“The people who control their livelihood. All the eastern money that gives them a job and tells them at the same time that they’re working for themselves and some pioneer independent spirit. They tried to organize unions here during the depression, and they got locked out until they begged to work. So they think that any change is trouble, and they’ve told themselves that for so long now that they’ve come to believe it.”
“You have more tolerance than I do.”
“I imagine that you made the same type of realizations in growing up in the South, or you would have left it a long time ago,” he said.
He set his end of the cage down by the edge of the pond and began to roll a cigarette, his gray eyes focused intently on the quiet swell of water around the pile of dead and polished cottonwoods and pines that had been cut through at the base of the trunks by beavers until they toppled into the center of the creek. The wood had turned bone white from sun and rot, and tree worms had left their intricate designs in the smooth surface after the bark had cracked and shaled away in the current. On each side of the pile, two feet under the current, were burrowed openings where the beavers could enter and then surface into a dry, sheltered domed fortress. Behind the dam, where the gnawed stumps of the cottonwoods protruded from the water and formed a swift eddy against the surface, cutthroat trout, brookies, and Dolly Vardens balanced themselves against the pebble bottom, drifting sideways momentarily when food floated downstream toward them, their color a flash of ivory-tipped fins and gold and gills roaring with fire.
I unhooked the cage door and tilted the cage upward into the pond. At first the nutrias clung to the wire mesh with their strange, webbed feet; then they clattered over one another and splashed into the water, their pelts beaded with light. They turned in circles, their red eyes like hot bbs, then swam toward the log pile.
“I don’t think the beavers are going to like these guys,” I said.
“Then one of them will move,” Mr. Riordan said.
I looked at him to see if there was a second meaning there. If there was, it didn’t show in the rigid profile and the lead-gray eyes that were still focused intently on the pond.
“You see those grouse tracks on the other side?” he said. “There haven’t been grouse up this creek since I was a boy. Two years ago I turned some blues loose about fifty yards from here, and they still water at this hole.”
He dropped the cigarette stub from his fingers into the shallows, as though it were an afterthought, and we got back in the pickup and started down the grade in second gear. Through the pines bordering the road I could see the blue immensity of the valley and the metallic sheen of the Bitterroot River winding through the cottonwoods.
“I’ll buy you a steak at the Fort Owen Inn,” he said.
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“You better take advantage of it. I don’t do this often. Besides, I’ll show you the place where the Montana vigilantes hanged old Whiskey Bill Graves.”
“I’ll bet some of the locals put a monument up there.”
He cleared his throat and laughed. “How did you know?”
“I just guessed,” I said.
It was Saturday afternoon, and the Inn was full of famlies from Stevensville and Corvallis and Hamilton. They sat around the checker-cloth tables like pieces of scrubbed beef, stuffed in their ill-fitting clothes and chewing on celery and radishes out of the salad bowl. A few of the men nodded at Mr. Riordan when we walked in, but I had the feeling that we were about as welcome there as cow flop. He slipped his sheep-lined jacket on the back of the chair and ordered two whiskies with draft chasers.
“Are you sure you want to eat here?” I said.
“Why shouldn’t we?”
I saw the same type of deliberate nonrecognition in his face that I used to see in my father’s when he refused to accept the most obvious human situation.
“It was just an observation,” I said.
He drank the whiskey neat, his lead-gray eyes blinking only once when he swallowed. He sipped off the top of the beer and set the mug evenly on the tablecloth.
“You don’t care for Jim Beam?” he said.
“I have to work tonight. Musicians can get away with almost anything except showing up high.”
His eyes went past me, into the faces of the people at the other tables; then he looked back at me again.
“You have to use that kind of caution in your work, do you?” he said.
I drank out of the beer.
“I have a habit of falling into the whole jug when I get started on bourbon,” I said. I smiled with my excuse, but he wasn’t really talking to me anymore.
