Buddy went inside again, knocking the heavy wood door shut when it wouldn’t close easily the first time. Mr. Riordan smoked his rolled cigarette down to a thin stub between his fingers, his elbows propped on his knees, his face looking out into the blowing snow that covered the whole ranch. The bib of his overalls had come unbuttoned and hung down on his stomach like a miniature and incongruous apron. I felt sorry for him, but I didn’t know why.
“I guess we’d better go inside,” I said.
“Yes, that’s probably right,” he answered.
By that time Buddy had come out on the porch with the thick, canvas elbow-length gloves for handling the birds. Mr. Riordan started to rise, then had to grab the banister for support. I put one hand under his arm, as innocuously as I could, and helped him turn toward the door. The whiskey and blood drained out of his face from the exertion. His weight tipped sideways away from my hand. He breathed deeply, with a phlegmy tick in his throat.
“I believe I’m going to have to leave it with you, boys,” he said.
Buddy and I walked him upstairs to bed, then went outside and set about trying to put three dozen confused birds back in their cages. After an hour of chasing them in a whir of wings and cacophony of noise, we still hadn’t caught half of them.
“Shit on it,” Buddy said. There were two blood-flecked welts on one cheek. “The ducks won’t go any farther than the slough, and the rest of these assholes will put themselves back in when they’re ready.”
I went inside the house with him to return the canvas gloves. His sister sat by the burning fireplace with a magazine folded back in her hands. When Buddy walked into the back of the house and left us alone, I could feel her resentment, like an aura around her, in the silence. I stood in the center of the room with an unlit cigarette in my mouth, the melted snow dripping out of my hair.
“You really leave your mark when you stay at somebody’s place, don’t you?” she said, without looking up.
“How’s that?” I said. I really didn’t want an exchange with her, but it looked like it was inevitable, and I was damned if I was going to lose to someone’s idle attempt at insult.
“Oh, I think we both know that you have a way of letting everybody know you’re around.”
“Yeah, I guess I led your father into a bottle of whiskey, and I got Buddy those five years in the joint. They must be pretty susceptible to what a part-time guitar picker can do to them.”
Her curly head looked up from the magazine, the light from the fireplace bright on the sunburned ends of her hair.
“You are a bastard, aren’t you?”
“A genuine southern badass.”
“It must be nice to have that awareness about yourself,” she said.
No more tilting, babe, because you’re an amateur, I thought. I had gotten to her, but I should have known then that she was going to pull out that arrow point later and give it back to me, in a form that I wouldn’t recognize until it was too late.
Buddy and I walked back to the cabin in the gray light. Most of the afternoon was gone, and there wasn’t enough time to take a nap before I would have to get ready to work that night. I hadn’t realized how tired I was. The lack of sleep from last night, unloading the nutrias with Mr. Riordan, an hour of fighting birds that pecked and defecated all over you, and two excursions into drinking in one day all came down on me like a wood club on the back of the neck.
I got into the tin shower and turned on the hot water, and just as I was thinking of a way to coast through the evening (no booze on the bandstand, long breaks between sets, letting the steel man do the lead and the drummer most of the vocals) until I could be back at Beth’s after we closed, Buddy decided that everyone should go to Milltown with me. The water drummed against the tin sides of the shower, and I tried to think of some reasonable way to dissuade him, but I knew that Beth was in the center of his mind, and there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t sound like a door kicked shut in his face.
So while I dressed, he went back to the main house and talked to Melvin, who needed little encouragement for any kind of adventure, and a half hour later they were sitting in the front room of the cabin with a bottle of vodka that Melvin had been working on through the afternoon. Pearl evidently had argued about going, because Buddy and her husband kept making reassuring remarks to her in the way obtuse or drunk people would to a child. Actually, I couldn’t believe it. Neither one of them saw how angry she was or how much she disliked herself for being in any proximity to me.
Then Buddy went one better. While I was wrapping the guitar in a blanket, he took a blotter of acid out of the icebox and convinced Melvin to eat some with him. Pearl looked out the window like an angry piece of stone.
“Take a hit, Iry,” Melvin said.
“I’ve got too many snakes in my head already.”
“Zeno has to do his Buck Owens progressions tonight,” Buddy said.
“Why don’t you join them?” Pearl said, her face still turned toward the window.
“I’m afraid I can’t handle it.”
“It’s all them big slides on the guitar neck,” Buddy said. “There’s three chords in every one of those shitkicker songs, and Zeno has to stay sharp.”
Buddy’s voice had a mean edge to it, and I knew that no matter what I did, we were headed into a bad one.
I drove the Plymouth to Missoula while Buddy sat beside me, giggling and passing the quart bottle of vodka to Melvin in the backseat. The wind was blowing strong off the river, and the melted snow on the highway had glazed in long, slick patches. The Plymouth’s tires were bald, and every time I hit ice, I had to shift into second and slow gradually, holding my breath, because the brakes would have sent us spinning sideways off the shoulder.
We stopped at Beth’s house, and Buddy banged on the door as though there were a fire inside. The porch light went on, and I could see Beth in silhouette and the children behind her. I felt awful. I wished I could tell her in some way that this wasn’t my plan, wasn’t something that was born out of a day’s drinking and dropped on her doorstep to contend with. But I knew that I wouldn’t get to talk with her alone during the evening, and there would be no visit at her house after the bar closed, and she would be trapped four or five hours at a soiled table while Buddy and Melvin got deeper and deeper into a liquor-soaked, acid delirium.