The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“I have three years’ parole time to do, Mr. Riordan. That means that on a whim a parole officer can violate me back to the farm for an overdrawn check, no job, or just not checking in on the right date. Maybe he’s got a little gas on his stomach, half a bag on from the night before, or maybe his wife cut him off that morning. All he’s got to do is get his ball point moving and I’m on my way back to Angola in handcuffs. In Louisiana a P.V. means one year before you come in for a hearing again.”

“Did you ever do farm work outside of the penitentiary?” he said.

“My father was a sugar grower.”

“I pay ten dollars a day for bucking bales, and you eat up at the house for the noon meal. There’s a lot of work in the fall, too, if you care to drive nails and butcher hogs.”

He walked away from me on the worn-out heels of his cowboy boots toward the flatbed wagon, where his three boys were waiting for him. I wanted to be angry at him for his abruptness and his sudden cut into a private area of my soul, but I couldn’t, because he was simply honest and brief in a way that I wasn’t prepared for.

I drove to Missoula that afternoon and checked in with the parole office. My new parole officer seemed to be an ordinary fellow who didn’t think of me as a particular problem in his case load, and after fifteen minutes I was back on the street in the sunshine, with my hands in my pockets and a whole new town and a blue-gold afternoon to explore. Missoula was a wonderful town. The mountains rose into the sky in every direction, the Clark Fork River cut right through the business district, and college kids in innertubes and on rubber rafts floated down the strips of white water with cans of beer in their hands, shouting and waving at the fishermen on the banks. The town was covered with elm and maple trees, the lawns were green and dug with flower beds, and men in shirtsleeves sprinkled the grass with garden hoses like a little piece of memory out of the 1940s.

I walked down the street with a sense of freedom that I hadn’t felt since I went to the penitentiary. Even at my father’s house the reminders were there, the darkness of the house, the ancestral death in the walls, the graveyard being eaten away a foot at a time by the bayou, that black vegetable growth across the brain that puts out new roots whenever you come home. But here there was sun all over the sidewalks, some of which still had tethering rings set in them.

I went into places that had names like the Oxford, Eddie’s Club, and Stockman’s Bar, and it was like walking through a door and losing a century. Cowboys, mill workers, lumberjacks, bindle stiffs, and professional gamblers played cards at felt tables in the back; there was a bar without stools for men who were serious about their drinking, a counter for steaks and spuds and draft beer, the click of billiard balls in a corner, and occasionally a loud voice, a scraping of chairs, and a punchout that sent a man reeling into the plasterboard partition of the rest rooms.

I was eating a steak fried in onions in the Oxford when a man without legs tried to raise himself onto a stool next to me. He had pushed himself along the street and into the bar on a small wooden platform that had roller-skate wheels nailed under it, and the two wood blocks sticking out from the pockets of his pea jacket looked like someone’s beaten ears. One of the buckle straps on his stump had caught, and I tried to raise him toward the stool. His tongue clicked out across his bad teeth like a lizard’s.

“He don’t want you to help him, mister,” the bartender said.

“I’m sorry.”

“He can’t hear or talk. He got all blowed up in the war,” the bartender said. He filled a bowl with lima-bean soup and placed it on a saucer with some crackers in front of the crippled man.

I listened to him gurgle at the soup, and I had to look at the far end of the counter while I ate. The bartender slid another draft in front of me.

“It’s on the house,” he said, and then, with a matchstick in the corner of his mouth and his eyes flat, he added, “You visiting in town?”

“I’m staying in the Bitterroot with a friend and looking around for work. I guess right now I’m going to be bucking bales for the Riordans awhile.” I couldn’t resist mentioning the name, just like you put your foot in lighdy to test the water.

The reaction was casual and slowly curious, but it was there.

“You know Frank Riordan pretty good?”

“I know his son.”

“What the hell is Frank up to with this pulp mill, anyway?”

“He’s up to putting a lot of men out of work,” a man farther down the counter said, without looking up from his plate.

Oh shit, I thought.

“I don’t know anything about it,” I said.

“He don’t know anything about it,” the same man said. He wore a tin hat and a checkered shirt with long-sleeved underwear.

The bartender suddenly became a diplomat and disinterested neutral.

“I ain’t seen Frank in a long time,” he said. “He used to come in here sometimes on Saturday and play cards.”

“He’s got no time for that now,” a man eating next to the cripple said. “He’s too busy sitting on thirteen hundred acres of cows and making sure a dollar-fifty-an-hour man gets his pink slip. That’s Frank Riordan for you.”

The bartender wiped the rag over the counter in front of me as though he were rubbing out a piece of personal guilt. “Some people say that smokestack stinks like shit, but it smells like bread and butter to me,” he said, and laughed with a gastric click in the back of his throat, exposing his line of yellowed teeth.

I could feel the anger of the two men on each side of me, like someone caught between bookends. I put the fork and knife in my plate and lit a cigarette and smoked long enough to keep personal honor intact, then walked back into the sunshine. No more testing of reactions to names, I decided, and maybe I should have

a more serious talk with Buddy.

Earlier in the afternoon a gyppo logger had told me in a bar that I might get on with a country band in Bonner. I drove out of Missoula through Hellgate Canyon, a huge split in the mountains where the Salish Indians used to follow the Clark Fork and annually get massacred by the Crows and the Blackfeet (whence the name, because the canyon floor was strewn with skeletons when the first Jesuits passed through). I followed along the river through the deep cut of the mountains and the thin second growth of pine on the slopes until I reached the meeting of the Blackfoot and Clark Fork rivers, which made a wide swirl of dark water that spilled white and iridescent over a concrete dam.