His face tensed momentarily with hangover fear and disbelief. Then he drank from the sherry and beer and stared back hard at me with his cigarette between his lips.
“Son, you are a dirty bastard to put your hungover partner on like that,” he said, and I saw Beth’s hand relax on her coffee cup.
But I couldn’t quite forget his lingering, watery blue eye and the probe that it had made. Buddy had a way of knowing things that it was impossible for him to know, and I never was sure if the gift came from the fact that possibly he was crazy or if in his cynicism about human behavior he simply intuited, with a great deal of accuracy, what bad things some people would do in certain circumstances.
He finished the glass and took another beer from the icebox.
“Let’s get it down the road,” he said. “Didn’t you say the old man wants us to finish the fence line down to the slough?”
I blinked inside again, because he remembered exactly, almost to the word, what I had told him before we carried him up to bed.
“Well, damn, Zeno, get it in gear,” he said.
We walked out on the front porch, and the yellow and red leaves were blowing across the grass in the sunlight, and the mountains behind the university were sharp and clear against the blue Montana sky. The crack of the fall air was like a cool burn against my face. I wanted to say something, anything, alone to Beth before we left, but I couldn’t, and so I just smiled as I would at a casual friend and said good-bye.
We drove back into the long, blue-green stretch of the Bitter-roots and stopped at Lolo for a drink because Buddy’s nervous system was starting to become unwired again. In the bar I drank a cup of coffee while he began on his second vodka Collins. I had a hard time looking at him directly in the eyes.
“You’re a quiet bastard this morning, ain’t you?” he said.
“I got burnt out yesterday. No more Idaho excursions.”
“Right. Bad scene. I ain’t going to let you lead me over there anymore. I feel like somebody stuck thumbtacks all over my head. Come on, let’s get out of here and put down those fence posts so I can stop thinking about my problems with ex-wives and kids.”
At the ranch we went back to work on the fence line, though I could do little more than unload the posts off the wagon with one arm and hold them steady in the hole while Buddy shoveled in the dirt. Then he would have to go to work on the next one with the post-hole digger, the sweat and booze running off his face and neck into his flannel shirt. We spoke little. He was too hung over, and I was too preoccupied with the latest thing I had gotten myself into. I didn’t know what to do about either Beth or Buddy, and any of the answers I could think of were bad ones. Maybe I should just drop it on him, I thought, because I was going to see her again, and eventually he would find out about it if he didn’t already have his finger on the edge of it. I slept with your wife last night. What do you think about that? Oh, you don’t mind? That’s cool, because I thought the shit might hit the fan.
He started to clean the post-hole digger in the bucket of water, his face pale with fatigue, then dropped the wood handles and let the whole thing fall to the ground. He wiped his face slick with his sleeve.
“Shit on this. We can do it this evening,” he said. “Man, I’m going to quit that damn drinking once and for all.”
He walked away alone toward the cabin, his shoulders bent slightly and his back shaking with a cigarette cough.
Buddy slept through the rest of the morning, and I sat on the porch in the cool wind and tried to read from an old paperback copy of The Old Man and the Sea. I had read it once in college and again in Angola, and it was my favorite of Ernest Hemingway’s books. But I couldn’t concentrate on the words; my attention would slip off the page, across the meadow of grazing Angus to the pile of ash and blackened boards where the barn had been.
So where do you go now, I thought. You can move out and try to explain to him why you have to, or you can let things keep falling one onto another without any plan at all until something even worse happens. Under other circumstances I would have just checked it on down the road, maybe up to Vancouver or out to San Fran, but the parole office had a nail through my foot, and the only type of transfer I could get would be back to Louisiana, and that was like going back to first base after you had knocked the ball out of the park.
But if I thought I had great problems to resolve there in the solitude of the porch and a windy sun-filled afternoon, I realized with a glance at the sheriff’s car turning in the front cattle guard that the complexities of my day were just beginning. Pat Floyd pulled the car off the dirt road onto the grass and put the gearshift in neutral with the engine still running, which meant we were going somewhere together.
