“I didn’t press Buddy this morning, but I want to know what happened. Was it something that grew out of an argument in a saloon, or was it more involved than that?”
I reached over to the nightstand where someone had placed my package of Lucky Strikes beside my billfold, and put one in my mouth. He took a book of matches from his denim shirt and lit it. I wanted to avoid his face and the private question that was there beyond the wind-burned skin, the short growth of whiskers, and those intense gray eyes.
“It started with Buddy at the bar, Mr. Riordan. I was outside most of the time. You’d better ask him about it later,” I said.
“And what was it exactly about?”
“Maybe too many drunk men in a bar on Sunday night.”
“What was said?”
I drew in on the cigarette and placed it in the ashtray. The wind blew the rain off the windowsill into the room. His big hands were pressed on his knees, and the veins stood up like twists of blue cord under the skin.
“You’ve got me in a hard place, and I think you know that,” I said.
“Yes, I guess I do. But I’d like to have it now.”
“Buddy was talking with some people at a table about the pulp mill. I don’t know who the men were who followed us out. Buddy thought they were just drunks until they smashed into the back of my truck.”
“I see,” he said.
I heard the wet slap of the football again and then the heavy rattle of leaves in a tree.
“It looks like we’ve gotten you into some of our family’s trouble, Mr. Paret,” he said.
“No, sir, that’s not true. I usually make a point of finding my own.”
He took a package of tobacco from his shirt pocket and rolled a cigarette, wet the glue neatly, and pinched the ends down.
“What did you kill that man for?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“It never came to you in those two years?”
“No.”
“I shot at a man once. I would have hit him and maybe killed him if he hadn’t jumped from the cab of a combine when he did. I shot at him because I’d thought for a long time about something he had done.”
“I formally resigned from my war a long time ago, Mr. Riordan.”
He cleared his throat quietly, as though there were a piece of bad air in it, and put out the rolled cigarette in the ashtray. This is one that’s hard to read, I thought.
“I’ll be back this evening,” he said. “The doctor said you two should be able to leave in the morning. Do you want anything?”
“I’d like a half pint of bourbon.”
“All right.”
“Wait,” I said, and gave him three dollars from my billfold.
After he had gone, I tried to sleep in the cool sound of the rain and fall back into the dream about the duck hunt with my father, but the perspiration rolled off my back onto the sheets, and when I kept my eyes closed too long, I saw the headlights roaring up out of the dark road into my tailgate. I turned on my side, with the ooze of salve thick against my skin, and stared at the wooden crucifix on the wall with two withered palms stuck behind it. I got up from the bed and found my slacks and shoes in the closet, but no shirt, and then I remembered the curl of flame climbing into the gas tank. It took me ten minutes to get on my trousers with one hand, and even with my buttocks against the bed the room kept tilting sideways from the square of pale light through the window. Sweat dripped out of my hair onto the cast, and my good hand was shaking as I tried to pop a match with my thumb and light a cigarette.
After I rang for the nurse, I looked across the room at my image in the dresser mirror. Oh man, I thought.
A nun in white pushed open the door softly, and then her quiet, cosmetic-free face dilated with a red hue.
“Oh, no, you shouldn’t do that,” she said. “Please don’t do that. You mustn’t.”
“I think I should leave this evening, Sister, but I need a shirt. I’d appreciate it if you could find any old one you have around here.”
“Please, Mr. Paret.”
“I have to check out, and I guess I’m going to. I just hate to ride the bus in a pajama shirt. You’d be doing me a great favor, Sister.”
Just then the nurse came in, and she could have been a matron in a women’s reformatory. Her face was at first a simple bright piece of cardboard and irritation at an annoyance on her floor; then after a few sentences were exchanged between us, the anger clicked in her eyes, and I was sure that she would have enjoyed seeing me collapse on the floor in a spasm that would require heart surgery with a pocketknife.
The nun came through the door again with a folded checkered shirt in her hands, brushed past the nurse in a swirl of white cloth over her small, polished black shoes, and put the shirt next to me, quickly, with just a flash of her concerned pretty face into mine.
I buttoned the shirt so I could rest my limp hand and the weight of the cast inside it and walked down the corridor to the desk in the waiting room. I could hear the leather soles and etched voice of the nurse echo behind me, and evidently she had enough command in the hospital to make the interns and the resident doctor look around walleyed and full of question marks at the strange man walking toward them a little off-balance.
I told the lady at the desk my name and asked for the bill.
“You ought to go back to your room, fella,” the resident said.
“Got to catch air, doc, and stretch it out a little bit tonight.”
He looked at me steadily for a moment.
“All right, that’s fine,” he said, and motioned the nurse away. “But we’re going to give you a sling and some pills for infection and pain. You come back in tomorrow to have your bandages changed.”
I sat down in a metal chair while another nurse tied a sling around my neck and placed my elbow carefully into the cloth and clipped safety pins into the folds. She stuck a brown envelope full of pills into the pocket of the checkered shirt, and I stood up to walk to the desk again. I could feel the stitches drawing tight against my eye, and I felt that there was a large blood blister swelling up on the bridge of my nose. My eyes couldn’t focus on the gray dimpling of rain on the concrete outside.
I asked again for my bill and was told that Mr. Riordan had asked that it be sent to him. I took out twenty-five dollars from my billfold and said that I would be back in to pay the rest.
I walked through the wet streets under the overhang of trees toward the bus depot. The wind swept the rain in gusts into my face. Clouds hung like soft smoke on the peaks of the mountains, and the neon signs over the bars were hazy red and green in the diminishing gray light.
So you showed everybody at the hospital you’re a stand-up guy, I thought. Isn’t that fine? Then I had to think about the rest of it. My truck and my Martin and Dobro burned up, a broken arm that put me out of work, and living at a strange family’s place as a bandage case because there wasn’t another damn thing I could do. And deeper than any of it was just a sick feeling, a humiliation at being beaten up by men who had done it with a lazy form of physical contempt. I’d had the same feeling only once before, when a bully in the eighth grade had caught me after school and pinned my arms into the dust with his knees and slapped my face casually back and forth, then spit on his finger and put it in my ear.
Six
In the morning the sun was all over the Bitterroot Valley, the grass had become a darker green from the rain, and the irrigation ditches were flowing high and muddy through the pigweed along the banks. I fired the wood stove and set the coffeepot to boil on an iron lid with the grinds in the water and went out back to see if I could start Buddy’s old Plymouth. He had driven it through the creek and smashed one headlight and fender into a cottonwood when he was drunk, and white water had boiled over the front axle into the wires and distributor. But I finally turned it over on three cylinders and left it knocking and drying in neutral in front of the cabin while I drank coffee out of the pot and ate some smoked trout from the icebox.