“I see,” he said.
I heard the wet slap of the football again and then the heavy rattle of leaves in a tree.
“It looks like we’ve gotten you into some of our family’s trouble, Mr. Paret,” he said.
“No, sir, that’s not true. I usually make a point of finding my own.”
He took a package of tobacco from his shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette, wet the glue neatly, and pinched the ends down.
“What did you kill that man for?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“It never came to you in those two years?”
“No.”
“I shot at a man once. I would have hit him and maybe killed him if he hadn’t jumped from the cab of a combine when he did. I shot at him because I’d thought for a long time about something he had done.”
“I formally resigned from my war a long time ago, Mr. Riordan.”
He cleared his throat quietly, as though there were a piece of bad air in it, and put out the rolled cigarette in the ashtray. This is one that’s hard to read, I thought.
“I’ll be back this evening,” he said. “The doctor said you two should be able to leave in the morning. Do you want anything?”
“I’d like a half pint of bourbon.”
“All right.”
“Wait,” I said, and gave him three dollars from my billfold.
After he had gone, I tried to sleep in the cool sound of the rain and fall back into the dream about the duck hunt with my father, but the perspiration rolled off my back onto the sheets, and when I kept my eyes closed too long, I saw the headlights roaring up out of the dark road into my tailgate. I turned on my side, with the ooze of salve thick against my skin, and stared at the wooden crucifix on the wall with two withered palms stuck behind it. I got up from the bed and found my slacks and shoes in the closet, but no shirt, and then I remembered the curl of flame climbing into the gas tank. It took me ten minutes to get on my trousers with one hand, and even with my buttocks against the bed the room kept tilting sideways from the square of pale light through the window. Sweat dripped out of my hair onto the cast, and my good hand was shaking as I tried to pop a match with my thumb and light a cigarette.
After I rang for the nurse, I looked across the room at my image in the dresser mirror. Oh man, I thought.
A nun in white pushed open the door softly, and then her quiet, cosmetic-free face dilated with a red hue.
“Oh, no, you shouldn’t do that,” she said. “Please don’t do that. You mustn’t.”
“I think I should leave this evening, Sister, but I need a shirt. I’d appreciate it if you could find any old one you have around here.”
“Please, Mr. Paret.”
“I have to check out, and I guess I’m going to. I just hate to ride the bus in a pajama shirt. You’d be doing me a great favor, Sister.”
Just then the nurse came in, and she could have been a matron in a women’s reformatory. Her face was at first a simple bright piece of cardboard and irritation at an annoyance on her floor; then after a few sentences were exchanged between us, the anger clicked in her eyes, and I was sure that she would have enjoyed seeing me collapse on the floor in a spasm that would require heart surgery with a pocketknife.
The nun came through the door again with a folded checkered shirt in her hands, brushed past the nurse in a swirl of white cloth over her small, polished black shoes, and put the shirt next to me, quickly, with just a flash of her concerned pretty face into mine.
I buttoned the shirt so I could rest my limp hand and the weight of the cast inside it and walked down the corridor to the desk in the waiting room. I could hear the leather soles and etched voice of the nurse echo behind me, and evidently she had enough command in the hospital to make the interns and the resident doctor look around walleyed and full of question marks at the strange man walking toward them a little off-balance.
I told the lady at the desk my name and asked for the bill.
“You ought to go back to your room, fella,” the resident said.
“Got to catch air, doc, and stretch it out a little bit tonight.”
He looked at me steadily for a moment.
“All right, that’s fine,” he said, and motioned the nurse away. “But we’re going to give you a sling and some pills for infection and pain. You come back in tomorrow to have your bandages changed.”
I sat down in a metal chair while another nurse tied a sling around my neck and placed my elbow carefully into the cloth and clipped safety pins into the folds. She stuck a brown envelope full of pills into the pocket of the checkered shirt, and I stood up to walk to the desk again. I could feel the stitches drawing tight against my eye, and I felt that there was a large blood blister swelling up on the bridge of my nose. My eyes couldn’t focus on the gray dimpling of rain on the concrete outside.
I asked again for my bill and was told that Mr. Riordan had asked that it be sent to him. I took out twenty-five dollars from my billfold and said that I would be back in to pay the rest.
I walked through the wet streets under the overhang of trees toward the bus depot. The wind swept the rain in gusts into my face. Clouds hung like soft smoke on the peaks of the mountains, and the neon signs over the bars were hazy red and green in the diminishing gray light.
So you showed everybody at the hospital you’re a stand-up guy, I thought. Isn’t that fine? Then I had to think about the rest of it. My truck and my Martin and dobro burned up, a broken arm that put me out of work, and living at a strange family’s place as a bandage case because there wasn’t another damn thing I could do. And deeper than any of it was just a sick feeling, a humiliation at being beaten up by men who had done it with a lazy form of physical contempt. I’d had the same feeling only once before, when a bully in the eighth grade had caught me after school and pinned my arms into the dust with his knees and slapped my face casually back and forth, then spit on his finger and put it in my ear.
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 wood 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, partner,” 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 Koolade, 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 wood 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.”