He took his package of string-cut tobacco out of his pocket and creased a cigarette paper between his thumb and forefinger. His nails were broken back to the cuticle and purple with carpenter’s bruises. But even while the tobacco was filling and shaling off the dented paper, before he wadded it all up and dropped it out of his palm into the ashtray, I already saw the dark change of mood, the vulnerable piece in his stoic armor, the brass wheels of disciplined empathy shearing against one another. At all those other tables he was at best a tolerable eccentric (since it was a Saturday afternoon family crowd that would make allowances).
“You want to drink at the bar?” I said.
“That’s a good idea.”
We walked between the tables into the small bar that adjoined the dining room, and Mr. Riordan told the waitress to serve our steaks in there.
“How are you, Frank?” the bartender said. I recognized him as one of the volunteer firemen who had come to the ranch when the barn burned.
“Pretty good, Slim. Give this man here a beer, and I’ll take a Beam with water on the side.”
The bartender set a double-shot glass on the counter and continued to pour to the top.
“Just one,” Mr. Riordan said.
“I like to give away other people’s whiskey.” The bartender glanced sideways at the empty stools and into the dining room. “Did you hear anything about who might have had that gasoline can?”
“No.”
“There were some guys drunk in here the other night talking about lighting a fire to somebody’s ass.”
Mr. Riordan rolled the whiskey back against his throat and swallowed once, deeply, the gray eyes momentarily bright.
“Who were they?” he said.
“I think one of them drives a tractor-trailer out of Lolo.”
“Slim, why in the hell would a truck driver want to burn me out?”
“I don’t know. I just told you what I heard them saying.”
“And you don’t know this man’s name.”
“Like I said, maybe I’ve seen him pulling out of Lolo a couple of times. I thought I might be of some help to you.”
Mr. Riordan clicked his fingernail on the lip of the glass.
“Well, next time call me while they’re here, or ask them to leave their name and address.”
The bartender’s lips were a tight line while he poured into the glass. He set the bottle down, lit a cigarette, and walked to the rounded end of the bar and leaned against it, with one foot on a beer case and his back to us. Then he squeezed his cigarette in an ashtray and took off his apron.
“I’m going on my break now,” he said. “Pour what you want out of the bottle, and add it on to your dinner bill.” I could see the color in his neck as he went through the doorway.
I shook my head and laughed.
“Buddy told me you had a private sense of humor,” Mr. Riordan said.
“I can’t get over the number of people around here who always have a fire storm inside themselves,” I said.
“Oh, Slim’s not a bad fellow. Actually, his problem is his wife. Her face would make a train turn left on a dirt road.” He was into his third shot, and the blood was starting to show in his unshaved cheeks. “One time he came in on a tear from the firemen’s picnic, and she sewed his bed sheet down with a sail needle and wore him out with a quirt. He got baptized at the Bapt
ist church the next Sunday.”
When he grinned, his teeth looked purple in the light from the neon beer sign above the bar.
“Do you believe what he said about that man in Lolo?” I said.
“No. But it’s not important, anyway.”
“It’s pretty damn important when they’re setting fire to your home and your animals.”
It was rash, and I hated my impetuosity even before I saw his face fix mine in the mirror behind the bar. The skin was tight against the bone, the eyes even, his red-check wool shirt buttoned like a twisted rose under his neck.
“I think I know who they are,” he said, his voice low and intense. “I don’t know if I could put them in the penitentiary, but I could probably do things to them myself that would make them never want to destroy a fine horse again. But that won’t stop others like them, and it won’t change the minds of those people in the dining room, either.”
The waitress brought our steaks, thick and swimming in blood and gravy, a piece of butter on the charcoaled center, surrounded with boiled carrots and Idaho potatoes. The meat was so tender and good that the steak knife clicked against the plate as soon as you cut into it.
Mr. Riordan finished his bourbon, then began to cut at the steak, his back rigid and his elbows at an angle. The steak slipped sideways on the plate and knocked potatoes and gravy all over the bar.
