“I don’t give a shit about the car,” he said, “but you’re going to get your ass in jail tonight.”
“Never had a ticket, babe.”
“That’s because those coonass cops don’t know how to write. Move it over and let’s go down and investigate it together.”
“You want the car back?”
“No, I want to keep you from going back on P.V.”
“I got to catch air. If you want the car, I’ll thumb.”
He stepped back from the door and bowed like a butler, sweeping his arm out into the darkness.
“It’s your caper, Zeno,” he said. “I ain’t got money for bond, so you take this fall on your own.”
I thumped across the cattle guard, and in the rearview mirror I saw Buddy and his brother swing the gate closed and pull the loop wire over the fence post.
The drive back to the pulp mill was a long blacktop stretch of angry headlights, horns blowing in a diminishing echo behind me, gravel showering up under the fender when I hit the shoulder, and a highway-patrol car that kept evenly behind me for two miles and then turned off indifferently into a truck stop. I opened a can of beer and set it beside me on the seat and sipped off the bottle of Beam’s Choice. I picked up a radio station in Salt Lake that was advertising tulip bulbs and baby chicks sent directly to your house, C.O.D., in one order, and the announcer’s voice rose to the fervor of a southern evangelist’s when he said: “And remember, friends and neighbors, just write ‘Bulb.’ B-U-L-B. That’s ‘Bulb.’”
There was a wooden bridge over the Clark Fork just below the pulp mill, and then a climbing log road against the mountain that overlooked the river, the sour, mud-banked ponds where they kept their chemicals before they seeped out into the current, and the lighted parking lot full of washed and waxed yellow trucks. The Plymouth slammed against the springs and dug rocks out of the road with the oil pan as I pushed it in second gear up the grade, and the dense overhang from the trees slapped across the windshield and top like dry scratches on a blackboard. When I reached the top of the grade and drove along the smooth yellow strip of road among the pines, the heat indicator was quivering past the red mark on the dash, and I could hear the steam hissing under the radiator cap. I pulled the car into a turnaround at the base of a curve on the mountain and slipped the sling of the Springfield over my shoulder and picked up the field jacket with my good hand.
I walked down through the timber, with the brown pine needles thick under my feet, and found a clear place where I could lean back against a pine trunk and cover the whole parking lot with the iron sights. There were white lights strung up the sides of both smokestacks, against the dark blue of the far mountain, and the parking lot ached with a brilliant electric glow off the asphalt.
I opened the breech of the Springfield and laid it across my lap, then counted out the shells on a handkerchief and cut a deep X with my pocketknife across each soft-nose. I pushed the shells into the magazine with my thumb until the spring came tight, then slid the bolt home and locked it down. I readjusted the sling and worked it past the cast so I could fire comfortably from a sitting position and aim across my knee without canting the sights.
The first round broke through a front windshield and spider-webbed the glass with cracks, and I drove two more shots through the top of the cab. The bullets against the metal sounded like a distant metallic slap. I couldn’t see the damage inside, but I figured that the flattened and splintered lead would tear holes like baseballs in the dashboard. I shifted my knee and swung the iron sights on the next truck and let off three rounds in a row without taking my cheek from the stock. The first bullet scoured across the hood and ripped the metal like an ax had hit it, and I to
re the grill and radiator into a wet grin with the other two.
I suppose that in some drunken compartment of my mind I had only planned to pay back in kind, on an equal basis, what had been done to me, but now I couldn’t stop firing. My ears rang with a heady exhilaration with each shot, the empty casings leaped from the thrown bolt and smoked in the pine needles, and then there was that whaaappp of the bullet flattening out into another truck. I took a long drink from the pint of Beam’s Choice, then reloaded and fired the whole clip all over the parking lot without aiming. I was now concentrated on how fast I could let off a round, recover from the recoil and throw the bolt, then lock another shell in the chamber and squeeze again.
On the last clip I must have bit into something electrical on an engine, either the battery or the ignition wiring, because the sparks leaped in a shower from under the hood. Then I could see the yellow-and-blue flame wavering under the oil pan and the paint starting to blister and pop in front of the windshield.
I slipped the sling off my shoulder and began to pick up the shell casings with one hand while I watched it. The casings were hot in my hand, and I put them clinking into the flap pocket of my field jacket. The fire sucked up through the truck cab, then caught the leather seat over the gas tank in earnest, and then it blew. The flame leaped upward into one cracking red handkerchief against the dark, and the truck body collapsed on the frame and the tires roared with circles of light.
