The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Seven

The holding cell was dull yellow with a crisscrossed door of flat iron strips that were coated with thick white paint. Names had been burned on the walls and ceiling with cigarette lighters, and there was a small, round drain in the center of the floor to urinate in. I sat on the concrete against the wall and smoked cigarettes and listened in my preoccupation with my own troubles to all the jailhouse complaints, stories of bum arrests, wives who should have had their teeth kicked in, and advice about how to deal with each screw on the day and night shifts. The area around the drain was covered with wet cigarette butts and reeked with a stench that made your eyes water when you had to stand over it. Two Flathead Indians were still drunk and waiting for the reservation police to pick them up; a check-writer who was already wanted in Idaho kept calling the sergeant back to the cell to ask about his wife, who was in the lock upstairs; a deranged old man, whose toothless gums were purple with snuff, sat by the drain, hawking and spitting through his knees; and then the one dangerous man, a twenty-five-year-old tar roofer, with square, callused hands that had no fingernails and were dark with cinders, leaned against the wall on a flexed arm, waiting for his wife to bring the bondsman down to the jail.

He asked me for a cigarette; then he wanted to know if I had ever pulled time. He paused a minute, lighting the cigarette with his thick, dark fingers, then asked what for.

After I told him, his muddy eyes looked at me for a moment, then stared off into the smoke. He sat down beside me and pulled his knees up before him. His white athletic socks were grimed with dirt. I said nothing to him, made no inquiry about his crime, and I could feel the sense of insult start to rise in him.

“What they got you for, podna?” I said.

“This guy give me some shit at Stockman’s last night. Like he was going to whip my ass with a pool cue. I put him once through the bathroom door. Then he learned what real shit smells like. And he ain’t going to press no charges, either, believe me.”

An hour later his wife, a vacuous and pathetic-looking blond girl in a waitress’s uniform, was at the jail with the bondsman. As I watched them through the grated door, holding hands in front of the property desk, I could see the humiliation in her face and the fear of another night and all the others to follow. They would pay out their lives in installments to bondsmen, guilty courts, finance companies, and collection agencies.

At seven that evening a deputy sheriff stood in front of the door with a pair of handcuffs hung over his index finger and waited for the sergeant to turn the lock.

“Get rid of the cigarette and put them behind you,” he said.

I flicked the butt toward the drain and waited for him to snip the cuffs around my wrists. He ran his hands under my armpits and down both sides of my trousers, then caught me under the arm with his hand. The cell door clanged behind us, and we walked down a corridor with spittoons on the floor toward the back of the building. Our shoes sucked against the damp mopping on the wooden floor, and a frosted yellow square of light shone from an office by the exit sign.

“Before we go in, tell me what the hell you thought you were going to get out of it,” he said.

“What?”

“Your parole officer said you were straight and probably wouldn’t do time again. You must have had some real ingrown hairs in your asshole, buddy.”

Inside the office the deputy took off the cuffs, and I sat down in a wood chair in front of the sheriff’s desk. The room was poorly lighted and smelled of cigars, and the desk lamp shone upward into the red corpulence of the sheriff’s round face. There was a tangle of gray hair above the V of his shirt, and the roll of fat on his stomach hung heavily on his gun belt. The red stone on his Mason’s ring glinted when he moved the wet stub of his cigar in the ashtray.

“It looks like you can’t stay out of a sheriff’s office,” he said. “Yesterday you tried to file a complaint down in Ravalli County, and today I get to meet you after you did some target practice at the mill.”

I looked him back in the eyes, but because of the lamp’s glare, I couldn’t tell yet how hard he was ready to turn it on. He took a sandwich out of his drawer and unfolded the wax paper.

“Go down to the cooler for me, John,” he said.

While the deputy was gone, he ate the sandwich and didn’t speak, and I thought, Watch out for this one. The deputy returned with a beaded can of beer and set it on the blotter. The sheriff sucked out half of it with one quick upward turn of the hand, the sandwich bread thick and white in his mouth.

“Now,” he said, “this shouldn’t take either one of us long. You know all the rules, so we don’t have to explain a lot of things. We’ll take a statement from you, you can look over it and add or change anything, and I’ll get you into court within a week and then off to Deer Lodge.”

“I don’t even know what you’re charging me with, Sheriff.”

“Son, you weren’t listening too good. I don’t have time for a game. I can charge you with any one or all of a half-dozen things. I guess about the worst one down on your sheet might be arson.”

“I don’t know what we’re talking about.” Our eyes locked together and held until he picked up his cigar.

“I see,” he said, and turned his swivel chair partly into the shadow, obscuring his face. “Well, tell us what you were up to last night.”

“I was boozing in a couple of beer joints in Lolo and another place just south of Missoula.”

“Did you meet any interesting people who might remember you?”

