“I guess we ought to start getting the bales up on the wagon. You ready, boys?” he said.
The three younger brothers got up from the table and started to follow him through the kitchen; then he turned, almost as an afterthought, and looked back at me with those gray, unblinking eyes.
“I think I have something out in the lot that you might be interested in seeing, Mr. Paret,” he said.
Buddy grinned at me over his coffee cup.
I walked with Mr. Riordan and the three boys into the backyard. The whole expanse of the valley was covered with sunshine now, and the bales of green hay in the fields and the click of light on the Bitterroot River through the trees and the heavy shadows down the canyon walls were so heart-sinking that I had to stop and fold my arms across my chest in a large breath.
“Have you ever seen one of these fellows before?” Mr. Riordan said.
He had opened a cage and picked up a large nutria. Its red eyes looked like hot BBs behind the fur, and its yellow buck teeth protruded from the mouth. The body was exactly like a rat’s, except much bigger and covered with long fur that grew like a porcupine’s quills, and the feet were almost webbed.
“I’ve never seen one outside of southern Louisiana,” I said. “I didn’t think they could live in a cold climate.”
“That’s what most people say. However, no one has advised the nutria of that fact. How much do you know about them?”
I shook a cigarette out of my pack and put it in my mouth. I had the feeling that I was about to be taught the rules of a new game.
“The McIlhenny tabasco family brought them from South America about 1900,” I said. “Supposedly, they were in cages on Marsh Island about twelve miles off the Louisiana coast, and after a storm smashed up their cages, they swam through waves all the way to land. Now they’re in every bayou and canal in south Louisiana. They’ll kill your dog if he gets in the water with them, and they can fill up a whole string of muskrat traps in a day.”
“I hope to eventually introduce them in the area. Do you think you’d like to help raise them?”
“At home they’re a pest, Mr. Riordan. They destroy the irrigation canals for the rice farms, and they breed like minks in heat.”
“Well, we’ll see how they do in colder climates.” Then, without a change in the voice, he said, “You murdered a man, did you?”
I had to wait a moment.
“That’s probably a matter of legal definition,” I said. “I went to prison for manslaughter.”
“I suppose those points are pretty fine sometimes,” he said.
“Yes, sir, they can be.”
“I signed for your parole transfer because Buddy asked me to. Normally, I stay as removed as I can from the dealings of the state and federal government, but he wanted you to come here. And so I’ve made some kind of contract with the authorities in Louisiana as well as in my own state. That involves a considerable bit on both of our parts. Do you understand me, Mr. Paret?”
I drew in on my cigarette and flipped it toward the fence. I could feel the blood start to ring in my palms.
“I have three years’ parole time to do, Mr. Riordan. That means that on a whim a parole officer can violate me back to the farm for an overdrawn check, no job, or just not checking in on the right date. Maybe he’s got a little gas on his stomach, half a bag on from the night before, or maybe his wife cut him off that morning. All he’s got to do is get his ballpoint moving and I’m on my way back to Angola in handcuffs. In Louisiana a P.V. means one year before you come in for a hearing again.”
“Did you ever do farm work outside of the penitentiary?” he said.
“My father was a sugar grower.”
“I pay ten dollars a day for bucking bales, and you eat up at the house for the noon meal. There’s a lot of work in the fall, too, if you care to drive nails and butcher hogs.”
He walked away from me on the worn-out heels of his cowboy boots toward the flatbed wagon, where his three boys were waiting for him. I wanted to be angry at him for his abruptness and his sudden cut into a private area of my soul, but I couldn’t, because he was simply honest and brief in a way that I wasn’t prepared for.
I drove to Missoula that afternoon and checked in with the parole office. My new parole officer seemed to be an ordinary fellow who didn’t think of me as a particular problem in his case load, and after fifteen minutes I was back on the street in the sunshine, with my hands in my pockets and a whole new town and a blue-gold afternoon to explore. Missoula was a wonderful town. The mountains rose into the sky in every direction, the Clark Fork River cut right through the business district, and college kids in inner tubes and on rubber rafts floated down the strips of white water with cans of beer in their hands, shouting and waving at the fishermen on the banks. The town was covered with elm and maple trees, the lawns were green and dug with flower beds, and men in shirtsleeves sprinkled the grass with garden hoses like a little piece of memory out of the 1940s.
I walked down the street with a sense of freedom that I hadn’t felt since I went to the penitentiary. Even at my father’s house the reminders were there, the darkness of the house, the ancestral death in the walls, the graveyard being eaten away a foot at a time by the bayou, that black vegetable growth across the brain that puts out new roots whenever you come home. But here there was sun all over the sidewalks, some of which still had tethering rings set in them.
I went into places that had names like the Oxford, Eddie’s Club, and Stockman’s Bar, and it was like walking through a door and losing a century. Cowboys, mill workers, lumberjacks, bindle stiffs, and professional gamblers played cards at felt tables in the back; there was a bar without stools for men who were serious about their drinking, a counter for steaks and spuds and draft beer, the click of billiard balls in a corner, and occasionally a loud voice, a scraping of chairs, and a punch-out that sent a man reeling into the plasterboard partition of the restrooms.
I was eating a steak fried in onions in the Oxford when a man without legs tried to raise himself onto a stool next to me. He had pushed himself along the street and into the bar on a small wooden platform that had roller-skate wheels nailed under it, and the two wood blocks sticking out from the pockets of his pea jacket looked like someone’s beaten ears. One of the buckle straps on his stump had caught, and I tried to raise him toward the stool. His tongue clicked out across his bad teeth like a lizard’s.
“He don’t want you to help him, mister,” the bartender said.
“I’m sorry.”
“He can’t hear or talk. He got all blowed up in the war,” the bartender said. He filled a bowl with lima-bean soup and placed it on a saucer with some crackers in front of the crippled man.
I listened to him gurgle at the soup, and I had to look at the far end of the counter while I ate. The bartender slid another draft in front of me.
“It’s on the house,” he said, and then, with a matchstick in the corner of his mouth and his eyes flat, he added, “You visiting in town?”
“I’m staying in the Bitterroot with a friend and looking around for work. I guess right now I’m going to be bucking bales for the Riordans awhile.” I couldn’t resist mentioning the name, just like you put your foot in lightly to test the water.
The reaction was casual and slowly curious, but it was there.
“You know Frank Riordan pretty good?”
“I know his son.”
“What the hell is Frank up to with this pulp mill, anyway?”