The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Eight

I couldn’t sleep that night. I smoked cigarettes in bed, then went out on the porch with a half glass of Four Roses, sat in the chill, and watched a herd of deer graze their way across the meadow toward the canyon. They were sculptured in the moonlight and the wet grass, and when an automobile passed out on the highway, I could see a brown glass eye flash at me from the darkness. Through the pines the wide expanse of the Bitterroot River was dripping with a blue shimmer. I drank the whiskey and tried to keep the shell casing in the plastic bag out of my mind, but I couldn’t. I was angry at my carelessness, my failure to count the hulls as they had ejected from the chamber, and the fact that an inconsequential thing, a spent cartridge, could put me back in prison for years.

I don’t know when I fell asleep in the chair, but I smelled the smoke just before the false dawn. In my whiskey dream I thought it was pine wood burning from a chimney, but then I heard the horses whinnying and rearing and crashing inside the stalls. The flames were already up one side of the barn, the sparks whipping across the shingled roof, and the loft was framed in a bright square of yellow light from inside. On the dirt road I heard a truck clank hard into gear and thunder across the cattle guard. I ran barefoot into the cabin and shook Buddy by the shoulders in bed.

“What the hell’s going on, man?”

“Your barn’s on fire.”

We started running across the field just as a single flame cut through the roof and caught the air and sucked a large hole downward in a shower of sparks. Lights were going on all over the main house, and I saw Mr. Riordan run off the front porch without a shirt on. The hay bales that had been stacked against one wall of the barn were turning into boxes of flame, and the aviary was filled with nickering yellow light and shadows and the wild beating of birds’ wings in the cages.

“The horses,” Mr. Riordan shouted.

Their screams were terrible. I could hear their hooves slashing into the wood, and even in the smoke and the heated absence of air I could smell the singed hair.

The rope pulley on the loft caught fire from the heat alone and burned away like a solitary thread of flame. Buddy’s three younger brothers ran into the lot behind their father in their pajamas, their eyes wide with fear and uncertainty, the skin of their faces red with the glowing heat.

“Soak blankets and bring them running, boys,” Mr. Riordan said, then started through the barn door.

“Get out of there, Frank,” Buddy yelled.

The cinders and ash fell across Mr. Riordan’s bare shoulders and back as he walked toward the stalls with his forearm held across his eyes.

“That crazy old son of a bitch,” Buddy said.

I don’t know why — maybe because I didn’t think about it — but I went in behind him. The heat was like the inside of a furnace. The loft door was dripping fire through the cracks, and all the tack was popping in black leathery blisters. The air was so hot it scalded my lungs, and before I had gone five feet, I could feel the smoke getting to my brain. Mr. Riordan had opened two of the stalls of the Appaloosas, and one bolted through the door to the outside, but the other had pitched his forelegs over the stall wall and was rearing and cutting his head against an upright post.

“Let him go. You won’t get him out,” I said.

“The Arabian,” he said.

The stall was at the back of the barn, which hadn’t yet caught fire but was smoking at every joint and crack and seam. The Arabian had kicked half the stall down, and one of his shoes hung twisted off a broken hoof. His eyes stuck out with fright, and he had used his nose to try to break the latch on his door. I threw the bolt and he started out toward the main door, then reared and crashed sideways into a row of stalls that were etched with fire. He rose on his knees, with sparks in his mane and tail, and pawed at the flames that had already consumed the first Appaloosa’s stall. The front of the barn was starting to sink, and burning shingles were raining across the doorway, and the smoke was now so thick that I could no longer see Mr. Riordan or the other horses. I worked my shirt off my shoulders with one hand and waited for the Arabian to back away from the flames and turn in another circle. Then I hit him running and jumped with my stomach across his back and pulled both knees high up into his shoulders. He kicked backward into a post and some tack, and I hit him behind the ear with my cast and got my shirt around his eyes. Then I gave it to him with both heels close under the flanks and bent low on his neck with the shirt pulled tight in both hands, and we bolted through the flames and exploding bales of green hay into the sudden coolness of the blue dawn outside.

His head went up when he smelled the air and the river, and he cut sideways and threw me on my back in the middle of the lot. Then I saw Mr. Riordan come out of the huge collapsing square of fire with a soaked blanket wrapped around the thoroughbred’s nose and eyes and a trouser belt pulled tight around his neck.

