The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Six

In the morning the sun was all over the Bitterroot Valley, the grass had become a darker green from the rain, and the irrigation ditches were flowing high and muddy through the pigweed along the banks. I fired the wood stove and set the coffeepot to boil on an iron lid with the grinds in the water and went out back to see if I could start Buddy’s old Plymouth. He had driven it through the creek and smashed one headlight and fender into a cottonwood when he was drunk, and white water had boiled over the front axle into the wires and distributor. But I finally turned it over on three cylinders and left it knocking and drying in neutral in front of the cabin while I drank coffee out of the pot and ate some smoked trout from the icebox.

Buddy’s father and his younger brothers looked up at me from their work in the hayfield as I drove slowly with one arm up the dirt road toward the cattle guard. The ignition wires I had tied together swung under the dashboard and sparked whenever they clicked against the metal. Out of my side vision I saw Mr. Riordan raise his checkered arm in the sunlight, but I slipped the transmission into third and thumped across the cattle guard onto the gravel road. I passed the burned wreck of my truck and the large area of blackened grass around it. The windows hung out on the scorched metal in folded sheets, and the boards in the bed were collapsed in charcoal over the rear axle. Through the broken eye of one window I thought I could see the silver wink of the twisted resonator from my Dobro.

I drove into Hamilton, the Ravalli County seat, and parked in front of the jail. As I walked up the sidewalk toward the building, a man behind the wire screen and bars of a cell window blew cigarette smoke out into the sunlight, then turned away into the gloom when I looked into his face.

I talked to the dispatcher in the sheriff’s office, then waited for thirty minutes on a wooden bench with the salve oozing out of my bandages into my shirt before the sheriff opened the door to his office and nodded his head at me.

His brown sleeves were rolled back over his elbows, and there was a faded army tattoo under the sun-bleached hair on one forearm and a navy tattoo on the other. His fingers on top of the desk pad were as thick as sausages, the nails broken down to the quick and lined with dirt, and there was a rim of dandruff around the bald spot in the center of his head. He didn’t ask me to sit down or even look at me directly. He simply clicked his fingernail against a paper spindle, as though he were involved in an abstract thought, and said:

“Yes, sir?”

“My name is Iry Paret. Buddy Riordan and I got run off the road by Florence the other night, and I got my truck burnt up.”

“You’re Mr. Paret, are you?” he said.

“That’s right.”

He clicked his finger against the spindle again.

“I sent one of my deputies up to the hospital in Missoula after I heard about it. You fellows sure put it in the ditch, didn’t you?”

“I had two guitars in that cab that were worth around seven hundred dollars,” I said.

“What would you like us to do?” He looked up at me from his finger game with the spindle. There was a blue touch in his eyes like something off an archer’s bow.

“I want to get the three men that burned my truck.”

“I talked with a few people in the tavern later that night. They said you and Buddy Riordan were drunk.”

“We weren’t drunk. We were knocked off the road, and somebody used my shirt to set fire to the gas tank.”

“I looked at your truck, too. There’s one pair of skid marks going off into the ditch.”

I took a cigarette from my shirt pocket and tried to light a match from the folder with one hand.

“Look, Sheriff, a yellow truck with a West Montana Lumber Company sign on the door ran right over my tailgate, and then they really went to work. I don’t know who those guys are, but they owe me for a 1949 pickup and two guitars and a broken arm.”

“Well, I guess you’re saying you just got the shit beat out of you,” he said, and popped his thick index finger loose from his thumb on the desk blotter. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a folder with three sheets clipped together inside. He turned over to the second page and folded it back and looked hard at one paragraph.

“Was it a colored man you killed down there?” he said.

I lit the cigarette and looked beyond him through the open window at the soft blue roll of the mountains.

“I mean, you got off with two years for murdering a man. In Montana, you’d get ten in Deer Lodge, even if it was an Indian.”

In that moment I hated him and his wry smile and the private blue glint in his eye.

“I got three years good time, Sheriff. I imagine that’s in your folder, too.”

“Yes, sir, it is. It also says you could get violated back to that place in Louisiana without too much trouble.”

I drove back to the ranch with my hands tight on the steering wheel. I had wanted to say something final to him when I left the office, something that would crack into that blue glint in his eyes, but I had simply walked out like someone who had been told his bus was gone.

