The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Four

I highballed the pickup all the way from the Little Bighorn River to Missoula, with stops only for gas and hamburgers in between. Montana was so beautiful that it made something drop inside me. At first there were only plains with slow, wide rivers and cottonwoods along the banks and the sawtooth edge of mountains in the distance; then I started to climb toward the Continental Divide and the Douglas fir and ponderosa pine country with chasms off the edge of the road that made my head reel. There was still snow banked deep in the trees at the top of the divide, and deer spooked out of my headlights in a flick of dirt and pine needles. I coasted down the other side of the grade and picked up the Clark Fork River the rest of the way into Missoula. The runoff from the snow in the high country was still heavy, and the river swelled out through the cottonwoods in the moonlight. The rick fences and long stretches of barbed wire and small ranch houses back against the foot of the mountains rolled by me in the whine of the pickup’s treadless tires against the cement. Then I was in Hellgate Canyon, and Missoula suddenly burst open before me in a shower of lights among the elm and maple and fir trees and quiet streets, with a ring of mountains silhouetted like iron all around the town.

I turned south into the Bitterroot Valley and followed Buddy’s map to his father’s ranch. The pasture land on each side of the road extended only a short distance into the mountains, which rose high and black into clouds torn with moonlight, and the Bitterroot River gleamed like a piece of broken mirror across the long sandbars and islands of willow trees. I got lost twice on rural roads, looking at names on mailboxes with a flashlight; then I found the right wire-hooped gate and cattle guard and rutted road up to his father’s place.

Buddy Riordan was working on a five-to-fifteen for possession of marijuana when I met him in Angola. He was a good jazz pianist, floating high on weed and the Gulf breeze and steady gigs at Joe Burton’s place in New Orleans, and then he got nailed in a men’s room with two reefers in his coat pocket. As a Yankee, he was prosecuted under a felony rather than a misdemeanor law, and the judge dropped the whole jailhouse on his head. He pulled five years on the farm, and he was one of the few there who was considered an outsider, a man who didn’t belong, by the rest of us who knew in the angry part of our souls that we had bought every inch of our time.

Buddy had strange Bird Parker rhythms in his head, and sometimes I couldn’t tell whether he was flying on Benzedrex inhalers or just high on a lot of wild riffs stripping off inside him. The hacks put him in lockdown for three days when they found a tube of airplane glue in his pocket on a routine shakedown, but he was still clicking to his own beat when they sent him back to the dormitory, and after that they simply dismissed him as crazy.

What they didn’t understand about Buddy was that he had turned in his resignation a long time ago: an “I casually resign” letter written sometime in his teens when he started bumming freights across the Pacific Northwest. He didn’t have a beef or an issue; he just started clicking to his own rhythm and stepped over some kind of invisible line.

And I guess that’s the thing I sensed in him, like a flash of private electricity, when I first met him in the exercise yard after I got out of the fish tank. The wind was cold and wet, and I was trying to roll a cigarette out of the few grains left in my package of state-issue tobacco. He was leaning against the wall, one foot propped up behind him, with his chafed wrists stuck down deep in his pockets. His pinstripe trousers hung low on his slender hips, and he had his denim jacket buttoned at the collar. The sharp bones of his face were red in the cold, and the short cigarette between his lips was wet with saliva.

“Take a tailor-made out of my coat pocket, Zeno,” he said.

I pulled the pack of Camels out and put one in my mouth.

“Take a couple extra. You won’t get any more issue until Saturday,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“Is this your first jolt?”

“I spent some time in an army stockade.”

“That don’t count in here, Zeno. Come on over to my bunk in Ash after chow. I can give you some machine-made butts to tide you over.”

I had already started to regret accepting the cigarettes. I turned my face toward the wall and struck a match in my cupped hands.

“Look, man, I’m not a wolf,” he said. “I read your file in records, and we need a guy to play electric bass in our jazz band. It’s not a bad deal. We play over in the women’s prison sometimes, and Saturdays we just wax the recreation room instead of scrubbing out toilets. Besides, somebody ought to teach you how to split matches. Those are worth almost as much as cigarettes in here.”