I drank again from the bottle and watched it with fascination. The heat had already cracked the glass on the next truck, and the fire was whipping inside the cab. The red light reflected off the river at the foot of the hill, and the dark trunks of the pines were filled with shadows. Out on the highway beyond the mill, I saw the blue bubblegum light of a police car turning furiously in the darkness. I put the bottle in my pocket and felt around for any shells that I hadn’t picked up, then shoved my hand under the pine needles and swept it across a half circle on my right side. The whiskey was throbbing behind my eyes, and I lost my balance when I tried to get to my feet with the sling across my chest.
For the first time that night I became genuinely aware that I was in trouble. My mind couldn’t function, I didn’t know anything about the back roads, and I stood a good chance of being picked up on the highway for drunk driving. My heart was beating with the exertion of climbing to the top of the rise with the Springfield slung on my shoulder, and sweat ran in rivulets out of my hair into my eyes. I sat behind the wheel of the Plymouth and tried to think. I could take the log road over the mountain and possibly drive off the edge of a wash into five hundred feet of canyon (provided that the road went anywhere) or return across the log bridge into a good chance of a jolt in Deer Lodge plus an automatic violation back to Angola. I started the engine but kept the lights off and let the car roll down the road in neutral, braking heavily all the way down the grade. The pines began to thin toward the bottom of the hill, and then I saw the brown sweep of the river with the thick eddies of sawdust along the banks. The bridge stood out flat and hard in the reflection of lights from the mill, and there was a police car parked at the other side with the airplane headlights turned on and the bubblegum machine swinging on the roof.
I cut on my lights and eased the Plymouth into second as I came off the incline; then I remembered the Springfield propped like an iron salute against the passenger’s door. It was too late to dump it or even throw it over into the back seat. The sheriff’s deputy was already by the wooden bridge rail, winking his flashlight at me.
Oh boy. And you rolled right into it, babe.
I slowed the car and looked over at the bright flame in the parking lot and the two men who were spraying it with fire extinguishers in silhouette. Then the deputy began to sweep his flashlight impatiently, and it took a second, like a beat out of my heart, to realize that he was waving me past. I rattled across the board planks, and the headlights suddenly illuminated his brown uniform, the wide gun belt and cartridges, and the Stetson pushed low over his eyes. I nodded at him and slowly depressed the accelerator.
I hit the highway and opened up the Plymouth with the rods knocking, the frame shaking, and the moon rising over the mountain like a song. I opened the wind vane into my face and felt the sweat turn cold and dry in my hair, and then I drank the last of the whiskey in a long swallow and sailed the bottle over the roof. I had walked right out of it with the kind of con luck that drops on your head when you’re sure that this time they’re going to weld the cell door shut.
I bought a six-pack of Great Falls to drink on the way back to the ranch, and I felt a light-headed, heart-beating sense of victory and omniscience that I had known only in the infantry after moving all the way to the top of a Chinese hill without being hit. The fact that I weaved across the white center line or ran through an intersection at seventy seemed unimportant; I was flying with magic all over me, and the alcohol and adrenalin worked in my heart with a mean new energy.
The next morning I felt the sun hot and white in my eyes through the window. There was an overturned can of beer by the bed, and my shirt was half off and tangled around my cast. I walked into the back room where Buddy was sleeping and saw the Springfield back on the rack, though I had no memory of having put it there. I could still taste the mixture of beer, whiskey, and cigarettes in my mouth, and I worked the pump on the sink and cupped the water up in my hand. When the coldness hit my stomach, I thought I was going to be sick. My hands were shaking, the blood veins in my head had started to draw tight with hangover, and my eyes ached when I looked through the window into the bright light and the dew shimmering on the hay bales.
I tried to light the kindling in the wood stove to make coffee, but the paper matches flared against my thumbnail, and as I stared at the split chunks of white wood, the whole task suddenly seemed enormous. I took a beer out of the icebox and sat on the edge of the bed while I drank it. The sickening taste of the whiskey began to dissipate, and I felt the quivering wire in the middle of my breast start to dull and quieten. I finished the beer and had another, and by the bottom of the second can that handkerchief of flame in the parking lot became removed enough to think about. Then I saw Buddy leaning against the doorjamb, naked to the waist, his blue jeans low on his flat stomach, grinning at me.
“Are you getting in or getting up, Zeno? Either way, you look like shit,” he said.
“What’s up?” I said. My voice sounded strange, distant and apart from me, a piece of color in the ears.
“Did you get bred last night?”