The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Fifteen minutes later we heard a car rumble over the cattle guard. Buddy looked through the window, then back at me.

“That’s your taxi, Zeno,” he said. “Don’t say anything. Little Orphan Annie with empty circles for eyes. You were juicing in the saloon at Lolo, and you were too drunk even to drive into Missoula.”

“Get rid of the roach.”

He went to the sink and peeled the reefer, then pumped water over it.

“Th

is is a crock, ain’t it?” he said.

“Give me all the cigarettes you have.”

“Look at that pair of geeks. They love making a bust on the old man’s place.”

He handed me two packs of Lucky Strikes and a paper book of matches.

“I ain’t got the bread for a bondsman, so you’re going to have to sit it out, Zeno,” he said.

“I should have a check by tomorrow or the next day. Bring it down to the jail and I’ll endorse it.”

The deputy didn’t knock. He opened the screen door and pointed one thick finger at me.

“All right, Paret. Move it up against the car,” he said.

He held the screen open while I walked past him to the automobile. The other deputy leaned against the fender with his palm resting on the butt of his .357. Both of them were over six feet, and their wide shoulders were stiff and angular against their starched shirts.

“Lean on it,” the first deputy said.

I spread my legs and propped my hands against the roof of the automobile while his hands moved inside my thighs, then dug inside my pockets and turned them inside out. He pulled my arms behind me and snipped on the handcuffs, and the other deputy held open the door into the wire-mesh segregated back seat.

“Are you going to give us any trouble on the way back, or do you want me to sit with you?” the first deputy said.

I didn’t answer, and he locked both back doors from the outside. As the car rolled along the rutted lane, I leaned back against the handcuffs and felt the metal bite into the skin. I tried to raise myself forward to keep the pressure off my wrists, but each chuckhole in the road sent me back into the seat and another dig into my skin. The mountains had taken on a deeper blue and green from the rains, and the boulders in the creeks under the bridges were wet and shining and steaming in the sunlight at the same time. But at that moment, in my comical effort to sit rigid in the back of a sheriff’s car, I remembered a Negro kid at Angola who was handcuffed and taken down to the hole and beaten with a garden hose for stealing a peanut-butter sandwich. He spit on a hack, and so they sweated him five more days and took away his good time.

At that time, what bothered me was meeting him out on the yard after he got out of lockdown. There were still blue gashes on the insides of his lips, and while he smoked a cigarette, he told me he didn’t mind pulling the extra three years because he knew that eventually he would fall again anyway.

SEVEN

The holding cell was dull yellow with a crisscrossed door of flat iron strips that were coated with thick white paint. Names had been burned on the walls and ceiling with cigarette lighters, and there was a small, round drain in the center of the floor to urinate in. I sat on the concrete against the wall and smoked cigarettes and listened in my preoccupation with my own troubles to all the jailhouse complaints, stories of bum arrests, wives who should have had their teeth kicked in, and advice about how to deal with each screw on the day and night shifts. The area around the drain was covered with wet cigarette butts and reeked with a stench that made your eyes water when you had to stand over it. Two Flathead Indians were still drunk and waiting for the reservation police to pick them up, a check-writer who was already wanted in Idaho kept calling the sergeant back to the cell to ask about his wife, who was in the lock upstairs; a deranged old man, whose toothless gums were purple with snuff, sat by the drain, hawking and spitting through his knees; and then the one dangerous man, a twenty-five-year-old tar roofer, with square, callused hands that had no fingernails and were dark with cinders, leaned against the wall on a flexed arm, waiting for his wife to bring the bondsman down to the jail.

He asked me for a cigarette; then he wanted to know if I had ever pulled time. He paused a minute, lighting the cigarette with his thick, dark fingers, then asked what for.

After I told him, his muddy eyes looked at me for a moment, then stared off into the smoke. He sat down beside me and pulled his knees up before him. His white athletic socks were grimed with dirt. I said nothing to him, made no inquiry about his crime, and I could feel the sense of insult start to rise in him.

“What they got you for, podna?” I said.

“This guy give me some shit at Stockman’s last night. Like he was going to whip my ass with a pool cue. I put him once through the bathroom door. Then he learned what real shit smells like. And he ain’t going to press no charges, either, believe me.”

An hour later his wife, a vacuous and pathetic-looking blonde girl in a waitress’s uniform, was at the jail with the bondsman. As I watched them through the grated door, holding hands in front of the property desk, I could see the humiliation in her face and the fear of another night and all the others to follow. They would pay out their lives in installments to bondsmen, guilty courts, finance companies, and collection agencies.

At seven that evening a deputy sheriff stood in front of the door with a pair of handcuffs hung over his index finger and waited for the sergeant to turn the lock.

“Get rid of the cigarette and put them behind you,” he said.

I flicked the butt toward the drain and waited for him to snip the cuffs around my wrists. He ran his hands under my armpits and down both sides of my trousers, then caught me under the arm with his hand. The cell door clanged behind us, and we walked down a corridor with spittoons on the floor toward the back of the building. Our shoes sucked against the damp mopping on the wooden floor, and a frosted yellow square of light shone from an office by the exit sign.

“Before we go in, tell me what the hell you thought you were going to get out of it,” he said.