The Lost Get-Back Boogie by James Lee Burke
“It’s the only living I have, and I was flat broke.”
“Maybe we could have worked that out, but you should have reported in before you took the job. It would have cost you one telephone call.”
“Let’s get the rest of it out of the way, too,” I said. “I’ve got a gig over in Thibodaux for twenty-five bucks a night. There’s no fights and the cop at the door doesn’t let hookers in and I leave there sober after we finish.”
I felt like a child explaining his conduct to an adult.
“Why did you do that? Why did you decide that you couldn’t trust me?”
“Mr. Mouton, it wasn’t a matter of trust. I was simply broke.”
“But you think the parole office is something to use evasion on.”
I had to catch my anger and humiliation in my throat before I spoke again. My unlit cigarette trembled in my fingers, and the other ex-convicts on metal waiting chairs and parole officers and secretaries in the room were listening to our conversation with an oblique, withdrawn enjoyment.
“I can’t do anything else except hustle jugs on a doodlebug crew or carry hod, and they’re not hot to hire ex-cons in the union,” I said.
He stroked lines with a ballpoint pen on his note pad.
“I don’t know,” he said. He was taking out every ounce of blood that he could. “I talked with your brother yesterday. He said he could get you a job on a well test in Opelousas.”
A well-test job in the oil field meant stringing flange pipe through a filthy sump hole for seventy-five cents an hour, and the job usually entailed only the day of the well’s completion, which meant that it was no job at all.
“He didn’t tell me about it,” I said.
“It’s there if you want it.”
I lit the cigarette and leaned closer to him on my elbow with the butt touching against my brow. He didn’t like the directness of the position, and he opened a side drawer in his desk as though he had forgotten a form or part of my file.
“Do I get violated back to Angola, or do we just play badminton awhile?” I said.
He wasn’t good at that kind of encounter, and after he had pushed back the desk drawer with a slow, flat hand and ticked his thumbnail along the edge of my file, he said: “Your transfer will probably come through in a week. Everything I sent into Baton Rouge was positive, and I made a case for your war record. But you don’t play in any more bars until you leave Louisiana, and then you’re somebody else’s responsibility.”
I looked at him blankly and sat back in the chair.
“That’s it, Iry. You’re cut loose,” he said.
The letter came from Baton Rouge three days later. I had four weeks to settle my affairs and report in to the parole and probation office in Missoula. Ace had transferred the title of the pickup to me, and I had $275 saved from my two jobs. I pushed my sleeping bag and tent with the wood supports wrapped inside the canvas behind the front seat and loaded a big box of canned stew meat, corned beef, bread, sardines, and soda crackers in the truck bed and stretched a tarpaulin over the sides.
The next morning I was rolling through the piney woods of east Texas, with the mist still in the trees and the red clay banked on each side of the road. By Dallas the radiator was blowing steam from under the hood, and a kid in a filling station had to knock the cap off with a broomstick. I pushed it on through the scorching afternoon to Wichita Falls, where the water pump went out and I had to spend five hours in a tin garage that enclosed the heat and humidity like a stove. I ate a can of stew meat cold and started chewing on No-Doze south of Amarillo. I should have pulled into a roadside park to sleep, but I was hooked on the highway and the combination of beer and No-Doze now, and I knew that I could roll it all the way to Denver.
The accents began to change in the filling stations and the truck stops, and then in the early dawn I saw the first mesa in the Panhandle. It rose out of the flat country like a geological accident, its edges lighted with a pink glow, the eroded gullies filled with purple shadow. The cotton and cornfields were behind me now, and also the patent medicine and MARTHA WHITE’S SELF RISING FLOUR SIGNS, the vegetables and watermelons sold off the backs of trucks along the roadsides, the revival tents set back in empty pastures, the South itself. It simply slipped past me over some invisible boundary that had nothing to do with geographical designation, and then it was Dalhart and Texline, where the grain silos stood gray against the hot sky and clouds of dust, and finally Raton, New Mexico.
I was in a stupor from the No-Doze and case of beer that I had drunk in the last twenty-four hours, and my eyes burned with the shimmer of heat off the blacktop. I put my head under a filling-station hose and let the water sluice down my neck and face and then ate a steak in the cafe. But I was finished. My hands, lined with the black imprint of the steering wheel, were shaking, my back ached when I walked, and I could still feel the truck’s engine vibrating up through my legs.
The filling-station operator said I could park my truck behind the building overnight, and I unrolled my sleeping bag in the bed and used the tarpaulin and my shirt as a pillow. For a while in the softness of the sleeping bag I was aware of the semis hissing air on the highway and shifting down for the long pull up Raton Pass; then I felt myself drop down into the smell of the canvas and the cool air against my face and a quietness inside me.
