The Lost Get-Back Boogie

  “What?”

  “He wants to believe in his friends.”

  “What are you talking about, man?”

  “All those shit-hog people who call themselves neighbors.”

  “You smell like you put your head in the jug, too.”

  “Tell me how you live around these bastards. They treat your old man like sheep-dip.”

  “What set you off?”

  We closed the cabin door behind us, and I felt the sudden warmth of the room in my face and hands.

  “I really don’t understand it,” I said. “Your father’s a decent man, and he puts up with a gyppo logger giggling on a cigar like a gargoyle, and these guys in the restaurant acted like somebody held up a bed pan to their nostrils when we walked in.”

  “Are you sure you weren’t into my blotter when you left here this morning?”

  I pulled off my coat and took a beer out of the icebox. Two elk steaks covered with mushrooms and slices of onion were simmering in the skillet on the stove.

  “Man, you’re a righteous son of a bitch today,” Buddy said. “You’re genuinely pissed because people can act as bad here as where you come from. And remember, Zeno, that’s where redneck and stump-jumper was first patented.”

  “You’re wrong there, podna. I didn’t grow up around a bunch of thugs that would beat the hell out of you or burn you out because they didn’t like you. They might sniff at you a little bit, but you have your own variety of sons of bitches here.”

  I picked up the guitar and put the strap around my neck. I tuned the big E down and did a run from Lightning Hopkins’ “Mojo Hand.” Buddy took a cigarette out of my shirt pocket and lit it. I could feel him looking down at me. He flicked the paper match at the stove.

  “Are you playing tonight?” he said quietly.

  “Yeah, at nine.”

  “Are you looking for company?”

  “Come along. It’s the same old gig. A bunch of Saturday-night drunks from the mill getting loaded enough to forget what their wives look like.”

  “You’ve really got some strong shit in your blood today, babe,” he said. “I’m going to walk down and fish the river for a couple of hours. Move the skillet to the edge of the fire in about thirty minutes.”

  I nodded at him and began tuning my treble strings with the plectrum. I heard him open the door and pause as the wind blew coldly against my back.

  “You want to come along?” he asked.

  “Go ahead. I better sleep this afternoon,” I said.

  I had another beer and played the guitar in my sullen mood while the sky outside became grayer with the snow clouds that rolled slowly over the peaks of the Bitterroots. But even in my strange depression, which must have been brought on by lack of sleep and early morning booze, I felt a tranquillity and freedom in Buddy’s absence, the way one would after his wife has left him temporarily.

  Still, it was a dark day, and no matter how much I played on the guitar, I couldn’t get rid of that heavy feeling in my breast. Normally, I could work out anything on the frets and the tinny shine of sound from my plectrum against the strings, but the blues wouldn’t work for me (because you have to be a Negro or a dying Jimmie Rodgers to play them right, I thought). And I still couldn’t get my song “The Lost Get-Back Boogie” into place, and I wondered even more deeply about everything that I was doing. I was betraying a friend, living among people who were as foreign to me as if I had been born in another dimension, and constantly scraping through the junk pile of my past, which had as much meaning as my father’s farm after Ace surveyed it into lots and covered it with cement. And I was thirty-one now, playing in the same beer joints for fifteen dollars a night, justifying what I did in a romantic abstraction about the music of the rural South.

  The reality of that music was otherwise. The most cynical kind of exploitation of poverty, social decay, ignorance of medicine, cultural paranoia, racial hatred, and finally, hick stupidity were all involved in it. And the irony was that those who best served this vulgar, cynical world often in turn became its victims. I remembered when Hank Williams died at age twenty-nine, rejected by the Opry, his alcoholic life a nightmare. They put his body on the stage of the Montgomery city auditorium, and somebody sang “The Great Speckled Bird” while thousands of people slobbered into their handkerchiefs.

  I put the guitar down and moved the skillet of elk steaks to the edge of the fire, then lay down on my bunk with my arm across my eyes. For a few minutes I heard the wind outside and the scrape of the pines against the cabin roof, and then I dropped down into the warmth of the blanket and the gray afternoon inside my head.

