The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Three

My father died two weeks after the day I returned home. We buried him during a sun-spangled rain shower in the family cemetery by the bayou. The aunts and uncles were there in their print-cotton dresses and brushed blue suits, the old men from town who had grown up with him, and the few Negroes who lived on the back of our property. Rita and Ace kept their children in the car because of the shower, and an old French priest read the prayers for the dead while an altar boy held an umbrella over his head.

My relatives nodded at me, and two of the old men shook hands, but I could have been a stranger among them. After they were all gone and the last car had rumbled over the wooden bridge, I stood under an oak tree and watched the two gravediggers from the mortuary service spade the dirt over the coffin. Their wet denims were wrapped tight across their muscles as they worked. One of them became impatient to get out of the rain, and he started to push the dirt off the mound into the hole with his boot.

“Do it right, buddy,” I said.

I walked back to the house, and the grass on the lawn was shining with water and light. I sat on the porch swing awhile and smoked cigarettes with a glass of bourbon and listened to the tree frogs begin to sing in the swamp. The air was cool from the rain, and the wind was blowing off the gulf, but it was all outside of me and the whiskey didn’t do any good and one cigarette burned up between my fingers. I went upstairs and tried to sleep. The house was dark, and the tree frogs became louder in the twilight’s stillness. I woke sometime in the middle of the night and thought I heard the count man click his stick on the bars at the same time a shovel scraped deep into a pile of dirt.

I had to roll, stretch it out, shake it down the road. I had put in for interstate parole to Montana with my parole officer two days after I got out of Angola, but it was very hard for an ex-convict with three years’ time still ahead of him, particularly one who had been sent up for manslaughter (which had been a reduction from second-degree murder), to be accepted by the parole and probation office in another state. First, there had to be reason for the transfer, such as the presence of family, social reformers, psychologists, good guys of any description, who would aid the state in the rehabilitation of their product. Second, there was the problem of employment, which meant that you would hold a regular job sanctified by a machine-stamped payroll check each week, one that would not lead you into association with other ex-cons, boost artists, and the like. And in Louisiana, as in many other states, an ex-convict could violate his parole by quitting a job without due cause. Finally, a good part of your case depended on the whim of the parole officer.

Mine was a middle-aged man who had transferred from the welfare agency. He wore dark J. C. Higgins suits even in the summertime, and there were blue and red lines all over his cheeks and nose. His blunt hands were too large for the fountain pen and papers that he tried to handle, and his stomach pressed the flap of his fly outward as though he had a hernia. I had known him around town most of my life, in an indirect way, because he belonged to almost every civic organization in the parish, or at least you could always find him on the edge of newspaper photographs showing the sponsors of civic drives to promote American Legion baseball or a new park that would include areas for colored citizens.

My file perplexed him. He said he couldn’t fully understand how a man who had been decorated with two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star could also receive a bad-conduct discharge. Also, he didn’t think it was a good plan for me to go to Montana. My family was in south Louisiana, and both my brother and sister could help me get started in business or whatever I would choose, since I had two years’ college education at Southwestern Louisiana Institute. His thick thumb dented and creased the papers in my folder, and his eyes wandered over my face in his abstraction as he talked about the inadvisability of leaving home roots and the possibilities of working with my brother. He ignored my open smile at the thought of an ex-convict in the employ of a public-relations and advertising company.

I had put on a pair of slacks and a sport shirt and had gotten a shine at the newsstand before coming into his office, but as I looked at his well-meaning face and clear blue eyes that didn’t fit the dark suit, and listened to the recommendations for my future, I wished that one of the bosses from Angola were there in his place, someone who had felt the same miserable touch of the prison farm that left a salty cut in the edge of your eye. Or at least someone whom you didn’t have to con.

Because that was what he wanted. I had already talked with a state supreme court judge, a friend of my father’s, who said he would push all the paper through Baton Rouge to get me an out-of-state parole. Also, Buddy Riordan, who had pulled time with me, had gotten his father to sponsor me with the Office of Parole and Probation in Missoula. But we still had to go through with the con.

