He had opened a cage and picked up a large nutria. Its red eyes looked like hot bbs behind the fur, and its yellow buck teeth protruded from the mouth. The body was exactly like a rat’s, except much bigger and covered with long fur that grew like a porcupine’s quills, and the feet were almost webbed.
“I’ve never seen one outside of southern Louisiana,” I said. “I didn’t think they could live in a cold climate.”
“That’s what most people say. However, no one has advised the nutria of that fact. How much do you know about them?”
I shook a cigarette out of my pack and put it in my mouth. I had the feeling that I was about to be taught the rules of a new game.
“The McIlhenny tabasco family brought them from South America about 1900,” I said. “Supposedly, they were in cages on Marsh Island about twelve miles off the Louisiana coast, and after a storm smashed up their cages, they swam through waves all the way to land. Now they’re in every bayou and canal in south Louisiana. They’ll kill your dog if he gets in the water with them, and they can fill up a whole string of muskrat traps in a day.”
“I hope to eventually introduce them in the area. Do you think you’d like to help raise them?”
“At home they’re a pest, Mr. Riordan. They destroy the irrigation canals for the rice farms, and they breed like minks in heat.”
“Well, we’ll see how they do in colder climates.” Then, without a change in the voice, he said, “You murdered a man, did you?”
I had to wait a moment.
“That’s probably a matter of legal definition,” I said. “I went to prison for manslaughter.”
“I suppose those points are pretty fine sometimes,” he said.
“Yes, sir, they can be.”
“I signed for your parole transfer because Buddy asked me to. Normally, I stay as removed as I can from the dealings of the state and federal government, but he wanted you to come here. And so I’ve made some kind of contract with the authorities in Louisiana as well as in my own state. That involves a considerable bit on both of our parts. Do you understand me, Mr. Paret?”
I drew in on my cigarette and flipped it toward the fence. I could feel the blood start to ring in my palms.
“I have three years’ parole time to do, Mr. Riordan. That means that on a whim a parole officer can violate me back to the farm for an overdrawn check, no job, or just not checking in on the right date. Maybe he’s got a little gas on his stomach, half a bag on from the night before, or maybe his wife cut him off that morning. All he’s got to do is get his ball point moving and I’m on my way back to Angola in handcuffs. In Louisiana a P.V. means one year before you come in for a hearing again.”
“Did you ever do farm work outside of the penitentiary?” he said.
“My father was a sugar grower.”
“I pay ten dollars a day for bucking bales, and you eat up at the house for the noon meal. There’s a lot of work in the fall, too, if you care to drive nails and butcher hogs.”
He walked away from me on the worn-out heels of his cowboy boots toward the flatbed wagon, where his three boys were waiting for him. I wanted to be angry at him for his abruptness and his sudden cut into a private area of my soul, but I couldn’t, because he was simply honest and brief in a way that I wasn’t prepared for.
I drove to Missoula that afternoon and checked in with the parole office. My new parole officer seemed to be an ordinary fellow who didn’t think of me as a particular problem in his case load, and after fifteen minutes I was back on the street in the sunshine, with my hands in my pockets and a whole new town and a blue-gold afternoon to explore. Missoula was a wonderful town. The mountains rose into the sky in every direction, the Clark Fork River cut right through the business district, and college kids in innertubes and on rubber rafts floated down the strips of white water with cans of beer in their hands, shouting and waving at the fishermen on the banks. The town was covered with elm and maple trees, the lawns were green and dug with flower beds, and men in shirtsleeves sprinkled the grass with garden hoses like a little piece of memory out of the 1940s.
I walked down the street with a sense of freedom that I hadn’t felt since I went to the penitentiary. Even at my father’s house the reminders were there, the darkness of the house, the ancestral death in the walls, the graveyard being eaten away a foot at a time by the bayou, that black vegetable growth across the brain that puts out new roots whenever you come home. But here there was sun all over the sidewalks, some of which still had tethering rings set in them.
