“Texas people is always high rollers. Even you coonasses ought to know that.”
I rattled the dice once in my hand and threw them on the edge of
his muddy blanket.
“Little Joe. You son of a buck,” he said. He put his pot on, picked up his rifle, slipped a bandolier over his shoulder, and lifted himself out of the hole. His back and seat were caked with mud.
That was the last time I saw him. He and fifteen others were caught halfway up the hill between two machine-gun emplacements that the Chinese had established on our side of Heart Break Ridge during the night.
I heard the screen door slam on the edge of my dream and Buddy pulling off his heavy jacket. His hair was powdered with wet snow, and his trousers were damp up to the thighs from the brush along the riverbank. He rubbed his hands on his red cheeks.
“It’s too damn cold to fish,” he said. “I had one brown on and almost froze my hand when I stuck it in the water.”
“Where’s the brown?”
“Very clever,” he said.
“It was just a question, since I was trying to sleep and you came in like Gangbusters.”
“Go back to sleep, then. I’m going to eat.” He unlaced the leather string on one boot and kicked it toward the wall. “You want some elk?”
“Go ahead. I’m not hungry.”
“You’re not anything these days, Zeno.”
“What am I supposed to do with that, Buddy?”
“Not a goddamn thing.”
“You want to just say it? If it’s on your mind, if it’s in some real bad place?”
“I don’t have nothing to say. I didn’t mean to piss you off because I woke you up. Or maybe you’re just pissed in general about something that don’t have anything to do with you and me.”
I sat up on the bunk and lit a cigarette. Outside, the snow was swirling in small flakes into the wet pines next to the cabin. The clouds had moved down low on the mountains until the timberline had disappeared. I wanted to push him into it, some final verbal recognition between the two of us about what I was doing with Beth and to him, my friend, so I wouldn’t have to keep contending with that dark feeling of deceit and betrayal that caught like a nail in my throat every time I looked at him. But I couldn’t push it over the edge, and he wouldn’t accept it either. I blinked into the cigarette smoke and took another deep puff, as though there were something philosophical in smoking a cigarette.
“I got pretty drunk last night, and it didn’t help to get half loaded again this morning,” I said. “I think I ought to hang up my drinking act for a while.”
“When you do that, Zeno, the Salvation Army is going to pass out free booze on Bourbon Street.”
“I believe that would be a commendable way to celebrate my sobriety.”
“Man, you are a clever son of a bitch. You sound like you went to one of those colored business colleges. You remember that psychotic preacher back in A that used to start hollering when the captain clanged the bell for evening count? His eyes were always busting out of his head after he’d been drinking julep in the cane all day, and he’d scream out all this stuff about standing up before Jesus that he’d memorized from one of those Baptist pamphlets, but he could never get all the words right. He’d stand there in the sun, still shouting, until the captain led him into the dormitory by the arm.”
In a moment Buddy had been back into our common prison experience, which I didn’t care to relive anymore, and I suddenly realized that maybe this was the only thing we shared: an abnormal period in our lives, since neither of us was a criminal by nature, that contained nothing but degradation, hopelessness, mindless cruelty (newborn kittens flushed down the commodes by the hacks), suicides bailing off the top tier, a shank in the spleen on the way to the dining hall, or the unbearable sexual heat that made your life a misery. I just didn’t feel any more humor in it, but Buddy’s face was flushed with laughter and anticipation of my own. I drew in on my cigarette and blew out the smoke without looking at him.
“What’s all that noise out there?” I said.
“What noise?” he said, his face coming back to composure.
“It sounds like a fox got into somebody’s hen house.”
He stood up from the kitchen chair and looked through the front window. He held the curtain in his hand a moment and then dropped it, almost flinging it at the window glass.
“What’s the old man doing?” he said. “He must have lost his mind.” He sat on the chair and pulled his wet boots back on without lacing them.
I looked out the window and saw Mr. Riordan walking off balance through the rows of birdcages in the aviary, the snow swirling softly around him in a dim halo. He had a canvas bird-feed sack looped over one shoulder, and he was pulling back the tarps on the cages, unlatching the wire doors, and slinging seed on the ground.
“I’ll go with you,” I said.