For the first time that night I became genuinely aware that I was in trouble. My mind couldn’t function, I didn’t know anything about the back roads, and I stood a good chance of being picked up on the highway for drunk driving. My heart was beating with the exertion of climbing to the top of the rise with the Springfield slung on my shoulder, and sweat ran in rivulets out of my hair into my eyes. I sat behind the wheel of the Plymouth and tried to think. I could take the log road over the mountain and possibly drive off the edge of a wash into five hundred feet of canyon (provided that the road went anywhere) or return across the log bridge into a good chance of a jolt in Deer Lodge plus an automatic violation back to Angola. I started the engine but kept the lights off and let the car roll down the road in neutral, braking heavily all the way down the grade. The pines began to thin toward the bottom of the hill, and then I saw the brown sweep of the river with the thick eddies of sawdust along the banks. The bridge stood out flat and hard in the reflection of lights from the mill, and there was a police car parked at the other side with the airplane headlights turned on and the bubblegum machine swinging on the roof.
I cut on my lights and eased the Plymouth into second as I came off the incline; then I remembered the Springfield propped like an iron salute against the passenger’s door. It was too late to dump it or even throw it over into the back seat. The sheriff’s deputy was already by the wooden bridge rail, winking his flashlight at me.
Oh boy. And you rolled right into it, babe.
I slowed the car and looked over at the bright flame in the parking lot and the two men who were spraying it with fire extinguishers in silhouette. Then the deputy began to sweep his flashlight impatiently, and it took a second, like a beat out of my heart, to realize that he was waving me past. I rattled across the board planks, and the headlights suddenly illuminated his brown uniform, the wide gun belt and cartridges, and the Stetson pushed low over his eyes. I nodded at him and slowly depressed the accelerator.
I hit the highway and opened up the Plymouth with the rods knocking, the frame shaking, and the moon rising over the mountain like a song. I opened the wind vane into my face and felt the sweat turn cold and dry in my hair, and then I drank the last of the whiskey in a long swallow and sailed the bottle over the roof. I had walked right out of it with the kind of con luck that drops on your head when you’re sure that this time they’re going to weld the cell door shut.
I bought a six-pack of Great Falls to drink on the way back to the ranch, and I felt a light-headed, heart-beating sense of victory and omniscience that I had known only in the infantry after moving all the way to the top of a Chinese hill without being hit. The fact that I weaved across the white center line or ran through an intersection at seventy seemed unimportant; I was flying with magic all over me, and the alcohol and adrenalin worked in my heart with a mean new energy.
The next morning I felt the sun hot and white in my eyes through the window. There was an overturned can of beer by the bed, and my shirt was half off and tangled around my cast. I walked into the back room where Buddy was sleeping and saw the Springfield back on the rack, though I had no memory of having put it there. I could still taste the mixture of beer, whiskey, and cigarettes in my mouth, and I worked the pump on the sink and cupped the water up in my hand. When the coldness hit my stomach, I thought I was going to be sick. My hands were shaking, the blood veins in my head had started to draw tight with hangover, and my eyes ached when I looked through the window into the bright light and the dew shimmering on the hay bales.
I tried to light the kindling in the wood stove to make coffee, but the paper matches flared against my thumbnail, and as I stared at the split chunks of white wood, the whole task suddenly seemed enormous. I took a beer out of the icebox and sat on the edge of the bed while I drank it. The sickening taste of the whiskey began to dissipate, and I felt the quivering wire in the middle of my breast start to dull and quieten. I finished the beer and had another, and by the bottom of the second can that handkerchief of flame in the parking lot became removed enough to think about. Then I saw Buddy leaning against the doorjamb, naked to the waist, his blue jeans low on his flat stomach, grinning at me.
“Are you getting in or getting up, Zeno? Either way, you look like shit,” he said.
“What’s up?” I said. My voice sounded strange, distant and apart from me, a piece of color in the ears.
“Did you get bred last night?”
“Get me a can out of the icebox.”
“Man, I can hear those hyenas beating on their cages in your head.”
“Just get the goddamn beer, Buddy.”
“My car ain’t in the pound, is it?”
I hadn’t thought yet about the car or what condition it might be in. My last memory of the Plymouth was winding it up out of Lolo after some drunk discussion in a bar about steelhead fishing over in Idaho. Then I remembered the tackhammer rattle out of the crankcase that meant a burnt bearing and maybe a flattened crankshaft.
I heard Buddy click off the cap from a bottle of beer and the foam drip flatly on the floor. He pushed the bottle inside my hand.
