But it didn’t work. He glared into my face, breathing loudly through his nose, his hair wet against his forehead.
“OK, step in your own shit,” I said.
He walked past me and got in the truck, then set the Winchester in the rack against the back glass and started the engine. He turned around and drove slowly past me with his window still down. I began to walk hurriedly along beside the truck, my legs almost comical in their attempt to keep pace with it before Buddy accelerated down the lane.
“Jesus Christ, don’t do this,” I said. “I’ll go after them with you in the morning. We’ll put their ass in Deer Lodge for ten years—”
He rolled up the window, and his face disappeared into an empty oval behind the frosted glass; then he hit second gear and the loose tire chains clanked and whipped along the frozen earth.
I started to go back into the house, but I didn’t belong there, and there was nothing truthful that I could say to anybody inside. I walked back across the field to the cabin and poured a glass of straight whiskey at the kitchen table and tried to think. I imagined that Mrs. Riordan or Pearl or Melvin had already called the sheriff’s office, but that wouldn’t do any good for Buddy, as none of them knew why he had left in the truck, unless someone had noticed that the Winchester was gone, which they probably hadn’t. So that left few alternatives, I thought, and sipped at the whiskey and looked at the crumbling ash in the grate of the stove. I could tell his family about it and let them make their own decisions, or I could call one of the deputies aside in front of the house (and I could already see him talking into the microphone of his car radio, with the door open and one leg sticking out in the snow, telling every cop in Ravalli County to pick up dope-smoking ex-convict Buddy Riordan, who was armed and headed down the Bitterroot highway to gun somebody). Then they could call the intern back to the house to give Mrs. Riordan a tranquilizer shot, and in the meantime there would be shitkicker dicks with shotguns behind roadblocks all the way to Missoula who would urinate with pleasure in their khakis if Buddy should try to get past them.
So you can’t tell his family, and you don’t drop the dime on a friend, I thought, and drank the last of the whiskey from the glass and filled it with water under the pump. And that leaves us where in this Sam Spade process of deduction? Nowhere. He’s simply out there someplace on the highway, driving too fast across the ice slicks, his heart beating, the Winchester vibrating in the rack behind his head, his brain a furnace.
Then I thought, That’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s looking at every beer joint on the way back to Missoula, pulling into the gravel parking lot and cruising slowly past the line of parked cars and trucks. Because he is con wise to criminal behavior, and he knows that anyone, except a professional, who pulls a violent job usually does not go back directly to home and normalcy; he stops at what he thinks is the first safe bar to toast his aberrant victory and quiet that surge of blood in his head.
I tied the ignition wires together on the Plymouth and drove down the blacktop toward Missoula. I was guessing about the direction Buddy would have taken, as well as the three men in the pickup, but I doubted that the killing of the birds was done by anyone in the south Bitterroot, since there was only one small sawmill south of us, at Darby, which was almost to Idaho, that had been affected by the injunction. I passed the bar at Florence, which would have been too close for them to stop, and looked for Buddy’s truck in the parking lots of the two bars at Lolo. The snow was coming down more heavily now, in large, wet flakes that swirled out of my headlights and banked thickly on the windshield wipers that shuddered and scratched across the glass. As I dropped over the hill into the outskirts of Missoula and again met the river, shining with moonlight and bordered by the dark, bare shapes of the cottonwoods, the wind came up the valley and polished the ice along the road and buffeted the Plymouth from side to side.
I pulled into every bar parking lot on the highway until I reached the center of town. No Buddy, no ambulances, no bubble-gum lights swinging around on the tops of cop cars. Strike three, babe, I thought. So I drove over to Beth’s, with the ignition wires swinging and sparking under the dash and the snow piling higher on the hood against the windshield.
The elm and maple trees in her yard were dripping with ice, and the yellow porch light fell out in shadows along the glazed sidewalk. She opened the door partway in her nightgown against the draft of cold air, her mouth in an oval, beginning to smile; then her eyes focused on my face. She closed the door behind me and touched my chest with her hand.
“What happened?”
I told her, in the quietest way I could, keeping the sequence intact and lowering my voice each time I saw the brightness and sudden confusion start to come into her eyes.
“Oh God,” she said.
“He’ll probably just drive around until he gets the lightning bolts out of his brain.”
“You don’t know him. Not when it comes to his father and all his crazy guilt about failing him.”
“Buddy?” I looked at her with the strange feeling of an outsider who would never know the private moments of confession between them in the quiet darkness of their marital bed.
“He’s not a violent man,” I said. “Even in Angola, the big stripes let him alone. He wasn’t a threat to anyone. He was just Buddy, a guy with glue fumes in his head and music in his fingers.”
But I was talking to myself now. Her eyes were looking at the blackness of the window, and she held an unlit cigarette in her lap as though she had forgotten it was there.
“I don’t know what else to do, Beth.”
“Call the sheriff’s office.”
“You’re not thinking.”
“He told you he knew who they were. He’s going to kill someone.”
“You weren’t listening while I was talking,” I said.
