We went in her car to the Heidelhaus, which inside was like a fine German place in the Black Forest, with big wooden beams on the ceiling, checker-cloth tables, candles melted in wine bottles, and a large stone fireplace over which was skewered a roasting pig. We drank Tuborg on tap and ate sausage-and-melted-cheese sandwiches, and then the waitress, in a Tyrolean dress, served us slices of the roasted pork in hot mustard. It was so pleasant inside, with the warmth of the fireplace, the buttered-rum drinks after dinner, the college kids in varsity sweaters at the bar, and the candlelight on her happy face, that the threats of the sheriff and my other problems lapsed away in a kind of autumnal euphoria. Her eyes were bright with the alcohol, and when her knee brushed mine under the table, we both felt the same recognition and expectation about the rest of the afternoon.
We went back to her house and made love in her bed upstairs for almost two hours. I heard the screen slam downstairs and jerked upward involuntarily, but she simply smiled and put her finger to my lips and opened the bedroom door slightly to tell the boys to play outside. She walked back to the bed, her body soft and white and her huge breasts almost like a memory from my prison fantasies. Then she sat on me and bit my lip softly, her hair covering my face, and I felt it rise again deep inside of her until my loins were burning, and the weak light outside seemed to gather and fade from my vision in her rhythmic breathing against my cheek.
That Saturday I had my cast cut off at the hospital. The electric saw hummed along the cast and shaled off the plaster, and then the whole thing cracked free like a foul and corroded shell and exposed my puckered, hairless white arm. The skin felt dead and rubbery when I touched it, as though it wasn’t a part of me, and when I closed my fist, the muscle in the forearm swelled like an obscene piece of whale fat. But it felt good to have two arms again. While I put on my shirt and buttoned it easily with two hands, I recalled something I had thought about when I was in the hospital in Japan after I had been hit: that everybody who thinks war is an interesting national excursion should give up the use of an arm, an eye, or a leg for one day.
I practiced chord configurations on the guitar for three days to bring back the coordination in my left hand. I had lost the calluses on my fingertips, and the strings burned the skin on the first day and raised tiny water blisters close to the nails, and the back of my hand wouldn’t work properly when I ran an E chord up the neck in “Steel Guitar Rag.” But by Tuesday I could feel the resilience and confidence back in my fingers, the easy slides and runs over the frets, and the natural movements I made without thinking.
It was twilight, and I was alone in the cabin, slightly drunk on a half-pint of Jim Beam and my own music and its memory of the rural South. The glow from the wood stove was warm against my back, and I could feel the chords in the guitar go through the sound box into my chest. A freight-train whistle blew coldly between the mountains, and though I couldn’t see that train, I knew that it was covered with the last red light of the dying sun and in the cab there was an engineer named Daddy Claxton, highballing for Dixie like the Georgia Mail.
I put my thumb picks on and played every railroad song I knew, double picking like A. P. Carter and Mother Maybelle, moving on with Hank Snow, running from Lynchburg to Danville on the Ole 97, the tortoiseshell picks flashing over the silver strings, the rumble and scream of mile-long legendary trains as real in that moment as when they ran with overheated fireboxes and sweating Negro coal shovelers and engineers who would give their lives just to make up lost time.
Buddy never understood why I made my living as a country musician when I probably could have worked steady with hotel dance bands in New Orleans or tried the jazz scene on the West Coast, where I might have made it at least as a rhythm guitarist. But what he didn’t understand, and what most northerners don’t, is that rural southern music is an attitude, a withdrawal into myths and an early agrarian dream about the promise of the new republic. And regardless of its vague quality, its false sense of romance, its restructuring of the reality of our history, it is nevertheless as true to a young boy in southern Louisiana listening to the Grand Ole Opry or the Louisiana Hayride on Saturday night as his grandfather’s story, which the grandfather had heard from his father, about the Federals burning the courthouse in New Iberia and pulling the bonnets off white women and carrying them on their bayonets. It was true because the boy had been told it was, and he would have no more questioned the veracity of the story than he would have the fact of his birth.
I was deep into my southern reverie and the last inch of Jim Beam when Buddy walked through the door, his eyes watery with the wind.
“I heard you across the field. It sounds very good, young Zeno,” he said. “For a minute, I thought I heard that colored blues player on Camp A. What was his name?”
“Guitar-git-it-and-go Welch.”
“Man, he was shit on that twelve-string, wasn’t he? What the hell were you doing with Beth at the Heidelhaus?”
I poured the rest of the Beam in my tin cup and picked up my cigarette from the edge of the table. The stove was hot against my back, and I felt a drop of perspiration slip down from my hairline.
“You want a drink?” I said.
“No, man. I want to know what you were doing with my old lady.”
“Having lunch. What the hell do you normally do in a restaurant?”
“What other kind of lunch did you have?”
“All right on that shit, Buddy.”
“You just happened to bop on down to the university library with Mel and take Beth out and not mention it for a week.”
“I saw my P.O. and had four hours to kill before I met Melvin. I didn’t want to hang around town and get picked up by the sheriff again, and I didn’t feel like sitting in the library anymore with a bunch of college students. So I asked her to go out for lunch.”
I had done a number of things over the years that were wrong, but lying was not one of them, even in prison, and I don’t know if this was because of my father’s deep feeling for truth and the habit it established in me or if I had found that the truth is the best pragmatic solution for any complex situation. But I had lied to Buddy and the words burned in my cheeks. I lifted the cup and took a sip out of it, then puffed off the cigarette.
“So why don’t you tell somebody about it?” he said. “I ain’t going to cut out your balls in the middle of the night.”
“I thought it wasn’t a big deal.”
“Well, it ain’t, Zeno. It ain’t. Just drop some words on your old partner so I don’t feel like a dumb asshole when Mel sends this kind of news across the mashed potatoes. I mean, that cat is all right, but my mother is serving the steak around, and he says, ‘Was Beth’s car still working all right when she took Iry down to the Heidelhaus?’ ”
He took my cigarette out of my fingers and drew in on the stub.
“What was I supposed to say, Zeno?” he said. “My sister had gloat in her eyes, and the old man took out his pocket watch like he’d never seen it before. Say, no shit, man, you ain’t balling her, are you?”
“No.”
“You want to get high? I got some real good Mexican stuff today.”
“I’d better go to bed early. I want to go up to Bonner tomorrow and see if I can get back on with the band.”
I took the guitar strap off my neck and laid the sound box facedown across my thighs. I pulled the picks off my fingers and dropped them in my shirt pocket.
“Come on and get loaded,” he said.
“I better look good tomorrow.”
“That’s on the square? You haven’t been milking through your partner’s fence?”
“I already told you, Buddy.”