“Ask them. I don’t remember. I was drunk.”

“Maybe you had a little trouble with a cowboy or knocked over some chairs.”

“Don’t recall a thing.”

He turned his big, oval face abruptly back into the light.

“You’re lying, son. Yesterday you were out at the mill raising hell about your pickup and your guitars, and last night you had Buddy Riordan’s Plymouth up on that mountain, and you drilled holes in those trucks like an infantry marksman. Some of my men ain’t the brightest in the world, or you wouldn’t have gotten back across that bridge. But the deputy made you, and that’s going to get you at least a two-spot. Now, if you want to piss around with us, we’ll see how much time we can add on to it.”

My con’s antennae quivered for the first time with a sense of hope. His eyes stared confidently into mine, but he had come on too strong and too soon. Also, I hadn’t been booked yet, and I realized that I might still have another season to run.

“I was at the mill yesterday afternoon, and I was driving Buddy’s car last night, but I don’t know a thing about your deputy or a bridge.”

“Why don’t you use your head a minute? You’re still a young man. You can be out with good time in nine months, and maybe Louisiana will waive on you if you get a strong recommendation from here.”

“Number one, I’m not going to take the fall for some local crap with that toilet-paper factory. Number two, you know the parole authority doesn’t work that way, Sheriff. They’ll send me straight back to the joint.”

He looked at me steadily and held the flattened wet end of his cigar to his mouth. Then his gaze broke, and he finished the rest of his beer.

“I don’t know what to tell you, then, son. It looks like you have things pretty well figured out for yourself.”

Without thinking, I put my fingers in my shirt pocket for a cigarette. The deputy behind me put his hand on my arm.

“That’s all right, John,” the sheriff said. “Tell me, what’s your connection with Frank Riordan?”

“I did time with his boy.”

“That’s right. Buddy was in the Louisiana pen, wasn’t he?” He lit his cigar again, and the red stone on his ring glowed with fire. “Tell me another thing, since you got it all tucked in your watch pocket. How far away from this jail do you think your life’s going to be?”

I kept my face expressionless and looked at his massive weight leaning into the desk.

“I mean, do you believe you’re just going to walk out of it? That you can come into this county as a parolee and destroy fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of machinery and go back to your guitar?”

“You don’t have anything, Sheriff.”

“Before you go back to the tank, let me give you something to roll around. How do you think you got five the first time? And believe me, son, you’re just about to become a two-time loser.”

The deputy walked me in the handcuffs back to the front of the building, then pointed me toward a spiral metal stairs.

“My coat’s in the holding cell,” I said.

“You’ll get it later.”

“Do I get booked?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

He locked me in a four-man cell upstairs with a wire-mesh and barred window that looked out on a brick alley. I could hear heat thunder and dry lightning out in the mountains, and momentarily the alley walls would flicker with a white light. There was a rolled tick mattress and a blanket on one empty iron bunk, and I sat down and rested the weight of my cast on my thigh and began to take off my shoes with one hand. Then a large black head, glistening like shoe polish in the gloom, leaned over the bunk above me, and before I could even look into the wine-red eyes, the odor of muscatel and snuff and jailhouse funk washed over me.

“Hey, blood,” the man said, “do you got a cigarette for a brother? I been up here a whole day with this white whale that’s got money stuck up his ass but won’t give the screw two bits for some cigarettes.”

I handed up the pack, but the Negro dropped off the bunk with one arm, and then I saw the black, puckered stump on his other shoulder. He picked a cigarette out with his fingernails and pulled down his white boxer undershorts and squatted on the seatless toilet. I unrolled the mattress and lay down with my head pointed toward the door and the draft of the corridor, then looked across the cell at the white whale. He lay on his back with his trousers and shoes on, and his stomach rose up like a mountain under his dirty white shirt. The fat in his cheeks hung back against his bones, and his eyes stared like burnt glass into the bottom of the bunk overhead.

I heard the Negro cracking wind into the toilet, and I turned on my stomach and lit a cigarette.

“Now catch this,” the Negro said. “They grabbed this cat on a morals charge. Eleven-year-old boy in a hotel room. The screw says all he’s got to do is pick up the phone and he’s out. But he just lays there and says ‘Jesus, forgive me.’ ”

“You shut up,” the white man said quietly.

“He says that, too,” the Negro said. “Every time I tell him to loosen up with some change. You ain’t crazy, too, are you, brother?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. Then I wondered, Good Lord, am I?

“He won’t eat his food, and now they don’t even bring him none.”

The cell was hot from the heat rising in the building, but I folded the blanket over my head and tried to close the sickening odors, the Negro, and the sad man out of my consciousness. The thunder echoed across the mountains like rows of distant cannon, and as I lay with my forehead damp against my wrist and the mothball smell of the blanket enveloping me, I slipped away through the concrete floor and the resonating clang of iron through jail corridors, melting with the softness of a morphine dream into yesterday when I could still turn the dial a degree in either direction and reshape the day into sunlight on trout streams, blue shadows on the pines in the canyons, or just a glass of iced tea on a lazy porch.

