“Buddy says you could make it as a jazz musician if you wanted to. Why do you play in country bands?”
“Because I’m good at what I do, and I have the feeling for it.”
“Do you like the people you play for?” She said it in a soft voice, her eyes interested, and I wondered why Buddy had ever left her.
“I think I understand them.”
“The type of men who beat you up and burned your truck?”
“Not everybody in a beer joint is a gangster. We wouldn’t have had that scene if Buddy—”
“I know. Buddy’s favorite expression: ‘That’s the way the toilet flushes sometimes, Zeno.’ He has a way of saying it when somebody is already thinking about killing him.”
“Well, it was something like that. But when you cruise into it with your signs on, somebody is going to try to cancel you out.”
“I read the story in the paper. Did you really do that much damage from across the river?” Her dark eyes were dancing into mine.
“What do you think, kiddo?”
“That you don’t understand the sheriff you’re dealing with or Frank Riordan either.”
“Ever since I came here, people have been telling me I don’t understand something. Does that happen to everybody who wanders into Montana?”
“Pat Floyd might look like a fat Louisiana redneck behind his desk, but he’s been sheriff for fifteen years, and he doesn’t let people out of his jail for something like this unless he has a reason. I think you’re going to find, also, that Buddy’s father can be a strange man to deal with.” She went to the sink and pulled the rubber plug in the drain, then began squeezing water out of the jeans and T-shirts. “Excuse me. Take another beer. I have to get this on the line before it rains again.”
I took a Grain Belt from the icebox and looked at the motion of her shoulders while she twisted the water out of her boys’ clothes. I was never very good with women, possibly because I had always thought of them simply as women, but this one could reach out with an intelligent fingernail and tick the edge of your soul and walk away into a question mark.
I waited three minutes in the silence, drinking the beer and looking out through the screen at the green trees in the backyard.
“So why is Mr. Riordan a strange man to deal with?” I said.
“He doesn’t recognize anything outside of his idea of the world and the people who should live in it. He might be a good person, but he’s always determined to do what he calls right, regardless of the cost to other people. You might not have thought about it yet, but to his mind you probably created something very large for him when you shot up those trucks.”
“I don’t create anything for anybody. I’ve tried to announce in capital letters that somebody’s fight with the pulp mill or the lumberjacks isn’t part of my act. So far I’ve gotten my arm broken and lost my job just for being around. So I don’t figure I owe anybody.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Sometimes you got to roll and stretch it out.”
“You should have stayed in Louisiana.”
“Do I get a bill for that?” I smiled at her, but her face stayed expressionless.
“If the pulp mill shuts down because of Frank Riordan, you won’t want to see what the people in this town will be like.”
“I’ve met some of them.”
“No, you haven’t. Not when they’re out of work and there’s no food in the house except what they get from the federal surplus center. There’s nothing worse than a lumber town when the mill closes down.”
“Why don’t you leave?” Then I felt stupid for my question.
“I could probably wait tables at the bus depot in Billings or a truck stop in Spokane. Do you recommend that as a large change?”
“I’m sorry. Too much beer in the morning.”
She dried her hands and pushed her hair back under her blue scarf.
“Tell me another thing,” she said. “Do you believe Buddy is going to stay out of jail?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t think that someday he’ll go back to prison for one thing or another? For dope or a drunk accident or a bottle thrown across a bar or any of the things that he does regularly and casually dismisses?”
“Buddy’s not a criminal. He fell in Louisiana because he was holding some weed at the wrong time. If he wasn’t a Yankee and had had some money, he could have walked out of it.”
“That wasn’t the first time he was in jail.”
“He told me about that.”
“What?” she said.
I felt uncomfortable again under her eyes, and I took a sip from the beer.
“He said you had him locked up once.”
“That’s wonderful. He drove his car through the lawns all the way down the block and ran over the front steps, then stuck a matchstick in the horn. Every neighbor in the block called the police, and the next day we were evicted from the house. While he spent ninety days in jail, we lived in a trailer without heat in East Missoula.”
I heard the front screen slam back on the spring. Melvin walked through the hallway into the kitchen, chalk dust on the back of his brown suit coat, his face bright and handsome, and poured a cup of coffee off the stove. He began talking immediately. He didn’t know it, but at that moment I would have enjoyed buying him a tall, cool drink.
He talked without stopping for almost fifteen minutes. Then he set down the empty coffeepot on the stove and said, “You ready to roll, ace?”
“Yeah, let’s get it,” I said.
“Jesus Christ, you blew the hell out of that place, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Well, all right. But I drove past the mill last night, and they were still scraping up a melted truck from the asphalt. Partner, that was a real job.”
“Let’s hit it if you’re going.”
We walked through the hallway to the front with Beth behind us. I paused at the screen door.
“I should have a check in the mail today if you and the kids would like to go on a barbecue or something,” I said. “Maybe Melvin and his wife would like to come, and Buddy can take along his little brothers, and we’ll find a lake someplace.”
She smiled at me, her blue-black hair soft on her forehead. Her dark eyes took on a deeper color in the sunlight through the trees.
“I used to make the second-best sauce piquante in southern Louisiana,” I said.
“Ask the others and give me a call,” she said.
I winked at her and walked across the shady lawn to the car.
Winking, I thought, Boy, are you a cool operator.
“You want to stop at Eddie’s Club for a beer?” Melvin said.
“I’d like to get this jailhouse smell off me, and I’ll buy you one this afternoon.”
We rolled across the bridge over the river, and I looked at the deep flashes of sunlight in the current.
“Did you use Buddy’s Springfield?” he said.
“I was pretty drunk that night, and I don’t remember much of anything.”
“OK. But you ought to throw it in the river.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said.
The wind was blowing up the Bitterroot Valley, and the leaves of the cottonwoods trembled with silver in the bright air. I watched the fields of hay and cattle move by, and the log ranch houses chinked with mortar, and the drift of smoke from a small forest fire high on a blue mountain. The creek beds that crossed under the road were alive with hatching insects, and the pebbles along the sandy banks glistened wet and brown in the sun. Damn, Montana was a beautiful part of the country, I thought. It reached out with its enormous sky and mountains and blue-green land and hit you like a fist in the heart. You simply became lost in looking at it.
Buddy got up from his chair on the porch of the cabin and spread his arms in the air when he saw the automobile. Melvin let me down and drove up the rutted road toward the main house, and I saw Buddy flip away a hand-rolled cigarette into the wind. His shirttail was pulled out, and his stitched and bruised face was grinning like a scarecrow’s as he walked disjointedly across the lawn.