The ranch ran back to the face of a canyon, and the main house was a sprawling two-story place made of logs with a wide front porch and side rooms that had been built with clapboard. Every room in the house was lighted, and the cliffs of the canyon rose up steep and black in the back under a full moon. When I got out of the truck, the cold air cut into me, even though it was only early August, and I put on my army-surplus jacket that I had used for duck hunting in Louisiana. A girl stepped through the lighted screen onto the front porch and held her hand over her brow to shield her eyes against the glare of my headlights.

“I’m looking for Buddy Riordan, ma’am. I don’t know if I have the right place. I got lost a couple of times.”

“He lives in the cabin where the road dead-ends by the trees. You’ll see his porch light.” Her voice was thin in the wind, and her silhouette seemed to shrink when she stepped back from the screen.

I drove to the end of the road, where there was a flat log building on the edge of the pines with a porch and swing and a brick chimney. The smoke from the chimney flattened out under the trees and turned in the wind off the canyon, and two fly rods were leaned against the porch with the lines pulled tight into the cork handles. Buddy came through the door barefoot, with a sleeveless nylon hunting vest on and a can of beer and a wooden spoon in his hand.

“Hey, Zeno, where the hell you been? I thought you’d be in yesterday.” He hit me on the shoulder with the flat of his hand like a lumberjack.

“I picked up some Indian guys in Wyoming and got sidetracked awhile.”

“Those Indians are crazy people. Hey, you old son of a bitch, you pulled that last year okay. Not a dent on you.”

“I made an ass of myself in this Indian guy’s home. I got a little saccharine with his wife.”

“We all do funny things when we make the street. Forget it. Come on in. I’ve had a rack of venison in the pot since yesterday.”

He had a wood stove in a small kitchen at the back of the cabin, and the iron lids glowed around the edges with the heat of the burning sap and resin in the sawed pine limbs. He took a beer from the icebox and put it in my hand. I sat at the table in the warm smell of the venison and felt the fatigue drain through my body. He finished slicing some wild mushrooms on a chopping board and scraped them into the pot with the knife.

“A few mushrooms and some wine and wow. You got a nickel and I got a dime — let’s get together and buy some wine. And that’s what we got to do. Bop it down to the tavern and get some vino for the pot and some more brew, and then we’ll have dinner on the porch. No kidding, Iry, you look solid.”

“I feel like somebody kicked that highway up my butt.”

“Did you have any trouble your last year?”

“I made half-trusty six months before my hearing, so I was pretty sure on getting my good time. It wasn’t a sweat. Just scratching off days and staying out of the boss man’s eye.”

“I was sorry to hear about your father.”

I finished the can of Great Falls and lit a cigarette on one of the stove’s glowing lids.

“Let’s go get the brew,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight unless I put a case down.”

“You’ll be able to sleep here, partner. We have the best damn air in the United States. It blows down the canyon every night, and you won’t hear a sound except the creek behind the cabin and the pine cones hitting the roof. Look, it’s too late for you to meet the family, but tomorrow we’ll go up to the house for breakfast, and you can talk to the old man about work. You can make ten bucks a day bucking bales, and that’s not bad money around here. We got the rent free, and I catch fish every day up Bass Creek or in the Bitterroot, and with the little truck garden I have and the game out of the freezer, it’s a pretty cool way to live. I should have caught on to this when I was a kid, and I never would have built that five down there with you southern primitives. And speaking of that, man, you didn’t bring any of that red-dirt Louisiana weed with you, did you?”

“What do you think, Buddy?”

“Well, it was just a question, Zeno. The kids up at the university in Missoula have got some new shit around called LSD, and it takes your brain apart in minutes and glues it back together one broken piece at a time. I mean you actually hear colors blowing sounds at you. I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean to run on about my obsessions. Let’s travel for the brew and put some spotiotti in the pot.”

I rubbed my palm into my eye, and a red circle of light receded back into my head.

“Yeah, I guess I was fading out,” I said. “I still feel the truck shaking under me.”

“A little brew and a little food and you’ll be cool. Come on, I’ll introduce you to a Montana tavern. Meet the shitkickers. Pick up a little color your first night here. Something to expand that jaded southern gourd of yours. You know, I read an article once that said all you southern guys are sexual nightmares. That’s why your restrooms are always filthy and full of rubber machines.”

“Are we going to get the beer, Buddy?”

“Right. Let’s take your truck, since I parked my car against a tree in the middle of the creek last night.”