I awoke sometime in the middle of the night to the rain falling on the windowsill. The drops sprayed inside on the concrete floor, and I could smell the cool wetness blowing through the air shaft. I felt a sick ache in my heart, and I lay on my back and smoked, waiting for it to pass, but it wouldn’t. In the darkness I felt the beginnings of a new awareness about myself, one that I had always denied before. When I was in Angola, I never thought of myself as a real con, a professional loser who would always be up before some kind of authority. I was just a juke-joint country musician who had acted by chance or accident in a beer and marijuana fog without thinking. But I realized now that I killed that man because I wanted to. I had shot people in Korea, and when I put my hand in my pocket for the knife, I knew exactly what I was doing.

Now I had run right back to jail, just like every recidivist who is always sure he will stay on the street but works full time at falling again. And maybe you got your whole ticket punched this time, I thought. Yes, maybe this is the whole shot, and you never saw it during those two years you waited for that cosmic mistake in time and place to correct itself.

“Put the board up in the window, blood,” the Negro said.

I got off the bunk and picked up the piece of shaped plywood that fitted into the frame against the bars. The mist blew into my face, and I looked at the glistening brick of the alley wall and heard a train whistle blow in the distance.

“Come on, man. I feel like somebody pissed on my mattress,” the Negro said.

In the morning an Indian trusty and a deputy opened the cell and handed us two tin plates of cold scrambled eggs and bread and black coffee in paper cups.

“Is he going to eat today?” the Indian said.

The Negro touched the white whale on the knee. He lay in the bunk with his face toward the wall, and the black hair on his buttocks showed above his trousers.

“Better eat now. The man don’t bring it back again till two o’clock,” the Negro said.

The whale didn’t answer, and the Negro held his palm up in a gesture of failure in trying to reason with a lunatic.

“If you want any candy or cigarettes from the machine, give me the money and I’ll bring it back to you this afternoon,” the Indian said.

I reached in my pocket and felt a wadded dollar bill with a quarter inside.

“Forget about him,” the deputy said, and locked the cell door.

“Hey, man, what these cats got down on you?” the Negro said.

“I don’t know. I haven’t been booked yet.”

“I mean, you got in the man’s face last night or something?”

“I didn’t read it like that. Maybe I did.”

“Let me have a smoke.”

There were two cigarettes left, and I gave him one and lit the other. He sat on the floor in his white undershorts, his knees splayed, and ate the eggs with one hand and held the cigarette in the back of his knuckles. His skin was absolutely black.

“I got a hundred and eighty to do,” he said. “But I don’t do nothing except wash cars. The judge says he’d send me to the joint, but you can’t cowboy with one arm.”

He laughed, and the dried eggs fell from his bad teeth back into the plate. “I’ll tell you why they ain’t put me in Deer Lodge, brother. Because they won’t take no niggers up there. That’s right. There ain’t a colored man in that whole joint.”

I sat on my bunk and drank the coffee from the paper cup. It tasted like iodine.

“You a paperhanger?” he said.

“No.”

“I ax you this because, you see, this is my living place, and they bring in this white whale that moans at night and makes gas every fifteen minutes. I don’t like jailing with no queer, either.”

“His family will come for him eventually,” I said.

“Which means me and you, brother.”

“OK, let me give it to you. Five in Louisiana for manslaughter. Maybe another jolt here for shooting up some people who leaned on me.”

He pressed the scrambled eggs into the spoon with his thumb and dropped them into his mouth, then took a puff off his cigarette and laughed again.

“What they putting you badasses in with me for?”

“I think the man wants to talk with me,” I said.

I heard the deputy’s keys and leather soles in the corridor.

“They ain’t bad guys,” the Negro said. “Most of them work another job in town. Just don’t stick your finger in the wrong place.”

The deputy who had brought breakfast with the Indian trusty turned the key and opened the cell door.

“Let’s get it, Paret,” he said.

He didn’t have the handcuffs out, nor did he catch me under the arm, which I waited automatically for him to do.

“Down the stairs,” he said.

“What’s going on?”

“Just walk.”

We went down the spiral metal staircase to the first floor, and I had to squint at the sudden light off the yellow walls. I looked over at the door to the booking room, the box camera on its tripod, and the ink pad, rollers, and cleansing cream on the counter.

“Sign for your stuff at the property desk,” he said.

I turned and stared at him, but his attention was already locked on the holding cell, where a man in a suit was shaking the door against the jamb.

