The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Twelve

The three men did a thorough job in the few minutes that they unloaded on the aviary. We could see the freezing tracks of their boots where they had walked to the fence and fired, and the empty shotgun shells that had melted with their own heat deep in the snow. They had loaded with precision to take care of everything living in the yard: their shells ranged from deer slugs and buckshot to BBs. They had laid down a pattern to kill, blind, or cripple every animal and bird within thirty yards. The deer slugs and buckshot had blown the cages into splinters, and the blood dripped through the floor wire in thick, congealing drops. The birds that had only been wounded twisted on their broken wings or quivered like balls of feathers in the snow. The bald eagle had been shot right through the beak, and he lay with his great reach of wings in a tangle of wire and birdseed.

The nutrias were at the far end of the yard. None of the birdshot had gotten through the other cages to them, but those twelve-gauge deer slugs, which were as thick as a man’s thumb, had flattened against the board side of their pen and hit them like canister. Their heads were torn away, their blue entrails hung in ropes out of their stomachs, and their large, yellow teeth were bitten into their tongues.

Mr. Riordan had on only his overalls and long-sleeved underwear with the bib hanging loose in front and the straps by his sides. He had put on a pair of unlaced leather boots without socks, and the snow and water squeezed over his ankles with each step as he walked back and forth through the aviary with a terrible rage on his face.

“That’s unbelievable,” Buddy said.

Mr. Riordan methodically knocked one huge fist against his thigh, and I was sure at that moment that he would have torn the lives out of those three men with his bare hands. His face was livid, his throat was lined with veins, and his gray eyes were so hot in the moonlight that I didn’t want to look at them. He bent over and picked up one of the wounded nutrias, and the dark drain of blood ran down his forearms before he placed it back in the shattered cage.

“Go back inside, Daddy,” Pearl said.

But he didn’t hear her. There was a heat inside his brain that must have made the blood roar in his ears. His chest began to swell up and down, as though his heart were palpitating, and I heard that deep rasp and click in his throat.

“It don’t do any good to stay out here now, Frank,” Buddy said.

“You don’t tell your father what to do,” Mr. Riordan said.

We stood in the silence and looked at him standing among the scattered bodies of the birds and the wet feathers that blew in the wind and stuck against his overalls. His gray hair was like meringue in the wash of moon that shone down over the canyon.

He coughed violently in his chest and bent forward to hawk and spit in the snow, as though he had some terrible obstruction in his throat. The vein in his temple swelled like a piece of blue cord. Then he coughed until he had to lean against one of the remaining cages for support.

“You better get him inside,” I said.

Still, Buddy and his sister and the others on the porch remained motionless.

“You better listen to me unless you want to put him in a box,” I said.

“Let him be,” Buddy said.

“You’re crazy. All of you are,” I said, and walked up to Mr. Riordan and put my hand under his arm. His long-sleeved underwear was wet with perspiration. He turned with me toward the house, the back of one hand against his mouth and the spittle that he couldn’t control. I heard Buddy walk up quickly behind us and take him by the other arm.

We led him up the steps and into the house and laid him on the couch. When Mrs. Riordan pulled off his boots, his feet were blue and covered with crystals of ice. The top button on his underwear had twisted loose, and I saw the flat, white scar where a bull’s horn had gone deep into his lung. He turned his head sideways on the pillow to let the phlegm drain from his mouth, and his wife pressed a towel into his hand and moved it up so he could hold it close to his face. I heard Pearl on the telephone in the kitchen, calling a doctor in Hamilton.

Buddy wiped the water out of his father’s hair with his hand, then began to brush at it with a shawl that was on the back of the couch. But Buddy’s hands were trembling, and his face had gone taut and pale. He took the blankets from his mother and spread them awkwardly over Mr. Riordan, then took the bottle of whiskey out of the cabinet.

“Don’t give him that,” I said.

“He’s cold,” Buddy said.

I took the bottle gently, and he released his fingers while he stared into my eyes with an uncomprehending expression.

“Why not?” he said.

“It’s just no good for him,” I said.

I looked at Mr. Riordan’s ashen face, his lips that had turned the purple color of an old woman’s, and his great knuckles pinched on the top of the blankets, and wondered at how time and age and events could catch a man so suddenly.

