The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Eleven

Fifteen days. I thought I would get out of it with a fine when I went to guilty court the next day, but the sheriff put in a few words for me with the judge to make sure that would not be the case. (He mentioned, as a casual aside, that I was an out-of-state parolee.)

They put me in a whitewashed eight-man cell on the second floor with the usual collection of county prisoners: habitual drunks, petty check writers, drifters, barroom brawlers, and hapless souls in for nonsupport. There was no window in the cell, the white walls were an insult on the eyes, and we got out only one hour a day for showers. It was going to be a long fifteen days.

I was angry with myself for getting busted on a punk charge like driving with an open container, but I realized that the particular charge didn’t make any difference. That fat cop was going to nail me one way or another; it was just a choice of time and place.

Buddy came to see me during the visiting hours that afternoon. I didn’t want to talk with him after the scene in the bar, and in fact I wasn’t in a mood to talk with anyone. The men in that crowded cell were generally a luckless and pathetic lot, but nevertheless each of their movements (their knee bends and push-ups) and attempts at conversation to relieve their boredom were irritating, eye-crossing reminders of all the wasted nights and days and the impaired, lost people I had known in Angola.

The hack unlocked the cell door and took me downstairs to the visitors’ room by the arm.

“You want some cigarettes from the machine while we’re down?” he said.

I gave him some change from my pocket and sat on one side of the long board table across from Buddy. There were still grains of ice on his mackinaw, which hung on the back of his chair. His face was white with hangover, and his hand with the cigarette shook slightly on top of his folded arm.

“You have thunder in your eyes, Zeno,” he said.

“Room service was bad today.”

“I’m sorry, man. That’s a bad deal. I thought they’d just lighten your wallet a little bit.”

“It could have been worse. They might have tried for drunk driving.”

He paused and looked away.

“You want a butt?” he said.

“The screw’s bringing me a pack.”

“Hey, man, I didn’t mean to go over the edge last night.” His eyes came back into mine.

“Everybody was drunk. That stuff’s always comedy, anyway.”

“You want the guitar? The jailer said you can have it up there.”

“I better not. A couple of those characters would probably try to screw it,” I said.

“Look, I feel like a piece of shit about it.”

“Forget it. I’m going to take up yoga.”

“No, I mean getting it on about Beth.”

The guard put the package of Lucky Strikes in front of me, and I peeled away the cellophane from the top.

“I wouldn’t have brought it out like that unless my head was soaking in acid and booze. Shit, I know I can’t make up back time with her. What you do is between you and her, Zeno.”

I felt my face flush, and I didn’t want to look at his self-abasement.

“I haven’t been thinking about any of that,” I said.

“Man, I can read you. I know what you’re going to think before a spark even flashes across that guilt-ridden spot in the center of your brain. You’re going to tango out of here after your fifteen days, move out of the cabin, and start being a family man in Missoula with some bullshit guilt about old friends hung on your shirt like a Purple Heart.”

“You’ve got it figured a lot better than I do, then,” I said.

“Because I know you.”

“You don’t know diddly-squat, Buddy. The only thing I’ve got in mind is living two weeks upstairs with some question about what my parole officer is going to do with this. After that scene at the pulp mill, this could be the nut that violates me back to Angola.”

“Yeah,” he said, quietly mumbling, with the backs of his fingers against his mouth. “I hadn’t thought about that. That geek would probably do it, too. I didn’t tell you I went to high school with him. He has the IQ of a moth, a real pocket-pool artist. He would probably put you in the toilet just to close the file on you.”

Buddy had a fine way of making you feel better about the future.

“Maybe we can bring a little pressure to bear,” he said, his eyes still introspective. “My sister says he hangs around with a bunch of faggots in East Missoula.”

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t do these things for me.” I could see the color coming back into Buddy’s face as his fantasy became more intense and the memory of last night and his discomfort in front of me started to fade into an ordinary day that he could live with.

“We always have alternatives, Zeno,” he said. “You can’t sit on a bunk all that time and worry about Louisiana and moving your baggage around and all this marital crap.”

I heard the hack light a cigar behind me and scrape his chair. Buddy looked past my shoulder, then put his pack of cigarettes on the table with four books of matches.

“I better roll, babe,” he said. “I’ll bring some candy bars and magazines tomorrow.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Become popular with your bunkies. But look, man, the cabin’s yours when you get out. None of this moving into town because you think you got to do something. Besides, the old man wants you to stay there.”

“When did he say this?”

“This morning.” He answered me in a matter-of-fact way, then looked at me with a new attention. “Why?”

“I just wondered. I thought I might have burned my welcome.” But it didn’t work.

His eyes studied mine for even the hint of some private relationship between his father and me, and I was probably not good in concealing it.

“Keep the butts and the matches,” he said. “You never did learn how to split them, did you?”

He put on his mackinaw and walked down the hall toward the front door of the courthouse, that square of brilliant natural light with the snow blowing behind it, and the trees along the street hung with ice, rattling and clicking in the wind, and the people in overcoats and scarfs, their shoes squeaking on the sidewalks while they walked toward homes and fireplaces and families. I put Buddy’s cigarettes, along with my own and the books of matches, into my denim shirt pocket and waited for the hack to put his hand around my arm for the walk upstairs.