We banged over the ruts in the corrugated road, with the truck rattling at every metal joint, until we bounced across the cattle guard onto the smooth gravel-spread lane that led back to the main highway through the Bitterroots. The moon had moved farther to the south, and I could see the dark water of the river cutting in silver rivulets around the willow trees on the edge of the sandbars. The mountains on each side of the valley were so large now in the moonlight that I felt they were crashing down upon me. The snow on the distant peaks was burning with moonlight beyond the jagged silhouette of the pines, and each time we crossed a bridge over a small creek, I could see the white tumble of water over the rocks and then the quiet pools hammered with metal dollars at the end of the riffle.

We pulled into the parking lot of a clapboard tavern next to a general store with two gas pumps in front. Pickup trucks with rifles and shotguns set in racks against the rear windows were parked in the lot, and the stickers on their bumpers were a sudden click of the eye back into the rural South: I FIGHT POVERTY — I WORK; PUT THE BIBLE BACK IN OUR SCHOOLS; DON’T WORRY, THEY’RE ONLY NINETY MILES AWAY.

Buddy and I went inside and had a beer at the bar and asked for a cold case to go and a small bottle of sauterne. A stone fireplace was roaring with logs at the far end of the pool table, and there were elk and moose racks on the walls and rusted frontier rifles laid across deer hooves. Most of the men in the bar wore faded blue jeans, Levi or nylon jackets, scuffed cowboy and work boots, shirts with the color washed out, and beat-up cowboy hats stained with sweat around the band. They all looked big, physical, with large, rough hands and wind-cut faces. The men at the pool table stamped down the rubber ends of their cues each time they missed a shot, and slammed the rack hard around the balls for a new game, and two cowboys next to me were shaking the poker dice violently in the leather cup and banging it loudly on the bar.

I didn’t notice it at first, or I dismissed it as my natural ex-con’s paranoia, but soon I started to catch a glance from a table or a man at the bar’s elbow. Then, as I looked back momentarily to assure myself that there was nothing there, I saw a flick of blue meanness or challenge in those eyes, and I knew that I was sitting on top of something. I waited in silence for Buddy to finish his beer so we could go, but he ordered two more before I could touch him on the arm.

I felt the open stares become harder now, and I looked intently at the punchboard in front of me. At that moment I thought how strange it was that, even though I was a grown man, eyes could feel like a wandering deadness on the side of my face. I tried to compensate with a silly commitment to my cigarette and the details in the ashtray, and then I walked to the restroom with the instinctive con’s slink across the yard, hands low in the pockets, cool, the shoulders bent just a little, the knees loose and easy.

But when I got back to the bar, the stares were still there. No one seemed to realize that I was a Louisiana badass. And Buddy was on his third beer.

“Hey, what the hell is going on?” I said quietly.

“Don’t pay any attention to those guys.”

“What is it?”

“It’s copacetic, Zeno. By the way, you looked very cool bopping into the pisser.”

“Shit on this, Buddy. Let’s get out of here.”

“Take it easy, man. We can’t let a few hot faces run us off.”

“I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like fooling in somebody else’s trouble.”

“Okay, let me finish and we’ll split.”

Outside, I put the cardboard case of Great Falls in the back of the truck and turned around in the gravel parking lot. I shot the transmission into second gear and wound it up on the blacktop. One jagged piece of mountain cut into the moon.

“So what was that stuff about?”

“The old man has been pissing people off around here for years, and right now he’s got them all on low boil.”

“What for?”

“He’s trying to get the new pulp mill shut down, which means that about four hundred guys will lose their jobs. But forget it, man. It don’t have anything to do with you. Those guys back there just like to snort with their virility when they have a chance.”

We crossed the cattle guard and passed the darkened main house on the ranch. The canyon walls behind the house were sheer and gray in the moon’s reflection off the clouds.

“Tomorrow you got to meet my family,” Buddy said. “They’re unusual people. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t burned them so bad.”

Then I realized that Buddy was drunk, because in the time I had known him, he had never indulged himself in private confession unless he was floating on Benzedrex inhalers or the occasional weed we got from the Negroes.

He poured the sauterne into the pot of venison and sprinkled black pepper and parsley on top of it, then replaced the iron lid and let it marinate for a half hour while we drank beer and I tried to retune my Dobro with fingers as thick and dull as a ruptured ear.

