I popped a pill to stay alive. But instead all the wrong tubes lighted up, and I went in and out of the conversation and all the half-formed lingering and unspoken ideas and finally over the edge into the memory of that Indian girl’s face. Her darkly beautiful eyes and the swirl of her black hair piled on her head flicked my mind, like the snap of a beer top, across the mountains and over the ocean to the soft clicking of bamboo shades and the dusky scent of a small Kabuki theater with the bottles of Nippon beer iced down in a bucket between me and the geisha waitress who dipped shrimp into a horseradish sauce with chopsticks and placed them in my mouth. I had been drinking for two days, my money was almost all gone, and I had three hours to report back to the hospital, but in my mind I had already resigned from the army, the war, and all the complexities that made it important for me to go back on the firing line. I finished the Nippon in the ice bucket, the mamasan sent the boy across the street for more, and the geisha girl heated sake for me in a cup over a candle flame while I watched the actresses in their white pancake makeup and red-painted eyes move across the stage in a whisper of flowered silk as though they were an extension of a drunken dream.
Then I realized that I hadn’t yet accomplished what I had set out to do. The bamboo shades clicked in the breeze through the windows, and I could hear the MPs rousting someone at the street corner. I snapped the cap off a Nippon with my pocketknife, got to my feet, and almost fell through a paper partition.
“You no drink more now,” the mamasan said. Her teeth were rotted, and she held her hand over her mouth when she talked. “You go back to hospital now.”
I ripped the shade off its fastening and leaned out the window. Two MPs had a drunk soldier pushed back against a wall on the corner with their sticks.
“No do that,” the mamasan said. “This not whorehouse. No bring Mike and Pat in here.”
I lobbed the bottle at them and watched it burst into foam and brown glass all over their spitshines and bleached leggings. They forgot about the soldier and looked around with their sticks clenched in their hands.
“Over here, girls,” I said, and I let another one fly, except this time I curled it in an arc along the wall so that it hit directly between them in a fountain of foam that splattered their trousers.
“You son a bitch,” the mamasan yelled at me.
“Come on, you candy-ass shiteaters,” I said through the window. “Get your balls fried in a skillet. We’ll give you a bayonet right up the ass that you can haul all the way back to the stockade.”
I pitched the other full bottles one after another into the street while the mamasan and the geisha girls pulled at my belt and slapped at me with rolled pillow mats and their hands.
The first MP into the room parted the reed curtain with his stick and held up a pair of handcuffs on his index finger. In the half-light through the door they looked like a piece of chain mail spangled around his fist.
“You have a telephone call outside,” he said.
“Hey, man, you better not drink no more,” the Indian said.
“What?” I raised my head from my forearms in the weak yellow light.
“You was making some terrible sounds.”
“I’m sorry.” His wife’s chair was empty, and the curtain to their bedroom was still swinging lightly back and forth. “What did—”
“She just ain’t used to white people. It ain’t important.” He grinned at me and exposed a gold tooth next to an empty black space in his teeth. “You got a long drive tomorrow.”
“Tell me what I did.”
“You was holding on to her hands. She couldn’t make you turn loose.” His smooth leather face and obsidian eyes were both kind and faintly embarrassed.
I picked up my can of beer and tried to walk out the back door to my truck. I hit the door jamb with my shoulder, and the can fell out of my hand on the porch. I felt the Indian touch me gently on the back and direct me toward the couch. Then while I sweated in my drunken pill-and-booze delirium on the edge of the cushions, with the sun turning the chicken yard and rabbit hutches purple in the new light, I heard the bugles blowing on a distant hill way beyond our concertina wire, and I knew that it was going to be a safe dawn because I was sitting out this dance and all the rest to follow.
FOUR
I highballed the pickup all the way from the Little Bighorn River to Missoula, with stops only for gas and hamburgers in between. Montana was so beautiful that it made something drop inside me. At first there were only plains with slow, wide rivers and cottonwoods along the banks and the sawtooth edge of mountains in the distance; then I started to climb toward the Continental Divide and the Douglas fir and pondero
sa pine country with chasms off the edge of the road that made my head reel. There was still snow banked deep in the trees at the top of the divide, and deer spooked out of my headlights in a flick of dirt and pine needles. I coasted down the other side of the grade and picked up the Clark Fork River the rest of the way into Missoula. The runoff from the snow in the high country was still heavy, and the river swelled out through the cottonwoods in the moonlight. The rick fences and long stretches of barbed wire and small ranch houses back against the foot of the mountains rolled by me in the whine of the pickup’s treadless tires against the cement. Then I was in Hellgate Canyon, and Missoula suddenly burst open before me in a shower of lights among the elm and maple and fir trees and quiet streets, with a ring of mountains silhouetted like iron all around the town.
I turned south into the Bitterroot Valley and followed Buddy’s map to his father’s ranch. The pasture land on each side of the road extended only a short distance into the mountains, which rose high and black into clouds torn with moonlight, and the Bitterroot River gleamed like a piece of broken mirror across the long sandbars and islands of willow trees. I got lost twice on rural roads, looking at names on mailboxes with a flashlight; then I found the right wire-hooped gate and cattle guard and rutted road up to his father’s place.
Buddy Riordan was working on a five-to-fifteen for possession of marijuana when I met him in Angola. He was a good jazz pianist, floating high on weed and the Gulf breeze and steady gigs at Joe Burton’s place in New Orleans, and then he got nailed in a men’s room with two reefers in his coat pocket. As a Yankee, he was prosecuted under a felony rather than a misdemeanor law, and the judge dropped the whole jailhouse on his head. He pulled five years on the farm, and he was one of the few there who was considered an outsider, a man who didn’t belong, by the rest of us who knew in the angry part of our souls that we had bought every inch of our time.
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.