The Lost Get-Back Boogie

nside the plaster.”

He wasn’t listening to me. He knocked the chair over in getting up from the table and went in the back room to change clothes. He came back out dressed in a pair of sharkskin slacks, a blue sports shirt, half-topped boots, and a gray windbreaker. He pumped some water in the sink and washed his face and combed his hair back in ducktails on the sides.

“What are we doing?” I said.

“Getting your arm back into gear, Zeno. Don’t worry about it.” He opened the icebox and took out a saucer that had the torn corner of an ink blotter on it.

“Hey, man, let that stuff slide today,” I said.

“There’s enough for two. You ought to get up after charging the flames and doing that Korean War-Bronze Star scene.”

“Come on, Buddy.”

He put the blotter in his mouth and bit down easily on it.

“I was talking with this guy in Missoula who’s been sending acid into Deer Lodge under postage stamps,” he said. “All a guy has to do is take one lick and he’s flying for the rest of the day.”

We drove through the Bitterroot toward Missoula, and Buddy was snapping to the music on the radio and lighting one cigarette off another while he kept a can of beer between his thighs. I couldn’t tell exactly when the acid took him, because he already had enough whiskey in his system to make him irrational and feverish in the eyes. But by the time we reached Lolo he was talking incoherently and punching me on the shoulder with two fingers to illustrate something, and each time he touched me a ripple of pain danced across my blistered skin. I shouldn’t have left the cabin with him. I looked up the highway that led off the junction at Lolo over the pass into Idaho and thought of driving up somewhere high in the lodgepole pines to let him get his head straight again, but he read me.

“Keep it straight into Missoula, Zeno. We want to get your arm flattened out so you can get into the shitkicker scene again. Then we’ll go over to Idaho later.”

I went on through the light at the junction and took the can of beer from between his legs.

“That’s what you don’t understand about acid, Iry,” he said. “You can look into people’s thoughts with it. Right on down into their ovaries.”

I parked the car in the shade of some elm trees by Saint Patrick’s Hospital and left Buddy outside. As I walked up toward the entrance in the bright fall air and spangle of sunshine, I turned around and saw Buddy’s half-topped boots resting casually over the edge of the driver’s window. The Irish nun who had been a friend to me before changed the dressings on my back with her cool fingers and then took me over to the X-ray room, where I was told that the crack in my arm had knitted well and I probably could have the cast sawed off in another week.

When I got back to the car, Buddy was sitting behind the wheel, drinking a hot beer and listening to a hillbilly radio station. His eyes were swimming with color.

“The heat came around and told me to get my feet out of the window,” he said. “They said it don’t look good around the hospital.”

“Let’s go to the Oxford. I’ll buy you a steak,” I said.

“They must have told you something good in there.”

“I get my cast off next week.”

He slipped across the seat when I opened the car door. I pulled out on the street and started to drive toward the Oxford. We crossed the bridge over the Clark Fork, and I looked away at the wide curve of green water and the white rocks engraved with the skeletons of dead insects along the banks. It was going to be a good day after all, with no thoughts of cops or parole violation or FBI fingerprint men in Helena. Buddy was probably right, I thought. The sheriff just wanted to spook me into jumping my parole so he could have me violated back to Angola, and if I kept my head on straight, I could probably walk out of the thing at the mill.

“Let’s get the steak later,” Buddy said.

“I’m flush and I don’t do this often,” I said. “A couple of T-bones and then we’ll have a few drinks with your photographer friend over at Eddie’s.”

“Just head on down the highway and I’ll give you the directions. You ain’t seen Idaho yet.”

“Why don’t we keep it solid today, Buddy, and just booze around a litte bit this afternoon and fish the river tonight?”

“It’s my car, ain’t it? Head it down the road, and I’ll tell you when to stop at this 1860 bar with bullet holes in the walls.”

“I don’t think this is cool. The rods knock on the highway like somebody put glass in the crankcase.”

“Turn left at the light or let me drive.”

We drove west along the river through the high canyons toward the Idaho line. When we climbed a grade toward a long span of bridge and looked down, the river shone blue and full of light, and the moss waved on the smooth boulders below the current. Just before the state line there was an old bar set back from the road against the base of a mountain. The rambling back part of the building was half collapsed, the windows were boarded, and a section of tin roof was torn up from the eave. But the bar itself was made of mahogany and scarred in a half-dozen places by pistol balls, with a long brass rail and a huge, yellow-stained baroque mirror that covered the entire wall.

Buddy ordered two whiskey sours before I could stop him, then dropped a quarter into the jukebox, which was located right next to a table where three workingmen were playing cards. They were annoyed, and they looked at him briefly before they moved to a table in back.

“They built this place when the railroad came through,” Buddy said. “The back of the building was all cribs. Up on the side of the mountain there’s about twenty graves of men that were shot right here.”