“I never did figure why you stayed with that hillbilly shot,” he said, “but you do it beautiful, man. Did you ever finish that song you were working on?”

The blood had gone out of his face, and his cigarette had burned down close between his fingers.

“No, I’ve still got it running around in pieces.”

“Do ‘Jolie Blonde,’ man.”

I picked it out on the Dobro and sang in my bad Cajun French while Buddy turned the venison in the pot with a wooden spoon. His white face glowed in the heat of the stove, and for a moment he looked as preoccupied and solitary as the man I had met over two years before in the yard at Angola.

We dragged the kitchen table onto the porch and ate the venison out of tin plates with garlic bread and an onion-and-beet salad that Buddy had chopped into a wooden bowl. I hadn’t had venison in a long time, and the mushroom and wine sauce was fine with the taste of the game, and as I watched the wind blowing snow off the top of the canyon, I knew that everything was going to be all right.

But I should have recognized it at the bar. Or at least part of it. It was there, and all I had to do was look at it.

In the morning the sun broke across the blue ridge of mountains, and the wet, green meadows shimmered in the light. The shadows at the base of the mountains were purple like a cold bruise, and as the morning warmed and the dew burned away on the grass, the cattle moved slowly into the shade of the cottonwoods along the river. Buddy and I fished with wet flies in the creek behind his cabin and caught a dozen cutthroat trout out of the deep pools that turned in eddies behind the rocks. I would crouch down on my haunches so as not to silhouette against the spangle of sunlight through the trees, and then I’d let the fly sink slowly to the bottom of the pool; a cutthroat would rise suddenly off the gravel, his brilliant rim of fire around the gills flashing in the sun, and the fly rod would arch down to the water with a steady, throbbing pull.

We cleaned the fish and took them up to the main house for breakfast. Piles of wood cut in round chunks with a chainsaw were stacked high next to the barn wall, and in the side lot there was the rusted-out skeleton of an old steam tractor with dark pigweed growing through the wheels. In back were at least fifty bird pens made with chicken wire and wood frames, and ducks, geese, and breeds of grouse and pheasant that I had never seen before wandered around the feed pens and watering pools located all over the yard.

“That’s the old man’s aviary,” Buddy said. “It’s probably the biggest in the state. He’s got birds in there from all over the world, which is one reason why I live in the cabin. You ought to hear those sons of bitches when they crank up at four in the morning.”

We browned the trout in butter, and Buddy’s mother cooked a huge platter of scrambled eggs and pork chops with sliced tomatoes on the side. The dining table was covered with an oilcloth thumbtacked to the sides, and Buddy’s father sat at the head, waiting quietly until each member of the family was seated before he picked up the first plate and started it around the table. Buddy’s three younger brothers, all in high school, sat opposite me, their faces eagerly curious and yet polite about their brother’s ex-convict friend. Their skin was tan, and there wasn’t an ounce of fat on their bodies, and in their blue jeans and faded print shirts rolled over their young, strong arms, they looked like everything that’s healthy in America.

Buddy’s sister and her husband, an instructor at the university, sat at the far end of the table, and for some reason they made me uncomfortable. I had the teacher made for a part-time agrarian romanticist or an eastern college man on a brief excursion into the life of his wife’s family. The smile and the handshake were too easy and open — and dismissing. She favored her mother, a well-shaped woman with clear skin and blue eyes that had a quick light in them, but none of the same cheerfulness was in the daughter’s face. The daughter was pretty, with sun-bleached curly hair and beautiful hands, but there was a darkness inside her that marred the rest of it, and I could sense a resentment in her because I was someone whom Buddy had known in prison and had brought to their home.

But Buddy’s father was the one who I realized instinctively was no ordinary person. His shoulders were square and hard, his neck coarse with sunburn and wind, and the edges of his palms were thick with callus and there were half-moon carpenter’s bruises on his fingernails. He was a good-looking man for his age. He combed his thin, brown hair straight back over a wide forehead, and his gray eyes looked directly at you without blinking. He didn’t have that soft quality to the edge of the bone structure in the face that most Irish have, and his back stayed straight in the chair and never quite rested against the wood. He took the silver watch on its chain from his blue-jeans pocket and looked at it a moment as though seeing it for the first time.