I walked to the property desk and gave my name. A woman in a brown uniform smiled pleasantly at me, pulled a manila envelope from a pigeonhole and placed it, my folded coat with one wet sleeve, and a release card in front of me. I slipped on my watch, put my billfold in my pocket, and in a signature I was back on the street, in the sunlight, into a cool morning with a hard blue sky and the brilliant whip of Indian summer in the air.

I didn’t have enough money to ride the bus back to the ranch, and I didn’t feel like hitchhiking, so I walked toward the Garden District by the university, where Buddy’s wife lived. It didn’t seem an unreasonable thing to do, and I didn’t allow myself to think deeply on it, anyway. The air was so clear and bright from the rains and the touch of fall that I could see college kids hiking high up on the brown mountain behind the university and the line of green trees that began on the top slope. I crossed the bridge over the Clark and looked down at the deep pools where large rainbow hung behind the boulders, waiting for food to float downstream. The sidewalks in the Garden District were shaded by maple and elm trees, and overnight the leaves had started to turn red and gold.

Buddy’s boys were playing catch in the front yard, burning each other out with the baseball. I started to walk up on the porch, and then I felt a sense of guilt and awkwardness at being there. I paused on the walk and felt even more stupid as the two boys looked at me.

“Did your old man ever show you how to throw an in-shoot?” I said. “It’s the meanest pitch in baseball. It leaves them looking every time.”

I wet two of my fingers, held the ball over the stitches, and whipped it out sidearm at the older boy’s claw mitt. He leaped upward at it, but it sailed away into the trees.

“I’ve been having trouble with my arm since I threw against Marty Marion,” I said.

“That’s all right. I’ll get it,” the boy said, and raced across the lawn through the leaves.

You’re really great with kids, Paret, I thought. I heard the screen door squeak on the spring.

“Come in,” Beth said. She wore white shorts and a denim shirt, and she had a blue bandana tied around her black hair.

“I was trying to get back to the ranch, and I thought Buddy might be around,” I said.

“I haven’t seen him, but Mel ought to be by later. Come on in the kitchen.”

I followed her through the house, which was darkened and furnished with old stuffed chairs and a broken couch and mismatched things that were bought at intervals in a secondhand store. She pulled a pair of dripping blue jeans from the soapy water in the sink and then rubbed the knees against one another. Her thighs and stomach were tight against her white shorts, and when she leaned over the sink, her breasts hung heavily against her denim shirt.

“What are you doing in town?” she said.

“I managed to get put in the bag yesterday.”

“What?”

“I just got out of the slam.”

“What for?” She turned around and looked at me.

“Some trucks were shot up down at that pulp mill.”

She went back to her washing in silence, then stopped and dried her hands on a towel.

“Do you want a beer?”

“All right.”

She took two bottles from the icebox and sat down at the unpainted wood table with me.

“Do they want Buddy?”

“They were just interested in me because I’d been out there about my pickup being burned.”

The younger boy came in perspiring and out of breath for a glass of water from the sink faucet. She waited until he finished and had slammed the screen behind him.

“Buddy can’t go to jail again. Not here,” she said.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with him.”

“There’re many people here who would like to destroy Frank Riordan, and they’ll take Buddy as a second choice. I had five years of explanation to his children about where he was, and we’re not up to it again.”

I wanted to explain that he wasn’t involved, that it was my own drunken barrel of snakes and southern barroom anger that had put me up on the mountain with a rifle. But I had stepped across a line with a heavy, dirty shoe into her and her children’s lives, and I felt like an intrusive outsider who had just presented someone with a handful of spiders. I drank down the bottle and set it lightly on the tabletop.

“I guess I’d better catch air,” I said. “I can probably hitch a ride pretty easy out by the highway.”

“Wait for Mel. He comes by after class for coffee.”

“Buddy’s probably junking his Plymouth for bond, and I have to go by the hospital anyway.”

She got up from her chair and took another beer from the icebox. The V in the tail of her denim shirt exposed the white skin above her shorts. She clicked the cap off into a paper bag and put the bottle in front of me.

“Buddy says you could make it as a jazz musician if you wanted to. Why do you play in country bands?”

“Because I’m good at what I do, and I have the feeling for it.”

“Do you like the people you play for?” She said it in a soft voice, her eyes interested, and I wondered why Buddy had ever left her.

“I think I understand them.”

“The type of men who beat you up and burned your truck?”

“Not everybody in a beer joint is a gangster. We wouldn’t have had that scene if Buddy—”

“I know. Buddy’s favorite expression: ‘That’s the way the toilet flushes sometimes, Zeno.’ He has a way of saying it when somebody is already thinking about killing him.”

“Well, it was something like that. But when you cruise into it with your signs on, somebody is going to try to cancel you out.”

“I read the story in the paper. Did you really do that much damage from across the river?” Her dark eyes were dancing into mine.

“What do you think, kiddo?”