“We’ll have to use the phone next door or go to the filling station.”
“Listen a minute. That fat son of a bitch you call a sheriff would love blowing Buddy all over the inside of that truck or welding the door shut on him in Deer Lodge.”
Her eyes were blinking at the darkness beyond the window.
“I’ll talk,” she said. “I’ll tell them he’s drunk and he tore up my house and I want him arrested.”
“That’s no good, kid.”
“Why? What do you offer as an alternative, for God’s sake?”
“He won’t pull over for any dicks, and it’ll get real bad after that.”
She sat back in the chair and rubbed the palm of her hand against her brow. I took the cigarette out of her fingers and lit it for her.
“I can’t sit here,” she said.
I wished I hadn’t come. It was selfish, and now I had included her in my own impotence to do anything in an impossible situation.
“Do you have anything to drink?” I asked.
“I think it’s in the cabinet.”
I found the half bottle of Old Crow and brought back two glasses. I poured into a glass and put it in her hand. She raised it once to her mouth as though she were going to drink, then set it aside on the table.
“I lied to the children for five years about their father,” she said. “They’re too old to lie to now. They’re not going to go through any more because of Frank Riordan and Buddy and all their insane obsessions.”
“Mr. Riordan didn’t choose this.”
“He’s done everything he could for twenty years to leave his stamp on everybody around him. He was never content simply to live. His children always had to know that he wasn’t an ordinary man.”
“He wouldn’t want Buddy out with a gun. You know that.”
“I’m sorry, but you didn’t learn very much living at his place.” That fine strand of wire was starting to tremble in her voice again. “He never thought about what would happen after he did anything. If he raised children to live in the nineteenth century, and if they ended up neurotic or in jail, it was the world’s fault for not recognizing that the Riordans were not
only different but right.”
“You’ve got him down wrong,” I said. “His ball game is pretty well over, and I think he knows it and doesn’t want grief like this for Buddy or anybody else.”
She put her fingers over her eyes, and I saw the wetness began to gleam on her cheeks.
“Don’t let it run away with you,” I said. “He might have gone to the hospital by now.” I stood up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. They were shaking, and she kept her face averted so I couldn’t see it.
It was a time not to say anything more. I rubbed the back of her neck until I felt her composure start to come back and her shoulders straighten. I picked up my whiskey glass and looked out the window while she got up and went into the bath. Behind me I could hear the water running.
The snow was frozen in broken stars around the edge of the window glass, and the shadows of the trees swept back and forth across the banked lawn. High up on the mountain behind the university I could dimly see the red beacon for the airplanes, pulsating against the infinite softness of the sky.
“I’m sorry,” Beth said, behind me, her face clear now.
“Do you want your drink?”
“I’d rather go to the hospital. You don’t mind, do you?” “No.”
“It’ll take me just a minute to dress.”
A few moments later she came back downstairs in a pair of corduroys and a wool shirt with a mackinaw under her arm. Her blue scarf was tied under her chin, and the flush in her face and the strands of black hair on her cheeks gave her the appearance of a young girl on her way to a nighttime ice-skating party.
I closed the door on her side of the Plymouth and put the ignition wires back together to start the engine. Her breath was steaming, and I could see her breasts rise and fall under the heavy mackinaw.
“If Buddy’s not at the room, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been by and gone back home,” I said as I drove slowly up the street.
“The head sister will know if he’s been there.”
“There’s another thing to think about, too. He might just talk to the doctor downstairs and go to sleep in the truck out on the street.”
“Just drive us there, Iry.”
We didn’t get past the receptionist’s desk. Frank Riordan was in intensive care, no one was allowed to see him, and the only persons in his family who had been at the hospital were Melvin and Pearl, and they had gone across the street to the all-night cafe.
“How’s he doing?” I said.
“You’ll have to ask the doctor when he comes down,” the receptionist said.
“When does he come down?”
“I don’t know. Are you a member of the family?”
“Where’s that little Irish nun that used to work here?”
“Sir?”
“There was an Irish sister that used to work on the second floor.”
“I don’t know who you mean.”
I walked outside with Beth toward the automobile. The snow had stopped blowing, and there was just a hint of blue light beyond the mountains in the east. The thin shale of ice over the gravel in the parking lot cracked under our feet.
“You want to go back home?” I said.
“No. Call Mrs. Riordan.”
“I don’t think we should do that.”
“She’s not sleeping tonight. One of the boys will answer the phone, anyway.”
“Beth, let it slide for tonight.”
“A phone call isn’t a lot to ask, is it?”
I put her in the Plymouth, started the engine, turned on the heater, and walked across the street to the cafe to use the public phone outside. My fingers were stiff with cold, and I had trouble dialing the numbers and depositing the coins for a toll call. Through the lighted window of the cafe I could see Melvin and Pearl drinking coffee in front of their empty plates.
Buddy’s little brother, Joe, answered the phone and said that Buddy hadn’t gotten back yet from the hospital, and no, there was no light on in his cabin, and no, sir, he would have seen the headlights if the pickup had come down the road.
