The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Beth had told me once what a lumber town could be like when the mills shut down and the paychecks stopped and families had to line up at the federal food-surplus center. Except in this case there was no workingman’s strike involved, no collective anger directed at management or unions, no depression to be blamed on federal bureaucrats and New York sharpers. Every unemployed man in Missoula County and the Bitterroot Valley knew there was only one reason for the deprivation of his family, his humiliation at accepting welfare and food commodities, and his daily visits to the state employment office for the chance of a casual labor job with the Forest Service: Frank Riordan.

Their mood was mean and dirty. It took on different forms that ran the gamut from an insult in the face to the failure of a neighbor to wave out of his truck cab, but it was all the same thing. I can’t say that they hated him, because they didn’t; it was more a matter of outrage and disbelief that one of their own kind would betray them and join forces with college people and slick lawyers to cause so much trouble in their lives.

I stopped going to the Oxford in Missoula for steak dinners after I sat at the counter and heard the loud and pointed remarks from the poker table behind me, and Eddie’s Club across the street was no place to have a beer in the afternoon when there were three or four drunk men against the bar who would happily bust your head open with a pool cue. One day I walked up to the small grocery store on the blacktop for a loaf of bread and a quart of milk, and the woman behind the counter looked through me like smoky glass while she counted out each hot coin in my palm.

The irony is that my job was also affected when the mills shut down. Our band was fired at the Milltown Union Bar, Cafe and Laundromat. On Saturday night, the first week after the injunction came down, there was a crowd of five people in the bar, and all of them were drinking on the tab. We played loyally to them until one in the morning, which was like singing into a neon-lighted cave, and the owner paid us off, gave us free bowls of chili and a fifth of Cutty Sark, and said to come back when the mills opened.

I could do without the job financially, because I had money in the bank, but our steel man and bass player got loaded on the botde of Scotch in their truck before they drove home. Both of them had been laid off at the sawmill in Seeley Lake, and they had been cleaning furnaces three and four days a week to make enough, along with their three nights’ work at the bar, to keep from going on welfare until the mills reopened.

Now I had no job, except for my work on the ranch, and no place really to go. I lived with a man whom I had made a cuckold out of. I slept with his wife every evening I could get into Missoula, and without embarrassment he and I fished each afternoon through the ice on the Bitterroot, which was shameful in itself. On the nights I couldn’t be with Beth (because of her boys or her temporary job waiting tables at the bus depot) and when Buddy went off to play at the college pizza place, I stayed alone in the cabin and drank neat whiskey and looked out the window at the fields of snow under the moon and the glistening sides of the canyon behind the Riordan house.

I worked on my song, the one I had never finished while I was in the penitentiary. The strange thing was that I could play lead on almost any country song that I had ever heard, and I could imitate Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, and Woody Guthrie in a way that left a southern or Okie audience banging their tables with beer bottles when I finished. But I couldn’t write a song myself. As I sat there with the three tortoiseshell picks on my fingers and the Gibson across my knee, I was reminded of an old Negro preacher who did odd jobs for my father. His son had been given five years on Sugarland Farm in Texas, and when the old man was told of the sentence, he said: “I tried to keep him out the juke joint. But he just like a mockingbird. He know every song but his own.”

I had most of my song, but the rest wouldn’t come. Maybe that was just because when you try to catch all of something, particularly something very good, it must always elude you in part so that it retains its original magic and mystery. I remembered when my cousin Andre and I found an Indian canoe submerged in four feet of water back in the swamp. The canoe was made of cypress and had stayed intact for over a century. The bow and sides were etched against the silt bottom with green moss, and we slid through the water quietly so as not to cloud it, our hearts tripping inside our wet shirts. We caught the canoe by each end and tried to lift it slowly, and when it wouldn’t rise, we pulled harder and our hands slipped on the moss, and the silt swelled out in a black balloon from the bottom. Then I ducked under the surface again and jerked on the bow with all my strength. It ripped away like wet newspaper in my hands. I felt heartsick, and with each of our hurried, young efforts to salvage what was left, we tore the canoe into dozens of pieces until finally we had only a pile of rotted cypress wood, like any other in the swamp, to take home in the bottom of my pirogue.

I heard a shotgun go off across the meadow, and before I could set down the guitar and walk to the window, there were three more reports and then a chain of five cracks in a row that must have come from an automatic without a plug in it. I threw open the door and the snow blew in my face, but I could see the individual flashes of the guns in the aviary, a lick of flame and sparks against the darkness of the mountain beyond. There was a pause while they must have reloaded, and then another roar of noise and streaks of fire that looked like a distant night scene from the war.