The boards in the walls snapped and curled as the wind blew the flames up through the roof and burst the remaining support timbers apart in arching cascades of sparks. The dark pines at the base of the canyon behind the house wavered in the light from the fire, and the birds in the aviary stood out in the reflection like ugly phoenixes with their wings extended. There were red welts all over my feet, and I could feel small holes on my shoulders like deep cigarette burns. The gauze bandages around my back were black and smelled of the boiled ointment inside, and when I pushed my hand through my hair, it felt as stiff and sharp as wire.

“Hey, man, are you all right?” Buddy said. He stood above me, looking down out of the dawn. Then his father and three brothers were beside him.

“Hey, Iry,” he said. He was kneeling beside me, and he rubbed his hand back and forth over my hair. “Hey, get out of it, man. We got them all out except one.”

Then Mr. Riordan’s face was close into mine. He was squatted on his haunches with his hand around my arm. The matted gray hair on his shoulders was burned down to the skin like pig bristles. There was a long red burn along his cheek and through part of his lip that was already swelling into water.

“Let’s go up to the house, son,” he said.

“Where in the hell are your neighbors?” I said.

“They’ll be here. It just takes them a while.”

A half hour later the volunteer fire truck from Stevensville came up the front lane, followed by two pickup trucks from neighboring ranches. The early sun had climbed above the lip of the mountains, and there were long, cool shadows across the porch, where we sat and watched the firemen spray the burnt timbers and piles of ash. I wore one of Mr. Riordan’s soft wool shirts over the butter that his wife had spread on my shoulders.

“How fast do these guys get out here when your house is burning down?” I said.

“It ain’t what you’re thinking,” Buddy said. “They have to come twenty miles, and before they can do anything else, they have to drag people out of bed all over the valley. They don’t like us, but they won’t turn away from you in an emergency.”

“Somehow you don’t convince me, Zeno.”

“You don’t understand Montana people. They’ll hate your ass and treat you like sheep dip, but they come through when you’re in trouble. Wait and see what happens if you bust an axle back on a log road or get lost deer hunting.”

I lit a cigarette and poured another cup of coffee from the pot Mrs. Riordan had brought out on the porch. The tops of my bare feet looked like they had been boiled in water.

“I don’t know if you want to see this, Frank, but you better look at it,” one of the firemen said. He had a scorched gasoline can impaled on the end of his fire ax. “It was against the south wall, and there’s a long burn back through the grass where somebody strung out the gasoline.”

“Just put it there,” Mr. Riordan said.

The fireman shook the can off the hook and looked away at the smoking timbers. Water dripped off his yellow slicker, and his face was powdered with ash.

“How many did you lose in there?” he said, squinting his eyes without looking back at us.

“One Appaloosa.”

“I’m sorry about this, Frank. You know it just takes a few sons of bitches to make you think that everybody is one.”

“Tell the others to come on up for coffee,” Mr. Riordan said. “Joe, go into the cabinet for me.”

Buddy’s little brother went into the house and came back with a quart of Jack Daniel’s while Mrs. Riordan poured out cups of coffee with both hands from a huge pot. The firemen and the neighbors in the pickup trucks sat on the steps and the porch railing, mixing whiskey in their cups and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Their politeness and quiet manner and the cool blue morning reminded me of scenes in Louisiana on our back porch before we went hunting in the fall, but there was an unrelieved tension here in the averted eyes, the concentration on rolling a cigarette, or the casual sip of whiskey from the bottom of a cup.

The bottle went around a second time, and Mrs. Riordan brought out a tray of biscuits that she had heated from the night before.

“When the hell are you going to lay off it, Frank?” It was one of the neighbors, a big man in a blue-jean jacket with patched corduroy pants pulled over his long underwear, and work boots that laced halfway up his thick calves. He didn’t look at Mr. Riordan, but took a bite off a plug of Brown Mule and worked it against his cheekbone.

“When I close it down, just like we all should have done when they first came in here,” Mr. Riordan said.

“I’ll be go-to-hell if I should have done any such thing,” the neighbor said. He spit off the porch and put the tobacco plug in his jacket. “What they do up in Missoula ain’t my business. Maybe it smells like a hog farm, but we ain’t breathing it and that’s them people’s jobs up there. If they want to shut it down, let them do it.”

“Do you remember what Missoula was like when you could drive down the Clark without that smoke plume hanging over the water?” Mr. Riordan said. “Do you ever fish that stretch of river today? What are you going to do when you have something like it right here in the Bitterroot?”