“I guess we ought to start getting the bales up on the wagon. You ready, boys?” he said.

The three younger brothers got up from the table and started to follow him through the kitchen; then he turned, almost as an afterthought, and looked back at me with those gray, unblinking eyes.

“I think I have something out in the lot that you might be interested in seeing, Mr. Paret,” he said.

Buddy grinned at me over his coffee cup.

I walked with Mr. Riordan and the three boys into the backyard. The whole expanse of the valley was covered with sunshine now, and the bales of green hay in the fields and the click of light on the Bitterroot River through the trees and the heavy shadows down the canyon walls were so heart-sinking that I had to stop and fold my arms across my chest in a large breath.

“Have you ever seen one of these fellows before?” Mr. Riordan said.

He had opened a cage and picked up a large nutria. Its red eyes looked like hot BBs behind the fur, and its yellow buck teeth protruded from the mouth. The body was exactly like a rat’s, except much bigger and covered with long fur that grew like a porcupine’s quills, and the feet were almost webbed.

“I’ve never seen one outside of southern Louisiana,” I said. “I didn’t think they could live in a cold climate.”

“That’s what most people say. However, no one has advised the nutria of that fact. How much do you know about them?”

I shook a cigarette out of my pack and put it in my mouth. I had the feeling that I was about to be taught the rules of a new game.

“The McIlhenny tabasco family brought them from South America about 1900,” I said. “Supposedly, they were in cages on Marsh Island about twelve miles off the Louisiana coast, and after a storm smashed up their cages, they swam through waves all the way to land. Now they’re in every bayou and canal in south Louisiana. They’ll kill your dog if he gets in the water with them, and they can fill up a whole string of muskrat traps in a day.”

“I hope to eventually introduce them in the area. Do you think you’d like to help raise them?”

“At home they’re a pest, Mr. Riordan. They destroy the irrigation canals for the rice farms, and they breed like minks in heat.”

“Well, we’ll see how they do in colder climates.” Then, without a change in the voice, he said, “You murdered a man, did you?”

I had to wait a moment.

“That’s probably a matter of legal definition,” I said. “I went to prison for manslaughter.”

“I suppose those points are pretty fine sometimes,” he said.

“Yes, sir, they can be.”

“I signed for your parole transfer because Buddy asked me to. Normally, I stay as removed as I can from the dealings of the state and federal government, but he wanted you to come here. And so I’ve made some kind of contract with the authorities in Louisiana as well as in my own state. That involves a considerable bit on both of our parts. Do you understand me, Mr. Paret?”

I drew in on my cigarette and flipped it toward the fence. I could feel the blood start to ring in my palms.

“I have three years’ parole time to do, Mr. Riordan. That means that on a whim a parole officer can violate me back to the farm for an overdrawn check, no job, or just not checking in on the right date. Maybe he’s got a little gas on his stomach, half a bag on from the night before, or maybe his wife cut him off that morning. All he’s got to do is get his ballpoint moving and I’m on my way back to Angola in handcuffs. In Louisiana a P.V. means one year before you come in for a hearing again.”

“Did you ever do farm work outside of the penitentiary?” he said.

“My father was a sugar grower.”

“I pay ten dollars a day for bucking bales, and you eat up at the house for the noon meal. There’s a lot of work in the fall, too, if you care to drive nails and butcher hogs.”

He walked away from me on the worn-out heels of his cowboy boots toward the flatbed wagon, where his three boys were waiting for him. I wanted to be angry at him for his abruptness and his sudden cut into a private area of my soul, but I couldn’t, because he was simply honest and brief in a way that I wasn’t prepared for.

I drove to Missoula that afternoon and checked in with the parole office. My new parole officer seemed to be an ordinary fellow who didn’t think of me as a particular problem in his case load, and after fifteen minutes I was back on the street in the sunshine, with my hands in my pockets and a whole new town and a blue-gold afternoon to explore. Missoula was a wonderful town. The mountains rose into the sky in every direction, the Clark Fork River cut right through the business district, and college kids in inner tubes and on rubber rafts floated down the strips of white water with cans of beer in their hands, shouting and waving at the fishermen on the banks. The town was covered with elm and maple trees, the lawns were green and dug with flower beds, and men in shirtsleeves sprinkled the grass with garden hoses like a little piece of memory out of the 1940s.

