When his whistle broke into a scream.
They found him in the wreck with his hand upon the throttle
He was scalded to death in the steam.
Buddy walked out on the porch with a piece of trout between his fingers and drank out of my beer can on the railing.
“That sounded fine, babe,” he said. He sat on the railing, and the moonlight broke around his shoulders. I took the cigarette from between his fingers and put it in my mouth. The mountains were like a glacial blackness against the sky.
“I know what you’re thinking about,” he said. “You don’t have to, man. It’s going to be cool.”
That was Thursday.
FIVE
On Sunday morning, Buddy, his sister, her husband, and I went into Missoula. It was a fine day for a birthday party in a green backyard, and Buddy had bought a claw mitt and spinning reel for his eleven-year-old boy, and a Swiss army knife full of can openers and screwdrivers for his younger son. I was surprised at how close Buddy was to his children. After we cracked away the rock salt and ice from the hand-crank icecream freezer, Buddy served each plate at the table under the maple tree, lit the candles in a glow of pink light and icing, and walked on his hands in the grass while the children squealed in delight.
He wasn’t as successful with his wife, Beth. Her manner was quiet and friendly toward him, one of a shared intimate knowledge or perhaps an acceptance out of necessity. But I felt that if he had not been the father of her children, he wouldn’t occupy even this small space in her life. I sat against the tree trunk and drank a can of beer, and as I watched Buddy talking to her, his arms sometimes flying in the air, his face smiling and his slacks and sport shirt ironed with sharp creases (and her eyes fading with a lack of attention and then quickening when one of the children spilled ice cream into his lap), I felt like an intruder in something that I shouldn’t see, particularly with Buddy. He had always had a crapshooter’s eye for any situation, but this time he was all boxcars, deuces, and treys.
She was certainly good to look at. Her hair was black with a light shine in it, and her white skin didn’t have a wrinkle or freckle on it. She was a little overweight, but in a soft way, and she stood with her knees close together like a school girl, and the smooth curve of her stomach and her large breasts brought back all my stunted sexual dreams and sleepless midnight frustration.
Later, Buddy insisted that she go with us to the bar in Milltown. She began clearing the table of paper plates and talking in an oblique way about the children’s supper, and Buddy walked away to the neighbor’s porch, knocked loudly on the jamb, then crossed the lawn again, his face set in a purpose, and started knocking on the other neighbor’s door. I saw the anger in his wife’s eyes for a moment; then her lips pressed together, and she patted the two boys softly on the shoulders and told them to finish cleaning the table.
She sat between us in the pickup, and Buddy’s sister and her husband followed us through Hellgate Canyon along the river to Milltown. Because it was Sunday, yellow life rafts full of beer drinkers in swimming suits, their bodies glistening with tan, roared down through the riffle in a spray of water and sunlight and happy screams of terror against the canyon walls. One raft struck against a boulder, the rubber bow bending upward while the white water boiled over the stern; then it swung sideways into the current like a carnival ride out of control while the people inside tumbled over one another and sent ropes of beer foam into the air.
I looked into the rearview mirror and saw Melvin, Buddy’s brother-in-law, driving with both arms folded on top of the wheel and a beer bottle in his hand while the car drifted back and forth toward the shoulder. He had started drinking early at the birthday party, and before we left, he had poured a boilermaker in the kitchen.
“I’d better pull off and let you take that fellow’s wheel,” I said.
“Don’t do that, man,” Buddy said. “He’ll want to fight. He’s a real Irish drunk.”
“He’s about to put himself and your sister all over those rocks.”
“You’d have to pull him from behind that steering wheel with a chain,” Buddy said. “Right now he’s probably talking about joining a revolution in Bolivia. You know, right after I got out of the joint—” Buddy stopped momentarily and touched a piece of tobacco on his lip, his eyes uncertain in front of his wife’s stare through the windshield—“I hadn’t met the guy and he asked me how you burn a safe, because he had some friends who were going to peel one in California for the revolution and he didn’t know if they could do it right. I mean he didn’t blink when he said it.”