Twenty minutes later we saw the red lights on the ambulance revolving through the fields toward us, the icy trees and snowdrifts momentarily alive with scarlet until they clicked by and disappeared behind the glare of head lamps. The doctor, who was actually an intern at St. Patrick’s in Missoula, and the volunteer fireman who drove the ambulance strapped Mr. Riordan onto a litter and carried him gingerly outside. Buddy pulled open the back door of the ambulance, and they eased the litter up onto the bed without unbuckling the straps. The doctor turned on the oxygen bottle and slipped the elastic band of the mask behind Mr. Riordan’s head.

“Well, what the hell is it, Doc?” Buddy said. “He got horned in the chest once—”

“I don’t know what it is. Shut the door.”

Buddy closed the door, and the ambulance turned around in a wide circle in the yard, cracking over the wood stakes on the edge of Mrs. Riordan’s vegetable garden, and rolled solidly down the road toward the cattle guard with the red lights swirling out over the snow.

“Why not the whiskey?” Buddy said.

“You just don’t give it to somebody sometimes.”

“Don’t give me that candy-ass stuff. There ain’t anybody else out here now.”

“He’s probably had a stroke.”

“Goddamn, I knew that’s what you were going to say,” he said, and pushed his snow-filled hair back over his head.

“Take it easy, Buddy.”

The sports clothes he had worn to the pizza place were soaked through. There were bird feathers all over his trousers, and his white wool socks had fallen down over his ankles. The army surplus greatcoat he wore over his sports clothes was eaten with moth rings and hung at a silly angle on his thin shoulders. His eyes were still looking at me, but his mind was far away on something very intense.

“Come on, Zeno. Hold it together,” I said.

“They took it all the way down the road this time.”

“Yeah, but, man, you got to—”

He turned away from me and went inside, then came back out with a handful of cartridges that he spilled into the pocket of his greatcoat. He picked up the lever-action Winchester that Pearl had propped beside the door, and headed for his father’s pickup truck. His shoes squeaked on the snow in the silence. I caught him by the arm and turned him to face me.

“Don’t do something like this,” I said.

“I know who they are. I saw the driver’s face in my headlights. I won’t have any doubts when I find his truck, either, because Pearl slammed one right along his door.”

“Then call the sheriff.”

“That bastard won’t do anything, no more than he did when they burned the barn. They’ll just say the truck got hit while they were hunting.”

“You don’t know that. Give it a chance. At least until tomorrow.”

“Let go, Iry.”

“All right,” I said. “Just talk a minute. A minute won’t make any difference.”

“Tell my mother I went to the hospital.” He started for the truck again, and I stepped in front of him.

“Look, maybe I’m the last person that should tell anyone about being rational and not going out on a banzai trip to blow somebody away,” I said. “But, damn it, think.”

“That’s right. You are the last person that should. Old Zeno, the shank artist of Louisiana and the firebomber of lumber mills. The saver of horses from the flames. But he’s my old man, and maybe they’ve punched his whole ticket.”

He started around me for the truck, his mouth in a tight line, and I stepped once more in front of him.

“I ain’t going to play this game anymore with you, Iry.”

His hands were set on the barrel and stock of the rifle, and his right arm and shoulder were already flexed.

“What are you going to do, bust me in the teeth? You ought to save your killer’s energy for those cats you’re going to blow all over a barroom wall someplace.”

But it didn’t work. He glared into my face, breathing loudly through his nose, his hair wet against his forehead.

“OK, step in your own shit,” I said.

He walked past me and got in the truck, then set the Winchester in the rack against the back glass and started the engine. He turned around and drove slowly past me with his window still down. I began to walk hurriedly along beside the truck, my legs almost comical in their attempt to keep pace with it before Buddy accelerated down the lane.

“Jesus Christ, don’t do this,” I said. “I’ll go after them with you in the morning. We’ll put their ass in Deer Lodge for ten years—”

He rolled up the window, and his face disappeared into an empty oval behind the frosted glass; then he hit second gear and the loose tire chains clanked and whipped along the frozen earth.

