“Are you sure you want to eat here?” I said.
“Why shouldn’t we?”
I saw the same type of deliberate nonrecognition in his face that I used to see in my father’s when he refused to accept the most obvious human situation.
“It was just an observation,” I said.
He drank the whiskey neat, his lead-gray eyes blinking only once when he swallowed. He sipped off the top of the beer and set the mug evenly on the tablecloth.
“You don’t care for Jim Beam?” he said.
“I have to work tonight. Musicians can get away with almost anything except showing up high.”
His eyes went past me, into the faces of the people at the other tables; then he looked back at me again.
“You have to use that kind of caution in your work, do you?” he said.
I drank out of the beer.
“I have a habit of falling into the whole jug when I get started on bourbon,” I said. I smiled with my excuse, but he wasn’t really talking to me anymore.
He took his package of string-cut tobacco out of his pocket and creased a cigarette paper between his thumb and forefinger. His nails were broken back to the cuticle and purple with carpenter’s bruises. But even while the tobacco was filling and shaling off the dented paper, before he wadded it all up and dropped it out of his palm into the ashtray, I already saw the dark change of mood, the vulnerable piece in his stoic armor, the brass wheels of disciplined empathy shearing against one another. At all those other tables he was at best a tolerable eccentric (since it was a Saturday afternoon family crowd that would make allowances).
“You want to drink at the bar?” I said.
“That’s a good idea.”
We walked between the tables into the small bar that adjoined the dining room, and Mr. Riordan told the waitress to serve our steaks in there.
“How are you, Frank?” the bartender said. I recognized him as one of the volunteer firemen who had come to the ranch when the barn burned.
“Pretty good, Slim. Give this man here a beer, and I’ll take a Beam with water on the side.”
The bartender set a double-shot glass on the counter and continued to pour to the top.
“Just one,” Mr. Riordan said.
“I like to give away other people’s whiskey.” The bartender glanced sideways at the empty stools and into the dining room. “Did you hear anything about who might have had that gasoline can?”
“No.”
“There were some guys drunk in here the other night talking about lighting a fire to somebody’s ass.”
Mr. Riordan rolled the whiskey back against his throat and swallowed once, deeply, the gray eyes momentarily bright.
“Who were they?” he said.
“I think one of them drives a tractor-trailer out of Lolo.”
“Slim, why in the hell would a truck driver want to burn me out?”
“I don’t know. I just told you what I heard them saying.”
“And you don’t know this man’s name.”
“Like I said, maybe I’ve seen him pulling out of Lolo a couple of times. I thought I might be of some help to you.”
Mr. Riordan clicked his fingernail on the lip of the glass.
“Well, next time call me while they’re here, or ask them to leave their name and address.”
The bartender’s lips were a tight line while he poured into the glass. He set the bottle down, lit a cigarette, and walked to the rounded end of the bar and leaned against it, with one foot on a beer case and his back to us. Then he squeezed his cigarette in an ashtray and took off his apron.
“I’m going on my break now,” he said. “Pour what you want out of the bottle, and add it on to your dinner bill.” I could see the color in his neck as he went through the doorway.
I shook my head and laughed.
“Buddy told me you had a private sense of humor,” Mr. Riordan said.
“I can’t get over the number of people around here who always have a firestorm inside themselves,” I said.
“Oh, Slim’s not a bad fellow. Actually, his problem is his wife. Her face would make a train turn left on a dirt road.” He was into his third shot, and the blood was starting to show in his unshaved cheeks. “One time he came in on a tear from the firemen’s picnic, and she sewed his bedsheet down with a sail needle and wore him out with a quirt. He got baptized at the Baptist church the next Sunday.”
When he grinned, his teeth looked purple in the light from the neon beer sign above the bar.
“Do you believe what he said about that man in Lolo?” I said.
“No. But it’s not important, anyway.”
“It’s pretty damn important when they’re setting fire to your home and your animals.”
It was rash, and I hated my impetuosity even before I saw his face fix mine in the mirror behind the bar. The skin was tight against the bone, the eyes even, his red-check wool shirt buttoned like a twisted rose under his neck.
“I think I know who they are,” he said, his voice low and intense. “I don’t know if I could put them in the penitentiary, but I could probably do things to them myself that would make them never want to destroy a fine horse again. But that won’t stop others like them, and it won’t change the minds of those people in the dining room, either.”
The waitress brought our steaks, thick and swimming in blood and gravy, a piece of butter on the charcoaled center, surrounded with boiled carrots and Idaho potatoes. The meat was so tender and good that the steak knife clicked against the plate as soon as you cut into it.
Mr. Riordan finished his bourbon, then began to cut at the steak, his back rigid and his elbows at an angle. The steak slipped sideways on the plate and knocked potatoes and gravy all over the bar.
“Well,” he said, and picked up the bartender’s towel. He had a good edge on, and I could feel him deciding something inside himself. He pushed the plate away with his fingertips, rolled a cigarette slowly, and poured again from the bottle of Jim Beam. “Go ahead and eat. Remind me in the future to stay away from morning whiskey.”
It was colder when we walked outside, and the snow clouds had covered the sun. The wind bit into my face and made my eyes water. A few early mallard ducks were winnowing low over the cottonwoods on the river. Mr. Riordan walked across the gravel to the truck as though the earth were about to shift on its axis. He took the keys out of his overalls pocket and paused at the driver’s door.
“I think you probably want to drive a truck again,” he said, and put the keys in my hand.
As we rolled along the blacktop toward the ranch, he looked steadily ahead through the windshield, his shoulder sometimes slipping momentarily against the door. He started to roll another cigarette, then gave it up.
“What do you plan to do in the future?” he said, because he felt that he had to say something.
“Finish my parole. Take it easy and cool and slide with it, I guess.”
“You probably have about thirty or forty years ahead of you. Do you think about that?” The movement of the truck made his head nod, and he blinked and widened his eyes.
“I’ve never gotten around to it.”
“You should. You don’t believe you’ll be fifty or sixty. Or even middle-aged. But you will.”
I looked over at him, but his eyes were focused on the blacktop. His large, worn hands lay on his thighs like skillets. The back of his left hand was burned with a thick white scar, hairless and slick as a piece of rubber. He cleared his throat, blinked again, and then his eyes faded and closed. He breathed as though he were short of breath.