The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“I didn’t press Buddy this morning, but I want to know what happened. Was it something that grew out of an argument in a saloon, or was it more involved than that?”

I reached over to the nightstand where someone had placed my package of Lucky Strikes beside my billfold, and put one in my mouth. He took a book of matches from his denim shirt and lit it. I wanted to avoid his face and the private question that was there beyond the wind-burned skin, the short growth of whiskers, and those intense gray eyes.

“It started with Buddy at the bar, Mr. Riordan. I was outside most of the time. You’d better ask him about it later,” I said.

“And what was it exactly about?”

“Maybe too many drunk men in a bar on Sunday night.” “What was said?”

I drew in on the cigarette and placed it in the ashtray. The wind blew the rain off the windowsill into the room. His big hands were pressed on his knees, and the veins stood up like twists of blue cord under the skin.

“You’ve got me in a hard place, and I think you know that,” I said.

“Yes, I guess I do. But I’d like to have it now.”

“Buddy was talking with some people at a table about the pulp mill. I don’t know who the men were who followed us out. Buddy thought they were just drunks until they smashed into the back of my truck.”

“I see,” he said.

I heard the wet slap of the football again and then the heavy rattle of leaves in a tree.

“It looks like we’ve gotten you into some of our family’s trouble, Mr. Paret,” he said.

“No, sir, that’s not true. I usually make a point of finding my own.”

He took a package of tobacco from his shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette, wet the glue neatly, and pinched the ends down.

“What did you kill that man for?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“It never came to you in those two years?”

“No.”

“I shot at a man once. I would have hit him and maybe killed him if he hadn’t jumped from the cab of a combine when he did. I shot at him because I’d thought for a long time about something he had done.”

“I formally resigned from my war a long time ago, Mr. Riordan.”

He cleared his throat quietly, as though there were a piece of bad air in it, and put out the rolled cigarette in the ashtray. This is one that’s hard to read, I thought.

“I’ll be back this evening,” he said. “The doctor said you two should be able to leave in the morning. Do you want anything?”

“I’d like a half pint of bourbon.”

“All right.”

“Wait,” I said, and gave him three dollars from my billfold.

After he had gone, I tried to sleep in the cool sound of the rain and fall back into the dream about the duck hunt with my father, but the perspiration rolled off my back onto the sheets, and when I kept my eyes closed too long, I saw the headlights roaring up out of the dark road into my tailgate. I turned on my side, with the ooze of salve thick against my skin, and stared at the wooden crucifix on the wall with two withered palms stuck behind it. I got up from the bed and found my slacks and shoes in the closet, but no shirt, and then I remembered the curl of flame climbing into the gas tank. It took me ten minutes to get on my trousers with one hand, and even with my buttocks against the bed the room kept tilting sideways from the square of pale light through the window. Sweat dripped out of my hair onto the cast, and my good hand was shaking as I tried to pop a match with my thumb and light a cigarette.

After I rang for the nurse, I looked across the room at my image in the dresser mirror. Oh man, I thought.

A nun in white pushed open the door softly, and then her quiet, cosmetic-free face dilated with a red hue.

“Oh, no, you shouldn’t do that,” she said. “Please don’t do that. You mustn’t.”

“I think I should leave this evening, Sister, but I need a shirt. I’d appreciate it if you could find any old one you have around here.”