“You should have been a little more careful, son,” he said.
“How’s that, Sheriff?”
“I told you that some of my men are a little dumb and it takes us a while to get there. It took me a while to figure out where you were shooting from, too. You picked them all up from that clip except this one. It was under the pine needles right beside the tree you sat against.”
He held up a small plastic bag, wrapped at the top with a rubber band. Inside was a spent brass cartridge.
“I understand that a print will burn right into a shell after it’s fired,” he said. “You can’t scrub it off with sandpaper.”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“Well, you hang around here. I’ll let you know what I find after I take it over to the FBI man in Helena.”
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 flickering 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 s
ee 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 Daniels 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 backpockets 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 i
nside 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.