The Lost Get-Back Boogie by James Lee Burke
“You better tell your old man that four hundred working men are going to lose their jobs because he thinks there’s a little bit of smell in the air,” he said.
“Well, that’s the way the toilet flushes sometimes, Zeno,” Buddy said.
I picked up the case of beer and headed for the door. I had to wait for a drunk cowboy to kiss his girl good night and stumble out ahead of me; then I walked across the parking lot in the light rain and threw the beer in the back of the truck. Buddy followed me in the frame of yellow light from the open door.
“Get in,” I said.
“Why the fire drill, man?”
“The next time, you charge your own hill. Collect Purple Hearts when I’m not around.”
“You’re really pissed.”
“Just get in. I’m burning it down the road in about five seconds.”
We pulled onto the blacktop, and I revved it up all the way in first and slammed the gearbox into second. The oil smoke billowed out of the truck’s tail pipe.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said. He still had the beer bottle in his hand, and he drank the foam out of the bottle.
“Don’t you know what you’re fooling with back there? Those people have blood in their eye. For a minute that man wanted to ice you.”
“Iry, you don’t know the scene around here. It’s not like rednecks opening up a shank in your face. This kind of crap goes on all the time. Besides, I can’t stand the righteousness of those bastards. They bitch about the federal government, the Indians, farm control, niggers, college kids, anything that’s not like them. You get pretty tired of it.”
“Haven’t you learned to leave people like that alone?”
“You’re really coming on like Gangbusters tonight.”
“Yeah, well, quick lesson you taught me my first week in the population: walk around the quiet ones that look harmless.”
“Okay, Zeno.”
I put a cigarette in my mouth and popped a kitchen match on my thumbnail. The rain turned in the headlights, and I breathed in on the cigarette and let the smoke out slowly.
“Buddy, I just don’t like to see you fade the wrong kind of action,” I said.
“I know all that, man.”
“You got to ease up sometimes and let people alone.”
“Forget about it. I’m cool. Do I look like I’m worried? I’m extremely cool on these matters.”
I looked into the rearview mirror as I slowed to turn into the side road that led to the ranch. A pair of headlights was gaining on me through the rain as though the driver couldn’t see that I was slowing. I shifted into second and accelerated into the gravel turnoff, the truck body bouncing hard against the springs. The trees were black by the side of the road, and the rocks pinged and rattled under the frame. The headlights turned in after us, and I pushed the accelerator to the floor.
“Hey, you trying out for the hot-rod circuit or something?” Buddy said. “Come on, you’re going to rip a tire on these rocks.”
I didn’t answer him. The driver behind us had on his brights, and they reflected in my eyes like a shattered white flame. I wound the truck up in second, shot it into third, with the gas all the way down, and popped the clutch. It slipped momentarily until it could grab, the speedometer needle quivered in a stationary place like part of a bad dream, and the headlights suddenly loomed up close enough to the tailgate so that I could see the hood and oudine of a large yellow truck.
“Pull over and let those drunk sons of bitches pass,” Buddy said.
Then they hit us. The back end of my pickup fishtailed toward the ditch, and I spun the steering wheel in my hands and shifted down in a spray of rocks. Then they hit us again, and I heard the metal tear like someone was ripping strips out of a tin roof. The headlights beat against the dark line of trees and wavered up into the sky, and I couldn’t pull the pickup to the center of the road again because either a fender had been crumpled against a tire or the frame had been bent. Buddy was looking backward through the cab window, his face brilliant in the headlights’ illumination.
“Another mile, man,” he said. “I’m going to get the old man’s shotgun and blow these assholes all over the road.”
They closed on us and caught my back bumper as a snow-plow might, with a heavy superior thrust of engine and weight that pushed the pickup forward as though it had no momentum of its own, the transmission shearing into filings, the wheels locked sideways and scouring ruts out of the rock road. I held on to the steering wheel with one hand and tried to put an arm in front of Buddy as the edge of the ditch cut under the front tire and we went over. The pine saplings slashed against the windshield, and the bottom of the ditch came up blackly and smashed the radiator into the fan. Buddy’s head spider-webbed the glass, and he recoiled backward into the seat, a brilliant jet of blood shooting from a small raised split like a crucifix in the skin. My stomach had gone hard into the steering wheel, my breath rushed out of a long collapsing place in my throat, and I fought to bring the air back in my lungs.
Then I heard their truck stop and back up on the road. Their doors slammed, and three big men skidded down the side of the ditch through the underbrush, their boots digging for balance in the wet dirt. I pulled the tire iron from under the seat and opened the door just before the first one got his hand on it. Before I could turn into him and swing, he brought a nightstick down on my arm. It was the type used by policemen and barroom bouncers, drilled out on the end and filled with lead, and I felt the bone crack like a piece of plate. My hand opened as though the tendons were severed, and the tire iron fell foolishly to the ground.
