Buddy had strange Bird Parker rhythms in his head, and sometimes I couldn’t tell whether he was flying on Benzedrex inhalers or just high on a lot of wild riffs stripping off inside him. The hacks put him in lockdown for three days when they found a tube of airplane glue in his pocket on a routine shakedown, but he was still clicking to his own beat when they sent him back to the dormitory, and after that they simply dismissed him as crazy.
What they didn’t understand about Buddy was that he had turned in his resignation a long time ago: an “I casually resign” letter written sometime in his teens when he started bumming freights across the Pacific Northwest. He didn’t have a beef or an issue; he just started clicking to his own rhythm and stepped over some kind of invisible line.
And I guess that’s the thing I sensed in him, like a flash of private electricity, when I first met him in the exercise yard after I got out of the fish tank. The wind was cold and wet, and I was trying to roll a cigarette out of the few grains left in my package of state-issue tobacco. He was leaning against the wall, one foot propped up behind him, with his chafed wrists stuck down deep in his pockets. His pinstripe trousers hung low on his slender hips, and he had his denim jacket buttoned at the collar. The sharp bones of his face were red in the cold, and the short cigarette between his lips was wet with saliva.
“Take a tailor-made out of my coat pocket, Zeno,” he said.
I pulled the pack of Camels out and put one in my mouth.
“Take a couple extra. You won’t get any more issue until Saturday,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Is this your first jolt?”
“I spent some time in an army stockade.”
“That don’t count in here, Zeno. Come on over to my bunk in Ash after chow. I can give you some machine-made butts to tide you over.”
I had already started to regret accepting the cigarettes. I turned my face toward the wall and struck a match in my cupped hands.
“Look, man, I’m not a wolf,” he said. “I read your file in records, and we need a guy to play electric bass in our jazz band. It’s not a bad deal. We play over in the women’s prison sometimes, and Saturdays we just wax the recreation room instead of scrubbing out toilets. Besides, somebody ought to teach you how to split matches. Those are worth almost as much as cigarettes in here.”
The ranch ran back to the face of a canyon, and the main house was a sprawling two-story place made of logs with a wide front porch and side rooms that had been built with clapboard. Every room in the house was lighted, and the cliffs of the canyon rose up steep and black in the back under a full moon. When I got out of the truck, the cold air cut into me, even though it was only early August, and I put on my army-surplus jacket that I had used for duck hunting in Louisiana. A girl stepped through the lighted screen onto the front porch and held her hand over her brow to shield her eyes against the glare of my headlights.
“I’m looking for Buddy Riordan, ma’am. I don’t know if I have the right place. I got lost a couple of times.”
“He lives in the cabin where the road dead-ends by the trees. You’ll see his porch light.” Her voice was thin in the wind, and her silhouette seemed to shrink when she stepped back from the screen.
I drove to the end of the road, where there was a flat log building on the edge of the pines with a porch and swing and a brick chimney. The smoke from the chimney flattened out under the trees and turned in the wind off the canyon, and two fly rods were leaned against the porch with the lines pulled tight into the cork handles. Buddy came through the door barefoot, with a sleeveless nylon hunting vest on and a can of beer and a wooden spoon in his hand.
“Hey, Zeno, where the hell you been? I thought you’d be in yesterday.” He hit me on the shoulder with the flat of his hand like a lumberjack.
“I picked up some Indian guys in Wyoming and got sidetracked a while.”
“Those Indians are crazy people. Hey, you old son of a bitch, you pulled that last year okay. Not a dent on you.”
“I made an ass of myself in this Indian guy’s home. I got a little saccharine with his wife.”
“We all do funny things when we make the street. Forget it. Come on in. I’ve had a rack of venison in the pot since yesterday.”
He had a wood stove in a small kitchen at the back of the cabin, and the iron lids glowed around the edges with the heat of the burning sap and resin in the sawed pine limbs. He took a beer from the ice-box and put it in my hand. I sat at the table in the warm smell of the venison and felt the fatigue drain through my body He finished slicing some wild mushrooms on a chopping board and scraped them into the pot with the knife.
