“That bastard won’t do anything, no more than he did when they burned the barn. They’ll just say the truck got hit while they were hunting.”
“You don’t know that. Give it a chance. At least until tomorrow.”
“Let go, Iry.”
“All right,” I said. “Just talk a minute. A minute won’t make any difference.”
“Tell my mother I went to the hospital.” He started for the truck again, and I stepped in front of him.
“Look, maybe I’m the last person that should tell anyone about being rational and not going out on a banzai trip to blow somebody away,” I said. “But, damn it, think”
“That’s right. You are the last person that should. Old Zeno, the shank artist of Louisiana and the fire bomber of lumber mills. The saver of horses from the flames. But he’s my old man, and maybe they’ve punched his whole ticket.”
He started around me for the truck, his mouth in a tight line, and I stepped once more in front of him.
“I ain’t going to play this game anymore with you, Iry.”
His hands were set on the barrel and stock of the rifle, and his right arm and shoulder were already flexed.
“What are you going to do, bust me in the teeth? You ought to save your killer’s energy for those cats you’re going to blow all over a barroom wall someplace.”
But it didn’t work. He glared into my face, breathing loudly through his nose, his hair wet against his forehead.
“OK, step in your own shit,” I said.
He walked past me and got in the truck, then set the Winchester in the rack against the back glass and started the engine. He turned around and drove slowly past me with his window still down. I began to walk hurriedly along beside the truck, my legs almost comical in their attempt to keep pace with it before Buddy accelerated down the lane.
“Jesus Christ, don’t do this,” I said. “I’ll go after them with you in the morning. We’ll put their ass in Deer Lodge for ten years—”
He rolled up the window, and his face disappeared into an empty oval behind the frosted glass; then he hit second gear and the loose tire chains clanked and whipped along the frozen earth.
I started to go back into the house, but I didn’t belong there, and there was nothing truthful that I could say to anybody inside. I walked back across the field to the cabin and poured a glass of straight whiskey at the kitchen table and tried to think. I imagined that Mrs. Riordan or Pearl or Melvin had already called the sheriff’s office, but that wouldn’t do any good for Buddy, as none of them knew why he had left in the truck, unless someone had noticed that the Winchester was gone, which they probably hadn’t. So that left few alternatives, I thought, and sipped at the whiskey and looked at the crumbling ash in the grate of the stove. I could tell his family about it and let them make their own decisions, or I could call one of the deputies aside in front of the house (and I could already see him talking into the microphone of his car radio, with the door open and one leg sticking out in the snow, telling every cop in Ravalli County to pick up dope-smoking ex-convict Buddy Riordan, who was armed and headed down the Bitterroot highway to gun somebody). Then they could call the intern back to the house to give Mrs. Riordan a tranquilizer shot, and in the meantime there would be shitkicker dicks with shotguns behind roadblocks all the way to Missoula who would urinate with pleasure in their khakis if Buddy should try to get past them.
So you can’t tell his family, and you don’t drop the dime on a friend, I thought, and drank the last of the whiskey from the glass and filled it with water under the pump. And that leaves us where in this Sam Spade process of deduction? Nowhere. He’s simply out there someplace on the highway, driving too fast across the ice slicks, his heart beating, the Winchester vibrating in the rack behind his head, his brain a furnace.
Then I thought, That’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s looking at every beer joint on the way back to Missoula, pulling into the gravel parking lot and cruising slowly past the line of parked cars and trucks. Because he is con wise to criminal behavior, and he knows that anyone, except a professional, who pulls a violent job usually does not go back directly to home and normalcy; he stops at what he thinks is the first safe bar to toast his aberrant victory and quiet that surge of blood in his head.
I tied the ignition wires together on the Plymouth and drove down the blacktop toward Missoula. I was guessing about the direction Buddy would have taken, as well as the three men in the pickup, but I doubted that the killing of the birds was done by anyone in the south Bitterroot, since there was only one small sawmill south of us, at Darby, which was almost to Idaho, that had been affected by the injunction. I passed the bar at Florence, which would have been too close for them to stop, and looked for Buddy’s truck in the parking lots of the two bars at Lolo. The snow was coming down more heavily now, in large, wet flakes that swirled out of my headlights and banked thickly on the windshield wipers that shuddered and scratched across the glass. As I dropped over the hill into the outskirts of Missoula and again met the river, shining with moonlight and bordered by the dark, bare shapes of the cottonwoods, the wind came up the valley and polished the ice along the road and buffeted the Plymouth from side to side.
I pulled into every bar parking lot on the highway until I reached the center of town. No Buddy, no ambulances, no bubble-gum lights swinging around on the tops of cop cars. Strike three, babe, I thought. So I drove over to Beth’s, with the ignition wires swinging and sparking under the dash and the snow piling higher on the hood against the windshield.
The elm and maple trees in her yard were dripping with ice, and the yellow porch light fell out in shadows along the glazed sidewalk. She opened the door partway in her nightgown against the draft of cold air, her mouth in an oval, beginning to smile; then her eyes focused on my face. She closed the door behind me and touched my chest with her hand.
“What happened?”
I told her, in the quietest way I could, keeping the sequence intact and lowering my voice each time I saw the brightness and sudden confusion start to come into her eyes.
“Oh God,” she said.
“He’ll probably just drive around until he gets the lightning bolts out of his brain.”
“You don’t know him. Not when it comes to his father and all his crazy guilt about failing him.”
“Buddy?” I looked at her with the strange feeling of an outsider who would never know the private moments of confession between them in the quiet darkness of their marital bed.
“He’s not a violent man,” I said. “Even in Angola, the big stripes let him alone. He wasn’t a threat to anyone. He was just Buddy, a guy with glue fumes in his head and music in his fingers.”
But I was talking to myself now. Her eyes were looking at the blackness of the window, and she held an unlit cigarette in her lap as though she had forgotten it was there.