The days passed slowly in the cell, with the endless card games and meaningless conversation and the constant hiss of the radiator. Beth visited me every afternoon, and I almost asked her to stop coming, because I wanted her so badly each time after she left. At night I lay on the bunk and tried not to think of being in bed with her, but when I drifted into sleep, my sexual heat embraced wild erotic dreams that made my loins ache for release. Then I would awake, my mattress damp with sweat, draw up my knees before me like an adolescent child suddenly beset with puberty, and debate the morality of masturbation.

I didn’t think it was going to be so hard to pull fifteen days. But after nine days I would have volunteered to pull thirty on a road gang to get away from my seven cell mates, their explosions into the toilet, their latent homosexuality (which they disguised as grab-assing), and finally a definite hum that was beginning in the center of my brain.

I noticed it at the end of the first week when I was sitting on my bunk, with my back against the wall, and staring at nothing in particular. Then I saw a plastic Benzedrex inhaler on the concrete floor, and the hum started like a tuning fork beginning to vibrate. It was like that dream you have as a child when you pick up something small and inconsequential off the ground, and suddenly it grows in your hand until it covers the whole earth, and you know you are into a nightmare that seems to have no origin.

Somebody in the cell had gotten hold of some inhalers and was chewing the cotton rings from inside, which was good for a high that would knock the head off King Kong. But for some reason my glance on that split-open plastic tube brought back all the listless hours in my cell at Angola and all the visions I had there about madness in myself and madness all over the world. My mother had killed herself and my sister Fran in the house fire, even though my father always pretended that it was an accident, and as I grew up, I always wondered if she had left some terrible seed in me. But in Korea I believed truly for the first time that I was all right, because I realized that insanity was not a matter of individual illness; it was abroad in all men, and its definition was a very relative matter. I even took a perverse pride in the fact that I knew the lieutenant was lying when he said we couldn’t take six gook prisoners back to the rear and we had to blow them all over a ditch. Four members of the patrol did it and enjoyed it, but they never admitted later that it was anything but necessary.

Even my father had the same strange dualism about war and people at their worst in the middle of an inferno, and their failure to recognize it later for what it was. He went all the way across France in the Great War, as he called it, a seventeen-year-old marine who would be hit twice and gassed once before his next birthday. But he refused to talk about it in even the most vague or general way. I often wondered what awful thing he carried back with him from France, something that must have lain inside him like a piece of rusted barbed wire.

But he was working an oil job at Texas City when it blew up in 1947 and killed over five hundred people, many of them roughnecks whom he had known for years. A ship carrying fertilizer was burning out in the harbor, and while people watched from the docks and a tug tried to pull it out to the Gulf, the fire dripped into the hold and then the ship exploded in a mushroom flame that rained onto the refineries and chemical plants along the shore. The town went up almost at once — the gas storage tanks, the derricks, the entire Monsanto plant — and blew out store windows as far away as Houston. The men caught in the oil field, where blown wellheads fired geysers of flame into the sky under thousands of pounds of pressure, were burned with heat so great that their ashes or even their scorched bones couldn’t be separated from the debris.

A year later my father and I were cane fishing for bream in some tanks on a stretch of bald prairie about six miles from Texas City, and we walked around a huge, scalloped hole in the earth where a sheet of twisted boiler plate, the size of a garage door, had spun out of the sky like a stray, ugly monument to all that agony back there in the flames. The hole had filled partially with water, tadpoles hovered under the lip of the rusted metal, and salt grass had begun to grow down the eroded banks.

My father rolled a cigarette from his package of Virginia Extra and looked out toward a windmill ginning in the breeze off the Gulf.

“I lost some of the best friends I ever had in that thing, Son,” he said. “There wasn’t any reason for it, either. They could have gotten that fertilizer ship out of there or shut them rigs down and taken everybody out. Those boys didn’t have to die.”

So the madness in war was an area that was sacrosanct, not even to be recognized, and there was no correlation between that and the death of your best friends because of corporate stupidity.

But I lost my point, with that description of the hum in my head back in Angola, that distant echo of a bugle that went even farther back to a hole in Korea. The Benzedrex inhaler had conjured up my old cell in the Block, on a languid Louisiana summer afternoon, with the humidity damp on the walls and the bars, and my cell mate W. J. Posey across from me, wiping the sweat off his naked, tattooed body with a washcloth. We were both stoned on Benzedrex and the paregoric that he had stolen from the infirmary.

“So you killed the son of a bitch,” W. J. said. “A punk like that has it coming. You iced people in Korea that didn’t do nothing to you.”

“He broke the shank off in him when he went down. He bled on the bandstand like an elephant.”

“You’re breaking my knob off. You got two years. Take another drag on ole Sneaky Pete.”

I got out of jail on Tuesday. Buddy was waiting for me at the possessions desk with a crazy grin on his face.

“How did you know what time I was coming out?” I said.

“They always flush you wineheads out about ten in the morning.”

I had hoped Beth would be there, and he must have seen it in my face.

“She couldn’t leave the house,” he said. “Both of the kids swoll up with mumps yesterday.”

“Are you putting me on?” I picked up the brown envelope with my belt, shoestrings, and wallet inside.

“I know you never had them, Zeno. I wouldn’t put you on like that.”

Damn, I thought.

“Figure it this way,” he said. “You could have gone over there one day earlier and had your rocks swell up like a pair of basketballs.”

The woman behind the desk looked up with her mouth open.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“There you go, babe. Let’s boogie on down the street, because your daddy is about to get into a gig again.”

