“Help me put him upstairs. I don’t want the children to see him,” she said.
Buddy was leaned back against the couch in the lamplight, his knees wide apart; his head rolled about on his shoulders like a balloon that wanted to break its string. He was talking at the far wall as though there were someone standing in front of him.
I tried to lift him by one arm, and he slapped at me with his hand, his hair over his eyes and ears.
“What the shit you doing, man?” he said. “You trying to get me kicked out of two places in one day?”
“We got to go to bed. Your old man wants us to finish the fence line by the slough tomorrow,” I said, though I should have known better than to patronize a drunk, particularly Buddy.
“Well, cool. Louisiana Zeno is looking out for the old man’s Angus after he went through the flames.” He tried to raise his head and focus on my face, but the effort was too much.
“What did he take today?” Beth said.
“Just a lot of booze.”
“No, he’s been using dope again, hasn’t he?”
I heard the boys’ voices shouting in the backyard. Beth shook him again by the shoulder.
“Get up,” she said. “Straighten up your head and stand.”
Buddy fell sideways against the arm of the couch, with one wrist bent back against his thigh. His face was as bloodless and empty as a child’s. The back screen slammed, and Beth walked hurriedly into the kitchen and told the children to stay outside. She returned with a wet towel in her hand and pressed it into Buddy’s face.
“Goddamn,” he said, his head rolling back.
“Walk to the stairs,” she said. “Lean forward and hold on to my arm. Damn you, Buddy, they’re not going to see you like this.”
“Come on, partner, let’s get up,” I said, and wondered at my pretense toward friendship.
We stood him up between us, like a collapsing gargoyle, and walked him toward the staircase. His head hit the banister once, his knees knocked like wood into the steps, and I had to grab his belt and pull with all my weight to keep him from rolling backward down to the first floor.
As I got him over the last step onto the safety of the carpet, my lungs breathless and my good arm weak with strain, I had a quick lesson about the way we as sane and sober people treat the drunk and hopelessly deranged. Considering the amount of acid and booze in his system, and the pathetic behavior in front of his wife on the couch, I had believed that his brain, at that moment, was as soft as yesterday’s ice cream, and as a result I had helped drag him upstairs with the care and dignity that you would show a bag of dirty laundry. But when I stood up for a breath before the last haul into the bedroom, he fixed one dilated, bloodshot eye on me from the floor, the other closed in the angry squint of a prizefighter who has just received a murderous leathery shot, and said:
“You really go for the balls when you win, Zeno.”
I put him facedown on the bed with his head slightly over the edge so the blood would stay in his brain and he wouldn’t become sick. Downstairs, a moment later, I heard him hit the floor.
“There’s nothing you can do for him,” Beth said.
“I’ll get him back on the bed.”
“If he wakes up, he’ll wake up fighting. I know Buddy when he’s like this. He chooses the people closest to him to help him destroy himself. Take a beer out of the icebox while I get the boys ready for bed.”
“I’d better go.”
“Stay. I want to talk with you.”
The boys came in from the backyard, their faces flushed with cold and play, and drank glasses of powdered milk at the kitchen table. Then they went up the stairs with their eyes fixed curiously on me.
“I bet you still don’t believe I used to pitch against Marty Marion,” I said.
“My daddy says you’re a guitar player that was in jail with him,” the younger boy said over the banister.
Learn one day not to try to con kids, Paret, I thought.
“Upstairs, and I don’t want to hear any feet walking around,” Beth said.
The boys trudged up to their room as though they were being sent to a firing squad.
“What’s this about Frank’s barn?” Beth said.
“Somebody set fire to it this morning and burned it to the ground.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“We couldn’t get one of the Appaloosas out.”
“Does Frank know who it was?”
“He might, but I don’t think he would tell anyone if he does. He seems to play a pretty solitary game.”
“Yes, and it’s the type that eventually damages everybody around him.”
“That hasn’t been my impression about him.”
“He draws an imaginary line that nobody else knows about, and when someone steps over it, you’d better watch out for Frank Riordan.”
“How long did you and Buddy live with him?”
I didn’t know that they had, but at this point I simply guessed it as an obvious fact.
“Long enough for Buddy to have to make choices between his own family and his father,” she said.
I avoided the flash in her eyes and looked blankly around at the worn furniture and wondered how I got into this subject. I could think of nothing to say.
“Why did he use dope today?” she asked.
“I guess the fire set off some strange things in his head. I don’t know. Sometimes people see the same thing differently.”
“What do you mean?”
“He got wiped out after I followed his old man into the barn and he stayed outside. So I guess he thinks he froze and so he’s a coward. After anything like that, you go back over it in your head and try to understand what you did or didn’t do, but he doesn’t have the experience to see it for what it was.”
She didn’t understand what I was saying, and I wished I hadn’t started to explain.
“Buddy’s not a coward,” I said. “I’ve seen him go up against yard bullies at Angola that would have cut him to pieces in the shower if they had sensed any fear in him. He laid it on pretty heavy in the car this afternoon about the Bronze Star I got in Korea, but what he doesn’t understand is that you go in one direction or the other, or just stand still, for the same reason — you’re too scared to do anything else. It doesn’t have anything to do with what you are.
“Look, I shouldn’t have brought him here. It’s not his fault. He just fried his head today. And I think I better cut.”
“No, I have more beer and some sandwiches in the icebox. Just a minute.”
She walked toward the kitchen with a cigarette in her hand, her thighs and smooth rear end tight against her jeans, and her uncombed hair tangled with light. She came back with a tray and sat on the couch next to me with one bare foot pulled under her leg.
“How did you stay sober while you were carrying around the madman of Ravalli County?” she said, and laughed, and all the anger with Buddy and Frank Riordan was gone.
“I got some good news about my arm this morning. They’re going to saw the cast off next week. I’ll probably have to play finger exercises like a kid for a few days, but I ought to have my act back in gear at the beer joint if that fat sheriff doesn’t nail me and get me violated in the meantime.”
“Have you run into Pat Floyd again?”
“He eased himself out to the ranch yesterday afternoon to show me a spent shell he said he picked up across the river from the pulp mill. I might have my signature burned right into it.”
Her eyes passed over mine with a gathering concern, then lowered to the ashtray, where she picked up her cigarette.