Buddy wiped the water out of his father’s hair with his hand, then began to brush at it with a shawl that was on the back of the couch. But Buddy’s hands were trembling, and his face had gone taut and pale. He took the blankets from his mother and spread them awkwardly over Mr. Riordan, then took the bottle of whiskey out of the cabinet.
“Don’t give him that,” I said.
“He’s cold,” Buddy said.
I took the bottle gently, and he released his fingers while he stared into my eyes with an uncomprehending expression.
“Why not?” he said.
“It’s just no good for him,” I said.
I looked at Mr. Riordan’s ashen face, his lips that had turned the purple color of an old woman’s, and his great knuckles pinched on the top of the blankets, and wondered at how time and age and events could catch a man so suddenly.
Twenty minutes later we saw the red lights on the ambulance revolving through the fields toward us, the icy trees and snowdrifts momentarily alive with scarlet until they clicked by and disappeared behind the glare of head lamps. The doctor, who was actually an intern at St. Patrick’s in Missoula, and the volunteer fireman who drove the ambulance strapped Mr. Riordan onto a litter and carried him gingerly outside. Buddy pulled open the back door of the ambulance, and they eased the litter up onto the bed without unbuckling the straps. The doctor turned on the oxygen bottle and slipped the elastic band of the mask behind Mr. Riordan’s head.
“Well, what the hell is it, Doc?” Buddy said. “He got horned in the chest once—”
“I don’t know what it is. Shut the door.”
Buddy closed the door, and the ambulance turned around in a wide circle in the yard, cracking over the wood stakes on the edge of Mrs. Riordan’s vegetable garden, and rolled solidly down the road toward the cattle guard with the red lights swirling out over the snow.
“Why not the whiskey?” Buddy said.
“You just don’t give it to somebody sometimes.”
“Don’t give me that candy-ass stuff. There ain’t anybody else out here now.”
“He’s probably had a stroke.”
“Goddamn, I knew that’s what you were going to say,” he said, and pushed his snow-filled hair back over his head.
“Take it easy, Buddy.”
The sports clothes he had worn to the pizza place were soaked through. There were bird feathers all over his trousers, and his white wool socks had fallen down over his ankles. The army surplus greatcoat he wore over his sports clothes was eaten with moth rings and hung at a silly angle on his thin shoulders. His eyes were still looking at me, but his mind was far away on something very intense.
“Come on, Zeno. Hold it together,” I said.
“They took it all the way down the road this time.”
“Yeah, but, man, you got to—”
He turned away from me and went inside, then came back out with a handful of cartridges that he spilled into the pocket of his greatcoat. He picked up the lever-action Winchester that Pearl had propped beside the door, and headed for his father’s pickup truck. His shoes squeaked on the snow in the silence. I caught him by the arm and turned him to face me.
“Don’t do something like this,” I said.
“I know who they are. I saw the driver’s face in my headlights. I won’t have any doubts when I find his truck, either, because Pearl slammed one right along his door.”
“Then call the sheriff.”
“That bastard won’t do anything, no more than he did when they burned the barn. They’ll just say the truck got hit while they were hunting.”
“You don’t know that. Give it a chance. At least until tomorrow.”
“Let go, Iry.”
“All right,” I said. “Just talk a minute. A minute won’t make any difference.”
“Tell my mother I went to the hospital.” He started for the truck again, and I stepped in front of him.
“Look, maybe I’m the last person that should tell anyone about being rational and not going out on a banzai trip to blow somebody away,” I said. “But, damn it, think.”
“That’s right. You are the last person that should. Old Zeno, the shank artist of Louisiana and the firebomber of lumber mills. The saver of horses from the flames. But he’s my old man, and maybe they’ve punched his whole ticket.”
He started around me for the truck, his mouth in a tight line, and I stepped once more in front of him.
“I ain’t going to play this game anymore with you, Iry.”
His hands were set on the barrel and stock of the rifle, and his right arm and shoulder were already flexed.
“What are you going to do, bust me in the teeth? You ought to save your killer’s energy for those cats you’re going to blow all over a barroom wall someplace.”
But it didn’t work. He glared into my face, breathing loudly through his nose, his hair wet against his forehead.
“OK, step in your own shit,” I said.
He walked past me and got in the truck, then set the Winchester in the rack against the back glass and started the engine. He turned around and drove slowly past me with his window still down. I began to walk hurriedly along beside the truck, my legs almost comical in their attempt to keep pace with it before Buddy accelerated down the lane.
“Jesus Christ, don’t do this,” I said. “I’ll go after them with you in the morning. We’ll put their ass in Deer Lodge for ten years—”
He rolled up the window, and his face disappeared into an empty oval behind the frosted glass; then he hit second gear and the loose tire chains clanked and whipped along the frozen earth.
I started to go back into the house, but I didn’t belong there, and there was nothing truthful that I could say to anybody inside. I walked back across the field to the cabin and poured a glass of straight whiskey at the kitchen table and tried to think. I imagined that Mrs. Riordan or Pearl or Melvin had already called the sheriff’s office, but that wouldn’t do any good for Buddy, as none of them knew why he had left in the truck, unless someone had noticed that the Winchester was gone, which they probably hadn’t. So that left few alternatives, I thought, and sipped at the whiskey and looked at the crumbling ash in the grate of the stove. I could tell his family about it and let them make their own decisions, or I could call one of the deputies aside in front of the house (and I could already see him talking into the microphone of his car radio, with the door open and one leg sticking out in the snow, telling every cop in Ravalli County to pick up dope-smoking ex-convict Buddy Riordan, who was armed and headed down the Bitterroot highway to gun somebody). Then they could call the intern back to the house to give Mrs. Riordan a tranquilizer shot, and in the meantime there would be shitkicker dicks with shotguns behind roadblocks all the way to Missoula who would urinate with pleasure in their khakis if Buddy should try to get past them.
So you can’t tell his family, and you don’t drop the dime on a friend, I thought, and drank the last of the whiskey from the glass and filled it with water under the pump. And that leaves us where in this Sam Spade process of deduction? Nowhere. He’s simply out there someplace on the highway, driving too fast across the ice slicks, his heart beating, the Winchester vibrating in the rack behind his head, his brain a furnace.
Then I thought, That’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s looking at every beer joint on the way back to Missoula, pulling into the gravel parking lot and cruising slowly past the line of parked cars and trucks. Because he is con wise to criminal behavior, and he knows that anyone, except a professional, who pulls a violent job usually does not go back directly to home and normalcy; he stops at what he thinks is the first safe bar to toast his aberrant victory and quiet that surge of blood in his head.