregularly.

“Do you have a hangover, Daddy?” the younger boy said.

Buddy got up from the table without answering and walked duckfooted to the icebox. He opened a can of beer and then began looking through the cabinets.

“Where the hell is that bottle of sherry you keep?” he said.

“Don’t do it, Buddy,” she said. “Just let it work out your system and you’ll be all right this afternoon.”

“Give me the sherry and don’t tell me how to survive the morning.”

She took the bottle from under the sink, and he poured a glass half full of it and then filled the rest with beer and broke two raw eggs into it. He sipped the glass slowly at the table, with his head bent over, holding the glass with both hands. Five minutes later the color began to come back into his face, and his hands stopped shaking.

“Man, that’s a little better,” he said. “That whiskey must have had shellac in it. I haven’t had an eggbeater in my head like that since I sniffed some transmission fluid in the joint.” He looked up at Beth, then shook his head. “OK, I know, wrong reference. But, man, somebody must have stuck an enema bag full of piss in my ear last night.”

That’s great, Buddy, I thought.

Beth told the boys to put on their coats and go outside.

“All right, all right, I got a speech defect about bad language,” he said. “But they hear all that shit at school. You don’t have to put earmuffs on them when they’re in the house.”

The table was silent, and Beth made a point of not looking directly at either one of us.

“How did I get upstairs last night? You must have dragged me up there by my heels.”

“You floated up there like a balloon,” I said.

“I feel like somebody worked me over with a slapjack. What did you do to me, partner?” He fixed one watery blue eye on me over his cigarette, and I flinched inside.

“I had to use force on you a little bit after you started taking off your clothes in the street. That wasn’t too bad in itself, but after you threw those flowerpots through the neighbor’s window, I had to do something to keep both of us out of the bag.”

His face tensed momentarily with hangover fear and disbelief. Then he drank from the sherry and beer and stared back hard at me with his cigarette between his lips.

“Son, you are a dirty bastard to put your hungover partner on like that,” he said, and I saw Beth’s hand relax on her coffee cup.

But I couldn’t quite forget his lingering, watery blue eye and the probe that it had made. Buddy had a way of knowing things that it was impossible for him to know, and I never was sure if the gift came from the fact that possibly he was crazy or if in his cynicism about human behavior he simply intuited, with a great deal of accuracy, what bad things some people would do in certain circumstances.

He finished the glass and took another beer from the icebox.

“Let’s get it down the road,” he said. “Didn’t you say the old man wants us to finish the fence line down to the slough?”

I blinked inside again, because he remembered exactly, almost to the word, what I had told him before we carried him up to bed.

“Well, damn, Zeno, get it in gear,” he said.

We walked out on the front porch, and the yellow and red leaves were blowing across the grass in the sunlight, and the mountains behind the university were sharp and clear against the blue Montana sky. The crack of the fall air was like a cool burn against my face. I wanted to say something, anything, alone to Beth before we left, but I couldn’t, and so I just smiled as I would at a casual friend and said good-bye.

We drove back into the long, blue-green stretch of the Bitterroots and stopped at Lolo for a drink because Buddy’s nervous system was starting to become unwired again. In the bar I drank a cup of coffee while he began on his second vodka collins. I had a hard time looking at him directly in the eyes.

“You’re a quiet bastard this morning, ain’t you?” he said.

“I got burnt out yesterday. No more Idaho excursions.”

“Right. Bad scene. I ain’t going to let you lead me over there anymore. I feel like somebody stuck thumbtacks all over my head. Game on, let’s get out of here and put down those fence posts so I can stop thinking about my problems with ex-wives and kids.”

At the ranch we went back to work on the fence line, though I could do little more than unload the posts off the wagon with one arm and hold them steady in the hole while Buddy shoveled in the dirt. Then he would have to go to work on the next one with the post-hole digger, the sweat and booze running off his face and neck into his flannel shirt. We spoke little. He was too hungover, and I was too preoccupied with the latest thing I had gotten myself into. I didn’t know what to do about either Beth or Buddy, and any of the answers I could think of were bad ones. Maybe I should just drop it on him, I thought, because I was going to see her again, and eventually he would find out about it if he didn’t already have his finger on the edge of it. I slept with your wife last night. What do you think about that? Oh, you don’t mind? That’s cool, because I thought the shit might hit the fan.

