I practiced chord configurations on the guitar for three days to bring back the coordination in my left hand. I had lost the calluses on my fingertips, and the strings burned the skin on the first day and raised tiny water blisters close to the nails, and the back of my hand wouldn’t work properly when I ran an E chord up the neck in “Steel Guitar Rag.” But by Tuesday I could feel the resilience and confidence back in my fingers, the easy slides and runs over the frets, and the natural movements I made without thinking.
It was twilight, and I was alone in the cabin, slightly drunk on a half-pint of Jim Beam and my own music and its memory of the rural South. The glow from the wood stove was warm against my back, and I could feel the chords in the guitar go through the sound box into my chest. A freight-train whistle blew coldly between the mountains, and though I couldn’t see that train, I knew that it was covered with the last red light of the dying sun and in the cab there was an engineer named Daddy Claxton, highballing for Dixie like the Georgia Mail.
I put my thumb picks on and played every railroad song I knew, double picking like A. P Carter and Mother Maybelle, moving on with Hank Snow, running from Lynchburg to Danville on the Ole 97, the tortoise shell picks flashing over the silver strings, the rumble and scream of mile-long legendary trains as real in that moment as when they ran with overheated fireboxes and sweating Negro coal shovelers and engineers who would give their lives just to make up lost time.
Buddy never understood why I made my living as a country musician when I probably could have worked steady with hotel dance bands in New Orleans or tried the jazz scene on the West Coast, where I might have made it at least as a rhythm guitarist. But what he didn’t understand, and what most northerners don’t, is that rural southern music is an attitude, a withdrawal into myths and an early agrarian dream about the promise of the new republic. And regardless of its vague quality, its false sense of romance, its restructuring of the reality of our history, it is nevertheless as true to a young boy in southern Louisiana listening to the Grand Ole Opry or the Louisiana Hayride on Saturday night as his grandfather’s story, which the grandfather had heard from his father, about the Federals burning the courthouse in New Iberia and pulling the bonnets off white women and carrying them on their bayonets. It was true because the boy had been told it was, and he would have no more questioned the veracity of the story than he would have the fact of his birth.
I was deep into my southern reverie and the last inch of Jim Beam when Buddy walked through the door, his eyes watery with the wind.
“I heard you across the field. It sounds very good, young Zeno,” he said. “For a minute, I thought I heard that colored blues player on Camp A. What was his name?”
“Guitar-git-it-and-go Welch.”
“Man, he was shit on that twelve-string, wasn’t he? What the hell were you doing with Beth at the Heidelhaus?”
I poured the rest of the Beam in my tin cup and picked up my cigarette from the edge of the table. The stove was hot against my back, and I felt a drop of perspiration slip down from my hairline.
“You want a drink?” I said.
“No, man. I want to know what you were doing with my old lady.”
“Having lunch. What the hell do you normally do in a restaurant?”
“What other kind of lunch did you have?”
“All right on that shit, Buddy.”
“You just happened to bop on down to the university library with Mel and take Beth out and not mention it for a week.”
“I saw my P.O. and had four hours to kill before I met Melvin. I didn’t want to hang around town and get picked up by the sheriff again, and I didn’t feel like sitting in the library anymore with a bunch of college students. So I asked her to go out for lunch.”
I had done a number of things over the years that were wrong, but lying was not one of them, even in prison, and I don’t know if this was because of my father’s deep feeling for truth and the habit it established in me or if I had found that the truth is the best pragmatic solution for any complex situation. But I had lied to Buddy and the words burned in my cheeks. I lifted the cup and took a sip out of it, then puffed off the cigarette.
“So why don’t you tell somebody about it?” he said. “I ain’t going to cut out your balls in the middle of the night.” “I thought it wasn’t a big deal.”
“Well, it ain’t, Zeno. It ain’t. Just drop some words on your old partner so I don’t feel like a dumb asshole when Mel sends this kind of news across the mashed potatoes. I mean, that cat is all right, but my mother is serving the steak around, and he says, ‘Was Beth’s car still working all right when she took Iry down to the Heidelhaus?’”
He took my cigarette out of my fingers and drew in on the stub.
“What was I supposed to say, Zeno?” he said. “My sister had gloat in her eyes, and the old man took out his pocket watch like he’d never seen it before. Say, no shit, man, you ain’t balling her, are you?”
“No.”
“You want to get high? I got some real good Mexican stuff today.”
“I’d better go to bed early. I want to go up to Bonner tomorrow and see if I can get back on with the band.”
I took the guitar strap off my neck and laid the sound box face down across my thighs. I pulled the picks off my fingers and dropped them in my shirt pocket.
“Come on and get loaded,” he said.
“I better look good tomorrow.”
“That’s on the square? You haven’t been milking through your partner’s fence?”
“I already told you, Buddy.”
I wrapped the Gibson in a blanket and went to sleep on my bunk, leaving him to a large kitchen matchbox of green Mexican weed and all the paranoid nightmares he could get out of it.