“Nobody’s going to argue that with you, Frank,” the fireman said. “But, damn, those people can’t go anywhere else for work. Anaconda ain’t going to hire them, and that don’t even count the gyppos that are going to be losing their tractors and everything else.”

“All they have to do is put in a purification system,” Mr. Riordan said. “Don’t you realize that they didn’t come here as a favor to us? They’re here for profit, and they destroy the air and make you like them for it.”

It was silent a moment; then one of the firemen set his cup in the saucer, nodded, and walked back to the truck. The other men smoked their cigarettes, deliberately looking out across the fields and up the canyon, where the sun was now breaking against the cliff walls and tops of the pines. Then one by one they casually stripped their cigarettes along the seam and let the tobacco blow away dryly in the breeze, or placed their cups and saucers quietly on the steps, and walked back across the lawn, pulling their gloves from their back pockets and slapping them across their palms, yawning and arching their backs as though they were thinking profoundly of the day’s work ahead of them.

“I’m going to report this to the sheriff’s office as arson,” the fireman who had found the gasoline can said. “That won’t put anybody in jail, but he can scare two or three sons of bitches out of trying to come back here again.”

“They won’t be back.”

“Frank, this is a hell of a thing, and I want you to know what I think.”

“Okay, Bob.”

The fireman got up in the seat of the volunteer truck and drove down the lane toward the cattle guard with the other firemen sitting against the coiled hoses in a lazy euphoria of sunlight and early-morning whiskey.

“You want another drink, Iry?” Mr. Riordan said.

“Sure.”

Then we went inside and had a breakfast of pork chops and eggs. They were a tough family. There was no mention of the fire at the table, though I knew the image of the burned Appaloosa under the collapsed roof was like a piece of metal behind Mr. Riordan’s brow. Buddy ate his breakfast quietly and left the table first. Through the window I saw him pick up the bottle from the porch and walk back toward the cabin.

When I got back to the cabin, he was sitting at the kitchen table with a tin cup of whiskey and water in his hand. The bottle was almost down to the bottom.

“Pour a shot,” he said.

“I hate to get drunk before nine in the morning.”

“You were belting it pretty heavy on the porch.”

“I don’t get fried every day of the week.”

He drank down the cup and picked up a cigarette butt from the ashtray. I threw my pack of Lucky Strikes on the table, but he ignored the gesture and puffed on a match held close to his lips.

“How’d you know the barn was on fire?” he said.

“I couldn’t sleep last night. That fat cop put my cojònes in a skillet when he showed me that spent cartridge.”

“Don’t worry about it. He’s just sweating you.”

“You got it figured out, do you?”

“What do you think? If he had you nailed, he would have busted you right there. He could have gotten that shell anywhere.”

“I wish I could be that damn sure, considering it’s my ass that’s on the line.”

“You talk like a fish. Use your gourd a minute. He wants you to jump your parole.”

There was a touch of irritation and meanness in Buddy’s voice that I didn’t like.

“Maybe I didn’t read him right, then,” I said.

“Besides, even if he picked that shell up, he still don’t have crap. You could have been target shooting up there two weeks ago. So forget it.” Buddy poured the rest of the bottle into the tin cup.

I sat on the edge of my bunk and rubbed Vaseline over the tops of my blistered feet, then put on a pair of white socks with my loafers.

“What did the old man talk about after I left?” Buddy said.

“Nothing, except finishing the fence line down by the slough.”

“That’s all. Nothing about the weather or the goddamn cows or cleaning out the birdcages?”

“He didn’t say anything.”

“You all just sat in silence and chewed on your pork-chop bones.”

“I don’t know what you’re pushing at, Buddy.”

“Not a thing, Zeno. Open a beer. Let’s get high.”

“I told you I’ve had it.”

“You look great.” He went to the icebox and came back with an opened can.

“I have to go to the hospital this morning to get my arm checked,” I said.

“That’s cool, because you can drive me somewhere else afterwards.”

I sipped off the beer and looked at him. His eyes were red, and he rubbed the nicotine-stained ends of his fingers together. I knew Buddy too well to intrude on whatever strange things were beating inside his crazy head, but something bad was loose and it was ugly as well.

“What do you have to do at the hospital?” he asked.

“I want to find out when I can get this cast off so I can start playing again. I feel like worms are crawling inside the plaster.”

