“Like what kind of action do you have planned, Zeno?”
“I need to call my brother in Louisiana, and I’m supposed to stop by the hospital.”
“There’s a phone up at the house.”
“Can I use the car?”
He took the keys from his pocket and dropped them in my palm. I followed him into the woods with my can of beer and watched him fish with wet flies for cutthroat in the turning pools behind the boulders. After he had moved farther up the stream into the deeper shade of the trees’ overhang, I finished my beer against a pine trunk, whistled at him softly and waved, and walked back to the cabin.
I had one good suit, a gray one that I wore when I played at good clubs, and I put it on with my half-topped black boots and a blue-and-white, small-checked cowboy shirt with pearl snap buttons. It took me almost a half hour to dress with one arm, and it was impossible to get the necktie into a knot.
I drove the thirty miles to Missoula and stopped at a beer joint with no cars in front to phone Ace. I got change for five dollars at the bar. Then it struck me what type of conversation I was about to have, and I ordered a vodka and ice to take to the telephone.
After his secretary whispered something hurriedly, like “I think it’s your brother, Mr. Paret,” Ace was on the line, and I could almost see his stomach swell up in satisfaction in that reclining leather chair. “Hello, Iry,” he said, “how do you like it up there with the Eskimos? Just a minute. I’ve got about three people on hold. . Go ahead. . Well, I don’t know if I want to buy just the two acres. Your four run all the way back to the bayou, and that’s going to leave a strip that anybody can move in on later. . I mean, if you decide later on to sell to a boat yard or let that oil company build a dock there, what I’ve got invested in the development isn’t going to be worth spit on the sidewalk. That’s the way it is, Bro’. . What the hell went wrong up there? I thought you had a job with that friend of yours. . Well, I don’t want to be the one that told you about latching the gate too quick behind you, but that’s the deal. All four acres or I can’t use it.”
So I took it at $250 an acre and gave up any mineral rights or future land-lease agreements for oil exploration, and Ace said he would have the deed transfer and check in the morning’s mail.
I walked back to the bar and finished the vodka. For a thousand dollars I had quitclaim forever to any of the Paret land, and if I knew Ace, I would not want to see the farm or the bamboo and cypress and oaks along the bayou ever again, even in memory.
I drove west of town through the green, sloping hills along the Clark. The sun was bright on the green riffles in the water, and insects were turning in hot swarms over the boulders that stood exposed in the current. Ahead I could see the huge plume of smoke that curled up against the sky from the pulp mill, and then I caught the first raw odor in the air. It smelled like sewage, and the wind flattened the smoke across the valley and left a dull white haze low on the meadows. I cleared my throat and spat outside the window, but my eyes started to water and I tried to breathe quietly through my mouth. The only thing I had ever smelled like it, on a scale that could cover a whole rural area, was the sugar mill back home in winter, which produced a thick, sick-sweet odor that seemed to permeate the inside of your skull.
I turned through the gate and parked in the employees’ lot. A new shift was going in, and men in Levi’s clothes and work boots and tin hats with lunch pails were walking into the side of the building. Log trucks piled with ponderosa pines, the booming chains notched tightly into the bark, were lined up in back to unload, the tractor engines hammering under the hoods. Someone told me later that the leather boots the men wore eventually turned black and rotted from the air inside the mill and the chemicals on the floor, and I thought their lungs must have looked like a pathologist’s dream.
I asked a foreman where the management was, and he looked at me with a sweaty, questioning eye from under his tin hat.
“There’s no jobs right now,” he said.
“I just want to see the timekeeper or somebody in personnel.”
His eyes moved over my face; then he pointed at a door.
“Over there. There’s some glass doors at the end of the hall,” he said.
The hallway was dark and hot, and it smelled much worse than the outside of the mill. Someone had painted the walls green at one time, but the paint was blistered and peeling in flakes on the baseboards. Behind the glass doors I could see an air-conditioning unit with streamers blowing off the vents, a big-breasted secretary who sat in her chair as though she had an arrow in her back, and three men in business suits behind their glass-topped desks, each of them concerned with typed papers that brought on knitted brows, a sweep of the hand to the telephone, a quick concentration on some piece of thunder hidden in a figure.
The secretary wanted to know who it was exactly that I would like to see or if I could explain exactly what I wanted.
“It’s about an accident, actually,” I said. “I haven’t talked with a lawyer yet. I thought I’d come down here and see what y’all could tell me.”
Her eyelashes blinked, and she looked sideways briefly at the man behind the next desk. There was a pause, and then the man glanced up from his papers and nodded to her.
“Mr. Overstreet can talk with you. Just have a seat,” she said. (All of this in a room where each of us was within five feet of the other.)
I sat in the chair in front of Mr. Overstreet’s desk for possibly two minutes before he decided that I was there. He looked like a working man who had gotten off the green chain years ago, worked his way up to yard foreman, and finally slipped through a side door into a necktie and a place in front of an air-conditioning unit. There were still freckles on the backs of his hands, and thin pinch scars on his fingers that come from working with boomer chains, and he had the rigidity and habitual frown of a man who was afraid of his own position every day. He pushed the papers to the side of the glass desktop, then looked up flatly into my eyes.
“Sunday night my pickup was knocked off the road by one of your trucks down by Florence,” I said. “There were three men in it, and they burned my pickup and musical instruments and left me and another guy a hospital bill to pay. I’m not after your company. I just want those three guys.”
He stared at me, and then his eyes flicked angrily at the secretary. He rubbed the back of one hand into his palm.
“What are you saying?”
“There’s a truck out in your lot that probably has red paint all over the front bumper. Also, you must know who drives a company truck out of here at night.”
The other two men behind the desks had stopped work and were looking blankly at us. I could hear the secretary squeak the rollers of her chair across the rug.
“That doesn’t have anything to do with the mill,” he said. “You take that up with the sheriff’s department in Ravalli County.”
“It was your truck. That makes you liable. If you protect them, that makes you criminally liable.”
“You watch what you say, fella.”
“All you’ve got to tell me is you’ll come up with the men in that truck.”
“Who the hell you think you are talking to me about criminal charges?”
“I’m not asking you for anything that’s unreasonable.”
“Yeah? I think you stopped using your reason when you walked in here. So now you turn around and walk back out.”
“Why don’t you flick on your brain a minute? Do you want guys like this beating up people out of one of your trucks?”
“You don’t understand me. You’re leaving here. Now.”
“You ass.”
“That’s it.” He picked up the telephone and dialed an inner office number. His free hand was spread tightly on the glass desktop while he waited for an answer.