Buddy was sitting on the front porch of the cabin with a cup of tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other. His face was puffed with yellow and purple bruises, and a thick band of gauze was wrapped around his head. He tried to grin, but I could see the pain in his mouth.

“I didn’t know when you’d be back, so I wired it up,” I said.

“I’m just going to guess, Zeno. The sheriff’s office,” he said.

“Do you import these bastards out of the South?”

“A couple of quick lessons from Uncle Zeno. Around here the law won’t do anything about barroom brawls or any variety of Saturday night cuttings or swinging of pool cues. It don’t matter if it’s one guy against the whole Russian army — he’s on his own. Number two, the name Riordan is like the stink on shit down there at Hamilton.”

“In the meantime we got stomped, podna,” I said. “I’m out my truck and my guitars, and I don’t know when I can work again.”

“We got this place, man. You don’t have to worry about money.”

His acceptance made me even angrier than I had been in the sheriff’s office.

“That’s not my kind of caper.”

“Maybe you don’t like to hear this, but you got to mark it off.”

“Damn, Buddy, those guys are out there somewhere.”

“Yeah, man, and maybe you’ll recognize them somewhere, but what are you going to do then? Call the same dick that just threw you out of his office? Get a beer out of the icebox and sit down. I’m going to go fishing in a little while.”

“That’s real Kool-Aid, babe. I have to give it to you,” I said.

“You haven’t taken the wood plugs out of your ears yet. You talk like a fish with part of his brain still outside. You know better.”

I walked out of the sun’s glare into the shade of the porch and went inside. My suitcase was opened beside my bunk bed, and I wanted to throw my clothes into it and hitch on down the road, but I was broke and stuck here with my parole. I opened a can of beer and leaned back against the wooden ceiling post and drank it. I could hear the creek through the back window.

“Come on out here, Iry,” he called through the screen door.

I drank the bottom of the can slowly, and then I felt my throat and chest begin to relax and the blood slow in my temples. I took another can from the icebox and went back outside. The ridge of mountains behind the main house was dark blue and honed like a knife against the sky.

“You see what I mean, don’t you?” Buddy said. “I know you got brass cymbals going off in your head all the time. What’s the name of that guy you celled with, the one with all the whorehouse stories? He told me how you used to sweat all over the bunk at night and sometimes just sit up till morning bell. But, man, on a deal like this we just lose. That’s all. You just draw a line through it and flush it on down.”

“All right, Buddy, no therapy. I’ll watch you fish for a while, and then I want to borrow your car again.”

“Like what kind of action do you have planned, Zeno?”

“I need to call my brother in Louisiana, and I’m supposed to stop by the hospital.”

“There’s a phone up at the house.”

“Can I use the car?”

He took the keys from his pocket and dropped them in my palm. I followed him into the woods with my can of beer and watched him fish with wet flies for cutthroat in the turning pools behind the boulders. After he had moved farther up the stream into the deeper shade of the trees’ overhang, I finished my beer against a pine trunk, whistled at him softly and waved, and walked back to the cabin.

I had one good suit, a gray one that I wore when I played at good clubs, and I put it on with my half-topped black boots and a blue-and-white, small-checked cowboy shirt with pearl snap buttons. It took me almost a half hour to dress with one arm, and it was impossible to get the necktie into a knot.

I drove the thirty miles to Missoula and stopped at a beer joint with no cars in front to phone Ace. I got change for five dollars at the bar. Then it struck me what type of conversation I was about to have, and I ordered a vodka and ice to take to the telephone.

After his secretary whispered something hurriedly, like “I think it’s your brother, Mr. Paret,” Ace was on the line, and I could almost see his stomach swell up in satisfaction in that reclining leather chair. “Hello, Iry,” he said, “how do you like it up there with the Eskimos? Just a minute. I’ve got about three people on hold. . Go ahead. . Well, I don’t know if I want to buy just the two acres. Your four run all the way back to the bayou, and that’s going to leave a strip that anybody can move in on later. . I mean, if you decide later on to sell to a boat yard or let that oil company build a dock there, what I’ve got invested in the development isn’t going to be worth spit on the sidewalk. That’s the way it is, Bro’. . What the hell went wrong up there? I thought you had a job with that friend of yours. . Well, I don’t want to be the one that told you about latching the gate too quick behind you, but that’s the deal. All four acres or I can’t use it.”