In the mirror I saw the car rip a shower of gravel out of the shoulder and float back toward the center stripe.
“Let’s get some coffee and a sandwich at the truck stop,” I said.
“Go ahead. He’ll be all right,” Beth said.
I glanced at her calm, lovely face in the cab, and for just a second I felt the touch of her thigh against mine and realized that I hadn’t ridden close to a woman in a vehicle for over two years and had forgotten how pleasant it could be.
“Yeah, don’t stop there, man,” Buddy said. “They don’t sell booze, and he’ll make up for it by trying to get it on with the lumberjacks. Even the old man thinks he’s got a lightning bolt in his head. He came into the house one night blowing some green weed and turned up his hi-fi until the plates were shaking in the cupboard. The birds were flapping in the pens, and the old man came up the stairs like a hurricane.”
I put the truck into second gear and slowed for the turn across the railroad embankment into the white shale parking lot in front of the bar. There was already a large afternoon crowd in the bar, and somebody was tuning an electric bass and blowing into the microphone over the roar of noise. Melvin bounced across the tracks, fishtailed on the back springs, and slid with his brakes in a scour of earth three inches from my front fender. His face was almost totally white, and he had a filter-tipped cigar in the middle of his mouth. He leaned toward the passenger’s window to speak, and his wife averted her face from his breath.
“A little Roy Acuff this afternoon, cousin,” he said.
I nodded at him and rolled up the window.
“Say, Buddy, I’ve only played twice with these guys,” I said. “It’s a good gig and I want to keep it.”
“It’s solid, babe. Just go in there and do the Ernest Tubb shot. We’ll take care of this guy.”
“I’m not putting you on,” I said.
“Go inside. It’ll be all right,” Beth said.
She was a princess inside the bar. After I began the first number on the bandstand, Melvin stood below the platform with a shot glass in one hand and a draft beer in the other, his face happily drunk. He swayed on his feet, talking with a fractured smile into the amplified sound; then she took him by the elbow and led him away to the dance floor.
I did the lead with my Martin on our second song, “I’m Moving On,” and the bar became quiet while I held the sound box up to my chin and played directly into the microphone. I ran Hank Snow’s chord progressions up and down the frets, thumping the deep bass notes of a train highballing through Dixie while I picked out the notes of the melody on the treble strings with my fingernail. I heard the steel try to get in behind me before I realized that I had been riding too long, and I moved back down the neck into the standard G chord on the second fret and tapered off into the rest of the band with a bass roll. The crowd applauded and whistled, and a man at the bar shouted out, “Give ‘em hell, reb.”
I saw Buddy in the rest room at the end of the set. He was leaning over the urinal with one hand propped against the wall, and his eyes looked like whorls of color with cinders for pupils.
“I scored some acid from a guy out in the parking lot,” he said. “You want to try some of this crazy mixture on your neurotic southern chemistry?”
“I got to work this afternoon, babe.”
“How you like my old lady? She’s quite a gal, ain’t she?”
“Yeah,
she is.”
“I was catching your radiations in the truck there, Zeno,” he said. “A little pulsing of the blood behind the steering wheel.”
“You better leave that college dope alone,” I said.
“Hey, don’t walk out. After you get finished, we’re going to Eddie’s Club, and then I’m bringing a whole crew down to the place for a barbecue. Some bear steaks soaked overnight in milk. It’s the best barbecue in the world. Puts meat in your brain and black hair all over your toenails.”
“Okay, Buddy.”
He drew in on his cigarette, the smoke and hot ash curling between his yellowed fingers, and squinted at me with a radiant smile on his face.
Eddie’s Club was a place full of hard yellow light, smoke, winos, drunk Salish Indians, the clatter of pool balls, a hillbilly jukebox, college students, and some teachers from the university. One wall was lined with large framed photographs of the old men who drank in there, their mouths toothless and collapsed, their slouch hats and cloth caps pulled at an angle over the alcoholic lines and bright eyes of their faces.