The strange thing about conning a man who deliberately opens his vest to a series of lies is the fact that both of you have to protect him from knowledge of his own dishonesty. In this case my parole officer recorded every insult to his intelligence without an eyelid faltering over the movement of his pen, but occasionally the hand would pause and an eyebrow would lift off the paper to register some abstract discrepancy in my account, a small warning that would keep us both honest tomorrow.

So we went through it. I would like to do ranch work up in Montana, dig postholes in frozen ground, shave sheep with electric barber clippers, dehorn cows, wring the necks of chickens and shuck their feathers in pots of scalding water, shovel boxcar loads of green horse manure in one-hundred-degree heat.

Actually, most of what I told him was true. I did want to go to Montana and live on a ranch in the mountains with Buddy and buck bales on a new morning. But I couldn’t tell him that most of all I just needed to roll, to flee the last two years of my life, to exorcise from my sleep the iron smell of jail and the clack of the count man’s baton against my cell door.

I knew that the parole transfer might take weeks or longer to be approved in Baton Rouge, and I had only thirty-five dollars left from my discharge money. My father had left each of the children one-third of the farm, but he had borrowed against it twice, and an oil company was claiming that four acres of it was somehow part of a royalty pool. Which meant, in effect, that there was a legal cloud over the house and land title, and before the estate could be divided, we would have to settle in or out of court with Texaco as well as deal with the bank. Ace was the only one of us who had the combination of what it took to wait it through: money, a disregard for time, and an ambitious energy for the profits to be made in land development.

And Ace stayed right on top of it. Two days after my father was buried, he had his agency’s lawyer draft a quitclaim settlement on the inheritance for Rita and me to sign. He drove his Cadillac up the front lane one afternoon while I was on the porch steps tuning my Dobro, and began explaining in his serious way the advantages of settling the estate now. I didn’t feel like talking with him or listening to his practical statements of figures and legality. And his self-deluded attitude of magnanimity was more than I could stand at the moment.

He offered me five thousand dollars in exchange for the quitclaim and power of attorney. I drank out of my beer and set the can down on the step.

“I tell you what, Ace. Get your lawyer to draw up another one, and give me the old man’s truck and four of the back acres by the bayou. You can have the rest of it, and I’ll sign the oil rights over to you, too. But don’t put any of your tract homes near my property.”

“You’re cutting yourself short,” he said.

“That’s all I need, Bro’.”

I had cut myself short, but I couldn’t take any money from him, and I felt better at evening off any debt I owed for my father’s care. And inside he was very happy because he had gone through his act of generosity and fairness and later would realize a fortune in the subdivision of the land.

So in a moment’s irritation I had become an equal member of the family at a large cost: I was still broke and had taken to buying sardines and soda crackers with my six-packs of beer at the little store down the dirt road.

Sunday morning I drove to New Iberia and looked up Rafe Arceneaux, the tea-head singer in our band. He was married now, with twin boys, and working ten days on and five off as a radio man on an offshore oil rig. We sat on the wood porch of his small house and drank chicory coffee in the clang of church bells and the screams of his kids and the loud voice of his wife in the back of their house. The triangular scar from the barroom fight was raised like an inner-tube patch on his forehead.

“I wish I could say something helpful, man, but it’s bad right now,” he said. “Most of the old guys are gone. Bernard’s wife got him locked up for nonsupport, Archie got busted for possession in Pascagoula, and the rest of us catch a gig when we can. They only want rock ’n’ roll bands now, and they can get the colored guys to play cheaper than we do.”

“How about the Victory Club?”

“Some of the local punks burned it down while you were gone.”

His wife came through the screen door and put one of his diapered boys in his lap without speaking to either of us. The screen slammed shut after her. Rafe directed his embarrassed eyes at the line of dilapidated storefronts across the street. “She’s mad because I wouldn’t take her to her mother’s last night. It’s one of those things you have to live with when you play it straight.”

I finished my coffee and started to leave, because his wife’s anger hadn’t been directed at him but me, the ex-convict and bad influence out of his past.