So I took it at $250 an acre and gave up any mineral rights or future land-lease agreements for oil exploration, and Ace said he would have the deed transfer and check in the morning’s mail.

I walked back to the bar and finished the vodka. For a thousand dollars I had quitclaim forever to any of the Paret land, and if I knew Ace, I would not want to see the farm or the bamboo and cypress and oaks along the bayou ever again, even in memory.

I drove west of town through the green, sloping hills along the Clark. The sun was bright on the green riffles in the water, and insects were turning in hot swarms over the boulders that stood exposed in the current. Ahead I could see the huge plume of smoke that curled up against the sky from the pulp mill, and then I caught the first raw odor in the air. It smelled like sewage, and the wind flattened the smoke across the valley and left a dull white haze low on the meadows. I cleared my throat and spat outside the window, but my eyes started to water and I tried to breathe quietly through my mouth. The only thing I had ever smelled like it, on a scale that could cover a whole rural area, was the sugar mill back home in winter, which produced a thick, sick-sweet odor that seemed to permeate the inside of your skull.

I turned through the gate and parked in the employees’ lot. A new shift was going in, and men in Levi’s clothes and work boots and tin hats with lunch pails were walking into the side of the building. Log trucks piled with ponderosa pines, the booming chains notched tightly into the bark, were lined up in back to unload, the tractor engines hammering under the hoods. Someone told me later that the leather boots the men wore eventually turned black and rotted from the air inside the mill and the chemicals on the floor, and I thought their lungs must have looked like a pathologist’s dream.

I asked a foreman where the management was, and he looked at me with a sweaty, questioning eye from under his tin hat.

“There’s no jobs right now,” he said.

“I just want to see the timekeeper or somebody in personnel.”

His eyes moved over my face; then he pointed at a door.

“Over there. There’s some glass doors at the end of the hall,” he said.

The hallway was dark and hot, and it smelled much worse than the outside of the mill. Someone had painted the walls green at one time, but the paint was blistered and peeling in flakes on the baseboards. Behind the glass doors I could see an air-conditioning unit with streamers blowing off the vents, a big-breasted secretary who sat in her chair as though she had an arrow in her back, and three men in business suits behind their glass-topped desks, each of them concerned with typed papers that brought on knitted brows, a sweep of the hand to the telephone, a quick concentration on some piece of thunder hidden in a figure.

The secretary wanted to know who it was exactly that I would like to see or if I could explain exactly what I wanted.

“It’s about an accident, actually,” I said. “I haven’t talked with a lawyer yet. I thought I’d come down here and see what y’all could tell me.”

Her eyelashes blinked, and she looked sideways briefly at the man behind the next desk. There was a pause, and then the man glanced up from his papers and nodded to her.

“Mr. Overstreet can talk with you. Just have a seat,” she said. (All of this in a room where each of us was within five feet of the other.)

I sat in the chair in front of Mr. Overstreet’s desk for possibly two minutes before he decided that I was there. He looked like a working man who had gotten off the green chain years ago, worked his way up to yard foreman, and finally slipped through a side door into a necktie and a place in front of an air-conditioning unit. There were still freckles on the backs of his hands, and thin pinch scars on his fingers that come from working with boomer chains, and he had the rigidity and habitual frown of a man who was afraid of his own position every day. He pushed the papers to the side of the glass desktop, then looked up flatly into my eyes.

“Sunday night my pickup was knocked off the road by one of your trucks down by Florence,” I said. “There were three men in it, and they burned my pickup and musical instruments and left me and another guy a hospital bill to pay. I’m not after your company. I just want those three guys.”

He stared at me, and then his eyes flicked angrily at the secretary. He rubbed the back of one hand into his palm.

“What are you saying?”

“There’s a truck out in your lot that probably has red paint all over the front bumper. Also, you must know who drives a company truck out of here at night.”

The other two men behind the desks had stopped work and were looking blankly at us. I could hear the secretary squeak the rollers of her chair across the rug.

“That doesn’t have anything to do with the mill,” he said. “You take that up with the sheriff’s department in Ravalli County.”

“It was your truck. That makes you liable. If you protect them, that makes you criminally liable.”

“You watch what you say, fella.”

“All you’ve got to tell me is you’ll come up with the men in that truck.”

“Who the hell you think you are talking to me about criminal charges?”

“I’m not asking you for anything that’s unreasonable.”

