The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Five

On Sunday morning, Buddy, his sister, her husband, and I went into Missoula. It was a fine day for a birthday party in a green backyard, and Buddy had bought a claw mitt and spinning reel for his eleven-year-old boy, and a Swiss army knife full of can openers and screwdrivers for his younger son. I was surprised at how close Buddy was to his children. After we cracked away the rock salt and ice from the hand-crank ice-cream freezer, Buddy served each plate at the table under the maple tree, lit the candles in a glow of pink light and icing, and walked on his hands in the grass while the children squealed in delight.

He wasn’t as successful with his wife, Beth. Her manner was quiet and friendly toward him, one of a shared intimate knowledge or perhaps an acceptance out of necessity. But I felt that if he had not been the father of her children, he wouldn’t occupy even this small space in her life. I sat against the tree trunk and drank a can of beer, and as I watched Buddy talking to her, his arms sometimes flying in the air, his face smiling and his slacks and sport shirt ironed with sharp creases (and her eyes fading with a lack of attention and then quickening when one of the children spilled ice cream into his lap), I felt like an intruder in something that I shouldn’t see, particularly with Buddy. He had always had a crapshooter’s eye for any situation, but this time he was all boxcars, deuces, and treys.

She was certainly good to look at. Her hair was black with a light shine in it, and her white skin didn’t have a wrinkle or freckle on it. She was a little overweight, but in a soft way, and she stood with her knees close together like a schoolgirl, and the smooth curve of her stomach and her large breasts brought back all my stunted sexual dreams and sleepless midnight frustration.

Later, Buddy insisted that she go with us to the bar in Milltown. She began clearing the table of paper plates and talking in an oblique way about the children’s supper, and Buddy walked away to the neighbor’s porch, knocked loudly on the jamb, then crossed the lawn again, his face set in a purpose, and started knocking on the other neighbor’s door. I saw the anger in his wife’s eyes for a moment; then her lips pressed together, and she patted the two boys softly on the shoulders and told them to finish cleaning the table.

She sat between us in the pickup, and Buddy’s sister and her husband followed us through Hellgate Canyon along the river to Milltown. Because it was Sunday, yellow life rafts full of beer drinkers in swimming suits, their bodies glistening with tan, roared down through the riffle in a spray of water and sunlight and happy screams of terror against the canyon walls. One raft struck against a boulder, the rubber bow bending upward while the white water boiled over the stern; then it swung sideways into the current like a carnival ride out of control while the people inside tumbled over one another and sent ropes of beer foam into the air.

I looked into the rearview mirror and saw Melvin, Buddy’s brother-in-law, driving with both arms folded on top of the wheel and a beer bottle in his hand while the car drifted back and forth toward the shoulder. He had started drinking early at the birthday party, and before we left, he had poured a boilermaker in the kitchen.

“I’d better pull off and let you take that fellow’s wheel,” I said.

“Don’t do that, man,” Buddy said. “He’ll want to fight. He’s a real Irish drunk.”

“He’s about to put himself and your sister all over those rocks.”

“You’d have to pull him from behind that steering wheel with a chain,” Buddy said. “Right now he’s probably talking about joining a revolution in Bolivia. You know, right after I got out of the joint” — Buddy stopped momentarily and touched a piece of tobacco on his lip, his eyes uncertain in front of his wife’s stare through the windshield — “I hadn’t met the guy and he asked me how you burn a safe, because he had some friends who were going to peel one in California for the revolution and he didn’t know if they could do it right. I mean he didn’t blink when he said it.”

In the mirror I saw the car rip a shower of gravel out of the shoulder and float back toward the center stripe.

“Let’s get some coffee and a sandwich at the truck stop,” I said.

“Go ahead. He’ll be all right,” Beth said.

I glanced at her calm, lovely face in the cab, and for just a second I felt the touch of her thigh against mine and realized that I hadn’t ridden close to a woman in a vehicle for over two years and had forgotten how pleasant it could be.

“Yeah, don’t stop there, man,” Buddy said. “They don’t sell booze, and he’ll make up for it by trying to get it on with the lumberjacks. Even the old man thinks he’s got a lightning bolt in his head. He came into the house one night blowing some green weed and turned up his hi-fi until the plates were shaking in the cupboard. The birds were flapping in the pens, and the old man came up the stairs like a hurricane.”