He wasn’t listening to me. He knocked the chair over in getting up from the table and went in the back room to change clothes. He came back out dressed in a pair of sharkskin slacks, a blue sports shirt, half-topped boots, and a gray windbreaker. He pumped some water in the sink and washed his face and combed his hair back in ducktails on the sides.

“What are we doing?” I said.

“Getting your arm back into gear, Zeno. Don’t worry about it.” He opened the icebox and took out a saucer that had the torn corner of an ink blotter on it.

“Hey, man, let that stuff slide today,” I said.

“There’s enough for two. You ought to get up after charging the flames and doing that Korean War — Bronze Star scene.”

“Come on, Buddy.”

He put the blotter in his mouth and bit down easily on it.

“I was talking with this guy in Missoula who’s been sending acid into Deer Lodge under postage stamps,” he said. “All a guy has to do is take one lick and he’s flying for the rest of the day.”

We drove through the Bitterroot toward Missoula, and Buddy was snapping to the music on the radio and lighting one cigarette off another while he kept a can of beer between his thighs. I couldn’t tell exactly when the acid took him, because he already had enough whiskey in his system to make him irrational and feverish in the eyes. But by the time we reached Lolo he was talking incoherently and punching me on the shoulder with two fingers to illustrate something, and each time he touched me a ripple of pain danced across my blistered skin. I shouldn’t have left the cabin with him. I looked up the highway that led off the junction at Lolo over the pass into Idaho and thought of driving up somewhere high in the lodgepole pines to let him get his head straight again, but he read me.

“Keep it straight into Missoula, Zeno. We want to get your arm flattened out so you can get into the shitkicker scene again. Then we’ll go over to Idaho later.”

I went on through the light at the junction and took the can of beer from between his legs.

“That’s what you don’t understand about acid, Iry,” he said. “You can look into people’s thoughts with it. Right on down into their ovaries.”

I parked the car in the shade of some elm trees by Saint Patrick’s Hospital and left Buddy outside. As I walked up toward the entrance in the bright fall air and spangle of sunshine, I turned around and saw Buddy’s half-topped boots resting casually over the edge of the driver’s window. The Irish nun who had been a friend to me before changed the dressings on my back with her cool fingers and then took me over to the X-ray room, where I was told that the crack in my arm had knitted well and I probably could have the cast sawed off in another week.

When I got back to the car, Buddy was sitting behind the wheel, drinking a hot beer and listening to a hillbilly radio station. His eyes were swimming with color.

“The heat came around and told me to get my feet out of the window,” he said. “They said it don’t look good around the hospital.”

“Let’s go to the Oxford. I’ll buy you a steak,” I said.

“They must have told you something good in there.”

“I get my cast off next week.”

He slipped across the seat when I opened the car door. I pulled out on the street and started to drive toward the Oxford. We crossed the bridge over the Clark Fork, and I looked away at the wide curve of green water and the white rocks engraved with the skeletons of dead insects along the banks. It was going to be a good day after all, with no thoughts of cops or parole violation or FBI fingerprint men in Helena. Buddy was probably right, I thought. The sheriff just wanted to spook me into jumping my parole so he could have me violated back to Angola, and if I kept my head on straight, I could probably walk out of the thing at the mill.

“Let’s get the steak later,” Buddy said.

“I’m flush and I don’t do this often,” I said. “A couple of T-bones and then we’ll have a few drinks with your photographer friend over at Eddie’s.”

“Just head on down the highway and I’ll give you the directions. You ain’t seen Idaho yet.”

“Why don’t we keep it solid today, Buddy, and just booze around a little bit this afternoon and fish the river tonight?”

“It’s my car, ain’t it? Head it down the road, and I’ll tell you when to stop at this 1860 bar with bullet holes in the walls.”

“I don’t think this is cool. The rods knock on the highway like somebody put glass in the crankcase.”

“Turn left at the light or let me drive.”

We drove west along the river through the high canyons toward the Idaho line. When we climbed a grade toward a long span of bridge and looked down, the river shone blue and full of light, and the moss waved on the smooth boulders below the current. Just before the state line there was an old bar set back from the road against the base of a mountain. The rambling back part of the building was half collapsed, the windows were boarded, and a section of tin roof was torn up from the eave. But the bar itself was made of mahogany and scarred in a half-dozen places by pistol balls, with a long brass rail and a huge, yellow-stained baroque mirror that covered the entire wall.