“A few mushrooms and some wine and wow. You got a nickle and I got a dime—let’s get together and buy some wine. And that’s what we got to do. Bop it down to the tavern and get some vino for the pot and some more brew, and then we’ll have dinner on the porch. No kidding, Iry, you look solid.”
“I feel like somebody kicked that highway up my butt.”
“Did you have any trouble your last year?”
“I made half-trusty six months before my hearing, so I was pretty sure on getting my good time. It wasn’t a sweat. Just scratching off days and staying out of the boss man’s eye.”
“I was sorry to hear about your father.”
I finished the can of Great Falls and lit a cigarette on one of the stove’s glowing lids.
“Let’s go get the brew,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight unless I put a case down.”
“You’ll be able to sleep here, partner. We have the best damn air in the United States. It blows down the canyon every night, and you won’t hear a sound except the creek behind the cabin and the pine cones hitting the roof. Look, it’s too late for you to meet the family, but tomorrow we’ll go up to the house for breakfast, and you can talk to the old man about work. You can make ten bucks a day bucking bales, and that’s not bad money around here. We got the rent free, and I catch fish every day up Bass Creek or in the Bitterroot, and with the little truck garden I have and the game out of the freezer, it’s a pretty cool way to live. I should have caught on to this when I was a kid, and I never would have built that five down there with you southern primitives. And speaking of that, man, you didn’t bring any of that red-dirt Louisiana weed with you, did you?”
“What do you think, Buddy?”
“Well, it was just a question, Zeno. The kids up at the university in Missoula have got some new shit around called LSD, and it takes your brain apart in minutes and glues it back together one broken piece at a time. I mean you actually hear colors blowing sounds at you. I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean to run on about my obsessions. Let’s travel for the brew and put some spotiotti in the pot.”
I rubbed my palm into my eye, and a red circle of light receded back into my head.
“Yeah, I guess I was fading out,” I said. “I still feel the truck shaking under me.”
“A little brew and a little food and you’ll be cool. Come on, I’ll introduce you to a Montana tavern. Meet the shitkickers. Pick up a little color your first night here. Something to expand that jaded southern gourd of yours. You know, I read an article once that said all you southern guys are sexual nightmares. That’s why your rest rooms are always filthy and full of rubber machines.”
“Are we going to get the beer, Buddy?”
“Right. Let’s take your truck, since I parked my car against a tree in the middle of the creek last night.”
We banged over the ruts in the corrugated road, with the truck rattling at every metal joint, until we bounced across the cattle guard onto the smooth gravel-spread lane that led back to the main highway through the Bitterroots. The moon had moved farther to the south, and I could see the dark water of the river cutting in silver rivulets around the willow trees on the edge of the sandbars. The mountains on each side of the valley were so large now in the moonlight that I felt they were crashing down upon me. The snow on the distant peaks was burn
ing with moonlight beyond the jagged silhouette of the pines, and each time we crossed a bridge over a small creek, I could see the white tumble of water over the rocks and then the quiet pools hammered with metal dollars at the end of the riffle.
We pulled into the parking lot of a clapboard tavern next to a general store with two gas pumps in front. Pickup trucks with rifles and shotguns set in racks against the rear windows were parked in the lot, and the stickers on their bumpers were a sudden click of the eye back into the rural South: I FIGHT POVERTY—I WORK; PUT THE BIBLE BACK IN OUR SCHOOLS; DON’T WORRY, THEY’RE ONLY NINETY MILES AWAY.