I started to go back into the house, but I didn’t belong there, and there was nothing truthful that I could say to anybody inside. I walked back across the field to the cabin and poured a glass of straight whiskey at the kitchen table and tried to think. I imagined that Mrs. Riordan or Pearl or Melvin had already called the sheriff’s office, but that wouldn’t do any good for Buddy, as none of them knew why he had left in the truck, unless someone had noticed that the Winchester was gone, which they probably hadn’t. So that left few alternatives, I thought, and sipped at the whiskey and looked at the crumbling ash in the grate of the stove. I could tell his family about it and let them make their own decisions, or I could call one of the deputies aside in front of the house (and I could already see him talking into the microphone of his car radio, with the door open and one leg sticking out in the snow, telling every cop in Ravalli County to pick up dope-smoking ex-convict Buddy Riordan, who was armed and headed down the Bitterroot highway to gun somebody). Then they could call the intern back to the house to give Mrs. Riordan a tranquilizer shot, and in the meantime there would be shitkicker dicks with shotguns behind roadblocks all the way to Missoula who would urinate with pleasure in their khakis if Buddy should try to get past them.

So you can’t tell his family, and you don’t drop the dime on a friend, I thought, and drank the last of the whiskey from the glass and filled it with water under the pump. And that leaves us where in this Sam Spade process of deduction? Nowhere. He’s simply out there someplace on the highway, driving too fast across the ice slicks, his heart beating, the Winchester vibrating in the rack behind his head, his brain a furnace.

Then I thought, That’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s looking at every beer joint on the way back to Missoula, pulling into the gravel parking lot and cruising slowly past the line of parked cars and trucks. Because he is con wise to criminal behavior, and he knows that anyone, except a professional, who pulls a violent job usually does not go back directly to home and normalcy; he stops at what he thinks is the first safe bar to toast his aberrant victory and quiet that surge of blood in his head.

I tied the ignition wires together on the Plymouth and drove down the blacktop toward Missoula. I was guessing about the direction Buddy would have taken, as well as the three men in the pickup, but I doubted that the killing of the birds was done by anyone in the south Bitterroot, since there was only one small sawmill south of us, at Darby, which was almost to Idaho, that had been affected by the injunction. I passed the bar at Florence, which would have been too close for them to stop, and looked for Buddy’s truck in the parking lots of the two bars at Lolo. The snow was coming down more heavily now, in large, wet flakes that swirled out of my headlights and banked thickly on the windshield wipers that shuddered and scratched across the glass. As I dropped over the hill into the outskirts of Missoula and again met the river, shining with moonlight and bordered by the dark, bare shapes of the cottonwoods, the wind came up the valley and polished the ice along the road and buffeted the Plymouth from side to side.

I pulled into every bar parking lot on the highway until I reached the center of town. No Buddy, no ambulances, no bubble-gum lights swinging around on the tops of cop cars. Strike three, babe, I thought. So I drove over to Beth’s, with the ignition wires swinging and sparking under the dash and the snow piling higher on the hood against the windshield.

The elm and maple trees in her yard were dripping with ice, and the yellow porch light fell out in shadows along the glazed sidewalk. She opened the door partway in her nightgown against the draft of cold air, her mouth in an oval, beginning to smile; then her eyes focused on my face. She closed the door behind me and touched my chest with her hand.

“What happened?”

I told her, in the quietest way I could, keeping the sequence intact and lowering my voice each time I saw the brightness and sudden confusion start to come into her eyes.

“Oh God,” she said.

“He’ll probably just drive around until he gets the lightning bolts out of his brain.”

“You don’t know him. Not when it comes to his father and all his crazy guilt about failing him.”

“Buddy?” I looked at her with the strange feeling of an outsider who would never know the private moments of confession between them in the quiet darkness of their marital bed.

“He’s not a violent man,” I said. “Even in Angola, the big stripes let him alone. He wasn’t a threat to anyone. He was just Buddy, a guy with glue fumes in his head and music in his fingers.”

But I was talking to myself now. Her eyes were looking at the blackness of the window, and she held an unlit cigarette in her lap as though she had forgotten it was there.

“I don’t know what else to do, Beth.”

“Call the sheriff’s office.”

“You’re not thinking.”

“He told you he knew who they were. He’s going to kill someone.”

“You weren’t listening while I was talking,” I said.

“We’ll have to use the phone next door or go to the filling station.”

“Listen a minute. That fat son of a bitch you call a sheriff would love blowing Buddy all over the inside of that truck or welding the door shut on him in Deer Lodge.”

Her eyes were blinking at the darkness beyond the window.

“I’ll talk,” she said. “I’ll tell them he’s drunk and he tore up my house and I want him arrested.”

“That’s no good, kid.”

“Why? What do you offer as an alternative, for God’s sake?”

