The Lost Get-Back Boogie

  “No, man. It was the same scene. You saw I was froze, and you followed the old man into the fire. You didn’t do it because of him. You knew I was nailed, and your heart started beating. Because you’re scared shitless of fire, baby, but you had a chance to make me look like a piece of shit.”

  I could feel the anger tighten across my chest and swell into my throat and head until I wanted to hit Buddy as hard as I could with my fist. I took a cigarette off the dashboard and lit it and drew in deeply on the smoke.

  “You want to go to Beth’s?” I said.

  “I told you that, Zeno.”

  OK, son of a bitch, I thought, and drove toward the university district through the dark, tree-lined streets and past the quiet lawns of all those ordinary people I had wondered about with a sense of envy just a few minutes before.

  Later, reflecting on the events that were to follow, I would sometimes feel that a human being’s life is not shaped so much by what he is or what he pretends to be or even by the compulsions that he tries to root out and burn away; instead it can be just a matter of a wrong turn in an angry moment and a disregard for its consequences. But I didn’t know then that I would betray a friend and once more become involved in someone’s death.

  NINE

  I parked in the dark shadow of the maple tree in front of Beth’s house.

  “You want me to wait or catch air?” I said.

  “Come on in. She’s got some beer in the icebox.”

  “This is your caper, daddy-o. I’m going to rain-check this one.”

  He walked across the lawn and the dead leaves onto the wood porch. Under the door light, his body looked small and white. He had to lean against the wall for balance when he knocked again.

  I guess I wanted to see Buddy ruin himself with Beth, but as I looked at him there, dissipated, his head crawling with snakes, the unfulfilled rut still in his loins, I wished I could get him back in the car and home again.

  Beth opened the door, and I heard Buddy’s voice in its strained and careful attempt to sound sober. But the words came too fast, as though they had been rehearsed and pulled out like a piece of tape.

  “Somebody burned out the old man’s barn this morning, and we were cruising around and decided to drop by.”

  She didn’t open the screen, and there was a quiet moment while she said something to him, and then his arms went up in the air and he started to rock on both feet in the shadowy light.

  “They’re my boys, too, ain’t they?” he said, and his voice became louder after a few seconds of silence. “I mean what the hell they have to go to bed so early for, anyway?” Then another pause while Beth spoke.

  “You keep listening to that goddamn psychologist and they’re going to grow up in Warm Springs.” Another pause.

  “I’ll roll out the whole fucking neighborhood if I want to. We’ll give all these straight cats something to talk about over their breakfast cereal for a week.”

  I saw Beth open the screen, then latch it and turn off the porch light. I waited fifteen minutes in the darkness of the maple tree and listened to a hillbilly radio station in Spokane, then decided to go to the Oxford for a chicken-fried steak and a cup of coffee and leave Buddy to his self-flagellation.

  But then the light came on again, and Beth stepped out on the porch in a pair of blue jeans and a denim shirt bleached almost white with Clorox. Her blue-black hair hung in a tangle on her shoulders, and her bare feet looked as cold as ivory in the light. She motioned at me, a gentle gesture of the fingers as though she were saying good-bye to someone, and I walked across the dry, stiff grass and dead leaves toward her with a quickening in my heart and emptiness in my legs that confirmed altogether too quickly what had been in my mind all day while I had let Buddy tear his chemistry apart with whiskey and guilt.

  “Help me put him upstairs. I don’t want the children to see him,” she said.

  Buddy was leaned back against the couch in the lamplight, his knees wide apart; his head rolled about on his shoulders like a balloon that wanted to break its string. He was talking at the far wall as though there were someone standing in front of him.

  I tried to lift him by one arm, and he slapped at me with his hand, his hair over his eyes and ears.

  “What the shit you doing, man?” he said. “You trying to get me kicked out of two places in one day?”

  “We got to go to bed. Your old man wants us to finish the fence line by the slough tomorrow,” I said, though I should have known better than to patronize a drunk, particularly Buddy.

