I tied the ignition wires together on the Plymouth and drove down the blacktop toward Missoula. I was guessing about the direction Buddy would have taken, as well as the three men in the pickup, but I doubted that the killing of the birds was done by anyone in the south Bitterroot, since there was only one small sawmill south of us, at Darby, which was almost to Idaho, that had been affected by the injunction. I passed the bar at Florence, which would have been too close for them to stop, and looked for Buddy’s truck in the parking lots of the two bars at Lolo. The snow was coming down more heavily now, in large, wet flakes that swirled out of my headlights and banked thickly on the windshield wipers that shuddered and scratched across the glass. As I dropped over the hill into the outskirts of Missoula and again met the river, shining with moonlight and bordered by the dark, bare shapes of the cottonwoods, the wind came up the valley and polished the ice along the road and buffeted the Plymouth from side to side.
I pulled into every bar parking lot on the highway until I reached the center of town. No Buddy, no ambulances, no bubble-gum lights swinging around on the tops of cop cars. Strike three, babe, I thought. So I drove over to Beth’s, with the ignition wires swinging and sparking under the dash and the snow piling higher on the hood against the windshield.
The elm and maple trees in her yard were dripping with ice, and the yellow porch light fell out in shadows along the glazed sidewalk. She opened the door partway in her nightgown against the draft of cold air, her mouth in an oval, beginning to smile; then her eyes focused on my face. She closed the door behind me and touched my chest with her hand.
“What happened?”
I told her, in the quietest way I could, keeping the sequence intact and lowering my voice each time I saw the brightness and sudden confusion start to come into her eyes.
“Oh God,” she said.
“He’ll probably just drive around until he gets the lightning bolts out of his brain.”
“You don’t know him. Not when it comes to his father and all his crazy guilt about failing him.”
“Buddy?” I looked at her with the strange feeling of an outsider who would never know the private moments of confession between them in the quiet darkness of their marital bed.
“He’s not a violent man,” I said. “Even in Angola, the big stripes let him alone. He wasn’t a threat to anyone. He was just Buddy, a guy with glue fumes in his head and music in his fingers.”
But I was talking to myself now. Her eyes were looking at the blackness of the window, and she held an unlit cigarette in her lap as though she had forgotten it was there.
“I don’t know what else to do, Beth.”
“Call the sheriff’s office.”
“You’re not thinking.”
“He told you he knew who they were. He’s going to kill someone.”
“You weren’t listening while I was talking,” I said.
“We’ll have to use the phone next door or go to the filling station.”
“Listen a minute. That fat son of a bitch you call a sheriff would love blowing Buddy all over the inside of that truck or welding the door shut on him in Deer Lodge.”
Her eyes were blinking at the darkness beyond the window.
“I’ll talk,” she said. “I’ll tell them he’s drunk and he tore up my house and I want him arrested.”
“That’s no good, kid.”
“Why? What do you offer as an alternative, for God’s sake?”
“He won’t pull over for any dicks, and it’ll get real bad after that.”
She sat back in the chair and rubbed the palm of her hand against her brow. I took the cigarette out of her fingers and lit it for her.
“I can’t sit here,” she said.
I wished I hadn’t come. It was selfish, and now I had included her in my own impotence to do anything in an impossible situation.
“Do you have anything to drink?” I asked.
“I think it’s in the cabinet.”
I found the half bottle of Old Crow and brought back two glasses. I poured into a glass and put it in her hand. She raised it once to her mouth as though she were going to drink, then set it aside on the table.
“I lied to the children for five years about their father,” she said. “They’re too old to lie to now. They’re not going to go through any more because of Frank Riordan and Buddy and all their insane obsessions.”
“Mr. Riordan didn’t choose this.”
“He’s done everything he could for twenty years to leave his stamp on everybody around him. He was never content simply to live. His children always had to know that he wasn’t an ordinary man.”
“He wouldn’t want Buddy out with a gun. You know that.”
“I’m sorry, but you didn’t learn very much living at his place.” That fine strand of wire was starting to tremble in her voice again. “He never thought about what would happen after he did anything. If he raised children to live in the nineteenth century, and if they ended up neurotic or in jail, it was the world’s fault for not recognizing that the Riordans were not only different but right.”
“You’ve got him down wrong,” I said. “His ball game is pretty well over, and I think he knows it and doesn’t want grief like this for Buddy or anybody else.”
She put her fingers over her eyes, and I saw the wetness began to gleam on her cheeks.
“Don’t let it run away with you,” I said. “He might have gone to the hospital by now.” I stood up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. They were shaking, and she kept her face averted so I couldn’t see it.
It was a time not to say anything more. I rubbed the back of her neck until I felt her composure start to come back and her shoulders straighten. I picked up my whiskey glass and looked out the window while she got up and went into the bath. Behind me I could hear the water running.
The snow was frozen in broken stars around the edge of the window glass, and the shadows of the trees swept back and forth across the banked lawn. High up on the mountain behind the university I could dimly see the red beacon for the airplanes, pulsating against the infinite softness of the sky.
“I’m sorry,” Beth said, behind me, her face clear now.
“Do you want your drink?”
“I’d rather go to the hospital. You don’t mind, do you?”
“No.”
“It’ll take me just a minute to dress.”
A few moments later she came back downstairs in a pair of corduroys and a wool shirt with a mackinaw under her arm. Her blue scarf was tied under her chin, and the flush in her face and the strands of black hair on her cheeks gave her the appearance of a young girl on her way to a nighttime ice-skating party.
I closed the door on her side of the Plymouth and put the ignition wires back together to start the engine. Her breath was steaming, and I could see her breasts rise and fall under the heavy mackinaw.
“If Buddy’s not at the room, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been by and gone back home,” I said as I drove slowly up the street.
“The head sister will know if he’s been there.”
“There’s another thing to think about, too. He might just talk to the doctor downstairs and go to sleep in the truck out on the street.”
“Just drive us there, Iry.”
We didn’t get past the receptionist’s desk. Frank Riordan was in intensive care, no one was allowed to see him, and the only persons in his family who had been at the hospital were Melvin and Pearl, and they had gone across the street to the all-night cafe.
“How’s he doing?” I said.
“You’ll have to ask the doctor when he comes down,” the receptionist said.