  I dreamed I was in Korea again. It was hot, and three of us were sitting in the shade of a burnt-out tank with our shirts off, drinking warm beer out of cans that I had punched open with my bayonet. The twisted cloth straps of the bandoliers crisscrossed over my chest were dark with perspiration, and the metal side of the tank scorched my back every time I leaned against it. A couple of miles out from the beach, in the Sea of Japan, a British destroyer escort was throwing it into two MIGs that banked up high into the burning sky each time they made a strafing pass. I hadn’t seen Communist planes this far south before, except Bedcheck Charlie in his Piper Cub when he used to drop potato mashers on us, and it was fun to be a spectator, in the shade of the tank, with a lazy cigarette in my mouth and a wet can of beer between my thighs. The sea was flat and slate green, and the tracers from the pom-poms streaked away infinitely into the vast blueness of the sky. Then suddenly one of the MIGs burst apart in an explosion of yellow flame and flying metal that spun dizzily in trails of smoke toward the water.

  The man next to me, Vern Benbow, an ex-ballplayer from the Texas bush, belched and held up his beer can in a toast. There were grains of sand in his damp hair, and his pale-blue, hillbilly eyes were red around the edges.

  “May you find peace, motherfucker,” he said.

  Then the scene changed. It was night, and Vern and I were in a wet hole fifteen yards behind our concertina wire, and the dark outline of a ridge loomed up into a darker sky that was occasionally violated with the falling halos of pistol flares. I was shaking with the malaria that I had picked up in the Philippines, and I thought I could hear mosquitoes buzzing inside my head. Every time a flare ripped upward into the blackness and popped into its ghostly phosphorescence, I felt another series of chills crawl like worms through every blood vein in my body.

  “I think I got it figured out why they blow those goddamn bugles,” Vern said. “They’re dumb. That’s why they’re here. Nobody in his right mind would fight for a piece of shit like this.”

  My rifle was leaned against the side of the hole with a tin can over the end of the barrel. I tried to straighten the poncho under me to keep the water from seeping along my spine.

  “What the hell do we want that hill for?” Vern said. “Let the gooks have it. They deserve it. They can sit up there and play their bugles with their assholes. You couldn’t grow weeds here if you wanted to.”

  His young face and the anxiety in it about tomorrow and the barrage that came in every day at exactly three o’clock was lighted momentarily by the pale glow of a descending flare. He took his package of Red Man chewing tobacco out of his pocket, filled his fingers with the loose strands, and put them in his mouth along with the slick lump that was already in his jaw. Out in the darkness, we saw the sergeant walking along the line of holes with his Thompson held in one hand.

  “I guess I’ll go out tonight,” Vern said.

  “You went out last night,” I said.

  “You pulled mine two days ago. Besides, your teeth are clicking.”

  I raised myself on one elbow, unbuttoned my shirt pocket, and took out the pair of red dice that I had carried with me since the Philippines.

  “Snake eyes or boxcars?” I said.

  “Texas people is always high rollers. Even you coonasses ought to know that.”

  I rattled the dice once in my hand and threw them on the edge of
his muddy blanket.

  “Little Joe. You son of a buck,” he said. He put his pot on, picked up his rifle, slipped a bandolier over his shoulder, and lifted himself out of the hole. His back and seat were caked with mud.

  That was the last time I saw him. He and fifteen others were caught halfway up the hill between two machine-gun emplacements that the Chinese had established on our side of Heart Break Ridge during the night.

  I heard the screen door slam on the edge of my dream and Buddy pulling off his heavy jacket. His hair was powdered with wet snow, and his trousers were damp up to the thighs from the brush along the riverbank. He rubbed his hands on his red cheeks.

  “It’s too damn cold to fish,” he said. “I had one brown on and almost froze my hand when I stuck it in the water.”

  “Where’s the brown?”

  “Very clever,” he said.

  “It was just a question, since I was trying to sleep and you came in like Gangbusters.”

  “Go back to sleep, then. I’m going to eat.” He unlaced the leather string on one boot and kicked it toward the wall. “You want some elk?”