“Hey, don’t cut out yet, Iry. Look, I’m sorry about all this. It’s just that things aren’t the same anymore. I mean, ten years ago we all thought we’d be playing Nashville by this time. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. Let’s face it, man — we’re getting to be history.”

I finally found a job working four nights a week at a roadhouse outside of Thibodaux. They didn’t really need a lead-guitar man, but when I opened my case and took out the Dobro, I had the job. A Dobro is a bluegrass instrument, inlaid in the sound box with a metal resonator and played flat with a bar like a steel guitar, and you don’t see many of them outside the southern mountains. I had bought mine on order from El Monte, California, for four hundred dollars, and the thin neck and gleaming wood of the box was as light as an envelope of air in my hands.

I made twenty-five dollars a night and my share of the tips from the money jar on the bandstand. I worked in well with the band, which was made up of hillbillies who played only country and juke-joint music. My first night I played and sang six Hank Williams songs in a row, then went into “Poison Love” by Johnny and Jack and “Detour” and “I’ll Sail My Ship Along,” and the place went wild. They jitterbugged and did the dirty boogie, yelled from their tables, roared with some type of nostalgic confirmation when they recognized an old song, and dropped change and dollar bills into the money jar. Oil-field roughnecks with tin hats and beery faces and drilling mud on their clothes looked up at me with moist, serious eyes when I sang “The Lost Highway.” I was good at imitating Hank Williams, and I could make the Dobro sound just like the steel that he had used behind him.

I played there three weeks and picked up an afternoon job on Sundays at a club in St. Martinville, which got me into trouble with the parole office. The St. Martinville band had a thirty-minute television show on Sunday mornings, and as an aside into the microphone the singer decided that he would mention that their Dobro man, Iry Paret, would be at the club with them that afternoon.

So when I went in for my visit with the parole officer that week, I noticed first the stiffness of his handshake and then the rigidity of his elbows on the desk and the folded hands under his chin while he talked. We had to go around three corners before he got to it, but he did. And like most people who ask to be conned, he now felt that he had stepped too far over a line into a large hole.

“You didn’t report that you were working in a nightclub,” he said.

“It’s not much of a job. I’m just sitting in temporarily.”

It was an easy offering if he wanted to continue the con, but I could see the struggle in his face to turn the compromise around, and I knew that it was going to be at my expense.

“Your parole agreement stipulates that you won’t return to any of the past associations that contributed to your crime. I know that’s vague on a piece of paper, but in your case it means playing in beer joints and driving home drunk at four in the morning.”

“It’s the only living I have, and I was flat broke.”

“Maybe we could have worked that out, but you should have reported in before you took the job. It would have cost you one telephone call.”

“Let’s get the rest of it out of the way, too,” I said. “I’ve got a gig over in Thibodaux for twenty-five bucks a night. There’s no fights and the cop at the door doesn’t let hookers in and I leave there sober after we finish.”

I felt like a child explaining his conduct to an adult.

“Why did you do that? Why did you decide that you couldn’t trust me?”

“Mr. Mouton, it wasn’t a matter of trust. I was simply broke.”

“But you think the parole office is something to use evasion on.”

I had to catch my anger and humiliation in my throat before I spoke again. My unlit cigarette trembled in my fingers, and the other ex-convicts on metal waiting chairs and parole officers and secretaries in the room were listening to our conversation with an oblique, withdrawn enjoyment.

“I can’t do anything else except hustle jugs on a doodlebug crew or carry hod, and they’re not hot to hire ex-cons in the union,” I said.

He stroked lines with a ballpoint pen on his note pad.

“I don’t know,” he said. He was taking out every ounce of blood that he could. “I talked with your brother yesterday. He said he could get you a job on a well test in Opelousas.”

A well-test job in the oil field meant stringing flange pipe through a filthy sump hole for seventy-five cents an hour, and the job usually entailed only the day of the well’s completion, which meant that it was no job at all.

“He didn’t tell me about it,” I said.

“It’s there if you want it.”

