I nodded at him and rolled up the window.
“Say, Buddy, I’ve only played twice with these guys,” I said. “It’s a good gig and I want to keep it.”
“It’s solid, babe. Just go in there and do the Ernest Tubb shot. We’ll take care of this guy.”
“I’m not putting you on,” I said.
“Go inside. It’ll be all right,” Beth said.
She was a princess inside the bar. After I began the first number on the bandstand, Melvin stood below the platform with a shot glass in one hand and a draft beer in the other, his face happily drunk. He swayed on his feet, talking with a fractured smile into the amplified sound; then she took him by the elbow and led him away to the dance floor.
I did the lead with my Martin on our second song, “I’m Moving On,” and the bar became quiet while I held the sound box up to my chin and played directly into the microphone. I ran Hank Snow’s chord progressions up and down the frets, thumping the deep bass notes of a train highballing through Dixie while I picked out the notes of the melody on the treble strings with my fingernail. I heard the steel try to get in behind me before I realized that I had been riding too long, and I moved back down the neck into the standard G chord on the second fret and tapered off into the rest of the band with a bass roll. The crowd applauded and whistled, and a man at the bar shouted out, “Give ‘em hell, reb.”
I saw Buddy in the rest room at the end of the set. He was leaning over the urinal with one hand propped against the wall, and his eyes looked like whorls of color with cinders for pupils.
“I scored some acid from a guy out in the parking lot,” he said. “You want to try some of this crazy mixture on your neurotic southern chemistry?”
“I got to work this afternoon, babe.”
“How you like my old lady? She’s quite a gal, ain’t she?”
“Yeah,
she is.”
“I was catching your radiations in the truck there, Zeno,” he said. “A little pulsing of the blood behind the steering wheel.”
“You better leave that college dope alone,” I said.
“Hey, don’t walk out. After you get finished, we’re going to Eddie’s Club, and then I’m bringing a whole crew down to the place for a barbecue. Some bear steaks soaked overnight in milk. It’s the best barbecue in the world. Puts meat in your brain and black hair all over your toenails.”
“Okay, Buddy.”
He drew in on his cigarette, the smoke and hot ash curling between his yellowed fingers, and squinted at me with a radiant smile on his face.
Eddie’s Club was a place full of hard yellow light, smoke, winos, drunk Salish Indians, the clatter of pool balls, a hillbilly jukebox, college students, and some teachers from the university. One wall was lined with large framed photographs of the old men who drank in there, their mouths toothless and collapsed, their slouch hats and cloth caps pulled at an angle over the alcoholic lines and bright eyes of their faces.
“Boyd Valentine, the bartender, did all that,” Buddy said, his forehead perspiring in the smoke. “You got to meet this guy. He’s a Michelangelo with a camera. A real wild man. Your kind of people.”
Before I could stop him, Buddy had walked away into the confusion of noise and people, who were two-deep at the bar. I was left at the table with Beth, Pearl, and Melvin, who couldn’t find the end of his cigarette with his lighter, and a half-dozen other people whose elbows rested in spilled beer without their taking notice of it.
“Try a Montana busthead highball,” Melvin said. “Don’t try to stay sober in this crowd. Its useless.”
He lowered a full whiskey jigger into a beer schooner with two fingers and pushed it toward me.
“I’d better pass,” I said.
He picked up the schooner with both hands and drank it to the bottom, the whiskey jigger rolling against the glass. I had to shudder while I watched him.
In the back two men began fighting over the pool table. A couple of chairs were overturned, a pool cue shattered across the table, and one man was knocked to the floor, then helped up and pushed out the back door. Few people paid any attention.
“What’s on your mind?” Beth said, smiling.
“I wonder what I’m doing here.”
“It’s part of Buddy and Mel’s guided tour of Missoula,” Pearl said. She wasn’t happy with any of it.
“You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din,” Melvin said, toasting me in some private irony.