The next morning was like an infusion into the soul, a feeling that you can only have after you dissipate all the mental and physical energy in yourself, to the point that you know you will never return from it. And on this morning it was really the West. The town lay flat against the mountains, which climbed steadily out of brown hills into the high, green timber of the Rocky Mountain range. The broken streets of the town were lined with stucco and adobe houses, outbuildings, chicken yards, and junker cars with weeds growing up through the frames. Mexican kids roared along the sidewalks in roller-skate wagons, Indians with creased faces like withered apples waited in front of the state labor office for the doors to open, and the sky was alive with a green-blue magic that was so hard and beautiful that I had to blink a little when I looked at it.
But it was the mountains and the early light in the pines more than anything else. As I shifted down to second for the two-mile grade up Raton Pass, the mountains seemed to tumble one upon another ahead of me, bluer in the distance, spread across the sky in a broken monolith that should have cracked the earth’s edges. The needle on the temperature gauge was almost beyond the dash, and the gearshift was knocking in my palm when I crossed the Colorado state line at the top and rolled into the old town of Trinidad.
I bought two six-packs of Coors and pushed the cans deep into a sack of crushed ice on the floor, and highballed down the four-lane through Pueblo, a decaying, soot-covered town with plumes of ugly smoke rising from tin buildings, on up the steady incline toward Denver, with the mountains always blue and tumbling higher into the clouds on my left. Denver looked wonderful, filled with fir and spruce trees, green lawns and parks with tulip gardens. I ate Mexican food in a cafe north of town. Then it was Fort Collins and Cheyenne and a straight roll into the late red sun across the cinnamon-colored land of Wyoming toward the Montana line.
Deer grazed in the sparse grass, their summer coats almost indistinguishable in the fading purple light, and after dark I almost hit a doe and fawn that stood transfixed in my headlights by the side of the road. I picked up two drunk Indian hitchhikers, who both wore blue-jean jackets with two shirts underneath and sat pressed together in the cab in some type of isolation from me, passing a bottle of dago red back and forth. After we had driven fifty miles, they bothered to ask me how far I was going, and I told them I hoped to make it to Billings before I stopped. I saw their wine-stained teeth grin in the dashboard light.
“You better stay at my place tonight. You ain’t going to make it to Billings,” one of them said, and he took a cigarette off the dash without asking.
“Why can’t I make it to Billings?”
“Because you can??
I looked at him, but he had already lost attention and was staring into the cigarette smoke with his flat, obsidian eyes.
The sound of the engine hummed in my head, and the headlights briefly illuminated the names chiseled into the concrete faces of the bridges over dried-out riverbeds, MEDICINE BOW, PLATTE, SHOSHONI, each a part of something old and thundering with war ponies.
I stayed at the Indian man’s place that night, on the edge of the Big Horn Mountains. He had ten acres on the reservation and a Montgomery Ward brick house with a chicken yard and a few dozen rabbit hutches and the most beautiful Indian wife I had ever seen. They put blankets on the sofa for me and went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. The highway was spinning in my head, and I couldn’t close my hands. I walked across the chicken yard to the outhouse and then sat on the edge of the sofa and smoked cigarettes in the dark. The solitary electric bulb screwed into the ceiling clicked on, and the Indian stood above me in his socks and jockey shorts, with a line of black hair running up out of the elastic over his metallic stomach.
“You can’t sleep good, man?” he said.
“I just need to wind it down a little bit. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“We’ll go to the tavern and find you a girlfriend. Then we’ll drink some beer together and you’ll be all right.”
“I wouldn’t be good company for anybody right now.”
“You got some snakes crawling around? That ain’t no big thing. Lots of people on the reservation is like that. Come down to the tavern. You’ll see.”
“I’d better pass. But I appreciate it. I really do.”
“You got a race thing about Indian girls?”
“No, I’m not like that.”
“You’re a nice-looking guy. You ain’t a queer, either. You shouldn’t be traveling around without no woman.”
Then I didn’t know what to say. I put out my cigarette in an empty beer can and pushed my hand back through my hair, hoping that he would turn off the light and let it end there.
“I ain’t one to poke in your business, but I think your in-sides is all stove in,” he said. “I recognize it. Indians get like that before they kill themselves.”
“I was in the Louisiana pen. I guess I haven’t gotten used to rolling around loose yet. They say it takes a while.”
“Get up, Irene,” he said through the curtain that hung from the bedroom door.
“You don’t need to do that.”
“No, it’s all right, man. We’ll drink together and then you can sleep. I was in jail over in Deer Lodge. I got myself put in the hole so’s I could sleep. People was always yelling and banging iron doors all night.”
His wife came out in a robe and sat silently at the table while he pulled out the beer from the icebox. Her eyes were brown and quiet, the dark skin of one cheek still lined with the creases of the pillow, and I could see the tops of her olive breasts below the V of her robe. While we drank beer and rolled cigarettes out of a large Half and Half can, she looked flatly through the back window as though she were at the table as a feminine duty. On the third six-pack I began to perspire, and the control in my conversation and mind started to slip away in the yellow electric light, the match blisters on my fingers, and the confused sentences and beer cans covered with cigarette stubs.
