The other two men behind the desks had stopped work and were looking blankly at us. I could hear the secretary squeak the rollers of her chair across the rug.
“That doesn’t have anything to do with the mill,” he said. “You take that up with the sheriff’s department in Ravalli County.”
“It was your truck. That makes you liable. If you protect them, that makes you criminally liable.”
“You watch what you say, fella.”
“All you’ve got to tell me is you’ll come up with the men in that truck.”
“Who the hell you think you are talking to me about criminal charges?”
“I’m not asking you for anything that’s unreasonable.”
“Yeah? I think you stopped using your reason when you walked in here. So now you turn around and walk back out.”
“Why don’t you flick on your brain a minute? Do you want guys like this beating up people out of one of your trucks?”
“You don’t understand me. You’re leaving here. Now.”
“You ass.”
“That’s it.” He picked up the telephone and dialed an inner office number. His free hand was spread tightly on the glass desk top while he waited for an answer.
“All right, bubba,” I said. “Go back to your papers.”
But he wasn’t listening. “Send Lloyd and Jack down here,” he said.
I walked out the office and down the dark hallway; then the outer door opened in a flash of sunlight and two big men in tin hats moved toward me in silhouette. One of them had a cigar pushed back like a stick in his jaw, and he wiped tobacco juice off his mouth with a flat thumb and looked hard at me.
“Better get in that office,” I said. “Some crazy man is in there raising hell.”
They went past me, walking fast, their brows wrinkled in-tendy. I was across the parking lot when I heard the door open again behind me. The man with the cigar leaned out, his tin hat bright in the sun, and shouted: “You keep going. Don’t ever come around here again.”
I drove back to Missoula and stopped at the tavern where I had called Ace earlier. I started drinking beer. Then from among the many wet rings on the bar I lifted up a boilermaker, and I guess it was then that an odd tumbler clicked over in my brain and it started.
In the darkness of the tavern, with the soft glow of the mountain twilight through the blinds, I began to think about my boyhood South and the song I never finished in Angola. I had all the music in my mind and the runs that bled into each chord, but the lyrics were always wooden, and I couldn’t get all of the collective memory into a sliding blues. I called it “The Lost Get-Back Boogie,” and I wanted it to contain all those private, inviolate things that a young boy saw and knew about while growing up in southern Louisiana in a more uncomplicated time: the bottle trees (during the depression people used to stick empty milk of magnesia bottles on the winter branches of a hackberry until the whole tree rang with blue glass), the late evening sun boiling into the green horizon of the Gulf, the dinners of crawfish and bluepoint crabs under the cypress trees on Bayou Teche, and freight cars slamming together in the Southern Pacific yard, and through the mist the distant locomotive whistle that spoke of journeys across the wetlands to cities like New Orleans and Mobile.
There was much more to it, like the Negro juke joint by the sugar mill and Loup-garous Row, the string of shacks by the rail yard where the whores sat on the wood porches on Saturday afternoons and dipped their beer out of a bucket. But maybe that was why I didn’t finish it. There was too much of it for one song or maybe even for a book.
I kept looking at the clock above the neon GRAIN BELT sign, and I was sure that I had my thumb right on the pulse of the day, but each time I focused again on the hour hand, I realized that some terrible obstruction had prevented me from seeing that another thirty or forty minutes or hour and a half had passed. When I walked to the rest room, my cast scratched along the wall with my weight, and when I came back out, the tables, the row of stools, and the people all seemed rearranged in place.
“You want another one, buddy?” the bartender said.
“Yeah. This time give me a draft and a double Beam on the side.”
He brought the schooner dripping with foam and ice and set a shot jigger beside it.
“You want to throw for the washline?” he said.
“What do I do?”
He picked up the leather cup of poker dice and set it down in front of me with his palm over the top.
“You roll me double or nothing for the drinks. If you roll five of a kind, you get everything up there on the line.”
There was a long string of wire above the bar with one-dollar bills clipped to it with clothespins.
“What are my chances?” I said.