The Lost Get-Back Boogie

lickered with sunlight in the breeze.

“But this is an old scene with him. He fought the Anaconda Company when they started polluting the Clark, and he helped stop a bunch over in east Montana that were catching wild horses and selling them to a dog-food company.” Buddy squatted down with the water can by the hole and puffed a minute on his cigarette. “He’s always got the right thing in mind, but he’s one of these guys that draws a line in the dirt, and then that’s it. He doesn’t see anything in between.”

We dug the last hole by the slough in the late afternoon, and I looked back at the long straight line of fence posts, rigid and thick in the ground, and felt a pride in their geometric progression from the front of the ranch to the mud bottom we were standing in. The grass bent in the wind off the river, and the sun already had a black piece cut out of it by a mountain peak. We threw the tools into the wagon bed and walked back through the fields to the cabin. I felt physically tired and satisfied in the way you do when you have bent yourself to a right task. The shadows of the mountains were moving across the valley, over the log houses, the hay bales in the fields, the stone walls, and the cords of wood piled by the barns, as the light receded and gathered in the trees on the far side of the river.

We fished with worms in the creek behind the cabin during the twilight, then fired the wood stove and broiled the cutthroat trout in butter and garlic salt. I took a can of beer and the Martin out on the front porch while Buddy turned the fish in the pan. I dropped the tuning into D, clicked my thumb pick across the bass strings, and went up the neck into a diminished blues chording that I had learned from Robert Pete Williams in Angola. The strings rang with moonlight, and I felt the deep notes reverberate through my fingers and forearm as though the wood itself had caught the beat of my blood. I bridged over into “The Wreck of the Ole 97,” hammering on and pulling off like A. P. Carter, the strings trembling with light and their own metallic sympathy.

He was going down the grade making ninety miles an hour

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.