James Burke - The Lost Get-Back Boogie

I heard a shotgun go off across the meadow, and before I could set down the guitar and walk to the window, there were three more reports and then a chain of five cracks in a row that must have come from an automatic without a plug in it. I threw open the door and the snow blew in my face, but I could see the individual flashes of the guns in the aviary, a lick of flame and sparks against the darkness of the mountain beyond. There was a pause while they must have reloaded, and then another roar of noise and streaks of fire that looked like a distant night scene from the war.

Jesus God, I thought.

I could hear the birds crying in their cages and the splatter of shot against the wire and wood sides. The only gun in the cabin had been the Springfield, which Buddy had buried, and as I stood there with my coat half on, I felt suddenly impotent to do anything about the terror that was going on in the aviary. But I went anyway, running across the dry grass that protruded through the snow, my chest beating with a fear that I hadn’t felt since Heartbreak Ridge. The cold air cut like a razor in the dryness of my mouth and throat, and in my feeling of nakedness in that bare field under the moon I prayed desperately that something would happen before I got there.

All the lights were on in the house now; there was a brief silence while the shots echoed away into the canyon, then one more solitary crack, and then I saw three men in silhouette running like stick figures with their guns for their truck, which they had parked on the far side of the house. They roared off with the cab doors still open, the tire chains ripping snow and frozen mud into the air.

I saw Pearl under the porch light, wearing only a brassiere and a pair of blue jeans, with a Winchester lever-action in her hands.

“You goddamn dirty bastards!” she yelled, and at the same time let off the round in the chamber. Then she worked the action and fired one round after another at the diminishing dark outline of the truck. But she got home with one, because a moment after the explosion from the barrel I heard the bullet whang into the metal like a ball peen hammer.

When I got to the porch, she was trying to pump free a spent cartridge that was crimped in the slide. Just as it ejected and she shoved another cartridge home, a pair of headlights came down the gravel road and bounced across the cattle guard, illuminating the truck that was headed out at a good fifty miles an hour.

Pearl aimed the Winchester against the porch post, her breath steaming in the air, the white skin of her shoulder already red from the recoil of the rifle. I slapped at the barrel and knocked it at a downward angle, and her face, which had been filled with murderous intent, suddenly went blank and looked at me as a surprised girl’s would have.

“That’s Buddy’s Plymouth,” I said.

The three men did a thorough job in the few minutes that they unloaded on the aviary. We could see the freezing tracks of their boots where they had walked to the fence and fired, and the empty shotgun shells that had melted with their own heat deep in the snow. They had loaded with precision to take care of everything living in the yard: their shells ranged from deer slugs and buckshot to BBs. They had laid down a pattern to kill, blind, or cripple every animal and bird within thirty yards. The deer slugs and buckshot had blown the cages into splinters, and the blood dripped through the floor wire in thick, congealing drops. The birds that had only been wounded twisted on their broken wings or quivered like balls of feathers in the snow. The bald eagle had been shot right through the beak, and he lay with his great reach of wings in a tangle of wire and birdseed.

The nutrias were at the far end of the yard. None of the birdshot had gotten through the other cages to them, but those twelve-gauge deer slugs, which were as thick as a man’s thumb, had flattened against the board side of their pen and hit them like canister. Their heads were torn away, their blue entrails hung in ropes out of their stomachs, and their large, yellow teeth were bitten into their tongues.

Mr. Riordan had on only his overalls and long-sleeved underwear with the bib hanging loose in front and the straps by his sides. He had put on a pair of unlaced leather boots without socks, and the snow and water squeezed over his ankles with each step as he walked back and forth through the aviary with a terrible rage on his face.

“That’s unbelievable,” Buddy said.

Mr. Riordan methodically knocked one huge fist against his thigh, and I was sure at that moment that he would have torn the lives out of those three men with his bare hands. His face was livid, his throat was lined with veins, and his gray eyes were so hot in the moonlight that I didn’t want to look at them. He bent over and picked up one of the wounded nutrias, and the dark drain of blood ran down his forearms before he placed it back in the shattered cage.

“Go back inside, Daddy,” Pearl said.

But he didn’t hear her. There was a heat inside his brain that must have made the blood roar in his ears. His chest began to swell up and down, as though his heart were palpitating, and I heard that deep rasp and click in his throat.

“It don’t do any good to stay out here now, Frank,” Buddy said.

“You don’t tell your father what to do,” Mr. Riordan said.

We stood in the silence and looked at him standing among the scattered bodies of the birds and the wet feathers that blew in the wind and stuck against his overalls. His gray hair was like meringue in the wash of moon that shone down over the canyon.

He coughed violently in his chest and bent forward to hawk and spit in the snow, as though he had some terrible obstruction in his throat. The vein in his temple swelled like a piece of blue cord. Then he coughed until he had to lean against one of the remaining cages for support.

“You better get him inside,” I said.

Still, Buddy and his sister and the others on the porch remained motionless.

“You better listen to me unless you want to put him in a box,” I said.

“Let him be,” Buddy said.

“You’re crazy. All of you are,” I said, and walked up to Mr. Riordan and put my hand under his arm. His long-sleeved underwear was wet with perspiration. He turned with me toward the house, the back of one hand against his mouth and the spittle that he couldn’t control. I heard Buddy walk up quickly behind us and take him by the other arm.

We led him up the steps and into the house and laid him on the couch. When Mrs. Riordan pulled off his boots, his feet were blue and covered with crystals of ice. The top button on his underwear had twisted loose, and I saw the flat, white scar where a bull’s horn had gone deep into his lung. He turned his head sideways on the pillow to let the phlegm drain from his mouth, and his wife pressed a towel into his hand and moved it up so he could hold it close to his face. I heard Pearl on the telephone in the kitchen, calling a doctor in Hamilton.

Buddy wiped the water out of his father’s hair with his hand, then began to brush at it with a shawl that was on the back of the couch. But Buddy’s hands were trembling, and his face had gone taut and pale. He took the blankets from his mother and spread them awkwardly over Mr. Riordan, then took the bottle of whiskey out of the cabinet.

“Don’t give him that,” I said.

“He’s cold,” Buddy said.

I took the bottle gently, and he released his fingers while he stared into my eyes with an uncomprehending expression.

“Why not?” he said.

“It’s just no good for him,” I said.

I looked at Mr. Riordan’s ashen face, his lips that had turned the purple color of an old woman’s, and his great knuckles pinched on the top of the blankets, and wondered at how time and age and events could catch a man so suddenly.