“That you don’t understand the sheriff you’re dealing with or Frank Riordan either.”

“Ever since I came here, people have been telling me I don’t understand something. Does that happen to everybody who wanders into Montana?”

“Pat Floyd might look like a fat Louisiana redneck behind his desk, but he’s been sheriff for fifteen years, and he doesn’t let people out of his jail for something like this unless he has a reason. I think you’re going to find, also, that Buddy’s father can be a strange man to deal with.” She went to the sink and pulled the rubber plug in the drain, then began squeezing water out of the jeans and T-shirts. “Excuse me. Take another beer. I have to get this on the line before it rains again.”

I took a Grain Belt from the icebox and looked at the motion of her shoulders while she twisted the water out of her boys’ clothes. I was never very good with women, possibly because I had always thought of them simply as women, but this one could reach out with an intelligent fingernail and tick the edge of your soul and walk away into a question mark.

I waited three minutes in the silence, drinking the beer and looking out through the screen at the green trees in the backyard.

“So why is Mr. Riordan a strange man to deal with?” I said.

“He doesn’t recognize anything outside of his idea of the world and the people who should live in it. He might be a good person, but he’s always determined to do what he calls right, regardless of the cost to other people. You might not have thought about it yet, but to his mind you probably created something very large for him when you shot up those trucks.”

“I don’t create anything for anybody. I’ve tried to announce in capital letters that somebody’s fight with the pulp mill or the lumberjacks isn’t part of my act. So far I’ve gotten my arm broken and lost my job just for being around. So I don’t figure I owe anybody.”

“Why did you come here?”

“Sometimes you got to roll and stretch it out.”

“You should have stayed in Louisiana.”

“Do I get a bill for that?” I smiled at her, but her face stayed expressionless.

“If the pulp mill shuts down because of Frank Riordan, you won’t want to see what the people in this town will be like.”

“I’ve met some of them.”

“No, you haven’t. Not when they’re out of work and there’s no food in the house except what they get from the federal surplus center. There’s nothing worse than a lumber town when the mill closes down.”

“Why don’t you leave?” Then I felt stupid for my question.

“I could probably wait tables at the bus depot in Billings or a truck stop in Spokane. Do you recommend that as a large change?”

“I’m sorry. Too much beer in the morning.”

She dried her hands and pushed her hair back under her blue scarf.

“Tell me another thing,” she said. “Do you believe Buddy is going to stay out of jail?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t think that someday he’ll go back to prison for one thing or another? For dope or a drunk accident or a bottle thrown across a bar or any of the things that he does regularly and casually dismisses?”

“Buddy’s not a criminal. He fell in Louisiana because he was holding some weed at the wrong time. If he wasn’t a Yankee and had had some money, he could have walked out of it.”

“That wasn’t the first time he was in jail.”

“He told me about that.”

“What?” she said.

I felt uncomfortable again under her eyes, and I took a sip from the beer.

“He said you had him locked up once.”

“That’s wonderful. He drove his car through the lawns all the way down the block and ran over the front steps, then stuck a matchstick in the horn. Every neighbor in the block called the police, and the next day we were evicted from the house. While he spent ninety days in jail, we lived in a trailer without heat in East Missoula.”

I heard the front screen slam back on the spring. Melvin walked through the hallway into the kitchen, chalk dust on the back of his brown suit coat, his face bright and handsome, and poured a cup of coffee off the stove. He began talking immediately. He didn’t know it, but at that moment I would have enjoyed buying him a tall, cool drink.

He talked without stopping for almost fifteen minutes. Then he set down the empty coffeepot on the stove and said, “You ready to roll, ace?”

“Yeah, let’s get it,” I said.

“Jesus Christ, you blew the hell out of that place, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, all right. But I drove past the mill last night, and they were still scraping up a melted truck from the asphalt. Partner, that was a real job.”

“Let’s hit it if you’re going.”

We walked through the hallway to the front with Beth behind us. I paused at the screen door.

“I should have a check in the mail today if you and the kids would like to go on a barbecue or something,” I said. “Maybe Melvin and his wife would like to come, and Buddy can take along his little brothers, and we’ll find a lake someplace.”

She smiled at me, her blue-black hair soft on her forehead. Her dark eyes took on a deeper color in the sunlight through the trees.

“I used to make the second-best sauce piquante in southern Louisiana,” I said.

“Ask the others and give me a call,” she said.

I winked at her and walked across the shady lawn to the car.

Winking, I thought, Boy, are you a cool operator.

“You want to stop at Eddie’s Club for a beer?” Melvin said.

“I’d like to get this jailhouse smell off me, and I’ll buy you one this afternoon.”

We rolled across the bridge over the river, and I looked at the deep flashes of sunlight in the current.

“Did you use Buddy’s Springfield?” he said.