I went into places that had names like the Oxford, Eddie’s Club, and Stockman’s Bar, and it was like walking through a door and losing a century. Cowboys, mill workers, lumberjacks, bindle stiffs, and professional gamblers played cards at felt tables in the back; there was a bar without stools for men who were serious about their drinking, a counter for steaks and spuds and draft beer, the click of billiard balls in a corner, and occasionally a loud voice, a scraping of chairs, and a punchout that sent a man reeling into the plasterboard partition of the rest rooms.
I was eating a steak fried in onions in the Oxford when a man without legs tried to raise himself onto a stool next to me. He had pushed himself along the street and into the bar on a small wooden platform that had roller-skate wheels nailed under it, and the two wood blocks sticking out from the pockets of his pea jacket looked like someone’s beaten ears. One of the buckle straps on his stump had caught, and I tried to raise him toward the stool. His tongue clicked out across his bad teeth like a lizard’s.
“He don’t want you to help him, mister,” the bartender said.
“I’m sorry.”
“He can’t hear or talk. He got all blowed up in the war,” the bartender said. He filled a bowl with lima-bean soup and placed it on a saucer with some crackers in front of the crippled man.
I listened to him gurgle at the soup, and I had to look at the far end of the counter while I ate. The bartender slid another draft in front of me.
“It’s on the house,” he said, and then, with a matchstick in the corner of his mouth and his eyes flat, he added, “You visiting in town?”
“I’m staying in the Bitterroot with a friend and looking around for work. I guess right now I’m going to be bucking bales for the Riordans awhile.” I couldn’t resist mentioning the name, just like you put your foot in lighdy to test the water.
The reaction was casual and slowly curious, but it was there.
“You know Frank Riordan pretty good?”
“I know his son.”
“What the hell is Frank up to with this pulp mill, anyway?”
“He’s up to putting a lot of men out of work,” a man farther down the counter said, without looking up from his plate.
Oh shit, I thought.
“I don’t know anything about it,” I said.
“He don’t know anything about it,” the same man said. He wore a tin hat and a checkered shirt with long-sleeved underwear.
The bartender suddenly became a diplomat and disinterested neutral.
“I ain’t seen Frank in a long time,” he said. “He used to come in here sometimes on Saturday and play cards.”
“He’s got no time for that now,” a man eating next to the cripple said. “He’s too busy sitting on thirteen hundred acres of cows and making sure a dollar-fifty-an-hour man gets his pink slip. That’s Frank Riordan for you.”
The bartender wiped the rag over the counter in front of me as though he were rubbing out a piece of personal guilt. “Some people say that smokestack stinks like shit, but it smells like bread and butter to me,” he said, and laughed with a gastric click in the back of his throat, exposing his line of yellowed teeth.
I could feel the anger of the two men on each side of me, like someone caught between bookends. I put the fork and knife in my plate and lit a cigarette and smoked long enough to keep personal honor intact, then walked back into the sunshine. No more testing of reactions to names, I decided, and maybe I should have
a more serious talk with Buddy.
Earlier in the afternoon a gyppo logger had told me in a bar that I might get on with a country band in Bonner. I drove out of Missoula through Hellgate Canyon, a huge split in the mountains where the Salish Indians used to follow the Clark Fork and annually get massacred by the Crows and the Blackfeet (whence the name, because the canyon floor was strewn with skeletons when the first Jesuits passed through). I followed along the river through the deep cut of the mountains and the thin second growth of pine on the slopes until I reached the meeting of the Blackfoot and Clark Fork rivers, which made a wide swirl of dark water that spilled white and iridescent over a concrete dam.
Bonner was the Anaconda Company, a huge mill on the edge of the river that blew plumes of smoke that hung in the air for miles down the Blackfoot canyon. The town itself was made up of one street, lined with neat yards and shade trees and identical wood-frame houses. I hadn’t seen a company town outside of Louisiana and Mississippi, and though there was no stench of the sugar mill in the air or vision through a car window of Negroes walking from the sugar press to their wood porches in the twilight with lunch pails in their hands, Bonner could have been snipped out of Iberia Parish and glued down in the middle of the Rocky Mountains.