Buddy ordered two whiskey sours before I could stop him, then dropped a quarter into the jukebox, which was located right next to a table where three workingmen were playing cards. They were annoyed, and they looked at him briefly before they moved to a table in back.

“They built this place when the railroad came through,” Buddy said. “The back of the building was all cribs. Up on the side of the mountain there’s about twenty graves of men that were shot right here.”

One of the cardplayers got up and turned the jukebox down.

“Hey, Zeno, they’re messing with my song,” Buddy called out.

I asked the bartender for two paper cups, poured our whiskey sours into them, and walked toward the door. Buddy had to follow me or drink by himself.

“What are you doing, man?” he said outside. “You can’t walk away every time some guy puts his thumb in your eye.”

“You want to bet?” I said.

The light was hard and bright, and the blue and green of the trees seemed to recede infinitely across the roll of mountains against the sky. Without looking at Buddy, I casually turned the car around the gas pump toward Missoula. His hand went out and caught the wheel, his forearm as stiff and determined as a piece of pipe.

“No, man, I got to deliver you to this other scene,” he said.

“All right, what kind of caper are we on to?”

“We’re going to a cathouse.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“Does that rub against some Catholic corner of your soul?”

“Aren’t we over the hill for that kind of stuff? I mean, don’t you feel a little silly sitting in a hot-pillow joint with a bunch of college boys and drunk loggers?”

“Well, you righteous son of a bitch. You eyeball everything that looks vaguely female, you get drunk and try to make out with some Indian guy’s wife, and then you got moral statements to make about your partner’s sex life. Some people might just call you a big bullshitter, Zeno.”

We crossed the state line and began to drop down into the mining area of eastern Idaho, a torn and gouged section of the state where everything that hadn’t been ruined by stripping had been blighted and stunted by the yellow haze that drifted off the smokestacks of the smelter plants. It was Indian summer in the rest of the northern Rockies, but here the acrid smoke made your head ache and your eyes wince, and the second growth on top of the destroyed mountains was the color of urine. At the bottom of the grade was Wallace, and beyond that, Smelterville, towns that were put together in the nineteenth century out of board, tin, crushed rock for streets, and some type of design on making the earth a gravel pit. The buildings in Wallace looked caved in, grimed with dirt and smoke from the smelters, and their windows were cracked and yellowed. Even the sidewalks sagged in the middle of the streets as though some oppressive weight were on top of them.

“You can really pick them, Buddy,” I said.

“Drive on up the hill to that big two-story wood house.”

The house sat up on a high, weed-filled lawn, with a wide sagging front porch and a blue light bulb over the door. The white paint was dirty and peeling, and crushed beer cans were strewn along the path to the steps.

“I’ll wait for you,” I said.

“None of that stuff. You’re not going to pull your Catholic action on your old partner.”

“I’m going to pass. This isn’t my scene.”

“You see that car at the bottom of the hill? That’s the deputy sheriff who watches this place, and if we keep fooling around he’s going to be up here and you can talk to him.”

“I’m telling you, Buddy, you better not get our ass worked over again.”

“Have a beer in the living room. Talk to the bouncer. He’s a real interesting guy. He has an iron bolt through both temples.”

“I’ll listen to the radio till you come out,” I said. I smiled at him and lit a cigarette, but there was nothing pleasant in his face.

He walked up the path and knocked on the torn screen door. A girl in blue jeans and a halter opened it, her face expressionless, the eyes indifferent except for a momentary glance, almost like curiosity, in my direction; then she latched the screen again without any show of recognition that a human being had walked past her.

Fifteen minutes later I heard people yelling inside, and then I heard Buddy’s voice: “You go for that sap and you’re going to be pulling a shank out of your throat with your fingernails.”

I walked quickly up the path, focused my eyes through the screen, and saw him facing an enormous, bull-necked man in the middle of the living room. The braided leather tip of a blackjack stuck out of the big man’s back pocket. Buddy’s face was white from drinking, his shirt was ripped and pulled down on one shoulder, and a full whiskey bottle hung from his right hand.

“Turn around and walk out the door and you’re out of Indian country,” the bouncer said.

I put my hand through the torn screen, unlatched the door, and stepped inside. All the windows were drawn with yellow roll shades that must have been left over from the 1940s. An old jukebox with a cracked plastic casing stood against one wall, the colored lights inside rippling up and down against the gloom. A hallway separated by a curtain led back from the living room, and there was a garbage can in one corner that was filled with beer cans and whiskey bottles. In the half-light, mill workers and drunks left over from last night’s bars sat with the whores on stuffed couches and chairs that seemed to exude a mixture of dust, age, and stale beer. Their faces were pinched with a mean dislike for Buddy, for me, and even for each other. I wondered at my own passivity in allowing Buddy to lead us into this dirty little corner of the universe.