“Boyd Valentine, the bartender, did all that,” Buddy said, his forehead perspiring in the smoke. “You got to meet this guy. He’s a Michelangelo with a camera. A real wild man. Your kind of people.”
Before I could stop him, Buddy had walked away into the confusion of noise and people, who were two-deep at the bar. I was left at the table with Beth, Pearl, and Melvin, who couldn’t find the end of his cigarette with his lighter, and a half-dozen other people whose elbows rested in spilled beer without their taking notice of it.
“Try a Montana busthead highball,” Melvin said. “Don’t try to stay sober in this crowd. Its useless.”
He lowered a full whiskey jigger into a beer schooner with two fingers and pushed it toward me.
“I’d better pass,” I said.
He picked up the schooner with both hands and drank it to the bottom, the whiskey jigger rolling against the glass. I had to shudder while I watched him.
In the back two men began fighting over the pool table. A couple of chairs were overturned, a pool cue shattered across the table, and one man was knocked to the floor, then helped up and pushed out the back door. Few people paid any attention.
“What’s on your mind?” Beth said, smiling.
“I wonder what I’m doing here.”
“It’s part of Buddy and Mel’s guided tour of Missoula,” Pearl said. She wasn’t happy with any of it.
“You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din,” Melvin said, toasting me in some private irony.
“We’ll be leaving in a few minutes,” Beth said.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll probably shoot on across the street to the Oxford and get something to eat.” Although I wouldn’t admit the impulse to myself then, I was hoping that she would ask to go along.
“Hey,” Buddy shouted behind me. “This is Boyd Valentine. Used to hang around New Orleans when I was making my cool sounds there. Got a ’55 Chevy and blows engines out at a hundred and ten on the Bitterroot road. Outruns cops, ambulances, and fire trucks. Best photographer in the Northwest.”
Buddy held the bartender by one arm, a man with fierce black eyes and an electric energy in his face. One of his thumbs was missing, and the black hair on his chest grew out of his shirt.
“What’s happening?” he said, and shook hands. There was good humor in his voice and smile, and a current in his hand.
“My man here is going to load up his hot rod with good people, and we’re going to burn on down to the place and juice under the stars while I barbecue steaks that will bring you to your knees in reverence,” Buddy said. “Then my other man will crank out his Martin and sing songs of Dixie and molasses and ham hocks cooked with grits in his mammy’s shoe.”
We finally left the bar after Melvin turned over a pitcher of beer in an Indian woman’s lap. She raised her dress over her waist and squeezed it out over her thighs and kneecaps, her husband tore Melvin’s shirt, the bartender then brought three more pitchers to the table, and that was the end of that.
Buddy and I dropped Beth off at her house. He tried to convince her to come out to the ranch, but in her quiet woman’s way she mentioned the children, their supper, school tomorrow, those arguments that know no refutation. We drove down through the Bitterroots with the river black and winding beyond the cottonwoods. Rain clouds had started to move across the mountain peaks, and there was a dry rumble of thunder on the far side of the valley. In the distance, heat lightning wavered and flickered over the rolling hills of pines. I opened the wind vane and let the cool air, with just the hint of rain in it, blow into my face.
Buddy took a reefer stub from his pocket and lit it, holding the smoke down deep, his teeth tight together. He let out the smoke slowly and took another hit.
“Where did you get that?” I said.
“An Indian girl at Eddie’s. You want a snort?” He pushed in the cigarette lighter on the dashboard.
“Buddy, you’ve got enough shit in you now to make a time bomb out of your head.”
“Forget that crap, man. The only thing I could never pull down right was coke.” He placed the stub on the hot lighter and held it under his nose, sniffing the curl of smoke deeply into his head. “Look, I struck out with her back there, didn’t I?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hell yes, you know.”
“I never met your wife before. She said she had to take care of the kids.”
“That’s not what I mean, man, and you know it. Don’t give a con the con.”
“I was on the bandstand. I don’t know what went on between you.”
“But you know.”
“Come on, Buddy. You’re pulling me into your own stuff.”
