The Lost Get-Back Boogie by James Lee Burke
“I guess we’d better go inside,” I said.
“Yes, that’s probably right,” he answered.
By that time Buddy had come out on the porch with the thick, canvas elbow-length gloves for handling the birds. Mr. Riordan started to rise, then had to grab the banister for support. I put one hand under his arm, as innocuously as I could, and helped him turn toward the door. The whiskey and blood drained out of his face from the exertion. His weight tipped sideways away from my hand. He breathed deeply, with a phlegmy tick in his throat.
“I believe I’m going to have to leave it with you, boys,” he said.
Buddy and I walked him upstairs to bed, then went outside and set about trying to put three dozen confused birds back in their cages. After an hour of chasing them in a whir of wings and cacophony of noise, we still hadn’t caught half of them.
“Shit on it,” Buddy said. There were two blood-flecked welts on one cheek. “The ducks won’t go any farther than the slough, and the rest of these assholes will put themselves back in when they’re ready.”
I went inside the house with him to return the canvas gloves. His sister sat by the burning fireplace with a magazine folded back in her hands. When Buddy walked into the back of the house and left us alone, I could feel her resentment, like an aura around her, in the silence. I stood in the center of the room with an unlit cigarette in my mouth, the melted snow dripping out of my hair.
“You really leave your mark when you stay at somebody’s place, don’t you?” she said, without looking up.
“How’s that?” I said. I really didn’t want an exchange with her, but it looked like it was inevitable, and I was damned if I was going to lose to someone’s idle attempt at insult.
“Oh, I think we both know that you have a way of letting everybody know you’re around.”
“Yeah, I guess I led your father into a bottle of whiskey, and I got Buddy those five years in the joint. They must be pretty susceptible to what a part-time guitar picker can do to them.”
Her curly head looked up from the magazine, the light from the fireplace bright on the sunburned ends of her hair.
“You are a bastard, aren’t you?”
“A genuine southern badass.”
“It must be nice to have that awareness about yourself,” she said.
No more tilting, babe, because you’re an amateur, I thought. I had gotten to her, but I should have known then that she was going to pull out that arrow point later and give it back to me, in a form that I wouldn’t recognize until it was too late.
Buddy and I walked back to the cabin in the gray light. Most of the afternoon was gone, and there wasn’t enough time to take a nap before I would have to get ready to work that night. I hadn’t realized how tired I was. The lack of sleep from last night, unloading the nutrias with Mr. Riordan, an hour of fighting birds that pecked and defecated all over you, and two excursions into drinking in one day all came down on me like a wood club on the back of the neck.
I got into the tin shower and turned on the hot water, and just as I was thinking of a way to coast through the evening (no booze on the bandstand, long breaks between sets, letting the steel man do the lead and the drummer most of the vocals) until I could be back at Beth’s after we closed, Buddy decided that everyone should go to Milltown with me. The water drummed against the tin sides of the shower, and I tried to think of some reasonable way to dissuade him, but I knew that Beth was in the center of his mind, and there was nothing I could say that wouldn’t sound like a door kicked shut in his face.
So while I dressed, he went back to the main house and talked to Melvin, who needed little encouragement for any kind of adventure, and a half hour later they were sitting in the front room of the cabin with a bottle of vodka that Melvin had been working on through the afternoon. Pearl evidently had argued about going, because Buddy and her husband kept making reassuring remarks to her in the way obtuse or drunk people would to a child. Actually, I couldn’t believe it. Neither one of them saw how angry she was or how much she disliked herself for being in any proximity to me.
Then Buddy went one better. While I was wrapping the guitar in a blanket, he took a blotter of acid out of the icebox and convinced Melvin to eat some with him. Pearl looked out the window like an angry piece of stone.
“Take a hit, Iry,” Melvin said.
“I’ve got too many snakes in my head already.”
“Zeno has to do his Buck Owens progressions tonight,” Buddy said.
“Why don’t you join them?” Pearl said, her face still turned toward the window.
“I’m afraid I can’t handle it.”
“It’s all them big slides on the guitar neck,” Buddy said. “There’s three chords in every one of those shitkicker songs, and Zeno has to stay sharp.”
Buddy’s voice had a mean edge to it, and I knew that no matter what I did, we were headed into a bad one.
I drove the Plymouth to Missoula while Buddy sat beside me, giggling and passing the quart bottle of vodka to Melvin in the backseat. The wind was blowing strong off the river, and the melted snow on the highway had glazed in long, slick patches. The Plymouth’s tires were bald, and every time I hit ice, I had to shift into second and slow gradually, holding my breath, because the brakes would have sent us spinning sideways off the shoulder.
We stopped at Beth’s house, and Buddy banged on the door as though there were a fire inside. The porch light went on, and I could see Beth in silhouette and the children behind her. I felt awful. I wished I could tell her in some way that this wasn’t my plan, wasn’t something that was born out of a day’s drinking and dropped on her doorstep to contend with. But I knew that I wouldn’t get to talk with her alone during the evening, and there would be no visit at her house after the bar closed, and she would be trapped four or five hours at a soiled table while Buddy and Melvin got deeper and deeper into a liquor-soaked, acid delirium.
