“Keep it straight into Missoula, Zeno. We want to get your arm flattened out so you can get into the shitkicker scene again. Then we’ll go over to Idaho later.”
I went on through the light at the junction and took the can of beer from between his legs.
“That’s what you don’t understand about acid, Iry,” he said. “You can look into people’s thoughts with it. Right on down into their ovaries.”
I parked the car in the shade of some elm trees by Saint Patrick’s Hospital and left Buddy outside. As I walked up toward the entrance in the bright fall air and spangle of sunshine, I turned around and saw Buddy’s half-topped boots resting casually over the edge of the driver’s window. The Irish nun who had been a friend to me before changed the dressings on my back with her cool fingers and then took me over to the X-ray room, where I was told that the crack in my arm had knitted well and I probably could have the cast sawed off in another week.
When I got back to the car, Buddy was sitting behind the wheel, drinking a hot beer and listening to a hillbilly radio station. His eyes were swimming with color.
“The heat came around and told me to get my feet out of the window,” he said. “They said it don’t look good around the hospital.”
“Let’s go to the Oxford. I’ll buy you a steak,” I said.
“They must have told you something good in there.”
“I get my cast off next week.”
He slipped across the seat when I opened the car door. I pulled out on the street and started to drive toward the Oxford. We crossed the bridge over the Clark Fork, and I looked away at the wide curve of green water and the white rocks engraved with the skeletons of dead insects along the banks. It was going to be a good day after all, with no thoughts of cops or parole violation or FBI fingerprint men in Helena. Buddy was probably right, I thought. The sheriff just wanted to spook me into jumping my parole so he could have me violated back to Angola, and if I kept my head on straight, I could probably walk out of the thing at the mill.
“Let’s get the steak later,” Buddy said.
“I’m flush and I don’t do this often,” I said. “A couple of T-bones and then we’ll have a few drinks with your photographer friend over at Eddie’s.”
“Just head on down the highway and I’ll give you the directions. You ain’t seen Idaho yet.”
“Why don’t we keep it solid today, Buddy, and just booze around a litte bit this afternoon and fish the river tonight?”
“It’s my car, ain’t it? Head it down the road, and I’ll tell you when to stop at this 1860 bar with bullet holes in the walls.”
“I don’t think this is cool. The rods knock on the highway like somebody put glass in the crankcase.”
“Turn left at the light or let me drive.”
We drove west along the river through the high canyons toward the Idaho line. When we climbed a grade toward a long span of bridge and looked down, the river shone blue and full of light, and the moss waved on the smooth boulders below the current. Just before the state line there was an old bar set back from the road against the base of a mountain. The rambling back part of the building was half collapsed, the windows were boarded, and a section of tin roof was torn up from the eave. But the bar itself was made of mahogany and scarred in a half-dozen places by pistol balls, with a long brass rail and a huge, yellow-stained baroque mirror that covered the entire wall.
Buddy ordered two whiskey sours before I could stop him, then dropped a quarter into the jukebox, which was located right next to a table where three workingmen were playing cards. They were annoyed, and they looked at him briefly before they moved to a table in back.
“They built this place when the railroad came through,” Buddy said. “The back of the building was all cribs. Up on the side of the mountain there’s about twenty graves of men that were shot right here.”
One of the cardplayers got up and turned the jukebox down.
“Hey, Zeno, you’re messing with my song,” Buddy called out.
I asked the bartender for two paper cups, poured our whiskey sours into them, and walked toward the door. Buddy had to follow me or drink by himself.
“What are you doing, man?” he said outside. “You can’t walk away every time some guy puts his thumb in your eye.”
“You want to bet?” I said.
The light was hard and bright, and the blue and green of the trees seemed to recede infinitely across the roll of mountains against the sky. Without looking at Buddy, I casually turned the car around the gas pump toward Missoula. His hand went out and caught the wheel, his forearm as stiff and determined as a piece of pipe.
“No, man, I got to deliver you to this other scene,” he said.
“All right, what kind of caper are we on to?”
“We’re going to a cathouse.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“Does that rub against some Catholic corner of your soul?”
“Aren’t we over the hill for that kind of stuff? I mean, don’t you feel a little silly sitting in a hot-pillow joint with a bunch of college boys and drunk loggers?”
“Well, you righteous son of a bitch. You eyeball everything that looks vaguely female, you get drunk and try to make out with some Indian guy’s wife, and then you got moral statements to make about your partner’s sex life. Some people might just call you a big bullshitter, Zeno.”
We crossed the state line and began to drop down into the mining area of eastern Idaho, a torn and gouged section of the state where everything that hadn’t been ruined by stripping had been blighted and stunted by the yellow haze that drifted off the smokestacks of the smelter plants. It was Indian summer in the rest of the northern Rockies, but here the acrid smoke made your head ache and your eyes wince, and the second growth on top of the destroyed mountains was the color of urine. At the bottom of the grade was Wallace, and beyond that, Smelterville, towns that were put together in the nineteenth century out of board, tin, crushed rock for streets, and some type of design on making the earth a gravel pit. The buildings in Wallace looked caved in, grimed with dirt and smoke from the smelters, and their windows were cracked and yellowed. Even the sidewalks sagged in the middle of the streets as though some oppressive weight were on top of them.
