I lit a cigarette and poured another cup of coffee from the pot Mrs. Riordan had brought out on the porch. The tops of my bare feet looked like they had been boiled in water.
“I don’t know if you want to see this, Frank, but you better look at it,” one of the firemen said. He had a scorched gasoline can impaled on the end of his fire ax. “It was against the south wall, and there’s a long burn back through the grass where somebody strung out the gasoline.”
“Just put it there,” Mr. Riordan said.
The fireman shook the can off the hook and looked away at the smoking timbers. Water dripped off his yellow slicker, and his face was powdered with ash.
“How many did you lose in there?” he said, squinting his eyes without looking back at us.
“One Appaloosa.”
“I’m sorry about this, Frank. You know it just takes a few sons of bitches to make you think that everybody is one.”
“Tell the others to come on up for coffee,” Mr. Riordan said. “Joe, go into the cabinet for me.”
Buddy’s little brother went into the house and came back with a quart of Jack Daniel’s while Mrs. Riordan poured out cups of coffee with both hands from a huge pot. The firemen and the neighbors in the pickup trucks sat on the steps and the porch railing, mixing whiskey in their cups and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Their politeness and quiet manner and the cool blue morning reminded me of scenes in Louisiana on our back porch before we went hunting in the fall, but there was an unrelieved tension here in the averted eyes, the concentration on rolling a cigarette, or the casual sip of whiskey from the bottom of a cup.
The bottle went around a second time, and Mrs. Riordan brought out a tray of biscuits that she had heated from the night before.
“When the hell are you going to lay off it, Frank?” It was one of the neighbors, a big man in a blue-jean jacket with patched corduroy pants pulled over his long underwear, and work boots that laced halfway up his thick calves. He didn’t look at Mr. Riordan, but took a bite off a plug of Brown Mule and worked it against his cheekbone.
“When I close it down, just like we all should have done when they first came in here,” Mr. Riordan said.
“I’ll be go-to-hell if I should have done any such thing,” the neighbor said. He spit off the porch and put the tobacco plug in his jacket. “What they do up in Missoula ain’t my business. Maybe it smells like a hog farm, but we ain’t breathing it and that’s them people’s jobs up there. If they want to shut it down, let them do it.”
“Do you remember what Missoula was like when you could drive down the Clark without that smoke plume hanging over the water?” Mr. Riordan said. “Do you ever fish that stretch of river today? What are you going to do when you have something like it right here in the Bitterroot?”
“Nobody’s going to argue that with you, Frank,” the fireman said. “But, damn, those people can’t go anywhere else for work. Anaconda ain’t going to hire them, and that don’t even count the gyppos that are going to be losing their tractors and everything else.”
“All they have to do is put in a purification system,” Mr. Riordan said. “Don’t you realize that they didn’t come here as a favor to us? They’re here for profit, and they destroy the air and make you like them for it.”
It was silent a moment; then one of the firemen set his cup in the saucer, nodded, and walked back to the truck. The other men smoked their cigarettes, deliberately looking out across the fields and up the canyon, where the sun was now breaking against the cliff walls and tops of the pines. Then one by one they casually stripped their cigarettes along the seam and let the tobacco blow away dryly in the breeze, or placed their cups and saucers quietly on the steps, and walked back across the lawn, pulling their gloves from their back pockets and slapping them across their palms, yawning and arching their backs as though they were thinking profoundly of the day’s work ahead of them.
“I’m going to report this to the sheriff’s office as arson,” the fireman who had found the gasoline can said. “That won’t put anybody in jail, but he can scare two or three sons of bitches out of trying to come back here again.”
“They won’t be back.”
“Frank, this is a hell of a thing, and I want you to know what I think.”
“Okay, Bob.”
The fireman got up in the seat of the volunteer truck and drove down the lane toward the cattle guard with the other firemen sitting against the coiled hoses in a lazy euphoria of sunlight and early-morning whiskey.
“You want another drink, Iry?” Mr. Riordan said.
“Sure.”
Then we went inside and had a breakfast of pork chops and eggs. They were a tough family. There was no mention of the fire at the table, though I knew the image of the burned Appaloosa under the collapsed roof was like a piece of metal behind Mr. Riordan’s brow. Buddy ate his breakfast quietly and left the table first. Through the window I saw him pick up the bottle from the porch and walk back toward the cabin.
When I got back to the cabin, he was sitting at the kitchen table with a tin cup of whiskey and water in his hand. The bottle was almost down to the bottom.
“Pour a shot,” he said.
“I hate to get drunk before nine in the morning.”
“You were belting it pretty heavy on the porch.”
“I don’t get fried every day of the week.”
He drank down the cup and picked up a cigarette butt from the ashtray. I threw my pack of Lucky Strikes on the table, but he ignored the gesture and puffed on a match held close to his lips.
“How’d you know the barn was on fire?” he said.
“I couldn’t sleep last night. That fat cop put my cojònes in a skillet when he showed me that spent cartridge.”
“Don’t worry about it. He’s just sweating you.”
“You got it figured out, do you?”
“What do you think? If he had you nailed, he would have busted you right there. He could have gotten that shell anywhere.”
“I wish I could be that damn sure, considering it’s my ass that’s on the line.”
“You talk like a fish. Use your gourd a minute. He wants you to jump your parole.”
There was a touch of irritation and meanness in Buddy’s voice that I didn’t like.
“Maybe I didn’t read him right, then,” I said.
“Besides, even if he picked that shell up, he still don’t have crap. You could have been target shooting up there two weeks ago. So forget it.” Buddy poured the rest of the bottle into the tin cup.
I sat on the edge of my bunk and rubbed Vaseline over the tops of my blistered feet, then put on a pair of white socks with my loafers.
“What did the old man talk about after I left?” Buddy said.
“Nothing, except finishing the fence line down by the slough.”
“That’s all. Nothing about the weather or the goddamn cows or cleaning out the birdcages?”
“He didn’t say anything.”
“You all just sat in silence and chewed on your pork-chop bones.”
“I don’t know what you’re pushing at, Buddy.”
“Not a thing, Zeno. Open a beer. Let’s get high.”
“I told you I’ve had it.”
“You look great.” He went to the icebox and came back with an opened can.
“I have to go to the hospital this morning to get my arm checked,” I said.
“That’s cool, because you can drive me somewhere else afterwards.”
I sipped off the beer and looked at him. His eyes were red, and he rubbed the nicotine-stained ends of his fingers together. I knew Buddy too well to intrude on whatever strange things were beating inside his crazy head, but something bad was loose and it was ugly as well.
“What do you have to do at the hospital?” he asked.
“I want to find out when I can get this cast off so I can start playing again. I feel like worms are crawling inside the plaster.”