Friday night I was playing lead guitar again on the platform at the Milltown Union Bar, Cafe and Laundromat. The bar-stools and the tables were filled with mill workers and loggers and their masculine women, and at nine o’clock I attached the microphone pickup to my sound hole and opened up with Hank’s “Lost Highway,” a lament about a deck of cards, a jug of wine, and a woman’s lies. Their faces were quiet in the red-and-purple neon glow off the bar, and by the time I slipped into “The Wild Side of Life,” they were mine. Then I did a song about gyppo loggers written by our drummer (“the jimmy roaring, the big wheels rolling, the dirt and bark a-flying”), and I could see the words burn with private meaning, with affirmation of their impoverished lives, into all those work-creased faces.
It was good to be working again, to hear the applause, to sit at the bar between sets in a primitive aura and receive the free drinks and the callused handshakes. We played until two in the morning, turning our speakers higher and higher against the noise on the dance floor, the rattle of bottles, and the occasional violent scrape of chairs when a fight broke out. My voice was hoarse, my left arm throbbed, and my fingertips felt like they had been touched with acid, but that was all right. I was playing with that sense of control and quietness inside that came to me only when I was at my best. After everyone had left, I had a bowl of chili and a cup of coffee at the bar with the drummer, both of us light-headed with alcohol, exhaustion, and the electric echoes of the last five hours. Then I walked out into a sleeting rain and drove the Plymouth back toward Missoula and Beth’s house.
TEN
During the night the sleet and wind whipped the trees against the second-story bedroom window, and when the dawn began to grow into the sky, the grass was thick with small hailstones, and the sidewalks looked like they had been powdered with rock candy. I drove back to the ranch as the sun broke coldly over the edge of the Bitterroots, and I saw the snow in the pines high up in the mountains and the drift of white, shimmering light when the wind blew through the trunks. I should have left Beth’s house earlier, but in the warmth of her bed and with her woman’s heat against me and the wet rake of the maple on the window, I drifted back into sleep until the room was suddenly gray with the false dawn. Now, I worried abou
t Buddy and the lie I would have to tell him if he was awake.
But he was asleep, face down in the bed with his clothes and shoes on, his arms spread out beside him, a dead joint stuck like a flag in a beer can on the floor. It was cold inside the cabin, and I fired the wood stove, fanned the draft until the kindling caught and snapped into the hunks of split pine, and started to undress on the edge of my bunk. Through the side window I could see the snow clouds above the mountaintops turning violet over the dark sheen of the trees. My body was thick with fatigue, and I could still hear the noise of the bar and the electronic amplifiers as though the few hours’ interlude with Beth hadn’t been there. Then, as I lay back on the pillow with my arm over my eyes and started to sink into the growing warmth of the wood stove and the lessening of my heartbeat, I heard Mr. Riordan’s boots on the porch and his quiet knock on the screen.
He said he needed one of us to go up Lost Horse Creek with him to turn loose some more nutrias, so I got in the pickup, and we headed down the highway with the wire cages bouncing in the bed. I looked around through the window at the red eyes of the nutrias and their yellow buck teeth and porcupine hair and had to laugh.
“You must find them a great source of humor,” he said. His red-check wool shirt was buttoned at the collar and wrists under his sheep-lined jacket.
“I’m sorry,” I said, still laughing. “But I can’t get over these things being introduced deliberately into an area. One time my father and I had to spend a week cleaning out the irrigation ditches in our rice field after these guys had gone to work.”
“They’re that bad, are they?” he said, his face on the road.
“No, sir, they’re worse.” I laughed again. It was too ridiculous.
“If these prove that they can acclimate to the environment and be of commercial value, the beaver in the Northwest might be with us a few more years.”
He was a serious man not given to levity about his work, and I now felt awkward and a bit stupid in not having seen as much. He drove with his forearms against the steering wheel and tried to roll a cigarette between his fingers while the tobacco spilled out both ends of the paper.
“You want a tailor-made?” I said.
“Thank you.” He crumpled the paper and tobacco grains in his palm and dropped them out the wind vane. I had a notion that he could have rolled that cigarette into a tube as slick as spit if he had wanted, but he was a gentleman and had just erased that moment of righteousness that had led to my discomfort.
We turned on the rock road that wound along Lost Horse Creek and started up the long grade through the timber in second gear. As we veered on the corner of the switchbacks and the creek dropped farther below us like a cold blue flash through the tree trunks, I felt the air begin to thin, and the smell of the pines grew heavy in my head. On up the road I could see the first mountain start to crest, and then others rose higher and bluer behind it until they disappeared in the wet mist and the torn edges of snow clouds. We turned up another switchback, and again I looked down below at the creek. It was small and flecked with white water, and the remaining leaves on the cottonwoods looked like pieces of stamped Byzantine bronze. Rocks spilled off the edge of the road and dropped a hundred feet before they struck a treetop.
“We’ll pick up the creek again farther on. The height doesn’t bother you, does it?”
Hell no, I always light one cigarette off another like this, I thought.
“I just wonder what you might do if you blow out a tire on one of these turns,” I said.
