The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Ten

During the night the sleet and wind whipped the trees against the second-story bedroom window, and when the dawn began to grow into the sky, the grass was thick with small hailstones, and the sidewalks looked like they had been powdered with rock candy. I drove back to the ranch as the sun broke coldly over the edge of the Bitterroots, and I saw the snow in the pines high up in the mountains and the drift of white, shimmering light when the wind blew through the trunks. I should have left Beth’s house earlier, but in the warmth of her bed and with her woman’s heat against me and the wet rake of the maple on the window, I drifted back into sleep until the room was suddenly gray with the false dawn. Now, I worried about Buddy and the lie I would have to tell him if he was awake.

But he was asleep, facedown in the bed with his clothes and shoes on, his arms spread out beside him, a dead joint stuck like a flag in a beer can on the floor. It was cold inside the cabin, and I fired the wood stove, fanned the draft until the kindling caught and snapped into the hunks of split pine, and started to undress on the edge of my bunk. Through the side window I could see the snow clouds above the mountaintops turning violet over the dark sheen of the trees. My body was thick with fatigue, and I could still hear the noise of the bar and the electronic amplifiers as though the few hours’ interlude with Beth hadn’t been there. Then, as I lay back on the pillow with my arm over my eyes and started to sink into the growing warmth of the wood stove and the lessening of my heartbeat, I heard Mr. Riordan’s boots on the porch and his quiet knock on the screen.

He said he needed one of us to go up Lost Horse Creek with him to turn loose some more nutrias, so I got in the pickup, and we headed down the highway with the wire cages bouncing in the bed. I looked around through the window at the red eyes of the nutrias and their yellow buck teeth and porcupine hair and had to laugh.

“You must find them a great source of humor,” he said. His red-check wool shirt was buttoned at the collar and wrists under his sheep-lined jacket.

“I’m sorry,” I said, still laughing. “But I can’t get over these things being introduced deliberately into an area. One time my father and I had to spend a week cleaning out the irrigation ditches in our rice field after these guys had gone to work.”

“They’re that bad, are they?” he said, his face on the road.

“No, sir, they’re worse.” I laughed again. It was too ridiculous.

“If these prove that they can acclimate to the environment and be of commercial value, the beaver in the Northwest might be with us a few more years.”

He was a serious man not given to levity about his work, and I now felt awkward and a bit stupid in not having seen as much. He drove with his forearms against the steering wheel and tried to roll a cigarette between his fingers while the tobacco spilled out both ends of the paper.

“You want a tailor-made?” I said.

“Thank you.” He crumpled the paper and tobacco grains in his palm and dropped them out the wind vane. I had a notion that he could have rolled that cigarette into a tube as slick as spit if he had wanted, but he was a gentleman and had just erased that moment of righteousness that had led to my discomfort.

We turned on the rock road that wound along Lost Horse Creek and started up the long grade through the timber in second gear. As we veered on the corner of the switchbacks and the creek dropped farther below us like a cold blue flash through the tree trunks, I felt the air begin to thin, and the smell of the pines grew heavy in my head. On up the road I could see the first mountain start to crest, and then others rose higher and bluer behind it until they disappeared in the wet mist and the torn edges of snow clouds. We turned up another switchback, and again I looked down below at the creek. It was small and flecked with white water, and the remaining leaves on the cottonwoods looked like pieces of stamped Byzantine bronze. Rocks spilled off the edge of the road and dropped a hundred feet before they struck a treetop.

“We’ll pick up the creek again farther on. The height doesn’t bother you, does it?”

Hell no, I always light one cigarette off another like this, I thought.

“I just wonder what you might do if you blow out a tire on one of these turns,” I said.

“We probably just wouldn’t have to worry about putting the nutrias in a beaver pond today.”

The grade evened off, and the road began to straighten with thick pines on each side of it, and then I saw the creek again, this time no more than fifty yards away through the front window, a white roar of water breaking in a shower between smooth gray rocks that were as big as small houses. Mr. Riordan pulled the pickup off the road at an angle into the pines and rolled a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, licked it, seamed it down, twisted both ends, clicked a match on his thumbnail, and had it smoking in less than a minute, and there weren’t three grains of tobacco on his flat palm. He opened the door and laid his sheep-lined jacket on the seat. His bib overalls and buttoned-down, red-check shirt made me think of a southern farmer. We could hear a logging truck up the road as it shifted into low gear for the slow descent down the grade.

“Are you courting Buddy’s wife?” he said, the cigarette wet in the corner of his mouth.

I got out the passenger’s door and walked around to the tailgate and pulled loose the chain hook. The nutrias had been frightened by the ride over the rock road and the rattle of the chain, and they started to chew against the wire cages with their yellow teeth.

He leaned with one stiff arm against the truck bed and held the cigarette between his thick fingers as he looked away at the fallen trees across the creek.

“Are you courting his wife?” he said. “Which means, are you sleeping with her?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Have you thought about what he’ll do if he decides to stop looking in the other direction?”

“I haven’t gotten that far yet.”

“Because frankly I don’t know what he’ll do. I just know I don’t want my boy back in prison again. I think you can understand that.”

“He’s not the type to do what you’re thinking about,” I said.

“You’re pretty damn sure of that, are you? Let me tell you a lesson, son. The man who kills you will be the one at your throat before you ever expect it.”

The wind felt cold on my neck. The thought of Buddy as a murderous enemy seemed as incongruous and awful as a daytime nightmare.

“I won’t try to explain any of it to you,” I said, “but sometimes things just happen of their own accord and it’s not easy to revise them.”

“I didn’t ask you for an apology. I just want you to think about consequences. For everybody.”

“Is that why we took this ride?”

“No. I figure you already knew what I had to say. And it’s probably not going to make any difference anyway.”

“You want me to pull out?”

“You’re his guest. That’s between you and him. I don’t hold anything against you. Beth marked him off a long time ago, but he hasn’t come to accept that yet. I’d just hoped that with some time he could come to see things as they are. He’s not up to having another big hole dug for him.”

“Maybe he’s tougher than you think.”

“It doesn’t take ‘tough’ to go to jail and do all five years because you can’t stay out of trouble.”

“I don’t think you know what kind of special feeling the hacks had for him in there. He was different. He didn’t take them seriously, and that bothered them right down in their scrotums.”