I lit the cigarette and leaned closer to him on my elbow with the butt touching against my brow. He didn’t like the directness of the position, and he opened a side drawer in his desk as though he had forgotten a form or part of my file.

“Do I get violated back to Angola, or do we just play badminton awhile?” I said.

He wasn’t good at that kind of encounter, and after he had pushed back the desk drawer with a slow, flat hand and ticked his thumbnail along the edge of my file, he said: “Your transfer will probably come through in a week. Everything I sent into Baton Rouge was positive, and I made a case for your war record. But you don’t play in any more bars until you leave Louisiana, and then you’re somebody else’s responsibility.”

I looked at him blankly and sat back in the chair.

“That’s it, Iry. You’re cut loose,” he said.

The letter came from Baton Rouge three days later. I had four weeks to settle my affairs and report in to the parole and probation office in Missoula. Ace had transferred the title of the pickup to me, and I had $275 saved from my two jobs. I pushed my sleeping bag and tent with the wood supports wrapped inside the canvas behind the front seat and loaded a big box of canned stew meat, corned beef, bread, sardines, and soda crackers in the truck bed and stretched a tarpaulin over the sides.

The next morning I was rolling through the piney woods of east Texas, with the mist still in the trees and the red clay banked on each side of the road. By Dallas the radiator was blowing steam from under the hood, and a kid in a filling station had to knock the cap off with a broomstick. I pushed it on through the scorching afternoon to Wichita Falls, where the water pump went out and I had to spend five hours in a tin garage that enclosed the heat and humidity like a stove. I ate a can of stew meat cold and started chewing on No-Doz south of Amarillo. I should have pulled into a roadside park to sleep, but I was hooked on the highway and the combination of beer and No-Doz now, and I knew that I could roll it all the way to Denver.

The accents began to change in the filling stations and the truck stops, and then in the early dawn I saw the first mesa in the Panhandle. It rose out of the flat country like a geological accident, its edges lighted with a pink glow, the eroded gullies filled with purple shadow. The cotton and cornfields were behind me now, and also the patent medicine and MARTHA WHITE’S SELF RISING FLOUR signs, the vegetables and watermelons sold off the backs of trucks along the roadsides, the revival tents set back in empty pastures, the South itself. It simply slipped past me over some invisible boundary that had nothing to do with geographical designation, and then it was Dalhart and Texline, where the grain silos stood gray against the hot sky and clouds of dust, and finally Raton, New Mexico.

I was in a stupor from the No-Doz and case of beer that I had drunk in the last twenty-four hours, and my eyes burned with the shimmer of heat off the blacktop. I put my head under a filling-station hose and let the water sluice down my neck and face and then ate a steak in the cafe. But I was finished. My hands, lined with the black imprint of the steering wheel, were shaking, my back ached when I walked, and I could still feel the truck’s engine vibrating up through my legs.

The filling-station operator said I could park my truck behind the building overnight, and I unrolled my sleeping bag in the bed and used the tarpaulin and my shirt as a pillow. For a while in the softness of the sleeping bag I was aware of the semis hissing air on the highway and shifting down for the long pull up Raton Pass; then I felt myself drop down into the smell of the canvas and the cool air against my face and a quietness inside me.

The next morning was like an infusion into the soul, a feeling that you can have only after you dissipate all the mental and physical energy in yourself, to the point that you know you will never return from it. And on this morning it was really the West. The town lay flat against the mountains, which climbed steadily out of brown hills into the high, green timber of the Rocky Mountain range. The broken streets of the town were lined with stucco and adobe houses, outbuildings, chicken yards, and junker cars with weeds growing up through the frames. Mexican kids roared along the sidewalks in roller-skate wagons, Indians with creased faces like withered apples waited in front of the state labor office for the doors to open, and the sky was alive with a green-blue magic that was so hard and beautiful that I had to blink a little when I looked at it.