We walked outside into the cold, sunlit day, and the sharp air cut into my lungs. The green trees on the mountains were heavy with snow, and the sky was so clear and deeply blue that I thought I would become lost in it.

“Let’s walk to this place,” Buddy said. “My tires are so bald you can see the air showing through. I didn’t park the car at that angle. It slid sideways through the intersection.”

“What’s this gig?”

“I thought I might clean up my act and get back in the business. A guy I know runs this college joint up in the next block, and he wants to try a piano player to bring in all those fraternity cats and their sweet young girls. Somebody with class, such as myself. Someone to keep them plugged into magic sounds so they won’t bust up the place every night and puke all over his crapper.”

“That sounds good, man.”

“Well, he’s not real sure about me. Thinks I’m crazy. Undependable. I might show up with a hype hanging out of my forehead. Anyway, he asked me to come down this morning and play a few because his wife will be there, and she knows music. Now dig this, man. I used to know her in high school when she was in the band, and she couldn’t tell the difference between a C chord and a snare drum. She was so awful that the bandleader put the tubas in front of her to blow her back into the wall. She used to wear Oxford therapeutic shoes and these glasses that looked like they were made out of the bottoms of Coke bottles. She also had gas all the time. Every two minutes you could hear her burping through her alto sax.”

I was shaking my head and laughing.

“Zeno, you don’t believe anything anybody tells you,” he said.

“Because nobody in the world ever had experiences or knew people like these.”

“All right, you’ll see, partner. Just be prepared to meet humanity’s answer to the goldfish.”

I never did know why Buddy boozed and doped. He could get high in minutes on just himself.

The bar was a beer-and-pizza place with checker-cloth table covers and rows of fraternity steins on the shelves. The contraceptive machine in the men’s room had long since been destroyed, and young, virile Americans had punched out big, ragged holes in the fiberboard partitions. I sat at the bar and had a sandwich and a beer while Buddy played the piano for the owner and his wife, who looked exactly as Buddy had described her. (This is why I could never tell whether he was lying, fantasizing, or telling the truth.) She stared at him a few moments with those huge orbs of color behind her glasses, then began washing glasses in a tin sink.

I watched Buddy play. I had forgotten how really good he was. He started out with “I Found a New Baby,” and he played it the way Mel Powell used to at the Lighthouse in California: a slow, delicate, almost conventional entrance into the melody, then building, the bass growing louder, his right hand working on a fine counterpoint, and finally he was way inside himself and all the wild sounds around him. He didn’t even look the same when he played. A strange physical transformation took over him, the kind you see in people who are always partly out of cadence with the rest of the world until they do the one thing that they’re good at. As I looked at him, with his shoulders bent, his arms working, the eyes flat and withdrawn, I would have never made him for the Buddy I knew the rest of the time.

Later the owner bought us a beer and told Buddy to come to work the next night. He wanted to hide it, but I could see he was truly happy. He hadn’t worked as a musician since he went to jail, and that was six years ago.

“Let’s make it,” I said.

“One more beer. I have to ease the effect of joining the work force again. It really blows my self-image.”

“One, damn it, and that’s it. I’m not getting into any more of your bloody capers.”

“Oo, oo, oo, oo,” he said, his face in a feminine pout. “Dig who’s coming on about capers. The mad firebomber of Missoula.”

“Hey, man,” I said, hoarsely.

“Anyway, I wanted to tell you this story, since it just rolled into my gourd while I was into that 1950 Lighthouse shot. I never told you about the Legend of the Gigantic Fart, did I?”

“Put the beer in a paper bag. Let’s get it on the road.”

“No, man, this story became a legend and is still told in the high schools around the county. You see, it was at the junior prom, a very big deal with hoop dresses and everybody drinking sloe gin and R.C. Cola outside in the cars. Now, this is strictly a class occasion if you live in a shitkicker town. Anyway, we’d been slopping down the beer all afternoon and eating pinto-bean salad and these greasy fried fish before we got to the dance. So it was the third number, and I took Betty Hoggenback out on the floor and was doing wonderful, tilting her back like Fred Astaire doing Ginger Rogers. Then I felt this wet fart start to grow inside me. It was like a brown rat trying to get outside. I tried to leak it off one shot at a time and keep dancing away from it, but I must have left a cloud behind that would take the varnish off the gym floor. Then one guy says, ‘Man, I don’t believe it!’ People were walking off the floor, holding their noses and saying, ‘Pew, who cut it?’ Then the saxophone player on the bandstand threw up into the piano. Later, guys were shaking my hand and buying me drinks, and a guy on the varsity came up and said that was the greatest fart he’d ever seen. It destroyed the whole prom. The saxophone player had urp all over his summer tux, and they must have had to burn the smell out of that piano with a blowtorch.”

Buddy was laughing so hard at his own story that tears ran down his cheeks. He caught his breath, drank out of the beer glass, then started laughing again. The woman behind the bar was looking at him as though a lunatic had just walked into the normalcy of her life.

We drove back to the ranch, and later in the afternoon I walked up the gravel road to the general store on the blacktop and used the pay phone to call Beth. I told her that I had never had the mumps and couldn’t come to the house because I didn’t feel like becoming sterile; then I waited with my hand tight on the receiver during a long, heart-beating pause. She said she didn’t have anyone to stay with the boys and couldn’t leave them for any period of time anyway, and that was the end of that. So that meant another two weeks on the shelf, I thought, as I walked back down the road in the cold air between the rows of pine trees.