The bouncer’s face was as round as a skillet. He smiled with a look of pleasant anticipation.

“Well, I guess it’s guys like you that keep me honest and make me earn my pay,” he said. “But I’m afraid it’s a bad day at Black Rock for you boys.”

“Wait a minute, mister. We’re leaving,” I said.

“So leave. But if you bring your pet asshole back here again, we’ll have to whip some big bumps on him. Give him some real mean hurt. Take his mind off his tallywhacker so he don’t have to come here no more.”

“You notice how these guys have a quick turn for everything?” Buddy said. “They memorize all kinds of hep phrases for every life situation. But they put rock ’n’ roll on their jukeboxes and pay their money to the cops and hand out blow jobs to the Kiwanis Club. Look at Mad Man Muntz here. He got his brains at the junkyard, he probably makes a buck an hour, but he comes on like the poet laureate of the brooder house.”

I walked over to Buddy and took him by the arm.

“Our bus is leaving,” I said.

“So long, you lovely people, and remember the reason you’re here,” he said. “You’re losers, you got one gear and it’s in neutral, and you hire this big clown to keep you safe from all your failures.”

I pulled hard on his arm and pushed him toward the door. The bouncer lifted his finger at him.

“You ought to go to church, boy. You got somebody looking over you,” he said.

The screen slammed behind us, and we walked down the path in the sunlight. The sharpness of the afternoon seemed disjointed and strange after the gloom and anger and bilious view of humanity in the whorehouse.

“I bought a bottle at the bar and was drinking a shot out of it when I saw the guy next to me buying drinks for him and his girl out of my change,” Buddy said as we drove down the hill toward the highway out of town. “I couldn’t believe it. Then he called me a pimp and put his cigarette ashes in my glass. The next thing I knew, his girl was trying to tear my shirt off my back. Man, I thought I saw people do some wild action in the joint, but that’s the bottom of the bucket, ain’t it?”

I drove without answering and wondered what had really taken place. We passed the town limits, and I stepped on the accelerator as we began the climb up the slope toward the blue tumble of mountains on the Montana line. In the rearview mirror the ugly sprawl of that devastated mining area and stunted town disappeared behind us.

“Yeah, that was a real geek show,” he said.

“Well, how the hell did you get there?” I said righteously, but I was angry at his irresponsibility and the physical danger he had put both of us in again. “They didn’t send out invitations to Florence, Montana. That’s their action every day back there, and you go on their rules when you walk through the door.”

I could feel his eyes on the side of my face; then I heard him take a drink out of the whiskey bottle. He didn’t speak for another five minutes, and the whistle of air through the window and my cigarette ashes flaking on my trousers began to feel more and more uncomfortable in the silence. I just couldn’t stay mad at Buddy for very long.

“How much did they hook you for the bottle?” I said.

“Twelve bucks. You want a shot?”

I drank out of the neck and handed it back to him. The warm bourbon made me wince and my arms tingle.

“Look, Zeno, what’s this lecture crap about?” he said.

“Jesus Christ, I just don’t want to get busted up again.”

“You could have canceled out early. You didn’t have to drive us up there.”

I didn’t have an answer for that one.

“You knew what type of scene we were floating into,” he said. “You better run the film backwards in your own gourd. You were clicking around about maybe improving your love life yourself.”

We dropped over the Montana line, and I really opened up the Plymouth. The front end was badly out of alignment, at least two bearings were tapping like tack hammers, and the oil smoke was blowing out the frayed exhaust in a long black spiral. The car frame shook and rattled, the doors vibrated on the jambs, and when I had to shift into second to pull a grade, the heat needle moved into the red area on the gauge and the radiator began to sing. Buddy pulled on the bottle and lit a cigarette. But before he did, he split a paper match with his thumbnail, as fast as anyone could pull one from a cover, and flipped the other half on the dashboard in front of me.

“That’s pretty good, ain’t it, Zeno?” he said. “I once beat a guy out of a whole deck of cigarettes by splitting thirty in fifty seconds.”

“Why don’t you forget all that prison shit?”