“Yeah? I think you stopped using your reason when you walked in here. So now you turn around and walk back out.”

“Why don’t you flick on your brain a minute? Do you want guys like this beating up people out of one of your trucks?”

“You don’t understand me. You’re leaving here. Now.”

“You ass.”

“That’s it.” He picked up the telephone and dialed an inner office number. His free hand was spread tightly on the glass desktop while he waited for an answer.

“All right, bubba,” I said. “Go back to your papers.”

But he wasn’t listening. “Send Lloyd and Jack down here,” he said.

I walked out the office and down the dark hallway; then the outer door opened in a flash of sunlight and two big men in tin hats moved toward me in silhouette. One of them had a cigar pushed back like a stick in his jaw, and he wiped tobacco juice off his mouth with a flat thumb and looked hard at me.

“Better get in that office,” I said. “Some crazy man is in there raising hell.”

They went past me, walking fast, their brows wrinkled intently. I was across the parking lot when I heard the door open again behind me. The man with the cigar leaned out, his tin hat bright in the sun, and shouted: “You keep going. Don’t ever come around here again.”

I drove back to Missoula and stopped at the tavern where I had called Ace earlier. I started drinking beer. Then from among the many wet rings on the bar I lifted up a boilermaker, and I guess it was then that an odd tumbler clicked over in my brain and it started.

In the darkness of the tavern, with the soft glow of the mountain twilight through the blinds, I began to think about my boyhood South and the song I never finished in Angola. I had all the music in my mind and the runs that bled into each chord, but the lyrics were always wooden, and I couldn’t get all of the collective memory into a sliding blues. I called it “The Lost Get-Back Boogie,” and I wanted it to contain all those private, inviolate things that a young boy saw and knew about while growing up in southern Louisiana in a more uncomplicated time: the bottle trees (during the depression people used to stick empty milk of magnesia bottles on the winter branches of a hackberry until the whole tree rang with blue glass), the late evening sun boiling into the green horizon of the Gulf, the dinners of crawfish and bluepoint crabs under the cypress trees on Bayou Teche, and freight cars slamming together in the Southern Pacific yard, and through the mist the distant locomotive whistle that spoke of journeys across the wetlands to cities like New Orleans and Mobile.

There was much more to it, like the Negro juke joint by the sugar mill and Loup-garous Row, the string of shacks by the rail yard where the whores sat on the wooden porches on Saturday afternoons and dipped their beer out of a bucket. But maybe that was why I didn’t finish it. There was too much of it for one song or maybe even for a book.

I kept looking at the clock above the neon GRAIN BELT sign, and I was sure that I had my thumb right on the pulse of the day, but each time I focused again on the hour hand, I realized that some terrible obstruction had prevented me from seeing that another thirty or forty minutes or hour and a half had passed. When I walked to the restroom, my cast scratched along the wall with my weight, and when I came back out, the tables, the row of stools, and the people all seemed rearranged in place.

“You want another one, buddy?” the bartender said.

“Yeah. This time give me a draft and a double Beam on the side.”

He brought the schooner dripping with foam and ice and set a shot jigger beside it.

“You want to throw for the washline?” he said.

“What do I do?”

He picked up the leather cup of poker dice and set it down in front of me with his palm over the top.

“You roll me double or nothing for the drinks. If you roll five of a kind, you get everything up there on the line.”

There was a long string of wire above the bar with one-dollar bills clipped to it with clothespins.

“What are my chances?” I said.

“Outside of the drinks, bad.”

“All right.” The whiskey was hot in my face, and I could feel the perspiration start to run out of my hair. There was a dead hum in my head, and behind me I heard Kitty Wells’s nasal falsetto from the jukebox: “It wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels.”

I rattled the dice once in the leather cup with my hand tight over the top and threw them along the bar.

“I’ll be damned,” the bartender said.

I had to look again myself, in the red glow of the neon beer sign, at the five aces glinting up from the mahogany bar top.

The bartender pulled twenty one-dollar bills from the clothespins and put them in front of me, then took away my beer glass and jigger and brought them back filled. He chewed on the flattened end of a match and shook his head as though some type of mathematical principle in the universe had just been proved untrue.

“You ought to shoot craps at one of them joints over in Idaho, buddy,” he said.

“I’ve shot lots of craps. They keep you off night patrol.”

He looked at me with a flat pause in his face, the matchstick motionless in a gap between his teeth.