I put the truck into second gear and slowed for the turn across the railroad embankment into the white shale parking lot in front of the bar. There was already a large afternoon crowd in the bar, and somebody was tuning an electric bass and blowing into the microphone over the roar of noise. Melvin bounced across the tracks, fishtailed on the back springs, and slid with his brakes in a scour of earth three inches from my front fender. His face was almost totally white, and he had a filter-tipped cigar in the middle of his mouth. He leaned toward the passenger’s window to speak, and his wife averted her face from his breath.

“A little Roy Acuff this afternoon, cousin,” he said.

I nodded at him and rolled up the window.

“Say, Buddy, I’ve only played twice with these guys,” I said. “It’s a good gig and I want to keep it.”

“It’s solid, babe. Just go in there and do the Ernest Tubb shot. We’ll take care of this guy.”

“I’m not putting you on,” I said.

“Go inside. It’ll be all right,” Beth said.

She was a princess inside the bar. After I began the first number on the bandstand, Melvin stood below the platform with a shot glass in one hand and a draft beer in the other, his face happily drunk. He swayed on his feet, talking with a fractured smile into the amplified sound; then she took him by the elbow and led him away to the dance floor.

I did the lead with my Martin on our second song, “I’m Moving On,” and the bar became quiet while I held the sound box up to my chin and played directly into the microphone. I ran Hank Snow’s chord progressions up and down the frets, thumping the deep bass notes of a train highballing through Dixie while I picked out the notes of the melody on the treble strings with my fingernail. I heard the steel try to get in behind me before I realized that I had been riding too long, and I moved back down the neck into the standard G chord on the second fret and tapered off into the rest of the band with a bass roll. The crowd applauded and whistled, and a man at the bar shouted out, “Give ’em hell, reb.”

I saw Buddy in the restroom at the end of the set. He was leaning over the urinal with one hand propped against the wall, and his eyes looked like whorls of color with cinders for pupils.

“I scored some acid from a guy out in the parking lot,” he said. “You want to try some of this crazy mixture on your neurotic southern chemistry?”

“I got to work this afternoon, babe.”

“How you like my old lady? She’s quite a gal, ain’t she?”

“Yeah, she is.”

“I was catching your radiations in the truck there, Zeno,” he said. “A little pulsing of the blood behind the steering wheel.”

“You better leave that college dope alone,” I said.

“Hey, don’t walk out. After you get finished, we’re going to Eddie’s Club, and then I’m bringing a whole crew down to the place for a barbecue. Some bear steaks soaked overnight in milk. It’s the best barbecue in the world. Puts meat in your brain and black hair all over your toenails.”

“Okay, Buddy.”

He drew in on his cigarette, the smoke and hot ash curling between his yellowed fingers, and squinted at me with a radiant smile on his face.

Eddie’s Club was a place full of hard yellow light, smoke, winos, drunk Salish Indians, the clatter of pool balls, a hillbilly jukebox, college students, and some teachers from the university. One wall was lined with large framed photographs of the old men who drank in there, their mouths toothless and collapsed, their slouch hats and cloth caps pulled at an angle over the alcoholic lines and bright eyes of their faces.

“Boyd Valentine, the bartender, did all that,” Buddy said, his forehead perspiring in the smoke. “You got to meet this guy. He’s a Michelangelo with a camera. A real wild man. Your kind of people.”

Before I could stop him, Buddy had walked away into the confusion of noise and people, who were two-deep at the bar. I was left at the table with Beth, Pearl, and Melvin, who couldn’t find the end of his cigarette with his lighter, and a half-dozen other people whose elbows rested in spilled beer without their taking notice of it.

“Try a Montana busthead highball,” Melvin said. “Don’t try to stay sober in this crowd. It’s useless.”

He lowered a full whiskey jigger into a beer schooner with two fingers and pushed it toward me.

“I’d better pass,” I said.

He picked up the schooner with both hands and drank it to the bottom, the whiskey jigger rolling against the glass. I had to shudder while I watched him.

In the back two men began fighting over the pool table. A couple of chairs were overturned, a pool cue shattered across the table, and one man was knocked to the floor, then helped up and pushed out the back door. Few people paid any attention.

“What’s on your mind?” Beth said, smiling.

“I wonder what I’m doing here.”

“It’s part of Buddy and Mel’s guided tour of Missoula,” Pearl said. She wasn’t happy with any of it.

“You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din,” Melvin said, toasting me in some private irony.

“We’ll be leaving in a few minutes,” Beth said.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll probably shoot on across the street to the Oxford and get something to eat.” Although I wouldn’t admit the impulse to myself then, I was hoping that she would ask to go along.