“Well,” he said, and picked up the bartender’s towel. He had a good edge on, and I could feel him deciding something inside himself. He pushed the plate away with his fingertips, rolled a cigarette slowly, and poured again from the bottle of Jim Beam. “Go ahead and eat. Remind me in the future to stay away from morning whiskey.”
It was colder when we walked outside, and the snow clouds had covered the sun. The wind bit into my face and made my eyes water. A few early mallard ducks were winnowing low over the cottonwoods on the river. Mr. Riordan walked across the gravel to the truck as though the earth was about to shift on its axis. He took the keys out of his overalls pocket and paused at the driver’s door.
“I think you probably want to drive a truck again,” he said, and put the keys in my hand.
As we rolled along the blacktop toward the ranch, he looked steadily ahead through the windshield, his shoulder sometimes slipping momentarily against the door. He started to roll another cigarette, then gave it up.
“What do you plan to do in the future?” he said, because he felt that he had to say something.
“Finish my parole. Take it easy and cool and slide with it, I guess.”
“You probably have about thirty or forty years ahead of you. Do you think about that?” The movement of the truck made his head nod, and he blinked and widened his eyes.
“I’ve never gotten around to it.”
“You should. You don’t believe you’ll be fifty or sixty. Or even middle-aged. But you will.”
I looked over at him, but his eyes were focused on the blacktop. His large, worn hands lay on his thighs like skillets. The back of his left hand was burned with a thick white scar, hairless and slick as a piece of rubber. He cleared his throat, blinked again, and then his eyes faded and closed. He breathed as though he were short of breath.
Buddy had told me about his old man riding for five bucks a show on the Northwestern rodeo circuit during the depression. In 1934 he couldn’t make the mortgage payments for seven months on an eight-hundred-acre spread outside of Billings, and a farm corporation out of Chicago bought it up at twenty dollars an acre. They knocked the two-story wood home flat with an earth grader, bulldozed it up in a broken pile of boards, burned it and pushed it in a steaming heap into the Yellowstone River. Mr. Riordan pulled his children and wife around in a homemade tin trailer on the back of a Ford pickup through Wyoming, Utah, and California, working lettuce, topping carrots and onions, and picking apples at three cents a crate.
He took a job in Idaho on a horse farm by the Clearwater, breaking and training Appaloosas for a man who provided rough stock on the rodeo circuit. In a year and a half of stinting, eating welfare potatoes and listening to the wind crack off the mountain and blow through the newspaper plugged in the trailer’s sides, he put away four hundred dollars in the People’s Bank of Missoula. It all went down on the ranch in the Bitter-roots. He had no idea of how he could make the first mortgage payment. But nevertheless it went down, and he pulled the tin trailer up to the house, stomped down the chicken-wire fence with his boot, let the kids out of the trailer door into a yard full of pigweed and cow flop, and said: “This is it. We’re going to do it right here.”
He stayed two days at the house and then left Mrs. Riordan to clean, scrub, and boil an entire ranch to cleanliness while he followed the circuit through Oregon and Washington and Alberta. He worked as a pickup man and hazer, then rode bulls and broncs for prize money. In Portland he drew a sorrel that had a reputation as an easy rocker, but when the sorrel came out of the chute, he slammed sideways into the gate and then started sunfishing. Mr. Riordan stayed on for six seconds, and then he was twisted sideways on the horse’s back with his left hand wound in the leather. The pickup men couldn’t get the bucking strap off. The leather pinched Mr. Riordan’s hand into a shriveled monkey’s paw, and the bones snapped apart like twigs.