I walked back across the street to the automobile and sat down heavily behind the steering wheel.
“Where do you want to go now, kiddo?” I said.
She shook her head quietly and looked straight ahead at the dark line of mountains. Her face was drained of emotion now, and her hands lay open in her lap. I put my arm briefly around her shoulders, and we drove back in silence to her house.
She wanted the glass of whiskey now, but I took it out of her hand and walked her upstairs to bed. It was dark in her bedroom, and she turned her head on the pillow toward the opposite wall, but I could see that her eyes were still opened when I covered her.
“I’ll be downstairs when you wake up,” I said, and closed the door softly behind me.
I fixed coffee in the kitchen while the blueness of the night began to fade outside and the false dawn rimmed the edge of the mountains. I poured a shot of whiskey into the coffee and smoked cigarettes until my lungs were raw and my fingers and the backs of my legs started to shake with fatigue and strain. I lay back on the couch and closed my eyes, but there were red flashes of color in my head and that persistent hum in my blood that I had felt in jail. I touched my brow, and my fingers were covered with perspiration.
I put on my coat and walked out into the cold, early light and drove to the sheriff’s office. The streets were empty, and newspapers in plastic wrappers lay upon the quiet lawns. Some of the kitchens in the houses were lighted, and occasionally I caught a glimpse of a workingman bent over his breakfast.
I walked up the courthouse steps, trying to light a cigarette in the wind. I was sweating inside my clothes, and when I entered the gloom of the hallway and smelled the odor of the spittoons and dead cigars, the hum started to grow louder in my head. Three sheriff’s deputies sat on wooden chairs in front of the dispatcher’s cage, reading parts of the newspaper and yawning. A drunk who had just bonded out of the tank was accusing the dispatcher of taking money out of his wallet while it was in Possessions.
“You used it to go bail,” the dispatcher said. The other deputies never looked up from their paper. Their faces were tired and had the greenish cast of men who worked all night.
“I had thirty-five goddamn dollars in there,” the drunk said.
“Get the hell out of here before I take you upstairs again,” one of the deputies said from behind his paper.
The dispatcher looked at me from his radio desk.
“Yes, sir?” he said.
I started to speak, but didn’t get the chance.
“What are you doing in here?” the sheriff’s voice said behind me.
His khaki sleeves were rolled up over his massive fat arms, and the splayed end of his cigar was stuck in the center of his mouth. He clicked his Mason’s ring on the clipboard that he carried in one hand.
“Do you have Buddy Riordan in jail?” I said.
“Should I?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s he been doing?”
“He didn’t come home last night.”
His head tilted slightly, and he narrowed his eyes at me.
“What is this, Paret?”
“I want to know if he’s in jail. That’s not hard to understand.”
He took the cigar out of his mouth and pushed his tongue into one cheek.
“Did you book Buddy Riordan in here last night?” he said to the dispatcher.
“No, sir.”
The sheriff looked back at me.
“Is that all you want?” he said.
“Sheriff, there’s something you might want to know,” the dispatcher said. “One of the deputies at the Ravalli office called on the mobile unit and said that three guys shot the hell out of Frank Riordan’s birds last night.”
The sheriff walked to the spittoon, his head bowed into position as though he were over a toilet, and spit a dripping stream into it.
“What was Buddy driving?” he said.
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I wanted to get back out into the cold air again, away from the hissing radiators and the indolent, flat eyes of the men looking at me.
“Forget it,” I said. “He’s probably on a drunk over in Idaho.”
“Don’t fool with me, son. I ain’t up to it this morning.”
I lit my cigarette and wiped my damp hair back over my head.
“Give me that accident report that come in from French-town,” the sheriff said to the dispatcher. He took his glasses out of his shirt pocket and squinted at the small writing on the paper.
“Was he driving a ’55 Ford pickup?” he said, pulling his glasses off his nose.
“Yes.” I felt something drop inside of me.
“Take a ride with me.”
He started walking down the hallway toward the front door, his waist like an innertube under his shirt. I remained motionless, the cigarette hanging in my mouth, watching his huge silhouette walk toward the square of dawn outside.
“You better go with him, mister,” the dispatcher said.
I caught up with the sheriff outside on the glazed sidewalk. I could feel my shoes slipping on the ice, but his very weight seemed to give him traction on the cement.
“All right, what are we playing?” I said.
“Get in.” But this time his voice was lower and more human.
I got in on the passenger’s side and closed the door. The sawed-off twelve-gauge pump clipped vertically against the dashboard knocked against my knees. He flicked on the bubble-gum light without the siren, and we headed west out of town. He was breathing heavily from the fast walk to the car.
“About an hour ago a ’55 pickup went off the road on 263 and rolled all the way down to the river,” he said.
My head was swimming.
“So what the hell are we doing?” I said. “You’ve got a junked truck in the river. You want me to identify it so you can give Buddy a citation?”
He opened the wind vane and flipped his cigar out. He waited a moment, and I saw his hands tense on the wheel before he turned to me with his pie-plate face.
“The driver’s still in there, Paret. It burned.”