The Lost Get-Back Boogie

  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 jail-house 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. “Mo
st 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?”