“I talked with a few people in the tavern later that night. They said you and Buddy Riordan were drunk.”
“We weren’t drunk. We were knocked off the road, and somebody used my shirt to set fire to the gas tank.”
“I looked at your truck, too. There’s one pair of skid marks going off into the ditch.”
I took a cigarette from my shirt pocket and tried to light a match from the folder with one hand.
“Look, Sheriff, a yellow truck with a West Montana Lumber Company sign on the door ran right over my tailgate, and then they really went to work. I don’t know who those guys are, but they owe me for a 1949 pickup and two guitars and a broken arm.”
“Well, I guess you’re saying you just got the shit beat out of you,” he said, and popped his thick index finger loose from his thumb on the desk blotter. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a folder with three sheets clipped together inside. He turned over to the second page and folded it back and looked hard at one paragraph.
“Was it a colored man you killed down there?” he said.
I lit the cigarette and looked beyond him through the open window at the soft blue roll of the mountains.
“I mean, you got off with two years for murdering a man. In Montana, you’d get ten in Deer Lodge, even if it was an Indian.”
In that moment I hated him and his wry smile and the private blue glint in his eye.
“I got three years good time, Sheriff. I imagine that’s in your folder, too.”
“Yes, sir, it is. It also says you could get violated back to that place in Louisiana without too much trouble.”
I drove back to the ranch with my hands tight on the steering wheel. I had wanted to say something final to him when I left the office, something that would crack into that blue glint in his eyes, but I had simply walked out like someone who had been told his bus was gone.
Buddy was sitting on the front porch of the cabin with a cup of tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other. His face was puffed with yellow and purple bruises, and a thick band of gauze was wrapped around his head. He tried to grin, but I could see the pain in his mouth.
“I didn’t know when you’d be back, so I wired it up,” I said.
“I’m just going to guess, Zeno. The sheriff’s office,” he said.
“Do you import these bastards out of the South?”
“A couple of quick lessons from Uncle Zeno. Around here the law won’t do anything about barroom brawls or any variety of Saturday night cuttings or swinging of pool cues. It don’t matter if it’s one guy against the whole Russian army— he’s on his own. Number two, the name Riordan is like the stink on shit down there at Hamilton.”
“In the meantime we got stomped, partner,” I said. “I’m out my truck and my guitars, and I don’t know when I can work again.”
“We got this place, man. You don’t have to worry about money.”
His acceptance made me even angrier than I had been in the sheriff’s office.
“That’s not my kind of caper.”
“Maybe you don’t like to hear this, but you got to mark it off.”
“Damn, Buddy, those guys are out there somewhere.”
“Yeah, man, and maybe you’ll recognize them somewhere, but what are you going to do then? Call the same dick that just threw you out of his office? Get a beer out of the icebox and sit down. I’m going to go fishing in a little while.”
“That’s real Koolade, babe. I have to give it to you,” I said.
“You haven’t taken the wood plugs out of your ears yet. You talk like a fish with part of his brain still outside. You know better.”
I walked out of the sun’s glare into the shade of the porch and went inside. My suitcase was opened beside my bunk bed, and I wanted to throw my clothes into it and hitch on down the road, but I was broke and stuck here with my parole. I opened a can of beer and leaned back against the wood ceiling post and drank it. I could hear the creek through the back window.
“Come on out here, Iry,” he called through the screen door.
I drank the bottom of the can slowly, and then I felt my throat and chest begin to relax and the blood slow in my temples. I took another can from the icebox and went back outside. The ridge of mountains behind the main house was dark blue and honed like a knife against the sky.