He started to clean the post-hole digger in the bucket of water, his face pale with fatigue, then dropped the wood handles and let the whole thing fall to the ground. He wiped his face slick with his sleeve.

“Shit on this. We can do it this evening,” he said. “Man, I’m going to quit that damn drinking once and for all.”

He walked away alone toward the cabin, his shoulders bent slightly and his back shaking with a cigarette cough.

Buddy slept through the rest of the morning, and I sat on the porch in the cool wind and tried to read from an old paperback copy of The Old Man and the Sea. I had read it once in college and again in Angola, and it was my favorite of Ernest Hemingway’s books. But I couldn’t concentrate on the words; my attention would slip off the page, across the meadow of grazing Angus to the pile of ash and blackened boards where the barn had been.

So where do you go now, I thought. You can move out and try to explain to him why you have to, or you can let things keep falling one onto another without any plan at all until something even worse happens. Under other circumstances I would have just checked it on down the road, maybe up to Vancouver or out to San Fran, but the parole office had a nail through my foot, and the only type of transfer I could get would be back to Louisiana, and that was like going back to first base after you had knocked the ball out of the park.

But if I thought I had great problems to resolve there in the solitude of the porch and a windy sun-filled afternoon, I realized with a glance at the sheriff’s car turning in the front cattle guard that the complexities of my day were just beginning. Pat Floyd pulled the car off the dirt road onto the grass and put the gearshift in neutral with the engine still running, which meant we were going somewhere together.

I closed the paperback and set it beside me and looked at him without speaking. At first I’d had no feelings about him; he was just another dick, a member of that vast army who play out their roles and games with their sets of keys and paper forms and intricate rules of human behavior. But I was learning to dislike this fat man. I had the feeling that he was taking a special interest in me, one that went beyond the prosecution of a drunken ex-convict who shot up the local toilet-paper factory. I was an outsider, a rounder with a corn-pone mystique, a glib troublemaker who had been kicked off his own turf and was using the locals for a doormat.

“Let’s take a ride,” he said.

“You got a paper on me, Sheriff?”

“This ain’t an arrest. And I wouldn’t need a warrant to make one, either, son.”

“Hey, Buddy,” I called back through the screen door.

“You don’t need him. Just get in, and we’re going to talk a minute.”

“I just want to tell him we’ll be back soon. We’re going fishing shortly.”

I opened the screen and spoke into the dim shadows of the cabin. Buddy was on my bunk with the pillow and quilt over his head, his body deep in the mattress with sleep.

“I’ll be out with Sheriff Floyd a few minutes. OK?”

I got in the passenger side of the car and lit a cigarette, and we started up the road toward the cattle guard.

“You’re a pretty sharp boy,” he said.

“How’s that, Sheriff?”

“You thought I might take you out, beat the shit out of you with a billy, and leave you in a ditch, didn’t you?”

“It didn’t cross my mind.”

“We don’t do it that way up here. In fact, we don’t hardly have any crime here to speak of. On Saturday night a few boys might try to break up each other in a bar, and I have to lock them up till Sunday morning, but that’s all we get. People around here obey the law most of the time.”

We turned out on the highway, and he reached over with his huge weight and popped open the glove compartment. Inside was a half-pint of whiskey in a paper bag twisted around the neck. He unscrewed the cap with his thumb and took a drink, then set the bottle between his swollen khaki thighs.

“Actually, being a sheriff around here is easy,” he said. “A lot of times people take care of the law by themselves. A few years ago one of those California motorcycle gangs rode into Virginia City on a Saturday afternoon and said they were taking over the town. By that night every sheepherder and cowboy in the county was in town. They broke arms and heads and legs, beat them till they got down on their knees, and left just enough of that crowd intact to drive the others out of town. That’s the way it gets done out here sometimes.”

