I heard the screen door slam on the edge of my dream and Buddy pulling off his heavy jacket. His hair was powdered with wet snow, and his trousers were damp up to the thighs from the brush along the riverbank. He rubbed his hands on his red cheeks.
“It’s too damn cold to fish,” he said. “I had one brown on and almost froze my hand when I stuck it in the water.”
“Where’s the brown?”
“Very clever,” he said.
“It was just a question, since I was trying to sleep and you came in like gangbusters.”
“Go back to sleep, then. I’m going to eat.” He unlaced the leather string on one boot and kicked it toward the wall. “You want some elk?”
“Go ahead. I’m not hungry.”
“You’re not anything these days, Zeno.”
“What am I supposed to do with that, Buddy?”
“Not a goddamn thing.”
“You want to just say it? If it’s on your mind, if it’s in some real bad place?”
“I don’t have nothing to say. I didn’t mean to piss you off because I woke you up. Or maybe you’re just pissed in general about something that don’t have anything to do with you and me.”
I sat up on the bunk and lit a cigarette. Outside, the snow was swirling in small flakes into the wet pines next to the cabin. The clouds had moved down low on the mountains until the timberline had disappeared. I wanted to push him into it, some final verbal recognition between the two of us about what I was doing with Beth and to him, my friend, so I wouldn’t have to keep contending with that dark feeling of deceit and betrayal that caught like a nail in my throat every time I looked at him. But I couldn’t push it over the edge, and he wouldn’t accept it either. I blinked into the cigarette smoke and took another deep puff, as though there were something philosophical in smoking a cigarette.
“I got pretty drunk last night, and it didn’t help to get half loaded again this morning,” I said. “I think I ought to hang up my drinking act for a while.”
“When you do that, Zeno, the Salvation Army is going to pass out free booze on Bourbon Street.”
“I believe that would be a commendable way to celebrate my sobriety.”
“Man, you are a clever son of a bitch. You sound like you went to one of those colored business colleges. You remember that psychotic preacher back in A that used to start hollering when the captain clanged the bell for evening count? His eyes were always busting out of his head after he’d been drinking julep in the cane all day, and he’d scream out all this stuff about standing up before Jesus that he’d memorized from one of those Baptist pamphlets, but he could never get all the words right. He’d stand there in the sun, still shouting, until the captain led him into the dormitory by the arm.”
In a moment Buddy had been back into our common prison experience, which I didn’t care to relive anymore, and I suddenly realized that maybe this was the only thing we shared: an abnormal period in our lives, since neither of us was a criminal by nature, that contained nothing but degradation, hopelessness, mindless cruelty (newborn kittens flushed down the commodes by the hacks), suicides bailing off the top tier, a shank in the spleen on the way to the dining hall, or the unbearable sexual heat that made your life a misery. I just didn’t feel any more humor in it, but Buddy’s face was flushed with laughter and anticipation of my own. I drew in on my cigarette and blew out the smoke without looking at him.
“What’s all that noise out there?” I said.
“What noise?” he said, his face coming back to composure.
“It sounds like a fox got into somebody’s henhouse.”
He stood up from the kitchen chair and looked through the front window. He held the curtain in his hand a moment and then dropped it, almost flinging it at the window glass.
“What’s the old man doing?” he said. “He must have lost his mind.” He sat on the chair and pulled his wet boots back on without lacing them.
I looked out the window and saw Mr. Riordan walking off balance through the rows of birdcages in the aviary, the snow swirling softly around him in a dim halo. He had a canvas bird-feed sack looped over one shoulder, and he was pulling back the tarps on the cages, unlatching the wire doors, and slinging seed on the ground.
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
“I’ll take care of it.”
“I was the one that got him drunk.”
“Nobody gets the old man drunk, Zeno.”
We walked hurriedly across the wet, cold field to the main house. Mrs. Riordan and Buddy’s sister had come out on the front porch and were standing silently by the rail with the wind in their faces. I could see a bottle of whiskey on top of one of the cages.
Birds were everywhere, like chickens all over a roost when an egg-sucking dog gets inside: ruffed grouse, Canadian geese, greenhead mallards, ground owls, gulls, bobwhites, ring-necked pheasants, an eagle, egrets, pintails, blue herons, and two turkey buzzards. Most of them seemed as though they didn’t know what to do, but then a mallard hen took off, circled once overhead, and winnowed toward the river. Buddy started latching the doors on the birds that hadn’t yet jumped out after the seed.
“Frank, what in the hell are you doing?” Buddy said.
Mr. Riordan’s back was to us, his shoulders bent, as he sowed the seed from side to side like a farmer walking a fallow field.
“Don’t let any more of them out,” Buddy said. “It’ll take us a week to get them back.”
Mr. Riordan turned and saw us for the first time. The bill of his fur cap was pulled low over his eyes.
“Hello, boys. What are you doing here?” he said.
“Let’s go inside,” Buddy said, and slipped the heavy sack of feed off his father’s shoulder. The pupils in Mr. Riordan’s eyes had contracted until there was nothing left but a frosted grayness that seemed to look through us.
He walked with us toward the porch, then as an afterthought picked up the bottle of whiskey by the neck. I thought he was going to drink from it, but I should have known better. He was not the type of man who would be seen drinking straight out of a bottle, particularly when drunk, in front of his family.
“Put it away for today, Frank,” Buddy said.
“Go get us three cups and the coffeepot that’s on the stove,” he said.
“I don’t think that’s good,” Buddy said.
He looked at Buddy from under the bill of his cap. There was no command in his expression, not even a hint of older authority, just the gray flatness of those eyes and maybe somewhere behind them a question mark.
“All right,” Buddy said. “But those birds are going to be spread all over the Bitterroot by tonight.”
He went inside with his mother and sister and a moment later came back with three cups hooked on his fingers and the metal coffeepot with a napkin wrapped around the handle.
We sat on the steps and leaned against the wood railing, with the snow blowing under the eave into our faces, and drank coffee and whiskey for a half hour. Occasionally, I heard movement inside the house, and when I would turn, I would see the disappearing face of Mrs. Riordan or Pearl in the window. The snow was starting to fall more heavily now, with the wind blowing from behind us out of Idaho, and I watched the mountains on the far side of the valley gradually disappear in the white haze, then the stripped cottonwoods along the river, and finally our cabin across the field.
Mr. Riordan was talking about his grandfather, who had owned half of a mine and the camp that went with it at Confederate Gulch during the 1870s.
“He was a part-time preacher, and he wouldn’t allow a saloon or a racetrack in town unless they contributed to his church,” he said. “He used to say there was nothing the devil hated worse than to have his own money used against him. Once, two of Henry Plummer’s old gang tried to hoorah the main street when they were drunk. He locked them in a stone powder house for two days and wouldn’t give them anything to drink but castor oil and busthead Indian whiskey. Then he made them wash in the creek, and took them home and fed them and gave them jobs in his mine.”