“Hey,” Buddy shouted behind me. “This is Boyd Valentine. Used to hang around New Orleans when I was making my cool sounds there. Got a ’55 Chevy and blows engines out at a hundred and ten on the Bitterroot road. Outruns cops, ambulances, and fire trucks. Best photographer in the Northwest.”

Buddy held the bartender by one arm, a man with fierce black eyes and an electric energy in his face. One of his thumbs was missing, and the black hair on his chest grew out of his shirt.

“What’s happening?” he said, and shook hands. There was good humor in his voice and smile, and a current in his hand.

“My man here is going to load up his hot rod with good people, and we’re going to burn on down to the place and juice under the stars while I barbecue steaks that will bring you to your knees in reverence,” Buddy said. “Then my other man will crank out his Martin and sing songs of Dixie and molasses and ham hocks cooked with grits in his mammy’s shoe.”

We finally left the bar after Melvin turned over a pitcher of beer in an Indian woman’s lap. She raised her dress over her waist and squeezed it out over her thighs and kneecaps, her husband tore Melvin’s shirt, the bartender then brought three more pitchers to the table, and that was the end of that.

Buddy and I dropped Beth off at her house. He tried to convince her to come out to the ranch, but in her quiet woman’s way she mentioned the children, their supper, school tomorrow, those arguments that know no refutation. We drove down through the Bitterroots with the river black and winding beyond the cottonwoods. Rain clouds had started to move across the mountain peaks, and there was a dry rumble of thunder on the far side of the valley. In the distance, heat lightning wavered and flickered over the rolling hills of pines. I opened the wind vane and let the cool air, with just the hint of rain in it, blow into my face.

Buddy took a reefer stub from his pocket and lit it, holding the smoke down deep, his teeth tight together. He let out the smoke slowly and took another hit.

“Where did you get that?” I said.

“An Indian girl at Eddie’s. You want a snort?” He pushed in the cigarette lighter on the dashboard.

“Buddy, you’ve got enough shit in you now to make a time bomb out of your head.”

“Forget that crap, man. The only thing I could never pull down right was coke.” He placed the stub on the hot lighter and held it under his nose, sniffing the curl of smoke deeply into his head. “Look, I struck out with her back there, didn’t I?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hell yes, you know.”

“I never met your wife before. She said she had to take care of the kids.”

“That’s not what I mean, man, and you know it. Don’t give a con the con.”

“I was on the bandstand. I don’t know what went on between you.”

“But you know.”

“Come on, Buddy. You’re pulling me into your own stuff.”

“That’s right, Zeno. But you got an eye for looking into people. You tool around the yard, throwing the handball up against the wall, cool walk under the gun hack, but you’re clicking right into somebody’s pulse-beat.”

He knocked the lighter clean against the wind vane and rubbed it clean again on his shoe. There were red flecks in the corners of his eyes. This was the first time I had seen a bit of meanness come out in Buddy when he was high.

“Hell, Iry, I read your action when you first came in. All that southern-country-boy jive works cool on old ladies, but you know, man, and you’re digging everything I say.”

I was in that position where there is nothing to say, with no words that wouldn’t increase an unpleasant situation, and silence was equally bad. Then the bartender’s 1955 Chevrolet passed us in a roar of twin exhausts, a quick brilliance of headlights, and a scorch of black rubber as he shifted up and accelerated in front of us. The back draft and vacuum pushed my truck toward the shoulder of the road.

“Damn,” I said. “Does that fellow drive in demolition derbies or something?”

“That’s just Boyd Valentine airing out his gourd.”

“You have another stick?” I thought it was better that I smoke it and dump it if he had any more.

“That was the last of the souvenirs from the reservation. It was green, anyway. Think they must grow it in hog shit. Makes you talk with forked brain. Pull into the bar up there and I’ll buy a little brew for our crowd.”

The neon sign reflected a dull purple and red on the gravel and the cars and pickups in the parking lot. It was the same bar where we had gone my first night in Montana.

“Let’s pass, man,” I said. “We have some in the icebox, and I can go down the road later.”

“Pull in, pull in, pull in. You got to stop worrying about all these things.”

“I don’t think it’s too cool, Buddy.”

“Because you’ve got your head in the parole office all the time. Wait just a minute and I’ll bop on out with the brew.”