We drove along the Clark through Hellgate Canyon to the bar, with the snow blowing out of the dark pines into the headlights. There was no easy way to coast through the evening. The building was already crowded when we got there, the steel man had cut off one of his fingers with a chain saw that afternoon, and the drummer, who I thought could take the vocal, had four opened beers sitting in a row on the rail next to his traps.
I got up on the platform, slipped the guitar strap around my neck, and tripped the purple and orange lights with my foot. In the glare of light against my eyes I saw Buddy walk with his arm around Beth’s shoulders to a table by the edge of the dance floor. I put on my thumb pick, screwed the guitar into D, and kicked it off with “Poison Love.” I didn’t have a mandolin to back me up, and my fingers still felt stiff from the cold outside, but Johnny and Jack or Bill and Charlie Monroe never did it better. Then I rolled into Moon Mulligan’s “Ragged but Right” and knocked out four others in a row with no pause except for the bridge into the next key. The cellophane-covered lights were hot against my face, and my eyes were starting to water in the drifting clouds of cigarette smoke. The dance floor and the tables were lost somewhere behind the rail of the platform and the violent glitter and rattle of bottles and glasses. I felt the sweat roll down off my face and hit on my hand, and when I went into the last song, I heard the drummer miss a beat and clatter a stick against the metal edge of the trap.
“Hey, man, save some for later,” he said.
After the set I went to the table, which was now wet with spilled beer and scorched with cigarettes that Buddy had mashed out on the cloth. Beth’s face was almost white.
“Give me the keys,” he said.
“What for?” I said.
“Because they’re my keys. And because it’s my goddamn car, and that’s my goddamn wife. You understand that’s my wife, don’t you?”
Everyone looked momentarily into the center of the table.
“Don’t go driving anywhere now, man,” I said.
“I ain’t. And you didn’t answer my question.”
“Just answer me. Without all that southern bullshit you put out.”
“I got to get back on the bandstand.”
“No, man, you answer something straight for the first time in your fucking insignificant life.”
“He just wants the keys to get in the trunk,” Melvin said. “He bought a couple of lids from some university kids.”
“They’re right there,” I said. I rose from the chair and started back toward the platform. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Beth lean forward and place her forehead against her fingertips.
I couldn’t get between two tables because a fat man had fallen over backward like a beer barrel in his chair. Up on the stand, the drummer was draining the last foam from a bottle, and our bass man was slipping his velvet glove back on his hand. I felt Melvin’s arm on my shoulder and his sour liquor breath along the side of my cheek.
“Take a walk with me into the head,” he said.
I followed him inside the yellow glare of the men’s room and leaned against the stall with him.
“Look, he just ate too much acid, and maybe we ought to get out of here early tonight,” he said.
I looked at him, with his tailored attempt at some romantic western ethic, and wondered if his rebellion was against a mother or father who owned a candy factory in Connecticut.
“I work here,” I said. “If I leave, I don’t get paid. Also, I probably get fired. What happened at the table with Beth?”
“What do you mean?” He looked at the garish color of the wall in front of him, as though he had seen it for the first time.
“She looked sick.”
“Buddy was trying to feel her up under the table.”
“Man, I don’t believe it,” I said.
“That’s what I said. We should leave early tonight.”
I left him leaning over the trough and went back to the platform just as the rhythm guitarist was starting to fake his way through “Folsom Prison Blues” by humping the microphone and roaring it out with enough amplification to blow the front windows into the parking lot.
I cut it short at one-thirty in the morning, and normally there would have been a protest from the crowd. But the temperature was dropping steadily, and the little plastic radio behind the bar said that a storm that had already torn through Calgary and southern Alberta would hit the Missoula area tomorrow.
The bar emptied out while we put away our instruments on the bandstand, and after I tripped off the purple and orange lights with my foot, I could see Buddy at the table with his arms folded under his head. Melvin was leaned back in the chair, his tie pulled loose and a dead cigarette in his grinning mouth, his arms hooked back over the chair’s supports like a man who had been crucified by comical accident.
There were no keys to the Plymouth. No one was sure what happened to them. Buddy possibly broke one off in the trunk and lost the other one while wandering around in the snow after all his reefer blew away in the wind. I said good-night to Harold, the owner, took a glass of Jim Beam with me, and while Melvin, Buddy, and Pearl slept in a pile in the backseat, Beth held the flashlight for me under the dashboard, and I used a piece of chewing tobacco tinfoil to wrap together the wires behind the ignition.
She sat close to me on the drive back to Missoula, with her hand inside my coat, and each time the draft would come up through the floorboard, she would press her thigh against mine and hold a little tighter with her arm. I forgot about Buddy in the backseat and what he would think later. I just wanted to be with her again upstairs in her house with the tree raking against the window. She knew it, too, as we came through the Hellgate into Missoula, with the water starting to freeze into white plates on the edge of the Clark. She leaned her breasts into my arm and kissed me with her tongue against my neck, and I knew everything was going to be all right when I came around the last curve on the mountain into Missoula.