I closed the paperback and set it beside me and looked at him without speaking. At first I’d had no feelings about him; he was just another dick, a member of that vast army who play out their roles and games with their sets of keys and paper forms and intricate rules of human behavior. But I was learning to dislike this fat man. I had the feeling that he was taking a special interest in me, one that went beyond the prosecution of a drunk ex-convict who shot up the local toilet-paper factory. I was an outsider, a rounder with a corn-pone mystique, a glib troublemaker who had been kicked off his own turf and was using the locals for a doormat.
“Let’s take a ride,” he said.
“You got a paper on me, Sheriff?”
“This ain’t an arrest. And I wouldn’t need a warrant to make one, either, son.”
“Hey, Buddy,” I called back through the screen door.
“You don’t need him. Just get in, and we’re going to talk a minute.”
“I just want to tell him we’ll be back soon. We’re going fishing shortly.”
I opened the screen and spoke into the dim shadows of the cabin. Buddy was on my bunk with the pillow and quilt over his head, his body deep in the mattress with sleep.
“I’ll be out with Sheriff Floyd a few minutes. OK?”
I got in the passenger side of the car and lit a cigarette, and we started up the road toward the cattle guard.
“You’re a pretty sharp boy,” he said.
“How’s that, Sheriff?”
“You thought I might take you out, beat the shit out of you with a billy, and leave you in a ditch, didn’t you?”
“It didn’t cross my mind.”
“We don’t do it that way up here. In fact, we don’t hardly have any crime here to speak of. On Saturday night a few boys might try to break up each other in a bar, and I have to lock them up till Sunday morning, but that’s all we get. People around here obey the law most of the time.”
We turned out on the highway, and he reached over with his huge weight and popped open the glove compartment. Inside was a half-pint of whiskey in a paper bag twisted around the neck. He unscrewed the cap with his thumb and took a drink, then set the bottle between his swollen khaki thighs.
“Actually, being a sheriff around here is easy,” he said. “A lot of times people take care of the law by themselves. A few years ago one of those California motorcycle gangs rode into Virginia City on a Saturday afternoon and said they were taking over the town. By that night every sheepherder and cowboy in the county was in town. They broke arms and heads and legs, beat them till they got down on their knees, and left just enough of that crowd intact to drive the others out of town. That’s the way it gets done out here sometimes.”
“What’s all this about?”
“Not too much. I just want to tell you a couple of things.” We passed the Sweeny Creek grocery store, a small wood building set back from the blacktop in the trees, and turned onto a rock road that led back toward the mountains. I puffed on my cigarette and looked at him from the side of my eye. He wasn’t carrying a billy on his hip, and I hadn’t seen one in the glove compartment, but maybe it was under the seat or lying within a second’s reach against the doorjamb.
I had never been beaten in prison, or even mistreated for that matter, but I
could never forget the time I saw what a Negro could look like after he had been sweated with a garden hose three nights in isolation. He was serving peas in the chow line for the free people, and when one of the hacks told him, “You better start ladling out them peas a little faster, boy,” he replied, “You ladle them out yourself, boss.” Three hacks cuffed him in the serving line and took him down to the hole. When he came out his eyes were swollen shut, and the striped bruises on his stomach and back looked like a black deformity.
The sheriff parked the car close into the shade of the pines along the creek and cut the engine. He took another drink out of the whiskey and offered the bottle to me.
“Go ahead. You ain’t going to get trench mouth out of it.” He laughed and took a cigar from his pocket. “You know, you’ve got a shit pot full of good luck. The FBI man couldn’t find a thing on that shell casing. Either you must have wiped all them hulls clean before you put them in the magazine or a deer walked over and took a good, solid piss right on top of it.”
He bit off the tip of the cigar and spit it through the window, then wet the end as though he were rolling a stick around in his mouth.
“Do you think you got pretty good luck?” he said.
