The Lost Get-Back Boogie by James Lee Burke
His eyes moved over my face; then he pointed at a door.
“Over there. There’s some glass doors at the end of the hall,” he said.
The hallway was dark and hot, and it smelled much worse than the outside of the mill. Someone had painted the walls green at one time, but the paint was blistered and peeling in flakes on the baseboards. Behind the glass doors I could see an air-conditioning unit with streamers blowing off the vents, a big-breasted secretary who sat in her chair as though she had an arrow in her back, and three men in business suits behind their glass-topped desks, each of them concerned with typed papers that brought on knitted brows, a sweep of the hand to the telephone, a quick concentration on some piece of thunder hidden in a figure.
The secretary wanted to know who it was exactly that I would like to see or if I could explain exactly what I wanted.
“It’s about an accident, actually,” I said. “I haven’t talked with a lawyer yet. I thought I’d come down here and see what y’all could tell me.”
Her eyelashes blinked, and she looked sideways briefly at the man behind the next desk. There was a pause, and then the man glanced up from his papers and nodded to her.
“Mr. Overstreet can talk with you. Just have a seat,” she said. (All of this in a room where each of us was within five feet of the other.)
I sat in the chair in front of Mr. Overstreet’s desk for possibly two minutes before he decided that I was there. He looked like a working man who had gotten off the green chain years ago, worked his way up to yard foreman, and finally slipped through a side door into a necktie and a place in front of an airconditioning unit. There were still freckles on the backs of his hands, and thin pinch scars on his fingers that come from working with boomer chains, and he had the rigidity and habitual frown of a man who was afraid of his own position every day. He pushed the papers to the side of the glass desk top, then looked up flatly into my eyes.
“Sunday night my pickup was knocked off the road by one of your trucks down by Florence,” I said. “There were three men in it, and they burned my pickup and musical instruments and left me and another guy a hospital bill to pay. I’m not after your company. I just want those three guys.”
He stared at me, and then his eyes flicked angrily at the secretary. He rubbed the back of one hand into his palm.
“What are you saying?”
“There’s a truck out in your lot that probably has red paint all over the front bumper. Also, you must know who drives a company truck out of here at night.”
The other two men behind the desks had stopped work and were looking blankly at us. I could hear the secretary squeak the rollers of her chair across the rug.
“That doesn’t have anything to do with the mill,” he said. “You take that up with the sheriff’s department in Ravalli County.”
“It was your truck. That makes you liable. If you protect them, that makes you criminally liable.”
“You watch what you say, fella.”
“All you’ve got to tell me is you’ll come up with the men in that truck.”
“Who the hell you think you are talking to me about criminal charges?”
“I’m not asking you for anything that’s unreasonable.”
“Yeah? I think you stopped using your reason when you walked in here. So now you turn around and walk back out.”
“Why don’t you flick on your brain a minute? Do you want guys like this beating up people out of one of your trucks?”
“You don’t understand me. You’re leaving here. Now.”
“You ass.”
“That’s it.” He picked up the telephone and dialed an inner office number. His free hand was spread tightly on the glass desk top while he waited for an answer.
“All right, bubba,” I said. “Go back to your papers.”
But he wasn’t listening. “Send Lloyd and Jack down here,” he said.
I walked out the office and down the dark hallway; then the outer door opened in a flash of sunlight and two big men in tin hats moved toward me in silhouette. One of them had a cigar pushed back like a stick in his jaw, and he wiped tobacco juice off his mouth with a flat thumb and looked hard at me.
“Better get in that office,” I said. “Some crazy man is in there raising hell.”
They went past me, walking fast, their brows wrinkled in-tendy. I was across the parking lot when I heard the door open again behind me. The man with the cigar leaned out, his tin hat bright in the sun, and shouted: “You keep going. Don’t ever come around here again.”
I drove back to Missoula and stopped at the tavern where I had called Ace earlier. I started drinking beer. Then from among the many wet rings on the bar I lifted up a boilermaker, and I guess it was then that an odd tumbler clicked over in my brain and it started.
In the darkness of the tavern, with the soft glow of the mountain twilight through the blinds, I began to think about my boyhood South and the song I never finished in Angola. I had all the music in my mind and the runs that bled into each chord, but the lyrics were always wooden, and I couldn’t get all of the collective memory into a sliding blues. I called it “The Lost Get-Back Boogie,” and I wanted it to contain all those private, inviolate things that a young boy saw and knew about while growing up in southern Louisiana in a more uncomplicated time: the bottle trees (during the depression people used to stick empty milk of magnesia bottles on the winter branches of a hackberry until the whole tree rang with blue glass), the late evening sun boiling into the green horizon of the Gulf, the dinners of crawfish and bluepoint crabs under the cypress trees on Bayou Teche, and freight cars slamming together in the Southern Pacific yard, and through the mist the distant locomotive whistle that spoke of journeys across the wetlands to cities like New Orleans and Mobile.
There was much more to it, like the Negro juke joint by the sugar mill and Loup-garous Row, the string of shacks by the rail yard where the whores sat on the wood porches on Saturday afternoons and dipped their beer out of a bucket. But maybe that was why I didn’t finish it. There was too much of it for one song or maybe even for a book.
