The Bartender's Tale (10 page)

“Hold on to yourself a minute, okay? I need to get a bottle from in back.” Pop signaled me with the slightest jerk of his head and I followed him to the back room.

The instant we were there, he said low enough for only me to hear: “He’s gonna drink himself blotto. Call Dode.”

I dialed the ranch number, letting it ring about twenty times as you have to when a rancher is in the lambing shed. Finally the familiar voice answered, sounding testy, and I hurriedly said who I was and why I was calling: “My father thought you’d better know Canada Dan is in here.”

“He’s
what
? The phone line practically sizzled. “We’re still in the middle of lambing! What’s he doing in town?”

“Getting drunk as fast as he can.”

There was a silence and then a burst of swearing that swelled to the question, “What in hell brought this on?”

“Dan says you, uhm, ran him off the place.”

“Silly son of a bitch.” Shocked, I nearly dropped the phone before realizing that meant Canada Dan, not me. “I only told him to get out of my sight when I found out about those lambs. I figured he’d stew in his wagon until I cooled down. Tell your dad not to let the idiot get too boozed up before I get there.”

For the next while, Pop kept up a conversation with an increasingly slurred Canada Dan. The sheepherders of the Two Medicine country were a familyless tribe, single men with kinks in their lives that sent them into the hills like hermits for months on end and then deposited them in town to drink up their wages as fast as possible. Canada Dan was only one of the more habitual of the many who passed through the Medicine Lodge in the course of a year, the saloon and the Top Spot cafe and cheap rooms at the back of the hotel their way stations before the last stop of all, the cemetery on the hill overlooking Gros Ventre. “They’re just waiting for the marble farm,” Pop set me straight when I once said something about always having smelly old sheepherders around the joint, “and they’ll get there soon enough.” Canada Dan looked halfway there now as he hoisted his shot glass to his lips with a trembling hand. I slowly wiped down booths and fiddled with other chores so I could watch what would happen when Dode Withrow got hold of him.

Something of the sort must have been in the back of Canada Dan’s mind, too. “Here’s what I owe, ain’t it.” He shoved some money along the bar toward Pop and jammed the rest of it in his nearest pocket. “I’m going down to the Falls,” he declared, as if Great Falls was on the next block, instead of ninety miles away. “See what’s happening on First Avenue South.” Even I knew that was the wino district where whores hung out.

“Are you,” Pop said, as if he had heard this too many times. “How you gonna get there?”

“Thumb.”

“Don’t be a horse’s ass.” Pop’s language was unusually strong. “You’ll freeze to death on the side of the road before anybody comes along to give you a lift.” Squinting toward the street in vain for any sign of Dode, he resorted to direct diplomacy. “Just go over there in a booth and simmer down, why don’t you, and I’ll bring you some more bar grub and another drink.”

“Nope. I’m going, you watch and see,” the herder lurched off his bar stool and unsteadily pointed himself in the direction of the door. “Had enough of old Dode and his dead lambs.”

“Damn it, you’re not going anywhere in this weather.” Pop came around the end of the bar to head him off. Canada Dan was toddling off toward the door, his gait as rolling as a sailor’s, when he hit the glare from the snowfield outside, and with a grunt flung up an arm just as Pop reached him. To my horror, his elbow clouted Pop smack in the eye, knocking him off balance and sending him to his knees with a sickening “Uhh.”

“Pop!” I squealed in fright, throwing my dust rag away and tripping over myself in my rush to him. “Are you okay?”

That was the dumbest of questions, with him down on all fours and groaning in pain, but the sight of my father so vulnerable in the barroom that was his kingdom shook me to my roots. My imagination had never even come close to this. I was afraid to touch him for fear of what I’d find when that eye was revealed.

Blinking in confusion, Canada Dan swayed over him. “You hurt yourself, Tom?” he asked considerately.

“What in blazes is going on in here?”

Dode Withrow had just now come in, stopping short at the sight of tottering sheepherder and paralyzed boy, both useless as bumps on a log, hovering over the figure of Pop struggling up onto one knee. “Get out of the way.” The rancher was a portrait of temper in a plaid mackinaw as he roughly pushed the two of us aside and grappled Pop onto his feet. “What did the son of a bitch do to you, Tom?”

