The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“Outside of the drinks, bad.”

“All right.” The whiskey was hot in my face, and I could feel the perspiration start to run out of my hair. There was a dead hum in my head, and behind me I heard Kitty Wells’s nasal falsetto from the jukebox: “It wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels.”

I rattled the dice once in the leather cup with my hand tight over the top and threw them along the bar.

“I’ll be damned,” the bartender said.

I had to look again myself, in the red glow of the neon beer sign, at the five aces glinting up from the mahogany bar top.

The bartender pulled twenty one-dollar bills from the clothespins and put them in front of me, then took away my beer glass and

jigger and brought them back filled. He chewed on the flattened end of a match and shook his head as though some type of mathematical principle in the universe had just been proved untrue.

“You ought to shoot craps at one of them joints over in Idaho, buddy,” he said.

“I’ve shot lots of craps. They keep you off night patrol.”

He looked at me with a flat pause in his face, the matchstick motionless in a gap between his teeth.

“You can throw the bones for high point right down at the end of the blanket and the other guy has got to go up through their wire. Him and fifteen others.” Then I knew that I was drunk, because the words had already freed themselves from behind all those locks and hasps and welded doors that you keep sealed in the back of your mind.

“Well, I guess you got good luck, buddy,” he said, and wiped the rag over the bar in front of me before he walked down to a cowboy who had just come in.

I drank the whiskey neat and chased it with the beer, then smoked a cigarette and called him back again.

“Give me a pint of Beam’s Choice and a six-pack. While you’re getting it, give me a ditch.”

“Mister, I ain’t telling you nothing, but you ain’t going to be able to drive.”

Outside, the stars were bright above the dark ring of mountains around Missoula, and the plume of smoke from the pulp mill floated high above the Clark Fork in the moonlight. My broken arm itched as though ants were crawling in the sweat inside my cast. I fell heavily behind the steering wheel of Buddy’s Plymouth, and for just a second I saw my guitars snapping apart in the truck fire and heard that level, hot voice: Give that son of a bitch his buckwheats.

As I drove back down the blacktop toward Lolo, with the bright lights of semis flashing over me and the air brakes hissing when I swerved across the center line, I remembered again the bully putting spittle in my ear, reenacted in my mind being thrown out of a pulp mill that manufactured toilet paper, and studied hard upon the sale of my inheritance to the cement-truck and shopping-center interests.

Bugs swam around the light on the front porch of Buddy’s cabin and his fly rod was leaned against the screen door, but he must have been up at his father’s house. I walked unsteadily to the back room, where he kept the ’03 Springfield rifle with the Mauser action on two deer-antler racks. I put the sling over my shoulder and filled the big flap pockets of my army jacket with shells from a box on the floor. Even as drunk as I was, even as I caught my balance against the doorjamb, I knew that it was insane, that every self-protective instinct and light in my head was blinking red, but I was already in motion in the same way I had been my first day out of prison when I covered the license plate of the pickup with mud and went banging down the road drunk into a possible parole violation.

I put the rifle on the back floor with my field jacket over it and drove back toward the cattle guard. The wind off the river bent the grass in the pasture under the moon, and the cows were bunched in a dark shadow by the cottonwoods. I saw a flashlight bobbing across the field toward me and heard Buddy’s voice call out in the dark. I stopped and let the engine idle while the sweat rolled down my face and my own whiskey breath came back sharp in my throat. He jumped across the irrigation ditch on one foot, and one of his younger brothers jumped in a rattle of cattails behind him.

“Where are you going, man?”

An answer wouldn’t come, and I just flicked an index finger off the steering wheel toward the road.

“What have you been drinking?” he said.

“Made a stop down the highway.”

“You really look boiled, Zeno. Turn it around and go fishing with us. We’re going to try some worms in a hole on the river.”

I got a cigarette out of my shirt pocket and pushed it in my mouth. It seemed that minutes passed before I completed the motion.

“I got lucky at craps today. There’s a lady in a beer joint that wants to help me drink my money.”

“Where?”

“Eddie’s, or one of those places of yours.”

“I’ll go with you,” he said, and clicked off the flashlight. “Joe, go down to the river with the old man, and I’ll try to meet you later.”

“That’s no good, Buddy. She’s a one-guy chick, and I’m the guy that faded all the bread this afternoon.”