I walked down the street with a sense of freedom that I hadn’t felt since I went to the penitentiary. Even at my father’s house the reminders were there, the darkness of the house, the ancestral death in the walls, the graveyard being eaten away a foot at a time by the bayou, that black vegetable growth across the brain that puts out new roots whenever you come home. But here there was sun all over the sidewalks, some of which still had tethering rings set in them.

I went into places that had names like the Oxford, Eddie’s Club, and Stockman’s Bar, and it was like walking through a door and losing a century. Cowboys, mill workers, lumberjacks, bindle stiffs, and professional gamblers played cards at felt tables in the back; there was a bar without stools for men who were serious about their drinking, a counter for steaks and spuds and draft beer, the click of billiard balls in a corner, and occasionally a loud voice, a scraping of chairs, and a punch-out that sent a man reeling into the plasterboard partition of the restrooms.

I was eating a steak fried in onions in the Oxford when a man without legs tried to raise himself onto a stool next to me. He had pushed himself along the street and into the bar on a small wooden platform that had roller-skate wheels nailed under it, and the two wood blocks sticking out from the pockets of his pea jacket looked like someone’s beaten ears. One of the buckle straps on his stump had caught, and I tried to raise him toward the stool. His tongue clicked out across his bad teeth like a lizard’s.

“He don’t want you to help him, mister,” the bartender said.

“I’m sorry.”

“He can’t hear or talk. He got all blowed up in the war,” the bartender said. He filled a bowl with lima-bean soup and placed it on a saucer with some crackers in front of the crippled man.

I listened to him gurgle at the soup, and I had to look at the far end of the counter while I ate. The bartender slid another draft in front of me.

“It’s on the house,” he said, and then, with a matchstick in the corner of his mouth and his eyes flat, he added, “You visiting in town?”

“I’m staying in the Bitterroot with a friend and looking around for work. I guess right now I’m going to be bucking bales for the Riordans awhile.” I couldn’t resist mentioning the name, just like you put your foot in lightly to test the water.

The reaction was casual and slowly curious, but it was there.

“You know Frank Riordan pretty good?”

“I know his son.”

“What the hell is Frank up to with this pulp mill, anyway?”

“He’s up to putting a lot of men out of work,” a man farther down the counter said, without looking up from his plate.

Oh shit, I thought.

“I don’t know anything about it,” I said.

“He don’t know anything about it,” the same man said. He wore a tin hat and a checkered shirt with long-sleeved underwear.

The bartender suddenly became a diplomat and disinterested neutral.

“I ain’t seen Frank in a long time,” he said. “He used to come in here sometimes on Saturday and play cards.”

“He’s got no time for that now,” a man eating next to the cripple said. “He’s too busy sitting on thirteen hundred acres of cows and making sure a dollar-fifty-an-hour man gets his pink slip. That’s Frank Riordan for you.”

The bartender wiped the rag over the counter in front of me as though he were rubbing out a piece of personal guilt. “Some people say that smokestack stinks like shit, but it smells like bread and butter to me,” he said, and laughed with a gastric click in the back of his throat, exposing his line of yellowed teeth.

I could feel the anger of the two men on each side of me, like someone caught between bookends. I put the fork and knife in my plate and lit a cigarette and smoked long enough to keep personal honor intact, then walked back into the sunshine. No more testing of reactions to names, I decided, and maybe I should have a more serious talk with Buddy.

Earlier in the afternoon a gyppo logger had told me in a bar that I might get on with a country band in Bonner. I drove out of Missoula through Hellgate Canyon, a huge split in the mountains where the Salish Indians used to follow the Clark Fork and annually get massacred by the Crows and the Blackfeet (whence the name, because the canyon floor was strewn with skeletons when the first Jesuits passed through). I followed along the river through the deep cut of the mountains and the thin second growth of pine on the slopes until I reached the meeting of the Blackfoot and Clark Fork rivers, which made a wide swirl of dark water that spilled white and iridescent over a concrete dam.