“What’s all this about?”

“Not too much. I just want to tell you a couple of things.” We passed the Sweeny Creek grocery store, a small wooden building set back from the blacktop in the trees, and turned onto a rock road that led back toward the mountains. I puffed on my cigarette and looked at him from the side of my eye. He wasn’t carrying a billy on his hip, and I hadn’t seen one in the glove compartment, but maybe it was under the seat or lying within a second’s reach against the doorjamb.

I had never been beaten in prison, or even mistreated for that matter, but I could never forget the time I saw what a Negro could look like after he had been sweated with a garden hose three nights in isolation. He was serving peas in the chow line for the free people, and when one of the hacks told him, “You better start ladling out them peas a little faster, boy,” he replied, “You ladle them out yourself, boss.” Three hacks cuffed him in the serving line and took him down to the hole. When he came out his eyes were swollen shut, and the striped bruises on his stomach and back looked like a black deformity.

The sheriff parked the car close into the shade of the pines along the creek and cut the engine. He took another drink out of the whiskey and offered the bottle to me.

“Go ahead. You ain’t going to get trench mouth out of it.” He laughed and took a cigar from his pocket. “You know, you’ve got a shit pot full of good luck. The FBI man couldn’t find a thing on that shell casing. Either you must have wiped all them hulls clean before you put them in the magazine or a deer walked over and took a good, solid piss right on top of it.”

He bit off the tip of the cigar and spit it through the window, then wet the end as though he were rolling a stick around in his mouth.

“Do you think you got pretty good luck?” he said.

“You tell me.”

He struck a match on the horn button and lit the cigar.

“I don’t think your luck is too good at all,” he said. “But that’s another matter. I wanted to drive up here today mainly because it’s my day off and this is where I always come the first day of deer season. You see where that saddle begins right after the first mountain, where the meadow opens up in the trees? I get two whitetail there opening day every year. I got an elk cow there last year, too, right up the nose with this.357 Magnum from forty yards. I was using a shotgun with deer slugs, and I got some snow in the barrel and blew it all apart firing at a doe. Then the elk walked into the meadow with the wind behind her and never smelled a thing. I put it in her snout and tore her ass all over the snow. Those steel jackets will go through an automobile block, and they don’t even slow down when they gut an animal.”

I handed his whiskey back to him and looked out the passenger’s window.

“You’re not a hunter, are you?” he said.

“I gave it up in the army.”

He had started to take a drink, but he lowered the bottle and looked hard at me. I tried to keep my gaze on his face, but it was too much. His anger toward me and what I represented in some vague place in his mind or memory — some abstraction from a childhood difficulty, a sexual argument with his wife, a fear of the mayor or the town councilmen or himself — was too much to contend with in a stare contest, even though he was trying to pull my life into pieces.

“Let me tell you something before we drive back,” he said. “I don’t like you. I probably can’t get you for shooting up the mill right now, but I’m going to make you as unwelcome as I can in Missoula County. I’ll put you in jail for spitting on the street, throwing a cigarette wrapper down, walking in public with beer on your breath. I’ll have you in jail every time I see you or any of my department does. I have the feeling that if I lock you up enough and call your parole officer each time I do it, you’ll get your sack lunch and bus ticket back to Louisiana. Which means you better keep your ass out of my sight.”

“Is that it?”

“You better believe it, son.”

I opened the door and stepped out on the short grass. My head was light, and the wind blowing through the pines along the creek bed was cold against the perspiration in my hair.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he said.

“I’ll hitch a ride back to the Riordans’.”

The sun’s rays struck through his windshield, revealing in his face all his anger, all his doubt about leaving me to find my way home (and the possible recriminations later), and the most serious question — whether he had struck the fear of God into me with a burning poker.