“You can throw the bones for high point right down at the end of the blanket and the other guy has got to go up through their wire. Him and fifteen others.” Then I knew that I was drunk, because the words had already freed themselves from behind all those locks and hasps and welded doors that you keep sealed in the back of your mind.

“Well, I guess you got good luck, buddy,” he said, and wiped the rag over the bar in front of me before he walked down to a cowboy who had just come in.

I drank the whiskey neat and chased it with the beer, then smoked a cigarette and called him back again.

“Give me a pint of Beam’s Choice and a six-pack. While you’re getting it, give me a ditch.”

“Mister, I ain’t telling you nothing, but you ain’t going to be able to drive.”

Outside, the stars were bright above the dark ring of mountains around Missoula, and the plume of smoke from the pulp mill floated high above the Clark Fork in the moonlight. My broken arm itched as though ants were crawling in the sweat inside my cast. I fell heavily behind the steering wheel of Buddy’s Plymouth, and for just a second I saw my guitars snapping apart in the truck fire and heard that level, hot voice: Give that son of a bitch his buckwheats.

As I drove back down the blacktop toward Lolo, with the bright lights of semis flashing over me and the air brakes hissing when I swerved across the center line, I remembered again the bully putting spittle in my ear, reenacted in my mind being thrown out of a pulp mill that manufactured toilet paper, and studied hard upon the sale of my inheritance to the cement-truck and shopping-center interests.

Bugs swam around the light on the front porch of Buddy’s cabin and his fly rod was leaned against the screen door, but he must have been up at his father’s house. I walked unsteadily to the back room, where he kept the ’03 Springfield rifle with the Mauser action on two deer-antler racks. I put the sling over my shoulder and filled the big flap pockets of my army jacket with shells from a box on the floor. Even as drunk as I was, even as I caught my balance against the doorjamb, I knew that it was insane, that every self-protective instinct and light in my head was blinking red, but I was already in motion in the same way I had been my first day out of prison when I covered the license plate of the pickup with mud and went banging down the road drunk into a possible parole violation.

I put the rifle on the back floor with my field jacket over it and drove back toward the cattle guard. The wind off the river bent the grass in the pasture under the moon, and the cows were bunched in a dark shadow by the cottonwoods. I saw a flashlight bobbing across the field toward me and heard Buddy’s voice call out in the dark. I stopped and let the engine idle while the sweat rolled down my face and my own whiskey breath came back sharp in my throat. He jumped across the irrigation ditch on one foot, and one of his younger brothers jumped in a rattle of cattails behind him.

“Where are you going, man?”

An answer wouldn’t come, and I just flicked an index finger off the steering wheel toward the road.

“What have you been drinking?” he said.

“Made a stop down the highway.”

“You really look boiled, Zeno. Turn it around and go fishing with us. We’re going to try some worms in a hole on the river.”

I got a cigarette out of my shirt pocket and pushed it in my mouth. It seemed that minutes passed before I completed the motion.

“I got lucky at craps today. There’s a lady in a beer joint that wants to help me drink my money.”

“Where?”

“Eddie’s, or one of those places of yours.”

“I’ll go with you,” he said, and clicked off the flashlight. “Joe, go down to the river with the old man, and I’ll try to meet you later.”

“That’s no good, Buddy. She’s a one-guy chick, and I’m the guy that faded all the bread this afternoon.”

“I don’t give a shit about the car,” he said, “but you’re going to get your ass in jail tonight.”

“Never had a ticket, babe.”

“That’s because those coonass cops don’t know how to write. Move it over and let’s go down and investigate it together.”

“You want the car back?”

“No, I want to keep you from going back on P. V.”

“I got to catch air. If you want the car, I’ll thumb.”

He stepped back from the door and bowed like a butler, sweeping his arm out into the darkness.

“It’s your caper, Zeno,” he said. “I ain’t got money for bond, so you take this fall on your own.”

I thumped across the cattle guard, and in the rearview mirror I saw Buddy and his brother swing the gate closed and pull the loop wire over the fence post.

