The Lost Get-Back Boogie by James Lee Burke

Author:James Lee Burke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 1986-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

I couldn’t sleep that night. I smoked cigarettes in bed, then went out on the porch with a half glass of Four Roses, sat in the chill, and watched a herd of deer graze their way across the meadow toward the canyon. They were sculptured in the moonlight and the wet grass, and when an automobile passed out on the highway, I could see a brown glass eye flash at me from the darkness. Through the pines the wide expanse of the Bitterroot River was dripping with a blue shimmer. I drank the whiskey and tried to keep the shell casing in the plastic bag out of my mind, but I couldn’t. I was angry at my carelessness, my failure to count the hulls as they had ejected from the chamber, and the fact that an inconsequential thing, a spent cartridge, could put me back in prison for years.

I don’t know when I fell asleep in the chair, but I smelled the smoke just before the false dawn. In my whiskey dream I thought it was pine wood burning from a chimney, but then I heard the horses whinnying and rearing and crashing inside the stalls. The flames were already up one side of the barn, the sparks whipping across the shingled roof, and the loft was framed in a bright square of yellow light from inside. On the dirt road I heard a truck clank hard into gear and thunder across the cattle guard. I ran barefoot into the cabin and shook Buddy by the shoulders in bed.

“What the hell’s going on, man?”

“Your barn’s on fire.”

We started running across the field just as a single flame cut through the roof and caught the air and sucked a large hole downward in a shower of sparks. Lights were going on all over the main house, and I saw Mr. Riordan run off the front porch without a shirt on. The hay bales that had been stacked against one wall of the barn were turning into boxes of flame, and the aviary was filled with flickering yellow light and shadows and the wild beating of birds’ wings in the cages.

“The horses,” Mr. Riordan shouted.

Their screams were terrible. I could hear their hooves slashing into the wood, and even in the smoke and the heated absence of air I could smell the singed hair.

The rope pulley on the loft caught fire from the heat alone and burned away like a solitary thread of flame. Buddy’s three younger brothers ran into the lot behind their father in their pajamas, their eyes wide with fear and uncertainty, the skin of their faces red with the glowing heat.

“Soak blankets and bring them running, boys,” Mr. Riordan said, then started through the barn door.

“Get out of there, Frank,” Buddy yelled.

The cinders and ash fell across Mr. Riordan’s bare shoulders and back as he walked toward the stalls with his forearm held across his eyes.

“That crazy old son of a bitch,” Buddy said.

I don’t know why—maybe because I didn’t think about it—but I went in behind him.

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