“Are you sure you weren’t into my blotter when you left here this morning?”
I pulled off my coat and took a beer out of the icebox. Two elk steaks covered with mushrooms and slices of onion were simmering in the skillet on the stove.
“Man, you’re a righteous son of a bitch today,” Buddy said. “You’re genuinely pissed because people can act as bad here as where you come from. And remember, Zeno, that’s where redneck and stump-jumper was first patented.”
“You’re wrong there, podna. I didn’t grow up around a bunch of thugs that would beat the hell out of you or burn you out because they didn’t like you. They might sniff at you a little bit, but you have your own variety of sons of bitches here.”
I picked up the guitar and put the strap around my neck. I tuned the big E down and did a run from Lightning Hopkins’ “Mojo Hand.” Buddy took a cigarette out of my shirt pocket and lit it. I could feel him looking down at me. He flicked the paper match at the stove.
“Are you playing tonight?” he said quietly.
“Yeah, at nine.”
“Are you looking for company?”
“Come along. It’s the same old gig. A bunch of Saturday-night drunks from the mill getting loaded enough to forget what their wives look like.”
“You’ve really got some strong shit in your blood today, babe,” he said. “I’m going to walk down and fish the river for a couple of hours. Move the skillet to the edge of the fire in about thirty minutes.”
I nodded at him and began tuning my treble strings with the plectrum. I heard him open the door and pause as the wind blew coldly against my back.
“You want to come along?” he asked.
“Go ahead. I better sleep this afternoon,” I said.
I had another beer and played the guitar in my sullen mood while the sky outside became grayer with the snow clouds that rolled slowly over the peaks of the Bitterroots. But even in my strange depression, which must have been brought on by lack of sleep and early morning booze, I felt a tranquillity and freedom in Buddy’s absence, the way one would after his wife has left him temporarily.
Still, it was a dark day, and no matter how much I played on the guitar, I couldn’t get rid of that heavy feeling in my breast. Normally, I could work out anything on the frets and the tinny shine of sound from my plectrum against the strings, but the blues wouldn’t work for me (because you have to be a Negro or a dying Jimmie Rodgers to play them right, I thought). And I still couldn’t get my song “The Lost Get-Back Boogie” into place, and I wondered even more deeply about everything that I was doing. I was betraying a friend, living among people who were as foreign to me as if I had been born in another dimension, and constantly scraping through the junk pile of my past, which had as much meaning as my father’s farm after Ace surveyed it into lots and covered it with cement. And I was thirty-one now, playing in the same beer joints for fifteen dollars a night, justifying what I did in a romantic abstraction about the music of the rural South.
The reality of that music was otherwise. The most cynical kind of exploitation of poverty, social decay, ignorance of medicine, cultural paranoia, racial hatred, and finally, hick stupidity were all involved in it. And the irony was that those who best served this vulgar, cynical world often in turn became its victims. I remembered when Hank Williams died at age twenty-nine, rejected by the Opry, his alcoholic life a nightmare. They put his body on the stage of the Montgomery city auditorium, and somebody sang “The Great Speckled Bird” while thousands of people slobbered into their handkerchiefs.
I put the guitar down and moved the skillet of elk steaks to the edge of the fire, then lay down on my bunk with my arm across my eyes. For a few minutes I heard the wind outside and the scrape of the pines against the cabin roof, and then I dropped down into the warmth of the blanket and the gray afternoon inside my head.
I dreamed I was in Korea again. It was hot, and three of us were sitting in the shade of a burnt-out tank with our shirts off, drinking warm beer out of cans that I had punched open with my bayonet. The twisted cloth straps of the bandoliers crisscrossed over my chest were dark with perspiration, and the metal side of the tank scorched my back every time I leaned against it. A couple of miles out from the beach, in the Sea of Japan, a British destroyer escort was throwing it into two MIGs that banked up high into the burning sky each time they made a strafing pass. I hadn’t seen Communist planes this far south before, except Bedcheck Charlie in his Piper Cub when he used to drop potato mashers on us, and it was fun to be a spectator, in the shade of the tank, with a lazy cigarette in my mouth and a wet can of beer between my thighs. The sea was flat and slate green, and the tracers from the pom-poms streaked away infinitely into the vast blueness of the sky. Then suddenly one of the MIGs burst apart in an explosion of yellow flame and flying metal that spun dizzily in trails of smoke toward the water.
The man next to me, Vern Benbow, an ex-ballplayer from the Texas bush, belched and held up his beer can in a toast. There were grains of sand in his damp hair, and his pale-blue, hillbilly eyes were red around the edges.
“May you find peace, motherfucker,” he said.
Then the scene changed. It was night, and Vern and I were in a wet hole fifteen yards behind our concertina wire, and the dark outline of a ridge loomed up into a darker sky that was occasionally violated with the falling halos of pistol flares. I was shaking with the malaria that I had picked up in the Philippines, and I thought I could hear mosquitoes buzzing inside my head. Every time a flare ripped upward into the blackness and popped into its ghostly phosphorescence, I felt another series of chills crawl like worms through every blood vein in my body.
“I think I got it figured out why they blow those goddamn bugles,” Vern said. “They’re dumb. That’s why they’re here. Nobody in his right mind would fight for a piece of shit like this.”
My rifle was leaned against the side of the hole with a tin can over the end of the barrel. I tried to straighten the poncho under me to keep the water from seeping along my spine.
“What the hell do we want that hill for?” Vern said. “Let the gooks have it. They deserve it. They can sit up there and play their bugles with their assholes. You couldn’t grow weeds here if you wanted to.”
His young face and the anxiety in it about tomorrow and the barrage that came in every day at exactly three o’clock was lighted momentarily by the pale glow of a descending flare. He took his package of Red Man chewing tobacco out of his pocket, filled his fingers with the loose strands, and put them in his mouth along with the slick lump that was already in his jaw. Out in the darkness, we saw the sergeant walking along the line of holes with his Thompson held in one hand.
“I guess I’ll go out tonight,” Vern said.
“You went out last night,” I said.
“You pulled mine two days ago. Besides, your teeth are clicking.”
I raised myself on one elbow, unbuttoned my shirt pocket, and took out the pair of red dice that I had carried with me since the Philippines.
“Snake eyes or boxcars?” I said.