It was Saturday afternoon, and the Inn was full of famlies from Stevensville and Corvallis and Hamilton. They sat around the checker-cloth tables like pieces of scrubbed beef, stuffed in their ill-fitting clothes and chewing on celery and radishes out of the salad bowl. A few of the men nodded at Mr. Riordan when we walked in, but I had the feeling that we were about as welcome there as cow flop. He slipped his sheep-lined jacket on the back of the chair and ordered two whiskies with draft chasers.
“Are you sure you want to eat here?” I said.
“Why shouldn’t we?”
I saw the same type of deliberate nonrecognition in his face that I used to see in my father’s when he refused to accept the most obvious human situation.
“It was just an observation,” I said.
He drank the whiskey neat, his lead-gray eyes blinking only once when he swallowed. He sipped off the top of the beer and set the mug evenly on the tablecloth.
“You don’t care for Jim Beam?” he said.
“I have to work tonight. Musicians can get away with almost anything except showing up high.”
His eyes went past me, into the faces of the people at the other tables; then he looked back at me again.
“You have to use that kind of caution in your work, do you?” he said.
I drank out of the beer.
“I have a habit of falling into the whole jug when I get started on bourbon,” I said. I smiled with my excuse, but he wasn’t really talking to me anymore.
He took his package of string-cut tobacco out of his pocket and creased a cigarette paper between his thumb and forefinger. His nails were broken back to the cuticle and purple with carpenter’s bruises. But even while the tobacco was filling and shaling off the dented paper, before he wadded it all up and dropped it out of his palm into the ashtray, I already saw the dark change of mood, the vulnerable piece in his stoic armor, the brass wheels of disciplined empathy shearing against one another. At all those other tables he was at best a tolerable eccentric (since it was a Saturday afternoon family crowd that would make allowances).
“You want to drink at the bar?” I said.
“That’s a good idea.”
We walked between the tables into the small bar that adjoined the dining room, and Mr. Riordan told the waitress to serve our steaks in there.
“How are you, Frank?” the bartender said. I recognized him as one of the volunteer firemen who had come to the ranch when the barn burned.
“Pretty good, Slim. Give this man here a beer, and I’ll take a Beam with water on the side.”
The bartender set a double-shot glass on the counter and continued to pour to the top.
“Just one,” Mr. Riordan said.
“I like to give away other people’s whiskey.” The bartender glanced sideways at the empty stools and into the dining room. “Did you hear anything about who might have had that gasoline can?”
“No.”
“There were some guys drunk in here the other night talking about lighting a fire to somebody’s ass.”
Mr. Riordan rolled the whiskey back against his throat and swallowed once, deeply, the gray eyes momentarily bright.
“Who were they?” he said.
“I think one of them drives a tractor-trailer out of Lolo.”
“Slim, why in the hell would a truck driver want to burn me out?”
“I don’t know. I just told you what I heard them saying.”
“And you don’t know this man’s name.”
“Like I said, maybe I’ve seen him pulling out of Lolo a couple of times. I thought I might be of some help to you.”