I pulled into the parking lot of a weathered gray building by the railroad crossing that had a neon sign on the roof that read: MILLTOWN UNION BAR, CAFE ANN LAUNDROMAT. There were electric slot machines inside the bar, winking with yellow horseshoes, bunches of cherries, and gold bars. Over the front door was the head of a mountain sheep covered with a plexiglass dome, and mounted on the wall over the jukebox was an elk’s head with a huge, sweeping rack. I talked with the owner at the bar about a lead-guitar job on the weekends, and while he pushed his coffee cup around in his saucer with a thick finger, I went to the truck and brought back my double case with the dobro inside and the Confederate flag sewn into the lining. The metal resonator set in the sound hole swam with the silvery purple reflection of the lights behind the counter, and I pulled the steel picks across the strings and floated the bar down the neck into the beginning of Hank’s “Love-Sick Blues.”
The dobro did it every time. It had paid for itself several times over in turning jobs for me. He said he would pay thirty-five dollars for Friday and Saturday nights and a three-hour session on Sunday afternoons, and I drove back through the Hellgate with the engine humming under the hood and the late sun red on the walls of the canyon and the deep current in the river.
The next day I went to work with Buddy bucking bales, digging postholes, and opening up irrigation ditches. The sky was immense over our heads, and the mountains were blue and sharp in the sunlight, and pieces of cloud hung in the pines on the far peaks. By midday our bare chests were running with sweat and covered with bits of green hay, and the muscles in my stomach ached from driving the posthole digger into the ground and spreading the wood handles outward. Buddy’s sister, Pearl, brought out a pitcher of sun tea with mint leaves and cracked ice in it and poured some into two deep paper cups, and we drank it while we sat on the back of the flatbed wagon and ate ham sandwiches. Her curly hair was bright on the tips in the sunlight, and the sun halter she wore with her blue jeans showed enough that I had to keep my attention on the sandwich to be polite. She didn’t like me, and I wished that Buddy had not tried to ignore that obvious fact.
“I’m going to visit the wife-o and kids Sunday, Jimmie’s birthday scene, and why don’t you and Melvin come along and we’ll watch the hippy-dippy from Mississippi here do his Ernest Tubb act up at the beer joint in Bonner,” Buddy said.
She put the top on the iced-tea pitcher and set it carefully on the tailgate. Her eyes went flat.
“I’ll have to ask Mel.”
“He’s always good for Sunday afternoon boozing,” Buddy said. “In fact, the only time he gets drunk is the night before he has to work. He goes roaring out of here to the college in the morning with a hangover that must fill up a whole classroom.”
I looked away at the cottonwoods on the river and put a cigarette in my mouth. I had a feeling that anything said next would be wrong. It was.
“You ought to hear this shitkicker, anyway,” Buddy said. “Plays like Charlie Christian when he wants to, but for some reason my coonass pal is fascinated with the hillbillies and Okies. Loves Jimmie Rodgers and Woody Guthrie, imitates Hank Williams, yodels and picks like Bill Monroe. It’s gooder than grits.”
“Let’s get on it, Buddy,” I said.
“He’s also sensitive about his sounds.”
I folded the remaining half of my ham sandwich in the wax paper and put it back in the lunch pail.
“Your father said he wanted those holes dug up to the slough before we quit,” I said.
“He’s loyal to employers, too. A very good man, this one,” Buddy said, hitting the wet slickness of my shoulder with his palm. I wanted to dump him off the tailgate.
“Hey, Pearl, wait a minute,” he said. “Ask Melvin, and maybe Beth can come along with us.”
She nodded without replying and walked across the hay-field, graceful and cool, her sun halter flashing a white line below her tan.
Buddy and I walked out to where the posts were laid at regular intervals on the ground along the fence line. I thudded the posthole digger in the hard dirt while he poured water out of a bucket into the hole.
“Man, I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I said.