“That’s right, Zeno. But you got an eye for looking into people. You tool around the yard, throwing the handball up against the wall, cool walk under the gun hack, but you’re clicking right into somebody’s pulsebeat.”
He knocked the lighter clean against the wind vane and rubbed it clean again on his shoe. There were red flecks in the corners of his eyes. This was the first time I had seen a bit of meanness come out in Buddy when he was high.
“Hell, Iry, I read your action when you first came in. All that southern-country-boy jive works cool on old ladies, but you know, man, and you’re digging everything I say.”
I was in that position where there is nothing to say, with no words that wouldn’t increase an unpleasant situation, and silence was equally bad. Then the bartender’s 1955 Chevrolet passed us in a roar of twin exhausts, a quick brilliance of headlights, and a scorch of black rubber as he shifted up and accelerated in front of us. The back draft and vacuum pushed my truck toward the shoulder of the road.
“Damn,” I said. “Does that fellow drive in demolition derbies or something?”
“That’s just Boyd Valentine airing out his gourd.”
“You have another stick?” I thought it was better that I smoke it and dump it if he had any more.
“That was the last of the souvenirs from the reservation. It was green, anyway. Think they must grow it in hog shit. Makes you talk with forked brain. Pull into the bar up there and I’ll buy a little brew for our crowd.”
The neon sign reflected a dull purple and red on the gravel and the cars and pickups in the parking lot. It was the same bar where we had gone my first night in Montana.
“Let’s pass, man,” I said. “We have some in the icebox, and I can go down the road later.”
“Pull in, pull in, pull in. You got to stop worrying about all these things.”
“I don’t think it’s too cool, Buddy.”
“Because you’ve got your head in the parole office all the time. Wait just a minute and I’ll bop on out with the brew.”
I parked the truck on the edge of the lot by the road, and Buddy walked inside, his balance deliberate like a sailor’s on a ship. I smoked a cigarette and watched a few raindrops strike against the windshield. A long st
reak of lightning quivered in the blackness off a distant mountain, and I flicked my cigarette out into the moist, sulfurous air. Well, to hell with it, I thought, and went inside after him.
It was crowded, and the barstools were filled with cowboys and mill workers bent over into the poker dice, punchboards, and rows of beer bottles. Buddy was standing in front of a table with a beer in his hand, talking with three rawboned men and their wives, who were as bovine and burned with wind and sun as their husbands. They had empty steak plates in front of them, streaked with gravy and blood, and while Buddy talked, they tipped their cigarette ashes into the plates with a kind of patient anger that they kept in with only the greatest stoicism. Buddy must have played the Ray Charles number on the jukebox, because I didn’t think anyone else in the place would have, and his speech was already full of hip language that raised up and down with the song while his hand tapped against the loose change in his slacks. He was on the outer edge of his high, and Bird Parker rhythms were working in his head, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time.
“Well, that’s your scene, man, and that’s copacetic,” he said. “And the old man has got his scene, too. And that’s cool. He just turns over his action a little different. It’s a matter of understanding what kind of scene you want to build and which kind of cats you want in on it—”
I went to the bar and asked if Buddy had put in an order to carry out.
“That’s it waiting on the end of the counter when you’re ready to leave, mister,” the bartender said.
I picked up the cardboard case of beer from the bar and walked over to Buddy with it.
“My meter’s running overtime,” I said.
“Just a minute. There’s a delicate metaphysical point involved here.”
“What’s involved is our ass.”
“Set it down. Let’s clear this question up. Now, if that stink plant down there invested some money in a purification system, the valley wouldn’t smell like it just had an enema, and they could supply all kinds of copacetic toilet paper all over the world.”
One man, with a bull neck, iron eyebrows, and his shirt lapels pressed and starched flat, looked at Buddy with a stare that I would never want to have turned on me. The thick veins in his neck and brow were like twisted pieces of cord. He breathed deeply in his chest, almost clicking with a stunted anger, and his thumb knuckle rubbed back and forth on the oil cover of the table. He blinked and looked at a far spot on the wall.