I parked the truck on the edge of the lot by the road, and Buddy walked inside, his balance deliberate like a sailor’s on a ship. I smoked a cigarette and watched a few raindrops strike against the windshield. A long streak of lightning quivered in the blackness off a distant mountain, and I nicked my cigarette out into the moist, sulfurous air. Well, to hell with it, I thought, and went inside after him.

It was crowded, and the barstools were filled with cowboys and mill workers bent over into the poker dice, punchboards, and rows of beer bottles. Buddy was standing in front of a table with a beer in his hand, talking with three rawboned men and their wives, who were as bovine and burned with wind and sun as their husbands. They had empty steak plates in front of them, streaked with gravy and blood, and while Buddy talked, they tipped their cigarette ashes into the plates with a kind of patient anger that they kept in with only the greatest stoicism. Buddy must have played the Ray Charles number on the jukebox, because I didn’t think anyone else in the place would have, and his speech was already full of hip language that raised up and down with the song while his hand tapped against the loose change in his slacks. He was on the outer edge of his high, and Bird Parker rhythms were working in his head, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

“Well, that’s your scene, man, and that’s copacetic,” he said. “And the old man has got his scene, too. And that’s cool. He just turns over his action a little different. It’s a matter of understanding what kind of scene you want to build and which kind of cats you want in on it—”

I went to the bar and asked if Buddy had put in an order to carry out.

“That’s it waiting on the end of the counter when you’re ready to leave, mister,” the bartender said.

I picked up the cardboard case of beer from the bar and walked over to Buddy with it.

“My meter’s running overtime,” I said.

“Just a minute. There’s a delicate metaphysical point involved here.”

“What’s involved is our ass.”

“Set it down. Let’s clear this question up. Now, if that stink plant down there invested some money in a purification system, the valley wouldn’t smell like it just had an enema, and they could supply all kinds of copacetic toilet paper all over the world.”

One man, with a bull neck, iron eyebrows, and his shirt lapels pressed and starched flat, looked at Buddy with a stare that I would never want to have turned on me. The thick veins in his neck and brow were like twisted pieces of cord. He breathed deeply in his chest, almost clicking with a stunted anger, and his thumb knuckle rubbed back and forth on the oil cover of the table. He blinked and looked at a far spot on the wall.

“You better tell your old man that four hundred working men are going to lose their jobs because he thinks there’s a little bit of smell in the air,” he said.

“Well, that’s the way the toilet flushes sometimes, Zeno,” Buddy said.

I picked up the case of beer and headed for the door. I had to wait for a drunken cowboy to kiss his girl good night and stumble out ahead of me; then I walked across the parking lot in the light rain and threw the beer in the back of the truck. Buddy followed me in the frame of yellow light from the open door.

“Get in,” I said.

“Why the fire drill, man?”

“The next time, you charge your own hill. Collect Purple Hearts when I’m not around.”

“You’re really pissed.”

“Just get in. I’m burning it down the road in about five seconds.”

We pulled onto the blacktop, and I revved it up all the way in first and slammed the gearbox into second. The oil smoke billowed out of the truck’s tail pipe.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said. He still had the beer bottle in his hand, and he drank the foam out of the bottle.

“Don’t you know what you’re fooling with back there? Those people have blood in their eye. For a minute that man wanted to ice you.”

“Iry, you don’t know the scene around here. It’s not like rednecks opening up a shank in your face. This kind of crap goes on all the time. Besides, I can’t stand the righteousness of those bastards. They bitch about the federal government, the Indians, farm control, niggers, college kids, anything that’s not like them. You get pretty tired of it.”

“Haven’t you learned to leave people like that alone?”

“You’re really coming on like Gangbusters tonight.”

“Yeah, well, quick lesson you taught me my first week in the population: walk around the quiet ones that look harmless.”

“Okay, Zeno.”

I put a cigarette in my mouth and popped a kitchen match on my thumbnail. The rain turned in the headlights, and I breathed in on the cigarette and let the smoke out slowly.

“Buddy, I just don’t like to see you fade the wrong kind of action,” I said.

“I know all that, man.”

“You got to ease up sometimes and let people alone.”

“Forget about it. I’m cool. Do I look like I’m worried? I’m extremely cool on these matters.”

I looked into the rearview mirror as I slowed to turn into the side road that led to the ranch. A pair of headlights was gaining on me through the rain as though the driver couldn’t see that I was slowing. I shifted into second and accelerated into the gravel turnoff, the truck body bouncing hard against the springs. The trees were black by the side of the road, and the rocks pinged and rattled under the frame. The headlights turned in after us, and I pushed the accelerator to the floor.