His rodeo career ended six months later at Calgary. He had won forty dollars that afternoon in the calf roping and had enough money for his trip back to Montana and the entry fee in another event. So that night under the lights he entered the bulldogging competition and drew a mucus-eyed, blood-flecked black bull with alabaster horns that had already taken out two riders and ground a clown into a board fence. The rope dropped, and Mr. Riordan bent low over the quarter horse and raced even with the bull toward the far end of the arena, the judge’s clock ticking inside of him with his own heartbeat and the blood rushing in his head as he leaned out of the saddle, waiting for that right second to come down on the horns with both hands, the weight perfectly balanced, the thighs already flexed like iron for the sudden brake against the earth and the violent twist of the bull’s neck against his chest. But he misjudged his distance and pushed the quarter horse too hard. When he left the saddle, one arm went out over the bull’s face, the other hand grabbed a horn as though he wanted to do a gymnastic pushup, and his body folded into the horns just as the bull sat on all four legs and brought his head up. He was impaled through the lung in a way that could be equaled only by a medieval executioner. The blood roared from his nose and mouth while he was twisted and whipped like a rag doll on the boss of the horns and the pickup men and clowns tried to pull him free. The bull dipped once, knocking him into the sawdust and horseshit, then trampled over him in a shower of torn sod.
Buddy said he should have been dead three times during his first week in the hospital, and the surgeon who cut out part of his lung told Mrs. Riordan that even if he lived, he would probably be an invalid the rest of his life. But four months later he got off the train in Missoula (thirty pounds lighter and as pale as milk, Mrs. Riordan said) with a walking cane, a tan western suit on, a gold watch in his vest, and an eight-hundred-dollar cashier’s check from the Rodeo Cowboys’ Association. While he was on the circuit through all those dusty shitkicker depression towns, he had put his money together with a rider named Casey Tibbs, who at that time saw the profit to be made in buying rough stock and trained horses for Hollywood films.
I had the heater on in the truck as we bounced along the corrugated road toward the main house, where I planned to let Mr. Riordan off, but the cold seemed to gather and swell in all the plastic and metal of the cab, and even the windshield looked blue against the cold sky. The grass along the irrigation ditch was dry and stiff in the wind, or a momentary sear brown when a gust out of the canyon blew it flat against the ground. Flurries of snow were starting to whirl out of the gray sun and click in broken crystals against the glass. It was a good day for pine logs burning and snapping and bursting into resinous flames in a stone hearth, with mulled buttered rum in flagons and
tin plates full of venison stew and French bread.
“It’s early this year,” Mr. Riordan said.
“Sir?” I said, because I had thought he was still asleep.
“It’s early for snow.” His eyes were squinted at the canyon behind his house. “The deer will be down early this year. As soon as a snow pack forms on that first rise, they’ll move down to feed along the drainage just the other side of my fence. The grouse move down about the same time.” He straightened himself in the seat and opened the window slightly to let the wind blow into his face. “Where are you going?”
“To your house.”
“Let yourself off at the cabin and I’ll take the truck home.”
“I can walk across the field.”
“Son, just do what I tell you. Besides, Buddy is probably wondering where we’ve been.” His breath was heavy with whiskey.
I backed the truck around in the center of the road and drove back to the Y fork that divided off toward Buddy’s cabin. I could see Buddy on the front porch in a red wool shirt and a pair of corduroys with a white coffee cup in his hand.
“I don’t guess there’s a need to take up our conversation with him, is there?” Mr. Riordan said.
I didn’t want to answer him or even acknowledge his presumption. But he was still drunk, his gray eyes staring as flatly at me as though he were looking down a rifle barrel.
“No, sir, I don’t guess there is,” I said.
I got out of the truck, and he slipped behind the wheel, clanked the transmission into first with the clutch partially depressed, the gears shearing into one another like broken Coke bottles, then popped the pedal loose and bounced forward across the field toward his house. I heard him shift into second, and the transmission whined as though there were a file caught in it.
Buddy walked toward me off the porch with his cup of coffee in his hand. His face was pinched in the wind.
“What happened to the old man?” he said.
“He got the sun in his eyes.”
“I don’t believe it. The old man really drunk? He don’t get drunk.”
“He had some bad stuff working in him back there in the restaurant.”