“That’s blather. Buddy was looking for that jail for years, but there’s no point in arguing about it. Let’s get these cages down to the pond.” He rubbed out the fire on his cigarette between his fingers and scattered the tobacco in the wind.

We heard the gears of the log truck wind down on the switchback, the air brakes hissing. Then the cab bent around the edge of the mountain with the huge flatbed behind it, and the great snow-covered ponderosa trunks boomed down with chains that cut whitely into the bark. The driver was bent over the wheel, his arm and shoulder working on the gear stick as the weight shifted on the bed; then the brakes hissed again, and he slowed to a stop where the grade evened off. He pulled off his leather gloves and picked up a cigar stub from the dashboard.

“Hey, Riordan,” he said. “You turning more of them rats loose?”

“What the hell does it look like?”

“Goddamn, if they ain’t beautiful,” the driver said, and laughed with the cigar in his teeth. “I guess if one of them tops a beaver, we’ll see animals running around with yellow teeth and porcupine quills growing out their asshole.”

“You’re probably late with your load, Carl,” Mr. Riordan said.

“Don’t worry about that. I want to see you put them things in the creek. Do you have to club them in the head first and carry them down on the end of a shovel?” The driver giggled from the truck window with the cigar stub in the center of his teeth.

“You have a hot dinner waiting for you at home, Carl. Don’t make your wife throw it out in the backyard again.”

“You want me to help you with them things, in case they start biting your tires all to pieces?” the driver said.

“Tell him to get fucked,” I said.

Mr. Riordan looked at me with a sharp, brief expression, then picked up the two sawed-off broom handles that we used to put through the cages and carry them to the stream.

“Better put them in here, because the creek is dryer than a popcorn fart higher up,” the driver said. “In fact, I seen a couple of them rats walking up the road carrying a canteen.”

Mr. Riordan pushed the broom handles through the first cage, and we lifted it out of the pickup bed and carried it down the incline toward the beaver pond. The truck driver was still giggling behind us; then we heard him turn over his engine and shift into gear. We walked over the pine needles through the short trees, the nutrias tumbling over one another in the cage and gnawing with their buck teeth on the wooden handles.

“Why do you take it off them?” I said.

“He’s a harmless man. He means nothing by it.”

“I don’t know how you define ‘son of a bitch’ around here, but it seems to me that you have an awful lot of them.”

“They’re afraid.”

“Of what, for God’s sake?”

“The people who control their livelihood. All the eastern money that gives them a job and tells them at the same time that they’re working for themselves and some pioneer independent spirit. They tried to organize unions here during the depression, and they got locked out until they begged to work. So they think that any change is trouble, and they’ve told themselves that for so long now that they’ve come to believe it.”

“You have more tolerance than I do.”

“I imagine that you made the same type of realizations in growing up in the South, or you would have left it a long time ago,” he said.

He set his end of the cage down by the edge of the pond and began to roll a cigarette, his gray eyes focused intently on the quiet swell of water around the pile of dead and polished cottonwoods and pines that had been cut through at the base of the trunks by beavers until they toppled into the center of the creek. The wood had turned bone white from sun and rot, and tree worms had left their intricate designs in the smooth surface after the bark had cracked and shaled away in the current. On each side of the pile, two feet under the current, were burrowed openings where the beavers could enter and then surface into a dry, sheltered domed fortress. Behind the dam, where the gnawed stumps of the cottonwoods protruded from the water and formed a swift eddy against the surface, cutthroat trout, brookies, and Dolly Vardens balanced themselves against the pebble bottom, drifting sideways momentarily when food floated downstream toward them, their color a flash of ivory-tipped fins and gold and gills roaring with fire.

I unhooked the cage door and tilted the cage upward into the pond. At first the nutrias clung to the wire mesh with their strange, webbed feet; then they clattered over one another and splashed into the water, their pelts beaded with light. They turned in circles, their red eyes like hot BBs, then swam toward the log pile.

“I don’t think the beavers are going to like these guys,” I said.

“Then one of them will move,” Mr. Riordan said.

I looked at him to see if there was a second meaning there. If there was, it didn’t show in the rigid profile and the lead-gray eyes that were still focused intently on the pond.

“You see those grouse tracks on the other side?” he said. “There haven’t been grouse up this creek since I was a boy. Two years ago I turned some blues loose about fifty yards from here, and they still water at this hole.”

He dropped the cigarette stub from his fingers into the shallows, as though it were an afterthought, and we got back in the pickup and started down the grade in second gear. Through the pines bordering the road I could see the blue immensity of the valley and the metallic sheen of the Bitterroot River winding through the cottonwoods.

“I’ll buy you a steak at the Fort Owen Inn,” he said.

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“You better take advantage of it. I don’t do this often. Besides, I’ll show you the place where the Montana vigilantes hanged old Whiskey Bill Graves.”

“I’ll bet some of the locals put a monument up there.”

He cleared his throat and laughed. “How did you know?”

“I just guessed,” I said.

It was Saturday afternoon, and the Inn was full of families from Stevensville and Corvallis and Hamilton. They sat around the checker-cloth tables like pieces of scrubbed beef, stuffed in their ill-fitting clothes and chewing on celery and radishes out of the salad bowl. A few of the men nodded at Mr. Riordan when we walked in, but I had the feeling that we were about as welcome there as cow flop. He slipped his sheep-lined jacket on the back of the chair and ordered two whiskeys with draft chasers.

“Are you sure you want to eat here?” I said.

“Why shouldn’t we?”

I saw the same type of deliberate nonrecognition in his face that I used to see in my father’s when he refused to accept the most obvious human situation.

“It was just an observation,” I said.

He drank the whiskey neat, his lead-gray eyes blinking only once when he swallowed. He sipped off the top of the beer and set the mug evenly on the tablecloth.

“You don’t care for Jim Beam?” he said.

“I have to work tonight. Musicians can get away with almost anything except showing up high.”

His eyes went past me, into the faces of the people at the other tables; then he looked back at me again.

“You have to use that kind of caution in your work, do you?” he said.

I drank out of the beer.

“I have a habit of falling into the whole jug when I get started on bourbon,” I said. I smiled with my excuse, but he wasn’t really talking to me anymore.

He took his package of string-cut tobacco out of his pocket and creased a cigarette paper between his thumb and forefinger. His nails were broken back to the cuticle and purple with carpenter’s bruises. But even while the tobacco was filling and shaling off the dented paper, before he wadded it all up and dropped it out of his palm into the ashtray, I already saw the dark change of mood, the vulnerable piece in his stoic armor, the brass wheels of disciplined empathy shearing against one another. At all those other tables he was at best a tolerable eccentric (since it was a Saturday afternoon family crowd that would make allowances).