He tilted the bucket downward, sluicing water over the wooden handle and the mud impacted between the blades, as though he were preoccupied with a large engineering problem.
“No shit, Buddy,” I said.
“There were other things there, Zeno. You just didn’t see them. I didn’t mean to piss in your shoe with Pearl. She married this university instructor, and he’s an all-right guy, but he’s got an eggbeater in his head most of the time, and she’s trying to keep up with whatever mood he’s in next. That means pack off to Alaska on snowshoes, join some sit-in deal in Alabama, or turn up Beethoven so loud on the hi-fi three nights in a row that it blows the old man out of his bedroom.”
I pulled the posthole digger out of the ground and knocked the mud from the blades.
“Well, that ain’t exacdy what was really going on there,” he said. “You see, I’m trying to get back with the wife-o, which might seem like a bad scene, but the boys are nine and eleven now, and they’re not doing worth a darn in school, and Beth is taking them to some kind of psychologist in Missoula. That’s the only outside thing that bothered me in the joint. I cut out on them after the old lady got me locked up one night, and I kept on going all the way to New Orleans.”
I laid aside the digger and placed the fence post in the hole while Buddy shoveled in dirt and rocks on top of it. His thin back was glistening, and it rippled with bone and muscle when he spaded in each shovel-load.
“Maybe this is a bad time to ask you,” I said, “but yesterday I was in a place called the Oxford, and I had the feeling that your father has declared war on everybody in this county.”
“Most of those guys have a log up their ass. You can’t take that kind of barroom stuff too seriously.”
“I think they were pretty serious.”
“Here’s the scene on that caper. They built this pulp mill on the river west of town, and some days the smell in the valley is so bad that you think an elephant cut a fart in your face. They make toilet paper or something up there. That’s right, man. All those beautiful ponderosa pines eventually get flushed down somebody’s commode in Des Moines. Anyway, the old man has got them in state court now, and if he wins his injunction, they shut down the whole damn thing. I guess I can’t blame most of those guys for being pissed. They don’t earn diddly-squat there, anyway, their union don’t do anything for them, and the only other work around here is seasonal. Sometimes I even wonder if the old man sees the other end of what he’s doing.”
He lit a cigarette while I started on the next hole. The leaves of the cottonwoods by the river f
lickered with sunlight in the breeze.
“But this is an old scene with him. He fought the Anaconda Company when they started polluting the Clark, and he helped stop a bunch over in east Montana that were catching wild horses and selling them to a dog-food company.” Buddy squatted down with the water can by the hole and puffed a minute on his cigarette. “He’s always got the right thing in mind, but he’s one of these guys that draws a line in the dirt, and then that’s it. He doesn’t see anything in between.”
We dug the last hole by the slough in the late afternoon, and I looked back at the long straight line of fence posts, rigid and thick in the ground, and felt a pride in their geometric progression from the front of the ranch to the mud bottom we were standing in. The grass bent in the wind off the river, and the sun already had a black piece cut out of it by a mountain peak. We threw the tools into the wagon bed and walked back through the fields to the cabin. I felt physically tired and satisfied in the way you do when you have bent yourself to a right task. The shadows of the mountains were moving across the valley, over the log houses, the hay bales in the fields, the stone walls, and the cords of wood piled by the barns, as the light receded and gathered in the trees on the far side of the river.
We fished with worms in the creek behind the cabin during the twilight, then fired the wood stove and broiled the cutthroat trout in butter and garlic salt. I took a can of beer and the Martin out on the front porch while Buddy turned the fish in the pan. I dropped the tuning into D, clicked my thumb pick across the bass strings, and went up the neck into a diminished blues chording that I had learned from Robert Pete Williams in Angola. The strings rang with moonlight, and I felt the deep notes reverberate through my fingers and forearm as though the wood itself had caught the beat of my blood. I bridged over into “The Wreck of the Ole 97,” hammering on and pulling off like A. P. Carter, the strings trembling with light and their own metallic sympathy.
He was going down the grade making ninety miles an hour