“You tell me.”
He struck a match on the horn button and lit the cigar.
“I don’t think your luck is too good at all,” he said. “But that’s another matter. I wanted to drive up here today mainly because it’s my day off and this is where I always come the first day of deer season. You see where that saddle begins right after the first mountain, where the meadow opens up in the trees? I get two whitetail there opening day every year. I got an elk cow there last year, too, right up the nose with this .357 magnum from forty yards. I was using a shotgun with deer slugs, and I got some snow in the barrel and blew it all apart firing at a doe. Then the elk walked into the meadow with the wind behind her and never smelled a thing. I put it in her snout and tore her ass all over the snow. Those steel jackets will go through an automobile block, and they don’t even slow down when they gut an animal.”
I handed his whiskey back to him and looked out the passenger’s window.
“You’re not a hunter, are you?” he said.
“I gave it up in the army.”
He had started to take a drink, but he lowered the bottle and looked hard at me. I tried to keep my gaze on his face, but it was too much. His anger toward me and what I represented in some vague place in his mind or memory—some abstraction from a childhood difficulty, a sexual argument with his wife, a fear of the mayor or the town councilmen or himself— was too much to contend with in a stare contest, even though he was trying to pull my life into pieces.
“Let me tell you something before we drive back,” he said. “I don’t like you. I probably can’t get you for shooting up the mill right now, but I’m going to make you as unwelcome as I can in Missoula County. I’ll put you in jail for spitting on the street, throwing a cigarette wrapper down, walking in public with beer on your breath. I’ll have you in jail every time I see you or any of my department does. I have the feeling that if I lock you up enough and call your parole officer each time I do it, you’ll get your sack lunch and bus ticket back to Louisiana. Which means you better keep your ass out of my sight.”
“Is that it?”
“You better believe it, son.”
I opened the door and stepped out on the short grass. My head was light, and the wind blowing through the pines along the creek bed was cold against the perspiration in my hair.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he said.
“I’ll hitch a ride back to the Riordans’.”
The sun’s rays struck through his windshield, revealing in his face all his anger, all his doubt about leaving me to find my way home (and the possible recriminations later), and the most serious question—whether he had struck the fear of God into me with a burning poker.
I walked up the rock road toward the blacktop, smoking a cigarette, and he drove along beside me in first gear with his fat arm over the window, the doubt and anger still stamped in his face, and I was glad no one could see this sad comedy of two grown men acting out a ludicrous exercise in a mountain wilderness so that one of them could go home with a piece of scalp lock to keep his pride intact.
The sheriff floored the car in front of me, fishtailing off the grass that was already turning wet with dew, and spun a shower of rocks off the back tires when he hit second. He threw the whiskey bottle out the window into the gravel as he turned onto the blacktop, then roared away toward Missoula with both exhausts throbbing, his arm like a ham on the window.
By the time I had hitched a ride back to the ranch, the sunlight was drawing away over the mountains in a pink haze, and Buddy was sitting on the porch steps in a sheep-lined jacket, tying tapered leader on his fly line.
“Where you been, man?” he said.
“I went for a ride with that fat dick.”
He looked up from his concentration on the leader and waited.
“That shell casing was clean, but he says he’s going to make my life interesting every time he catches me in Missoula,” I said.
“Just stay out of his way. It’ll be cool after a while.” “What am I supposed to do in the meantime? Live out here like a hermit?”
“You want to go fishing?” “Yeah.”
We took the car down to the river and fished two deep holes in the twilight with wet flies. As the moon began to rise over the mountains, they started hitting. I saw my line straighten out quickly below the surface of the pool; then there was that hard-locking tension when the brown really hung into it, and the split-bamboo rod arched toward the water and the backup line started to strip off the automatic reel. I held the rod high over my head at an angle and walked with him through the shallows until he started to weaken and I could back him into the cattails at the head of the pool. I couldn’t manage the rod and the net at the same time because of my cast, and Buddy came up under him slowly with his net, the sandy bottom clouding as the dorsal and tail fins broke the water, and then he was heavy and thick and dripping inside the net, his brown-and-gold color and red spots wet with moonlight.