I walked up the rock road toward the blacktop, smoking a cigarette, and he drove along beside me in first gear with his fat arm over the window, the doubt and anger still stamped in his face, and I was glad no one could see this sad comedy of two grown men acting out a ludicrous exercise in a mountain wilderness so that one of them could go home with a piece of scalp lock to keep his pride intact.

The sheriff floored the car in front of me, fishtailing off the grass that was already turning wet with dew, and spun a shower of rocks off the back tires when he hit second. He threw the whiskey bottle out the window into the gravel as he turned onto the blacktop, then roared away toward Missoula with both exhausts throbbing, his arm like a ham on the window.

By the time I had hitched a ride back to the ranch, the sunlight was drawing away over the mountains in a pink haze, and Buddy was sitting on the porch steps in a sheep-lined jacket, tying tapered leader on his fly line.

“Where you been, man?” he said.

“I went for a ride with that fat dick.”

He looked up from his concentration on the leader and waited.

“That shell casing was clean, but he says he’s going to make my life interesting every time he catches me in Missoula,” I said.

“Just stay out of his way. It’ll be cool after a while.”

“What am I supposed to do in the meantime? Live out here like a hermit?”

“You want to go fishing?”

“Yeah.”

We took the car down to the river and fished two deep holes in the twilight with wet flies. As the moon began to rise over the mountains, they started hitting. I saw my line straighten out quickly below the surface of the pool; then there was that hard-locking tension when the brown really hung into it, and the split-bamboo rod arched toward the water and the backup line started to strip off the automatic reel. I held the rod high over my head at an angle and walked with him through the shallows until he started to weaken and I could back him into the cattails at the head of the pool. I couldn’t manage the rod and the net at the same time because of my cast, and Buddy came up under him slowly with his net, the sandy bottom clouding as the dorsal and tail fins broke the water, and then he was heavy and thick and dripping inside the net, his brown-and-gold color and red spots wet with moonlight.

We cooked the fish with lemons, onions, and butter sauce, and it was warm and fine inside the cabin with the heat from the wood stove and the smell of burning pine chunks and the wind blowing through the trees on the creek. But I couldn’t eat or even finish my coffee. Paret, you wrecker of dreams, I thought. How did you do it?

During the week I helped Buddy’s father feed the birds and clean the cages in the aviary. We finished the fence line down to the slough, and much against all my instincts and previous experiences with nutrias in Louisiana, I went with him and Buddy up Lost Horse Creek to release two pairs of males and females. At the time I rationalized that it would be two or three years before the damage was felt on a large scale in the area, and I would be safely gone when a mob of commercial trappers, gyppo loggers, and fishermen tore the Riordan home apart board and nail.

I resolved in a vague way to leave Beth alone, but like an alcoholic who goes through one day dry and has to count all the others on the calendar, I knew it was just a matter of which day I would call her or suggest to Buddy that we drive into Missoula.

As it turned out, it was neither. I drove to town on Thursday morning with Melvin to check in with my parole officer, though my appointment wasn’t until the following week. He dropped me off by the university library, since I told him that I had three hours to waste before I saw my P.O., and then I walked the four blocks to Beth’s house.

She was scraping leaves into huge piles in her front yard with a cane rake. She wore a pair of faded corduroy jeans and a wool shirt buttoned at the throat and rolled over her elbows. Each time she scraped the rake and flattened it across the dry grass, more leaves blew in cold eddies off the piles.

“Do you want to go eat lunch at that German restaurant?” I said.

She turned around, surprised, then stood erect with both of her hands folded on the rake handle. She blew her hair away from the corner of her mouth, her cheeks spotted with color in the coldness of the shade, and smiled in a way that made me go weak inside.

“Let me put on another shirt and get the leaves and twigs out of my hair,” she said.