  “Well, cool. Louisiana Zeno is looking out for the old man’s Angus after he went through the flames.” He tried to raise his head and focus on my face, but the effort was too much.

  “What did he take today?” Beth said.

  “Just a lot of booze.”

  “No, he’s been using dope again, hasn’t he?”

  I heard the boys’ voices shouting in the backyard. Beth shook him again by the shoulder.

  “Get up,” she said. “Straighten up your head and stand.”

  Buddy fell sideways against the arm of the couch, with one wrist bent back against his thigh. His face was as bloodless and empty as a child’s. The back screen slammed, and Beth walked hurriedly into the kitchen and told the children to stay outside. She returned with a wet towel in her hand and pressed it into Buddy’s face.

  “Goddamn,” he said, his head rolling back.

  “Walk to the stairs,” she said. “Lean forward and hold on to my arm. Damn you, Buddy, they’re not going to see you like this.”

  “Come on, partner, let’s get up,” I said, and wondered at my pretense toward friendship.

  We stood him up between us, like a collapsing gargoyle, and walked him toward the staircase. His head hit the banister once, his knees knocked like wood into the steps, and I had to grab his belt and pull with all my weight to keep him from rolling backward down to the first floor.

  As I got him over the last step onto the safety of the carpet, my lungs breathless and my good arm weak with strain, I had a quick lesson about the way we as sane and sober people treat the drunk and hopelessly deranged. Considering the amount of acid and booze in his system, and the pathetic behavior in front of his wife on the couch, I had believed that his brain, at that moment, was as soft as yesterday’s ice cream, and as a result I had helped drag him upstairs with the care and dignity that you would show a bag of dirty laundry. But when I stood up for a breath before the last haul into the bedroom, he fixed one dilated, bloodshot eye on me from the floor, the other closed in the angry squint of a prizefighter who has just received a murderous leathery shot, and said:

  “You really go for the balls when you win, Zeno.”

  I put him face down on the bed with his head slightly over the edge so the blood would stay in his brain and he wouldn’t become sick. Downstairs, a moment later, I heard him hit the floor.

  “There’s nothing you can do for him,” Beth said.

  “I’ll get him back on the bed.”

  “If he wakes up, he’ll wake up fighting. I know Buddy when he’s like this. He chooses the people closest to him to help him destroy himself. Take a beer out of the icebox while I get the boys ready for bed.”

  “I’d better go.”

  “Stay. I want to talk with you.”

  The boys came in from the backyard, their faces flushed with cold and play, and drank glasses of powdered milk at the kitchen table. Then they went up the stairs with their eyes fixed curiously on me.

  “I bet you still don’t believe I used to pitch against Marty Marion,” I said.

  “My daddy says you’re a guitar player that was in jail with him,” the younger boy said over the banister.

  Learn one day not to try to con kids, Paret, I thought.

  “Upstairs, and I don’t want to hear any feet walking around,” Beth said.

  The boys trudged up to their room as though they were being sent to a firing squad.

  “What’s this about Frank’s ba
rn?” Beth said.

  “Somebody set fire to it this morning and burned it to the ground.”

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “We couldn’t get one of the Appaloosas out.” “Does Frank know who it was?”

  “He might, but I don’t think he would tell anyone if he does. He seems to play a pretty solitary game.”

  “Yes, and it’s the type that eventually damages everybody around him.”

  “That hasn’t been my impression about him.”

  “He draws an imaginary line that nobody else knows about, and when someone steps over it, you’d better watch out for Frank Riordan.”

  “How long did you and Buddy live with him?”

  I didn’t know that they had, but at this point I simply guessed it as an obvious fact.

  “Long enough for Buddy to have to make choices between his own family and his father,” she said.

  I avoided the flash in her eyes and looked blankly around at the worn furniture and wondered how I got into this subject. I could think of nothing to say.