“You want to drink at the bar?” I said.

“That’s a good idea.”

We walked between the tables into the small bar that adjoined the dining room, and Mr. Riordan told the waitress to serve our steaks in there.

“How are you, Frank?” the bartender said. I recognized him as one of the volunteer firemen who had come to the ranch when the barn burned.

“Pretty good, Slim. Give this man here a beer, and I’ll take a Beam with water on the side.”

The bartender set a double-shot glass on the counter and continued to pour to the top.

“Just one,” Mr. Riordan said.

“I like to give away other people’s whiskey.” The bartender glanced sideways at the empty stools and into the dining room. “Did you hear anything about who might have had that gasoline can?”

“No.”

“There were some guys drunk in here the other night talking about lighting a fire to somebody’s ass.”

Mr. Riordan rolled the whiskey back against his throat and swallowed once, deeply, the gray eyes momentarily bright.

“Who were they?” he said.

“I think one of them drives a tractor-trailer out of Lolo.”

“Slim, why in the hell would a truck driver want to burn me out?”

“I don’t know. I just told you what I heard them saying.”

“And you don’t know this man’s name.”

“Like I said, maybe I’ve seen him pulling out of Lolo a couple of times. I thought I might be of some help to you.”

Mr. Riordan clicked his fingernail on the lip of the glass.

“Well, next time call me while they’re here, or ask them to leave their name and address.”

The bartender’s lips were a tight line while he poured into the glass. He set the bottle down, lit a cigarette, and walked to the rounded end of the bar and leaned against it, with one foot on a beer case and his back to us. Then he squeezed his cigarette in an ashtray and took off his apron.

“I’m going on my break now,” he said. “Pour what you want out of the bottle, and add it on to your dinner bill.” I could see the color in his neck as he went through the doorway.

I shook my head and laughed.

“Buddy told me you had a private sense of humor,” Mr. Riordan said.

“I can’t get over the number of people around here who always have a firestorm inside themselves,” I said.

“Oh, Slim’s not a bad fellow. Actually, his problem is his wife. Her face would make a train turn left on a dirt road.” He was into his third shot, and the blood was starting to show in his unshaved cheeks. “One time he came in on a tear from the firemen’s picnic, and she sewed his bedsheet down with a sail needle and wore him out with a quirt. He got baptized at the Baptist church the next Sunday.”

When he grinned, his teeth looked purple in the light from the neon beer sign above the bar.

“Do you believe what he said about that man in Lolo?” I said.

“No. But it’s not important, anyway.”

“It’s pretty damn important when they’re setting fire to your home and your animals.”

It was rash, and I hated my impetuosity even before I saw his face fix mine in the mirror behind the bar. The skin was tight against the bone, the eyes even, his red-check wool shirt buttoned like a twisted rose under his neck.

“I think I know who they are,” he said, his voice low and intense. “I don’t know if I could put them in the penitentiary, but I could probably do things to them myself that would make them never want to destroy a fine horse again. But that won’t stop others like them, and it won’t change the minds of those people in the dining room, either.”

The waitress brought our steaks, thick and swimming in blood and gravy, a piece of butter on the charcoaled center, surrounded with boiled carrots and Idaho potatoes. The meat was so tender and good that the steak knife clicked against the plate as soon as you cut into it.

Mr. Riordan finished his bourbon, then began to cut at the steak, his back rigid and his elbows at an angle. The steak slipped sideways on the plate and knocked potatoes and gravy all over the bar.

“Well,” he said, and picked up the bartender’s towel. He had a good edge on, and I could feel him deciding something inside himself. He pushed the plate away with his fingertips, rolled a cigarette slowly, and poured again from the bottle of Jim Beam. “Go ahead and eat. Remind me in the future to stay away from morning whiskey.”

It was colder when we walked outside, and the snow clouds had covered the sun. The wind bit into my face and made my eyes water. A few early mallard ducks were winnowing low over the cottonwoods on the river. Mr. Riordan walked across the gravel to the truck as though the earth were about to shift on its axis. He took the keys out of his overalls pocket and paused at the driver’s door.

“I think you probably want to drive a truck again,” he said, and put the keys in my hand.

As we rolled along the blacktop toward the ranch, he looked steadily ahead through the windshield, his shoulder sometimes slipping momentarily against the door. He started to roll another cigarette, then gave it up.

“What do you plan to do in the future?” he said, because he felt that he had to say something.

“Finish my parole. Take it easy and cool and slide with it, I guess.”

“You probably have about thirty or forty years ahead of you. Do you think about that?” The movement of the truck made his head nod, and he blinked and widened his eyes.

“I’ve never gotten around to it.”

“You should. You don’t believe you’ll be fifty or sixty. Or even middle-aged. But you will.”

I looked over at him, but his eyes were focused on the blacktop. His large, worn hands lay on his thighs like skillets. The back of his left hand was burned with a thick white scar, hairless and slick as a piece of rubber. He cleared his throat, blinked again, and then his eyes faded and closed. He breathed as though he were short of breath.

Buddy had told me about his old man riding for five bucks a show on the Northwestern rodeo circuit during the depression. In 1934 he couldn’t make the mortgage payments for seven months on an eight-hundred-acre spread outside of Billings, and a farm corporation out of Chicago bought it up at twenty dollars an acre. They knocked the two-story wooden home flat with an earth grader, bulldozed it up in a broken pile of boards, burned it and pushed it in a steaming heap into the Yellowstone River. Mr. Riordan pulled his children and wife around in a homemade tin trailer on the back of a Ford pickup through Wyoming, Utah, and California, working lettuce, topping carrots and onions, and picking apples at three cents a crate.

He took a job in Idaho on a horse farm by the Clearwater, breaking and training Appaloosas for a man who provided rough stock on the rodeo circuit. In a year and a half of stinting, eating welfare potatoes and listening to the wind crack off the mountain and blow through the newspaper plugged in the trailer’s sides, he put away four hundred dollars in the People’s Bank of Missoula. It all went down on the ranch in the Bitterroots. He had no idea of how he could make the first mortgage payment. But nevertheless it went down, and he pulled the tin trailer up to the house, stomped down the chicken-wire fence with his boot, let the kids out of the trailer door into a yard full of pigweed and cow flop, and said: “This is it. We’re going to do it right here.”