“I was pretty drunk that night, and I don’t remember much of anything.”

“OK. But you ought to throw it in the river.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said.

The wind was blowing up the Bitterroot Valley, and the leaves of the cottonwoods trembled with silver in the bright air. I watched the fields of hay and cattle move by, and the log ranch houses chinked with mortar, and the drift of smoke from a small forest fire high on a blue mountain. The creek beds that crossed under the road were alive with hatching insects, and the pebbles along the sandy banks glistened wet and brown in the sun. Damn, Montana was a beautiful part of the country, I thought. It reached out with its enormous sky and mountains and blue-green land and hit you like a fist in the heart. You simply became lost in looking at it.

Buddy got up from his chair on the porch of the cabin and spread his arms in the air when he saw the automobile. Melvin let me down and drove up the rutted road toward the main house, and I saw Buddy flip away a hand-rolled cigarette into the wind. His shirttail was pulled out, and his stitched and bruised face was grinning like a scarecrow’s as he walked disjointedly across the lawn.

“One night in the bag and Zeno has made the street,” he said. “That’s what I call accelerated.”

I could smell the marijuana on his clothes when I was five feet from him.

“I can see you’ve been sweating out your podna’s poor ass being in jail.”

“I knew you were going to walk late last night. I did a ding-a-ling on the ring-a-ling after the old man said he would go a property bond. But they said there was no bail because Zeno hadn’t been charged, and you would be sent home safely in the morning.”

“What time was this?”

“About midnight.”

“That’s great, Buddy. So I spent the night with one of your local homosexuals and a one-armed Negro psychotic while everything was cool on the farm. I’m relieved as hell to know that I didn’t have anything to worry about.”

“I couldn’t get you out that late. They don’t hire a night jailer, and I don’t think they liked you down there too much anyway. Look, man, I got something for you inside. Also, you got to see the rainbow I took this morning.”

We walked up on the porch, and Buddy went through the screen door in front of me.

“I got it on credit, so don’t worry about it. I got credit out my winky hole, and I just send them a hubcap from the Plymouth when they threaten to take my property.”

On my bunk was a new Gibson guitar with a Confederate flag wrapped around the sound box. The blond, waxed wood in the face and the dark, tapered neck and silver frets shone in the light through the window.

“They ain’t got Dobros in Montana, and I couldn’t find a Martin,” he said.

“Well, hell, man.”

“But this has got a lifetime guarantee, and the guy says he’ll sell us a case for it at cost.”

“Well, you dumb bastard.”

He folded a torn match cover around a roach and lit it, already grinning into the smoke before he spoke.

“I tried to get you a Buck Owens instruction book, but they didn’t have it,” he said.

I sat down on the bed and clicked my thumbnail over the guitar strings. They reverberated and trembled in the deep echo from the box. I tried to make an awkward E chord, but I couldn’t work my cast around the neck.

“Can you figure that scene down at the jail?” I said.

“You got me. I thought they had you nailed flat.”

“What do you know about the sheriff?”

“Look out for him. He’s an old fox.”

“Yeah, Beth told me.” Then I regretted my words.

“What were you doing over there?” he said.

“I didn’t have any bread to catch the bus, and I thought you might be around.”

He looked at me curiously. I took a flat pick out of my pocket and began tuning the first string on the guitar. The room was silent a moment.

Then he said, “Take a look at the rainbow I got on a worm this morning,” and lifted a twenty-inch trout out of the sink by the gill. The iridescent band of blue and pink and sunlight was still bright along the sides. “I had the drag screwed all the way down, and I still couldn’t horse him out. I had to wade him up on a sandbar. If you can keep your ass out of jail today, we’ll go out again this evening.”

“My check ought to be here today. What if I pick up the tab for a beerbust and a picnic this afternoon?”

“That sounds commendable, Zeno. But I already went to the mailbox, and your check ain’t here. Also, before we slide into anything else, the old man wants to talk with you.”

He opened up the trout’s stomach with a fish knife and scooped out the entrails with his hand.

“How involved is that going to be?” I said.

“It’s just his way. He wants to talk a few minutes.”

“Say, I know I’m getting free rent here, and maybe becoming an instant sniper is pretty stupid, but like you said, it’s my fall.”

“You are the most paranoid bastard I’ve ever met. Look, he was going to go a property bond for you. I mean put the whole place on the line. OK, big deal. But give him his innings. He’s all right.”

This was the first time I had seen Buddy become defensive about his father.

“OK,” I said.

Buddy worked the iron pump over the trout and scraped out the blood from the ridge of bone on the inside with his thumbnail.

“All root, all reet,” he said, and lit the kindling in the stove. “A few lemon rings and slices of onion, and we’ll dine on the porch and do up some of this fine Mexican laughing grass.”

“Your father came to my room while we were in the hospital and said he tried to shoot someone once.”

