“He’s up to putting a lot of men out of work,” a man farther down the counter said, without looking up from his plate.
Oh shit, I thought.
“I don’t know anything about it,” I said.
“He don’t know anything about it,” the same man said. He wore a tin hat and a checkered shirt with long-sleeved underwear.
The bartender suddenly became a diplomat and disinterested neutral.
“I ain’t seen Frank in a long time,” he said. “He used to come in here sometimes on Saturday and play cards.”
“He’s got no time for that now,” a man eating next to the cripple said. “He’s too busy sitting on thirteen hundred acres of cows and making sure a dollar-fifty-an-hour man gets his pink slip. That’s Frank Riordan for you.”
The bartender wiped the rag over the counter in front of me as though he were rubbing out a piece of personal guilt. “Some people say that smokestack stinks like shit, but it smells like bread and butter to me,” he said, and laughed with a gastric click in the back of his throat, exposing his line of yellowed teeth.
I could feel the anger of the two men on each side of me, like someone caught between bookends. I put the fork and knife in my plate and lit a cigarette and smoked long enough to keep personal honor intact, then walked back into the sunshine. No more testing of reactions to names, I decided, and maybe I should have a more serious talk with Buddy.
Earlier in the afternoon a gyppo logger had told me in a bar that I might get on with a country band in Bonner. I drove out of Missoula through Hellgate Canyon, a huge split in the mountains where the Salish Indians used to follow the Clark Fork and annually get massacred by the Crows and the Blackfeet (whence the name, because the canyon floor was strewn with skeletons when the first Jesuits passed through). I followed along the river through the deep cut of the mountains and the thin second growth of pine on the slopes until I reached the meeting of the Blackfoot and Clark Fork rivers, which made a wide swirl of dark water that spilled white and iridescent over a concrete dam.
Bonner was the Anaconda Company, a huge mill on the edge of the river that blew plumes of smoke that hung in the air for miles down the Blackfoot canyon. The town itself was made up of one street, lined with neat yards and shade trees and identical wood-frame houses. I hadn’t seen a company town outside of Louisiana and Mississippi, and though there was no stench of the sugar mill in the air or vision through a car window of Negroes walking from the sugar press to their wooden porches in the twilight with lunch pails in their hands, Bonner could have been snipped out of Iberia Parish and glued down in the middle of the Rocky Mountains.
I pulled into the parking lot of a weathered gray building by the railroad crossing that had a neon sign on the roof that read: MILLTOWN UNION BAR, CAFE AND LAUNDROMAT. There were electric slot machines inside the bar, winking with yellow horseshoes, bunches of cherries, and gold bars. Over the front door was the head of a mountain sheep covered with a Plexiglas dome, and mounted on the wall over the jukebox was an elk’s head with a huge, sweeping rack. I talked with the owner at the bar about a lead-guitar job on the weekends, and while he pushed his coffee cup around in his saucer with a thick finger, I went to the truck and brought back my double case with the Dobro inside and the Confederate flag sewn into the lining. The metal resonator set in the sound hole swam with the silvery purple reflection of the lights behind the counter, and I pulled the steel picks across the strings and floated the bar down the neck into the beginning of Hank’s “Love-Sick Blues.”
The Dobro did it every time. It had paid for itself several times over in turning jobs for me. He said he would pay thirty-five dollars for Friday and Saturday nights and a three-hour session on Sunday afternoons, and I drove back through the Hellgate with the engine humming under the hood and the late sun red on the walls of the canyon and the deep current in the river.
The next day I went to work with Buddy bucking bales, digging postholes, and opening up irrigation ditches. The sky was immense over our heads, and the mountains were blue and sharp in the sunlight, and pieces of cloud hung in the pines on the far peaks. By midday our bare chests were running with sweat and covered with bits of green hay, and the muscles in my stomach ached from driving the posthole digger into the ground and spreading the wood handles outward. Buddy’s sister, Pearl, brought out a pitcher of sun tea with mint leaves and cracked ice in it and poured some into two deep paper cups, and we drank it while we sat on the back of the flatbed wagon and ate ham sandwiches. Her curly hair was bright on the tips in the sunlight, and the sun halter she wore with her blue jeans showed enough that I had to keep my attention on the sandwich to be polite. She didn’t like me, and I wished that Buddy had not tried to ignore that obvious fact.
“I’m going to visit the wife-o and kids Sunday, Jimmie’s birthday scene, and why don’t you and Melvin come along and we’ll watch the hippy-dippy from Mississippi here do his Ernest Tubb act up at the beer joint in Bonner,” Buddy said.
She put the top on the iced-tea pitcher and set it carefully on the tailgate. Her eyes went flat.
“I’ll have to ask Mel.”
“He’s always good for Sunday afternoon boozing,” Buddy said. “In fact, the only time he gets drunk is the night before he has to work. He goes roaring out of here to the college in the morning with a hangover that must fill up a whole classroom.”
I looked away at the cottonwoods on the river and put a cigarette in my mouth. I had a feeling that anything said next would be wrong. It was.
“You ought to hear this shitkicker, anyway,” Buddy said. “Plays like Charlie Christian when he wants to, but for some reason my coonass pal is fascinated with the hillbillies and Okies. Loves Jimmie Rodgers and Woody Guthrie, imitates Hank Williams, yodels and picks like Bill Monroe. It’s gooder than grits.”
“Let’s get on it, Buddy,” I said.
“He’s also sensitive about his sounds.”
I folded the remaining half of my ham sandwich in the wax paper and put it back in the lunch pail.
“Your father said he wanted those holes dug up to the slough before we quit,” I said.
“He’s loyal to employers, too. A very good man, this one,” Buddy said, hitting the wet slickness of my shoulder with his palm. I wanted to dump him off the tailgate.
“Hey, Pearl, wait a minute,” he said. “Ask Melvin, and maybe Beth can come along with us.”
She nodded without replying and walked across the hayfield, graceful and cool, her sun halter flashing a white line below her tan.
Buddy and I walked out to where the posts were laid at regular intervals on the ground along the fence line. I thudded the posthole digger in the hard dirt while he poured water out of a bucket into the hole.
“Man, I wish you wouldn’t do that,” I said.
He tilted the bucket downward, sluicing water over the wooden handle and the mud impacted between the blades, as though he were preoccupied with a large engineering problem.
“No shit, Buddy,” I said.
“There were other things there, Zeno. You just didn’t see them. I didn’t mean to piss in your shoe with Pearl. She married this university instructor, and he’s an all-right guy, but he’s got an eggbeater in his head most of the time, and she’s trying to keep up with whatever mood he’s in next. That means pack off to Alaska on snowshoes, join some sit-in deal in Alabama, or turn up Beethoven so loud on the hi-fi three nights in a row that it blows the old man out of his bedroom.”
I pulled the posthole digger out of the ground and knocked the mud from the blades.
“Well, that ain’t exactly what was really going on there,” he said. “You see, I’m trying to get back with the wife-o, which might seem like a bad scene, but the boys are nine and eleven now, and they’re not doing worth a darn in school, and Beth is taking them to some kind of psychologist in Missoula. That’s the only outside thing that bothered me in the joint. I cut out on them after the old lady got me locked up one night, and I kept on going all the way to New Orleans.”