During the next week I helped Mr. Riordan feed the birds in the aviary and start work on a new barn, but I couldn’t go to sleep at night, even though I was physically exhausted, until I had sat at the kitchen table alone for two hours with a bottle of Jim Beam. I was back with the band on the weekend, and one night I went into town with Buddy to the pizza place and called Beth again in a beer fog, hoping that she would say Yes yes yes. Check into the Florence. I’ll be there in a few minutes. However, like most drunken wishes, it didn’t have much to do with reality. I liked to hear Buddy play, but I couldn’t sit long in the middle of that college crowd.

I don’t know why they bothered me. It wasn’t their loud and bullish behavior that came after three beers, or even their curiosity about my foreign presence, which was like the appearance of a dinosaur among them. They reached down and touched something else in me that I couldn’t articulate. Maybe it was just the fact that they were young and still standing on first base with all the confidence and expectation of stealing second. There was no such thing as a clock in the universe, and all of them knew that they would never die. I walked down the street to the Oxford in the light snow and sat on one of the high wooden chairs in the side room and watched the strange collection of late-night characters play cards until Buddy got off.

Monday afternoon we caught part of a storm that blew over the mountains from Idaho, and my hands got so cold hammering nails into the side of the barn that I could hardly feel the blow when I missed once and came down on my thumb. My ears felt like iron inside the hood of my coat, and when the light started to fail, I waited for Mr. Riordan to stick his hammer through the loop of his overalls; but instead he kicked a bunch of scrap boards into a pile, poured gasoline over it, paused long enough to relight his cigarette in his cupped hands, and dropped the match into the pile. We finished the side frame in the light of the fire, which flared into a cone of flame and then flattened into a white circle of heat each time the wind sucked under the boards.

When we got back to the cabin, Buddy took off his clothes, dropped them on the floor, and turned the hot water on in the tin shower just long enough to bring the feeling back into his body. He stood naked by the wood stove and dried himself with a towel. His ribs drew tight against his sides each time he breathed. There was a tattoo of a pair of dice showing a six and a five inside one thigh.

“Wow, I’m tired,” he said, rubbing the towel into his face and hair. “And I’m late, and my fingers feel like balloons, and I didn’t press a shirt this morning, and I don’t feel like making that gig, Zeno.”

“Do it,” I said. I sat at the table, with my wet clothes dripping on the floor and a damp cigarette in my fingers. I had poured a glass of neat whiskey, but I hadn’t had the strength yet to pick it up.

“That’s very cool. While I entertain these college cats, you’ll be sitting home by the fire digging on some whiskey dream about southern freight trains. So I have a suggestion. Why don’t you zip on my Uncle Zeno suit and try filling in for me. If you think playing for a bunch of shitkickers is a zoo scene, do a shot with the junior lettermen that ask you to play ‘Happy Birthday’ for a chick they’re going to assault in the backseat that night.”

“Go to work, Buddy.”

He went into his bedroom and came back with his suit on the hanger, his underwear, and the soiled shirt that he had worn last night. He dressed by the stove, his body thin and yellow in the light of the electric bulb overhead. I took a drink out of the whiskey, and I felt the first warmth come back into my lungs.

“Where did you get that tattoo?” I said.

“Before I got nailed, I used to live with this mulatto girl that played sometimes at Pat O’Brien’s. I sat down at the piano once with her, and she thought I was her Mister Cool, the best thing since Brubeck, Monk, Mel Powell, or anybody. Except she liked shooting craps better than playing jazz. She made me take her to a couple of those upstairs games on Rampart, and she’d fade every bet on the board. When we got cleaned out, she’d bust up the apartment and call up some Baptist preacher in Mississippi and promise never to hang around white musicians again.”

“How did you get the tattoo?”

“I just told you.”

“Buddy, you are a dislodged madman. I think the hacks were right. That glue got to you a long time ago.”

“That’s because you got all your wiring tuned in to another radio set,” he said. “And speaking of that, while your high-rolling daddy is about to move it down the road and do his act for the sweater girls and their Howdy Doody boyfriends, let me click on the radio so we can listen to that fine jazz station in Spokane and dig on Shorty’s flügelhorn.”

Buddy turned on the radio that was set in the kitchen window, his trousers unzippered, one-half of his shirt hanging off his back. The tubes warmed in the old plastic box, the static cracked, and when the sound sharpened through the speaker, Shorty Rogers and Shelly Mann were actually playing.

Buddy put his arm through the other sleeve, as though he had been in suspension, and then began jiggling all over in rhythm to the music while he buttoned his shirt in his bare feet.

“Tell me, truthfully,” he said. “Were you ever tempted when you were inside? I mean, to just quit fighting it and let the girl have her way?”

Without rising from the chair, I reached over and turned up the radio to full volume and finished the whiskey in my glass. A few minutes later I heard Buddy grind the starter on the Plymouth outside.

After I had showered and put on a soft wool shirt and clean pair of khakis, I saw the pickup truck stop in front of the porch. I opened the door and looked through the screen at Pearl in the blowing snow. She wore a man’s mackinaw with a scarf tied around her head, and her face was red with cold.

“Tell Buddy that—”

“Come in before you turn into a snowman,” I said.