I kept looking at the clock above the neon GRAIN BELT sign, and I was sure that I had my thumb right on the pulse of the day, but each time I focused again on the hour hand, I realized that some terrible obstruction had prevented me from seeing that another thirty or forty minutes or hour and a half had passed. When I walked to the rest room, my cast scratched along the wall with my weight, and when I came back out, the tables, the row of stools, and the people all seemed rearranged in place.
“You want another one, buddy?” the bartender said.
“Yeah. This time give me a draft and a double Beam on the side.”
He brought the schooner dripping with foam and ice and set a shot jigger beside it.
“You want to throw for the washline?” he said.
“What do I do?”
He picked up the leather cup of poker dice and set it down in front of me with his palm over the top.
“You roll me double or nothing for the drinks. If you roll five of a kind, you get everything up there on the line.”
There was a long string of wire above the bar with one-dollar bills clipped to it with clothespins.
“What are my chances?” I said.
“Outside of the drinks, bad.”
“All right.” The whiskey was hot in my face, and I could feel the perspiration start to run out of my hair. There was a dead hum in my head, and behind me I heard Kitty Wells’s nasal falsetto from the jukebox: “It wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels.”
I rattled the dice once in the leather cup with my hand tight over the top and threw them along the bar.
“I’ll be damned,” the bartender said.
I had to look again myself, in the red glow of the neon beer sign, at the five aces glinting up from the mahogany bar top.
The bartender pulled twenty one-dollar bills from the clothespins and put them in front of me, then took away my beer glass and
“You ought to shoot craps at one of them joints over in Idaho, buddy,” he said.
“I’ve shot lots of craps. They keep you off night patrol.”
He looked at me with a flat pause in his face, the matchstick motionless in a gap between his teeth.
“You can throw the bones for high point right down at the end of the blanket and the other guy has got to go up through their wire. Him and fifteen others.” Then I knew that I was drunk, because the words had already freed themselves from behind all those locks and hasps and welded doors that you keep sealed in the back of your mind.
“Well, I guess you got good luck, buddy,” he said, and wiped the rag over the bar in front of me before he walked down to a cowboy who had just come in.
I drank the whiskey neat and chased it with the beer, then smoked a cigarette and called him back again.
“Give me a pint of Beam’s Choice and a six-pack. While you’re getting it, give me a ditch.”
“Mister, I ain’t telling you nothing, but you ain’t going to be able to drive.”
Outside, the stars were bright above the dark ring of mountains around Missoula, and the plume of smoke from the pulp mill floated high above the Clark Fork in the moonlight. My broken arm itched as though ants were crawling in the sweat inside my cast. I fell heavily behind the steering wheel of Buddy’s Plymouth, and for just a second I saw my guitars snapping apart in the truck fire and heard that level, hot voice: Give that son of a bitch his buckwheats.
As I drove back down the blacktop toward Lolo, with the bright lights of semis flashing over me and the air brakes hissing when I swerved across the center line, I remembered again the bully putting spittle in my ear, reenacted in my mind being thrown out of a pulp mill that manufactured toilet paper, and studied hard upon the sale of my inheritance to the cement-truck and shopping-center interests.
Bugs swam around the light on the front porch of Buddy’s cabin and his fly rod was leaned against the screen door, but he must have been up at his father’s house. I walked unsteadily to the back room, where he kept the ’03 Springfield rifle with the Mauser action on two deer-antler racks. I put the sling over my shoulder and filled the big flap pockets of my army jacket with shells from a box on the floor. Even as drunk as I was, even as I caught my balance against the doorjamb, I knew that it was insane, that every self-protective instinct and light in my head was blinking red, but I was already in motion in the same way I had been my first day out of prison when I covered the license plate of the pickup with mud and went banging down the road drunk into a possible parole violation.
I put the rifle on the back floor with my field jacket over it and drove back toward the cattle guard. The wind off the river bent the grass in the pasture under the moon, and the cows were bunched in a dark shadow by the cottonwoods. I saw a flashlight bobbing across the field toward me and heard Buddy’s voice call out in the dark. I stopped and let the engine idle while the sweat rolled down my face and my own whiskey breath came back sharp in my throat. He jumped across the irrigation ditch on one foot, and one of his younger brothers jumped in a rattle of cattails behind him.
“Where are you going, man?”
An answer wouldn’t come, and I just flicked an index finger off the steering wheel toward the road.
“What have you been drinking?” he said.
“Made a stop down the highway.”
“You really look boiled, Zeno. Turn it around and go fishing with us. We’re going to try some worms in a hole on the river.”
I got a cigarette out of my shirt pocket and pushed it in my mouth. It seemed that minutes passed before I completed the motion.
“I got lucky at craps today. There’s a lady in a beer joint that wants to help me drink my money.”
“Where?”
“Eddie’s, or one of those places of yours.”
“I’ll go with you,” he said, and clicked off the flashlight. “Joe, go down to the river with the old man, and I’ll try to meet you later.”