We went in her car to the Heidelhaus, which inside was like a fine German place in the Black Forest, with big wooden beams on the ceiling, checker-cloth tables, candles melted in wine bottles, and a large stone fireplace over which was skewered a roasting pig. We drank Tuborg on tap and ate sausage-and-melted-cheese sandwiches, and then the waitress, in a Tyrolean dress, served us slices of the roasted pork in hot mustard. It was so pleasant inside, with the warmth of the fireplace, the buttered-rum drinks after dinner, the college kids in varsity sweaters at the bar, and the candlelight on her happy face, that the threats of the sheriff and my other problems lapsed away in a kind of autumnal euphoria. Her eyes were bright with the alcohol, and when her knee brushed mine under the table, we both felt the same recognition and expectation about the rest of the afternoon.

We went back to her house and made love in her bed upstairs for almost two hours. I heard the screen slam downstairs and jerked upward involuntarily, but she simply smiled and put her finger to my lips and opened the bedroom door slightly to tell the boys to play outside. She walked back to the bed, her body soft and white and her huge breasts almost like a memory from my prison fantasies. Then she sat on me and bit my lip softly, her hair covering my face, and I felt it rise again deep inside of her until my loins were burning, and the weak light outside seemed to gather and fade from my vision in her rhythmic breathing against my cheek.

That Saturday I had my cast cut off at the hospital. The electric saw hummed along the cast and shaled off the plaster, and then the whole thing cracked free like a foul and corroded shell and exposed my puckered, hairless white arm. The skin felt dead and rubbery when I touched it, as though it wasn’t a part of me, and when I closed my fist, the muscle in the forearm swelled like an obscene piece of whale fat. But it felt good to have two arms again. While I put on my shirt and buttoned it easily with two hands, I recalled something I had thought about when I was in the hospital in Japan after I had been hit: that everybody who thinks war is an interesting national excursion should give up the use of an arm, an eye, or a leg for one day.

I practiced chord configurations on the guitar for three days to bring back the coordination in my left hand. I had lost the calluses on my fingertips, and the strings burned the skin on the first day and raised tiny water blisters close to the nails, and the back of my hand wouldn’t work properly when I ran an E chord up the neck in “Steel Guitar Rag.” But by Tuesday I could feel the resilience and confidence back in my fingers, the easy slides and runs over the frets, and the natural movements I made without thinking.

It was twilight, and I was alone in the cabin, slightly drunk on a half-pint of Jim Beam and my own music and its memory of the rural South. The glow from the wood stove was warm against my back, and I could feel the chords in the guitar go through the sound box into my chest. A freight-train whistle blew coldly between the mountains, and though I couldn’t see that train, I knew that it was covered with the last red light of the dying sun and in the cab there was an engineer named Daddy Claxton, highballing for Dixie like the Georgia Mail.

I put my thumb picks on and played every railroad song I knew, double picking like A. P. Carter and Mother Maybelle, moving on with Hank Snow, running from Lynchburg to Danville on the Ole 97, the tortoiseshell picks flashing over the silver strings, the rumble and scream of mile-long legendary trains as real in that moment as when they ran with overheated fireboxes and sweating Negro coal shovelers and engineers who would give their lives just to make up lost time.

Buddy never understood why I made my living as a country musician when I probably could have worked steady with hotel dance bands in New Orleans or tried the jazz scene on the West Coast, where I might have made it at least as a rhythm guitarist. But what he didn’t understand, and what most northerners don’t, is that rural southern music is an attitude, a withdrawal into myths and an early agrarian dream about the promise of the new republic. And regardless of its vague quality, its false sense of romance, its restructuring of the reality of our history, it is nevertheless as true to a young boy in southern Louisiana listening to the Grand Ole Opry or the Louisiana Hayride on Saturday night as his grandfather’s story, which the grandfather had heard from his father, about the Federals burning the courthouse in New Iberia and pulling the bonnets off white women and carrying them on their bayonets. It was true because the boy had been told it was, and he would have no more questioned the veracity of the story than he would have the fact of his birth.

I was deep into my southern reverie and the last inch of Jim Beam when Buddy walked through the door, his eyes watery with the wind.

“I heard you across the field. It sounds very good, young Zeno,” he said. “For a minute, I thought I heard that colored blues player on Camp A. What was his name?”

“Guitar-git-it-and-go Welch.”