“What did you get into last night?” he said. He struck a match on the stove. Then I smelled the flame touch the reefer.
“It’s a real bag of shit, man.”
He pulled a chair out from the table and sat down, his eyes focused and serious over the joint in his mouth.
“Like what?”
“I really went over the edge and hung one out.”
“What did you do?”
“I took your Springfield and shot the hell out of the parking lot in that pulp mill.”
“Oh man.”
I couldn’t look at him. I felt miserable, and the absurdity of what I had done ached inside my hangover like an unacceptable dream.
“How bad?”
“I left about three trucks burning and probably blew the engine blocks out of a half-dozen others.”
“Wow. You don’t fool around, do you?”
It was silent for a moment, and I heard him take a long inhale on the reefer and let it out of his lungs slowly.
“Iry, what’s in your head? They’re going to pour your ass in Deer Lodge.”
“I got out of it. There was a dick at the log bridge, but he must have thought the damage was done inside the lot.”
“Forget that. You were in the sheriff’s office yesterday, and maybe these cowboys ain’t too bright, but they’re going to put the dice together and waltz you right into the bag. And believe me, buddy, they hand out time here to outsiders like there’s no calendar.”
He set the reefer on the edge of the table and walked back to the bedroom.
“What are you doing?” I said.
He unlocked the bolt of the Springfield, and an unfired cartridge sprang from the magazine.
“Really cool, man. What do you think I’m going to do?”
He walked out the screen door, and then I heard a shovel crunching in the earth behind the cabin. I wanted to argue with him about his rifle, but I knew he was right. I wet a towel under the pump and held it to my face and neck. I couldn’t stop sweating. Buddy dropped the shovel on the porch and came back through the door with grains of dirt in the perspiration on his arms. He was grinning again, with that crazy light in his eyes that used to get him into isolation at Angola.
“You’re sure a dumb son of a bitch,” he said.
“That’s the smartest thing you’ve said since I got out here.”
“But we’re in a real hardball game now, partner.”
Fifteen minutes later we heard a car rumble over the cattle guard. Buddy looked through the window, then back at me.
“That’s your taxi, Zeno,” he said. “Don’t say anything. Little Orphan Annie with empty circles for eyes. You were juicing in the saloon at Lolo, and you were too drunk even to drive into Missoula.”
“Get rid of the roach.”
He went to the sink and peeled the reefer, then pumped water over it.
“Th
is is a crock, ain’t it?” he said.
“Give me all the cigarettes you have.”
“Look at that pair of geeks. They love making a bust on the old man’s place.”
He handed me two packs of Lucky Strikes and a paper book of matches.
“I ain’t got the bread for a bondsman, so you’re going to have to sit it out, Zeno,” he said.
“I should have a check by tomorrow or the next day. Bring it down to the jail and I’ll endorse it.”
The deputy didn’t knock. He opened the screen door and pointed one thick finger at me.
“All right, Paret. Move it up against the car,” he said.
He held the screen open while I walked past him to the automobile. The other deputy leaned against the fender with his palm resting on the butt of his .357. Both of them were over six feet, and their wide shoulders were stiff and angular against their starched shirts.
“Lean on it,” the first deputy said.
I spread my legs and propped my hands against the roof of the automobile while his hands moved inside my thighs, then dug inside my pockets and turned them inside out. He pulled my arms behind me and snipped on the handcuffs, and the other deputy held open the door into the wire-mesh segregated back seat.
“Are you going to give us any trouble on the way back, or do you want me to sit with you?” the first deputy said.
I didn’t answer, and he locked both back doors from the outside. As the car rolled along the rutted lane, I leaned back against the handcuffs and felt the metal bite into the skin. I tried to raise myself forward to keep the pressure off my wrists, but each chuckhole in the road sent me back into the seat and another dig into my skin. The mountains had taken on a deeper blue and green from the rains, and the boulders in the creeks under the bridges were wet and shining and steaming in the sunlight at the same time. But at that moment, in my comical effort to sit rigid in the back of a sheriff’s car, I remembered a Negro kid at Angola who was handcuffed and taken down to the hole and beaten with a garden hose for stealing a peanut-butter sandwich. He spit on a hack, and so they sweated him five more days and took away his good time.
At that time, what bothered me was meeting him out on the yard after he got out of lockdown. There were still blue gashes on the insides of his lips, and while he smoked a cigarette, he told me he didn’t mind pulling the extra three years because he knew that eventually he would fall again anyway.
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 blonde 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?”