I popped a pill to stay alive. But instead all the wrong tubes lighted up, and I went in and out of the conversation and all the half-formed lingering and unspoken ideas and finally over the edge into the memory of that Indian girl’s face. Her darkly beautiful eyes and the swirl of her black hair piled on her head flicked my mind, like the snap of a beer top, across the mountains and over the ocean to the soft clicking of bamboo shades and the dusky scent of a small Kabuki theater with the bottles of Nippon beer iced down in a bucket between me and the geisha waitress who dipped shrimp into a horseradish sauce with chopsticks and placed them in my mouth. I had been drinking for two days, my money was almost all gone, and I had three hours to report back to the hospital, but in my mind I had already resigned from the army, the war, and all the complexities that made it important for me to go back on the firing line. I finished the Nippon in the ice bucket, the mamasan sent the boy across the street for more, and the geisha girl heated sake for me in a cup over a candle flame while I watched the actresses in their white pancake makeup and red-painted eyes move across the stage in a whisper of flowered silk as though they were an extension of a drunken dream.
Then I realized that I hadn’t yet accomplished what I had set out to do. The bamboo shades clicked in the breeze through the windows, and I could hear the MPs rousting someone at the street corner. I snapped the cap off a Nippon with my pocketknife, got to my feet, and almost fell through a paper partition.
“You no drink more now,” the mamasan said. Her teeth were rotted, and she held her hand over her mouth when she talked. “You go back to hospital now.”
I ripped the shade off its fastening and leaned out the window. Two MPs had a drunk soldier pushed back against a wall on the corner with their sticks.
“No do that,” the mamasan said. “This not whorehouse. No bring Mike and Pat in here.”
I lobbed the bottle at them and watched it burst into foam and brown glass all over their spitshines and bleached leggings. They forgot about the soldier and looked around with their sticks clenched in their hands.
“Over here, girls,” I said, and I let another one fly, except this time I curled it in an arc along the wall so that it hit directly between them in a fountain of foam that splattered their trousers.
“You son a bitch,” the mamasan yelled at me.
“Come on, you candy-ass shiteaters,” I said through the window. “Get your balls fried in a skillet. We’ll give you a bayonet right up the ass that you can haul all the way back to the stockade.”
I pitched the other full bottles one after another into the street while the mamasan and the geisha girls pulled at my belt and slapped at me with rolled pillow mats and their hands.
The first MP into the room parted the reed curtain with his stick and held up a pair of handcuffs on his index finger. In the half-light through the door they looked like a piece of chain mail spangled around his fist.
“You have a telephone call outside,” he said.
“Hey, man, you better not drink no more,” the Indian said.
“What?” I raised my head from my forearms in the weak yellow light.
“You was making some terrible sounds.”
“I’m sorry.” His wife’s chair was empty, and the curtain to their bedroom was still swinging lightly back and forth. “What did—”
“She just ain’t used to white people. It ain’t important.” He grinned at me and exposed a gold tooth next to an empty black space in his teeth. “You got a long drive tomorrow.”
“Tell me what I did.”
“You was holding on to her hands. She couldn’t make you turn loose.” His smooth leather face and obsidian eyes were both kind and faintly embarrassed.
I picked up my can of beer and tried to walk out the back door to my truck. I hit the door jamb with my shoulder, and the can fell out of my hand on the porch. I felt the Indian touch me gently on the back and direct me toward the couch. Then while I sweated in my drunken pill-and-booze delirium on the edge of the cushions, with the sun turning the chicken yard and rabbit hutches purple in the new light, I heard the bugles blowing on a distant hill way beyond our concertina wire, and I knew that it was going to be a safe dawn because I was sitting out this dance and all the rest to follow.
FOUR
I highballed the pickup all the way from the Little Bighorn River to Missoula, with stops only for gas and hamburgers in between. Montana was so beautiful that it made something drop inside me. At first there were only plains with slow, wide rivers and cottonwoods along the banks and the sawtooth edge of mountains in the distance; then I started to climb toward the Continental Divide and the Douglas fir and pondero
I turned south into the Bitterroot Valley and followed Buddy’s map to his father’s ranch. The pasture land on each side of the road extended only a short distance into the mountains, which rose high and black into clouds torn with moonlight, and the Bitterroot River gleamed like a piece of broken mirror across the long sandbars and islands of willow trees. I got lost twice on rural roads, looking at names on mailboxes with a flashlight; then I found the right wire-hooped gate and cattle guard and rutted road up to his father’s place.
Buddy Riordan was working on a five-to-fifteen for possession of marijuana when I met him in Angola. He was a good jazz pianist, floating high on weed and the Gulf breeze and steady gigs at Joe Burton’s place in New Orleans, and then he got nailed in a men’s room with two reefers in his coat pocket. As a Yankee, he was prosecuted under a felony rather than a misdemeanor law, and the judge dropped the whole jailhouse on his head. He pulled five years on the farm, and he was one of the few there who was considered an outsider, a man who didn’t belong, by the rest of us who knew in the angry part of our souls that we had bought every inch of our time.