The drive back to the pulp mill was a long blacktop stretch of angry headlights, horns blowing in a diminishing echo behind me, gravel showering up under the fender when I hit the shoulder, and a highway-patrol car that kept evenly behind me for two miles and then turned off indifferently into a truck stop. I opened a can of beer and set it beside me on the seat and sipped off the bottle of Beam’s Choice. I picked up a radio station in Salt Lake that was advertising tulip bulbs and baby chicks sent directly to your house, C.O.D., in one order, and the announcer’s voice rose to the fervor of a southern evangelist’s when he said: “And remember, friends and neighbors, just write ‘Bulb.’ B-U-L-B. That’s ‘Bulb.’ ”

There was a wooden bridge over the Clark Fork just below the pulp mill, and then a climbing log road against the mountain that overlooked the river, the sour, mud-banked ponds where they kept their chemicals before they seeped out into the current, and the lighted parking lot full of washed and waxed yellow trucks. The Plymouth slammed against the springs and dug rocks out of the road with the oil pan as I pushed it in second gear up the grade, and the dense overhang from the trees slapped across the windshield and top like dry scratches on a blackboard. When I reached the top of the grade and drove along the smooth yellow strip of road among the pines, the heat indicator was quivering past the red mark on the dash, and I could hear the steam hissing under the radiator cap. I pulled the car into a turnaround at the base of a curve on the mountain and slipped the sling of the Springfield over my shoulder and picked up the field jacket with my good hand.

I walked down through the timber, with the brown pine needles thick under my feet, and found a clear place where I could lean back against a pine trunk and cover the whole parking lot with the iron sights. There were white lights strung up the sides of both smokestacks, against the dark blue of the far mountain, and the parking lot ached with a brilliant electric glow off the asphalt.

I opened the breech of the Springfield and laid it across my lap, then counted out the shells on a handkerchief and cut a deep X with my pocketknife across each soft-nose. I pushed the shells into the magazine with my thumb until the spring came tight, then slid the bolt home and locked it down. I readjusted the sling and worked it past the cast so I could fire comfortably from a sitting position and aim across my knee without canting the sights.

The first round broke through a front windshield and spider-webbed the glass with cracks, and I drove two more shots through the top of the cab. The bullets against the metal sounded like a distant metallic slap. I couldn’t see the damage inside, but I figured that the flattened and splintered lead would tear holes like baseballs in the dashboard. I shifted my knee and swung the iron sights on the next truck and let off three rounds in a row without taking my cheek from the stock. The first bullet scoured across the hood and ripped the metal like an ax had hit it, and I tore the grill and radiator into a wet grin with the other two.

I suppose that in some drunken compartment of my mind I had only planned to pay back in kind, on an equal basis, what had been done to me, but now I couldn’t stop firing. My ears rang with a heady exhilaration with each shot, the empty casings leaped from the thrown bolt and smoked in the pine needles, and then there was that whaaappp of the bullet flattening out into another truck. I took a long drink from the pint of Beam’s Choice, then reloaded and fired the whole clip all over the parking lot without aiming. I was now concentrated on how fast I could let off a round, recover from the recoil and throw the bolt, then lock another shell in the chamber and squeeze again.

On the last clip I must have bit into something electrical on an engine, either the battery or the ignition wiring, because the sparks leaped in a shower from under the hood. Then I could see the yellow-and-blue flame wavering under the oil pan and the paint starting to blister and pop in front of the windshield.

I slipped the sling off my shoulder and began to pick up the shell casings with one hand while I watched it. The casings were hot in my hand, and I put them clinking into the flap pocket of my field jacket. The fire sucked up through the truck cab, then caught the leather seat over the gas tank in earnest, and then it blew. The flame leaped upward into one cracking red handkerchief against the dark, and the truck body collapsed on the frame and the tires roared with circles of light.

I drank again from the bottle and watched it with fascination. The heat had already cracked the glass on the next truck, and the fire was whipping inside the cab. The red light reflected off the river at the foot of the hill, and the dark trunks of the pines were filled with shadows. Out on the highway beyond the mill, I saw the blue bubble gum light of a police car turning furiously in the darkness. I put the bottle in my pocket and felt around for any shells that I hadn’t picked up, then shoved my hand under the pine needles and swept it across a half circle on my right side. The whiskey was throbbing behind my eyes, and I lost my balance when I tried to get to my feet with the sling across my chest.