  “Go ahead. I’m not hungry.”

  “You’re not anything these days, Zeno.”

  “What am I supposed to do with that, Buddy?”

  “Not a goddamn thing.”

  “You want to just say it? If it’s on your mind, if it’s in some real bad place?”

  “I don’t have nothing to say. I didn’t mean to piss you off because I woke you up. Or maybe you’re just pissed in general about something that don’t have anything to do with you and me.”

  I sat up on the bunk and lit a cigarette. Outside, the snow was swirling in small flakes into the wet pines next to the cabin. The clouds had moved down low on the mountains until the timberline had disappeared. I wanted to push him into it, some final verbal recognition between the two of us about what I was doing with Beth and to him, my friend, so I wouldn’t have to keep contending with that dark feeling of deceit and betrayal that caught like a nail in my throat every time I looked at him. But I couldn’t push it over the edge, and he wouldn’t accept it either. I blinked into the cigarette smoke and took another deep puff, as though there were something philosophical in smoking a cigarette.

  “I got pretty drunk last night, and it didn’t help to get half loaded again this morning,” I said. “I think I ought to hang up my drinking act for a while.”

  “When you do that, Zeno, the Salvation Army is going to pass out free booze on Bourbon Street.”

  “I believe that would be a commendable way to celebrate my sobriety.”

  “Man, you are a clever son of a bitch. You sound like you went to one of those colored business colleges. You remember that psychotic preacher back in A that used to start hollering when the captain clanged the bell for evening count? His eyes were always busting out of his head after he’d been drinking julep in the cane all day, and he’d scream out all this stuff about standing up before Jesus that he’d memorized from one of those Baptist pamphlets, but he could never get all the words right. He’d stand there in the sun, still shouting, until the captain led him into the dormitory by the arm.”

  In a moment Buddy had been back into our common prison experience, which I didn’t care to relive anymore, and I suddenly realized that maybe this was the only thing we shared: an abnormal period in our lives, since neither of us was a criminal by nature, that contained nothing but degradation, hopelessness, mindless cruelty (newborn kittens flushed down the commodes by the hacks), suicides bailing off the top tier, a shank in the spleen on the way to the dining hall, or the unbearable sexual heat that made your life a misery. I just didn’t feel any more humor in it, but Buddy’s face was flushed with laughter and anticipation of my own. I drew in on my cigarette and blew out the smoke without looking at him.

  “What’s all that noise out there?” I said.

  “What noise?” he said, his face coming back to composure.

  “It sounds like a fox got into somebody’s hen house.”

  He stood up from the kitchen chair and looked through the front window. He held the curtain in his hand a moment and then dropped it, almost flinging it at the window glass.

  “What’s the old man doing?” he said. “He must have lost his mind.” He sat on the chair and pulled his wet boots back on without lacing them.

  I looked out the window and saw Mr. Riordan walking off balance through the rows of birdcages in the aviary, the snow swirling softly around him in a dim halo. He had a canvas bird-feed sack looped over one shoulder, and he was pulling back the tarps on the cages, unlatching the wire doors, and slinging seed on the ground.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “I was the one that got him drunk.”

  “Nobody gets the old man drunk, Zeno.”

  We walked hurriedly across the wet, cold field to the main house. Mrs. Riordan and Buddy’s sister had come out on the front porch and were standing silently by the rail with the wind in their faces. I could see a bottle of whiskey on top of one of the cages.

  Birds were everywhere, like chickens all over a roost when an egg-sucking dog gets inside: ruffed grouse, Canadian geese, greenhead mallards, ground owls, gulls, bobwhites, ring-necked pheasants, an eagle, egrets, pintails, blue herons, and two turkey buzzards. Most of them seemed as though they didn’t know what to do, but then a mallard hen took off, circled once overhead, and winnowed toward the river. Buddy started latching the doors on the birds that hadn’t yet jumped out after the seed.

  “Frank, what in the hell are you doing?” Buddy said.

  Mr. Riordan’s back was to us, his shoulders bent, as he sowed the seed from side to side like a farmer walking a fallow field.

