“Go ahead. You ain’t going to get trench mouth out of it.” He laughed and took a cigar from his pocket. “You know, you’ve got a shit pot full of good luck. The FBI man couldn’t find a thing on that shell casing. Either you must have wiped all them hulls clean before you put them in the magazine or a deer walked over and took a good, solid piss right on top of it.”
He bit off the tip of the cigar and spit it through the window, then wet the end as though he were rolling a stick around in his mouth.
“Do you think you got pretty good luck?” he said.
“You tell me.”
He struck a match on the horn button and lit the cigar.
“I don’t think your luck is too good at all,” he said. “But that’s another matter. I wanted to drive up here today mainly because it’s my day off and this is where I always come the first day of deer season. You see where that saddle begins right after the first mountain, where the meadow opens up in the trees? I get two whitetail there opening day every year. I got an elk cow there last year, too, right up the nose with this.357 Magnum from forty yards. I was using a shotgun with deer slugs, and I got some snow in the barrel and blew it all apart firing at a doe. Then the elk walked into the meadow with the wind behind her and never smelled a thing. I put it in her snout and tore her ass all over the snow. Those steel jackets will go through an automobile block, and they don’t even slow down when they gut an animal.”
I handed his whiskey back to him and looked out the passenger’s window.
“You’re not a hunter, are you?” he said.
“I gave it up in the army.”
He had started to take a drink, but he lowered the bottle and looked hard at me. I tried to keep my gaze on his face, but it was too much. His anger toward me and what I represented in some vague place in his mind or memory — some abstraction from a childhood difficulty, a sexual argument with his wife, a fear of the mayor or the town councilmen or himself — was too much to contend with in a stare contest, even though he was trying to pull my life into pieces.
“Let me tell you something before we drive back,” he said. “I don’t like you. I probably can’t get you for shooting up the mill right now, but I’m going to make you as unwelcome as I can in Missoula County. I’ll put you in jail for spitting on the street, throwing a cigarette wrapper down, walking in public with beer on your breath. I’ll have you in jail every time I see you or any of my department does. I have the feeling that if I lock you up enough and call your parole officer each time I do it, you’ll get your sack lunch and bus ticket back to Louisiana. Which means you better keep your ass out of my sight.”
“Is that it?”
“You better believe it, son.”
I opened the door and stepped out on the short grass. My head was light, and the wind blowing through the pines along the creek bed was cold against the perspiration in my hair.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he said.
“I’ll hitch a ride back to the Riordans’.”
The sun’s rays struck through his windshield, revealing in his face all his anger, all his doubt about leaving me to find my way home (and the possible recriminations later), and the most serious question — whether he had struck the fear of God into me with a burning poker.
I walked up the rock road toward the blacktop, smoking a cigarette, and he drove along beside me in first gear with his fat arm over the window, the doubt and anger still stamped in his face, and I was glad no one could see this sad comedy of two grown men acting out a ludicrous exercise in a mountain wilderness so that one of them could go home with a piece of scalp lock to keep his pride intact.
The sheriff floored the car in front of me, fishtailing off the grass that was already turning wet with dew, and spun a shower of rocks off the back tires when he hit second. He threw the whiskey bottle out the window into the gravel as he turned onto the blacktop, then roared away toward Missoula with both exhausts throbbing, his arm like a ham on the window.
By the time I had hitched a ride back to the ranch, the sunlight was drawing away over the mountains in a pink haze, and Buddy was sitting on the porch steps in a sheep-lined jacket, tying tapered leader on his fly line.
“Where you been, man?” he said.
“I went for a ride with that fat dick.”
He looked up from his concentration on the leader and waited.
“That shell casing was clean, but he says he’s going to make my life interesting every time he catches me in Missoula,” I said.
“Just stay out of his way. It’ll be cool after a while.”
“What am I supposed to do in the meantime? Live out here like a hermit?”
“You want to go fishing?”
“Yeah.”
We took the car down to the river and fished two deep holes in the twilight with wet flies. As the moon began to rise over the mountains, they started hitting. I saw my line straighten out quickly below the surface of the pool; then there was that hard-locking tension when the brown really hung into it, and the split-bamboo rod arched toward the water and the backup line started to strip off the automatic reel. I held the rod high over my head at an angle and walked with him through the shallows until he started to weaken and I could back him into the cattails at the head of the pool. I couldn’t manage the rod and the net at the same time because of my cast, and Buddy came up under him slowly with his net, the sandy bottom clouding as the dorsal and tail fins broke the water, and then he was heavy and thick and dripping inside the net, his brown-and-gold color and red spots wet with moonlight.
We cooked the fish with lemons, onions, and butter sauce, and it was warm and fine inside the cabin with the heat from the wood stove and the smell of burning pine chunks and the wind blowing through the trees on the creek. But I couldn’t eat or even finish my coffee. Paret, you wrecker of dreams, I thought. How did you do it?
During the week I helped Buddy’s father feed the birds and clean the cages in the aviary. We finished the fence line down to the slough, and much against all my instincts and previous experiences with nutrias in Louisiana, I went with him and Buddy up Lost Horse Creek to release two pairs of males and females. At the time I rationalized that it would be two or three years before the damage was felt on a large scale in the area, and I would be safely gone when a mob of commercial trappers, gyppo loggers, and fishermen tore the Riordan home apart board and nail.
I resolved in a vague way to leave Beth alone, but like an alcoholic who goes through one day dry and has to count all the others on the calendar, I knew it was just a matter of which day I would call her or suggest to Buddy that we drive into Missoula.
As it turned out, it was neither. I drove to town on Thursday morning with Melvin to check in with my parole officer, though my appointment wasn’t until the following week. He dropped me off by the university library, since I told him that I had three hours to waste before I saw my P.O., and then I walked the four blocks to Beth’s house.
She was scraping leaves into huge piles in her front yard with a cane rake. She wore a pair of faded corduroy jeans and a wool shirt buttoned at the throat and rolled over her elbows. Each time she scraped the rake and flattened it across the dry grass, more leaves blew in cold eddies off the piles.
“Do you want to go eat lunch at that German restaurant?” I said.
She turned around, surprised, then stood erect with both of her hands folded on the rake handle. She blew her hair away from the corner of her mouth, her cheeks spotted with color in the coldness of the shade, and smiled in a way that made me go weak inside.
“Let me put on another shirt and get the leaves and twigs out of my hair,” she said.