“You can really pick them, Buddy,” I said.
“Drive on up the hill to that big two-story wood house.”
The house sat up on a high, weed-filled lawn, with a wide sagging front porch and a blue light bulb over the door. The white paint was dirty and peeling, and crushed beer cans were strewn along the path to the steps.
“I’ll wait for you,” I said.
“None of that stuff. You’re not going to pull your Catholic action on your old partner.”
“I’m going to pass. This isn’t my scene.”
“You see that car at the bottom of the hill? That’s the deputy sheriff who watches this place, and if we keep fooling around he’s going to be up here and you can talk to him.”
“I’m telling you, Buddy, you better not get our ass worked over again.”
“Have a beer in the living room. Talk to the bouncer. He’s a real interesting guy. He has an iron bolt through both temples.”
“I’ll listen to the radio till you come out,” I said. I smiled at him and lit a cigarette, but there was nothing pleasant in his face.
He walked up the path and knocked on the torn screen door. A girl in blue jeans and a halter opened it, her face expressionless, the eyes indifferent except for a momentary glance, almost like curiosity, in my direction; then she latched the screen again without any show of recognition that a human being had walked past her.
Fifteen minutes later I heard people yelling inside, and then I heard Buddy’s voice: “You go for that sap and you’re going to be pulling a shank out of your throat with your fingernails.”
I walked quickly up the path, focused my eyes through the screen, and saw him facing an enormous, bull-necked man in the middle of the living room. The braided leather tip of a blackjack stuck out of the big man’s back pocket. Buddy’s face was white from drinking, his shirt was ripped and pulled down on one shoulder, and a full whiskey bottle hung from his right hand.
“Turn around and walk out the door and you’re out of Indian country,” the bouncer said.
I put my hand through the torn screen, unlatched the door, and stepped inside. All the windows were drawn with yellow roll shades that must have been left over from the 1940s. An old jukebox with a cracked plastic casing stood against one wall, the colored lights inside rippling up and down against the gloom. A hallway separated by a curtain led back from the living room, and there was a garbage can in one corner that was filled with beer cans and whiskey bottles. In the half-light, mill workers and drunks left over from last night’s bars sat with the whores on stuffed couches and chairs that seemed to exude a mixture of dust, age, and stale beer. Their faces were pinched with a mean dislike for Buddy, for me, and even for each other. I wondered at my own passivity in allowing Buddy to lead us into this dirty little corner of the universe.
The bouncer’s face was as round as a skillet. He smiled with a look of pleasant anticipation.
“Well, I guess it’s guys like you that keep me honest and make me earn my pay,” he said. “But I’m afraid it’s a bad day at Black Rock for you boys.”
“Wait a minute, mister. We’re leaving,” I said.
“So leave. But if you bring your pet asshole back here again, we’ll have to whip some big bumps on him. Give him some real mean hurt. Take his mind off his tallywhacker so he don’t have to come here no more.”
“You notice how these guys have a quick turn for everything?” Buddy said. “They memorize all kinds of hep phrases for every life situation. But they put rock ’n’ roll on their jukeboxes and pay their money to the cops and hand out blow jobs to the Kiwanis Club. Look at Mad Man Muntz here. He got his brains at the junkyard, he probably makes a buck an hour, but he comes on like the poet laureate of the brooder house.”
I walked over to Buddy and took him by the arm.
“Our bus is leaving,” I said.
“So long, you lovely people, and remember the reason you’re here,” he said. “You’re losers, you got one gear and it’s in neutral, and you hire this big clown to keep you safe from all your failures.”
I pulled hard on his arm and pushed him toward the door. The bouncer lifted his finger at him.
“You ought to go to church, boy. You got somebody looking over you,” he said.
The screen slammed behind us, and we walked down the path in the sunlight. The sharpness of the afternoon seemed disjointed and strange after the gloom and anger and bilious view of humanity in the whorehouse.
“I bought a bottle at the bar and was drinking a shot out of it when I saw the guy next to me buying drinks for him and his girl out of my change,” Buddy said as we drove down the hill toward the highway out of town. “I couldn’t believe it. Then he called me a pimp and put his cigarette ashes in my glass. The next thing I knew, his girl was trying to tear my shirt off my back. Man, I thought I saw people do some wild action in the joint, but that’s the bottom of the bucket, ain’t it?”
I drove without answering and wondered what had really taken place. We passed the town limits, and I stepped on the accelerator as we began the climb up the slope toward the blue tumble of mountains on the Montana line. In the rearview mirror the ugly sprawl of that devastated mining area and stunted town disappeared behind us.
“Yeah, that was a real geek show,” he said.
“Well, how the hell did you get there?” I said righteously, but I was angry at his irresponsibility and the physical danger he had put both of us in again. “They didn’t send out invitations to Florence, Montana. That’s their action every day back there, and you go on their rules when you walk through the door.”
I could feel his eyes on the side of my face; then I heard him take a drink out of the whiskey bottle. He didn’t speak for another five minutes, and the whistle of air through the window and my cigarette ashes flaking on my trousers began to feel more and more uncomfortable in the silence. I just couldn’t stay mad at Buddy for very long.
“How much did they hook you for the bottle?” I said.
“Twelve bucks. You want a shot?”
I drank out of the neck and handed it back to him. The warm bourbon made me wince and my arms tingle.
“Look, Zeno, what’s this lecture crap about?” he said.
“Jesus Christ, I just don’t want to get busted up again.”
“You could have canceled out early. You didn’t have to drive us up there.”
I didn’t have an answer for that one.
“You knew what type of scene we were floating into,” he said. “You better run the film backwards in your own gourd. You were clicking around about maybe improving your love life yourself.”
We dropped over the Montana line, and I really opened up the Plymouth. The front end was badly out of alignment, at least two bearings were tapping like tack hammers, and the oil smoke was blowing out the frayed exhaust in a long black spiral. The car frame shook and rattled, the doors vibrated on the jambs, and when I had to shift into second to pull a grade, the heat needle moved into the red area on the gauge and the radiator began to sing. Buddy pulled on the bottle and lit a cigarette. But before he did, he split a paper match with his thumbnail, as fast as anyone could pull one from a cover, and flipped the other half on the dashboard in front of me.
“That’s pretty good, ain’t it, Zeno?” he said. “I once beat a guy out of a whole deck of cigarettes by splitting thirty in fifty seconds.”