“You can really pick them, Buddy,” I said.
“Drive on up the hill to that big two-story wood house.”
The house sat up on a high, weed-filled lawn, with a wide sagging front porch and a blue light bulb over the door. The white paint was dirty and peeling, and crushed beer cans were strewn along the path to the steps.
“I’ll wait for you,” I said.
“None of that stuff. You’re not going to pull your Catholic action on your old partner.”
“I’m going to pass. This isn’t my scene.”
“You see that car at the bottom of the hill? That’s the deputy sheriff who watches this place, and if we keep fooling around he’s going to be up here and you can talk to him.”
“I’m telling you, Buddy, you better not get our ass worked over again.”
“Have a beer in the living room. Talk to the bouncer. He’s a real interesting guy. He has an iron bolt through both temples.”
“I’ll listen to the radio till you come out,” I said. I smiled at him and lit a cigarette, but there was nothing pleasant in his face.
He walked up the path and knocked on the torn screen door. A girl in blue jeans and a halter opened it, her face expressionless, the eyes indifferent except for a momentary glance, almost like curiosity, in my direction; then she latched the screen again without any show of recognition that a human being had walked past her.
Fifteen minutes later I heard people yelling inside, and then I heard Buddy’s voice: “You go for that sap and you’re going to be pulling a shank out of your throat with your fingernails.”
I walked quickly up the path, focused my eyes through the screen, and saw him facing an enormous, bull-necked man in the middle of the living room. The
braided leather tip of a blackjack stuck out of the big man’s back pocket. Buddy’s face was white from drinking, his shirt was ripped and pulled down on one shoulder, and a full whiskey bottle hung from his right hand.
“Turn around and walk out the door and you’re out of Indian country,” the bouncer said.
I put my hand through the torn screen, unlatched the door, and stepped inside. All the windows were drawn with yellow roll shades that must have been left over from the 1940s. An old jukebox with a cracked plastic casing stood against one wall, the colored lights inside rippling up and down against the gloom. A hallway separated by a curtain led back from the living room, and there was a garbage can in one corner that was filled with beer cans and whiskey bottles. In the half-light, mill workers and drunks left over from last night’s bars sat with the whores on stuffed couches and chairs that seemed to exude a mixture of dust, age, and stale beer. Their faces were pinched with a mean dislike for Buddy, for me, and even for each other. I wondered at my own passivity in allowing Buddy to lead us into this dirty little corner of the universe.
The bouncer’s face was as round as a skillet. He smiled with a look of pleasant anticipation.
“Well, I guess it’s guys like you that keep me honest and make me earn my pay,” he said. “But I’m afraid it’s a bad day at Black Rock for you boys.”
“Wait a minute, mister. We’re leaving,” I said.
“So leave. But if you bring your pet asshole back here again, we’ll have to whip some big bumps on him. Give him some real mean hurt. Take his mind off his tallywhacker so he don’t have to come here no more.”
“You notice how these guys have a quick turn for everything?” Buddy said. “They memorize all kinds of hep phrases for every life situation. But they put rock ‘n’ roll on their jukeboxes and pay their money to the cops and hand out blow jobs to the Kiwanis Club. Look at Mad Man Muntz here. He got his brains at the junkyard, he probably makes a buck an hour, but he comes on like the poet laureate of the brooder house.”
I walked over to Buddy and took him by the arm.
“Our bus is leaving,” I said.
“So long, you lovely people, and remember the reason you’re here,” he said. “You’re losers, you got one gear and it’s in neutral, and you hire this big clown to keep you safe from all your failures.”
I pulled hard on his arm and pushed him toward the door. The bouncer lifted his finger at him.
“You ought to go to church, boy. You got somebody looking over you,” he said.
The screen slammed behind us, and we walked down the path in the sunlight. The sharpness of the afternoon seemed disjointed and strange after the gloom and anger and bilious view of humanity in the whorehouse.
“I bought a bottle at the bar and was drinking a shot out of it when I saw the guy next to me buying drinks for him and his girl out of my change,” Buddy said as we drove down the hill toward the highway out of town. “I couldn’t believe it. Then he called me a pimp and put his cigarette ashes in my glass. The next thing I knew, his girl was trying to tear my shirt off my back. Man, I thought I saw people do some wild action in the joint, but that’s the bottom of the bucket, ain’t it?”
I drove without answering and wondered what had really taken place. We passed the town limits, and I stepped on the accelerator as we began the climb up the slope toward the blue tumble of mountains on the Montana line. In the rearview mirror the ugly sprawl of that devastated mining area and stunted town disappeared behind us.
“Yeah, that was a real geek show,” he said.
“Well, how the hell did you get there?” I said righteously, but I was angry at his irresponsibility and the physical danger he had put both of us in again. “They didn’t send out invitations to Florence, Montana. That’s their action every day back there, and you go on their rules when you walk through the door.”