Bonner was the Anaconda Company, a huge mill on the edge of the river that blew plumes of smoke that hung in the air for miles down the Blackfoot canyon. The town itself was made up of one street, lined with neat yards and shade trees and identical wood-frame houses. I hadn’t seen a company town outside of Louisiana and Mississippi, and though there was no stench of the sugar mill in the air or vision through a car window of Negroes walking from the sugar press to their wooden porches in the twilight with lunch pails in their hands, Bonner could have been snipped out of Iberia Parish and glued down in the middle of the Rocky Mountains.

I pulled into the parking lot of a weathered gray building by the railroad crossing that had a neon sign on the roof that read: MILLTOWN UNION BAR, CAFE AND LAUNDROMAT. There were electric slot machines inside the bar, winking with yellow horseshoes, bunches of cherries, and gold bars. Over the front door was the head of a mountain sheep covered with a Plexiglas dome, and mounted on the wall over the jukebox was an elk’s head with a huge, sweeping rack. I talked with the owner at the bar about a lead-guitar job on the weekends, and while he pushed his coffee cup around in his saucer with a thick finger, I went to the truck and brought back my double case with the Dobro inside and the Confederate flag sewn into the lining. The metal resonator set in the sound hole swam with the silvery purple reflection of the lights behind the counter, and I pulled the steel picks across the strings and floated the bar down the neck into the beginning of Hank’s “Love-Sick Blues.”

The Dobro did it every time. It had paid for itself several times over in turning jobs for me. He said he would pay thirty-five dollars for Friday and Saturday nights and a three-hour session on Sunday afternoons, and I drove back through the Hellgate with the engine humming under the hood and the late sun red on the walls of the canyon and the deep current in the river.

The next day I went to work with Buddy bucking bales, digging postholes, and opening up irrigation ditches. The sky was immense over our heads, and the mountains were blue and sharp in the sunlight, and pieces of cloud hung in the pines on the far peaks. By midday our bare chests were running with sweat and covered with bits of green hay, and the muscles in my stomach ached from driving the posthole digger into the ground and spreading the wood handles outward. Buddy’s sister, Pearl, brought out a pitcher of sun tea with mint leaves and cracked ice in it and poured some into two deep paper cups, and we drank it while we sat on the back of the flatbed wagon and ate ham sandwiches. Her curly hair was bright on the tips in the sunlight, and the sun halter she wore with her blue jeans showed enough that I had to keep my attention on the sandwich to be polite. She didn’t like me, and I wished that Buddy had not tried to ignore that obvious fact.

“I’m going to visit the wife-o and kids Sunday, Jimmie’s birthday scene, and why don’t you and Melvin come along and we’ll watch the hippy-dippy from Mississippi here do his Ernest Tubb act up at the beer joint in Bonner,” Buddy said.

She put the top on the iced-tea pitcher and set it carefully on the tailgate. Her eyes went flat.

“I’ll have to ask Mel.”

“He’s always good for Sunday afternoon boozing,” Buddy said. “In fact, the only time he gets drunk is the night before he has to work. He goes roaring out of here to the college in the morning with a hangover that must fill up a whole classroom.”

I looked away at the cottonwoods on the river and put a cigarette in my mouth. I had a feeling that anything said next would be wrong. It was.

“You ought to hear this shitkicker, anyway,” Buddy said. “Plays like Charlie Christian when he wants to, but for some reason my coonass pal is fascinated with the hillbillies and Okies. Loves Jimmie Rodgers and Woody Guthrie, imitates Hank Williams, yodels and picks like Bill Monroe. It’s gooder than grits.”

“Let’s get on it, Buddy,” I said.

“He’s also sensitive about his sounds.”

I folded the remaining half of my ham sandwich in the wax paper and put it back in the lunch pail.

“Your father said he wanted those holes dug up to the slough before we quit,” I said.

“He’s loyal to employers, too. A very good man, this one,” Buddy said, hitting the wet slickness of my shoulder with his palm. I wanted to dump him off the tailgate.

“Hey, Pearl, wait a minute,” he said. “Ask Melvin, and maybe Beth can come along with us.”

She nodded without replying and walked across the hayfield, graceful and cool, her sun halter flashing a white line below her tan.

Buddy and I walked out to where the posts were laid at regular intervals on the ground along the fence line. I thudded the posthole digger in the hard dirt while he poured water out of a bucket into the hole.

“Man, I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I said.

He tilted the bucket downward, sluicing water over the wooden handle and the mud impacted between the blades, as though he were preoccupied with a large engineering problem.

