“He’s about to put himself and your sister all over those rocks.”
“You’d have to pull him from behind that steering wheel with a chain,” Buddy said. “Right now he’s probably talking about joining a revolution in Bolivia. You know, right after I got out of the joint” — Buddy stopped momentarily and touched a piece of tobacco on his lip, his eyes uncertain in front of his wife’s stare through the windshield — “I hadn’t met the guy and he asked me how you burn a safe, because he had some friends who were going to peel one in California for the revolution and he didn’t know if they could do it right. I mean he didn’t blink when he said it.”
In the mirror I saw the car rip a shower of gravel out of the shoulder and float back toward the center stripe.
“Let’s get some coffee and a sandwich at the truck stop,” I said.
“Go ahead. He’ll be all right,” Beth said.
I glanced at her calm, lovely face in the cab, and for just a second I felt the touch of her thigh against mine and realized that I hadn’t ridden close to a woman in a vehicle for over two years and had forgotten how pleasant it could be.
“Yeah, don’t stop there, man,” Buddy said. “They don’t sell booze, and he’ll make up for it by trying to get it on with the lumberjacks. Even the old man thinks he’s got a lightning bolt in his head. He came into the house one night blowing some green weed and turned up his hi-fi until the plates were shaking in the cupboard. The birds were flapping in the pens, and the old man came up the stairs like a hurricane.”
I put the truck into second gear and slowed for the turn across the railroad embankment into the white shale parking lot in front of the bar. There was already a large afternoon crowd in the bar, and somebody was tuning an electric bass and blowing into the microphone over the roar of noise. Melvin bounced across the tracks, fishtailed on the back springs, and slid with his brakes in a scour of earth three inches from my front fender. His face was almost totally white, and he had a filter-tipped cigar in the middle of his mouth. He leaned toward the passenger’s window to speak, and his wife averted her face from his breath.
“A little Roy Acuff this afternoon, cousin,” he said.
I nodded at him and rolled up the window.
“Say, Buddy, I’ve only played twice with these guys,” I said. “It’s a good gig and I want to keep it.”
“It’s solid, babe. Just go in there and do the Ernest Tubb shot. We’ll take care of this guy.”
“I’m not putting you on,” I said.
“Go inside. It’ll be all right,” Beth said.
She was a princess inside the bar. After I began the first number on the bandstand, Melvin stood below the platform with a shot glass in one hand and a draft beer in the other, his face happily drunk. He swayed on his feet, talking with a fractured smile into the amplified sound; then she took him by the elbow and led him away to the dance floor.
I did the lead with my Martin on our second song, “I’m Moving On,” and the bar became quiet while I held the sound box up to my chin and played directly into the microphone. I ran Hank Snow’s chord progressions up and down the frets, thumping the deep bass notes of a train highballing through Dixie while I picked out the notes of the melody on the treble strings with my fingernail. I heard the steel try to get in behind me before I realized that I had been riding too long, and I moved back down the neck into the standard G chord on the second fret and tapered off into the rest of the band with a bass roll. The crowd applauded and whistled, and a man at the bar shouted out, “Give ’em hell, reb.”
I saw Buddy in the restroom at the end of the set. He was leaning over the urinal with one hand propped against the wall, and his eyes looked like whorls of color with cinders for pupils.
“I scored some acid from a guy out in the parking lot,” he said. “You want to try some of this crazy mixture on your neurotic southern chemistry?”
“I got to work this afternoon, babe.”
“How you like my old lady? She’s quite a gal, ain’t she?”
“Yeah, she is.”
“I was catching your radiations in the truck there, Zeno,” he said. “A little pulsing of the blood behind the steering wheel.”
“You better leave that college dope alone,” I said.
“Hey, don’t walk out. After you get finished, we’re going to Eddie’s Club, and then I’m bringing a whole crew down to the place for a barbecue. Some bear steaks soaked overnight in milk. It’s the best barbecue in the world. Puts meat in your brain and black hair all over your toenails.”
“Okay, Buddy.”
He drew in on his cigarette, the smoke and hot ash curling between his yellowed fingers, and squinted at me with a radiant smile on his face.
Eddie’s Club was a place full of hard yellow light, smoke, winos, drunk Salish Indians, the clatter of pool balls, a hillbilly jukebox, college students, and some teachers from the university. One wall was lined with large framed photographs of the old men who drank in there, their mouths toothless and collapsed, their slouch hats and cloth caps pulled at an angle over the alcoholic lines and bright eyes of their faces.
“Boyd Valentine, the bartender, did all that,” Buddy said, his forehead perspiring in the smoke. “You got to meet this guy. He’s a Michelangelo with a camera. A real wild man. Your kind of people.”
Before I could stop him, Buddy had walked away into the confusion of noise and people, who were two-deep at the bar. I was left at the table with Beth, Pearl, and Melvin, who couldn’t find the end of his cigarette with his lighter, and a half-dozen other people whose elbows rested in spilled beer without their taking notice of it.
“Try a Montana busthead highball,” Melvin said. “Don’t try to stay sober in this crowd. It’s useless.”
He lowered a full whiskey jigger into a beer schooner with two fingers and pushed it toward me.
“I’d better pass,” I said.
He picked up the schooner with both hands and drank it to the bottom, the whiskey jigger rolling against the glass. I had to shudder while I watched him.
In the back two men began fighting over the pool table. A couple of chairs were overturned, a pool cue shattered across the table, and one man was knocked to the floor, then helped up and pushed out the back door. Few people paid any attention.
“What’s on your mind?” Beth said, smiling.
“I wonder what I’m doing here.”
“It’s part of Buddy and Mel’s guided tour of Missoula,” Pearl said. She wasn’t happy with any of it.
“You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din,” Melvin said, toasting me in some private irony.
“We’ll be leaving in a few minutes,” Beth said.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll probably shoot on across the street to the Oxford and get something to eat.” Although I wouldn’t admit the impulse to myself then, I was hoping that she would ask to go along.
“Hey,” Buddy shouted behind me. “This is Boyd Valentine. Used to hang around New Orleans when I was making my cool sounds there. Got a ’55 Chevy and blows engines out at a hundred and ten on the Bitterroot road. Outruns cops, ambulances, and fire trucks. Best photographer in the Northwest.”
Buddy held the bartender by one arm, a man with fierce black eyes and an electric energy in his face. One of his thumbs was missing, and the black hair on his chest grew out of his shirt.
“What’s happening?” he said, and shook hands. There was good humor in his voice and smile, and a current in his hand.
“My man here is going to load up his hot rod with good people, and we’re going to burn on down to the place and juice under the stars while I barbecue steaks that will bring you to your knees in reverence,” Buddy said. “Then my other man will crank out his Martin and sing songs of Dixie and molasses and ham hocks cooked with grits in his mammy’s shoe.”