For the first time that night I became genuinely aware that I was in trouble. My mind couldn’t function, I didn’t know anything about the back roads, and I stood a good chance of being picked up on the highway for drunk driving. My heart was beating with the exertion of climbing to the top of the rise with the Springfield slung on my shoulder, and sweat ran in rivulets out of my hair into my eyes. I sat behind the wheel of the Plymouth and tried to think. I could take the log road over the mountain and possibly drive off the edge of a wash into five hundred feet of canyon (provided that the road went anywhere) or return across the log bridge into a good chance of a jolt in Deer Lodge plus an automatic violation back to Angola. I started the engine but kept the lights off and let the car roll down the road in neutral, braking heavily all the way down the grade. The pines began to thin toward the bottom of the hill, and then I saw the brown sweep of the river with the thick eddies of sawdust along the banks. The bridge stood out flat and hard in the reflection of lights from the mill, and there was a police car parked at the other side with the airplane headlights turned on and the bubble gum machine swinging on the roof.

I cut on my lights and eased the Plymouth into second as I came off the incline; then I remembered the Springfield propped like an iron salute against the passenger’s door. It was too late to dump it or even throw it over into the backseat. The sheriff’s deputy was already by the wooden bridge rail, winking his flashlight at me.

Oh boy. And you rolled right into it, babe.

I slowed the car and looked over at the bright flame in the parking lot and the two men who were spraying it with fire extinguishers in silhouette. Then the deputy began to sweep his flashlight impatiently, and it took a second, like a beat out of my heart, to realize that he was waving me past. I rattled across the board planks, and the headlights suddenly illuminated his brown uniform, the wide gun belt and cartridges, and the Stetson pushed low over his eyes. I nodded at him and slowly depressed the accelerator.

I hit the highway and opened up the Plymouth with the rods knocking, the frame shaking, and the moon rising over the mountain like a song. I opened the wind vane into my face and felt the sweat turn cold and dry in my hair, and then I drank the last of the whiskey in a long swallow and sailed the bottle over the roof. I had walked right out of it with the kind of con luck that drops on your head when you’re sure that this time they’re going to weld the cell door shut.

I bought a six-pack of Great Falls to drink on the way back to the ranch, and I felt a light-headed, heart-beating sense of victory and omniscience that I had known only in the infantry after moving all the way to the top of a Chinese hill without being hit. The fact that I weaved across the white center line or ran through an intersection at seventy seemed unimportant; I was flying with magic all over me, and the alcohol and adrenaline worked in my heart with a mean new energy.

The next morning I felt the sun hot and white in my eyes through the window. There was an overturned can of beer by the bed, and my shirt was half off and tangled around my cast. I walked into the back room where Buddy was sleeping and saw the Springfield back on the rack, though I had no memory of having put it there. I could still taste the mixture of beer, whiskey, and cigarettes in my mouth, and I worked the pump on the sink and cupped the water up in my hand. When the coldness hit my stomach, I thought I was going to be sick. My hands were shaking, the blood veins in my head had started to draw tight with hangover, and my eyes ached when I looked through the window into the bright light and the dew shimmering on the hay bales.

I tried to light the kindling in the wood stove to make coffee, but the paper matches flared against my thumbnail, and as I stared at the split chunks of white wood, the whole task suddenly seemed enormous. I took a beer out of the icebox and sat on the edge of the bed while I drank it. The sickening taste of the whiskey began to dissipate, and I felt the quivering wire in the middle of my breast start to dull and quieten. I finished the beer and had another, and by the bottom of the second can that handkerchief of flame in the parking lot became removed enough to think about. Then I saw Buddy leaning against the doorjamb, naked to the waist, his blue jeans low on his flat stomach, grinning at me.

“Are you getting in or getting up, Zeno? Either way, you look like shit,” he said.

“What’s up?” I said. My voice sounded strange, distant and apart from me, a piece of color in the ears.

“Did you get bred last night?”

“Get me a can out of the icebox.”

“Man, I can hear those hyenas beating on their cages in your head.”

“Just get the goddamn beer, Buddy.”

“My car ain’t in the pound, is it?”

I hadn’t thought yet about the car or what condition it might be in. My last memory of the Plymouth was winding it up out of Lolo after some drunk discussion in a bar about steelhead fishing over in Idaho. Then I remembered the tack-hammer rattle out of the crankcase that meant a burnt bearing and maybe a flattened crankshaft.

I heard Buddy click off the cap from a bottle of beer and the foam drip flatly on the floor. He pushed the bottle inside my hand.

“What did you get into last night?” he said.

He struck a match on the stove. Then I smelled the flame touch the reefer.