But it was the mountains and the early light in the pines more than anything else. As I shifted down to second for the two-mile grade up Raton Pass, the mountains seemed to tumble one upon another ahead of me, bluer in the distance, spread across the sky in a broken monolith that should have cracked the earth’s edges. The needle on the temperature gauge was almost beyond the dash, and the gearshift was knocking in my palm when I crossed the Colorado state line at the top and rolled into the old town of Trinidad.

I bought two six-packs of Coors and pushed the cans deep into a sack of crushed ice on the floor, and highballed down the four-lane through Pueblo, a decaying, soot-covered town with plumes of ugly smoke rising from tin buildings, on up the steady incline toward Denver, with the mountains always blue and tumbling higher into the clouds on my left. Denver looked wonderful, filled with fir and spruce trees, green lawns and parks with tulip gardens. I ate Mexican food in a cafe north of town. Then it was Fort Collins and Cheyenne and a straight roll into the late red sun across the cinnamon-colored land of Wyoming toward the Montana line.

Deer grazed in the sparse grass, their summer coats almost indistinguishable in the fading purple light, and after dark I almost hit a doe and fawn that stood transfixed in my headlights by the side of the road. I picked up two drunken Indian hitchhikers, who both wore blue-jean jackets with two shirts underneath and sat pressed together in the cab in some type of isolation from me, passing a bottle of dago red back and forth. After we had driven fifty miles, they bothered to ask me how far I was going, and I told them I hoped to make it to Billings before I stopped. I saw their wine-stained teeth grin in the dashboard light.

“You better stay at my place tonight. You ain’t going to make it to Billings,” one of them said, and he took a cigarette off the dash without asking.

“Why can’t I make it to Billings?”

“Because you can’t. You ought to know that, man,” he said.

I looked at him, but he had already lost attention and was staring into the cigarette smoke with his flat obsidian eyes.

The sound of the engine hummed in my head, and the headlights briefly illuminated the names chiseled into the concrete faces of the bridges over dried-out riverbeds, MEDICINE BOW, PLATTE, SHOSHONI, each a part of something old and thundering with war ponies.

I stayed at the Indian man’s place that night, on the edge of the Big Horn Mountains. He had ten acres on the reservation and a Montgomery Ward brick house with a chicken yard and a few dozen rabbit hutches and the most beautiful Indian wife I had ever seen. They put blankets on the sofa for me and went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. The highway was spinning in my head, and I couldn’t close my hands. I walked across the chicken yard to the outhouse and then sat on the edge of the sofa and smoked cigarettes in the dark. The solitary electric bulb screwed into the ceiling clicked on, and the Indian stood above me in his socks and jockey shorts, with a line of black hair running up out of the elastic over his metallic stomach.

“You can’t sleep good, man?” he said.

“I just need to wind it down a little bit. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“We’ll go to the tavern and find you a girlfriend. Then we’ll drink some beer together and you’ll be all right.”

“I wouldn’t be good company for anybody right now.”

“You got some snakes crawling around? That ain’t no big thing. Lots of people on the reservation is like that. Come down to the tavern. You’ll see.”

“I’d better pass. But I appreciate it. I really do.”

“You got a race thing about Indian girls?”

“No, I’m not like that.”

“You’re a nice-looking guy. You ain’t a queer, either. You shouldn’t be traveling around without no woman.”

Then I didn’t know what to say. I put out my cigarette in an empty beer can and pushed my hand back through my hair, hoping that he would turn off the light and let it end there.

“I ain’t one to poke in your business, but I think your insides is all stove in,” he said. “I recognize it. Indians get like that before they kill themselves.”

“I was in the Louisiana pen. I guess I haven’t gotten used to rolling around loose yet. They say it takes a while.”

“Get up, Irene,” he said through the curtain that hung from the bedroom door.

“You don’t need to do that.”

“No, it’s all right, man. We’ll drink together and then you can sleep. I was in jail over in Deer Lodge. I got myself put in the hole so’s I could sleep. People was always yelling and banging iron doors all night.”

