The Lost Get-Back Boogie

I wanted to explain that he wasn’t involved, that it was my own drunken barrel of snakes and southern barroom anger that had put me up on the mountain with a rifle. But I had stepped across a line with a heavy, dirty shoe into her and her children’s lives, and I felt like an intrusive outsider who had just presented someone with a handful of spiders. I drank down the bottle and set it lightly on the tabletop.

“I guess I’d better catch air,” I said. “I can probably hitch a ride pretty easy out by the highway.”

“Wait for Mel. He comes by after class for coffee.”

“Buddy’s probably junking his Plymouth for bond, and I have to go by the hospital anyway.”

She got up from her chair and took another beer from the icebox. The V in the tail of her denim shirt exposed the white skin above her shorts. She clicked the cap off into a paper bag and put the bottle in front of me.

“Buddy says you could make it as a jazz musician if you wanted to. Why do you play in country bands?”

“Because I’m good at what I do, and I have the feeling for it.”

“Do you like the people you play for?” She said it in a soft voice, her eyes interested, and I wondered why Buddy had ever left her.

“I think I understand them.”

“The type of men who beat you up and burned your truck?”

“Not everybody in a beer joint is a gangster. We wouldn’t have had that scene if Buddy—”

“I know. Buddy’s favorite expression: That’s the way the toilet flushes sometimes, Zeno.’ He has a way of saying it when somebody is already thinking about killing him.”

“Well, it was something like that. But when you cruise into it with your signs on, somebody is going to try to cancel you out.”

“I read the story in the paper. Did you really do that much damage from across the river?” Her dark eyes were dancing into mine.

“What do you think, kiddo?”

“That you don’t understand the sheriff you’re dealing with or Frank Riordan either.”

“Ever since I came here, people have been telling me I don’t understand something. Does that happen to everybody who wanders into Montana?”

“Pat Floyd might look like a fat Louisiana redneck behind his desk, but he’s been sheriff for fifteen years, and he doesn’t let people out of his jail for something like this unless he has a reason. I think you’re going to find, also, that Buddy’s father can be a strange man to deal with.” She went to the sink and pulled the rubber plug in the drain, then began squeezing water out of the jeans and T-shirts. “Excuse me. Take another beer. I have to get this on the line before it rains again.”

I took a Grain Belt from the icebox and looked at the motion of her shoulders while she twisted the water out of her boys’ clothes. I was never very good with women, possibly because I had always thought of them simply as women, but this one could reach out with an intelligent fingernail and tick the edge of your soul and walk away into a question mark.

I waited three minutes in the silence, drinking the beer and looking out through the screen at the green

trees in the backyard.

“So why is Mr. Riordan a strange man to deal with?” I said.

“He doesn’t recognize anything outside of his idea of the world and the people who should live in it. He might be a good person, but he’s always determined to do what he calls right, regardless of the cost to other people. You might not have thought about it yet, but to his mind you probably created something very large for him when you shot up those trucks.”

“I don’t create anything for anybody. I’ve tried to announce in capital letters that somebody’s fight with the pulp mill or the lumberjacks isn’t part of my act. So far I’ve gotten my arm broken and lost my job just for being around. So I don’t figure I owe anybody.”

“Why did you come here?”

“Sometimes you got to roll and stretch it out.”

“You should have stayed in Louisiana.”

“Do I get a bill for that?” I smiled at her, but her face stayed expressionless.

“If the pulp mill shuts down because of Frank Riordan, you won’t want to see what the people in this town will be like.”

“I’ve met some of them.”