Buddy and I went inside and had a beer at the bar and asked for a cold case to go and a small bottle of sauterne. A stone fireplace was roaring with logs at the far end of the pool table, and there were elk and moose racks on the walls and rusted frontier rifles laid across deer hooves. Most of the men in the bar wore faded blue jeans, Levi or nylon jackets, scuffed cowboy and work boots, shirts with the color washed out, and beat-up cowboy hats stained with sweat around the band. They all looked big, physical, with large, rough hands and wind-cut faces. The men at the pool table stamped down the rubber ends of their cues each time they missed a shot, and slammed the rack hard around the balls for a new game, and two cowboys next to me were shaking the poker dice violently in the leather cup and banging it loudly on the bar.
I didn’t notice it at first, or I dismissed it as my natural excon’s paranoia, but soon I started to catch a glance from a table or a man at the bar’s elbow. Then, as I looked back momentarily to assure myself that there was nothing there, I saw a flick of blue meanness or challenge in those eyes, and I knew that I was sitting on top of something. I waited in silence for Buddy to finish his beer so we could go, but he ordered two more before I could touch him on the arm.
I felt the open stares become harder now, and I looked intently at the punchboard in front of me. At that moment I thought how strange it was that, even though I was a grown man, eyes could feel like a wandering deadness on the side of my face. I tried to compensate with a silly commitment to my cigarette and the details in the ashtray, and then I walked to the rest room with the instinctive con’s slink across the yard, hands low in the pockets, cool, the shoulders bent just a little, the knees loose and easy.
But when I got back to the bar, the stares were still there. No one seemed to realize that I was a Louisiana badass. And Buddy was on his third beer.
“Hey, what the hell is going on?” I said quietly.
“Don’t pay any attention to those guys.”
“What is it?”
“It’s copacetic, Zeno. By the way, you looked very cool bopping into the pisser.”
“Shit on this, Buddy. Let’s get out of here.”
“Take it easy, man. We can’t let a few hot faces run us off.”
“I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like fooling in somebody else’s trouble.”
“Okay, let me finish and we’ll split.”
Outside, I put the cardboard case of Great Falls in the back of the truck and turned around in the gravel parking lot. I shot the transmission into second gear and wound it up on the blacktop. One jagged piece of mountain cut into the moon.
“So what was that stuff about?”
“The old man has been pissing people off around here for years, and right now he’s got them all on low boil.”
“What for?”
“He’s trying to get the new pulp mill shut down, which means that about four hundred guys will lose their jobs. But forget it, man. It don’t have anything to do with you. Those guys back there just like to snort with their virility when they have a chance.”
We crossed the cattle guard and passed the darkened main house on the ranch. The canyon walls behind the house were sheer and gray in the moon’s reflection off the clouds.
“Tomorrow you got to meet my family,” Buddy said. “They’re unusual people. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t burned them so bad.”
Then I realized that Buddy was drunk, because in the time I had known him, he had never indulged himself in private confession unless he was floating on Benzedrex inhalers or the occasional weed we got from the Negroes.
He poured the sauterne into the pot of venison and sprinkled black pepper and parsley on top of it, then replaced the iron lid and let it marinate for a half hour while we drank beer and I tried to retune my dobro with fingers as thick and dull as a ruptured ear.
“I never did figure why you stayed with that hillbilly shot,” he said, “but you do it beautiful, man. Did you ever finish that song you were working on?”
The blood had gone out of his face, and his cigarette had burned down close between his fingers.
“No, I’ve still got it running around in pieces.”
“Do ‘Jolie Blonde,’ man.”
I picked it out on the dobro and sang in my bad Cajun French while Buddy turned the venison in the pot with a wooden spoon. His white face glowed in the heat of the stove, and for a moment he looked as preoccupied and solitary as the man I had met over two years before in the yard at Angola.
We dragged the kitchen table onto the porch and ate the venison out of tin plates with garlic bread and an onion-and-beet salad that Buddy had chopped into a wooden bowl. I hadn’t had venison in a long time, and the mushroom and wine sauce was fine with the taste of the game, and as I watched the wind blowing snow off the top of the canyon, I knew that everything was going to be all right.
But I should have recognized it at the bar. Or at least part of it. It was there, and all I had to do was look at it.
