The Lost Get-Back Boogie

The bouncer’s face was as round as a skillet. He smiled with a look of pleasant anticipation.

“Well, I guess it’s guys like you that keep me honest and make me earn my pay,” he said. “But I’m afraid it’s a bad day at Black Rock for you boys.”

“Wait a minute, mister. We’re leaving,” I said.

“So leave. But if you bring your pet asshole back here again, we’ll have to whip some big bumps on him. Give him some real mean hurt. Take his mind off his tallywhacker so he don’t have to come here no more.”

“You notice how these guys have a quick turn for everything?” Buddy said. “They memorize all kinds of hep phrases for every life situation. But they put rock ‘n’ roll on their jukeboxes and pay their money to the cops and hand out blow jobs to the Kiwanis Club. Look at Mad Man Muntz here. He got his brains at the junkyard, he probably makes a buck an hour, but he comes on like the poet laureate of the brooder house.”

I walked over to Buddy and took him by the arm.

“Our bus is leaving,” I said.

“So long, you lovely people, and remember the reason you’re here,” he said. “You’re losers, you got one gear and it’s in neutral, and you hire this big clown to keep you safe from all your failures.”

I pulled hard on his arm and pushed him toward the door. The bouncer lifted his finger at him.

“You ought to go to church, boy. You got somebody looking over you,” he said.

The screen slammed behind us, and we walked down the path in the sunlight. The sharpness of the afternoon seemed disjointed and strange after the gloom and anger and bilious view of humanity in the whorehouse.

“I bought a bottle at the bar and was drinking a shot out of it when I saw the guy next to me buying drinks for him and his girl out of my change,” Buddy said as we drove down the hill toward the highway out of town. “I couldn’t believe it. Then he called me a pimp and put his cigarette ashes in my glass. The next thing I knew, his girl was trying to tear my shirt off my back. Man, I thought I saw people do some wild action in the joint, but that’s the bottom of the bucket, ain’t it?”

I drove without answering and wondered what had really taken place. We passed the town limits, and I stepped on the accelerator as we began the climb up the slope toward the blue tumble of mountains on the Montana line. In the rearview mirror the ugly sprawl of that devastated mining area and stunted town disappeared behind us.

“Yeah, that was a real geek show,” he said.

“Well, how the hell did you get there?” I said righteously, but I was angry at his irresponsibility and the physical danger he had put both of us in again. “They didn’t send out invitations to Florence, Montana. That’s their action every day back there, and you go on their rules when you walk through the door.”

I could feel his eyes on the side of my face; then I heard him take a drink out of the whiskey bottle. He didn’t speak for another five minutes, and the whistle of air through the window and my cigarette ashes flaking on my trousers began to feel more and more uncomfortable in the silence. I just couldn’t stay mad at Buddy for very long.

“How much did they hook you for the bottle?” I said.

“Twelve bucks. You want a shot?”

I drank out of the neck and handed it back to him. The warm bourbon made me wince and my arms tingle.

“Look, Zeno, what’s this lecture crap about?” he said.

“Jesus Christ, I just don’t want to get busted up again.”

“You could have canceled out early. You didn’t have to drive us up there.”

I didn’t have an answer for that one.

“You knew what type of scene we were floating into,” he said. “You better run the film backwards in your own gourd. You were clicking around about maybe improving your love life yourself.”

We dropped over the Montana line, and I really opened up the Plymouth. The front end was badly out of alignment, at least two bearings were tapping like tack hammers, and the oil smoke was blowing out the frayed exhaust in a long black spiral. The car frame shook and rattled, the doors vibrated on the jambs, and when I had to shift into second to pull a grade, the heat needle moved into the red area on the gauge and the radiator began to sing. Buddy pulled on the bottle and lit a cigarette. But before he did, he split a paper match with his thumbnail, as fast as anyone could pull one from a cover, and flipped the other half on the dashboard in front of me.

“That’s pretty good, ain’t it, Zeno?” he said. “I once beat a guy out of a whole deck of cigarettes by splitting thirty in fifty seconds.”

“Why don’t you forget all that prison shit?”

“Why don’t you forget about destroying my car because you’re pissed off?”

I let the Plymouth slow, and I heard Buddy drag off the bottle again. The sun had moved behind the edge of the mountains, and the yellow leaves on the cottonwoods along the river looked like hammered brass over the flow of the current. The blue shadows fell out in front of us on the highway, and the short pines at the base of the hills were already turning dark against the white slide of rocks behind them. The air became cool in minutes, the wind off the river in the canyon seemed sharper, and the banks of clouds on the mountains ahead took on the pink glow of a new rose above the trees.

Buddy pulled steadily on the bottle until he sank back against the door and the seat with an opened can of hot beer between his thighs.