“Hey, you trying out for the hot-rod circuit or something?” Buddy said. “Come on, you’re going to rip a tire on these rocks.”

I didn’t answer him. The driver behind us had on his brights, and they reflected in my eyes like a shattered white flame. I wound the truck up in second, shot it into third, with the gas all the way down, and popped the clutch. It slipped momentarily until it could grab, the speedometer needle quivered in a stationary place like part of a bad dream, and the headlights suddenly loomed up close enough to the tailgate so that I could see the hood and outline of a large yellow truck.

“Pull over and let those drunk sons of bitches pass,” Buddy said.

Then they hit us. The back end of my pickup fishtailed toward the ditch, and I spun the steering wheel in my hands and shifted down in a spray of rocks. Then they hit us again, and I heard the metal tear like someone was ripping strips out of a tin roof. The headlights beat against the dark line of trees and wavered up into the sky, and I couldn’t pull the pickup to the center of the road again because either a fender had been crumpled against a tire or the frame had been bent. Buddy was looking backward through the cab window, his face brilliant in the headlights’ illumination.

“Another mile, man,” he said. “I’m going to get the old man’s shotgun and blow these assholes all over the road.”

They closed on us and caught my back bumper as a snow-plow might, with a heavy superior thrust of engine and weight that pushed the pickup forward as though it had no momentum of its own, the transmission shearing into filings, the wheels locked sideways and scouring ruts out of the rock road. I held on to the steering wheel with one hand and tried to put an arm in front of Buddy as the edge of the ditch cut under the front tire and we went over. The pine saplings slashed against the windshield, and the bottom of the ditch came up blackly and smashed the radiator into the fan. Buddy’s head spider-webbed the glass, and he recoiled backward into the seat, a brilliant jet of blood shooting from a small raised split like a crucifix in the skin. My stomach had gone hard into the steering wheel, my breath rushed out of a long collapsing place in my throat, and I fought to bring the air back in my lungs.

Then I heard their truck stop and back up on the road. Their doors slammed, and three big men skidded down the side of the ditch through the underbrush, their boots digging for balance in the wet dirt. I pulled the tire iron from under the seat and opened the door just before the first one got his hand on it. Before I could turn into him and swing, he brought a nightstick down on my arm. It was the type used by policemen and barroom bouncers, drilled out on the end and filled with lead, and I felt the bone crack like a piece of plate. My hand opened as though the tendons were severed, and the tire iron fell foolishly to the ground.

“That other one’s Riordan,” a second man said. They were all dressed in blue jeans, work boots, and wash-faded flannel shirts, and their large bodies were bursting with a confident physical power.

They pulled Buddy from the cab and knocked him to the ground, then held him up against the tire well and drove their fists into his face. They discounted my presence as they might have a stray limb that was in their way. The blood was already swelling up in a blue knot under the skin on my arm, and my fingers were quivering uncontrollably. Buddy’s hair was matted against the split in his forehead, and his face had gone white from the blows. I picked up the tire iron with my left hand and stumbled around the front of the truck in the brush, the headlights bright in my eyes, and threw it as hard as I could into a man’s back. His shoulders straightened abruptly, and his arm flickered in the air behind his spine, his body frozen as though some awful pain was working its way into his groin.

They didn’t take long after that. They had finished beating Buddy, streaking his clothes with blood, and now they turned their attention to me. The man I had hit leaned against my truck with one arm, arching his back and kneading his fist into the vertebrae. I could see the pain in his eyes.

“Give that son of a bitch his buckwheats,” he said.

The first punch caught me in the eye. I felt the man’s whole weight lift into it, and I spun backward off the fender with a corridor of purple light receding into my brain. I must have held on to the fender, because the second blow came downward across my nose, and for just an instant I knew that he had a ring on. There was mud all over my hands and knees, the rain ticked in my hair, and I heard one man say, “You ought to know when to stay in Louisiana, bud.” Then he kicked me between the buttocks, and I thought I was going to urinate.

I heard their truck doors slam, and as they turned around in the road, the headlight beams reflected off the tree trunks, and I saw the words on the side of the cab: WEST MONTANA LUMBER COMPANY. I got to my feet and started over toward Buddy, who was bent on his knees in the undergrowth. My back felt cold and wet, and I realized that half my shirt had been torn away from one shoulder. Then I saw the thin ribbon of fire curling up the twisted strip of cloth into the open gas tank. I ran to Buddy and grabbed him under the arm with my good hand, and we tripped along the bottom of the ditch with the pine branches whipping back across our faces and arms.

