I didn’t notice it at first, or I dismissed it as my natural ex-con’s paranoia, but soon I started to catch a glance from a table or a man at the bar’s elbow. Then, as I looked back momentarily to assure myself that there was nothing there, I saw a flick of blue meanness or challenge in those eyes, and I knew that I was sitting on top of something. I waited in silence for Buddy to finish his beer so we could go, but he ordered two more before I could touch him on the arm.
I felt the open stares become harder now, and I looked intently at the punchboard in front of me. At that moment I thought how strange it was that, even though I was a grown man, eyes could feel like a wandering deadness on the side of my face. I tried to compensate with a silly commitment to my cigarette and the details in the ashtray, and then I walked to the restroom with the instinctive con’s slink across the yard, hands low in the pockets, cool, the shoulders bent just a little, the knees loose and easy.
But when I got back to the bar, the stares were still there. No one seemed to realize that I was a Louisiana badass. And Buddy was on his third beer.
“Hey, what the hell is going on?” I said quietly.
“Don’t pay any attention to those guys.”
“What is it?”
“It’s copacetic, Zeno. By the way, you looked very cool bopping into the pisser.”
“Shit on this, Buddy. Let’s get out of here.”
“Take it easy, man. We can’t let a few hot faces run us off.”
“I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like fooling in somebody else’s trouble.”
“Okay, let me finish and we’ll split.”
Outside, I put the cardboard case of Great Falls in the back of the truck and turned around in the gravel parking lot. I shot the transmission into second gear and wound it up on the blacktop. One jagged piece of mountain cut into the moon.
“So what was that stuff about?”
“The old man has been pissing people off around here for years, and right now he’s got them all on low boil.”
“What for?”
“He’s trying to get the new pulp mill shut down, which means that about four hundred guys will lose their jobs. But forget it, man. It don’t have anything to do with you. Those guys back there just like to snort with their virility when they have a chance.”
We crossed the cattle guard and passed the darkened main house on the ranch. The canyon walls behind the house were sheer and gray in the moon’s reflection off the clouds.
“Tomorrow you got to meet my family,” Buddy said. “They’re unusual people. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t burned them so bad.”
Then I realized that Buddy was drunk, because in the time I had known him, he had never indulged himself in private confession unless he was floating on Benzedrex inhalers or the occasional weed we got from the Negroes.
He poured the sauterne into the pot of venison and sprinkled black pepper and parsley on top of it, then replaced the iron lid and let it marinate for a half hour while we drank beer and I tried to retune my Dobro with fingers as thick and dull as a ruptured ear.
“I never did figure why you stayed with that hillbilly shot,” he said, “but you do it beautiful, man. Did you ever finish that song you were working on?”
The blood had gone out of his face, and his cigarette had burned down close between his fingers.
“No, I’ve still got it running around in pieces.”
“Do ‘Jolie Blonde,’ man.”
I picked it out on the Dobro and sang in my bad Cajun French while Buddy turned the venison in the pot with a wooden spoon. His white face glowed in the heat of the stove, and for a moment he looked as preoccupied and solitary as the man I had met over two years before in the yard at Angola.
We dragged the kitchen table onto the porch and ate the venison out of tin plates with garlic bread and an onion-and-beet salad that Buddy had chopped into a wooden bowl. I hadn’t had venison in a long time, and the mushroom and wine sauce was fine with the taste of the game, and as I watched the wind blowing snow off the top of the canyon, I knew that everything was going to be all right.
But I should have recognized it at the bar. Or at least part of it. It was there, and all I had to do was look at it.
In the morning the sun broke across the blue ridge of mountains, and the wet, green meadows shimmered in the light. The shadows at the base of the mountains were purple like a cold bruise, and as the morning warmed and the dew burned away on the grass, the cattle moved slowly into the shade of the cottonwoods along the river. Buddy and I fished with wet flies in the creek behind his cabin and caught a dozen cutthroat trout out of the deep pools that turned in eddies behind the rocks. I would crouch down on my haunches so as not to silhouette against the spangle of sunlight through the trees, and then I’d let the fly sink slowly to the bottom of the pool; a cutthroat would rise suddenly off the gravel, his brilliant rim of fire around the gills flashing in the sun, and the fly rod would arch down to the water with a steady, throbbing pull.
We cleaned the fish and took them up to the main house for breakfast. Piles of wood cut in round chunks with a chainsaw were stacked high next to the barn wall, and in the side lot there was the rusted-out skeleton of an old steam tractor with dark pigweed growing through the wheels. In back were at least fifty bird pens made with chicken wire and wood frames, and ducks, geese, and breeds of grouse and pheasant that I had never seen before wandered around the feed pens and watering pools located all over the yard.
“That’s the old man’s aviary,” Buddy said. “It’s probably the biggest in the state. He’s got birds in there from all over the world, which is one reason why I live in the cabin. You ought to hear those sons of bitches when they crank up at four in the morning.”
We browned the trout in butter, and Buddy’s mother cooked a huge platter of scrambled eggs and pork chops with sliced tomatoes on the side. The dining table was covered with an oilcloth thumbtacked to the sides, and Buddy’s father sat at the head, waiting quietly until each member of the family was seated before he picked up the first plate and started it around the table. Buddy’s three younger brothers, all in high school, sat opposite me, their faces eagerly curious and yet polite about their brother’s ex-convict friend. Their skin was tan, and there wasn’t an ounce of fat on their bodies, and in their blue jeans and faded print shirts rolled over their young, strong arms, they looked like everything that’s healthy in America.
Buddy’s sister and her husband, an instructor at the university, sat at the far end of the table, and for some reason they made me uncomfortable. I had the teacher made for a part-time agrarian romanticist or an eastern college man on a brief excursion into the life of his wife’s family. The smile and the handshake were too easy and open — and dismissing. She favored her mother, a well-shaped woman with clear skin and blue eyes that had a quick light in them, but none of the same cheerfulness was in the daughter’s face. The daughter was pretty, with sun-bleached curly hair and beautiful hands, but there was a darkness inside her that marred the rest of it, and I could sense a resentment in her because I was someone whom Buddy had known in prison and had brought to their home.
But Buddy’s father was the one who I realized instinctively was no ordinary person. His shoulders were square and hard, his neck coarse with sunburn and wind, and the edges of his palms were thick with callus and there were half-moon carpenter’s bruises on his fingernails. He was a good-looking man for his age. He combed his thin, brown hair straight back over a wide forehead, and his gray eyes looked directly at you without blinking. He didn’t have that soft quality to the edge of the bone structure in the face that most Irish have, and his back stayed straight in the chair and never quite rested against the wood. He took the silver watch on its chain from his blue-jeans pocket and looked at it a moment as though seeing it for the first time.