The truck was scorched black, and all the windows had exploded from the heat. There was a large melted area around it in the snow, and the tires had burned away to the rims. I could see the huge scars in the rock incline where the truck had rolled end over end and had come to rest against a cottonwood tree, as though its driver had simply wanted to park there with a high-school girl after a dance. The men from the coroner’s office had already wrapped the body in a rubber sheet, covered it with canvas, and strapped it on an alpine stretcher that they worked slowly up the incline. A deputy sheriff walked to the car with the melted barrel and torn magazine of a rifle in his hand. The stock had been burned away, and the ejection lever hung down from the trigger.
“Look at this son of a bitch,” he said. “Every shell in it blew up. He must have had a bunch of them in his clothes, too, because they went off all over him.”
We were outside the car now, standing in the snow, though I didn’t remember how we got there. Across the river the sunlight fell on the white mountain as it would on a mirror.
You don’t know it’s Buddy, I thought. There are ranchers all over this county that drive pickup trucks, and they all carry a lever-action in the deer rack. Every week a drunk cowboy goes off the road in a pickup. And this one just happened to burn.
“You don’t know who he is,” I said, my voice loud even to myself.
The deputy looked at me curiously.
“Did you find anything that says who he was?” the sheriff said.
“No, sir. The tag was burned up, and so was anything in the glove. But like the coroner said, the damnedest thing is the way that guy went out. He must have caught his head inside the steering wheel when he turned over, and the top half of him was burned into a piece of cork. But there wasn’t a mark on his legs, except for a tattoo inside his thigh.”
I walked away from the car, along the shoulder of the road and the glistening shine of the snow melting on the asphalt and the yellow grass that protruded through the gravel. I could hear the cottonwoods clatter dryly against one another in the wind along the river, and water was ticking somewhere in flat drops off a boulder into a crystalline pool. Then I heard the powerful engine of the sheriff’s car next to me, the idle racing, and his voice straining through the half-open passenger’s window.
I turned and looked at him as I might at someone from the other side of the moon. He was trying to hold the wheel with one hand and roll down the window completely with the other. His pie-plate face was filled with blood and exertion, and his words came out with a labored wheeze in his chest.
Get in, Paret.
That’s all right, Sheriff. I just got to stretch it out a little bit.
Get in, son. Then he pulled the car at an angle to me so I couldn’t walk down the road farther, and popped the door handle on the passenger’s side.
Take a drink out of this.
The steam on the highway sucked away under us, and then we began to pass cars full of families and ranchers in pickups and a few gyppo loggers that were still operating in western Montana. They were all in their ordered place, driving into a yellow, wintry sun, with the confident knowledge that they would never have to correct time when there was none left.
Take another bite out of that bottle.
I felt the steady vibration of the engine under my feet, and then I saw the mountains re-form and come back into shape on the horizon, and the river was once more a blue spangle of light coursing through the sheets of ice far below.
That’s better, ain’t it?
Sure.
Damn right, it is. And he turned up the volume on his mobile unit and drove intently with a fresh purpose.
Epilogue
Frank Riordan was in the hospital four weeks, and by the time he was released, the lawyers for the lumber mills had gotten his injunction lifted. So when they brought him back home in the ambulance, he could look out the window and see the smoke in the valley from the pulp mill and the plumes rising in dirty strings from the tepee burners.
But he didn’t seem to care now. His right side was paralyzed from the stroke, his arm was frozen at a crooked angle against his rib cage, and when he talked, his mouth worked as though there were a stitch sewn on the edge of his lips. He stayed in a wheelchair the first two months at home, and then he was able to walk about the house with a cane, but he looked stricken and gray as though a light had been blown out inside him. When the weather started to warm toward the end of March, I took him fishing with me on the Bitterroot, and he could hold the rod stiffly and work the automatic reel with his atrophied hand and take up the slack line with the other. He couldn’t wade the stream or false cast, and he had to stay in one position and use wet flies, but when he hooked into a rainbow, I could see a smile come back into his gray eyes again.
Beth and I were married in a Catholic church in Missoula, and I bought twenty acres off of Mr. Riordan by the base of that blue canyon that cuts back through the mountain into the climbing pines beyond. Twenty acres isn’t much in Montana, but it’s mine, and it has a small stream and apple trees on it, and at night the deer come down to feed in the grass under an ivory moon. Two of the musicians from the band helped me build a split-log house on it, with a huge stone fireplace and a chimney and a front porch that looks out toward the river, the line of cottonwoods along the banks, and the infinite roll of the mountains beyond the fields.
I finished my song. I didn’t get everything into it that I had wanted; but maybe you never do, just like the time my cousin Andre and I tried to raise in our young vanity that dead Indian’s canoe from the silt bottom of the swamp. But I got most of it — the bottle trees during the depression, the smoky green of the Gulf at sunset, the Southern Pacific blowing down the line at night toward Mobile. My parole officer gave me interstate travel privileges, and I drove up to Vancouver with Beth and our bass man and recorded it. It wasn’t a big record. It was released only on the West Coast, but it played on the radio and on jukeboxes for a month, and two weeks after I thought it had been melted into slag, a recording studio in Nashville called and asked me to send a tape of anything else I had written.
It’s May now, and the runoff from the snowpack on the mountain behind my house has filled the creek bed in the canyon with a torrent of white water that bursts over the boulders in a rainbow’s spray, lighting the pine and fir trees along the bank with a dripping sheen, and then flattens out at the base of the mountain and runs in a brown course through the pasture toward the river. The grass is tall and humming with insects where the water has flowed out into the field, and occasionally I can see the sun flash on the red beaks of mudhens in the reeds. The river is high and yellow, the sandbars and gravel islands have disappeared under the churning surface, and the bottoms of the cottonwoods cut long, trembling V’s in the current. I can feel the spring catching harder each day, and the irrigated fields across the river are a wet, sunlit green against the far mountains and the patches of snow still melting among the pines on the crest.
In the early evening it turns suddenly cool, you can smell wood smoke in the air, and mauve shadows fall across the valley floor as the sun strikes its final spark against the ridge. From my front porch, I can see Buddy’s cabin faintly in the gathering dusk. Even after it has dissolved into the darkness and black trees and the laughter of his sons playing in the yard, I can still see it in my mind’s eye, lighted, the wood stove lined with fire, and sometimes in that moment I’m caught forever in the sound of a blues piano and the beating of my own heart.