I wrapped the Gibson in a blanket and went to sleep on my bunk, leaving him to a large kitchen matchbox of green Mexican weed and all the paranoid nightmares he could get out of it.
Friday night I was playing lead guitar again on the platform at the Milltown Union Bar, Cafe and Laundromat. The barstools and the tables were filled with mill workers and loggers and their masculine women, and at nine o’clock I attached the microphone pickup to my sound hole and opened up with Hank’s “Lost Highway,” a lament about a deck of cards, a jug of wine, and a woman’s lies. Their faces were quiet in the red-and-purple neon glow off the bar, and by the time I slipped into “The Wild Side of Life,” they were mine. Then I did a song about gyppo loggers written by our drummer (“the jimmy roaring, the big wheels rolling, the dirt and bark a-flying”), and I could see the words burn with private meaning, with affirmation of their impoverished lives, into all those work-creased faces.
It was good to be working again, to hear the applause, to sit at the bar between sets in a primitive aura and receive the free drinks and the callused handshakes. We played until two in the morning, turning our speakers higher and higher against the noise on the dance floor, the rattle of bottles, and the occasional violent scrape of chairs when a fight broke out. My voice was hoarse, my left arm throbbed, and my fingertips felt like they had been touched with acid, but that was all right. I was playing with that sense of control and quietness inside that came to me only when I was at my best. After everyone had left, I had a bowl of chili and a cup of coffee at the bar with the drummer, both of us light-headed with alcohol, exhaustion, and the electric echoes of the last five hours. Then I walked out into a sleeting rain and drove the Plymouth back toward Missoula and Beth’s house.
Ten
During the night the sleet and wind whipped the trees against the second-story bedroom window, and when the dawn began to grow into the sky, the grass was thick with small hailstones, and the sidewalks looked like they had been powdered with rock candy. I drove back to the ranch as the sun broke coldly over the edge of the Bitterroots, and I saw the snow in the pines high up in the mountains and the drift of white, shimmering light when the wind blew through the trunks. I should have left Beth’s house earlier, but in the warmth of her bed and with her woman’s heat against me and the wet rake of the maple on the window, I drifted back into sleep until the room was suddenly gray with the false dawn. Now, I worried about Buddy and the lie I would have to tell him if he was awake.
But he was asleep, facedown in the bed with his clothes and shoes on, his arms spread out beside him, a dead joint stuck like a flag in a beer can on the floor. It was cold inside the cabin, and I fired the wood stove, fanned the draft until the kindling caught and snapped into the hunks of split pine, and started to undress on the edge of my bunk. Through the side window I could see the snow clouds above the mountaintops turning violet over the dark sheen of the trees. My body was thick with fatigue, and I could still hear the noise of the bar and the electronic amplifiers as though the few hours’ interlude with Beth hadn’t been there. Then, as I lay back on the pillow with my arm over my eyes and started to sink into the growing warmth of the wood stove and the lessening of my heartbeat, I heard Mr. Riordan’s boots on the porch and his quiet knock on the screen.
He said he needed one of us to go up Lost Horse Creek with him to turn loose some more nutrias, so I got in the pickup, and we headed down the highway with the wire cages bouncing in the bed. I looked around through the window at the red eyes of the nutrias and their yellow buck teeth and porcupine hair and had to laugh.
“You must find them a great source of humor,” he said. His red-check wool shirt was buttoned at the collar and wrists under his sheep-lined jacket.
“I’m sorry,” I said, still laughing. “But I can’t get over these things being introduced deliberately into an area. One time my father and I had to spend a week cleaning out the irrigation ditches in our rice field after these guys had gone to work.”
“They’re that bad, are they?” he said, his face on the road.
“No, sir, they’re worse.” I laughed again. It was too ridiculous.
“If these prove that they can acclimate to the environment and be of commercial value, the beaver in the Northwest might be with us a few more years.”
He was a serious man not given to levity about his work, and I now felt awkward and a bit stupid in not having seen as much. He drove with his forearms against the steering wheel and tried to roll a cigarette between his fingers while the tobacco spilled out both ends of the paper.
“You want a tailor-made?” I said.
“Thank you.” He crumpled the paper and tobacco grains in his palm and dropped them out the wind vane. I had a notion that he could have rolled that cigarette into a tube as slick as spit if he had wanted, but he was a gentleman and had just erased that moment of righteousness that had led to my discomfort.
We turned on the rock road that wound along Lost Horse Creek and started up the long grade through the timber in second gear. As we veered on the corner of the switchbacks and the creek dropped farther below us like a cold blue flash through the tree trunks, I felt the air begin to thin, and the smell of the pines grew heavy in my head. On up the road I could see the first mountain start to crest, and then others rose higher and bluer behind it until they disappeared in the wet mist and the torn edges of snow clouds. We turned up another switchback, and again I looked down below at the creek. It was small and flecked with white water, and the remaining leaves on the cottonwoods looked like pieces of stamped Byzantine bronze. Rocks spilled off the edge of the road and dropped a hundred feet before they struck a treetop.
“We’ll pick up the creek again farther on. The height doesn’t bother you, does it?”
Hell no, I always light one cigarette off another like this, I thought.
“I just wonder what you might do if you blow out a tire on one of these turns,” I said.
“We probably just wouldn’t have to worry about putting the nutrias in a beaver pond today.”
The grade evened off, and the road began to straighten with thick pines on each side of it, and then I saw the creek again, this time no more than fifty yards away through the front window, a white roar of water breaking in a shower between smooth gray rocks that were as big as small houses. Mr. Riordan pulled the pickup off the road at an angle into the pines and rolled a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, licked it, seamed it down, twisted both ends, clicked a match on his thumbnail, and had it smoking in less than a minute, and there weren’t three grains of tobacco on his flat palm. He opened the door and laid his sheep-lined jacket on the seat. His bib overalls and buttoned-down, red-check shirt made me think of a southern farmer. We could hear a logging truck up the road as it shifted into low gear for the slow descent down the grade.
“Are you courting Buddy’s wife?” he said, the cigarette wet in the corner of his mouth.
I got out the passenger’s door and walked around to the tailgate and pulled loose the chain hook. The nutrias had been frightened by the ride over the rock road and the rattle of the chain, and they started to chew against the wire cages with their yellow teeth.
He leaned with one stiff arm against the truck bed and held the cigarette between his thick fingers as he looked away at the fallen trees across the creek.
“Are you courting his wife?” he said. “Which means, are you sleeping with her?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Have you thought about what he’ll do if he decides to stop looking in the other direction?”
“I haven’t gotten that far yet.”