“He won’t pull over for any dicks, and it’ll get real bad after that.”

She sat back in the chair and rubbed the palm of her hand against her brow. I took the cigarette out of her fingers and lit it for her.

“I can’t sit here,” she said.

I wished I hadn’t come. It was selfish, and now I had included her in my own impotence to do anything in an impossible situation.

“Do you have anything to drink?” I asked.

“I think it’s in the cabinet.”

I found the half bottle of Old Crow and brought back two glasses. I poured into a glass and put it in her hand. She raised it once to her mouth as though she were going to drink, then set it aside on the table.

“I lied to the children for five years about their father,” she said. “They’re too old to lie to now. They’re not going to go through any more because of Frank Riordan and Buddy and all their insane obsessions.”

“Mr. Riordan didn’t choose this.”

“He’s done everything he could for twenty years to leave his stamp on everybody around him. He was never content simply to live. His children always had to know that he wasn’t an ordinary man.”

“He wouldn’t want Buddy out with a gun. You know that.”

“I’m sorry, but you didn’t learn very much living at his place.” That fine strand of wire was starting to tremble in her voice again. “He never thought about what would happen after he did anything. If he raised children to live in the nineteenth century, and if they ended up neurotic or in jail, it was the world’s fault for not recognizing that the Riordans were not only different but right.”

“You’ve got him down wrong,” I said. “His ball game is pretty well over, and I think he knows it and doesn’t want grief like this for Buddy or anybody else.”

She put her fingers over her eyes, and I saw the wetness began to gleam on her cheeks.

“Don’t let it run away with you,” I said. “He might have gone to the hospital by now.” I stood up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. They were shaking, and she kept her face averted so I couldn’t see it.

It was a time not to say anything more. I rubbed the back of her neck until I felt her composure start to come back and her shoulders straighten. I picked up my whiskey glass and looked out the window while she got up and went into the bath. Behind me I could hear the water running.

The snow was frozen in broken stars around the edge of the window glass, and the shadows of the trees swept back and forth across the banked lawn. High up on the mountain behind the university I could dimly see the red beacon for the airplanes, pulsating against the infinite softness of the sky.

“I’m sorry,” Beth said, behind me, her face clear now.

“Do you want your drink?”

“I’d rather go to the hospital. You don’t mind, do you?”

“No.”

“It’ll take me just a minute to dress.”

A few moments later she came back downstairs in a pair of corduroys and a wool shirt with a mackinaw under her arm. Her blue scarf was tied under her chin, and the flush in her face and the strands of black hair on her cheeks gave her the appearance of a young girl on her way to a nighttime ice-skating party.

I closed the door on her side of the Plymouth and put the ignition wires back together to start the engine. Her breath was steaming, and I could see her breasts rise and fall under the heavy mackinaw.

“If Buddy’s not at the room, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been by and gone back home,” I said as I drove slowly up the street.

“The head sister will know if he’s been there.”

“There’s another thing to think about, too. He might just talk to the doctor downstairs and go to sleep in the truck out on the street.”

“Just drive us there, Iry.”

We didn’t get past the receptionist’s desk. Frank Riordan was in intensive care, no one was allowed to see him, and the only persons in his family who had been at the hospital were Melvin and Pearl, and they had gone across the street to the all-night cafe.

“How’s he doing?” I said.

“You’ll have to ask the doctor when he comes down,” the receptionist said.

“When does he come down?”

“I don’t know. Are you a member of the family?”

“Where’s that little Irish nun that used to work here?”

“Sir?”

“There was an Irish sister that used to work on the second floor.”

“I don’t know who you mean.”

I walked outside with Beth toward the automobile. The snow had stopped blowing, and there was just a hint of blue light beyond the mountains in the east. The thin shale of ice over the gravel in the parking lot cracked under our feet.

“You want to go back home?” I said.

“No. Call Mrs. Riordan.”

“I don’t think we should do that.”

“She’s not sleeping tonight. One of the boys will answer the phone, anyway.”

“Beth, let it slide for tonight.”

“A phone call isn’t a lot to ask, is it?”

I put her in the Plymouth, started the engine, turned on the heater, and walked across the street to the cafe to use the public phone outside. My fingers were stiff with cold, and I had trouble dialing the numbers and depositing the coins for a toll call. Through the lighted window of the cafe I could see Melvin and Pearl drinking coffee in front of their empty plates.

