The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Mr. Riordan clicked his fingernail on the lip of the glass.

“Well, next time call me while they’re here, or ask them to leave their name and address.”

The bartender’s lips were a tight line while he poured into the glass. He set the bottle down, lit a cigarette, and walked to the rounded end of the bar and leaned against it, with one foot on a beer case and his back to us. Then he squeezed his cigarette in an ashtray and took off his apron.

“I’m going on my break now,” he said. “Pour what you want out of the bottle, and add it on to your dinner bill.” I could see the color in his neck as he went through the doorway.

I shook my head and laughed.

“Buddy told me you had a private sense of humor,” Mr. Riordan said.

“I can’t get over the number of people around here who always have a fire storm inside themselves,” I said.

“Oh, Slim’s not a bad fellow. Actually, his problem is his wife. Her face would make a train turn left on a dirt road.” He was into his third shot, and the blood was starting to show in his unshaved cheeks. “One time he came in on a tear from the firemen’s picnic, and she sewed his bed sheet down with a sail needle and wore him out with a quirt. He got baptized at the Bapt

ist church the next Sunday.”

When he grinned, his teeth looked purple in the light from the neon beer sign above the bar.

“Do you believe what he said about that man in Lolo?” I said.

“No. But it’s not important, anyway.”

“It’s pretty damn important when they’re setting fire to your home and your animals.”

It was rash, and I hated my impetuosity even before I saw his face fix mine in the mirror behind the bar. The skin was tight against the bone, the eyes even, his red-check wool shirt buttoned like a twisted rose under his neck.

“I think I know who they are,” he said, his voice low and intense. “I don’t know if I could put them in the penitentiary, but I could probably do things to them myself that would make them never want to destroy a fine horse again. But that won’t stop others like them, and it won’t change the minds of those people in the dining room, either.”

The waitress brought our steaks, thick and swimming in blood and gravy, a piece of butter on the charcoaled center, surrounded with boiled carrots and Idaho potatoes. The meat was so tender and good that the steak knife clicked against the plate as soon as you cut into it.

Mr. Riordan finished his bourbon, then began to cut at the steak, his back rigid and his elbows at an angle. The steak slipped sideways on the plate and knocked potatoes and gravy all over the bar.

“Well,” he said, and picked up the bartender’s towel. He had a good edge on, and I could feel him deciding something inside himself. He pushed the plate away with his fingertips, rolled a cigarette slowly, and poured again from the bottle of Jim Beam. “Go ahead and eat. Remind me in the future to stay away from morning whiskey.”

It was colder when we walked outside, and the snow clouds had covered the sun. The wind bit into my face and made my eyes water. A few early mallard ducks were winnowing low over the cottonwoods on the river. Mr. Riordan walked across the gravel to the truck as though the earth was about to shift on its axis. He took the keys out of his overalls pocket and paused at the driver’s door.

“I think you probably want to drive a truck again,” he said, and put the keys in my hand.

As we rolled along the blacktop toward the ranch, he looked steadily ahead through the windshield, his shoulder sometimes slipping momentarily against the door. He started to roll another cigarette, then gave it up.

“What do you plan to do in the future?” he said, because he felt that he had to say something.

“Finish my parole. Take it easy and cool and slide with it, I guess.”

“You probably have about thirty or forty years ahead of you. Do you think about that?” The movement of the truck made his head nod, and he blinked and widened his eyes.

“I’ve never gotten around to it.”

“You should. You don’t believe you’ll be fifty or sixty. Or even middle-aged. But you will.”

I looked over at him, but his eyes were focused on the blacktop. His large, worn hands lay on his thighs like skillets. The back of his left hand was burned with a thick white scar, hairless and slick as a piece of rubber. He cleared his throat, blinked again, and then his eyes faded and closed. He breathed as though he were short of breath.

Buddy had told me about his old man riding for five bucks a show on the Northwestern rodeo circuit during the depression. In 1934 he couldn’t make the mortgage payments for seven months on an eight-hundred-acre spread outside of Billings, and a farm corporation out of Chicago bought it up at twenty dollars an acre. They knocked the two-story wood home flat with an earth grader, bulldozed it up in a broken pile of boards, burned it and pushed it in a steaming heap into the Yellowstone River. Mr. Riordan pulled his children and wife around in a homemade tin trailer on the back of a Ford pickup through Wyoming, Utah, and California, working lettuce, topping carrots and onions, and picking apples at three cents a crate.

He took a job in Idaho on a horse farm by the Clearwater, breaking and training Appaloosas for a man who provided rough stock on the rodeo circuit. In a year and a half of stinting, eating welfare potatoes and listening to the wind crack off the mountain and blow through the newspaper plugged in the trailer’s sides, he put away four hundred dollars in the People’s Bank of Missoula. It all went down on the ranch in the Bitter-roots. He had no idea of how he could make the first mortgage payment. But nevertheless it went down, and he pulled the tin trailer up to the house, stomped down the chicken-wire fence with his boot, let the kids out of the trailer door into a yard full of pigweed and cow flop, and said: “This is it. We’re going to do it right here.”

He stayed two days at the house and then left Mrs. Riordan to clean, scrub, and boil an entire ranch to cleanliness while he followed the circuit through Oregon and Washington and Alberta. He worked as a pickup man and hazer, then rode bulls and broncs for prize money. In Portland he drew a sorrel that had a reputation as an easy rocker, but when the sorrel came out of the chute, he slammed sideways into the gate and then started sunfishing. Mr. Riordan stayed on for six seconds, and then he was twisted sideways on the horse’s back with his left hand wound in the leather. The pickup men couldn’t get the bucking strap off. The leather pinched Mr. Riordan’s hand into a shriveled monkey’s paw, and the bones snapped apart like twigs.