“Just tell him that Frank—”

I opened the screen for her.

“Come in if you want to talk with me. You might not mind freezing, but I do,” I said.

She stepped inside, and I closed the wood door behind her.

“Frank’ll pick him up at six-thirty in the morning to go into Hamilton for some lumber,” she said.

“Oh, he’ll like that.”

“You can do it for him.”

“All right. No problem in that.” I could see she had on only a light shirt under the mackinaw, and she was shaking with the sudden warmth of the room. “You want a cup of coffee?”

“I have to get a loaf of bread up at the store before it closes.”

I took an unopened loaf from the bread box in the cupboard and set it on the table.

“Sit down. A cup of coffee won’t ruin your general feelings towards me.” I washed a cup under the iron pump and filled it from the pot on the stove.

She untied her scarf and shook her hair loose. It was wet with snow on the ends. She picked up the cup with both hands and sipped at the edge.

“Put a little iron it it,” I said, and tipped a capful of whiskey into her coffee. “Where’s Mel tonight?”

“He’s at a faculty meeting.”

“Is he serious about that revolution business?”

“In his way, yes, I guess he is.”

“What do you mean ‘in his way’?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” she said.

“I’ve had some experience with people who are always trying to right the world by wiping out large portions of it. They all have the same idea about sacrifices, but it’s always somebody else’s ass that gets burned.”

“Mel’s a good man,” she said, and looked at me flatly.

“I didn’t say he wasn’t. I didn’t say anything about him. I just asked a question.”

“He believes in idealistic things. He wasn’t in a war like you, and he doesn’t have your cynicism about things.”

I took a good hit out of the bottle on that one.

“You know, I think you’re a crazy woman and you belong in a crazy house,” I said. “The next time I get drafted into one of Uncle Sam’s shooting capers, I’ll write the draft board and tell them I’d rather opt out because I don’t want to come home with any cynical feelings.”

“Let me ask you a question. Do you feel anything at all about taking from everything around you no matter what it costs other people who have nothing to do with your life?”

I walked in my socks to the stove and poured more coffee and a flash of whiskey in her cup and sat back down. She had pulled back her mackinaw, and her breasts were stiff against her shirt as she breathed. Her full thighs were tight inside her blue jeans and spread open indifferently on the corner of the chair. I had to hold the anger down in my chest, and at the same time she disturbed me sexually.

“Let me hang this one on you, Pearl, and you can do with it what you want to,” I said. “I didn’t take anything from anybody, and any problem they have isn’t of my making. It was already there.”

She moved herself slightly in the chair, just enough so that her thighs widened an inch and her buttocks flattened.

“That must be a convenient way to think,” she said.

“It’s better than that. It’s the truth. And I don’t like anyone trying to make me take somebody else’s fall.”

“That must be some of your prison terminology.”

“You better believe it is. I paid my dues, and straight people don’t con a con.” I felt my heart beating and my words start to run away with themselves.

“Maybe all people don’t behave toward one another with a frame of reference they learned in jail.”

“Well, the next time you want to talk about people’s problems, come down here again and I’ll help you solve a couple of yours.”

She didn’t say anything. She just buttoned up her mackinaw, tied her scarf around her damp hair with the remote manner of a lady leaving a distasteful situation, and walked out the door to the truck. She left the door open, and the wind drove the snow into the room.

I didn’t even bother to shut it for ten minutes. I felt a red anger at myself for my loss of control that left me trembling. Talk about a con not being conned, I thought. You are a fish who just got conned into thinking he was a con who could not be conned. And for somebody who thought he had touched all the bases over the years, this was no mean thing to consider.

The two weeks finally passed, and it was a bright, cold day with the snow banked high on the lawns in Missoula when I knocked on Beth’s door. The boys were at school, and we made love on the couch, in her bed, and finally, in a last heated moment, on the floor. Her soft stomach and large, white breasts seemed to burn with her blood, and when she pressed her hands into the small of my back, I felt the fifteen days in jail and the two weeks of aching early morning hours drain away as in a dream.

Each morning I helped Mr. Riordan put in the stall partitions in the barn and feed the birds in the aviary; then after lunch I hitched a ride or flagged down the bus into Missoula. Beth and I whitefished in the broken ice along the banks of the Clark, a fire of driftwood roaring in the wind with the coffeepot set among the coals. We ate bleeding steaks by the stone fireplace in the German restaurant and explored ghost towns and mining camps up logging roads and drainages where the trees rang with the tangle of ice in their limbs. I had forgotten how fine it was to simply be with someone you love.

We drove up a graded log road off Rock Creek, high up the side of the mountain, to a mining camp that had been abandoned in the 1870s. The cabins were still there along the frozen creek, where they used to mine placer gold that washed down from the mother lode, and the old sluices and rocker boxes were covered with undergrowth, the rusted square nails and bits of chain encased in ice. But if you blinked for just a minute, and let your imagination have its way, you could almost see those old-timers of a century ago bent sweatily into their futile dream of a Comstock or Alder Gulch or Tombstone. They always knew that wealth and the fulfillment of American promise was in that next shovel-load of sand.

“What are you thinking so hard about?” Beth said, her face bright with the cold wind that blew down the drainage.