Buddy’s little brother, Joe, answered the phone and said that Buddy hadn’t gotten back yet from the hospital, and no, there was no light on in his cabin, and no, sir, he would have seen the headlights if the pickup had come down the road.

I walked back across the street to the automobile and sat down heavily behind the steering wheel.

“Where do you want to go now, kiddo?” I said.

She shook her head quietly and looked straight ahead at the dark line of mountains. Her face was drained of emotion now, and her hands lay open in her lap. I put my arm briefly around her shoulders, and we drove back in silence to her house.

She wanted the glass of whiskey now, but I took it out of her hand and walked her upstairs to bed. It was dark in her bedroom, and she turned her head on the pillow toward the opposite wall, but I could see that her eyes were still opened when I covered her.

“I’ll be downstairs when you wake up,” I said, and closed the door softly behind me.

I fixed coffee in the kitchen while the blueness of the night began to fade outside and the false dawn rimmed the edge of the mountains. I poured a shot of whiskey into the coffee and smoked cigarettes until my lungs were raw and my fingers and the backs of my legs started to shake with fatigue and strain. I lay back on the couch and closed my eyes, but there were red flashes of color in my head and that persistent hum in my blood that I had felt in jail. I touched my brow, and my fingers were covered with perspiration.

I put on my coat and walked out into the cold, early light and drove to the sheriff’s office. The streets were empty, and newspapers in plastic wrappers lay upon the quiet lawns. Some of the kitchens in the houses were lighted, and occasionally I caught a glimpse of a workingman bent over his breakfast.

I walked up the courthouse steps, trying to light a cigarette in the wind. I was sweating inside my clothes, and when I entered the gloom of the hallway and smelled the odor of the spittoons and dead cigars, the hum started to grow louder in my head. Three sheriff’s deputies sat on wooden chairs in front of the dispatcher’s cage, reading parts of the newspaper and yawning. A drunk who had just bonded out of the tank was accusing the dispatcher of taking money out of his wallet while it was in Possessions.

“You used it to go bail,” the dispatcher said. The other deputies never looked up from their paper. Their faces were tired and had the greenish cast of men who worked all night.

“I had thirty-five goddamn dollars in there,” the drunk said.

“Get the hell out of here before I take you upstairs again,” one of the deputies said from behind his paper.

The dispatcher looked at me from his radio desk.

“Yes, sir?” he said.

I started to speak, but didn’t get the chance.

“What are you doing in here?” the sheriff’s voice said behind me.

His khaki sleeves were rolled up over his massive fat arms, and the splayed end of his cigar was stuck in the center of his mouth. He clicked his Mason’s ring on the clipboard that he carried in one hand.

“Do you have Buddy Riordan in jail?” I said.

“Should I?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s he been doing?”

“He didn’t come home last night.”

His head tilted slightly, and he narrowed his eyes at me.

“What is this, Paret?”

“I want to know if he’s in jail. That’s not hard to understand.”

He took the cigar out of his mouth and pushed his tongue into one cheek.

“Did you book Buddy Riordan in here last night?” he said to the dispatcher.

“No, sir.”

The sheriff looked back at me.

“Is that all you want?” he said.

“Sheriff, there’s something you might want to know,” the dispatcher said. “One of the deputies at the Ravalli office called on the mobile unit and said that three guys shot the hell out of Frank Riordan’s birds last night.”

The sheriff walked to the spittoon, his head bowed into position as though he were over a toilet, and spit a dripping stream into it.

“What was Buddy driving?” he said.

I wanted to get back out into the cold air again, away from the hissing radiators and the indolent, flat eyes of the men looking at me.

“Forget it,” I said. “He’s probably on a drunk over in Idaho.”

“Don’t fool with me, son. I ain’t up to it this morning.”

I lit my cigarette and wiped my damp hair back over my head.

“Give me that accident report that come in from Frenchtown,” the sheriff said to the dispatcher. He took his glasses out of his shirt pocket and squinted at the small writing on the paper.

“Was he driving a ’55 Ford pickup?” he said, pulling his glasses off his nose.

“Yes.” I felt something drop inside of me.

“Take a ride with me.”

He started walking down the hallway toward the front door, his waist like an inner tube under his shirt. I remained motionless, the cigarette hanging in my mouth, watching his huge silhouette walk toward the square of dawn outside.

“You better go with him, mister,” the dispatcher said.

