“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 dis-jointedly 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 becom
e 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, jello 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 back seat, 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 Poison, 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 work
ing 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 back seat 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 part way to release his weight from under the steering wheel.