“I’m surprised he would tell you about that.”

“He was pretty intent on making a point.”

“That’s something he keeps filed away in a dark place. But by God, he tried to do it, all right. When I was a kid, we used to live over by Livingston, and every day I climbed over this guy’s barbed wire to fish in his slough. I climbed over it enough until it was broken down on the ground, and thirty of his cows got out on the highway. The next morning he caught me at the slough with a horse quirt. It only took him about a dozen licks, but he cut through the seat of my overalls with it. I had blood in my shoes when I walked into the house, and that’s the only time I’ve ever seen the old man look the way he did then.”

The trout broiled in the butter inside the pan, and Buddy squeezed a lemon along the delicate white-and-pink meat.

“So do I march up to talk with your father or wait around?” I said.

“No, you take a beer out of the icebox, and then we eat. If you want to boogie down the road then, and not blow five minutes with the old man, that’s OK. We’ll catch a couple of brews and worm fish along the river. Don’t fret your bowels about it. Everything’s cool.”

We ate out on the front porch, with the breeze blowing up through the pines from the river. It was almost cold in the shade of the porch, and Mr. Riordan’s four Appaloosas and his one thoroughbred and Arabian stood like pieces of sunlit stone in the lot next to the barn. Beyond the house, the edges of the canyon and the cliffs were razor blue against the sky.

I was eating the last piece of trout with a slice of onion when I heard Mr. Riordan step up on the side of the porch. He had slipped his overalls straps down over his shoulders so that they hung below his waist, and the red handkerchief tied around his neck was wet with perspiration. He reached into the bib of his overalls and took out a small cigar that was burned at the tip. Buddy’s face became vacant while he cleaned off the tin plates.

“I guess you get pretty serious when you decide to do something,” he said.

He lit his cigar, and his gray eyes looked through the smoke and lighted match without blinking.

“I thought we had an understanding back there at the hospital,” he said.

“It wasn’t something I planned. I just have a bad way of letting the burner get too hot until something starts to melt at the wrong moment.”

He took a piece of tobacco off his lip and made a sound in his throat. There were drops of perspiration in his eyebrows. Buddy took the plates inside, and I heard him work the iron pump in the sink.

“I guess I had you called wrong. I didn’t have you figured for this,” he said.

I looked away from him, took a cigarette out of my pack, and thought, Jesus Christ, what is this?

“Then, I never figured that my own boy would spend five years in a penitentiary,” he said.

“Sometimes you can’t call what people will do,” I said.

“Is that the kind of observation you make on human conduct after you’re in jail?”

“I don’t know if I learned it in jail or not, but my own feeling is that people will do what’s inside them and there’s not much way to change that.”

“That must be a strange philosophy to live with, especially if what you do ruins most of your life.”

“I thought I had my dues paid, Mr. Riordan, and I was going to live cool for as long as I could after that. But maybe you have to keep paying dues all the way down the line and there’s no such thing as living cool.”

“I won’t try to argue with your experience and what you’ve shaped out of it. But the world isn’t a jail. We just make our own sometimes. Does that make any sense to you?”

I drew in on my cigarette and looked off at the green-yellow haze on the meadow. The field hands were bucking bales on the back of a wagon, and the short pines at the base of the mountain were bent at the tops in the wind.

“I’m sorry I dragged some trouble on your place,” I said, “and I appreciate your willingness to go bond for me. Otherwise, I’m not sure what to tell you. I’ll probably be moving into town in a day or so.”

“I didn’t ask you to do that. I just ask you to think a little bit about what I said.”

“You want a beer, Frank?” Buddy called from inside.

“Bring two out, Son.” Then to me, “You probably can’t do much with that arm around the place, but I’ll pay you to help me with the nutrias. I’m going to introduce them into a couple of beaver ponds up Lost Horse Creek this weekend.”

“You shouldn’t ever let those things loose in Montana,” I said.

“I’m afraid you’re more conservative than you think, Iry.”

My check from Ace was in the mail the next day, and I treated everyone to a beerbust and picnic at Flathead Lake. We loaded up in two cars, with children’s heads sticking out the windows, goggle masks already strapped on their faces, and I bought two cases of Great Falls with cracked ice spread among the bottles and a wicker basket of sausage, cheese, smoked ham, and French bread. It was my first trip up to the Flathead country, and I realized that I hadn’t yet seen the most beautiful part of Montana. We began to climb higher north of Missoula, the mountains blue on each side of us, the air thin and cool, and then we were rolling through the Salish Indian reservation, across the Jocko River that was now low and flowing a clear, Jell-O green over the smooth bed of rocks with the short grass waving in the current along the banks. Buddy had the Plymouth screwed down to the floor, and he was drinking a beer with one hand, his shoulder against the door like a 1950s hood, and laughing into the wind and talking about the three-point-two weed that grows wild in Montana, while Beth kept one frightened eye on the speedometer and a nervous cigarette between her fingers.