A red finger of light leaped down the gas hole, and there was a whoosh and a brilliant illumination like strobe lights in the ditch. The truck body steamed and constricted, and the paint burst into blisters; then the fire suddenly welled up through the wooden bed and shot into the air in an exploding yellow scorch against the pine boughs high overhead. The heat burned my face and made my eyes water. The tires became ringed with fire, and the grease in the rear axle boiled and hissed through the seals, and the hood sprang open from its latch as though it were part of some isolated comic act. I heard the Martin and Dobro start to come apart in the cab. The mahogany and spruce wood, the tapered necks and German silver in the frets, gathered into a dark flame cracking through the windshield, and the strings on the Dobro tightened and popped one by one against the metal resonator, ringing out through the woods as though they were being pulled loose by a discordant pair of pliers.

I heard the rain on the windowsill and pulled the sheet up over my eyes. It was cool under the sheet, and I rolled back into that strange, comfortable world between sleep and wakefulness. On the edge of my mind I heard my father moving around downstairs in the early dawn, breaking open the shotguns to see that they were empty and dropping the decoys with their lead-anchor weights into the canvas duffel bag. I knew that it was going to be a fine day for duck hunting, with an overcast sky and enough rain to bring them sailing in low, denting the water with their feet and wings before they landed. It had been a good year for mallard and teal, and on a gray day like this one they always came in right above our blind on their way to feed in the rice field.

“Allons aller,” I heard my father call up the staircase.

And I could already feel the excitement of the outboard ride across the swamp to the blind, with the shotgun and the shells under my raincoat, knowing that we could take all the ducks we wanted simply because that part of the swamp was ours — we had earned it, the two of us. They would dip suddenly out of the sky when they saw our decoys while we sat motionlessly in the reeds, our faces pointed toward the ground, our camouflaged caps pulled down on our foreheads; then, as they winnowed over the bayou, we would rise together and the sixteen-gauge would roar in my ears and recoil into my shoulder, and before the first mallard had folded in the air and toppled toward the water, even before the dogs had splashed through the reeds after him, I was already firing again with the empty shell casings smoking at our feet.

But the swamp and my father’s happy voice over the piled ducks in the blind didn’t hold in my mind. I felt the gun go off again against my shoulder, but this time I was looking through the peep sight on my M-1 at a concrete bunker on the edge of a frozen rice field. The bunker was covered with holes, as though it had been beaten with a ball peen hammer, and the firing slit was scoured and chipped with ricochets. I let off the whole clip at the slit, the concrete shaling and powdering away like wisps of smoke in the gray air, and then I pulled back into the ditch and pressed in another clip with my thumb. The bottom of the ditch was filmed with ice and covered with empty shell casings. My hands were shaking with the cold inside my mittens, and my fingers felt like sticks on the bolt. I raised up and let off three rounds across the crusted snow on the edge of the ditch. Then I heard the sergeant behind me.

“All right, he’s dead in there. Save what you got.”

The other seven stopped firing and pulled away from the top of the ditch. The moisture in their nostrils was frozen, and their faces were discolored from the wind and the crystals of snow on their skin.

“So here’s the deal,” the sergeant said. “We got about one hour to get around that hill or there ain’t going to be anybody to meet us there.”

“He’s under a mattress in there. They put a whole pile of them in every one of them things,” another man said.

“Well, we can take our choices, and it’s a finger any way you look at it,” the sergeant said. He had a knitted sweater tied around his ears under his helmet, and two fingers of his left hand had started to swell with frostbite. “We can sit on our ass here and shoot everything we got on one gook, and in the meantime we’re going to get left, because those other fuckers aren’t going to wait on us, and we ain’t going to have nothing except a frozen pecker to stick out of this hole when they send their patrols through here tonight.”

There was no answer, but each of us was thinking of that hundred yards of wind-polished snow that at least four of us would have to cross before we would be beyond the angle of the machine gunner behind the slit in the bunker.

“OK, it’s Paret, Simpson, and Belcher,” the sergeant said. “Paret, you stay on my ass. We’re going around behind him and blow that iron door open. What you got left in the Browning, Roth?”

“A half clip and four in the bag.”

“Put it in his face until we get all the way across the field.”

The BAR man started firing, and we went over the top of the ditch in a run, our shoulders crouched, our boots like lead weights in the snow. The two other men headed toward the left side of the bunker, their breath laboring out in a fog before them. I followed hard on the sergeant, as though I were trying to run in a dream, and then the sun broke through the overcast and turned the snowfield into a brilliant white mirror. Our tracks looked sculptured, like a dark violation of the field’s whiteness.