“That’s no good, Buddy. She’s a one-guy chick, and I’m the guy that faded all the bread this afternoon.”
“I don’t give a shit about the car,” he said, “but you’re going to get your ass in jail tonight.”
“Never had a ticket, babe.”
“That’s because those coonass cops don’t know how to write. Move it over and let’s go down and investigate it together.”
“You want the car back?”
“No, I want to keep you from going back on P.V.”
“I got to catch air. If you want the car, I’ll thumb.”
He stepped back from the door and bowed like a butler, sweeping his arm out into the darkness.
“It’s your caper, Zeno,” he said. “I ain’t got money for bond, so you take this fall on your own.”
I thumped across the cattle guard, and in the rearview mirror I saw Buddy and his brother swing the gate closed and pull the loop wire over the fence post.
The drive back to the pulp mill was a long blacktop stretch of angry headlights, horns blowing in a diminishing echo behind me, gravel showering up under the fender when I hit the shoulder, and a highway-patrol car that kept evenly behind me for two miles and then turned off indifferently into a truck stop. I opened a can of beer and set it beside me on the seat and sipped off the bottle of Beam’s Choice. I picked up a radio station in Salt Lake that was advertising tulip bulbs and baby chicks sent directly to your house, C.O.D., in one order, and the announcer’s voice rose to the fervor of a southern evangelist’s when he said: “And remember, friends and neighbors, just write ‘Bulb.’ B-U-L-B. That’s ‘Bulb.’”
There was a wooden bridge over the Clark Fork just below the pulp mill, and then a climbing log road against the mountain that overlooked the river, the sour, mud-banked ponds where they kept their chemicals before they seeped out into the current, and the lighted parking lot full of washed and waxed yellow trucks. The Plymouth slammed against the springs and dug rocks out of the road with the oil pan as I pushed it in second gear up the grade, and the dense overhang from the trees slapped across the windshield and top like dry scratches on a blackboard. When I reached the top of the grade and drove along the smooth yellow strip of road among the pines, the heat indicator was quivering past the red mark on the dash, and I could hear the steam hissing under the radiator cap. I pulled the car into a turnaround at the base of a curve on the mountain and slipped the sling of the Springfield over my shoulder and picked up the field jacket with my good hand.
I walked down through the timber, with the brown pine needles thick under my feet, and found a clear place where I could lean back against a pine trunk and cover the whole parking lot with the iron sights. There were white lights strung up the sides of both smokestacks, against the dark blue of the far mountain, and the parking lot ached with a brilliant electric glow off the asphalt.
I opened the breech of the Springfield and laid it across my lap, then counted out the shells on a handkerchief and cut a deep X with my pocketknife across each soft-nose. I pushed the shells into the magazine with my thumb until the spring came tight, then slid the bolt home and locked it down. I readjusted the sling and worked it past the cast so I could fire comfortably from a sitting position and aim across my knee without canting the sights.
The first round broke through a front windshield and spider-webbed the glass with cracks, and I drove two more shots through the top of the cab. The bullets against the metal sounded like a distant metallic slap. I couldn’t see the damage inside, but I figured that the flattened and splintered lead would tear holes like baseballs in the dashboard. I shifted my knee and swung the iron sights on the next truck and let off three rounds in a row without taking my cheek from the stock. The first bullet scoured across the hood and ripped the metal like an ax had hit it, and I to
I suppose that in some drunken compartment of my mind I had only planned to pay back in kind, on an equal basis, what had been done to me, but now I couldn’t stop firing. My ears rang with a heady exhilaration with each shot, the empty casings leaped from the thrown bolt and smoked in the pine needles, and then there was that whaaappp of the bullet flattening out into another truck. I took a long drink from the pint of Beam’s Choice, then reloaded and fired the whole clip all over the parking lot without aiming. I was now concentrated on how fast I could let off a round, recover from the recoil and throw the bolt, then lock another shell in the chamber and squeeze again.
On the last clip I must have bit into something electrical on an engine, either the battery or the ignition wiring, because the sparks leaped in a shower from under the hood. Then I could see the yellow-and-blue flame wavering under the oil pan and the paint starting to blister and pop in front of the windshield.
I slipped the sling off my shoulder and began to pick up the shell casings with one hand while I watched it. The casings were hot in my hand, and I put them clinking into the flap pocket of my field jacket. The fire sucked up through the truck cab, then caught the leather seat over the gas tank in earnest, and then it blew. The flame leaped upward into one cracking red handkerchief against the dark, and the truck body collapsed on the frame and the tires roared with circles of light.
I drank again from the bottle and watched it with fascination. The heat had already cracked the glass on the next truck, and the fire was whipping inside the cab. The red light reflected off the river at the foot of the hill, and the dark trunks of the pines were filled with shadows. Out on the highway beyond the mill, I saw the blue bubblegum light of a police car turning furiously in the darkness. I put the bottle in my pocket and felt around for any shells that I hadn’t picked up, then shoved my hand under the pine needles and swept it across a half circle on my right side. The whiskey was throbbing behind my eyes, and I lost my balance when I tried to get to my feet with the sling across my chest.