“Look at those buffalo,” he said. “You know those cats can run at forty-five miles an hour? A chain fence doesn’t even slow them down. They got gristle and hair on their chests like armor plate. And they stay in rut like rabbits. So I asked this park ranger once why the government didn’t just turn them out and let them reproduce all over the country. And he says, now dig this, man, just imagine some Nebraska wheat farmer going to bed dreaming of a thousand acres of cereal out there, and then he hears this long rumble and looks out the window in the morning and there’s nothing but torn ground and thousands of buffalo turds.”

When we stopped for gas, Beth asked me to drive, and Buddy sat against the passenger’s door and lit a reefer. The Mission Mountains were the most beautiful range I had ever seen. They were jagged and snow-covered against the sky, with long, white waterfalls running from under the snowpack, and Kicking Horse Lake lay at the bottom like a great blue teardrop. My head was reeling with the thin air and the two beers that I had drunk, the wind and the shouts of the children in the backseat, and I felt Beth’s thigh against mine and I wondered if a person could ever hold on permanently to an experience like this.

I slowed the car as we neared Polson, and then I saw Flathead Lake, with the cherry trees along the shores, the huge expanse of blue water, the ring of mountains around it, the cliffs of stone that rose from the middle of its brilliant, quiet surface. It looked like the Pacific Ocean; it was so large that you simply lost conception of your geographical place. Boats with red sails tacked in the thin breeze, their bows white and glistening with sunlight, and the sandy stretches of beach were shaded by pine trees. We drove along the shore toward Big Fork, the water winking through the trees, and I watched the cherry pickers on their stepladders lean heavily into the leaves, their hands working methodically, while the cherries rained like blood drops into their baskets.

It was a wonderful day. We ate poor-boy sandwiches on the beach, drank beer in the sun until our eyes became weak in the glare, then dove into the water and swam out breathlessly into the cold. I rented a small outboard, and we took turns taking the kids out to an island that was covered with Indian cuttings in the rock. Then Melvin bought some large cutthroat trout from a fisherman, and we barbecued them inside foil with tomato sauce. We were all tired and happy when we drove back toward Missoula. Before we got to town, Buddy went to sleep in the backseat with the children, and Beth laid her head against my shoulder and put her hand on my knee. I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or if she was just in that type of dreamy exhaustion that gives women an aura in their sleep. But it made me ache a little, that and the absence of a wife and family at age thirty-one and the probability that I would never have either one.

The next week went by, and each morning I could see the Indian summer steal more heavily across the mountains. The trees were turning more rapidly, flashes of red and yellow among the leaves where there had been none yesterday, and the sky became a harder blue, and there was more pine smoke from the chimneys in the false dawn before the sun broke across the top of the Bitterroots. I helped Mr. Riordan introduce his nutrias into Lost Horse Creek and worked a couple of afternoons in the aviary, but I spent most of each day sitting on the front porch, either drinking beer and playing the Gibson with an open tuning (which can be done with one hand if you use a bottle neck along the frets as you would use a bar on a steel or a Dobro) or trying to forget the awful itch and stench of medicine and sweat inside my cast. On some days when I drank too much beer and fell into an afternoon delirium on top of my bed, I imagined that white ants that had never seen light were eating their way into my blood veins.

But altogether I felt quiet inside, and I had a strange notion that if I stayed in one place for a while and didn’t do anything extravagant, my scene at the pulp mill would disappear, and my personal war with the locals would be filed away in a can somewhere.

I was cleaning some brook trout in a pan of water on the porch when I saw the sheriff’s car turn through the cattle guard and roll along the road in a cloud of dust. I put my hands in the red water and wiped them on my blue jeans and lit a cigarette before he stopped in front of the cabin. He saw that I wasn’t going to get up from the porch, so he turned his wheel toward the steps and drove to within four feet parallel of me. There was a bead in his corpulent face, and his arm on the window looked like a fat bread roll. He took his cigar out of the ashtray, puffed on its splayed end, with the red stone of his Mason’s ring glinting in the sunlight and then opened the door partway to release his weight from under the steering wheel.

“You should have been a little more careful, son,” he said.

“How’s that, Sheriff?”

“I told you that some of my men are a little dumb and it takes us awhile to get there. It took me awhile to figure out where you were shooting from, too. You picked them all up from that clip except this one. It was under the pine needles right beside the tree you sat against.”

He held up a small plastic bag, wrapped at the top with a rubber band. Inside was a spent brass cartridge.

“I understand that a print will burn right into a shell after it’s fired,” he said. “You can’t scrub it off with sandpaper.”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Well, you hang around here. I’ll let you know what I find after I take it over to the FBI man in Helena.”