“You better get him inside,” I said.
Still, Buddy and his sister and the others on the porch remained motionless.
“You better listen to me unless you want to put him in a box,” I said.
“Let him be,” Buddy said.
“You’re crazy. All of you are,” I said, and walked up to Mr. Riordan and put my hand under his arm. His long-sleeved underwear was wet with perspiration. He turned with me toward the house, the back of one hand against his mouth and the spittle that he couldn’t control. I heard Buddy walk up quickly behind us and take him by the other arm.
We led him up the steps and into the house and laid him on the couch. When Mrs. Riordan pulled off his boots, his feet were blue and covered with crystals of ice. The top button on his underwear had twisted loose, and I saw the flat, white scar where a bull’s horn had gone deep into his lung. He turned his head sideways on the pillow to let the phlegm drain from his mouth, and his wife pressed a towel into his hand and moved it up so he could hold it close to his face. I heard Pearl on the telephone in the kitchen, calling a doctor in Hamilton.
Buddy wiped the water out of his father’s hair with his hand, then began to brush at it with a shawl that was on the back of the couch. But Buddy’s hands were trembling, and his face had gone taut and pale. He took the blankets from his mother and spread them awkwardly over Mr. Riordan, then took the bottle of whiskey out of the cabinet.
“Don’t give him that,” I said.
“He’s cold,” Buddy said.
I took the bottle gently, and he released his fingers while he stared into my eyes with an uncomprehending expression. “Why not?” he said. “It’s just no good for him,” I said.
I looked at Mr. Riordan’s ashen face, his lips that had turned the purple color of an old woman’s, and his great knuckles pinched on the top of the blankets, and wondered at how time and age and events could catch a man so suddenly.
Twenty minutes later we saw the red lights on the ambulance revolving through the fields toward us, the icy trees and snowdrifts momentarily alive with scarlet until they clicked by and disappeared behind the glare of head lamps. The doctor, who was actually an intern at St. Patrick’s in Missoula, and the volunteer fireman who drove the ambulance strapped Mr. Riordan onto a litter and carried him gingerly outside. Buddy pulled open the back door of the ambulance, and they eased the litter up onto the bed without unbuckling the straps. The doctor turned on the oxygen bottle and slipped the elastic band of the mask behind Mr. Riordan’s head.
“Well, what the hell is it, doc?” Buddy said. “He got horned in the chest once—”
“I don’t know what it is. Shut the door.”
Buddy closed the door, and the ambulance turned around in a wide circle in the yard, cracking over the wood stakes on the edge of Mrs. Riordan’s vegetable garden, and rolled solidly down the road toward the cattle guard with the red lights swirling out over the snow.
“Why not the whiskey?” Buddy said.
“You just don’t give it to somebody sometimes.”
“Don’t give me that candy-ass stuff. There ain’t anybody else out here now.”
“He’s probably had a stroke.”
“Goddamn, I knew that’s what you were going to say,” he said, and pushed his snow-filled hair back over his head.
“Take it easy, Buddy.”
The sports clothes he had worn to the pizza place were soaked through. There were bird feathers all over his trousers, and his white wool socks had fallen down over his ankles. The army surplus greatcoat he wore over his sports clothes was eaten with moth rings and hung at a silly angle on his thin shoulders. His eyes were still looking at me, but his mind was far away on something very intense.
“Come on, Zeno. Hold it together,” I said.
“They took it all the way down the road this time.”
“Yeah, but, man, you got to—”
He turned away from me and went inside, then came back out with a handful of cartridges that he spilled into the pocket of his greatcoat. He picked up the lever-action Winchester that Pearl had propped beside the door, and headed for his father’s pickup truck. His shoes squeaked on the snow in the silence. I caught him by the arm and turned him to face me.
“Don’t do something like this,” I said.
“I know who they are. I saw the driver’s face in my headlights. I won’t have any doubts when I find his truck, either, because Pearl slammed one right along
his door.”
“Then call the sheriff.”