The Lost Get-Back Boogie

“Please, Mr. Paret.”

“I have to check out, and I guess I’m going to. I just hate to ride the bus in a pajama shirt. You’d be doing me a great favor, Sister.”

Just then the nurse came in, and she could have been a matron in a women’s reformatory. Her face was at first a simple bright piece of cardboard and irritation at an annoyance on her floor; then after a few sentences were exchanged between us, the anger clicked in her eyes, and I was sure that she would have enjoyed seeing me collapse on the floor in a spasm that would require heart surgery with a pocketknife.

The nun came through the door again with a folded checkered shirt in her hands, brushed past the nurse in a swirl of white cloth over her small, polished black shoes, and put the shirt next to me, quickly, with just a flash of her concerned pretty face into mine.

I buttoned the shirt so I could rest my limp hand and the weight of the cast inside it and walked down the corridor to the desk in the waiting room. I could hear the leather soles and etched voice of the nurse echo behind me, and evidently she had enough command in the hospital to make the interns and the resident doctor look around walleyed and full of question marks at the strange man walking toward them a little off-balance.

I told the lady at the desk my name and asked for the bill.

“You ought to go back to your room, fella,” the resident said.

“Got to catch air, doc, and stretch it out a little bit tonight.”

He looked at me steadily for a moment.

“All right, that’s fine,” he said, and motioned the nurse away. “But we’re going to give you a sling and some pills for infection and pain. You come back in tomorrow to have your bandages changed.”

I sat down in a metal chair while another nurse tied a sling around my neck and placed my elbow carefully into the cloth and clipped safety pins into the folds. She stuck a brown envelope full of pills into the pocket of the checkered shirt, and I stood up to walk to the desk again. I could feel the stitches drawing tight against my eye, and I felt that there was a large blood blister swelling up on the bridge of my nose. My eyes couldn’t focus on the gray dimpling of rain on the concrete outside.

I asked again for my bill and was told that Mr. Riordan had asked that it be sent to him. I took out twenty-five dollars from my billfold and said that I would be back in to pay the rest.

I walked through the wet streets under the overhang of trees toward the bus depot. The wind swept the rain in gusts into my face. Clouds hung like soft smoke on the peaks of the mountains, and the neon signs over the bars were hazy red and green in the diminishing gray light.

So you showed everybody at the hospital you’re a stand-up guy, I thought. Isn’t that fine? Then I had to think about the rest of it. My truck and my Martin and dobro burned up, a broken arm that put me out of work, and living at a strange family’s place as a bandage case because there wasn’t another damn thing I could do. And deeper than any of it was just a sick feeling, a humiliation at being beaten up by men who had done it with a lazy form of physical contempt. I’d had the same feeling only once before, when a bully in the eighth grade had caught me after school and pinned my arms into the dust with his knees and slapped my face casually back and forth, then spit on his finger and put it in my ear.

SIX

In the morning the sun was all over the Bitterroot Valley, the grass had become a darker green from the rain, and the irrigation ditches were flowing high and muddy through the pigweed along the banks. I fired the wood stove and set the coffeepot to boil on an iron lid with the grinds in the water and went out back to see if I could start Buddy’s old Plymouth. He had driven it through the creek and smashed one headlight and fender into a cottonwood when he was drunk, and white water had boiled over the front axle into the wires and distributor. But I finally turned it over on three cylinders and left it knocking and drying in neutral in front of the cabin while I drank coffee out of the pot and ate some smoked trout from the icebox.

Buddy’s father and his younger brothers looked up at me from their work in the hayfield as I drove slowly with one arm up the dirt road toward the cattle guard. The ignition wires I had tied together swung under the dashboard and sparked whenever they clicked against the metal. Out of my side vision I saw Mr. Riordan raise his checkered arm in the sunlight, but I slipped the transmission into third and thumped across the cattle guard onto the gravel road. I passed the burned wreck of my truck and the large area of blackened grass around it. The windows hung out on the scorched metal in folded sheets, and the boards in the bed were collapsed in charcoal over the rear axle. Through the broken eye of one window I thought I could see the silver wink of the twisted resonator from my dobro.

I drove into Hamilton, the Ravalli County seat, and parked in front of the jail. As I walked up the sidewalk toward the building, a man behind the wire screen and bars of a cell window blew cigarette smoke out into the sunlight, then turned away into the gloom when I looked into his face.

I talked to the dispatcher in the sheriff’s office, then waited for thirty minutes on a wood bench with the salve oozing out of my bandages into my shirt before the sheriff opened the door to his office and nodded his head at me.

His brown sleeves were rolled back over his elbows, and there was a faded army tattoo under the sun-bleached hair

on one forearm and a navy tattoo on the other. His fingers on top of the desk pad were as thick as sausages, the nails broken down to the quick and lined with dirt, and there was a rim of dandruff around the bald spot in the center of his head. He didn’t ask me to sit down or even look at me directly. He simply clicked his fingernail against a paper spindle, as though he were involved in an abstract thought, and said:

“Yes, sir?”

“My name is Iry Paret. Buddy Riordan and I got run off the road by Florence the other night, and I got my truck burnt up.”

“You’re Mr. Paret, are you?” he said.

“That’s right.”

He clicked his finger against the spindle again.

“I sent one of my deputies up to the hospital in Missoula after I heard about it. You fellows sure put it in the ditch, didn’t you?”

“I had two guitars in that cab that were worth around seven hundred dollars,” I said.

“What would you like us to do?” He looked up at me from his finger game with the spindle. There was a blue touch in his eyes like something off an archer’s bow.

“I want to get the three men that burned my truck.”