“Why don’t you forget about destroying my car because you’re pissed off?”

I let the Plymouth slow, and I heard Buddy drag off the bottle again. The sun had moved behind the edge of the mountains, and the yellow leaves on the cottonwoods along the river looked like hammered brass over the flow of the current. The blue shadows fell out in front of us on the highway, and the short pines at the base of the hills were already turning dark against the white slide of rocks behind them. The air became cool in minutes, the wind off the river in the canyon seemed sharper, and the banks of clouds on the mountains ahead took on the pink glow of a new rose above the trees.

Buddy pulled steadily on the bottle until he sank back against the door and the seat with an opened can of hot beer between his thighs.

It was almost dark when I saw the lights of Missoula in the distance. The last purple twilight hung on the high, brown hills above the valley, and a solitary airplane with its landing lights on moved coldly above the city toward the airport. The city seemed so quiet and well ordered in its soft glow and neat pattern of streets and homes and lines of elm and maple trees that I wondered how any community of people could organize anything that secure against the coming of the night and the morrow. For just a moment I let it get away inside of me, and I wondered, with a little sense of envy and loss, about all the straight people in those homes: the men with families and ordinary jobs and ordinary lives, the men who pulled the green chain at the mill and carried lunch pails and never sweated parole officers, cops, jail tanks, the dirty knowledge of the criminal world that sometimes you would like to cut out with a knife, all the ten years’ roaring memory of bleeding hangovers, whorehouses, and beer-glass brawls.

But this type of reflection was one that I couldn’t afford. Otherwise I would have to put an X through a decade and admit that my brother Ace was right, and the parole office, the psychologist in the joint, the army, everybody who had told me that I had a little screw in the back of my head turned a few degrees off center.

Buddy came out of his whiskey-acid stupor just before we reached the edge of town. His glazed eyes stared at the lights for a moment, then focused on me and brightened in a way that I didn’t like. He popped the hot beer open, and the foam showered against the windshield.

“Man, I feel like a dragon,” he said. “I think I’ll go see the wife-o.”

“I think you better not,” I said.

“Just save your counseling and tool on down by the university, Zeno.”

“You’re not serious?”

He drank out of the whiskey bottle, chased it with the beer, and then hit it again.

“That’s a little better,” he said. “I could just feel the first snakes getting out of the basket.”

I drove without speaking until I got to the turnoff that would take us back into the Bitterroots.

“Where the hell are you going? I said I wanted to go to Beth’s.”

“Let it slide, Buddy.”

“She’s my old lady, man.”

“That’s the last thing you want to do now.”

“Let Professor Riordan worry about that. Just get it on over there.”

“Where’s your head? How do you think she’s going to feel when you waltz up to the door like a liquor truck?”

“You should have gone into the priesthood, Iry. You can really deliver the advice about somebody else’s life.”

“All right, you’ve been telling me you want to go back with her. Pull a scene like this and you’ll disconnect from her permanently.”

“I guess all this crap comes out of the new Bronze Star you won this morning.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“You charged the hill again, didn’t you? Shot the heads off all them sixteen-year-old gooks in the trench. Went through the barn door after my old man when I couldn’t move.”

“Don’t drink any more.”

“You told me about it, right? You went up the hill when everybody else froze and dumped a BAR in their faces, and when you turned them over, you said they looked like children.”

“Put your bag of needles back in your pocket, Buddy. I’m not up to it.”

“No, man. It was the same scene. You saw I was froze, and you followed the old man into the fire. You didn’t do it because of him. You knew I was nailed, and your heart started beating. Because you’re scared shitless of fire, baby, but you had a chance to make me look like a piece of shit.”

I could feel the anger tighten across my chest and swell into my throat and head until I wanted to hit Buddy as hard as I could with my fist. I took a cigarette off the dashboard and lit it and drew in deeply on the smoke.

“You want to go to Beth’s?” I said.

“I told you that, Zeno.”

OK, son of a bitch, I thought, and drove toward the university district through the dark, tree-lined streets and past the quiet lawns of all those ordinary people I had wondered about with a sense of envy just a few minutes before.

Later, reflecting on the events that were to follow, I would sometimes feel that a human being’s life is not shaped so much by what he is or what he pretends to be or even by the compulsions that he tries to root out and burn away; instead it can be just a matter of a wrong turn in an angry moment and a disregard for its consequences. But I didn’t know then that I would betray a friend and once more become involved in someone’s death.