The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“We’ll be leaving in a few minutes,” Beth said.

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll probably shoot on across the street to the Oxford and get something to eat.” Although I wouldn’t admit the impulse to myself then, I was hoping that she would ask to go along.

“Hey,” Buddy shouted behind me. “This is Boyd Valentine. Used to hang around New Orleans when I was making my cool sounds there. Got a ’55 Chevy and blows engines out at a hundred and ten on the Bitterroot road. Outruns cops, ambulances, and fire trucks. Best photographer in the Northwest.”

Buddy held the bartender by one arm, a man with fierce black eyes and an electric energy in his face. One of his thumbs was missing, and the black hair on his chest grew out of his shirt.

“What’s happening?” he said, and shook hands. There was good humor in his voice and smile, and a current in his hand.

“My man here is going to load up his hot rod with good people, and we’re going to burn on down to the place and juice under the stars while I barbecue steaks that will bring you to your knees in reverence,” Buddy said. “Then my other man will crank out his Martin and sing songs of Dixie and molasses and ham hocks cooked with grits in his mammy’s shoe.”

We finally left the bar after Melvin turned over a pitcher of beer in an Indian woman’s lap. She raised her dress over her waist and squeezed it out over her thighs and kneecaps, her husband tore Melvin’s shirt, the bartender then brought three more pitchers to the table, and that was the end of that.

Buddy and I dropped Beth off at her house. He tried to convince her to come out to the ranch, but in her quiet woman’s way she mentioned the children, their supper, school tomorrow, those arguments that know no refutation. We drove down through the Bitterroots with the river black and winding beyond the cottonwoods. Rain clouds had started to move across the mountain peaks, and there was a dry rumble of thunder on the far side of the valley. In the distance, heat lightning wavered and flickered over the rolling hills of pines. I opened the wind vane and let the cool air, with just the hint of rain in it, blow into my face.

Buddy took a reefer stub from his pocket and lit it, holding the smoke down deep, his teeth tight together. He let out the smoke slowly and took another hit.

“Where did you get that?” I said.

“An Indian girl at Eddie’s. You want a snort?” He pushed in the cigarette lighter on the dashboard.

“Buddy, you’ve got enough shit in you now to make a time bomb out of your head.”

“Forget that crap, man. The only thing I could never pull down right was coke.” He placed the stub on the hot lighter and held it under his nose, sniffing the curl of smoke deeply into his head. “Look, I struck out with her back there, didn’t I?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hell yes, you know.”

“I never met your wife before. She said she had to take care of the kids.”

“That’s not what I mean, man, and you know it. Don’t give a con the con.”

“I was on the bandstand. I don’t know what went on between you.”

“But you know.”

“Come on, Buddy. You’re pulling me into your own stuff.”

“That’s right, Zeno. But you got an eye for looking into people. You tool around the yard, throwing the handball up against the wall, cool walk under the gun hack, but you’re clicking right into somebody’s pulsebeat.”

He knocked the lighter clean against the wind vane and rubbed it clean again on his shoe. There were red flecks in the corners of his eyes. This was the first time I had seen a bit of meanness come out in Buddy when he was high.

“Hell, Iry, I read your action when you first came in. All that southern-country-boy jive works cool on old ladies, but you know, man, and you’re digging everything I say.”

I was in that position where there is nothing to say, with no words that wouldn’t increase an unpleasant situation, and silence was equally bad. Then the bartender’s 1955 Chevrolet passed us in a roar of twin exhausts, a quick brilliance of headlights, and a scorch of black rubber as he shifted up and accelerated in front of us. The back draft and vacuum pushed my truck toward the shoulder of the road.

“Damn,” I said. “Does that fellow drive in demolition derbies or something?”

“That’s just Boyd Valentine airing out his gourd.”

“You have another stick?” I thought it was better that I smoke it and dump it if he had any more.

“That was the last of the souvenirs from the reservation. It was green, anyway. Think they must grow it in hog shit. Makes you talk with forked brain. Pull into the bar up there and I’ll buy a little brew for our crowd.”

The neon sign reflected a dull purple and red on the gravel and the cars and pickups in the parking lot. It was the same bar where we had gone my first night in Montana.

“Let’s pass, man,” I said. “We have some in the icebox, and I can go down the road later.”