It was almost dark when I saw the lights of Missoula in the distance. The last purple twilight hung on the high, brown hills above the valley, and a solitary airplane with its landing lights on moved coldly above the city toward the airport. The city seemed so quiet and well ordered in its soft glow and neat pattern of streets and homes and lines of elm and maple trees that I wondered how any community of people could organize anything that secure against the coming of the night and the morrow. For just a moment I let it get away inside of me, and I wondered, with a little sense of envy and loss, about all the straight people in those homes: the men with families and ordinary jobs and ordinary lives, the men who pulled the green chain at the mill and carried lunch pails and never sweated parole officers, cops, jail tanks, the dirty knowledge of the criminal world that sometimes you would like to cut out with a knife, all the ten years’ roaring memory of bleeding hangovers, whorehouses, and beer-glass brawls.
But this type of reflection was one that I couldn’t afford. Otherwise I would have to put an X through a decade and admit that my brother Ace was right, and the parole office, the psychologist in the joint, the army, everybody who had told me that I had a little screw in the back of my head turned a few degrees off center.
Buddy came out of his whiskey-acid stupor just before we reached the edge of town. His glazed eyes stared at the lights for a moment, then focused on me and brightened in a way that I didn’t like. He popped the hot beer open, and the foam showered against the windshield.
?
??Man, I feel like a dragon,” he said. “I think I’ll go see the wife-o.”
“I think you better not,” I said.
“Just save your counseling and tool on down by the university, Zeno.”
“You’re not serious?”
He drank out of the whiskey bottle, chased it with the beer, and then hit it again.
“That’s a little better,” he said. “I could just feel the first snakes getting out of the basket.”
I drove without speaking until I got to the turnoff that would take us back into the Bitterroots.
“Where the hell are you going? I said I wanted to go to Beth’s.”
“Let it slide, Buddy.”
“She’s my old lady, man.”
“That’s the last thing you want to do now.”
“Let Professor Riordan worry about that. Just get it on over there.”
“Where’s your head? How do you think she’s going to feel when you waltz up to the door like a liquor truck?”
“You should have gone into the priesthood, Iry. You can really deliver the advice about somebody else’s life.”
“All right, you’ve been telling me you want to go back with her. Pull a scene like this and you’ll disconnect from her permanently.”
“I guess all this crap comes out of the new Bronze Star you won this morning.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“You charged the hill again, didn’t you? Shot the heads off all them sixteen-year-old gooks in the trench. Went through the barn door after my old man when I couldn’t move.”
“Don’t drink any more.”
“You told me about it, right? You went up the hill when everybody else froze and dumped a BAR in their faces, and when you turned them over, you said they looked like children.”
“Put your bag of needles back in your pocket, Buddy. I’m not up to it.”
“No, man. It was the same scene. You saw I was froze, and you followed the old man into the fire. You didn’t do it because of him. You knew I was nailed, and your heart started beating. Because you’re scared shitless of fire, baby, but you had a chance to make me look like a piece of shit.”
I could feel the anger tighten across my chest and swell into my throat and head until I wanted to hit Buddy as hard as I could with my fist. I took a cigarette off the dashboard and lit it and drew in deeply on the smoke.
“You want to go to Beth’s?” I said.
“I told you that, Zeno.”
OK, son of a bitch, I thought, and drove toward the university district through the dark, tree-lined streets and past the quiet lawns of all those ordinary people I had wondered about with a sense of envy just a few minutes before.