“That other one’s Riordan,” a second man said. They were all dressed in blue jeans, work boots, and wash-faded flannel shirts, and their large bodies were bursting with a confident physical power.
They pulled Buddy from the cab and knocked him to the ground, then held him up against the tire well and drove their fists into his face. They discounted my presence as they might have a stray limb that was in their way. The blood was already swelling up in a blue knot under the skin on my arm, and my fingers were quivering uncontrollably. Buddy’s hair was matted against the split in his forehead, and his face had gone white from the blows. I picked up the tire iron with my left hand and stumbled around the front of the truck in the brush, the headlights bright in my eyes, and threw it as hard as I could into a man’s back. His shoulders straightened abruptly, and his arm flickered in the air behind his spine, his body frozen as though some awful pain was working its way into his groin.
They didn’t take long after that. They had finished beating Buddy, streaking his clothes with blood, and now they turned their attention to me. The man I had hit leaned against my truck with one arm, arching his back and kneading his fist into the vertebrae. I could see the pain in his eyes.
“Give that son of a bitch his buckwheats,” he said.
The first punch caught me in the eye. I felt the man’s whole weight lift into it, and I spun backward off the fender with a corridor of purple light receding into my brain. I must have held on to the fender, because the second blow came downward across my nose, and for just an instant I knew that he had a ring on. There was mud all over my hands and knees, the rain ticked in my hair, and I heard one man say, “You ought to know when to stay in Louisiana, bud.” Then he kicked me between the buttocks, and I thought I was going to urinate.
I heard their truck doors slam, and as they turned around in the road, the headlight beams reflected off the tree trunks, and I saw the words on the side of the cab: WEST MONTANA LUMBER COMPANY. I got to my feet and started over toward Buddy, who was bent on his knees in the undergrowth. My back felt cold and wet, and I realized that half my shirt had been torn away from one shoulder. Then I saw the thin ribbon of fire curling up the twisted strip of cloth into the open gas tank. I ran to Buddy and grabbed him under the arm with my good hand, and we tripped along the bottom of the ditch with the pine branches whipping back across our faces and arms.
&nbs
I heard the rain on the windowsill and pulled the sheet up over my eyes. It was cool under the sheet, and I rolled back into that strange, comfortable world between sleep and wakefulness. On the edge of my mind I heard my father moving around downstairs in the early dawn, breaking open the shotguns to see that they were empty and dropping the decoys with their lead-anchor weights into the canvas duffel bag. I knew that it was going to be a fine day for duck hunting, with an overcast sky and enough rain to bring them sailing in low, denting the water with their feet and wings before they landed. It had been a good year for mallard and teal, and on a gray day like this one they always came in right above our blind on their way to feed in the rice field.
“Allons aller” I heard my father call up the staircase.
And I could already feel the excitement of the outboard ride across the swamp to the blind, with the shotgun and the shells under my raincoat, knowing that we could take all the ducks we wanted simply because that part of the swamp was ours— we had earned it, the two of us. They would dip suddenly out of the sky when they saw our decoys while we sat motionlessly in the reeds, our faces pointed toward the ground, our camouflaged caps pulled down on our foreheads; then, as they winnowed over the bayou, we would rise together and the sixteen-gauge would roar in my ears and recoil into my shoulder, and before the first mallard had folded in the air and toppled toward the water, even before the dogs had splashed through the reeds after him, I was already firing again with the empty shell casings smoking at our feet.
But the swamp and my father’s happy voice over the piled ducks in the blind didn’t hold in my mind. I felt the gun go off again against my shoulder, but this time I was looking through the peep sight on my M-1 at a concrete bunker on the edge of a frozen rice field. The bunker was covered with holes, as though it had been beaten with a ball peen hammer, and the firing slit was scoured and chipped with ricochets. I let off the whole clip at the slit, the concrete shaling and powdering away like wisps of smoke in the gray air, and then I pulled back into the ditch and pressed in another clip with my thumb. The bottom of the ditch was filmed with ice and covered with empty shell casings. My hands were shaking with the cold inside my mittens, and my fingers felt like sticks on the bolt. I raised up and let off three rounds across the crusted snow on the edge of the ditch. Then I heard the sergeant behind me.
“All right, he’s dead in there. Save what you got.”
The other seven stopped firing and pulled away from the top of the ditch. The moisture in their nostrils was frozen, and their faces were discolored from the wind and the crystals of snow on their skin.
“So here’s the deal,” the sergeant said. “We got about one hour to get around that hill or there ain’t going to be anybody to meet us there.”
“He’s under a mattress in there. They put a whole pile of them in every one of them things,” another man said.