He stayed two days at the house and then left Mrs. Riordan to clean, scrub, and boil an entire ranch to cleanliness while he followed the circuit through Oregon and Washington and Alberta. He worked as a pickup man and hazer, then rode bulls and broncs for prize money. In Portland he drew a sorrel that had a reputation as an easy rocker, but when the sorrel came out of the chute, he slammed sideways into the gate and then started sunfishing. Mr. Riordan stayed on for six seconds, and then he was twisted sideways on the horse’s back with his left hand wound in the leather. The pickup men couldn’t get the bucking strap off. The leather pinched Mr. Riordan’s hand into a shriveled monkey’s paw, and the bones snapped apart like twigs.

His rodeo career ended six months later at Calgary. He had won forty dollars that afternoon in the calf roping and had enough money for his trip back to Montana and the entry fee in another event. So that night under the lights he entered the bulldogging competition and drew a mucus-eyed, blood-flecked black bull with alabaster horns that had already taken out two riders and ground a clown into a board fence. The rope dropped, and Mr. Riordan bent low over the quarter horse and raced even with the bull toward the far end of the arena, the judge’s clock ticking inside of him with his own heartbeat and the blood rushing in his head as he leaned out of the saddle, waiting for that right second to come down on the horns with both hands, the weight perfectly balanced, the thighs already flexed like iron for the sudden brake against the earth and the violent twist of the bull’s neck against his chest. But he misjudged his distance and pushed the quarter horse too hard. When he left the saddle, one arm went out over the bull’s face, the other hand grabbed a horn as though he wanted to do a gymnastic pushup, and his body folded into the horns just as the bull sat on all four legs and brought his head up. He was impaled through the lung in a way that could be equaled only by a medieval executioner. The blood roared from his nose and mouth while he was twisted and whipped like a rag doll on the boss of the horns and the pickup men and clowns tried to pull him free. The bull dipped once, knocking him into the sawdust and horseshit, then trampled over him in a shower of torn sod.

Buddy said he should have been dead three times during his first week in the hospital, and the surgeon who cut out part of his lung told Mrs. Riordan that even if he lived, he would probably be an invalid the rest of his life. But four months later he got off the train in Missoula (thirty pounds lighter and as pale as milk, Mrs. Riordan said) with a walking cane, a tan western suit on, a gold watch in his vest, and an eight-hundred-dollar cashier’s check from the Rodeo Cowboys’ Association. While he was on the circuit through all those dusty shitkicker depression towns, he had put his money together with a rider named Casey Tibbs, who at that time saw the profit to be made in buying rough stock and trained horses for Hollywood films.

I had the heater on in the truck as we bounced along the corrugated road toward the main house, where I planned to let Mr. Riordan off, but the cold seemed to gather and swell in all the plastic and metal of the cab, and even the windshield looked blue against the cold sky. The grass along the irrigation ditch was dry and stiff in the wind, or a momentary sear brown when a gust out of the canyon blew it flat against the ground. Flurries of snow were starting to whirl out of the gray sun and click in broken crystals against the glass. It was a good day for pine logs burning and snapping and bursting into resinous flames in a stone hearth, with mulled buttered rum in flagons and tin plates full of venison stew and French bread.

“It’s early this year,” Mr. Riordan said.

“Sir?” I said, because I had thought he was still asleep.

“It’s early for snow.” His eyes were squinted at the canyon behind his house. “The deer will be down early this year. As soon as a snow pack forms on that first rise, they’ll move down to feed along the drainage just the other side of my fence. The grouse move down about the same time.” He straightened himself in the seat and opened the window slightly to let the wind blow into his face. “Where are you going?”

“To your house.”

“Let yourself off at the cabin and I’ll take the truck home.”

“I can walk across the field.”

“Son, just do what I tell you. Besides, Buddy is probably wondering where we’ve been.” His breath was heavy with whiskey.

I backed the truck around in the center of the road and drove back to the Y fork that divided off toward Buddy’s cabin. I could see Buddy on the front porch in a red wool shirt and a pair of corduroys with a white coffee cup in his hand.

“I don’t guess there’s a need to take up our conversation with him, is there?” Mr. Riordan said.

I didn’t want to answer him or even acknowledge his presumption. But he was still drunk, his gray eyes staring as flatly at me as though he were looking down a rifle barrel.

“No, sir, I don’t guess there is,” I said.

I got out of the truck, and he slipped behind the wheel, clanked the transmission into first with the clutch partially depressed, the gears shearing into one another like broken Coke bottles, then popped the pedal loose and bounced forward across the field toward his house. I heard him shift into second, and the transmission whined as though there were a file caught in it.

Buddy walked toward me off the porch with his cup of coffee in his hand. His face was pinched in the wind.

“What happened to the old man?” he said.

“He got the sun in his eyes.”

“I don’t believe it. The old man really drunk? He don’t get drunk.”

“He had some bad stuff working in him back there in the restaurant.”

“What?”

“He wants to believe in his friends.”

“What are you talking about, man?”

“All those shit-hog people who call themselves neighbors.”

“You smell like you put your head in the jug, too.”

“Tell me how you live around these bastards. They treat your old man like sheep dip.”

“What set you off?”

We closed the cabin door behind us, and I felt the sudden warmth of the room in my face and hands.

“I really don’t understand it,” I said. “Your father’s a decent man, and he puts up with a gyppo logger giggling on a cigar like a gargoyle, and these guys in the restaurant acted like somebody held up a bed pan to their nostrils when we walked in.”

“Are you sure you weren’t into my blotter when you left here this morning?”

I pulled off my coat and took a beer out of the icebox. Two elk steaks covered with mushrooms and slices of onion were simmering in the skillet on the stove.

“Man, you’re a righteous son of a bitch today,” Buddy said. “You’re genuinely pissed because people can act as bad here as where you come from. And remember, Zeno, that’s where redneck and stump-jumper was first patented.”

“You’re wrong there, podna. I didn’t grow up around a bunch of thugs that would beat the hell out of you or burn you out because they didn’t like you. They might sniff at you a little bit, but you have your own variety of sons of bitches here.”

I picked up the guitar and put the strap around my neck. I tuned the big E down and did a run from Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Mojo Hand.” Buddy took a cigarette out of my shirt pocket and lit it. I could feel him looking down at me. He flicked the paper match at the stove.

