One of the cardplayers got up and turned the jukebox down.
“Hey, Zeno, you’re messing with my song,” Buddy called out.
I asked the bartender for two paper cups, poured our whiskey sours into them, and walked toward the door. Buddy had to follow me or drink by himself.
“What are you doing, man?” he said outside. “You can’t walk away every time some guy puts his thumb in your eye.”
“You want to bet?” I said.
The light was hard and bright, and the blue and green of the trees seemed to recede infinitely across the roll of mountains against the sky. Without looking at Buddy, I casually turned the car around the gas pump toward Missoula. His hand went out and caught the wheel, his forearm as stiff and determined as a piece of pipe.
“No, man, I got to deliver you to this other scene,” he said.
“All right, what kind of caper are we on to?”
“We’re going to a cathouse.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“Does that rub against some Catholic corner of your soul?”
“Aren’t we over the hill for that kind of stuff? I mean, don’t you feel a little silly sitting in a hot-pillow joint with a bunch of college boys and drunk loggers?”
“Well, you righteous son of a bitch. You eyeball everything that looks vaguely female, you get drunk and try to make out with some Indian guy’s wife, and then you got moral statements to make about your partner’s sex life. Some people might just call you a big bullshitter, Zeno.”
We crossed the state line and began to drop down into the mining area of eastern Idaho, a torn and gouged section of the state where everything that hadn’t been ruined by stripping had been blighted and stunted by the yellow haze that drifted off the smokestacks of the smelter plants. It was Indian summer in the rest of the northern Rockies, but here the acrid smoke made your head ache and your eyes wince, and the second growth on top of the destroyed mountains was the color of urine. At the bottom of the grade was Wallace, and beyond that, Smelterville, towns that were put together in the nineteenth century out of board, tin, crushed rock for streets, and some type of design on making the earth a gravel pit. The buildings in Wallace looked caved in, grimed with dirt and smoke from the smelters, and their windows were cracked and yellowed. Even the sidewalks sagged in the middle of the streets as though some oppressive weight were on top of them.
“You can really pick them, Buddy,” I said.
“Drive on up the hill to that big two-story wood house.”
The house sat up on a high, weed-filled lawn, with a wide sagging front porch and a blue light bulb over the door. The white paint was dirty and peeling, and crushed beer cans were strewn along the path to the steps.
“I’ll wait for you,” I said.
“None of that stuff. You’re not going to pull your Catholic action on your old partner.”
“I’m going to pass. This isn’t my scene.”
“You see that car at the bottom of the hill? That’s the deputy sheriff who watches this place, and if we keep fooling around he’s going to be up here and you can talk to him.”
“I’m telling you, Buddy, you better not get our ass worked over again.”
“Have a beer in the living room. Talk to the bouncer. He’s a real interesting guy. He has an iron bolt through both temples.”
“I’ll listen to the radio till you come out,” I said. I smiled at him and lit a cigarette, but there was nothing pleasant in his face.
He walked up the path and knocked on the torn screen door. A girl in blue jeans and a halter opened it, her face expressionless, the eyes indifferent except for a momentary glance, almost like curiosity, in my direction; then she latched the screen again without any show of recognition that a human being had walked past her.
Fifteen minutes later I heard people yelling inside, and then I heard Buddy’s voice: “You go for that sap and you’re going to be pulling a shank out of your throat with your fingernails.”
I walked quickly up the path, focused my eyes through the screen, and saw him facing an enormous, bull-necked man in the middle of the living room. The
braided leather tip of a blackjack stuck out of the big man’s back pocket. Buddy’s face was white from drinking, his shirt was ripped and pulled down on one shoulder, and a full whiskey bottle hung from his right hand.
“Turn around and walk out the door and you’re out of Indian country,” the bouncer said.
I put my hand through the torn screen, unlatched the door, and stepped inside. All the windows were drawn with yellow roll shades that must have been left over from the 1940s. An old jukebox with a cracked plastic casing stood against one wall, the colored lights inside rippling up and down against the gloom. A hallway separated by a curtain led back from the living room, and there was a garbage can in one corner that was filled with beer cans and whiskey bottles. In the half-light, mill workers and drunks left over from last night’s bars sat with the whores on stuffed couches and chairs that seemed to exude a mixture of dust, age, and stale beer. Their faces were pinched with a mean dislike for Buddy, for me, and even for each other. I wondered at my own passivity in allowing Buddy to lead us into this dirty little corner of the universe.