  “Why did he use dope today?” she asked.

  “I guess the fire set off some strange things in his head. I don’t know. Sometimes people see the same thing differently.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He got wiped out after I followed his old man into the barn and he stayed outside. So I guess he thinks he froze and so he’s a coward. After anything like that, you go back over it in your head and try to understand what you did or didn’t do, but he doesn’t have the experience to see it for what it was.”

  She didn’t understand what I was saying, and I wished I hadn’t started to explain.

  “Buddy’s not a coward,” I said. “I’ve seen him go up against yard bullies at Angola that would have cut him to pieces in the shower if they had sensed any fear in him. He laid it on pretty heavy in the car this afternoon about the Bronze Star I got in Korea, but what he doesn’t understand is that you go in one direction or the other, or just stand still, for the same reason—you’re too scared to do anything else. It doesn’t have anything to do with what you are.

  “Look, I shouldn’t have brought him here. It’s not his fault. He just fried his head today And I think I better cut.”

  “No, I have more beer and some sandwiches in the icebox. Just a minute.”

  She walked toward the kitchen with a cigarette in her hand, her thighs and smooth rear end tight against her jeans, and her uncombed hair tangled with light. She came back with a tray and sat on the couch next to me with one bare foot pulled under her leg.

  “How did you stay sober while you were carrying around the mad man of Ravalli County?” she said, and laughed, and all the anger with Buddy and Frank Riordan was gone.

  “I got some good news about my arm this morning. They’re going to saw the cast off next week. I’ll probably have to play finger exercises like a kid for a few days, but I ought to have my act back in gear at the beer joint if that fat sheriff doesn’t nail me and get me violated in the meantime.”

  “Have you run into Pat Floyd again?”

  “He eased himself out to the ranch yesterday afternoon to show me a spent shell he said he picked up across the river from the pulp mill. I might have my signature burned right into it.”

  Her eyes passed over mine with a gathering concern, then lowered to the ashtray, where she picked up her cigarette.

  “Can you go back to prison?” she said.

  “If I left that shell and my print is on it. It might not get me time here, but it could be enough for my P.O. to have me sent back to Louisiana.”

  When I saw her expression and realized the casual tone of my voice, I also realized something about the impropriety of speaking out of one’s own cynical experience to people who are not prepared for it.

  “Buddy thinks he’s just trying to turn on the butane and get me to jump,” I said.

  “Pat Floyd will put you away,” she said.

  The seriousness of her voice made something drop inside me.

  “Well, you said he wasn’t a hillbilly cop.” But the detachment that I wanted to show in my voice wasn’t there. “What do you plan to do?”

  “Nothing. What the hell can I do? I can sweat this fat man or run, and if I run, I have another three to pull in Angola for sure. I figure I’ll hang around and let Gordo Deficado do his worst.”

  “He can do it, Iry.”

  “I’ve known some bad men, too.”

  She poured some of her beer into my glass and lit another cigarette from my pack.

  “I’ve got to roll, kiddo. I’ve burned up too much of your evening,” I said.

  “Buddy will need a ride home tomorrow. There’s no point in making two trips.” She looked away from me, and I saw the nervous touch of her finger on the cigarette.

  “I don’t want to cause an inconvenience.”

  “Oh, shit,” she said, and stood up from the couch and turned off the lamp on the table. In the darkness, she paused momentarily, listening for a sound from upstairs, then began to undress. She unsnapped her blue jeans and pushed them to her ankles, then pulled off her denim shirt and tried to reach for the back of her bra. In her hurried movement, with the glow of the kitchen light against her white stomach, she looked like an embarrassed contortionist in front of an audience of dolts.

  My heart was beating, and I felt the heat come into my face when I looked at her bare legs, her white line of swollen stomach above the elastic of her panties, and her wonderful soft breasts pressing against her bra. I looked up the stairs, where my friend was asleep after his day of dissipation, and before I could reflect on whether my quick glance was a matter of concern for Buddy or personal caution for myself, I looked back at Beth again and felt all the weak ache of two years stiffen into an erection.