I could feel his eyes on the side of my face; then I heard him take a drink out of the whiskey bottle. He didn’t speak for another five minutes, and the whistle of air through the window and my cigarette ashes flaking on my trousers began to feel more and more uncomfortable in the silence. I just couldn’t stay mad at Buddy for very long.
“How much did they hook you for the bottle?” I said.
“Twelve bucks. You want a shot?”
I drank out of the neck and handed it back to him. The warm bourbon made me wince and my arms tingle.
“Look, Zeno, what’s this lecture crap about?” he said.
“Jesus Christ, I just don’t want to get busted up again.”
“You could have canceled out early. You didn’t have to drive us up there.”
I didn’t have an answer for that one.
“You knew what type of scene we were floating into,” he said. “You better run the film backwards in your own gourd. You were clicking around about maybe improving your love life yourself.”
We dropped over the Montana line, and I really opened up the Plymouth. The front end was badly out of alignment, at least two bearings were tapping like tack hammers, and the oil smoke was blowing out the frayed exhaust in a long black spiral. The car frame shook and rattled, the doors vibrated on the jambs, and when I had to shift into second to pull a grade, the heat needle moved into the red area on the gauge and the radiator began to sing. Buddy pulled on the bottle and lit a cigarette. But before he did, he split a paper match with his thumbnail, as fast as anyone could pull one from a cover, and flipped the other half on the dashboard in front of me.
“That’s pretty good, ain’t it, Zeno?” he said. “I once beat a guy out of a whole deck of cigarettes by splitting thirty in fifty seconds.”
“Why don’t you forget all that prison shit?”
“Why don’t you forget about destroying my car because you’re pissed off?”
I let the Plymouth slow, and I heard Buddy drag off the bottle again. The sun had moved behind the edge of the mountains, and the yellow leaves on the cottonwoods along the river looked like hammered brass over the flow of the current. The blue shadows fell out in front of us on the highway, and the short pines at the base of the hills were already turning dark against the white slide of rocks behind them. The air became cool in minutes, the wind off the river in the canyon seemed sharper, and the banks of clouds on the mountains ahead took on the pink glow of a new rose above the trees.
Buddy pulled steadily on the bottle until he sank back against the door and the seat with an opened can of hot beer between his thighs.
It was almost dark when I saw the lights of Missoula in the distance. The last purple twilight hung on the high, brown hills above the valley, and a solitary airplane with its landing lights on moved coldly above the city toward the airport. The city seemed so quiet and well ordered in its soft glow and neat pattern of streets and homes and lines of elm and maple trees that I wondered how any community of people could organize anything that secure against the coming of the night and the morrow. For just a moment I let it get away inside of me, and I wondered, with a little sense of envy and loss, about all the straight people in those homes: the men with families and ordinary jobs and ordinary lives, the men who pulled the green chain at the mill and carried lunch pails and never sweated parole officers, cops, jail tanks, the dirty knowledge of the criminal world that sometimes you would like to cut out with a knife, all the ten years’ roaring memory of bleeding hangovers, whorehouses, and beer-glass brawls.
But this type of reflection was one that I couldn’t afford. Otherwise I would have to put an X through a decade and admit that my brother Ace was right, and the parole office, the psychologist in the joint, the army, everybody who had told me that I had a little screw in the back of my head turned a few degrees off center.
Buddy came out of his whiskey-acid stupor just before we reached the edge of town. His glazed eyes stared at the lights for a moment, then focused on me and brightened in a way that I didn’t like. He popped the hot beer open, and the foam showered against the windshield.
?
??Man, I feel like a dragon,” he said. “I think I’ll go see the wife-o.”
“I think you better not,” I said.
“Just save your counseling and tool on down by the university, Zeno.”
“You’re not serious?”
He drank out of the whiskey bottle, chased it with the beer, and then hit it again.
“That’s a little better,” he said. “I could just feel the first snakes getting out of the basket.”
I drove without speaking until I got to the turnoff that would take us back into the Bitterroots.
“Where the hell are you going? I said I wanted to go to Beth’s.”
“Let it slide, Buddy.”
“She’s my old lady, man.”
“That’s the last thing you want to do now.”
“Let Professor Riordan worry about that. Just get it on over there.”
“Where’s your head? How do you think she’s going to feel when you waltz up to the door like a liquor truck?”
“You should have gone into the priesthood, Iry. You can really deliver the advice about somebody else’s life.”
“All right, you’ve been telling me you want to go back with her. Pull a scene like this and you’ll disconnect from her permanently.”
“I guess all this crap comes out of the new Bronze Star you won this morning.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“You charged the hill again, didn’t you? Shot the heads off all them sixteen-year-old gooks in the trench. Went through the barn door after my old man when I couldn’t move.”
“Don’t drink any more.”
“You told me about it, right? You went up the hill when everybody else froze and dumped a BAR in their faces, and when you turned them over, you said they looked like children.”
“Put your bag of needles back in your pocket, Buddy. I’m not up to it.”