“Well, damn, Zeno, get it in gear,” he said.
We walked out on the front porch, and the yellow and red leaves were blowing across the grass in the sunlight, and the mountains behind the university were sharp and clear against the blue Montana sky. The crack of the fall air was like a cool burn against my face. I wanted to say something, anything, alone to Beth before we left, but I couldn’t, and so I just smiled as I would at a casual friend and said good-bye.
We drove back into the long, blue-green stretch of the Bitterroots and stopped at Lolo for a drink because Buddy’s nervous system was starting to become unwired again. In the bar I drank a cup of coffee while he began on his second vodka collins. I had a hard time looking at him directly in the eyes.
“You’re a quiet bastard this morning, ain’t you?” he said.
“I got burnt out yesterday. No more Idaho excursions.”
“Right. Bad scene. I ain’t going to let you lead me over there anymore. I feel like somebody stuck thumbtacks all over my head. Game on, let’s get out of here and put down those fence posts so I can stop thinking about my problems with ex-wives and kids.”
At the ranch we went back to work on the fence line, though I could do little more than unload the posts off the wagon with one arm and hold them steady in the hole while Buddy shoveled in the dirt. Then he would have to go to work on the next one with the post-hole digger, the sweat and booze running off his face and neck into his flannel shirt. We spoke little. He was too hungover, and I was too preoccupied with the latest thing I had gotten myself into. I didn’t know what to do about either Beth or Buddy, and any of the answers I could think of were bad ones. Maybe I should just drop it on him, I thought, because I was going to see her again, and eventually he would find out about it if he didn’t already have his finger on the edge of it. I slept with your wife last night. What do you think about that? Oh, you don’t mind? That’s cool, because I thought the shit might hit the fan.
He started to clean the post-hole digger in the bucket of water, his face pale with fatigue, then dropped the wood handles and let the whole thing fall to the ground. He wiped his face slick with his sleeve.
“Shit on this. We can do it this evening,” he said. “Man, I’m going to quit that damn drinking once and for all.”
He walked away alone toward the cabin, his shoulders bent slightly and his back shaking with a cigarette cough.
Buddy slept through the rest of the morning, and I sat on the porch in the cool wind and tried to read from an old paperback copy of The Old Man and the Sea. I had read it once in college and again in Angola, and it was my favorite of Ernest Hemingway’s books. But I couldn’t concentrate on the words; my attention would slip off the page, across the meadow of grazing Angus to the pile of ash and blackened boards where the barn had been.
So where do you go now, I thought. You can move out and try to explain to him why you have to, or you can let things keep falling one onto another without any plan at all until something even worse happens. Under other circumstances I would have just checked it on down the road, maybe up to Vancouver or out to San Fran, but the parole office had a nail through my foot, and the only type of transfer I could get would be back to Louisiana, and that was like going back to first base after you had knocked the ball out of the park.
But if I thought I had great problems to resolve there in the solitude of the porch and a windy sun-filled afternoon, I realized with a glance at the sheriff’s car turning in the front cattle guard that the complexities of my day were just beginning. Pat Floyd pulled the car off the dirt road onto the grass and put the gearshift in neutral with the engine still running, which meant we were going somewhere together.
I closed the paperback and set it beside me and looked at him without speaking. At first I’d had no feelings about him; he was just another dick, a member of that vast army who play out their roles and games with their sets of keys and paper forms and intricate rules of human behavior. But I was learning to dislike this fat man. I had the feeling that he was taking a special interest in me, one that went beyond the prosecution of a drunken ex-convict who shot up the local toilet-paper factory. I was an outsider, a rounder with a corn-pone mystique, a glib troublemaker who had been kicked off his own turf and was using the locals for a doormat.
“Let’s take a ride,” he said.
“You got a paper on me, Sheriff?”
“This ain’t an arrest. And I wouldn’t need a warrant to make one, either, son.”
“Hey, Buddy,” I called back through the screen door.
“You don’t need him. Just get in, and we’re going to talk a minute.”
“I just want to tell him we’ll be back soon. We’re going fishing shortly.”
I opened the screen and spoke into the dim shadows of the cabin. Buddy was on my bunk with the pillow and quilt over his head, his body deep in the mattress with sleep.
“I’ll be out with Sheriff Floyd a few minutes. OK?”
I got in the passenger side of the car and lit a cigarette, and we started up the road toward the cattle guard.
“You’re a pretty sharp boy,” he said.
“How’s that, Sheriff?”
“You thought I might take you out, beat the shit out of you with a billy, and leave you in a ditch, didn’t you?”
“It didn’t cross my mind.”
“We don’t do it that way up here. In fact, we don’t hardly have any crime here to speak of. On Saturday night a few boys might try to break up each other in a bar, and I have to lock them up till Sunday morning, but that’s all we get. People around here obey the law most of the time.”
We turned out on the highway, and he reached over with his huge weight and popped open the glove compartment. Inside was a half-pint of whiskey in a paper bag twisted around the neck. He unscrewed the cap with his thumb and took a drink, then set the bottle between his swollen khaki thighs.
“Actually, being a sheriff around here is easy,” he said. “A lot of times people take care of the law by themselves. A few years ago one of those California motorcycle gangs rode into Virginia City on a Saturday afternoon and said they were taking over the town. By that night every sheepherder and cowboy in the county was in town. They broke arms and heads and legs, beat them till they got down on their knees, and left just enough of that crowd intact to drive the others out of town. That’s the way it gets done out here sometimes.”
“What’s all this about?”
“Not too much. I just want to tell you a couple of things.” We passed the Sweeny Creek grocery store, a small wooden building set back from the blacktop in the trees, and turned onto a rock road that led back toward the mountains. I puffed on my cigarette and looked at him from the side of my eye. He wasn’t carrying a billy on his hip, and I hadn’t seen one in the glove compartment, but maybe it was under the seat or lying within a second’s reach against the doorjamb.
I had never been beaten in prison, or even mistreated for that matter, but I could never forget the time I saw what a Negro could look like after he had been sweated with a garden hose three nights in isolation. He was serving peas in the chow line for the free people, and when one of the hacks told him, “You better start ladling out them peas a little faster, boy,” he replied, “You ladle them out yourself, boss.” Three hacks cuffed him in the serving line and took him down to the hole. When he came out his eyes were swollen shut, and the striped bruises on his stomach and back looked like a black deformity.
The sheriff parked the car close into the shade of the pines along the creek and cut the engine. He took another drink out of the whiskey and offered the bottle to me.