He took a piece of tobacco off his lip and made a sound in his throat. There were drops of perspiration in his eyebrows. Buddy took the plates inside, and I heard him work the iron pump in the sink.
“I guess I had you called wrong. I didn’t have you figured for this,” he said.
I looked away from him, took a cigarette out of my pack, and thought, Jesus Christ, what is this?
“Then, I never figured that my own boy would spend five years in a penitentiary,” he said.
“Sometimes you can’t call what people will do,” I said.
“Is that the kind of observation you make on human conduct after you’re in jail?”
“I don’t know if I learned it in jail or not, but my own feeling is that people will do what’s inside them and there’s not much way to change that.”
“That must be a strange philosophy to live with, especially if what you do ruins most of your life.”
“I thought I had my dues paid, Mr. Riordan, and I was going to live cool for as long as I could after that. But maybe you have to keep paying dues all the way down the line and there’s no such thing as living cool.”
“I won’t try to argue with your experience and what you’ve shaped out of it. But the world isn’t a jail. We just make our own sometimes. Does that make any sense to you?”
I drew in on my cigarette and looked off at the green-yellow haze on the meadow. The field hands were bucking bales on the back of a wagon, and the short pines at the base of the mountain were bent at the tops in the wind.
“I’m sorry I dragged some trouble on your place,” I said, “and I appreciate your willingness to go bond for me. Otherwise, I’m not sure what to tell you. I’ll probably be moving into town in a day or so.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that. I just ask you to think a little bit about what I said.”
“You want a beer, Frank?” Buddy called from inside.
“Bring two out, Son.” Then to me, “You probably can’t do much with that arm around the place, but I’ll pay you to help me with the nutrias. I’m going to introduce them into a couple of beaver ponds up Lost Horse Creek this weekend.”
“You shouldn’t ever let those things loose in Montana,” I said.
“I’m afraid you’re more conservative than you think, Iry.”
My check from Ace was in the mail the next day, and I treated everyone to a beerbust and picnic at Flathead Lake. We loaded up in two cars, with children’s heads sticking out the windows, goggle masks already strapped on their faces, and I bought two cases of Great Falls with cracked ice spread among the bottles and a wicker basket of sausage, cheese, smoked ham, and French bread. It was my first trip up to the Flathead country, and I realized that I hadn’t yet seen the most beautiful part of Montana. We began to climb higher north of Missoula, the mountains blue on each side of us, the air thin and cool, and then we were rolling through the Salish Indian reservation, across the Jocko River that was now low and flowing a clear, jello green over the smooth bed of rocks with the short grass waving in the current along the banks. Buddy had the Plymouth screwed down to the floor, and he was drinking a beer with one hand, his shoulder against the door like a 1950s hood, and laughing into the wind and talking about the three-point-two weed that grows wild in Montana, while Beth kept one frightened eye on the speedometer and a nervous cigarette between her fingers.
“Look at those buffalo,” he said. “You know those cats can run at forty-five miles an hour? A chain fence doesn’t even slow them down. They got gristle and hair on their chests like armor plate. And they stay in rut like rabbits. So I asked this park ranger once why the government didn’t just turn them out and let them reproduce all over the country. And he says, now dig this, man, just imagine some Nebraska wheat farmer going to bed dreaming of a thousand acres of cereal out there, and then he hears this long rumble and looks out the window in the morning and there’s nothing but torn ground and thousands of buffalo turds.”
When we stopped for gas, Beth asked me to drive, and Buddy sat against the passenger’s door and lit a reefer. The Mission Mountains were the most beautiful range I had ever seen. They were jagged and snow-covered against the sky, with long, white waterfalls running from under the snowpack, and Kicking Horse Lake lay at the bottom like a great blue teardrop. My head was reeling with the thin air and the two beers that I had drunk, the wind and the shouts of the children in the back seat, and I felt Beth’s thigh against mine and I wondered if a person could ever hold on permanently to an experience like this.
I slowed the car as we neared Poison, and then I saw Flathead Lake, with the cherry trees along the shores, the huge expanse of blue water, the ring of mountains around it, the cliffs of stone that rose from the middle of its brilliant, quiet surface. It looked like the Pacific Ocean; it was so large that you simply lost conception of your geographical place. Boats with red sails tacked in the thin breeze, their bows white and glistening with sunlight, and the sandy stretches of beach were shaded by pine trees. We drove along the shore toward Big Fork, the water winking through the trees, and I watched the cherry pickers on their stepladders lean heavily into the leaves, their hands work
ing methodically, while the cherries rained like blood drops into their baskets.
It was a wonderful day. We ate poor-boy sandwiches on the beach, drank beer in the sun until our eyes became weak in the glare, then dove into the water and swam out breathlessly into the cold. I rented a small outboard, and we took turns taking the kids out to an island that was covered with Indian cuttings in the rock. Then Melvin bought some large cutthroat trout from a fisherman, and we barbecued them inside foil with tomato sauce. We were all tired and happy when we drove back toward Missoula. Before we got to town, Buddy went to sleep in the back seat with the children, and Beth laid her head against my shoulder and put her hand on my knee. I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or if she was just in that type of dreamy exhaustion that gives women an aura in their sleep. But it made me ache a little, that and the absence of a wife and family at age thirty-one and the probability that I would never have either one.
The next week went by, and each morning I could see the Indian summer steal more heavily across the mountains. The trees were turning more rapidly, flashes of red and yellow among the leaves where there had been none yesterday, and the sky became a harder blue, and there was more pine smoke from the chimneys in the false dawn before the sun broke across the top of the Bitterroots. I helped Mr. Riordan introduce his nutrias into Lost Horse Creek and worked a couple of afternoons in the aviary, but I spent most of each day sitting on the front porch, either drinking beer and playing the Gibson with an open tuning (which can be done with one hand if you use a bottle neck along the frets as you would use a bar on a steel or a dobro) or trying to forget the awful itch and stench of medicine and sweat inside my cast. On some days when I drank too much beer and fell into an afternoon delirium on top of my bed, I imagined that white ants that had never seen light were eating their way into my blood veins.
But altogether I felt quiet inside, and I had a strange notion that if I stayed in one place for a while and didn’t do anything extravagant, my scene at the pulp mill would disappear, and my personal war with the locals would be filed away in a can somewhere.
I was cleaning some brook trout in a pan of water on the porch when I saw the sheriff’s car turn through the cattle guard and roll along the road in a cloud of dust. I put my hands in the red water and wiped them on my blue jeans and lit a cigarette before he stopped in front of the cabin. He saw that I wasn’t going to get up from the porch, so he turned his wheel toward the steps and drove to within four feet parallel of me. There was a bead in his corpulent face, and his arm on the window looked like a fat bread roll. He took his cigar out of the ashtray, puffed on its splayed end, with the red stone of his Mason’s ring glinting in the sunlight and then opened the door part way to release his weight from under the steering wheel.
“You should have been a little more careful, son,” he said.
“How’s that, Sheriff?”
“I told you that some of my men are a little dumb and it takes us a while to get there. It took me a while to figure out where you were shooting from, too. You picked them all up from that clip except this one. It was under the pine needles right beside the tree you sat against.”
He held up a small plastic bag, wrapped at the top with a rubber band. Inside was a spent brass cartridge.