I picked it out on the dobro and sang in my bad Cajun French while Buddy turned the venison in the pot with a wooden spoon. His white face glowed in the heat of the stove, and for a moment he looked as preoccupied and solitary as the man I had met over two years before in the yard at Angola.
We dragged the kitchen table onto the porch and ate the venison out of tin plates with garlic bread and an onion-and-beet salad that Buddy had chopped into a wooden bowl. I hadn’t had venison in a long time, and the mushroom and wine sauce was fine with the taste of the game, and as I watched the wind blowing snow off the top of the canyon, I knew that everything was going to be all right.
But I should have recognized it at the bar. Or at least part of it. It was there, and all I had to do was look at it.
In the morning the sun broke across the blue ridge of mountains, and the wet, green meadows shimmered in the light. The shadows at the base of the mountains were purple like a cold bruise, and as the morning warmed and the dew burned away on the grass, the cattle moved slowly into the shade of the cottonwoods along the river. Buddy and I fished with wet flies in the creek behind his cabin and caught a dozen cutthroat trout out of the deep pools that turned in eddies behind the rocks. I would crouch down on my haunches so as not to silhouette against the spangle of sunlight through the trees, and then I’d let the fly sink slowly to the bottom of the pool; a cutthroat would rise suddenly off the gravel, his brilliant rim of fire around the gills flashing in the sun, and the fly rod would arch down to the water with a steady, throbbing pull.
We cleaned the fish and took them up to the main house for breakfast. Piles of wood cut in round chunks with a chainsaw were stacked high next to the barn wall, and in the side lot there was the rusted-out skeleton of an old steam tractor with dark pigweed growing through the wheels. In back were at least fifty bird pens made with chicken wire and wood frames, and ducks, geese, and breeds of grouse and pheasant that I had never seen before wandered around the feed pens and watering pools located all over the yard.
“That’s the old man’s aviary,” Buddy said. “It’s probably the biggest in the state. He’s got birds in there from all over the world, which is one reason why I live in the cabin. You ought to hear those sons of bitches when they crank up at four in the morning.”
We browned the trout in butter, and Buddy’s mother cooked a huge platter of scrambled eggs and pork chops with sliced tomatoes on the side. The dining table was covered with an oil cloth thumbtacked to the sides, and Buddy’s father sat at the head, waiting quietly until each member of the family was seated before he picked up the first plate and started it around the table. Buddy’s three younger brothers, all in high school, sat opposite me, their faces eagerly curious and yet polite about their brother’s ex-convict friend. Their skin was tan, and there wasn’t an ounce of fat on their bodies, and in their blue jeans and faded print shirts rolled over their young, strong arms, they looked like everything that’s healthy in America.
Buddy’s sister and her husband, an instructor at the university, sat at the far end of the table, and for some reason they made me uncomfortable. I had the teacher made for a part-time agrarian romanticist or an eastern c
ollege man on a brief excursion into the life of his wife’s family. The smile and the handshake were too easy and open—and dismissing. She favored her mother, a well-shaped woman with clear skin and blue eyes that had a quick light in them, but none of the same cheerfulness was in the daughter’s face. The daughter was pretty, with sun-bleached curly hair and beautiful hands, but there was a darkness inside her that marred the rest of it, and I could sense a resentment in her because I was someone whom Buddy had known in prison and had brought to their home.
But Buddy’s father was the one who I realized instinctively was no ordinary person. His shoulders were square and hard, his neck coarse with sunburn and wind, and the edges of his palms were thick with callus and there were half-moon carpenter’s bruises on his fingernails. He was a good-looking man for his age. He combed his thin, brown hair straight back over a wide forehead, and his gray eyes looked directly at you without blinking. He didn’t have that soft quality to the edge of the bone structure in the face that most Irish have, and his back stayed straight in the chair and never quite rested against the wood. He took the silver watch on its chain from his blue-jeans pocket and looked at it a moment as though seeing it for the first time.
“I guess we ought to start getting the bales up on the wagon. You ready, boys?” he said.
The three younger brothers got up from the table and started to follow him through the kitchen; then he turned, almost as an afterthought, and looked back at me with those gray, unblinking eyes.
“I think I have something out in the lot that you might be interested in seeing, Mr. Paret,” he said.
Buddy grinned at me over his coffee cup.
I walked with Mr. Riordan and the three boys into the backyard. The whole expanse of the valley was covered with sunshine now, and the bales of green hay in the fields and the click of light on the Bitterroot River through the trees and the heavy shadows down the canyon walls were so heart-sinking that I had to stop and fold my arms across my chest in a large breath.
“Have you ever seen one of these fellows before?” Mr. Riordan said.
He had opened a cage and picked up a large nutria. Its red eyes looked like hot bbs behind the fur, and its yellow buck teeth protruded from the mouth. The body was exactly like a rat’s, except much bigger and covered with long fur that grew like a porcupine’s quills, and the feet were almost webbed.
“I’ve never seen one outside of southern Louisiana,” I said. “I didn’t think they could live in a cold climate.”
“That’s what most people say. However, no one has advised the nutria of that fact. How much do you know about them?”
I shook a cigarette out of my pack and put it in my mouth. I had the feeling that I was about to be taught the rules of a new game.
“The McIlhenny tabasco family brought them from South America about 1900,” I said. “Supposedly, they were in cages on Marsh Island about twelve miles off the Louisiana coast, and after a storm smashed up their cages, they swam through waves all the way to land. Now they’re in every bayou and canal in south Louisiana. They’ll kill your dog if he gets in the water with them, and they can fill up a whole string of muskrat traps in a day.”
“I hope to eventually introduce them in the area. Do you think you’d like to help raise them?”
“At home they’re a pest, Mr. Riordan. They destroy the irrigation canals for the rice farms, and they breed like minks in heat.”
“Well, we’ll see how they do in colder climates.” Then, without a change in the voice, he said, “You murdered a man, did you?”
I had to wait a moment.
“That’s probably a matter of legal definition,” I said. “I went to prison for manslaughter.”
“I suppose those points are pretty fine sometimes,” he said.
“Yes, sir, they can be.”
“I signed for your parole transfer because Buddy asked me to. Normally, I stay as removed as I can from the dealings of the state and federal government, but he wanted you to come here. And so I’ve made some kind of contract with the authorities in Louisiana as well as in my own state. That involves a considerable bit on both of our parts. Do you understand me, Mr. Paret?”
I drew in on my cigarette and flipped it toward the fence. I could feel the blood start to ring in my palms.