“One night in the bag and Zeno has made the street,” he said. “That’s what I call accelerated.”
I could smell the marijuana on his clothes when I was five feet from him.
“I can see you’ve been sweating out your podna’s poor ass being in jail.”
“I knew you were going to walk late last night. I did a ding-a-ling on the ring-a-ling after the old man said he would go a property bond. But they said there was no bail because Zeno hadn’t been charged, and you would be sent home safely in the morning.”
“What time was this?”
“About midnight.”
“That’s great, Buddy. So I spent the night with one of your local homosexuals and a one-armed Negro psychotic while everything was cool on the farm. I’m relieved as hell to know that I didn’t have anything to worry about.”
“I couldn’t get you out that late. They don’t hire a night jailer, and I don’t think they liked you down there too much anyway. Look, man, I got something for you inside. Also, you got to see the rainbow I took this morning.”
We walked up on the porch, and Buddy went through the screen door in front of me.
“I got it on credit, so don’t worry about it. I got credit out my winky hole, and I just send them a hubcap from the Plymouth when they threaten to take my property.”
On my bunk was a new Gibson guitar with a Confederate flag wrapped around the sound box. The blond, waxed wood in the face and the dark, tapered neck and silver frets shone in the light through the window.
“They ain’t got Dobros in Montana, and I couldn’t find a Martin,” he said.
“Well, hell, man.”
“But this has got a lifetime guarantee, and the guy says he’ll sell us a case for it at cost.”
“Well, you dumb bastard.”
He folded a torn match cover around a roach and lit it, already grinning into the smoke before he spoke.
“I tried to get you a Buck Owens instruction book, but they didn’t have it,” he said.
I sat down on the bed and clicked my thumbnail over the guitar strings. They reverberated and trembled in the deep echo from the box. I tried to make an awkward E chord, but I couldn’t work my cast around the neck.
“Can you figure that scene down at the jail?” I said.
“You got me. I thought they had you nailed flat.”
“What do you know about the sheriff?”
“Look out for him. He’s an old fox.”
“Yeah, Beth told me.” Then I regretted my words.
“What were you doing over there?” he said.
“I didn’t have any bread to catch the bus, and I thought you might be around.”
He looked at me curiously. I took a flat pick out of my pocket and began tuning the first string on the guitar. The room was silent a moment.
Then he said, “Take a look at the rainbow I got on a worm this morning,” and lifted a twenty-inch trout out of the sink by the gill. The iridescent band of blue and pink and sunlight was still bright along the sides. “I had the drag screwed all the way down, and I still couldn’t horse him out. I had to wade him up on a sandbar. If you can keep your ass out of jail today, we’ll go out again this evening.”
“My check ought to be here today. What if I pick up the tab for a beerbust and a picnic this afternoon?”
“That sounds commendable, Zeno. But I already went to the mailbox, and your check ain’t here. Also, before we slide into anything else, the old man wants to talk with you.”
He opened up the trout’s stomach with a fish knife and scooped out the entrails with his hand.
“How involved is that going to be?” I said.
“It’s just his way. He wants to talk a few minutes.”
“Say, I know I’m getting free rent here, and maybe becoming an instant sniper is pretty stupid, but like you said, it’s my fall.”
“You are the most paranoid bastard I’ve ever met. Look, he was going to go a property bond for you. I mean put the whole place on the line. OK, big deal. But give him his innings. He’s all right.”
This was the first time I had seen Buddy become defensive about his father.
“OK,” I said.
Buddy worked the iron pump over the trout and scraped out the blood from the ridge of bone on the inside with his thumbnail.
“All root, all reet,” he said, and lit the kindling in the stove. “A few lemon rings and slices of onion, and we’ll dine on the porch and do up some of this fine Mexican laughing grass.”
“Your father came to my room while we were in the hospital and said he tried to shoot someone once.”
“I’m surprised he would tell you about that.”
“He was pretty intent on making a point.”
“That’s something he keeps filed away in a dark place. But by God, he tried to do it, all right. When I was a kid, we used to live over by Livingston, and every day I climbed over this guy’s barbed wire to fish in his slough. I climbed over it enough until it was broken down on the ground, and thirty of his cows got out on the highway. The next morning he caught me at the slough with a horse quirt. It only took him about a dozen licks, but he cut through the seat of my overalls with it. I had blood in my shoes when I walked into the house, and that’s the only time I’ve ever seen the old man look the way he did then.”
The trout broiled in the butter inside the pan, and Buddy squeezed a lemon along the delicate white-and-pink meat.
“So do I march up to talk with your father or wait around?” I said.
“No, you take a beer out of the icebox, and then we eat. If you want to boogie down the road then, and not blow five minutes with the old man, that’s OK. We’ll catch a couple of brews and worm fish along the river. Don’t fret your bowels about it. Everything’s cool.”
We ate out on the front porch, with the breeze blowing up through the pines from the river. It was almost cold in the shade of the porch, and Mr. Riordan’s four Appaloosas and his one thoroughbred and Arabian stood like pieces of sunlit stone in the lot next to the barn. Beyond the house, the edges of the canyon and the cliffs were razor blue against the sky.
I was eating the last piece of trout with a slice of onion when I heard Mr. Riordan step up on the side of the porch. He had slipped his overalls straps down over his shoulders so that they hung below his waist, and the red handkerchief tied around his neck was wet with perspiration. He reached into the bib of his overalls and took out a small cigar that was burned at the tip. Buddy’s face became vacant while he cleaned off the tin plates.
“I guess you get pretty serious when you decide to do something,” he said.
He lit his cigar, and his gray eyes looked through the smoke and lighted match without blinking.
“I thought we had an understanding back there at the hospital,” he said.
“It wasn’t something I planned. I just have a bad way of letting the burner get too hot until something starts to melt at the wrong moment.”
He took a piece of tobacco off his lip and made a sound in his throat. There were drops of perspiration in his eyebrows. Buddy took the plates inside, and I heard him work the iron pump in the sink.
“I guess I had you called wrong. I didn’t have you figured for this,” he said.
I looked away from him, took a cigarette out of my pack, and thought, Jesus Christ, what is this?
“Then, I never figured that my own boy would spend five years in a penitentiary,” he said.
“Sometimes you can’t call what people will do,” I said.
“Is that the kind of observation you make on human conduct after you’re in jail?”
“I don’t know if I learned it in jail or not, but my own feeling is that people will do what’s inside them and there’s not much way to change that.”