“Man, he was shit on that twelve-string, wasn’t he? What the hell were you doing with Beth at the Heidelhaus?”

I poured the rest of the Beam in my tin cup and picked up my cigarette from the edge of the table. The stove was hot against my back, and I felt a drop of perspiration slip down from my hairline.

“You want a drink?” I said.

“No, man. I want to know what you were doing with my old lady.”

“Having lunch. What the hell do you normally do in a restaurant?”

“What other kind of lunch did you have?”

“All right on that shit, Buddy.”

“You just happened to bop on down to the university library with Mel and take Beth out and not mention it for a week.”

“I saw my P.O. and had four hours to kill before I met Melvin. I didn’t want to hang around town and get picked up by the sheriff again, and I didn’t feel like sitting in the library anymore with a bunch of college students. So I asked her to go out for lunch.”

I had done a number of things over the years that were wrong, but lying was not one of them, even in prison, and I don’t know if this was because of my father’s deep feeling for truth and the habit it established in me or if I had found that the truth is the best pragmatic solution for any complex situation. But I had lied to Buddy and the words burned in my cheeks. I lifted the cup and took a sip out of it, then puffed off the cigarette.

“So why don’t you tell somebody about it?” he said. “I ain’t going to cut out your balls in the middle of the night.”

“I thought it wasn’t a big deal.”

“Well, it ain’t, Zeno. It ain’t. Just drop some words on your old partner so I don’t feel like a dumb asshole when Mel sends this kind of news across the mashed potatoes. I mean, that cat is all right, but my mother is serving the steak around, and he says, ‘Was Beth’s car still working all right when she took Iry down to the Heidelhaus?’ ”

He took my cigarette out of my fingers and drew in on the stub.

“What was I supposed to say, Zeno?” he said. “My sister had gloat in her eyes, and the old man took out his pocket watch like he’d never seen it before. Say, no shit, man, you ain’t balling her, are you?”

“No.”

“You want to get high? I got some real good Mexican stuff today.”

“I’d better go to bed early. I want to go up to Bonner tomorrow and see if I can get back on with the band.”

I took the guitar strap off my neck and laid the sound box facedown across my thighs. I pulled the picks off my fingers and dropped them in my shirt pocket.

“Come on and get loaded,” he said.

“I better look good tomorrow.”

“That’s on the square? You haven’t been milking through your partner’s fence?”

“I already told you, Buddy.”

I wrapped the Gibson in a blanket and went to sleep on my bunk, leaving him to a large kitchen matchbox of green Mexican weed and all the paranoid nightmares he could get out of it.

Friday night I was playing lead guitar again on the platform at the Milltown Union Bar, Cafe and Laundromat. The barstools and the tables were filled with mill workers and loggers and their masculine women, and at nine o’clock I attached the microphone pickup to my sound hole and opened up with Hank’s “Lost Highway,” a lament about a deck of cards, a jug of wine, and a woman’s lies. Their faces were quiet in the red-and-purple neon glow off the bar, and by the time I slipped into “The Wild Side of Life,” they were mine. Then I did a song about gyppo loggers written by our drummer (“the jimmy roaring, the big wheels rolling, the dirt and bark a-flying”), and I could see the words burn with private meaning, with affirmation of their impoverished lives, into all those work-creased faces.

It was good to be working again, to hear the applause, to sit at the bar between sets in a primitive aura and receive the free drinks and the callused handshakes. We played until two in the morning, turning our speakers higher and higher against the noise on the dance floor, the rattle of bottles, and the occasional violent scrape of chairs when a fight broke out. My voice was hoarse, my left arm throbbed, and my fingertips felt like they had been touched with acid, but that was all right. I was playing with that sense of control and quietness inside that came to me only when I was at my best. After everyone had left, I had a bowl of chili and a cup of coffee at the bar with the drummer, both of us light-headed with alcohol, exhaustion, and the electric echoes of the last five hours. Then I walked out into a sleeting rain and drove the Plymouth back toward Missoula and Beth’s house.