“Is this your first jolt?”
“I spent some time in an army stockade.”
“That don’t count in here, Zeno. Come on over to my bunk in Ash after chow. I can give you some machine-made butts to tide you over.”
I had already started to regret accepting the cigarettes. I turned my face toward the wall and struck a match in my cupped hands.
“Look, man, I’m not a wolf,” he said. “I read your file in records, and we need a guy to play electric bass in our jazz band. It’s not a bad deal. We play over in the women’s prison sometimes, and Saturdays we just wax the recreation room instead of scrubbing out toilets. Besides, somebody ought to teach you how to split matches. Those are worth almost as much as cigarettes in here.”
The ranch ran back to the face of a canyon, and the main house was a sprawling two-story place made of logs with a wide front porch and side rooms that had been built with clapboard. Every room in the house was lighted, and the cliffs of the canyon rose up steep and black in the back under a full moon. When I got out of the truck, the cold air cut into me, even though it was only early August, and I put on my army-surplus jacket that I had used for duck hunting in Louisiana. A girl stepped through the lighted screen onto the front porch and held her hand over her brow to shield her eyes against the glare of my headlights.
“I’m looking for Buddy Riordan, ma’am. I don’t know if I have the right place. I got lost a couple of times.”
“He lives in the cabin where the road dead-ends by the trees. You’ll see his porch light.” Her voice was thin in the wind, and her silhouette seemed to shrink when she stepped back from the screen.
I drove to the end of the road, where there was a flat log building on the edge of the pines with a porch and swing and a brick chimney. The smoke from the chimney flattened out under the trees and turned in the wind off the canyon, and two fly rods were leaned against the porch with the lines pulled tight into the cork handles. Buddy came through the door barefoot, with a sleeveless nylon hunting vest on and a can of beer and a wooden spoon in his hand.
“Hey, Zeno, where the hell you been? I thought you’d be in yesterday.” He hit me on the shoulder with the flat of his hand like a lumberjack.
“I picked up some Indian guys in Wyoming and got sidetracked awhile.”
“Those Indians are crazy people. Hey, you old son of a bitch, you pulled that last year okay. Not a dent on you.”
“I made an ass of myself in this Indian guy’s home. I got a little saccharine with his wife.”
“We all do funny things when we make the street. Forget it. Come on in. I’ve had a rack of venison in the pot since yesterday.”
He had a wood stove in a small kitchen at the back of the cabin, and the iron lids glowed around the edges with the heat of the burning sap and resin in the sawed pine limbs. He took a beer from the icebox and put it in my hand. I sat at the table in the warm smell of the venison and felt the fatigue drain through my body. He finished slicing some wild mushrooms on a chopping board and scraped them into the pot with the knife.
“A few mushrooms and some wine and wow. You got a nickel and I got a dime — let’s get together and buy some wine. And that’s what we got to do. Bop it down to the tavern and get some vino for the pot and some more brew, and then we’ll have dinner on the porch. No kidding, Iry, you look solid.”
“I feel like somebody kicked that highway up my butt.”
“Did you have any trouble your last year?”
“I made half-trusty six months before my hearing, so I was pretty sure on getting my good time. It wasn’t a sweat. Just scratching off days and staying out of the boss man’s eye.”
“I was sorry to hear about your father.”
I finished the can of Great Falls and lit a cigarette on one of the stove’s glowing lids.
“Let’s go get the brew,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight unless I put a case down.”
“You’ll be able to sleep here, partner. We have the best damn air in the United States. It blows down the canyon every night, and you won’t hear a sound except the creek behind the cabin and the pine cones hitting the roof. Look, it’s too late for you to meet the family, but tomorrow we’ll go up to the house for breakfast, and you can talk to the old man about work. You can make ten bucks a day bucking bales, and that’s not bad money around here. We got the rent free, and I catch fish every day up Bass Creek or in the Bitterroot, and with the little truck garden I have and the game out of the freezer, it’s a pretty cool way to live. I should have caught on to this when I was a kid, and I never would have built that five down there with you southern primitives. And speaking of that, man, you didn’t bring any of that red-dirt Louisiana weed with you, did you?”
“What do you think, Buddy?”
“Well, it was just a question, Zeno. The kids up at the university in Missoula have got some new shit around called LSD, and it takes your brain apart in minutes and glues it back together one broken piece at a time. I mean you actually hear colors blowing sounds at you. I’m sorry, man. I didn’t mean to run on about my obsessions. Let’s travel for the brew and put some spotiotti in the pot.”
I rubbed my palm into my eye, and a red circle of light receded back into my head.
“Yeah, I guess I was fading out,” I said. “I still feel the truck shaking under me.”
“A little brew and a little food and you’ll be cool. Come on, I’ll introduce you to a Montana tavern. Meet the shitkickers. Pick up a little color your first night here. Something to expand that jaded southern gourd of yours. You know, I read an article once that said all you southern guys are sexual nightmares. That’s why your restrooms are always filthy and full of rubber machines.”
“Are we going to get the beer, Buddy?”
“Right. Let’s take your truck, since I parked my car against a tree in the middle of the creek last night.”
We banged over the ruts in the corrugated road, with the truck rattling at every metal joint, until we bounced across the cattle guard onto the smooth gravel-spread lane that led back to the main highway through the Bitterroots. The moon had moved farther to the south, and I could see the dark water of the river cutting in silver rivulets around the willow trees on the edge of the sandbars. The mountains on each side of the valley were so large now in the moonlight that I felt they were crashing down upon me. The snow on the distant peaks was burning with moonlight beyond the jagged silhouette of the pines, and each time we crossed a bridge over a small creek, I could see the white tumble of water over the rocks and then the quiet pools hammered with metal dollars at the end of the riffle.
We pulled into the parking lot of a clapboard tavern next to a general store with two gas pumps in front. Pickup trucks with rifles and shotguns set in racks against the rear windows were parked in the lot, and the stickers on their bumpers were a sudden click of the eye back into the rural South: I FIGHT POVERTY — I WORK; PUT THE BIBLE BACK IN OUR SCHOOLS; DON’T WORRY, THEY’RE ONLY NINETY MILES AWAY.
Buddy and I went inside and had a beer at the bar and asked for a cold case to go and a small bottle of sauterne. A stone fireplace was roaring with logs at the far end of the pool table, and there were elk and moose racks on the walls and rusted frontier rifles laid across deer hooves. Most of the men in the bar wore faded blue jeans, Levi or nylon jackets, scuffed cowboy and work boots, shirts with the color washed out, and beat-up cowboy hats stained with sweat around the band. They all looked big, physical, with large, rough hands and wind-cut faces. The men at the pool table stamped down the rubber ends of their cues each time they missed a shot, and slammed the rack hard around the balls for a new game, and two cowboys next to me were shaking the poker dice violently in the leather cup and banging it loudly on the bar.