“Those old-timers must have really believed in it. Can you imagine what it was like to pull the winter up here in the 1870s when they had to haul everything up the side of the mountain on mules? Before they could even go to work, they had to do something minor, like build those cabins. I bet they didn’t even think about it. They just did it. And I bet you couldn’t tear those logs apart with a prizing bar.”

She put her hands inside my arm and pressed against my coat.

“You’re a strange mixture of men,” she said.

“Well, none of that analysis crap. You see that house down there with the elk droppings by the door? Think of some veteran from Cold Harbor in there, drunk every night on whiskey just to stay warm until the next day, and not sure that an Indian wouldn’t set his place afire after he passed out. Those must have been pretty formidable people.”

She pulled the bill of my fur cap and laughed and squeezed herself against my arm.

“I thought you believed Montana people were barbarians,” she said.

“Only those who burn up trucks and guitars that belong to me.”

“I guess destroying half of a parking lot at the mill doesn’t count,” she said, and laughed again.

I built a fire in the snow and boiled a can of stew on a piece of tin from one of the cabins, and as the snow melted away in a widening circle from the heat, I looked over at her and wanted her again. We went into her car and made love on the backseat, with the doors open and the wind blowing snow in the sunlight and the distant sound of a gyppo logger’s truck grinding up the next hill.

We went grouse hunting up Rattlesnake Creek for blues and ruffs with an old dogleg twenty-gauge that I borrowed from Buddy’s little brother, and we knocked six down in a stand of pines on the lip of a huge canyon and cooked them at her house in wine sauce, onion, and wild mushrooms. The next day I bought a resident deer tag, and we drove into the Swan Valley, which was so white and blinding under the sun that you had to look at the green of the timberline to keep from losing the horizon. We crossed two hills of lodge pine in deep snow, pulling her boys’ sled in blue tracks behind us, our lungs aching in the thin air, her Enfield rifle slung by its leather strap on my shoulder.

We found a place on the edge of the trees that overlooked a long valley where they would probably cross at sunset. I took the folded tarpaulin off the sled, spread it in the snow between the pine trunks, and set down the big coffee thermos and ham-and-turkey sandwiches. The air was clean and sharp, with the sweet scent of the pines, and the far side of the valley seemed to grow and recede in the sunlight over the mountain. I unscrewed the thermos top, and the steam and the smell of the coffee blew around us in the wind.

I hadn’t hunted for deer, or any animal for that matter, since I was discharged from the army. At home after the war, I had shot ducks and certainly fished a lot, but I wouldn’t go out with my father anymore after coons or shoot deer with him in east Texas. Once, he asked me why I would take the lives of fish and knock birds out of the air with a double-barrel when I wouldn’t drop an animal running across the ground. I didn’t have an answer for him, because I had thought until his question that it was just a general reaction to killing things, and he said: “You don’t want to bust something living on the land because it’s just like you. You know it hurts him just like it does a man.”

Regardless of my father’s explanation about the lack of ethical difference in taking the lives of wild things, I wasn’t up to busting a deer or an elk that might work down through that snowfield in the sun’s last red rays over the mountains. Also, I had hunted enough deer at home to know that anything that came out of that distant stand of pine on the far side of the valley would be either a doe or an elk cow, because the males always kicked them out into the open before they would cross themselves.

However, Beth had no such reservations. She was a real Montana girl. While I was holding an unlit cigarette and cup of coffee in my hands and thinking about striking a match (my dead army friend from Texas, Vern Benbow, used to say that a deer can see you fart from six miles), Beth slipped the sling of the Enfield up her left arm, eased the buckle tight, pushed a shell into the chamber, and lay on the tarp in a prone position. The sun had started to dip behind the line of trees on the next ridge, and the light fell out in long bands of scarlet on the valley floor.

“You know how to use iron sights at a distance like that?” I said.

“Be quiet. They’re coming down in a minute,” she said. The hood of her coat was back on her shoulders, and her black hair was covered with snow crystals.

“You’re frightening, woman.” But she wasn’t listening. She was aimed into the other side of the valley, her white hands numb with cold, those wonderful breasts as hard as ice against the ground.

I leaned back against a pine trunk and drank out of the coffee and ate a ham-and-turkey sandwich. Before the last Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s, the Blackfoot and the Salish used to pass through this valley on their way to the Clark in their timeless migrations across their sacred earth. As I set my coffee down in the snow and felt the sandwich bread turn stiff in my jaw, I looked into that dying sunset on the snowfield and thought of how those countless people who had been here for thousands of years were decimated and removed without trace in one generation. I wondered if in spring, when the snow melted and mountain flowers burst from the wet ground, there wouldn’t be some scratch of them there — a rose-quartz arrowhead, a woman’s broken grinding bowl, a child’s foolish carving on a stone.

My reverie was broken by the explosion of the Enfield. Two does had started down out of the pines on the opposite side of the valley, their tracks sharp and deep behind them, and Beth had fired high and popped snow into the air off of a wind-polished drift. She ejected the brass casing, slammed another shell into the chamber, and fired again. I saw her cant the rifle before she squeezed off. The deer turned in a run and headed for the far end of the valley.

“You better hold it straight and lower your sights,” I said, quietly. “We’re higher than they are, and that bullet’s not dropping.”

She worked the bolt and pushed it home, pulled the rifle tight against its sling, and let off another one. The doe in the rear bucked forward on her knees as though she had been struck by an invisible hammer. She struggled in the snow, the hooves tearing long scratches and divots in the incline as she tried to get to her feet. Then she stumbled forward, with a single trail of bright red drops behind her.