“Are you playing tonight?” he said quietly.

“Yeah, at nine.”

“Are you looking for company?”

“Come along. It’s the same old gig. A bunch of Saturday-night drunks from the mill getting loaded enough to forget what their wives look like.”

“You’ve really got some strong shit in your blood today, babe,” he said. “I’m going to walk down and fish the river for a couple of hours. Move the skillet to the edge of the fire in about thirty minutes.”

I nodded at him and began tuning my treble strings with the plectrum. I heard him open the door and pause as the wind blew coldly against my back.

“You want to come along?” he asked.

“Go ahead. I better sleep this afternoon,” I said.

I had another beer and played the guitar in my sullen mood while the sky outside became grayer with the snow clouds that rolled slowly over the peaks of the Bitterroots. But even in my strange depression, which must have been brought on by lack of sleep and early morning booze, I felt a tranquillity and freedom in Buddy’s absence, the way one would after his wife has left him temporarily.

Still, it was a dark day, and no matter how much I played on the guitar, I couldn’t get rid of that heavy feeling in my breast. Normally, I could work out anything on the frets and the tinny shine of sound from my plectrum against the strings, but the blues wouldn’t work for me (because you have to be a Negro or a dying Jimmie Rodgers to play them right, I thought). And I still couldn’t get my song “The Lost Get-Back Boogie” into place, and I wondered even more deeply about everything that I was doing. I was betraying a friend, living among people who were as foreign to me as if I had been born in another dimension, and constantly scraping through the junk pile of my past, which had as much meaning as my father’s farm after Ace surveyed it into lots and covered it with cement. And I was thirty-one now, playing in the same beer joints for fifteen dollars a night, justifying what I did in a romantic abstraction about the music of the rural South.

The reality of that music was otherwise. The most cynical kind of exploitation of poverty, social decay, ignorance of medicine, cultural paranoia, racial hatred, and finally, hick stupidity were all involved in it. And the irony was that those who best served this vulgar, cynical world often in turn became its victims. I remembered when Hank Williams died at age twenty-nine, rejected by the Opry, his alcoholic life a nightmare. They put his body on the stage of the Montgomery city auditorium, and somebody sang “The Great Speckled Bird” while thousands of people slobbered into their handkerchiefs.

I put the guitar down and moved the skillet of elk steaks to the edge of the fire, then lay down on my bunk with my arm across my eyes. For a few minutes I heard the wind outside and the scrape of the pines against the cabin roof, and then I dropped down into the warmth of the blanket and the gray afternoon inside my head.

I dreamed I was in Korea again. It was hot, and three of us were sitting in the shade of a burnt-out tank with our shirts off, drinking warm beer out of cans that I had punched open with my bayonet. The twisted cloth straps of the bandoliers crisscrossed over my chest were dark with perspiration, and the metal side of the tank scorched my back every time I leaned against it. A couple of miles out from the beach, in the Sea of Japan, a British destroyer escort was throwing it into two MIGs that banked up high into the burning sky each time they made a strafing pass. I hadn’t seen Communist planes this far south before, except Bedcheck Charlie in his Piper Cub when he used to drop potato mashers on us, and it was fun to be a spectator, in the shade of the tank, with a lazy cigarette in my mouth and a wet can of beer between my thighs. The sea was flat and slate green, and the tracers from the pom-poms streaked away infinitely into the vast blueness of the sky. Then suddenly one of the MIGs burst apart in an explosion of yellow flame and flying metal that spun dizzily in trails of smoke toward the water.

The man next to me, Vern Benbow, an ex-ballplayer from the Texas bush, belched and held up his beer can in a toast. There were grains of sand in his damp hair, and his pale-blue, hillbilly eyes were red around the edges.

“May you find peace, motherfucker,” he said.

Then the scene changed. It was night, and Vern and I were in a wet hole fifteen yards behind our concertina wire, and the dark outline of a ridge loomed up into a darker sky that was occasionally violated with the falling halos of pistol flares. I was shaking with the malaria that I had picked up in the Philippines, and I thought I could hear mosquitoes buzzing inside my head. Every time a flare ripped upward into the blackness and popped into its ghostly phosphorescence, I felt another series of chills crawl like worms through every blood vein in my body.

“I think I got it figured out why they blow those goddamn bugles,” Vern said. “They’re dumb. That’s why they’re here. Nobody in his right mind would fight for a piece of shit like this.”

My rifle was leaned against the side of the hole with a tin can over the end of the barrel. I tried to straighten the poncho under me to keep the water from seeping along my spine.

“What the hell do we want that hill for?” Vern said. “Let the gooks have it. They deserve it. They can sit up there and play their bugles with their assholes. You couldn’t grow weeds here if you wanted to.”

His young face and the anxiety in it about tomorrow and the barrage that came in every day at exactly three o’clock was lighted momentarily by the pale glow of a descending flare. He took his package of Red Man chewing tobacco out of his pocket, filled his fingers with the loose strands, and put them in his mouth along with the slick lump that was already in his jaw. Out in the darkness, we saw the sergeant walking along the line of holes with his Thompson held in one hand.

“I guess I’ll go out tonight,” Vern said.

“You went out last night,” I said.

“You pulled mine two days ago. Besides, your teeth are clicking.”

I raised myself on one elbow, unbuttoned my shirt pocket, and took out the pair of red dice that I had carried with me since the Philippines.

“Snake eyes or boxcars?” I said.

“Texas people is always high rollers. Even you coonasses ought to know that.”

I rattled the dice once in my hand and threw them on the edge of his muddy blanket.

“Little Joe. You son of a buck,” he said. He put his pot on, picked up his rifle, slipped a bandolier over his shoulder, and lifted himself out of the hole. His back and seat were caked with mud.

That was the last time I saw him. He and fifteen others were caught halfway up the hill between two machine-gun emplacements that the Chinese had established on our side of Heartbreak Ridge during the night.

I heard the screen door slam on the edge of my dream and Buddy pulling off his heavy jacket. His hair was powdered with wet snow, and his trousers were damp up to the thighs from the brush along the riverbank. He rubbed his hands on his red cheeks.

“It’s too damn cold to fish,” he said. “I had one brown on and almost froze my hand when I stuck it in the water.”

“Where’s the brown?”

“Very clever,” he said.

“It was just a question, since I was trying to sleep and you came in like gangbusters.”

