“Why don’t you forget all that prison shit?”
“Why don’t you forget about destroying my car because you’re pissed off?”
I let the Plymouth slow, and I heard Buddy drag off the bottle again. The sun had moved behind the edge of the mountains, and the yellow leaves on the cottonwoods along the river looked like hammered brass over the flow of the current. The blue shadows fell out in front of us on the highway, and the short pines at the base of the hills were already turning dark against the white slide of rocks behind them. The air became cool in minutes, the wind off the river in the canyon seemed sharper, and the banks of clouds on the mountains ahead took on the pink glow of a new rose above the trees.
Buddy pulled steadily on the bottle until he sank back against the door and the seat with an opened can of hot beer between his thighs.
It was almost dark when I saw the lights of Missoula in the distance. The last purple twilight hung on the high, brown hills above the valley, and a solitary airplane with its landing lights on moved coldly above the city toward the airport. The city seemed so quiet and well ordered in its soft glow and neat pattern of streets and homes and lines of elm and maple trees that I wondered how any community of people could organize anything that secure against the coming of the night and the morrow. For just a moment I let it get away inside of me, and I wondered, with a little sense of envy and loss, about all the straight people in those homes: the men with families and ordinary jobs and ordinary lives, the men who pulled the green chain at the mill and carried lunch pails and never sweated parole officers, cops, jail tanks, the dirty knowledge of the criminal world that sometimes you would like to cut out with a knife, all the ten years’ roaring memory of bleeding hangovers, whorehouses, and beer-glass brawls.
But this type of reflection was one that I couldn’t afford. Otherwise I would have to put an X through a decade and admit that my brother Ace was right, and the parole office, the psychologist in the joint, the army, everybody who had told me that I had a little screw in the back of my head turned a few degrees off center.
Buddy came out of his whiskey-acid stupor just before we reached the edge of town. His glazed eyes stared at the lights for a moment, then focused on me and brightened in a way that I didn’t like. He popped the hot beer open, and the foam showered against the windshield.
“Man, I feel like a dragon,” he said. “I think I’ll go see the wife-o.”
“I think you better not,” I said.
“Just save your counseling and tool on down by the university, Zeno.”
“You’re not serious?”
He drank out of the whiskey bottle, chased it with the beer, and then hit it again.
“That’s a little better,” he said. “I could just feel the first snakes getting out of the basket.”
I drove without speaking until I got to the turnoff that would take us back into the Bitterroots.
“Where the hell are you going? I said I wanted to go to Beth’s.”
“Let it slide, Buddy.”
“She’s my old lady, man.”
“That’s the last thing you want to do now.”
“Let Professor Riordan worry about that. Just get it on over there.”
“Where’s your head? How do you think she’s going to feel when you waltz up to the door like a liquor truck?”
“You should have gone into the priesthood, Iry. You can really deliver the advice about somebody else’s life.”
“All right, you’ve been telling me you want to go back with her. Pull a scene like this and you’ll disconnect from her permanently.”
“I guess all this crap comes out of the new Bronze Star you won this morning.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
“You charged the hill again, didn’t you? Shot the heads off all them sixteen-year-old gooks in the trench. Went through the barn door after my old man when I couldn’t move.”
“Don’t drink any more.”
“You told me about it, right? You went up the hill when everybody else froze and dumped a BAR in their faces, and when you turned them over, you said they looked like children.”
“Put your bag of needles back in your pocket, Buddy. I’m not up to it.”
“No, man. It was the same scene. You saw I was froze, and you followed the old man into the fire. You didn’t do it because of him. You knew I was nailed, and your heart started beating. Because you’re scared shitless of fire, baby, but you had a chance to make me look like a piece of shit.”
I could feel the anger tighten across my chest and swell into my throat and head until I wanted to hit Buddy as hard as I could with my fist. I took a cigarette off the dashboard and lit it and drew in deeply on the smoke.
“You want to go to Beth’s?” I said.
“I told you that, Zeno.”
OK, son of a bitch, I thought, and drove toward the university district through the dark, tree-lined streets and past the quiet lawns of all those ordinary people I had wondered about with a sense of envy just a few minutes before.
Later, reflecting on the events that were to follow, I would sometimes feel that a human being’s life is not shaped so much by what he is or what he pretends to be or even by the compulsions that he tries to root out and burn away; instead it can be just a matter of a wrong turn in an angry moment and a disregard for its consequences. But I didn’t know then that I would betray a friend and once more become involved in someone’s death.
Nine
I parked in the dark shadow of the maple tree in front of Beth’s house.
“You want me to wait or catch air?” I said.
“Come on in. She’s got some beer in the icebox.”
“This is your caper, daddy-o. I’m going to rain-check this one.”
He walked across the lawn and the dead leaves onto the wood porch. Under the door light, his body looked small and white. He had to lean against the wall for balance when he knocked again.
I guess I wanted to see Buddy ruin himself with Beth, but as I looked at him there, dissipated, his head crawling with snakes, the unfulfilled rut still in his loins, I wished I could get him back in the car and home again.
Beth opened the door, and I heard Buddy’s voice in its strained and careful attempt to sound sober. But the words came too fast, as though they had been rehearsed and pulled out like a piece of tape.
“Somebody burned out the old man’s barn this morning, and we were cruising around and decided to drop by.”
She didn’t open the screen, and there was a quiet moment while she said something to him, and then his arms went up in the air and he started to rock on both feet in the shadowy light.
“They’re my boys, too, ain’t they?” he said, and his voice became louder after a few seconds of silence. “I mean what the hell they have to go to bed so early for, anyway?” Then another pause while Beth spoke.
“You keep listening to that goddamn psychologist and they’re going to grow up in Warm Springs.” Another pause.
“I’ll roll out the whole fucking neighborhood if I want to. We’ll give all these straight cats something to talk about over their breakfast cereal for a week.”
I saw Beth open the screen, then latch it and turn off the porch light. I waited fifteen minutes in the darkness of the maple tree and listened to a hillbilly radio station in Spokane, then decided to go to the Oxford for a chicken-fried steak and a cup of coffee and leave Buddy to his self-flagellation.
But then the light came on again, and Beth stepped out on the porch in a pair of blue jeans and a denim shirt bleached almost white with Clorox. Her blue-black hair hung in a tangle on her shoulders, and her bare feet looked as cold as ivory in the light. She motioned at me, a gentle gesture of the fingers as though she were saying good-bye to someone, and I walked across the dry, stiff grass and dead leaves toward her with a quickening in my heart and emptiness in my legs that confirmed altogether too quickly what had been in my mind all day while I had let Buddy tear his chemistry apart with whiskey and guilt.