“Are we going to get the beer, Buddy?”
“Right. Let’s take your truck, since I parked my car against a tree in the middle of the creek last night.”
We banged over the ruts in the corrugated road, with the truck rattling at every metal joint, until we bounced across the cattle guard onto the smooth gravel-spread lane that led back to the main highway through the Bitterroots. The moon had moved farther to the south, and I could see the dark water of the river cutting in silver rivulets around the willow trees on the edge of the sandbars. The mountains on each side of the valley were so large now in the moonlight that I felt they were crashing down upon me. The snow on the distant peaks was burn
ing with moonlight beyond the jagged silhouette of the pines, and each time we crossed a bridge over a small creek, I could see the white tumble of water over the rocks and then the quiet pools hammered with metal dollars at the end of the riffle.
We pulled into the parking lot of a clapboard tavern next to a general store with two gas pumps in front. Pickup trucks with rifles and shotguns set in racks against the rear windows were parked in the lot, and the stickers on their bumpers were a sudden click of the eye back into the rural South: I FIGHT POVERTY—I WORK; PUT THE BIBLE BACK IN OUR SCHOOLS; DON’T WORRY, THEY’RE ONLY NINETY MILES AWAY.
Buddy and I went inside and had a beer at the bar and asked for a cold case to go and a small bottle of sauterne. A stone fireplace was roaring with logs at the far end of the pool table, and there were elk and moose racks on the walls and rusted frontier rifles laid across deer hooves. Most of the men in the bar wore faded blue jeans, Levi or nylon jackets, scuffed cowboy and work boots, shirts with the color washed out, and beat-up cowboy hats stained with sweat around the band. They all looked big, physical, with large, rough hands and wind-cut faces. The men at the pool table stamped down the rubber ends of their cues each time they missed a shot, and slammed the rack hard around the balls for a new game, and two cowboys next to me were shaking the poker dice violently in the leather cup and banging it loudly on the bar.
I didn’t notice it at first, or I dismissed it as my natural excon’s paranoia, but soon I started to catch a glance from a table or a man at the bar’s elbow. Then, as I looked back momentarily to assure myself that there was nothing there, I saw a flick of blue meanness or challenge in those eyes, and I knew that I was sitting on top of something. I waited in silence for Buddy to finish his beer so we could go, but he ordered two more before I could touch him on the arm.
I felt the open stares become harder now, and I looked intently at the punchboard in front of me. At that moment I thought how strange it was that, even though I was a grown man, eyes could feel like a wandering deadness on the side of my face. I tried to compensate with a silly commitment to my cigarette and the details in the ashtray, and then I walked to the rest room with the instinctive con’s slink across the yard, hands low in the pockets, cool, the shoulders bent just a little, the knees loose and easy.
But when I got back to the bar, the stares were still there. No one seemed to realize that I was a Louisiana badass. And Buddy was on his third beer.
“Hey, what the hell is going on?” I said quietly.
“Don’t pay any attention to those guys.”
“What is it?”
“It’s copacetic, Zeno. By the way, you looked very cool bopping into the pisser.”
“Shit on this, Buddy. Let’s get out of here.”
“Take it easy, man. We can’t let a few hot faces run us off.”
“I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like fooling in somebody else’s trouble.”
“Okay, let me finish and we’ll split.”
Outside, I put the cardboard case of Great Falls in the back of the truck and turned around in the gravel parking lot. I shot the transmission into second gear and wound it up on the blacktop. One jagged piece of mountain cut into the moon.
“So what was that stuff about?”
“The old man has been pissing people off around here for years, and right now he’s got them all on low boil.”
“What for?”
“He’s trying to get the new pulp mill shut down, which means that about four hundred guys will lose their jobs. But forget it, man. It don’t have anything to do with you. Those guys back there just like to snort with their virility when they have a chance.”
We crossed the cattle guard and passed the darkened main house on the ranch. The canyon walls behind the house were sheer and gray in the moon’s reflection off the clouds.
“Tomorrow you got to meet my family,” Buddy said. “They’re unusual people. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t burned them so bad.”
Then I realized that Buddy was drunk, because in the time I had known him, he had never indulged himself in private confession unless he was floating on Benzedrex inhalers or the occasional weed we got from the Negroes.
He poured the sauterne into the pot of venison and sprinkled black pepper and parsley on top of it, then replaced the iron lid and let it marinate for a half hour while we drank beer and I tried to retune my dobro with fingers as thick and dull as a ruptured ear.
“I never did figure why you stayed with that hillbilly shot,” he said, “but you do it beautiful, man. Did you ever finish that song you were working on?”
The blood had gone out of his face, and his cigarette had burned down close between his fingers.
“No, I’ve still got it running around in pieces.”
“Do ‘Jolie Blonde,’ man.”