“Go back to sleep, then. I’m going to eat.” He unlaced the leather string on one boot and kicked it toward the wall. “You want some elk?”

“Go ahead. I’m not hungry.”

“You’re not anything these days, Zeno.”

“What am I supposed to do with that, Buddy?”

“Not a goddamn thing.”

“You want to just say it? If it’s on your mind, if it’s in some real bad place?”

“I don’t have nothing to say. I didn’t mean to piss you off because I woke you up. Or maybe you’re just pissed in general about something that don’t have anything to do with you and me.”

I sat up on the bunk and lit a cigarette. Outside, the snow was swirling in small flakes into the wet pines next to the cabin. The clouds had moved down low on the mountains until the timberline had disappeared. I wanted to push him into it, some final verbal recognition between the two of us about what I was doing with Beth and to him, my friend, so I wouldn’t have to keep contending with that dark feeling of deceit and betrayal that caught like a nail in my throat every time I looked at him. But I couldn’t push it over the edge, and he wouldn’t accept it either. I blinked into the cigarette smoke and took another deep puff, as though there were something philosophical in smoking a cigarette.

“I got pretty drunk last night, and it didn’t help to get half loaded again this morning,” I said. “I think I ought to hang up my drinking act for a while.”

“When you do that, Zeno, the Salvation Army is going to pass out free booze on Bourbon Street.”

“I believe that would be a commendable way to celebrate my sobriety.”

“Man, you are a clever son of a bitch. You sound like you went to one of those colored business colleges. You remember that psychotic preacher back in A that used to start hollering when the captain clanged the bell for evening count? His eyes were always busting out of his head after he’d been drinking julep in the cane all day, and he’d scream out all this stuff about standing up before Jesus that he’d memorized from one of those Baptist pamphlets, but he could never get all the words right. He’d stand there in the sun, still shouting, until the captain led him into the dormitory by the arm.”

In a moment Buddy had been back into our common prison experience, which I didn’t care to relive anymore, and I suddenly realized that maybe this was the only thing we shared: an abnormal period in our lives, since neither of us was a criminal by nature, that contained nothing but degradation, hopelessness, mindless cruelty (newborn kittens flushed down the commodes by the hacks), suicides bailing off the top tier, a shank in the spleen on the way to the dining hall, or the unbearable sexual heat that made your life a misery. I just didn’t feel any more humor in it, but Buddy’s face was flushed with laughter and anticipation of my own. I drew in on my cigarette and blew out the smoke without looking at him.

“What’s all that noise out there?” I said.

“What noise?” he said, his face coming back to composure.

“It sounds like a fox got into somebody’s henhouse.”

He stood up from the kitchen chair and looked through the front window. He held the curtain in his hand a moment and then dropped it, almost flinging it at the window glass.

“What’s the old man doing?” he said. “He must have lost his mind.” He sat on the chair and pulled his wet boots back on without lacing them.

I looked out the window and saw Mr. Riordan walking off balance through the rows of birdcages in the aviary, the snow swirling softly around him in a dim halo. He had a canvas bird-feed sack looped over one shoulder, and he was pulling back the tarps on the cages, unlatching the wire doors, and slinging seed on the ground.

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

“I’ll take care of it.”

“I was the one that got him drunk.”

“Nobody gets the old man drunk, Zeno.”

We walked hurriedly across the wet, cold field to the main house. Mrs. Riordan and Buddy’s sister had come out on the front porch and were standing silently by the rail with the wind in their faces. I could see a bottle of whiskey on top of one of the cages.

Birds were everywhere, like chickens all over a roost when an egg-sucking dog gets inside: ruffed grouse, Canadian geese, greenhead mallards, ground owls, gulls, bobwhites, ring-necked pheasants, an eagle, egrets, pintails, blue herons, and two turkey buzzards. Most of them seemed as though they didn’t know what to do, but then a mallard hen took off, circled once overhead, and winnowed toward the river. Buddy started latching the doors on the birds that hadn’t yet jumped out after the seed.

“Frank, what in the hell are you doing?” Buddy said.

Mr. Riordan’s back was to us, his shoulders bent, as he sowed the seed from side to side like a farmer walking a fallow field.

“Don’t let any more of them out,” Buddy said. “It’ll take us a week to get them back.”

Mr. Riordan turned and saw us for the first time. The bill of his fur cap was pulled low over his eyes.

“Hello, boys. What are you doing here?” he said.

“Let’s go inside,” Buddy said, and slipped the heavy sack of feed off his father’s shoulder. The pupils in Mr. Riordan’s eyes had contracted until there was nothing left but a frosted grayness that seemed to look through us.

He walked with us toward the porch, then as an afterthought picked up the bottle of whiskey by the neck. I thought he was going to drink from it, but I should have known better. He was not the type of man who would be seen drinking straight out of a bottle, particularly when drunk, in front of his family.

“Put it away for today, Frank,” Buddy said.

“Go get us three cups and the coffeepot that’s on the stove,” he said.

“I don’t think that’s good,” Buddy said.

He looked at Buddy from under the bill of his cap. There was no command in his expression, not even a hint of older authority, just the gray flatness of those eyes and maybe somewhere behind them a question mark.

“All right,” Buddy said. “But those birds are going to be spread all over the Bitterroot by tonight.”

He went inside with his mother and sister and a moment later came back with three cups hooked on his fingers and the metal coffeepot with a napkin wrapped around the handle.

We sat on the steps and leaned against the wood railing, with the snow blowing under the eave into our faces, and drank coffee and whiskey for a half hour. Occasionally, I heard movement inside the house, and when I would turn, I would see the disappearing face of Mrs. Riordan or Pearl in the window. The snow was starting to fall more heavily now, with the wind blowing from behind us out of Idaho, and I watched the mountains on the far side of the valley gradually disappear in the white haze, then the stripped cottonwoods along the river, and finally our cabin across the field.

Mr. Riordan was talking about his grandfather, who had owned half of a mine and the camp that went with it at Confederate Gulch during the 1870s.

“He was a part-time preacher, and he wouldn’t allow a saloon or a racetrack in town unless they contributed to his church,” he said. “He used to say there was nothing the devil hated worse than to have his own money used against him. Once, two of Henry Plummer’s old gang tried to hoorah the main street when they were drunk. He locked them in a stone powder house for two days and wouldn’t give them anything to drink but castor oil and busthead Indian whiskey. Then he made them wash in the creek, and took them home and fed them and gave them jobs in his mine.”