“Damn, you gut-shot her,” I said. “Bust her again.”

Beth’s hands were shaking, and when she pulled the bolt, it hung halfway back, and the spent shell caught in the chamber. The doe was pumping hard for the cover of the trees, the blood flying in the wind between her flanks. I pulled the sling of the Enfield free from Beth’s arm, banged the heel of my hand against the magazine until the brass casing dislodged, shoved another shell into the chamber, and locked the bolt down. I didn’t have time to use the sling or get into a prone position. I steadied the Enfield against a pine trunk, aimed the iron sights just ahead of the deer, let my breath out slowly, and squeezed off. The bark shaled off the pine from the recoil, and my right ear was momentarily wooden from the explosion. I hit the doe right behind the neck, and I knew that with the downward angle the soft-nosed bullet must have torn through her heart and lungs like a lead tennis ball.

Beth sat up on the tarpaulin and shook the snow out of her hair with her hands. She tried to find a cigarette inside her coat, but it was as though all of her pockets were sewn together. I set the rifle down and handed her my pack.

“That was a wonderful shot,” she said, but her voice was uneven with an unnatural pitch to it in the quietness.

“Where did you learn to hunt deer?” I said.

Her hands were still shaking when she lit the cigarette.

“Why?”

“Because you never take a shot from a distance like that without a telescope.”

“Should I apologize?”

“Don’t be defensive about it. Hell, you know you were wrong.”

She picked up my coffee cup from the snow and drank out of it, then took a deep drag on the cigarette.

“Buddy told me you could be righteous sometimes,” she said.

“Well, shit, you let off on something that you can only hit with luck, and she wanders around for two days before she dies.”

We didn’t speak for a moment, and I ejected the spent shell from the Enfield and slipped out the unused cartridges from the magazine. She looked out over the valley, where the last light was starting to glow in a rim of fire on the mountain’s edge.

“You didn’t want to shoot anything and you did,” she said. “You want me to walk home with my mad money?”

I pulled the hood of her coat up on her head and tied the strings under her chin. Her cheeks were red, and there was still a brush of snow in the black hair over her eyes. I pushed her hair back with my hand and stuck one stiff finger in her ribs.

“We’d better get her on the sled before they send the search-and-rescue in after us,” I said.

She looked away, still angry and unwilling to give up, then kicked me gently in the calf with her boot and turned her fine woman’s face into mine.

The snow was already starting to freeze as we pulled the sled across the valley floor. Our boots crunched through the surface, then sank in the soft snow underneath, so that by the time we reached the doe, we were sweating inside our clothes, and the moon had come up in a clear sky and turned the whole valley into a blue-white, tree-lined place on the top of the world that made you fear time and mortality. I gutted the deer and threw the steaming entrails on the ground, and we tied down the frozen carcass on the sled and worked our way back up toward the dark border of pines. The sleeves of my coat were splattered with blood, my head was dizzy from the thin air and the effort of pulling the sled up the hill behind me, but I felt a quiet exhilaration in the long day and its completion. We roped the doe on the fender of the car and drove back out of the moon-drenched mountains of the Swan Valley toward Missoula, and as I steered down that blacktop highway with those huge, dark shapes on each side of me, I understood why men like Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith, and Jim Beckworth came here. There was simply no other place better, anywhere.

The next week Frank Riordan got his way with the state of Montana, the Anaconda Company, and in fact the whole lumber industry and anybody else who had anything to do with polluting the air. He and an environmental group got a temporary injunction from the court in Helena to shut down every pulp mill and tepee burner in western Montana. It was one of those things that nobody believed. A court decided on an abstraction that had nothing to do with economics, jobs, or clean air and water. It was just a matter of law. A judge’s signature went on the injunction, and suddenly the plume of smoke blowing down the Clark thinned and disappeared, and the tepee burners smoldering with sawdust crumpled slowly into ash and were covered by snow.

But other things happened, too. The workers at the plywood mill got a pink slip with their next check, the men who planed boards and pulled the green chain at the lumber companies were told to come around again in a month or so, the Anaconda Company was shut down at Bonner, and the gyppo loggers (the independents who owned their own tractors) had to either haul pine to a market in Idaho or Washington or go out of business.

Beth had told me once what a lumber town could be like when the mills shut down and the paychecks stopped and families had to line up at the federal food-surplus center. Except in this case there was no workingman’s strike involved, no collective anger directed at management or unions, no depression to be blamed on federal bureaucrats and New York sharpers. Every unemployed man in Missoula County and the Bitterroot Valley knew there was only one reason for the deprivation of his family, his humiliation at accepting welfare and food commodities, and his daily visits to the state employment office for the chance of a casual labor job with the Forest Service: Frank Riordan.

Their mood was mean and dirty. It took on different forms that ran the gamut from an insult in the face to the failure of a neighbor to wave out of his truck cab, but it was all the same thing. I can’t say that they hated him, because they didn’t; it was more a matter of outrage and disbelief that one of their own kind would betray them and join forces with college people and slick lawyers to cause so much trouble in their lives.

I stopped going to the Oxford in Missoula for steak dinners after I sat at the counter and heard the loud and pointed remarks from the poker table behind me, and Eddie’s Club across the street was no place to have a beer in the afternoon when there were three or four drunk men against the bar who would happily bust your head open with a pool cue. One day I walked up to the small grocery store on the blacktop for a loaf of bread and a quart of milk, and the woman behind the counter looked through me like smoky glass while she counted out each hot coin in my palm.