  “Don’t let any more of them out,” Buddy said. “It’ll take us a week to get them back.”

  Mr. Riordan turned and saw us for the first time. The bill of his fur cap was pulled low over his eyes.

  “Hello, boys. What are you doing here?” he said.

  “Let’s go inside,” Buddy said, and slipped the heavy sack of feed off his father’s shoulder. The pupils in Mr. Riordan’s eyes had contracted until there was nothing left but a frosted grayness that seemed to look through us.

  He walked with us toward the porch, then as an afterthought picked up the bottle of whiskey by the neck. I thought he was going to drink from it, but I should have known better. He was not the type of man who would be seen drinking straight out of a bottle, particularly when drunk, in front of his family.

  “Put it away for today, Frank,” Buddy said.

  “Go get us three cups and the coffeepot that’s on the stove,” he said.

  “I don’t think that’s good,” Buddy said.

  He looked at Buddy from under the bill of his cap. There was no command in his expression, not even a hint of older authority, just the gray flatness of those eyes and maybe somewhere behind them a question mark.

  “All right,” Buddy said. “But those birds are going to be spread all over the Bitterroot by tonight.”

  He went inside with his mother and sister and a moment later came back with three cups hooked on his fingers and the metal coffeepot with a napkin wrapped around the handle.

  We sat on the steps and leaned against the wood railing, with the snow blowing under the eave into our faces, and drank coffee and whiskey for a half hour. Occasionally, I heard movement inside the house, and when I would turn, I would see the disappearing face of Mrs. Riordan or Pearl in the window. The snow was starting to fall more heavily now, with the wind blowing from behind us out of Idaho, and I watched the mountains on the far side of the valley gradually disappear in the white haze, then the stripped cottonwoods along the river, and finally our cabin across the field.

  Mr. Riordan was talking about his grandfather, who had owned half of a mine and the camp that went with it at Confederate Gulch during the 1870s.

  “He was a part-time preacher, and he woul
dn’t allow a saloon or a racetrack in town unless they contributed to his church,” he said. “He used to say there was nothing the devil hated worse than to have his own money used against him. Once, two of Henry Plummer’s old gang tried to hoorah the main street when they were drunk. He locked them in a stone powder house for two days and wouldn’t give them anything to drink but castor oil and busthead Indian whiskey. Then he made them wash in the creek, and took them home and fed them and gave them jobs in his mine.”

  “It’s starting to come in heavy, Frank,” Buddy said. “We better get the birds back in and the tarps on.”

  Mr. Riordan poured the whiskey and coffee out of his cup into the saucer to cool it.

  “You should take Iry to a couple of the places around here,” he said. “There’s a whole city called Granite up eight thousand feet on the mountain outside of Philipsburg. Miners were making twelve-dollars-a-day wage, seven days a week, in the 1880s. They had an opry house, a union hall, a two-story hospital, one street filled with saloons and floozy houses, and the day the vein played out you couldn’t count ten people in that town. They left their food in plates right on the table.”

  He was enjoying his recounting of Montana history to me, not so much for its quality of strangeness and fascination to an outsider, but because it was a very great part of the sequence that he still saw in time.

  “I told you about where they hanged Whiskey Bill Graves,” he said, rolling a cigarette out of his string tobacco, “but before they got to him, they bounced Frank Parrish and four others off a beam in Virginia City. You can still see the rope burns on the rafter today. When they hoisted Parrish up on the ladder with the rope around his neck and asked him for his last words, he hollered out, ‘Hurray for Jefferson Davis! Let her rip, boys!’ and he jumped right into eternity.”

  “I’m going to get the canvas gloves,” Buddy said.

  “What?” Mr. Riordan said.

  “Those damn birds.”

  Buddy went inside again, knocking the heavy wood door shut when it wouldn’t close easily the first time. Mr. Riordan smoked his rolled cigarette down to a thin stub between his fingers, his elbows propped on his knees, his face looking out into the blowing snow that covered the whole ranch. The bib of his overalls had come unbuttoned and hung down on his stomach like a miniature and incongruous apron. I felt sorry for him, but I didn’t know why.