“It’s starting to come in heavy, Frank,” Buddy said. “We better get the birds back in and the tarps on.”

Mr. Riordan poured the whiskey and coffee out of his cup into the saucer to cool it.

“You should take Iry to a couple of the places around here,” he said. “There’s a whole city called Granite up eight thousand feet on the mountain outside of Philipsburg. Miners were making twelve-dollars-a-day wage, seven days a week, in the 1880s. They had an opry house, a union hall, a two-story hospital, one street filled with saloons and floozy houses, and the day the vein played out you couldn’t count ten people in that town. They left their food in plates right on the table.”

He was enjoying his recounting of Montana history to me, not so much for its quality of strangeness and fascination to an outsider, but because it was a very great part of the sequence that he still saw in time.

“I told you about where they hanged Whiskey Bill Graves,” he said, rolling a cigarette out of his string tobacco, “but before they got to him, they bounced Frank Parrish and four others off a beam in Virginia City. You can still see the rope burns on the rafter today. When they hoisted Parrish up on the ladder with the rope around his neck and asked him for his last words, he hollered out, ‘Hurray for Jefferson Davis! Let her rip, boys!’ and he jumped right into eternity.”

“I’m going to get the canvas gloves,” Buddy said.

“What?” Mr. Riordan said.

“Those damn birds.”

Buddy went inside again, knocking the heavy wood door shut when it wouldn’t close easily the first time. Mr. Riordan smoked his rolled cigarette down to a thin stub between his fingers, his elbows propped on his knees, his face looking out into the blowing snow that covered the whole ranch. The bib of his overalls had come unbuttoned and hung down on his stomach like a miniature and incongruous apron. I felt sorry for him, but I didn’t know why.

“I guess we’d better go inside,” I said.

“Yes, that’s probably right,” he answered.

By that time Buddy had come out on the porch with the thick, canvas elbow-length gloves for handling the birds. Mr. Riordan started to rise, then had to grab the banister for support. I put one hand under his arm, as innocuously as I could, and helped him turn toward the door. The whiskey and blood drained out of his face from the exertion. His weight tipped sideways away from my hand. He breathed deeply, with a phlegmy tick in his throat.

“I believe I’m going to have to leave it with you, boys,” he said.

Buddy and I walked him upstairs to bed, then went outside and set about trying to put three dozen confused birds back in their cages. After an hour of chasing them in a whir of wings and cacophony of noise, we still hadn’t caught half of them.

“Shit on it,” Buddy said. There were two blood-flecked welts on one cheek. “The ducks won’t go any farther than the slough, and the rest of these assholes will put themselves back in when they’re ready.”

I went inside the house with him to return the canvas gloves. His sister sat by the burning fireplace with a magazine folded back in her hands. When Buddy walked into the back of the house and left us alone, I could feel her resentment, like an aura around her, in the silence. I stood in the center of the room with an unlit cigarette in my mouth, the melted snow dripping out of my hair.

“You really leave your mark when you stay at somebody’s place, don’t you?” she said, without looking up.

“How’s that?” I said. I really didn’t want an exchange with her, but it looked like it was inevitable, and I was damned if I was going to lose to someone’s idle attempt at insult.

“Oh, I think we both know that you have a way of letting everybody know you’re around.”

“Yeah, I guess I led your father into a bottle of whiskey, and I got Buddy those five years in the joint. They must be pretty susceptible to what a part-time guitar picker can do to them.”

Her curly head looked up from the magazine, the light from the fireplace bright on the sunburned ends of her hair.

“You are a bastard, aren’t you?”

“A genuine southern badass.”

“It must be nice to have that awareness about yourself,” she said.

No more tilting, babe, because you’re an amateur, I thought. I had gotten to her, but I should have known then that she was going to pull out that arrow point later and give it back to me, in a form that I wouldn’t recognize until it was too late.

Buddy and I walked back to the cabin in the gray light. Most of the afternoon was gone, and there wasn’t enough time to take a nap before I would have to get ready to work that night. I hadn’t realized how tired I was. The lack of sleep from last night, unloading the nutrias with Mr. Riordan, an hour of fighting birds that pecked and defecated all over you, and two excursions into drinking in one day all came down on me like a wooden club on the back of the neck.

I got into the tin shower and turned on the hot water, and just as I was thinking of a way to coast through the evening (no booze on the bandstand, long breaks between sets, letting the steel man do the lead and the drummer most of the vocals) until I could be back at Beth’s after we closed, Buddy decided that everyone should go to Milltown with me. The water drummed against the tin sides of the shower, and I tried to think of some reasonable way to dissuade him, but I knew that Beth was in the center of his mind, and there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t sound like a door kicked shut in his face.

So while I dressed, he went back to the main house and talked to Melvin, who needed little encouragement for any kind of adventure, and a half hour later they were sitting in the front room of the cabin with a bottle of vodka that Melvin had been working on through the afternoon. Pearl evidently had argued about going, because Buddy and her husband kept making reassuring remarks to her in the way obtuse or drunk people would to a child. Actually, I couldn’t believe it. Neither one of them saw how angry she was or how much she disliked herself for being in any proximity to me.

Then Buddy went one better. While I was wrapping the guitar in a blanket, he took a blotter of acid out of the icebox and convinced Melvin to eat some with him. Pearl looked out the window like an angry piece of stone.

“Take a hit, Iry,” Melvin said.

“I’ve got too many snakes in my head already.”

“Zeno has to do his Buck Owens progressions tonight,” Buddy said.

“Why don’t you join them?” Pearl said, her face still turned toward the window.

“I’m afraid I can’t handle it.”

“It’s all them big slides on the guitar neck,” Buddy said. “There’s three chords in every one of those shitkicker songs, and Zeno has to stay sharp.”

Buddy’s voice had a mean edge to it, and I knew that no matter what I did, we were headed into a bad one.

I drove the Plymouth to Missoula while Buddy sat beside me, giggling and passing the quart bottle of vodka to Melvin in the backseat. The wind was blowing strong off the river, and the melted snow on the highway had glazed in long, slick patches. The Plymouth’s tires were bald, and every time I hit ice, I had to shift into second and slow gradually, holding my breath, because the brakes would have sent us spinning sideways off the shoulder.