“No shit, Buddy,” I said.

“There were other things there, Zeno. You just didn’t see them. I didn’t mean to piss in your shoe with Pearl. She married this university instructor, and he’s an all-right guy, but he’s got an eggbeater in his head most of the time, and she’s trying to keep up with whatever mood he’s in next. That means pack off to Alaska on snowshoes, join some sit-in deal in Alabama, or turn up Beethoven so loud on the hi-fi three nights in a row that it blows the old man out of his bedroom.”

I pulled the posthole digger out of the ground and knocked the mud from the blades.

“Well, that ain’t exactly what was really going on there,” he said. “You see, I’m trying to get back with the wife-o, which might seem like a bad scene, but the boys are nine and eleven now, and they’re not doing worth a darn in school, and Beth is taking them to some kind of psychologist in Missoula. That’s the only outside thing that bothered me in the joint. I cut out on them after the old lady got me locked up one night, and I kept on going all the way to New Orleans.”

I laid aside the digger and placed the fence post in the hole while Buddy shoveled in dirt and rocks on top of it. His thin back was glistening, and it rippled with bone and muscle when he spaded in each shovel-load.

“Maybe this is a bad time to ask you,” I said, “but yesterday I was in a place called the Oxford, and I had the feeling that your father has declared war on everybody in this county.”

“Most of those guys have a log up their ass. You can’t take that kind of barroom stuff too seriously.”

“I think they were pretty serious.”

“Here’s the scene on that caper. They built this pulp mill on the river west of town, and some days the smell in the valley is so bad that you think an elephant cut a fart in your face. They make toilet paper or something up there. That’s right, man. All those beautiful ponderosa pines eventually get flushed down somebody’s commode in Des Moines. Anyway, the old man has got them in state court now, and if he wins his injunction, they shut down the whole damn thing. I guess I can’t blame most of those guys for being pissed. They don’t earn diddly-squat there, anyway, their union don’t do anything for them, and the only other work around here is seasonal. Sometimes I even wonder if the old man sees the other end of what he’s doing.”

He lit a cigarette while I started on the next hole. The leaves of the cottonwoods by the river flickered with sunlight in the breeze.

“But this is an old scene with him. He fought the Anaconda Company when they started polluting the Clark, and he helped stop a bunch over in east Montana that were catching wild horses and selling them to a dog-food company.” Buddy squatted down with the water can by the hole and puffed a minute on his cigarette. “He’s always got the right thing in mind, but he’s one of these guys that draws a line in the dirt, and then that’s it. He doesn’t see anything in between.”

We dug the last hole by the slough in the late afternoon, and I looked back at the long straight line of fence posts, rigid and thick in the ground, and felt a pride in their geometric progression from the front of the ranch to the mud bottom we were standing in. The grass bent in the wind off the river, and the sun already had a black piece cut out of it by a mountain peak. We threw the tools into the wagon bed and walked back through the fields to the cabin. I felt physically tired and satisfied in the way you do when you have bent yourself to a right task. The shadows of the mountains were moving across the valley, over the log houses, the hay bales in the fields, the stone walls, and the cords of wood piled by the barns, as the light receded and gathered in the trees on the far side of the river.

We fished with worms in the creek behind the cabin during the twilight, then fired the wood stove and broiled the cutthroat trout in butter and garlic salt. I took a can of beer and the Martin out on the front porch while Buddy turned the fish in the pan. I dropped the tuning into D, clicked my thumb pick across the bass strings, and went up the neck into a diminished blues chording that I had learned from Robert Pete Williams in Angola. The strings rang with moonlight, and I felt the deep notes reverberate through my fingers and forearm as though the wood itself had caught the beat of my blood. I bridged over into “The Wreck of the Ole 97,” hammering on and pulling off like A. P. Carter, the strings trembling with light and their own metallic sympathy.

Buddy walked out on the porch with a piece of trout between his fingers and drank out of my beer can on the railing.

“That sounded fine, babe,” he said. He sat on the railing, and the moonlight broke around his shoulders. I took the cigarette from between his fingers and put it in my mouth. The mountains were like a glacial blackness against the sky.

“I know what you’re thinking about,” he said. “You don’t have to, man. It’s going to be cool.”

That was Thursday.