Jesus God, I thought.

I could hear the birds crying in their cages and the splatter of shot against the wire and wood sides. The only gun in the cabin had been the Springfield, which Buddy had buried, and as I stood there with my coat half on, I felt suddenly impotent to do anything about the terror that was going on in the aviary. But I went anyway, running across the dry grass that protruded through the snow, my chest beating with a fear that I hadn’t felt since Heartbreak Ridge. The cold air cut like a razor in the dryness of my mouth and throat, and in my feeling of nakedness in that bare field under the moon I prayed desperately that something would happen before I got there.

All the lights were on in the house now; there was a brief silence while the shots echoed away into the canyon, then one more solitary crack, and then I saw three men in silhouette running like stick figures with their guns for their truck, which they had parked on the far side of the house. They roared off with the cab doors still open, the tire chains ripping snow and frozen mud into the air.

I saw Pearl under the porch light, wearing only a brassiere and a pair of blue jeans, with a Winchester lever-action in her hands.

“You goddamn dirty bastards!” she yelled, and at the same time let off the round in the chamber. Then she worked the action and fired one round after another at the diminishing dark outline of the truck. But she got home with one, because a moment after the explosion from the barrel I heard the bullet whang into the metal like a ball peen hammer.

When I got to the porch, she was trying to pump free a spent cartridge that

was crimped in the slide. Just as it ejected and she shoved another cartridge home, a pair of headlights came down the gravel road and bounced across the cattle guard, illuminating the truck that was headed out at a good fifty miles an hour.

Pearl aimed the Winchester against the porch post, her breath steaming in the air, the white skin of her shoulder already red from the recoil of the rifle. I slapped at the barrel and knocked it at a downward angle, and her face, which had been filled with murderous intent, suddenly went blank and looked at me as a surprised girl’s would have.

“That’s Buddy’s Plymouth,” I said.

TWELVE

The three men did a thorough job in the few minutes that they unloaded on the aviary. We could see the freezing tracks of their boots where they had walked to the fence and fired, and the empty shotgun shells that had melted with their own heat deep in the snow. They had loaded with precision to take care of everything living in the yard: their shells ranged from deer slugs and buckshot to bbs. They had laid down a pattern to kill, blind, or cripple every animal and bird within thirty yards. The deer slugs and buckshot had blown the cages into splinters, and the blood dripped through the floor wire in thick, congealing drops. The birds that had only been wounded twisted on their broken wings or quivered like balls of feathers in the snow. The bald eagle had been shot right through the beak, and he lay with his great reach of wings in a tangle of wire and birdseed.

The nutrias were at the far end of the yard. None of the birdshot had gotten through the other cages to them, but those twelve-gauge deer slugs, which were as thick as a man’s thumb, had flattened against the board side of their pen and hit them like canister. Their heads were torn away, their blue entrails hung in ropes out of their stomachs, and their large, yellow teeth were bitten into their tongues.

Mr. Riordan had on only his overalls and long-sleeved underwear with the bib hanging loose in front and the straps by his sides. He had put on a pair of unlaced leather boots without socks, and the snow and water squeezed over his ankles with each step as he walked back and forth through the aviary with a terrible rage on his face.

“That’s unbelievable,” Buddy said.

Mr. Riordan methodically knocked one huge fist against his thigh, and I was sure at that moment that he would have torn the lives out of those three men with his bare hands. His face was livid, his throat was lined with veins, and his gray eyes were so hot in the moonlight that I didn’t want to look at them. He bent over and picked up one of the wounded nutrias, and the dark drain of blood ran down his forearms before he placed it back in the shattered cage.

“Go back inside, Daddy,” Pearl said.

But he didn’t hear her. There was a heat inside his brain that must have made the blood roar in his ears. His chest began to swell up and down, as though his heart were palpitating, and I heard that deep rasp and click in his throat.

“It don’t do any good to stay out here now, Frank,” Buddy said.

“You don’t tell your father what to do,” Mr. Riordan said.

We stood in the silence and looked at him standing among the scattered bodies of the birds and the wet feathers that blew in the wind and stuck against his overalls. His gray hair was like meringue in the wash of moon that shone down over the canyon.

He coughed violently in his chest and bent forward to hawk and spit in he snow, as though he had some terrible obstruction in his throat. The vein in his temple swelled like a piece of blue cord. Then he coughed until he had to lean against one of the remaining cages for support.