We stopped at Beth’s house, and Buddy banged on the door as though there were a fire inside. The porch light went on, and I could see Beth in silhouette and the children behind her. I felt awful. I wished I could tell her in some way that this wasn’t my plan, wasn’t something that was born out of a day’s drinking and dropped on her doorstep to contend with. But I knew that I wouldn’t get to talk with her alone during the evening, and there would be no visit at her house after the bar closed, and she would be trapped four or five hours at a soiled table while Buddy and Melvin got deeper and deeper into a liquor-soaked, acid delirium.

We drove along the Clark through Hellgate Canyon to the bar, with the snow blowing out of the dark pines into the headlights. There was no easy way to coast through the evening. The building was already crowded when we got there, the steel man had cut off one of his fingers with a chain saw that afternoon, and the drummer, who I thought could take the vocal, had four opened beers sitting in a row on the rail next to his traps.

I got up on the platform, slipped the guitar strap around my neck, and tripped the purple and orange lights with my foot. In the glare of light against my eyes I saw Buddy walk with his arm around Beth’s shoulders to a table by the edge of the dance floor. I put on my thumb pick, screwed the guitar into D, and kicked it off with “Poison Love.” I didn’t have a mandolin to back me up, and my fingers still felt stiff from the cold outside, but Johnny and Jack or Bill and Charlie Monroe never did it better. Then I rolled into Moon Mulligan’s “Ragged but Right” and knocked out four others in a row with no pause except for the bridge into the next key. The cellophane-covered lights were hot against my face, and my eyes were starting to water in the drifting clouds of cigarette smoke. The dance floor and the tables were lost somewhere behind the rail of the platform and the violent glitter and rattle of bottles and glasses. I felt the sweat roll down off my face and hit on my hand, and when I went into the last song, I heard the drummer miss a beat and clatter a stick against the metal edge of the trap.

“Hey, man, save some for later,” he said.

After the set I went to the table, which was now wet with spilled beer and scorched with cigarettes that Buddy had mashed out on the cloth. Beth’s face was almost white.

“Give me the keys,” he said.

“What for?” I said.

“Because they’re my keys. And because it’s my goddamn car, and that’s my goddamn wife. You understand that’s my wife, don’t you?”

Everyone looked momentarily into the center of the table.

“Don’t go driving anywhere now, man,” I said.

“I ain’t. And you didn’t answer my question.”

“Take the keys. Get into the stock-car derby if you like,” I said.

“Just answer me. Without all that southern bullshit you put out.”

“I got to get back on the bandstand.”

“No, man, you answer something straight for the first time in your fucking insignificant life.”

“He just wants the keys to get in the trunk,” Melvin said. “He bought a couple of lids from some university kids.”

“They’re right there,” I said. I rose from the chair and started back toward the platform. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Beth lean forward and place her forehead against her fingertips.

I couldn’t get between two tables because a fat man had fallen over backward like a beer barrel in his chair. Up on the stand, the drummer was draining the last foam from a bottle, and our bass man was slipping his velvet glove back on his hand. I felt Melvin’s arm on my shoulder and his sour liquor breath along the side of my cheek.

“Take a walk with me into the head,” he said. I followed him inside the yellow glare of the men’s room and leaned against the stall with him.

“Look, he just ate too much acid, and maybe we ought to get out of here early tonight,” he said.

I looked at him, with his tailored attempt at some romantic western ethic, and wondered if his rebellion was against a mother or father who owned a candy factory in Connecticut.

“I work here,” I said. “If I leave, I don’t get paid. Also, I probably get fired. What happened at the table with Beth?”

“What do you mean?” He looked at the garish color of the wall in front of him, as though he had seen it for the first time.

“She looked sick.”

“Buddy was trying to feel her up under the table.”

“Man, I don’t believe it,” I said.

“That’s what I said. We should leave early tonight.”

I left him leaning over the trough and went back to the platform just as the rhythm guitarist was starting to fake his way through “Folsom Prison Blues” by humping the microphone and roaring it out with enough amplification to blow the front windows into the parking lot.

I cut it short at one-thirty in the morning, and normally there would have been a protest from the crowd. But the temperature was dropping steadily, and the little plastic radio behind the bar said that a storm that had already torn through Calgary and southern Alberta would hit the Missoula area tomorrow.

The bar emptied out while we put away our instruments on the bandstand, and after I tripped off the purple and orange lights with my foot, I could see Buddy at the table with his arms folded under his head. Melvin was leaned back in the chair, his tie pulled loose and a dead cigarette in his grinning mouth, his arms hooked back over the chair’s supports like a man who had been crucified by comical accident.

There were no keys to the Plymouth. No one was sure what happened to them. Buddy possibly broke one off in the trunk and lost the other one while wandering around in the snow after all his reefer blew away in the wind. I said good-night to Harold, the owner, took a glass of Jim Beam with me, and while Melvin, Buddy, and Pearl slept in a pile in the backseat, Beth held the flashlight for me under the dashboard, and I used a piece of chewing tobacco tinfoil to wrap together the wires behind the ignition.

She sat close to me on the drive back to Missoula, with her hand inside my coat, and each time the draft would come up through the floorboard, she would press her thigh against mine and hold a little tighter with her arm. I forgot about Buddy in the backseat and what he would think later. I just wanted to be with her again upstairs in her house with the tree raking against the window. She knew it, too, as we came through the Hellgate into Missoula, with the water starting to freeze into white plates on the edge of the Clark. She leaned her breasts into my arm and kissed me with her tongue against my neck, and I knew everything was going to be all right when I came around the last curve on the mountain into Missoula.

The sheriff’s car pulled out even with the Plymouth from the gravel turnaround, the bubble-gum light revolving in a lazy blue-and-orange arc. His souped-up V-8 motor gunned once when he went past us on a slick stretch of ice. He braked to the side of the road and got out with a flashlight in his hand, the collar of his mackinaw turned up into the brim of his Stetson to protect his ears. He walked back to the Plymouth against the wind, as though his own weight was more than he could bear, and opened the door with the flashlight in my face.

“Don’t kick over that glass trying to hide it with your foot, son,” he said. “You don’t want to spill whiskey all over the car. Now what’s those wires doing hanging under the dashboard with tinfoil around them?”

I took a cigarette from the pack inside my coat and tried to pop a damp kitchen match on my thumbnail, but it broke across my finger. He clicked off the light and pulled back the door a little wider for me to get out.

“Sometimes you get caught by the short hairs, Paret. You ought to look out for that,” he said.