The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“I understand that a print will burn right into a shell after it’s fired,” he said. “You can’t scrub it off with sandpaper.”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Well, you hang around here. I’ll let you know what I find after I take it over to the FBI man in Helena.”

EIGHT

I couldn’t sleep that night. I smoked cigarettes in bed, then went out on the porch with a half glass of Four Roses, sat in the chill, and watched a herd of deer graze their way across the meadow toward the canyon. They were sculptured in the moonlight and the wet grass, and when an automobile passed out on the highway, I could see a brown glass eye flash at me from the darkness. Through the pines the wide expanse of the Bitterroot River was dripping with a blue shimmer. I drank the whiskey and tried to keep the shell casing in the plastic bag out of my mind, but I couldn’t. I was angry at my carelessness, my failure to count the hulls as they had ejected from the chamber, and the fact that an inconsequential thing, a spent cartridge, could put me back in prison for years.

I don’t know when I fell asleep in the chair, but I smelled the smoke just before the false dawn. In my whiskey dream I thought it was pine wood burning from a chimney, but then I heard the horses whinnying and rearing and crashing inside the stalls. The flames were already up one side of the barn, the sparks whipping across the shingled roof, and the loft was framed in a bright square of yellow light from inside. On the dirt road I heard a truck clank hard into gear and thunder across the cattle guard. I ran barefoot into the cabin and shook Buddy by the shoulders in bed.

“What the hell’s going on, man?”

“Your barn’s on fire.”

We started running across the field just as a single flame cut through the roof and caught the air and sucked a large hole downward in a shower of sparks. Lights were going on all over the main house, and I saw Mr. Riordan run off the front porch without a shirt on. The hay bales that had been stacked against one wall of the barn were turning into boxes of flame, and the aviary was filled with flickering yellow light and shadows and the wild beating of birds’ wings in the cages.

“The horses,” Mr. Riordan shouted.

Their screams were terrible. I could hear their hooves slashing into the wood, and even in the smoke and the heated absence of air I could smell the singed hair.

The rope pulley on the loft caught fire from the heat alone and burned away like a solitary thread of flame. Buddy’s three younger brothers ran into the lot behind their father in their pajamas, their eyes wide with fear and uncertainty, the skin of their faces red with the glowing heat.

“Soak blankets and bring them running, boys,” Mr. Riordan said, then started through the barn door.

“Get out of there, Frank,” Buddy yelled.

The cinders and ash fell across Mr. Riordan’s bare shoulders and back as he walked toward the stalls with his forearm held across his eyes.

“That crazy old son of a bitch,” Buddy said.

I don’t know why—maybe because I didn’t think about it—but I went in behind him. The heat was like the inside of a furnace. The loft door was dripping fire through the cracks, and all the tack was popping in black leathery blisters. The air was so hot it scalded my lungs, and before I had gone five feet, I could feel the smoke getting to my brain. Mr. Riordan had opened two of the stalls of the Appaloosas, and one bolted through the door to the outside, but the other had pitched his forelegs over the stall wall and was rearing and cutting his head against an upright post.

“Let him go. You won’t get him out,” I said.

“The Arabian,” he said.

The stall was at the back of the barn, which hadn’t yet caught fire but was smoking at every joint and crack and seam. The Arabian had kicked half the stall down, and one of his shoes hung twisted off a broken hoof. His eyes stuck out with fright, and he had used his nose to try to break the latch on his door. I threw the bolt and he started out toward the main door, then reared and crashed sideways into a row of stalls that were etched with fire. He rose on his knees, with sparks in his mane and tail, and pawed at the flames that had already consumed the first Appaloosa’s stall. The front of the barn was starting to sink, and burning shingles were raining across the doorway, and the smoke was now so thick that I could no longer see Mr. Riordan or the other horses. I worked my shirt off my shoulders with one hand and waited for the Arabian to back away from the flames and turn in another circle. Then I hit him running and jumped with my stomach across his back and pulled both knees high up into his shoulders. He kicked backward into a post and some tack, and I hit him behind the ear with my cast and got my shirt around his eyes. Then I gave it to him with both heels close under the flanks and bent low on his neck with the shirt pulled tight in both hands, and we bolted through the flames and exploding bales of green hay into the sudden coolness of the blue dawn outside.

His head went up when he smelled the air and the river, and he cut sideways and threw me on my back in the middle of the lot. Then I saw Mr. Riordan come out of the huge collapsing square of fire with a soaked blanket wrapped around the thoroughbred’s nose and eyes and a trouser belt pulled tight around his neck.

The boards in the walls snapped and curled as the wind blew the flames up through the roof and burst the remaining support timbers apart in arching cascades of sparks. The dark pines at the base of the canyon behind the house wavered in the light from the fire, and the birds in the aviary stood out in the reflection like ugly phoenixes with their wings extended. There were red welts all over my feet, and I could feel small holes on my shoulders like deep cigarette burns. The gauze bandages around my back were black and smelled of the boiled ointment inside, and when I pushed my hand through my hair, it felt as stiff and sharp as wire.

“Hey, man, are you all right?” Buddy said. He stood above me, looking down out of the dawn. Then his father and three brothers were beside him.

“Hey, Iry,” he said. He was kneeling beside me, and he rubbed his hand back and forth over my hair. “Hey, get out of it, man. We got them all out except one.”

Then Mr. Riordan’s face was close into mine. He was squatted on his haunches with his hand around my arm. The matted gray hair on his shoulders was burned down to the skin like pig bristles. There was a long red burn along his cheek and through part of his lip that was already swelling into water.

“Let’s go up to the house, son,” he said.

“Where in the hell are your neighbors?” I said.

“They’ll be here. It just takes them a while.”

A half hour later the volunteer fire truck from Stevensville came up the front lane, followed by two pickup trucks from neighboring ranches. The early sun had climbed above the lip of the mountains, and there were long, cool shadows across the porch, where we sat and watched the firemen spray the burnt timbers and piles of ash. I wore one of Mr. Riordan’s soft wool shirts over the butter that his wife had spread on my shoulders.

“How fast do these guys get out here when your house is burning down?” I said.