“I’d like to get this jailhouse smell off me, and I’ll buy you one this afternoon.”
We rolled across the bridge over the river, and I looked at the deep flashes of sunlight in the current.
“Did you use Buddy’s Springfield?” he said.
“I was pretty drunk that night, and I don’t remember much of anything.”
“OK. But you ought to throw it in the river.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said.
The wind was blowing up the Bitterroot Valley, and the leaves of the cottonwoods trembled with silver in the bright air. I watched the fields of hay and cattle move by, and the log ranch houses chinked with mortar, and the drift of smoke from a small forest fire high on a blue mountain. The creek beds that crossed under the road were alive with hatching insects, and the pebbles along the sandy banks glistened wet and brown in the sun. Damn, Montana was a beautiful part of the country, I thought. It reached out with its enormous sky and mountains and blue-green land and hit you like a fist in the heart. You simply became lost in looking at it.
Buddy got up from his chair on the porch of the cabin and spread his arms in the air when he saw the automobile. Melvin let me down and drove up the rutted road toward the main house, and I saw Buddy flip away a hand-rolled cigarette into the wind. His shirttail was pulled out, and his stitched and bruised face was grinning like a scarecrow’s as he walked dis-jointedly across the lawn.
“One night in the bag and Zeno has made the street,” he said. “That’s what I call accelerated.”
I could smell the marijuana on his clothes when I was five feet from him.
“I can see you’ve been sweating out your podna’s poor ass being in jail.”
“I knew you were going to walk late last night. I did a ding-a-ling on the ring-a-ling after the old man said he would go a property bond. But they said there was no bail because Zeno hadn’t been charged, and you would be sent home safely in the morning.”
“What time was this?”
“About midnight.”
“That’s great, Buddy. So I spent the night with one of your local homosexuals and a one-armed Negro psychotic while everything was cool on the farm. I’m relieved as hell to know that I didn’t have anything to worry about.”
“I couldn’t get you out that late. They don’t hire a night jailer, and I don’t think they liked you down there too much anyway. Look, man, I got something for you inside. Also, you got to see the rainbow I took this morning.”
We walked up on the porch, and Buddy went through the screen door in front of me.
“I got it on credit, so don’t worry about it. I got credit out my winky hole, and I just send them a hubcap from the Plymouth when they threaten to take my property.”
On my bunk was a new Gibson guitar with a Confederate flag wrapped around the sound box. The blond, waxed wood in the face and the dark, tapered neck and silver frets shone in the light through the window.
“They ain’t got dobros in Montana, and I couldn’t find a Martin,” he said.
“Well, hell, man.”
“But this has got a lifetime guarantee, and the guy says he’ll sell us a case for it at cost.”
“Well, you dumb bastard.”
He folded a torn match cover around a roach and lit it, already grinning into the smoke before he spoke.
“I tried to get you a Buck Owens instruction book, but they didn’t have it,” he said.
I sat down on the bed and clicked my thumbnail over the guitar strings. They reverberated and trembled in the deep echo from the box. I tried to make an awkward E chord, but I couldn’t work my cast around the neck.
“Can you figure that scene down at the jail?” I said.
“You got me. I thought they had you nailed flat.”
“What do you know about the sheriff?”
“Look out for him. He’s an old fox.”