“Well, we can take our choices, and it’s a finger any way you look at it,” the sergeant said. He had a knitted sweater tied around his ears under his helmet, and two fingers of his left hand had started to swell with frostbite. “We can sit on our ass here and shoot everything we got on one gook, and in the meantime we’re going to get left, because those other fuckers aren’t going to wait on us, and we ain’t going to have nothing except a frozen pecker to stick out of this hole when they send their patrols through here tonight.”
There was no answer, but each of us was thinking of that hundred yards of wind-polished snow that at least four of us would have to cross before we would be beyond the angle of the machine gunner behind the slit in the bunker.
“OK, it’s Paret, Simpson, and Belcher,” the sergeant said. “Paret, you stay on my ass. We’re going around behind him and blow that iron door open. What you got left in the Browning, Roth?”
“A half clip and four in the bag.”
“Put it in his face until we get all the way across the field.”
The BAR man started firing, and we went over the top of the ditch in a run, our shoulders crouched, our boots like lead weights in the snow. The two other men headed toward the left side of the bunker, their breath laboring out in a fog before them. I followed hard on the sergeant, as though I were trying to run in a dream, and then the sun broke through the overcast and turned the snowfield into a brilliant white mirror. Our tracks looked sculptured, like a dark violation of the field’s whiteness.
The snow became deeper and softer, and the sergeant and I pushed for that safe imaginary angle beyond the range of a machine gun’s swivel. Then the slit burst open with flame, and I saw the bullets clip in a straight pattern toward me in the snow. For a moment I saw the sergeant’s face turn and stare at me over his shoulder, as though he had been disturbed in an angry mood. I fell forward on my elbows, my boots still locked in their deep sculptured depressions, and heard the snow hiss and spit around me.
The whiteness of the snow ached like a flame inside my eyelids.
Where are you hit?
I don’t know.
Jesus Christ, his back is coming off.
Get up over the rise and tell them to wait. Shoot out their tires if you have to.
They better have plasma. Look at the snow.
I felt the nurse rub salve with a piece of cotton over my back and pull the gauze back into place. The rain broke on the win-dowsill in dimples of light, and I could see the dark green of the elms and maples waving in front of the old brick buildings across the street. I raised up on my elbows and felt the skin burn on my back. The plaster cast on my forearm was like a thick, obscene weight.
“Don’t turn over. You have some pretty bad blisters there,” a man’s voice said.
Buddy’s father was bent forward in a leather chair at the foot of the bed, his square, callused hands folded between his legs. His gold watch chain glinted against his faded Levi’s, and his wide forehead looked pale in the room’s half-light. His gray eyes were staring straight into mine.
“They put you under before they set your arm. The doctor said it might hang on a while after you woke up.”
My arms and bare chest were damp against the sheet, and I wiped my face with the pillow. The pressure sent a sudden touch of pain along my eyebrow and the bridge of my nose. I heard him pull his chair to the side of the bed.
“They really did a job on us,” I said.
He nodded with his eyes squinted, and I saw that he was looking over my face rather than at me. I propped myself on one elbow and softly touched the hard row of stitches under the strip of gauze bandage on my eyebrow. There were flecks of dried blood on my fingertips. When I moved, my back burned as though it had been scalded.
“How’s Buddy?”
“He’s asleep in the next room.”
“His head hit the glass when we went over in the ditch. Then they really hit him,” I said.
“He’ll be all right. He was awake earlier and we talked, and then he wanted to sleep for a while.”
“How bad is he?”
“He has a concussion, and they put twenty stitches in his forehead.”
Outside, the rain was dripping from
“I tried to stop it,” I said. “I got one of them with the tire iron, but they had already broken my arm.”
He rubbed his coarse palms over his knuckles and looked momentarily at the floor, then at me. There was a thin part line in his graying brown hair, and his eyelids blinked as though he were keeping some idea down inside himself.
“I didn’t press Buddy this morning, but I want to know what happened. Was it something that grew out of an argument in a saloon, or was it more involved than that?”
I reached over to the nightstand where someone had placed my package of Lucky Strikes beside my billfold, and put one in my mouth. He took a book of matches from his denim shirt and lit it. I wanted to avoid his face and the private question that was there beyond the wind-burned skin, the short growth of whiskers, and those intense gray eyes.
“It started with Buddy at the bar, Mr. Riordan. I was outside most of the time. You’d better ask him about it later,” I said.
“And what was it exactly about?”
“Maybe too many drunk men in a bar on Sunday night.” “What was said?”
I drew in on the cigarette and placed it in the ashtray. The wind blew the rain off the windowsill into the room. His big hands were pressed on his knees, and the veins stood up like twists of blue cord under the skin.
“You’ve got me in a hard place, and I think you know that,” I said.
“Yes, I guess I do. But I’d like to have it now.”
“Buddy was talking with some people at a table about the pulp mill. I don’t know who the men were who followed us out. Buddy thought they were just drunks until they smashed into the back of my truck.”