The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“No, you haven’t. Not when they’re out of work and there’s no food in the house except what they get from the federal surplus center. There’s nothing worse than a lumber town when the mill closes down.”

“Why don’t you leave?” Then I felt stupid for my question.

“I could probably wait tables at the bus depot in Billings or a truck stop in Spokane. Do you recommend that as a large change?”

“I’m sorry. Too much beer in the morning.”

She dried her hands and pushed her hair back under her blue scarf.

“Tell me another thing,” she said. “Do you believe Buddy is going to stay out of jail?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t think that someday he’ll go back to prison for one thing or another? For dope or a drunk accident or a bottle thrown across a bar or any of the things that he does regularly and casually dismisses?”

“Buddy’s not a criminal. He fell in Louisiana because he was holding some weed at the wrong time. If he wasn’t a Yankee and had had some money, he could have walked out of it.”

“That wasn’t the first time he was in jail.”

“He told me about that.”

“What?” she said.

I felt uncomfortable again under her eyes, and I took a sip from the beer.

“He said you had him locked up once.”

“That’s wonderful. He drove his car through the lawns all the way down the block and ran over the front steps, then stuck a matchstick in the horn. Every neighbor in the block called the police, and the next day we were evicted from the house. While he spent ninety days in jail, we lived in a trailer without heat in East Missoula.”

I heard the front screen slam back on the spring. Melvin walked through the hallway into the kitchen, chalk dust on the back of his brown suit coat, his face bright and handsome, and poured a cup of coffee off the stove. He began talking immediately. He didn’t know it, but at that moment I would have enjoyed buying him a tall, cool drink.

He talked without stopping for almost fifteen minutes. Then he set down the empty coffeepot on the stove and said, “You ready to roll, ace?”

“Yeah, let’s get it,” I said.

“Jesus Christ, you blew the hell out of that place, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, all right. But I drove past the mill last night, and they were still scraping up a melted truck from the asphalt. Partner, that was a real job.”

“Let’s hit it if you’re going.”

We walked through the hallway to the front with Beth behind us. I paused at the screen door.

“I should have a check in the mail today if you and the kids would like to go on a barbecue or something,” I said. “Maybe Melvin and his wife would like to come, and Buddy can take along his little brothers, and we’ll find a lake someplace.”

She smiled at me, her blue-black hair soft on her forehead. Her dark eyes took on a deeper color in the sunlight through the trees.

“I used to make the second-best sauce piquante in southern Louisiana,” I said.

“Ask the others and give me a call,” she said.

I winked at her and walked across the shady lawn to the car.

Winking, I thought. Boy, are you a cool operator.

“You want to stop at Eddie’s Club for a beer?” Melvin said.