His wife came out in a robe and sat silently at the table while he pulled out the beer from the icebox. Her eyes were brown and quiet, the dark skin of one cheek still lined with the creases of the pillow, and I could see the tops of her olive breasts below the V of her robe. While we drank beer and rolled cigarettes out of a large Half and Half can, she looked flatly through the back window as though she were at the table as a feminine duty. On the third six-pack I began to perspire, and the control in my conversation and mind started to slip away in the yellow electric light, the match blisters on my fingers, and the confused sentences and beer cans covered with cigarette stubs.

I popped a pill to stay alive. But instead all the wrong tubes lighted up, and I went in and out of the conversation and all the half-formed lingering and unspoken ideas and finally over the edge into the memory of that Indian girl’s face. Her darkly beautiful eyes and the swirl of her black hair piled on her head flicked my mind, like the snap of a beer top, across the mountains and over the ocean to the soft clicking of bamboo shades and the dusky scent of a small Kabuki theater with the bottles of Nippon beer iced down in a bucket between me and the geisha waitress who dipped shrimp into a horseradish sauce with chopsticks and placed them in my mouth. I had been drinking for two days, my money was almost all gone, and I had three hours to report back to the hospital, but in my mind I had already resigned from the army, the war, and all the complexities that made it important for me to go back on the firing line. I finished the Nippon in the ice bucket, the mamasan sent the boy across the street for more, and the geisha girl heated sake for me in a cup over a candle flame while I watched the actresses in their white pancake makeup and red-painted eyes move across the stage in a whisper of flowered silk as though they were an extension of a drunken dream.

Then I realized that I hadn’t yet accomplished what I had set out to do. The bamboo shades clicked in the breeze through the windows, and I could hear the MPs rousting someone at the street corner. I snapped the cap off a Nippon with my pocketknife, got to my feet, and almost fell through a paper partition.

“You no drink more now,” the mamasan said. Her teeth were rotted, and she held her hand over her mouth when she talked. “You go back to hospital now.”

I ripped the shade off its fastening and leaned out the window. Two MPs had a drunken soldier pushed back against a wall on the corner with their sticks.

“No do that,” the mamasan said. “This not whorehouse. No bring Mike and Pat in here.”

I lobbed the bottle at them and watched it burst into foam and brown glass all over their spitshines and bleached leggings. They forgot about the soldier and looked around with their sticks clenched in their hands.

“Over here, girls,” I said, and I let another one fly, except this time I curled it in an arc along the wall so that it hit directly between them in a fountain of foam that splattered their trousers.

“You son a bitch,” the mamasan yelled at me.

“Come on, you candy-ass shiteaters,” I said through the window. “Get your balls fried in a skillet. We’ll give you a bayonet right up the ass that you can haul all the way back to the stockade.”

I pitched the other full bottles one after another into the street while the mamasan and the geisha girls pulled at my belt and slapped at me with rolled pillow mats and their hands.

The first MP into the room parted the reed curtain with his stick and held up a pair of handcuffs on his index finger. In the half-light through the door they looked like a piece of chain mail spangled around his fist.

“You have a telephone call outside,” he said.

“Hey, man, you better not drink no more,” the Indian said.

“What?” I raised my head from my forearms in the weak yellow light.

“You was making some terrible sounds.”

“I’m sorry.” His wife’s chair was empty, and the curtain to their bedroom was still swinging lightly back and forth. “What did—”

“She just ain’t used to white people. It ain’t important.” He grinned at me and exposed a gold tooth next to an empty black space in his teeth. “You got a long drive tomorrow.”

“Tell me what I did.”

“You was holding on to her hands. She couldn’t make you turn loose.” His smooth leather face and obsidian eyes were both kind and faintly embarrassed.

I picked up my can of beer and tried to walk out the back door to my truck. I hit the door jamb with my shoulder, and the can fell out of my hand on the porch. I felt the Indian touch me gently on the back and direct me toward the couch. Then while I sweated in my drunken pill-and-booze delirium on the edge of the cushions, with the sun turning the chicken yard and rabbit hutches purple in the new light, I heard the bugles blowing on a distant hill way beyond our concertina wire, and I knew that it was going to be a safe dawn because I was sitting out this dance and all the rest to follow.