The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“I saw my P.O. and had four hours to kill before I met Melvin. I didn’t want to hang around town and get picked up by the sheriff again, and I didn’t feel like sitting in the library anymore with a bunch of college students. So I asked her to go out for lunch.”

I had done a number of things over the years that were wrong, but lying was not one of them, even in prison, and I don’t know if this was because of my father’s deep feeling for truth and the habit it established in me or if I had found that the truth is the best pragmatic solution for any complex situation. But I had lied to Buddy and the words burned in my cheeks. I lifted the cup and took a sip out of it, then puffed off the cigarette.

“So why don’t you tell somebody about it?” he said. “I ain’t going to cut out your balls in the middle of the night.” “I thought it wasn’t a big deal.”

“Well, it ain’t, Zeno. It ain’t. Just drop some words on your old partner so I don’t feel like a dumb asshole when Mel sends this kind of news across the mashed potatoes. I mean, that cat is all right, but my mother is serving the steak around, and he says, ‘Was Beth’s car still working all right when she took Iry down to the Heidelhaus?’”

He took my cigarette out of my fingers and drew in on the stub.

“What was I supposed to say, Zeno?” he said. “My sister had gloat in her eyes, and the old man took out his pocket watch like he’d never seen it before. Say, no shit, man, you ain’t balling her, are you?”

“No.”

“You want to get high? I got some real good Mexican stuff today.”

“I’d better go to bed early. I want to go up to Bonner tomorrow and see if I can get back on with the band.”

I took the guitar strap off my neck and laid the sound box face down across my thighs. I pulled the picks off my fingers and dropped them in my shirt pocket.

“Come on and get loaded,” he said.

“I better look good tomorrow.”

“That’s on the square? You haven’t been milking through your partner’s fence?”

“I already told you, Buddy.”

I wrapped the Gibson in a blanket and went to sleep on my bunk, leaving him to a large kitchen matchbox of green Mexican weed and all the paranoid nightmares he could get out of it.

Friday night I was playing lead guitar again on the platform at the Milltown Union Bar, Cafe and Laundromat. The bar-stools and the tables were filled with mill workers and loggers and their masculine women, and at nine o’clock I attached the microphone pickup to my sound hole and opened up with Hank’s “Lost Highway,” a lament about a deck of cards, a jug of wine, and a woman’s lies. Their faces were quiet in the red-and-purple neon glow off the bar, and by the time I slipped into “The Wild Side of Life,” they were mine. Then I did a song about gyppo loggers written by our drummer (“the jimmy roaring, the big wheels rolling, the dirt and bark a-flying”), and I could see the words burn with private meaning, with affirmation of their impoverished lives, into all those work-creased faces.

It was good to be working again, to hear the applause, to sit at the bar between sets in a primitive aura and receive the free drinks and the callused handshakes. We played until two in the morning, turning our speakers higher and higher against the noise on the dance floor, the rattle of bottles, and the occasional violent scrape of chairs when a fight broke out. My voice was hoarse, my left arm throbbed, and my fingertips felt like they had been touched with acid, but that was all right. I was playing with that sense of control and quietness inside that came to me only when I was at my best. After everyone had left, I had a bowl of chili and a cup of coffee at the bar with the drummer, both of us light-headed with alcohol, exhaustion, and the electric echoes of the last five hours. Then I walked out into a sleeting rain and drove the Plymouth back toward Missoula and Beth’s house.

TEN

During the night the sleet and wind whipped the trees against the second-story bedroom window, and when the dawn began to grow into the sky, the grass was thick with small hailstones, and the sidewalks looked like they had been powdered with rock candy. I drove back to the ranch as the sun broke coldly over the edge of the Bitterroots, and I saw the snow in the pines high up in the mountains and the drift of white, shimmering light when the wind blew through the trunks. I should have left Beth’s house earlier, but in the warmth of her bed and with her woman’s heat against me and the wet rake of the maple on the window, I drifted back into sleep until the room was suddenly gray with the false dawn. Now, I worried abou

t Buddy and the lie I would have to tell him if he was awake.

But he was asleep, face down in the bed with his clothes and shoes on, his arms spread out beside him, a dead joint stuck like a flag in a beer can on the floor. It was cold inside the cabin, and I fired the wood stove, fanned the draft until the kindling caught and snapped into the hunks of split pine, and started to undress on the edge of my bunk. Through the side window I could see the snow clouds above the mountaintops turning violet over the dark sheen of the trees. My body was thick with fatigue, and I could still hear the noise of the bar and the electronic amplifiers as though the few hours’ interlude with Beth hadn’t been there. Then, as I lay back on the pillow with my arm over my eyes and started to sink into the growing warmth of the wood stove and the lessening of my heartbeat, I heard Mr. Riordan’s boots on the porch and his quiet knock on the screen.

He said he needed one of us to go up Lost Horse Creek with him to turn loose some more nutrias, so I got in the pickup, and we headed down the highway with the wire cages bouncing in the bed. I looked around through the window at the red eyes of the nutrias and their yellow buck teeth and porcupine hair and had to laugh.

“You must find them a great source of humor,” he said. His red-check wool shirt was buttoned at the collar and wrists under his sheep-lined jacket.

“I’m sorry,” I said, still laughing. “But I can’t get over these things being introduced deliberately into an area. One time my father and I had to spend a week cleaning out the irrigation ditches in our rice field after these guys had gone to work.”

“They’re that bad, are they?” he said, his face on the road.

“No, sir, they’re worse.” I laughed again. It was too ridiculous.

“If these prove that they can acclimate to the environment and be of commercial value, the beaver in the Northwest might be with us a few more years.”

He was a serious man not given to levity about his work, and I now felt awkward and a bit stupid in not having seen as much. He drove with his forearms against the steering wheel and tried to roll a cigarette between his fingers while the tobacco spilled out both ends of the paper.

“You want a tailor-made?” I said.

“Thank you.” He crumpled the paper and tobacco grains in his palm and dropped them out the wind vane. I had a notion that he could have rolled that cigarette into a tube as slick as spit if he had wanted, but he was a gentleman and had just erased that moment of righteousness that had led to my discomfort.