The irony is that my job was also affected when the mills shut down. Our band was fired at the Milltown Union Bar, Cafe and Laundromat. On Saturday night, the first week after the injunction came down, there was a crowd of five people in the bar, and all of them were drinking on the tab. We played loyally to them until one in the morning, which was like singing into a neon-lighted cave, and the owner paid us off, gave us free bowls of chili and a fifth of Cutty Sark, and said to come back when the mills opened.

I could do without the job financially, because I had money in the bank, but our steel man and bass player got loaded on the bottle of Scotch in their truck before they drove home. Both of them had been laid off at the sawmill in Seeley Lake, and they had been cleaning furnaces three and four days a week to make enough, along with their three nights’ work at the bar, to keep from going on welfare until the mills reopened.

Now I had no job, except for my work on the ranch, and no place really to go. I lived with a man whom I had made a cuckold out of. I slept with his wife every evening I could get into Missoula, and without embarrassment he and I fished each afternoon through the ice on the Bitterroot, which was shameful in itself. On the nights I couldn’t be with Beth (because of her boys or her temporary job waiting tables at the bus depot) and when Buddy went off to play at the college pizza place, I stayed alone in the cabin and drank neat whiskey and looked out the window at the fields of snow under the moon and the glistening sides of the canyon behind the Riordan house.

I worked on my song, the one I had never finished while I was in the penitentiary. The strange thing was that I could play lead on almost any country song that I had ever heard, and I could imitate Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, and Woody Guthrie in a way that left a southern or Okie audience banging their tables with beer bottles when I finished. But I couldn’t write a song myself. As I sat there with the three tortoiseshell picks on my fingers and the Gibson across my knee, I was reminded of an old Negro preacher who did odd jobs for my father. His son had been given five years on Sugarland Farm in Texas, and when the old man was told of the sentence, he said: “I tried to keep him out the juke joint. But he just like a mockingbird. He know every song but his own.”

I had most of my song, but the rest wouldn’t come. Maybe that was just because when you try to catch all of something, particularly something very good, it must always elude you in part so that it retains its original magic and mystery. I remembered when my cousin Andre and I found an Indian canoe submerged in four feet of water back in the swamp. The canoe was made of cypress and had stayed intact for over a century. The bow and sides were etched against the silt bottom with green moss, and we slid through the water quietly so as not to cloud it, our hearts tripping inside our wet shirts. We caught the canoe by each end and tried to lift it slowly, and when it wouldn’t rise, we pulled harder and our hands slipped on the moss, and the silt swelled out in a black balloon from the bottom. Then I ducked under the surface again and jerked on the bow with all my strength. It ripped away like wet newspaper in my hands. I felt heartsick, and with each of our hurried, young efforts to salvage what was left, we tore the canoe into dozens of pieces until finally we had only a pile of rotted cypress wood, like any other in the swamp, to take home in the bottom of my pirogue.

I heard a shotgun go off across the meadow, and before I could set down the guitar and walk to the window, there were three more reports and then a chain of five cracks in a row that must have come from an automatic without a plug in it. I threw open the door and the snow blew in my face, but I could see the individual flashes of the guns in the aviary, a lick of flame and sparks against the darkness of the mountain beyond. There was a pause while they must have reloaded, and then another roar of noise and streaks of fire that looked like a distant night scene from the war.

Jesus God, I thought.

I could hear the birds crying in their cages and the splatter of shot against the wire and wood sides. The only gun in the cabin had been the Springfield, which Buddy had buried, and as I stood there with my coat half on, I felt suddenly impotent to do anything about the terror that was going on in the aviary. But I went anyway, running across the dry grass that protruded through the snow, my chest beating with a fear that I hadn’t felt since Heartbreak Ridge. The cold air cut like a razor in the dryness of my mouth and throat, and in my feeling of nakedness in that bare field under the moon I prayed desperately that something would happen before I got there.

All the lights were on in the house now; there was a brief silence while the shots echoed away into the canyon, then one more solitary crack, and then I saw three men in silhouette running like stick figures with their guns for their truck, which they had parked on the far side of the house. They roared off with the cab doors still open, the tire chains ripping snow and frozen mud into the air.

I saw Pearl under the porch light, wearing only a brassiere and a pair of blue jeans, with a Winchester lever-action in her hands.

“You goddamn dirty bastards!” she yelled, and at the same time let off the round in the chamber. Then she worked the action and fired one round after another at the diminishing dark outline of the truck. But she got home with one, because a moment after the explosion from the barrel I heard the bullet whang into the metal like a ball peen hammer.

When I got to the porch, she was trying to pump free a spent cartridge that was crimped in the slide. Just as it ejected and she shoved another cartridge home, a pair of headlights came down the gravel road and bounced across the cattle guard, illuminating the truck that was headed out at a good fifty miles an hour.

Pearl aimed the Winchester against the porch post, her breath steaming in the air, the white skin of her shoulder already red from the recoil of the rifle. I slapped at the barrel and knocked it at a downward angle, and her face, which had been filled with murderous intent, suddenly went blank and looked at me as a surprised girl’s would have.

“That’s Buddy’s Plymouth,” I said.