“All right, bubba,” I said. “Go back to your papers.”
But he wasn’t listening. “Send Lloyd and Jack down here,” he said.
I walked out the office and down the dark hallway; then the outer door opened in a flash of sunlight and two big men in tin hats moved toward me in silhouette. One of them had a cigar pushed back like a stick in his jaw, and he wiped tobacco juice off his mouth with a flat thumb and looked hard at me.
“Better get in that office,” I said. “Some crazy man is in there raising hell.”
They went past me, walking fast, their brows wrinkled intently. I was across the parking lot when I heard the door open again behind me. The man with the cigar leaned out, his tin hat bright in the sun, and shouted: “You keep going. Don’t ever come around here again.”
I drove back to Missoula and stopped at the tavern where I had called Ace earlier. I started drinking beer. Then from among the many wet rings on the bar I lifted up a boilermaker, and I guess it was then that an odd tumbler clicked over in my brain and it started.
In the darkness of the tavern, with the soft glow of the mountain twilight through the blinds, I began to think about my boyhood South and the song I never finished in Angola. I had all the music in my mind and the runs that bled into each chord, but the lyrics were always wooden, and I couldn’t get all of the collective memory into a sliding blues. I called it “The Lost Get-Back Boogie,” and I wanted it to contain all those private, inviolate things that a young boy saw and knew about while growing up in southern Louisiana in a more uncomplicated time: the bottle trees (during the depression people used to stick empty milk of magnesia bottles on the winter branches of a hackberry until the whole tree rang with blue glass), the late evening sun boiling into the green horizon of the Gulf, the dinners of crawfish and bluepoint crabs under the cypress trees on Bayou Teche, and freight cars slamming together in the Southern Pacific yard, and through the mist the distant locomotive whistle that spoke of journeys across the wetlands to cities like New Orleans and Mobile.
There was much more to it, like the Negro juke joint by the sugar mill and Loup-garous Row, the string of shacks by the rail yard where the whores sat on the wooden porches on Saturday afternoons and dipped their beer out of a bucket. But maybe that was why I didn’t finish it. There was too much of it for one song or maybe even for a book.
I kept looking at the clock above the neon GRAIN BELT sign, and I was sure that I had my thumb right on the pulse of the day, but each time I focused again on the hour hand, I realized that some terrible obstruction had prevented me from seeing that another thirty or forty minutes or hour and a half had passed. When I walked to the restroom, my cast scratched along the wall with my weight, and when I came back out, the tables, the row of stools, and the people all seemed rearranged in place.
“You want another one, buddy?” the bartender said.
“Yeah. This time give me a draft and a double Beam on the side.”
He brought the schooner dripping with foam and ice and set a shot jigger beside it.
“You want to throw for the washline?” he said.
“What do I do?”
He picked up the leather cup of poker dice and set it down in front of me with his palm over the top.
“You roll me double or nothing for the drinks. If you roll five of a kind, you get everything up there on the line.”
There was a long string of wire above the bar with one-dollar bills clipped to it with clothespins.
“What are my chances?” I said.
“Outside of the drinks, bad.”
“All right.” The whiskey was hot in my face, and I could feel the perspiration start to run out of my hair. There was a dead hum in my head, and behind me I heard Kitty Wells’s nasal falsetto from the jukebox: “It wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels.”
I rattled the dice once in the leather cup with my hand tight over the top and threw them along the bar.
“I’ll be damned,” the bartender said.
I had to look again myself, in the red glow of the neon beer sign, at the five aces glinting up from the mahogany bar top.
The bartender pulled twenty one-dollar bills from the clothespins and put them in front of me, then took away my beer glass and jigger and brought them back filled. He chewed on the flattened end of a match and shook his head as though some type of mathematical principle in the universe had just been proved untrue.
“You ought to shoot craps at one of them joints over in Idaho, buddy,” he said.
“I’ve shot lots of craps. They keep you off night patrol.”
He looked at me with a flat pause in his face, the matchstick motionless in a gap between his teeth.
“You can throw the bones for high point right down at the end of the blanket and the other guy has got to go up through their wire. Him and fifteen others.” Then I knew that I was drunk, because the words had already freed themselves from behind all those locks and hasps and welded doors that you keep sealed in the back of your mind.
“Well, I guess you got good luck, buddy,” he said, and wiped the rag over the bar in front of me before he walked down to a cowboy who had just come in.
I drank the whiskey neat and chased it with the beer, then smoked a cigarette and called him back again.
“Give me a pint of Beam’s Choice and a six-pack. While you’re getting it, give me a ditch.”
“Mister, I ain’t telling you nothing, but you ain’t going to be able to drive.”
Outside, the stars were bright above the dark ring of mountains around Missoula, and the plume of smoke from the pulp mill floated high above the Clark Fork in the moonlight. My broken arm itched as though ants were crawling in the sweat inside my cast. I fell heavily behind the steering wheel of Buddy’s Plymouth, and for just a second I saw my guitars snapping apart in the truck fire and heard that level, hot voice: Give that son of a bitch his buckwheats.
As I drove back down the blacktop toward Lolo, with the bright lights of semis flashing over me and the air brakes hissing when I swerved across the center line, I remembered again the bully putting spittle in my ear, reenacted in my mind being thrown out of a pulp mill that manufactured toilet paper, and studied hard upon the sale of my inheritance to the cement-truck and shopping-center interests.
Bugs swam around the light on the front porch of Buddy’s cabin and his fly rod was leaned against the screen door, but he must have been up at his father’s house. I walked unsteadily to the back room, where he kept the ’03 Springfield rifle with the Mauser action on two deer-antler racks. I put the sling over my shoulder and filled the big flap pockets of my army jacket with shells from a box on the floor. Even as drunk as I was, even as I caught my balance against the doorjamb, I knew that it was insane, that every self-protective instinct and light in my head was blinking red, but I was already in motion in the same way I had been my first day out of prison when I covered the license plate of the pickup with mud and went banging down the road drunk into a possible parole violation.
I put the rifle on the back floor with my field jacket over it and drove back toward the cattle guard. The wind off the river bent the grass in the pasture under the moon, and the cows were bunched in a dark shadow by the cottonwoods. I saw a flashlight bobbing across the field toward me and heard Buddy’s voice call out in the dark. I stopped and let the engine idle while the sweat rolled down my face and my own whiskey breath came back sharp in my throat. He jumped across the irrigation ditch on one foot, and one of his younger brothers jumped in a rattle of cattails behind him.
“Where are you going, man?”
An answer wouldn’t come, and I just flicked an index finger off the steering wheel toward the road.