The sheriff’s car pulled out even with the Plymouth from the gravel turnaround, the bubble-gum light revolving in a lazy blue-and-orange arc. His souped-up V-8 motor gunned once when he went past us on a slick stretch of ice. He braked to the side of the road and got out with a flashlight in his hand, the collar of his mackinaw turned up into the brim of his Stetson to protect his ears. He walked back to the Plymouth against the wind, as though his own weight was more than he could bear, and opened the door with the flashlight in my face.
“Don’t kick over that glass trying to hide it with your foot, son,” he said. “You don’t want to spill whiskey all over the car. Now what’s those wires doing hanging under the dashboard with tinfoil around them?”
I took a cigarette from the pack inside my coat and tried to pop a damp kitchen match on my thumbnail, but it broke across my finger. He clicked off the light and pulled back the door a little wider for me to get out.
“Sometimes you get caught by the short hairs, Paret. You ought to look out for that,” he said.
ELEVEN
Fifteen days. I thought I would get out of it with a fine when I went to guilty court the next day, but the sheriff put in a few words for me with the judge to make sure that would not be the case. (He mentioned, as a casual aside, that I was an out-of-state parolee.)
They put me in a whitewashed eight-man cell on the second floor with the usual collection of county prisoners: habitual drunks, petty check writers, drifters, barroom brawlers, and hapless souls in for nonsupport. There was no window in the cell, the white walls were an insult on the eyes, and we got out only one hour a day for showers. It was going to be a long fifteen days.
I was angry with myself for getting busted on a punk charge like driving with an open container, but I realized that the particular charge didn’t make any difference. That fat cop was going to nail me one way or another; it was just a choice of time and place.
Buddy came to see me during the visiting hours that afternoon. I didn’t want to talk with him after the scene in the bar, and in fact I wasn’t in a mood to talk with anyone. The men in that crowded cell were generally a luckless and pathetic lot, but nevertheless each of their movements (their knee bends and push-ups) and attempts at conversation to relieve their boredom were irritating, eye-crossing reminders of all the wasted nights and days and the impaired, lost people I had known in Angola.
The hack unlocked the cell door and took me downstairs to the visitors’ room by the arm.
“You want some cigarettes from the machine while we’re down?” he said.
I gave him some change from my pocket and sat on one side of the long board table across from Buddy. There were still grains of ice on his mackinaw, which hung on the back of his chair. His face was white with hangover, and his hand with the cigarette shook slightly on top of his folded arm.
“You have thunder in your eyes, Zeno,” he said.
“Room service was bad today.”
“I’m sorry, man. That’s a bad deal. I thought they’d just lighten your wallet a little bit.”
“It could have been worse. They might have tried for drunk driving.”
He paused and looked away.
“You want a butt?” he said.
“The screw’s bringing me a pack.”
“Hey, man, I didn’t mean to go over the edge last night.” His eyes came back into mine.
“Everybody was drunk. That stuff’s always comedy, anyway.”
“You want the guitar? The jailer said you can have it up there.”
“I better not. A couple of those characters would probably try to screw it,” I said.
“Look, I feel like a piece of shit about it.”
“Forget it. I’m going to take up yoga.”
“No, I mean getting it on about Beth.”
The guard put the package of Lucky Strikes in front of me, and I peeled away the cellophane from the top.
“I wouldn’t have brought it out like that unless my head was soaking in acid and booze. Shit, I know I can’t make up ba
I felt my face flush, and I didn’t want to look at his self-abasement.
“I haven’t been thinking about any of that,” I said.
“Man, I can read you. I know what you’re going to think before a spark even flashes across that guilt-ridden spot in the center of your brain. You’re going to tango out of here after your fifteen days, move out of the cabin, and start being a family man in Missoula with some bullshit guilt about old friends hung on your shirt like a Purple Heart.”
“You’ve got it figured a lot better than I do, then,” I said.
“Because I know you.”
“You don’t know diddly-squat, Buddy. The only thing I’ve got in mind is living two weeks upstairs with some question about what my parole officer is going to do with this. After that scene at the pulp mill, this could be the nut that violates me back to Angola.”
“Yeah,” he said, quietly mumbling, with the backs of his fingers against his mouth. “I hadn’t thought about that. That geek would probably do it, too. I didn’t tell you I went to high school with him. He has the IQ of a moth, a real pocket-pool artist. He would probably put you in the toilet just to close the file on you.”
Buddy had a fine way of making you feel better about the future.
“Maybe we can bring a little pressure to bear,” he said, his eyes still introspective. “My sister says he hangs around with a bunch of faggots in East Missoula.”
“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t do these things for me.” I could see the color coming back into Buddy’s face as his fantasy became more intense and the memory of last night and his discomfort in front of me started to fade into an ordinary day that he could live with.
“We always have alternatives, Zeno,” he said. “You can’t sit on a bunk all that time and worry about Louisiana and moving your baggage around and all this marital crap.”