The Lost Get-Back Boogie

We drove along the Clark through Hellgate Canyon to the bar, with the snow blowing out of the dark pines into the headlights. There was no easy way to coast through the evening. The building was already crowded when we got there, the steel man had cut off one of his fingers with a chain saw that afternoon, and the drummer, who I thought could take the vocal, had four opened beers sitting in a row on the rail next to his traps.

I got up on the platform, slipped the guitar strap around my neck, and tripped the purple and orange lights with my foot. In the glare of light against my eyes I saw Buddy walk with his arm around Beth’s shoulders to a table by the edge of the dance floor. I put on my thumb pick, screwed the guitar into D, and kicked it off with “Poison Love.” I didn’t have a mandolin to back me up, and my fingers still felt stiff from the cold outside, but Johnny and Jack or Bill and Charlie Monroe never did it better. Then I rolled into Moon Mulligan’s “Ragged but Right” and knocked out four others in a row with no pause except for the bridge into the next key. The cellophane-covered lights were hot against my face, and my eyes were starting to water in the drifting clouds of cigarette smoke. The dance floor and the tables were lost somewhere behind the rail of the platform and the violent glitter and rattle of bottles and glasses. I felt the sweat roll down off my face and hit on my hand, and when I went into the last song, I heard the drummer miss a beat and clatter a stick against the metal edge of the trap.

“Hey, man, save some for later,” he said.

After the set I went to the table, which was now wet with spilled beer and scorched with cigarettes that Buddy had mashed out on the cloth. Beth’s face was almost white.

“Give me the keys,” he said.

“What for?” I said.

“Because they’re my keys. And because it’s my goddamn car, and that’s my goddamn wife. You understand that’s my wife, don’t you?”

Everyone looked momentarily into the center of the table.

“Don’t go driving anywhere now, man,” I said.

“I ain’t. And you didn’t answer my question.”

/> “Take the keys. Get into the stock-car derby if you like,” I said.

“Just answer me. Without all that southern bullshit you put out.”

“I got to get back on the bandstand.”

“No, man, you answer something straight for the first time in your fucking insignificant life.”

“He just wants the keys to get in the trunk,” Melvin said. “He bought a couple of lids from some university kids.”

“They’re right there,” I said. I rose from the chair and started back toward the platform. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Beth lean forward and place her forehead against her fingertips.

I couldn’t get between two tables because a fat man had fallen over backward like a beer barrel in his chair. Up on the stand, the drummer was draining the last foam from a bottle, and our bass man was slipping his velvet glove back on his hand. I felt Melvin’s arm on my shoulder and his sour liquor breath along the side of my cheek.

“Take a walk with me into the head,” he said.

I followed him inside the yellow glare of the men’s room and leaned against the stall with him.

“Look, he just ate too much acid, and maybe we ought to get out of here early tonight,” he said.

I looked at him, with his tailored attempt at some romantic western ethic, and wondered if his rebellion was against a mother or father who owned a candy factory in Connecticut.

“I work here,” I said. “If I leave, I don’t get paid. Also, I probably get fired. What happened at the table with Beth?”

“What do you mean?” He looked at the garish color of the wall in front of him, as though he had seen it for the first time.

“She looked sick.”

“Buddy was trying to feel her up under the table.”

“Man, I don’t believe it,” I said.

“That’s what I said. We should leave early tonight.”

I left him leaning over the trough and went back to the platform just as the rhythm guitarist was starting to fake his way through “Folsom Prison Blues” by humping the microphone and roaring it out with enough amplification to blow the front windows into the parking lot.

I cut it short at one-thirty in the morning, and normally there would have been a protest from the crowd. But the temperature was dropping steadily, and the little plastic radio behind the bar said that a storm that had already torn through Calgary and southern Alberta would hit the Missoula area tomorrow.

The bar emptied out while we put away our instruments on the bandstand, and after I tripped off the purple and orange lights with my foot, I could see Buddy at the table with his arms folded under his head. Melvin was leaned back in the chair, his tie pulled loose and a dead cigarette in his grinning mouth, his arms hooked back over the chair’s supports like a man who had been crucified by comical accident.