We cooked the fish with lemons, onions, and butter sauce, and it was warm and fine inside the cabin with the heat from the wood stove and the smell of burning pine chunks and the wind blowing through the trees on the creek. But I couldn’t eat or even finish my coffee. Paret, you wrecker of dreams, I thought. How did you do it?
During the week I helped Buddy’s father feed the birds and clean the cages in the aviary. We finished the fence line down to the slough, and much against all my instincts and previous experiences with nutrias in Louisiana, I went with him and Buddy up Lost Horse Creek to release two pairs of males and females. At the time I rationalized that it would be two or three years before the damage was felt on a large scale in the area, and I would be safely gone when a mob of commercial trappers, gyppo loggers, and fishermen tore the Riordan home apart board and nail.
I resolved in a vague way to leave Beth alone, but like an alcoholic who goes through one day dry and has to count all the others on the calendar, I knew it was just a matter of which day I would call her or suggest to Buddy that we drive into Missoula.
As it turned out, it was neither. I drove to town on Thursday morning with Melvin to check in with my parole officer, though my appointment wasn’t until the following week. He dropped me off by the university library, since I told him that I had three hours to waste before I saw my P.O., and then I walked the four blocks to Beth’s house.
She was scraping leaves into huge piles in her front yard with a cane rake. She wore a pair of faded corduroy jeans and a wool shirt buttoned at the throat and rolled over her elbows. Each time she scraped the rake and flattened it across the dry grass, more leaves blew in cold eddies off the piles.
“Do you want to go eat lunch at that German restaurant?” I said.
She turned around, surprised,
then stood erect with both of her hands folded on the rake handle. She blew her hair away from the corner of her mouth, her cheeks spotted with color in the coldness of the shade, and smiled in a way that made me go weak inside.
“Let me put on another shirt and get the leaves and twigs out of my hair,” she said.
We went in her car to the Heidelhaus, which inside was like a fine German place in the Black Forest, with big wood beams on the ceiling, checker-cloth tables, candles melted in wine bottles, and a large stone fireplace over which was skewered a roasting pig. We drank Tuborg on tap and ate sausage-and-melted-cheese sandwiches, and then the waitress, in a Tyrolian dress, served us slices of the roasted pork in hot mustard. It was so pleasant inside, with the warmth of the fireplace, the buttered-rum drinks after dinner, the college kids in varsity sweaters at the bar, and the candlelight on her happy face, that the threats of the sheriff and my other problems lapsed away in a kind of autumnal euphoria. Her eyes were bright with the alcohol, and when her knee brushed mine under the table, we both felt the same recognition and expectation about the rest of the afternoon.
We went back to her house and made love in her bed upstairs for almost two hours. I heard the screen slam downstairs and jerked upward involuntarily, but she simply smiled and put her finger to my lips and opened the bedroom door slightly to tell the boys to play outside. She walked back to the bed, her body soft and white and her huge breasts almost like a memory from my prison fantasies. Then she sat on me and bit my lip softly, her hair covering my face, and I felt it rise again deep inside of her until my loins were burning, and the weak light outside seemed to gather and fade from my vision in her rhythmic breathing against my cheek.
That Saturday I had my cast cut off at the hospital. The electric saw hummed along the cast and shaled off the plaster, and then the whole thing cracked free like a foul and corroded shell and exposed my puckered, hairless white arm. The skin felt dead and rubbery when I touched it, as though it wasn’t a part of me, and when I closed my fist, the muscle in the forearm swelled like an obscene piece of whale fat. But it felt good to have two arms again. While I put on my shirt and buttoned it easily with two hands, I recalled something I had thought about when I was in the hospital in Japan after I had been hit: that everybody who thinks war is an interesting national excursion should give up the use of an arm, an eye, or a leg for one day.