The snow became deeper and softer, and the sergeant and I pushed for that safe imaginary angle beyond the range of a machine gun’s swivel. Then the slit burst open with flame, and I saw the bullets clip in a straight pattern toward me in the snow. For a moment I saw the sergeant’s face turn and stare at me over his shoulder, as though he had been disturbed in an angry mood. I fell forward on my elbows, my boots still locked in their deep sculptured depressions, and heard the snow hiss and spit around me.

The whiteness of the snow ached like a flame inside my eyelids.

Where are you hit?

I don’t know.

Jesus Christ, his back is coming off.

Get up over the rise and tell them to wait. Shoot out their tires if you have to.

They better have plasma. Look at the snow.

I felt the nurse rub salve with a piece of cotton over my back and pull the gauze back into place. The rain broke on the windowsill in dimples of light, and I could see the dark green of the elms and maples waving in front of the old brick buildings across the street. I raised up on my elbows and felt the skin burn on my back. The plaster cast on my forearm was like a thick, obscene weight.

“Don’t turn over. You have some pretty bad blisters there,” a man’s voice said.

Buddy’s father was bent forward in a leather chair at the foot of the bed, his square, callused hands folded between his legs. His gold watch chain glinted against his faded Levi’s, and his wide forehead looked pale in the room’s half-light. His gray eyes were staring straight into mine.

“They put you under before they set your arm. The doctor said it might hang on awhile after you woke up.”

My arms and bare chest were damp against the sheet, and I wiped my face with the pillow. The pressure sent a sudden touch of pain along my eyebrow and the bridge of my nose. I heard him pull his chair to the side of the bed.

“They really did a job on us,” I said.

He nodded with his eyes squinted, and I saw that he was looking over my face rather than at me. I propped myself on one elbow and softly touched the hard row of stitches under the strip of gauze bandage on my eyebrow. There were flecks of dried blood on my fingertips. When I moved, my back burned as though it had been scalded.

“How’s Buddy?”

“He’s asleep in the next room.”

“His head hit the glass when we went over in the ditch. Then they really hit him,” I said.

“He’ll be all right. He was awake earlier and we talked, and then he wanted to sleep for a while.”

“How bad is he?”

“He has a concussion, and they put twenty stitches in his forehead.”

Outside, the rain was dripping from the trees, and I could hear someone punting a football in a front yard.

“I tried to stop it,” I said. “I got one of them with the tire iron, but they had already broken my arm.”

He rubbed his coarse palms over his knuckles and looked momentarily at the floor, then at me. There was a thin part line in his graying brown hair, and his eyelids blinked as though he were keeping some idea down inside himself.

“I didn’t press Buddy this morning, but I want to know what happened. Was it something that grew out of an argument in a saloon, or was it more involved than that?”

I reached over to the nightstand where someone had placed my package of Lucky Strikes beside my billfold, and put one in my mouth. He took a book of matches from his denim shirt and lit it. I wanted to avoid his face and the private question that was there beyond the wind-burned skin, the short growth of whiskers, and those intense gray eyes.

“It started with Buddy at the bar, Mr. Riordan. I was outside most of the time. You’d better ask him about it later,” I said.

“And what was it exactly about?”

“Maybe too many drunk men in a bar on Sunday night.”

“What was said?”

I drew in on the cigarette and placed it in the ashtray. The wind blew the rain off the windowsill into the room. His big hands were pressed on his knees, and the veins stood up like twists of blue cord under the skin.

“You’ve got me in a hard place, and I think you know that,” I said.

“Yes, I guess I do. But I’d like to have it now.”

“Buddy was talking with some people at a table about the pulp mill. I don’t know who the men were who followed us out. Buddy thought they were just drunks until they smashed into the back of my truck.”

“I see,” he said.

I heard the wet slap of the football again and then the heavy rattle of leaves in a tree.

“It looks like we’ve gotten you into some of our family’s trouble, Mr. Paret,” he said.

“No, sir, that’s not true. I usually make a point of finding my own.”

He took a package of tobacco from his shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette, wet the glue neatly, and pinched the ends down.

“What did you kill that man for?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“It never came to you in those two years?”

“No.”

“I shot at a man once. I would have hit him and maybe killed him if he hadn’t jumped from the cab of a combine when he did. I shot at him because I’d thought for a long time about something he had done.”

