James Burke - The Lost Get-Back Boogie

Buddy took a reefer stub from his pocket and lit it, holding the smoke down deep, his teeth tight together. He let out the smoke slowly and took another hit.

“Where did you get that?” I said.

“An Indian girl at Eddie’s. You want a snort?” He pushed in the cigarette lighter on the dashboard.

“Buddy, you’ve got enough shit in you now to make a time bomb out of your head.”

“Forget that crap, man. The only thing I could never pull down right was coke.” He placed the stub on the hot lighter and held it under his nose, sniffing the curl of smoke deeply into his head. “Look, I struck out with her back there, didn’t I?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hell yes, you know.”

“I never met your wife before. She said she had to take care of the kids.”

“That’s not what I mean, man, and you know it. Don’t give a con the con.”

“I was on the bandstand. I don’t know what went on between you.”

“But you know.”

“Come on, Buddy. You’re pulling me into your own stuff.”

“That’s right, Zeno. But you got an eye for looking into people. You tool around the yard, throwing the handball up against the wall, cool walk under the gun hack, but you’re clicking right into somebody’s pulse-beat.”

He knocked the lighter clean against the wind vane and rubbed it clean again on his shoe. There were red flecks in the corners of his eyes. This was the first time I had seen a bit of meanness come out in Buddy when he was high.

“Hell, Iry, I read your action when you first came in. All that southern-country-boy jive works cool on old ladies, but you know, man, and you’re digging everything I say.”

I was in that position where there is nothing to say, with no words that wouldn’t increase an unpleasant situation, and silence was equally bad. Then the bartender’s 1955 Chevrolet passed us in a roar of twin exhausts, a quick brilliance of headlights, and a scorch of black rubber as he shifted up and accelerated in front of us. The back draft and vacuum pushed my truck toward the shoulder of the road.

“Damn,” I said. “Does that fellow drive in demolition derbies or something?”

“That’s just Boyd Valentine airing out his gourd.”

“You have another stick?” I thought it was better that I smoke it and dump it if he had any more.

“That was the last of the souvenirs from the reservation. It was green, anyway. Think they must grow it in hog shit. Makes you talk with forked brain. Pull into the bar up there and I’ll buy a little brew for our crowd.”

The neon sign reflected a dull purple and red on the gravel and the cars and pickups in the parking lot. It was the same bar where we had gone my first night in Montana.

“Let’s pass, man,” I said. “We have some in the icebox, and I can go down the road later.”

“Pull in, pull in, pull in. You got to stop worrying about all these things.”

“I don’t think it’s too cool, Buddy.”

“Because you’ve got your head in the parole office all the time. Wait just a minute and I’ll bop on out with the brew.”

I parked the truck on the edge of the lot by the road, and Buddy walked inside, his balance deliberate like a sailor’s on a ship. I smoked a cigarette and watched a few raindrops strike against the windshield. A long streak of lightning quivered in the blackness off a distant mountain, and I nicked my cigarette out into the moist, sulfurous air. Well, to hell with it, I thought, and went inside after him.

It was crowded, and the barstools were filled with cowboys and mill workers bent over into the poker dice, punchboards, and rows of beer bottles. Buddy was standing in front of a table with a beer in his hand, talking with three rawboned men and their wives, who were as bovine and burned with wind and sun as their husbands. They had empty steak plates in front of them, streaked with gravy and blood, and while Buddy talked, they tipped their cigarette ashes into the plates with a kind of patient anger that they kept in with only the greatest stoicism. Buddy must have played the Ray Charles number on the jukebox, because I didn’t think anyone else in the place would have, and his speech was already full of hip language that raised up and down with the song while his hand tapped against the loose change in his slacks. He was on the outer edge of his high, and Bird Parker rhythms were working in his head, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

“Well, that’s your scene, man, and that’s copacetic,” he said. “And the old man has got his scene, too. And that’s cool. He just turns over his action a little different. It’s a matter of understanding what kind of scene you want to build and which kind of cats you want in on it—”

I went to the bar and asked if Buddy had put in an order to carry out.

“That’s it waiting on the end of the counter when you’re ready to leave, mister,” the bartender said.

I picked up the cardboard case of beer from the bar and walked over to Buddy with it.

“My meter’s running overtime,” I said.

“Just a minute. There’s a delicate metaphysical point involved here.”

“What’s involved is our ass.”

“Set it down. Let’s clear this question up. Now, if that stink plant down there invested some money in a purification system, the valley wouldn’t smell like it just had an enema, and they could supply all kinds of copacetic toilet paper all over the world.”

One man, with a bull neck, iron eyebrows, and his shirt lapels pressed and starched flat, looked at Buddy with a stare that I would never want to have turned on me. The thick veins in his neck and brow were like twisted pieces of cord. He breathed deeply in his chest, almost clicking with a stunted anger, and his thumb knuckle rubbed back and forth on the oil cover of the table. He blinked and looked at a far spot on the wall.

“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 drunken 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.”