I caught up with the sheriff outside on the glazed sidewalk. I could feel my shoes slipping on the ice, but his very weight seemed to give him traction on the cement.

“All right, what are we playing?” I said.

“Get in.” But this time his voice was lower and more human.

I got in on the passenger’s side and closed the door. The sawed-off twelve-gauge pump clipped vertically against the dashboard knocked against my knees. He flicked on the bubble-gum light without the siren, and we headed west out of town. He was breathing heavily from the fast walk to the car.

“About an hour ago a ’55 pickup went off the road on 263 and rolled all the way down to the river,” he said.

My head was swimming.

“So what the hell are we doing?” I said. “You’ve got a junked truck in the river. You want me to identify it so you can give Buddy a citation?”

He opened the wind vane and flipped his cigar out. He waited a moment, and I saw his hands tense on the wheel before he turned to me with his pie-plate face.

“The driver’s still in there, Paret. It burned.”

We drove down the highway by the side of the Clark, and the water was blue and running fast in the middle between the sheets of ice that extended from the banks. The sun came up bright in a clear sky over the mountains, and men were fishing with wet flies and maggots for whitefish on the tips of the sandbars. The thick pines on the sides of the mountains were dark green and bent with the weight of the new snow, and the sunlight on the ice-covered boulders refracted with an iridescence that made your eyes water.

The truck was scorched black, and all the windows had exploded from the heat. There was a large melted area around it in the snow, and the tires had burned away to the rims. I could see the huge scars in the rock incline where the truck had rolled end over end and had come to rest against a cottonwood tree, as though its driver had simply wanted to park there with a high-school girl after a dance. The men from the coroner’s office had already wrapped the body in a rubber sheet, covered it with canvas, and strapped it on an alpine stretcher that they worked slowly up the incline. A deputy sheriff walked to the car with the melted barrel and torn magazine of a rifle in his hand. The stock had been burned away, and the ejection lever hung down from the trigger.

“Look at this son of a bitch,” he said. “Every shell in it blew up. He must have had a bunch of them in his clothes, too, because they went off all over him.”

We were outside the car now, standing in the snow, though I didn’t remember how we got there. Across the river the sunlight fell on the white mountain as it would on a mirror.

You don’t know it’s Buddy, I thought. There are ranchers all over this county that drive pickup trucks, and they all carry a lever-action in the deer rack. Every week a drunk cowboy goes off the road in a pickup. And this one just happened to burn.

“You don’t know who he is,” I said, my voice loud even to myself.

The deputy looked at me curiously.

“Did you find anything that says who he was?” the sheriff said.

“No, sir. The tag was burned up, and so was anything in the glove. But like the coroner said, the damnedest thing is the way that guy went out. He must have caught his head inside the steering wheel when he turned over, and the top half of him was burned into a piece of cork. But there wasn’t a mark on his legs, except for a tattoo inside his thigh.”

I walked away from the car, along the shoulder of the road and the glistening shine of the snow melting on the asphalt and the yellow grass that protruded through the gravel. I could hear the cottonwoods clatter dryly against one another in the wind along the river, and water was ticking somewhere in flat drops off a boulder into a crystalline pool. Then I heard the powerful engine of the sheriff’s car next to me, the idle racing, and his voice straining through the half-open passenger’s window.

I turned and looked at him as I might at someone from the other side of the moon. He was trying to hold the wheel with one hand and roll down the window completely with the other. His pie-plate face was filled with blood and exertion, and his words came out with a labored wheeze in his chest.

Get in, Paret.

That’s all right, Sheriff. I just got to stretch it out a little bit.

Get in, son. Then he pulled the car at an angle to me so I couldn’t walk down the road farther, and popped the door handle on the passenger’s side.

Take a drink out of this.

The steam on the highway sucked away under us, and then we began to pass cars full of families and ranchers in pickups and a few gyppo loggers that were still operating in western Montana. They were all in their ordered place, driving into a yellow, wintry sun, with the confident knowledge that they would never have to correct time when there was none left.

Take another bite out of that bottle.

I felt the steady vibration of the engine under my feet, and then I saw the mountains re-form and come back into shape on the horizon, and the river was once more a blue spangle of light coursing through the sheets of ice far below.

That’s better, ain’t it?

Sure.

Damn right, it is. And he turned up the volume on his mobile unit and drove intently with a fresh purpose.