“I formally resigned from my war a long time ago, Mr. Riordan.”

He cleared his throat quietly, as though there were a piece of bad air in it, and put out the rolled cigarette in the ashtray. This is one that’s hard to read, I thought.

“I’ll be back this evening,” he said. “The doctor said you two should be able to leave in the morning. Do you want anything?”

“I’d like a half pint of bourbon.”

“All right.”

“Wait,” I said, and gave him three dollars from my billfold.

After he had gone, I tried to sleep in the cool sound of the rain and fall back into the dream about the duck hunt with my father, but the perspiration rolled off my back onto the sheets, and when I kept my eyes closed too long, I saw the headlights roaring up out of the dark road into my tailgate. I turned on my side, with the ooze of salve thick against my skin, and stared at the wooden crucifix on the wall with two withered palms stuck behind it. I got up from the bed and found my slacks and shoes in the closet, but no shirt, and then I remembered the curl of flame climbing into the gas tank. It took me ten minutes to get on my trousers with one hand, and even with my buttocks against the bed the room kept tilting sideways from the square of pale light through the window. Sweat dripped out of my hair onto the cast, and my good hand was shaking as I tried to pop a match with my thumb and light a cigarette.

After I rang for the nurse, I looked across the room at my image in the dresser mirror. Oh man, I thought.

A nun in white pushed open the door softly, and then her quiet, cosmetic-free face dilated with a red hue.

“Oh, no, you shouldn’t do that,” she said. “Please don’t do that. You mustn’t.”

“I think I should leave this evening, Sister, but I need a shirt. I’d appreciate it if you could find any old one you have around here.”

“Please, Mr. Paret.”

“I have to check out, and I guess I’m going to. I just hate to ride the bus in a pajama shirt. You’d be doing me a great favor, Sister.”

Just then the nurse came in, and she could have been a matron in a women’s reformatory. Her face was at first a simple bright piece of cardboard and irritation at an annoyance on her floor; then after a few sentences were exchanged between us, the anger clicked in her eyes, and I was sure that she would have enjoyed seeing me collapse on the floor in a spasm that would require heart surgery with a pocketknife.

The nun came through the door again with a folded checkered shirt in her hands, brushed past the nurse in a swirl of white cloth over her small, polished black shoes, and put the shirt next to me, quickly, with just a flash of her concerned pretty face into mine.

I buttoned the shirt so I could rest my limp hand and the weight of the cast inside it and walked down the corridor to the desk in the waiting room. I could hear the leather soles and etched voice of the nurse echo behind me, and evidently she had enough command in the hospital to make the interns and the resident doctor look around walleyed and full of question marks at the strange man walking toward them a little off-balance.

I told the lady at the desk my name and asked for the bill.

“You ought to go back to your room, fella,” the resident said.

“Got to catch air, doc, and stretch it out a little bit tonight.”

He looked at me steadily for a moment.

“All right, that’s fine,” he said, and motioned the nurse away. “But we’re going to give you a sling and some pills for infection and pain. You come back in tomorrow to have your bandages changed.”

I sat down in a metal chair while another nurse tied a sling around my neck and placed my elbow carefully into the cloth and clipped safety pins into the folds. She stuck a brown envelope full of pills into the pocket of the checkered shirt, and I stood up to walk to the desk again. I could feel the stitches drawing tight against my eye, and I felt that there was a large blood blister swelling up on the bridge of my nose. My eyes couldn’t focus on the gray dimpling of rain on the concrete outside.

I asked again for my bill and was told that Mr. Riordan had asked that it be sent to him. I took out twenty-five dollars from my billfold and said that I would be back in to pay the rest.

I walked through the wet streets under the overhang of trees toward the bus depot. The wind swept the rain in gusts into my face. Clouds hung like soft smoke on the peaks of the mountains, and the neon signs over the bars were hazy red and green in the diminishing gray light.

So you showed everybody at the hospital you’re a stand-up guy, I thought. Isn’t that fine? Then I had to think about the rest of it. My truck and my Martin and Dobro burned up, a broken arm that put me out of work, and living at a strange family’s place as a bandage case because there wasn’t another damn thing I could do. And deeper than any of it was just a sick feeling, a humiliation at being beaten up by men who had done it with a lazy form of physical contempt. I’d had the same feeling only once before, when a bully in the eighth grade had caught me after school and pinned my arms into the dust with his knees and slapped my face casually back and forth, then spit on his finger and put it in my ear.