  I rose uncomfortably from the couch in a bent position and unfastened her bra, and she turned toward me and put her arms around my neck as though she wanted to hide her huge white breasts. I pulled her close, with my face in her hair, and kissed her ear and ran both my hands over the small of her back, down inside her panties and over her butt and thighs. I felt like a gorilla bent in an ugly position over a pale statue. I smelled her blue-black hair, her perfume, the dried perspiration on her neck, her breath, and I felt the backs of my thighs start to shake.

  She took her arms away and slipped her panties down over her thighs, then stepped out of them. “Sit on the couch,” she said.

  Her body was silhouetted like a soft white sculpture in the glow of light from the kitchen. I undressed and sat back on the couch, and then she moved over me. She moaned once in her woman’s fecund way, her eyes widened, and she spread her fingers across my back.

  Then I felt it grow inside of me, too early and beyond any attempt at control, and when it burst away in that heart-twisting moment, she leaned forward and held my head to her breasts as she might a child’s.

  In the morning we all had breakfast at the kitchen table, and the sky outside was blue and clear over the elm and maple trees, and the sun shone brightly through the window. The two boys were talking happily about a football game at school, and Beth turned the hashbrowns and eggs in the skillet as though she were fixing breakfast on any ordinary morning. But I could feel the tension in her whenever she looked toward me and Buddy at once. He was badly hung over, his hand shaking on his cigarette, the eyes puffed and dim and still focused inward on some barrel of snakes out of yesterday. His plate went cold in front of him, and finally he dropped his cigarette in his coffee and rested his forehead on the palm of his hand.

  “Boy, I really got one this time,” he said.

  I didn’t want to look at him, because I not only felt an awful guilt toward him but also that sense of primitive victory in making a cuckold out of a rival, particularly one who was coming apart while you had it all intact.

  “Try some tomato juice,” Beth said.

  “You got any ups? Or some of those diet pills will do it,” he said.

  “Don’t t
ake anything else,” she said. He remained with his head in his palm and breathed irregularly.

  “Do you have a hangover, Daddy?” the younger boy said.

  Buddy got up from the table without answering and walked duckfooted to the icebox. He opened a can of beer and then began looking through the cabinets.

  “Where the hell is that bottle of sherry you keep?” he said.

  “Don’t do it, Buddy,” she said. “Just let it work out your system and you’ll be all right this afternoon.”

  “Give me the sherry and don’t tell me how to survive the morning.”

  She took the bottle from under the sink, and he poured a glass half full of it and then filled the rest with beer and broke two raw eggs into it. He sipped the glass slowly at the table, with his head bent over, holding the glass with both hands. Five minutes later the color began to come back into his face, and his hands stopped shaking.

  “Man, that’s a little better,” he said. “That whiskey must have had shellac in it. I haven’t had an eggbeater in my head like that since I sniffed some transmission fluid in the joint.” He looked up at Beth, then shook his head. “OK, I know, wrong reference. But, man, somebody must have stuck an enema bag full of piss in my ear last night.”

  That’s great, Buddy, I thought.

  Beth told the boys to put on their coats and go outside.

  “All right, all right, I got a speech defect about bad language,” he said. “But they hear all that shit at school. You don’t have to put earmuffs on them when they’re in the house.”

  The table was silent, and Beth made a point of not looking directly at either one of us.

  “How did I get upstairs last night? You must have dragged me up there by my heels.”

  “You floated up there like a balloon,” I said.

  “I feel like somebody worked me over with a slapjack. What did you do to me, partner?” He fixed one watery blue eye on me over his cigarette, and I flinched inside.

  “I had to use force on you a little bit after you started taking off your clothes in the street. That wasn’t too bad in itself, but after you threw those flowerpots through the neighbor’s window, I had to do something to keep both of us out of the bag.”