In the morning the sun broke across the blue ridge of mountains, and the wet, green meadows shimmered in the light. The shadows at the base of the mountains were purple like a cold bruise, and as the morning warmed and the dew burned away on the grass, the cattle moved slowly into the shade of the cottonwoods along the river. Buddy and I fished with wet flies in the creek behind his cabin and caught a dozen cutthroat trout out of the deep pools that turned in eddies behind the rocks. I would crouch down on my haunches so as not to silhouette against the spangle of sunlight through the trees, and then I’d let the fly sink slowly to the bottom of the pool; a cutthroat would rise suddenly off the gravel, his brilliant rim of fire around the gills flashing in the sun, and the fly rod would arch down to the water with a steady, throbbing pull.
We cleaned the fish and took them up to the main house for breakfast. Piles of wood cut in round chunks with a chainsaw were stacked high next to the barn wall, and in the side lot there was the rusted-out skeleton of an old steam tractor with dark pigweed growing through the wheels. In back were at least fifty bird pens made with chicken wire and wood frames, and ducks, geese, and breeds of grouse and pheasant that I had never seen before wandered around the feed pens and watering pools located all over the yard.
“That’s the old man’s aviary,” Buddy said. “It’s probably the biggest in the state. He’s got birds in there from all over the world, which is one reason why I live in the cabin. You ought to hear those sons of bitches when they crank up at four in the morning.”
We browned the trout in butter, and Buddy’s mother cooked a huge platter of scrambled eggs and pork chops with sliced tomatoes on the side. The dining table was covered with an oil cloth thumbtacked to the sides, and Buddy’s father sat at the head, waiting quietly until each member of the family was seated before he picked up the first plate and started it around the table. Buddy’s three younger brothers, all in high school, sat opposite me, their faces eagerly curious and yet polite about their brother’s ex-convict friend. Their skin was tan, and there wasn’t an ounce of fat on their bodies, and in their blue jeans and faded print shirts rolled over their young, strong arms, they looked like everything that’s healthy in America.
Buddy’s sister and her husband, an instructor at the university, sat at the far end of the table, and for some reason they made me uncomfortable. I had the teacher made for a part-time agrarian romanticist or an eastern c
ollege man on a brief excursion into the life of his wife’s family. The smile and the handshake were too easy and open—and dismissing. She favored her mother, a well-shaped woman with clear skin and blue eyes that had a quick light in them, but none of the same cheerfulness was in the daughter’s face. The daughter was pretty, with sun-bleached curly hair and beautiful hands, but there was a darkness inside her that marred the rest of it, and I could sense a resentment in her because I was someone whom Buddy had known in prison and had brought to their home.
But Buddy’s father was the one who I realized instinctively was no ordinary person. His shoulders were square and hard, his neck coarse with sunburn and wind, and the edges of his palms were thick with callus and there were half-moon carpenter’s bruises on his fingernails. He was a good-looking man for his age. He combed his thin, brown hair straight back over a wide forehead, and his gray eyes looked directly at you without blinking. He didn’t have that soft quality to the edge of the bone structure in the face that most Irish have, and his back stayed straight in the chair and never quite rested against the wood. He took the silver watch on its chain from his blue-jeans pocket and looked at it a moment as though seeing it for the first time.
“I guess we ought to start getting the bales up on the wagon. You ready, boys?” he said.
The three younger brothers got up from the table and started to follow him through the kitchen; then he turned, almost as an afterthought, and looked back at me with those gray, unblinking eyes.
“I think I have something out in the lot that you might be interested in seeing, Mr. Paret,” he said.
Buddy grinned at me over his coffee cup.
I walked with Mr. Riordan and the three boys into the backyard. The whole expanse of the valley was covered with sunshine now, and the bales of green hay in the fields and the click of light on the Bitterroot River through the trees and the heavy shadows down the canyon walls were so heart-sinking that I had to stop and fold my arms across my chest in a large breath.
“Have you ever seen one of these fellows before?” Mr. Riordan said.