“We probably just wouldn’t have to worry about putting the nutrias in a beaver pond today.”
The grade evened off, and the road began to straighten with thick pines on each side of it, and then I saw the creek again, this time no more than fifty yards away through the front window, a white roar of water breaking in a shower between smooth gray rocks that were as big as small houses. Mr. Riordan pulled the pickup off the road at an angle into the pines and rolled a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, licked it, seamed it down, twisted both ends, clicked a match on his thumbnail, and had it smoking in less than a minute, and there weren’t three grains of tobacco on his flat palm. He opened the door and laid his sheep-lined jacket on the seat. His bib overalls and buttoned-down, red-check shirt made me think of a southern farmer. We could hear a logging truck up the road as it shifted into low gear for the slow descent down the grade.
“Are you courting Buddy’s wife?” he said, the cigarette wet in the corner of his mouth.
I got out the passenger’s door and walked around to the tailgate and pulled loose the chain hook. The nutrias had been frightened by the ride over the rock road and the rattle of the chain, and they started to chew against the wire cages with their yellow teeth.
He leaned with one stiff arm against the truck bed and held the cigarette between his thick fingers as he looked away at the fallen trees across the creek.
“Are you courting his wife?” he said. “Which means, are you sleeping with her?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Have you thought about what he’ll do if he decides to stop looking in the other direction?” “I haven’t gotten that far yet.”
“Because frankly I don’t know what he’ll do. I just know I don’t want my boy back in prison again. I think you can understand that.”
“He’s not the type to do what you’re thinking about,” I said.
“You’re pretty damn sure of that, are you? Let me tell you a lesson, son. The man who kills you will be the one at your throat before you ever expect it.”
The wind felt cold on my neck. The thought of Buddy as a murderous enemy seemed as incongruous and awful as a daytime nightmare.
“I won’t try to explain any of it to you,” I said, “but sometimes things just happen of their own accord and it’s not easy to revise them.”
“I didn’t ask you for an apology. I just want you to think about consequences. For everybody.”
“Is that why we took this ride?”
“No. I figure you already knew what I had to say. And it’s probably not going to make any difference anyway.”
“You want me to pull out?”
“You’re his guest. That’s between you and him. I don’t hold anything against you. Beth marked him off a long time ago, but he hasn’t come to accept that yet. I’d just hoped that with some time he could come to see things as they are. He’s not up to having another big hole dug for him.”
“Maybe he’s tougher than you think.”
“It doesn’t take “tough’ to go to jail and do all five years because you can’t stay out of trouble.”
“I don’t think you know what kind of special feeling the hacks had for him in there. He was different. He didn’t take them seriously, and that bothered them right down in their scrotums.”
“That’s blather. Buddy was looking for that jail for years, but there’s no point in arguing about it. Let’s get these cages down to the pond.” He rubbed out the fire on his cigarette between his fingers and scattered the tobacco in the wind.
We heard the gears of the log truck wind down on the switchback, the air brakes hissing. Then the cab bent around the edge of the mountain with the huge flatbed behind it, and the great snow-covered ponderosa trunks boomed down with chains that cut whitely into the bark. The driver was bent over the wheel, his arm and shoulder working on the gear stick as the weight shifted on the bed; then the brakes hissed again, and he slowed to a stop where the grade evened off. He pulled off his leather gloves and picked up a cigar stub from the dashboard.
“Hey, Riordan,” he said. “You turning more of them rats loose?”
“What the hell does it look like?”
“Goddamn, if they ain’t beautiful,” the driver said, and laughed with the cigar in his teeth. “I guess if one of them tops a beaver, we’ll see animals running around with yellow teeth and porcupine quills growing out their asshole.”
“You’re probably late with your load, Carl,”
Mr. Riordan said.
“Don’t worry about that. I want to see you put them things in the creek. Do you have to club them in the head first and carry them down on the end of a shovel?” The driver giggled from the truck window with the cigar stub in the center of his teeth.
“You have a hot dinner waiting for you at home, Carl. Don’t make your wife throw it out in the backyard again.”
“You want me to help you with them things, in case they start biting your tires all to pieces?” the driver said.
“Tell him to get fucked,” I said.
Mr. Riordan looked at me with a sharp, brief expression, then picked up the two sawed-off broom handles that we used to put through the cages and carry them to the stream.
“Better put them in here, because the creek is dryer than a popcorn fart higher up,” the driver said. “In fact, I seen a couple of them rats walking up the road carrying a canteen.”
Mr. Riordan pushed the broom handles through the first cage, and we lifted it out of the pickup bed and carried it down the incline toward the beaver pond. The truck driver was still giggling behind us; then we heard him turn over his engine and shift into gear. We walked over the pine needles through the short trees, the nutrias tumbling over one another in the cage and gnawing with their buck teeth on the wood handles.
“Why do you take it off them?” I said.
“He’s a harmless man. He means nothing by it.”
“I don’t know how you define son of a bitch around here, but it seems to me that you have an awful lot of them.”
“They’re afraid.”
“Of what, for God’s sake?”