“It’s a real bag of shit, man.”

He pulled a chair out from the table and sat down, his eyes focused and serious over the joint in his mouth.

“Like what?”

“I really went over the edge and hung one out.”

“What did you do?”

“I took your Springfield and shot the hell out of the parking lot in that pulp mill.”

“Oh man.”

I couldn’t look at him. I felt miserable, and the absurdity of what I had done ached inside my hangover like an unacceptable dream.

“How bad?”

“I left about three trucks burning and probably blew the engine blocks out of a half-dozen others.”

“Wow. You don’t fool around, do you?”

It was silent for a moment, and I heard him take a long inhale on the reefer and let it out of his lungs slowly.

“Iry, what’s in your head? They’re going to pour your ass in Deer Lodge.”

“I got out of it. There was a dick at the log bridge, but he must have thought the damage was done inside the lot.”

“Forget that. You were in the sheriff’s office yesterday, and maybe these cowboys ain’t too bright, but they’re going to put the dice together and waltz you right into the bag. And believe me, buddy, they hand out time here to outsiders like there’s no calendar.”

He set the reefer on the edge of the table and walked back to the bedroom.

“What are you doing?” I said.

He unlocked the bolt of the Springfield, and an unfired cartridge sprang from the magazine.

“Really cool, man. What do you think I’m going to do?”

He walked out the screen door, and then I heard a shovel crunching in the earth behind the cabin. I wanted to argue with him about his rifle, but I knew he was right. I wet a towel under the pump and held it to my face and neck. I couldn’t stop sweating. Buddy dropped the shovel on the porch and came back through the door with grains of dirt in the perspiration on his arms. He was grinning again, with that crazy light in his eyes that used to get him into isolation at Angola.

“You’re sure a dumb son of a bitch,” he said.

“That’s the smartest thing you’ve said since I got out here.”

“But we’re in a real hardball game now, partner.”

Fifteen minutes later we heard a car rumble over the cattle guard. Buddy looked through the window, then back at me.

“That’s your taxi, Zeno,” he said. “Don’t say anything. Little Orphan Annie with empty circles for eyes. You were juicing in the saloon at Lolo, and you were too drunk even to drive into Missoula.”

“Get rid of the roach.”

He went to the sink and peeled the reefer, then pumped water over it.

“This is a crock, ain’t it?” he said.

“Give me all the cigarettes you have.”

“Look at that pair of geeks. They love making a bust on the old man’s place.”

He handed me two packs of Lucky Strikes and a paper book of matches.

“I ain’t got the bread for a bondsman, so you’re going to have to sit it out, Zeno,” he said.

“I should have a check by tomorrow or the next day. Bring it down to the jail and I’ll endorse it.”

The deputy didn’t knock. He opened the screen door and pointed one thick finger at me.

“All right, Paret. Move it up against the car,” he said.

He held the screen open while I walked past him to the automobile. The other deputy leaned against the fender with his palm resting on the butt of his.357. Both of them were over six feet, and their wide shoulders were stiff and angular against their starched shirts.

“Lean on it,” the first deputy said.

I spread my legs and propped my hands against the roof of the automobile while his hands moved inside my thighs, then dug inside my pockets and turned them inside out. He pulled my arms behind me and snipped on the handcuffs, and the other deputy held open the door into the wire-mesh segregated backseat.

“Are you going to give us any trouble on the way back, or do you want me to sit with you?” the first deputy said.

I didn’t answer, and he locked both back doors from the outside. As the car rolled along the rutted lane, I leaned back against the handcuffs and felt the metal bite into the skin. I tried to raise myself forward to keep the pressure off my wrists, but each chuckhole in the road sent me back into the seat and another dig into my skin. The mountains had taken on a deeper blue and green from the rains, and the boulders in the creeks under the bridges were wet and shining and steaming in the sunlight at the same time. But at that moment, in my comical effort to sit rigid in the back of a sheriff’s car, I remembered a Negro kid at Angola who was handcuffed and taken down to the hole and beaten with a garden hose for stealing a peanut-butter sandwich. He spit on a hack, and so they sweated him five more days and took away his good time.

At that time, what bothered me was meeting him out on the yard after he got out of lockdown. There were still blue gashes on the insides of his lips, and while he smoked a cigarette, he told me he didn’t mind pulling the extra three years because he knew that eventually he would fall again anyway.