Both hands covering his eye, Pop gasped to steady his breath. “Dan’s crazy bone got in my way, is all,” he managed. “These things happen.” Mustering himself, he directed: “Get me some ice in a towel, Rusty.” And to Canada Dan: “How about planting your stupid butt over there in a booth like I told you?”

“Hunky-dory,” the herder said, as if he was the soul of cooperation, and staggered over and sat down.

With Dode and me helping to steer him, Pop made it to the amen corner and dropped onto the high-backed stool there, clasping the ice pack to his eye. “Don’t take a fit,” he told us, mostly me, “see, it’s only a shiner.” It was going to be spectacularly that, all right, a real raccoon job of a black eye. I was relieved, but still shaken, too, aghast over that image of him collapsed on the floor until Dode helped him up. As a unit, the three of us looked across the room to the booth where Canada Dan was mumbling his trials to the Buck Fever Case in the picture on the wall. “I hung on to the ess of a bee until you could get here,” Pop told Dode in a resigned exhalation, “he’s yours to deal with now.”

Dode studied the hunched-up herder a trifle longer, then offered: “What do you say I just take him outside and beat the living daylights out of him?”

“You know better than that.”

“Yeah, I’m afraid I do.” The weary sheep raiser grimaced and headed over to the booth, shaking his head. “This is the damnedest year.”

Canada Dan addressed him indignantly as he approached. “Couldn’t wait to track me down and hand me my pay, huh? Write ’er out.”

“I will like hell,” Dode said back to him angrily as he slid into the opposite side of the booth. “I need a herder with those sheep. Even if it’s you.”

Canada Dan sniffed. “I ain’t said I’ll work for you ever again, have I.” He sat in woozy dignity before demanding: “How come you didn’t tell me it was gonna snow so goddamn much?”

“I didn’t catch up with the forecast,” Dode said in a dead voice. “Midge and me were in Great Falls at a woolgrowers’ meeting and didn’t get back until late. Never gave it a thought we’d get dumped on this time of year.”

“That wasn’t any too bright of you.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

Long silence.

“You still sore at me for losing them lambs?”

“No more than I was.”

Longer silence.

“That’s sore enough, ain’t it.”

“Yeah, it’ll do. You ready to quit tearing the town up and go back to the ranch?”

“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” Wobbling to his feet, Canada Dan called over to where we were watching: “Sorry if I inconvenienced you any, Tom.”

“It could happen to a nun,” Pop said past his ice pack.

The two of us watched through the plate-glass window as the unsteady herder put his arm over his eyes against the glare of the snow and let Dode lead him to the car. Then Pop winced and took a look at his mostly shut discolored eye in the breakfront mirror, and said to my distressed reflection: “Better get at the mopping, so we can open the joint on time.”

—

THIS GOES TO SHOW
you how much I knew about handling the embarrassment of a black eye. I’d have been sick with mortification until the telltale mark of a losing battle was fully gone. Not Pop. He practically turned that record shiner into a public attraction, imperturbably tending bar in the same style as ever and answering the obvious question by saying no more than, “Hey, you should have seen the other guy.” And guess what, in the course of all the razzing he took about learning when to duck, customers often had a second drink or a third. “Business has picked up, kiddo,” he reported in my bedroom doorway, untying his bow tie with a flourish, a week or so after the incident in the barroom. “I probably should cut Canada Dan in on the proceeds, but I’m not gonna.”

Relieved as I was at that outcome, it still bothered me to see him going around with that doozy of a shiner, which turned various sickening colors on its gradual route to fading. On the other hand, he hadn’t vanished on a trip since that nightmare one at the start of the year, so if I didn’t have an unblemished father, I at least had one steadily on the premises. Even the weather improved now that the winter that threatened never to leave finally went away for the next thirty years or so, and spring, what little was left of it, settled in.

True, it rained notably more than usual as June approached, but that merely revived the old saying among the customers in the barroom that in Montana too much rain is just about enough, and beside our house, English Creek ran high and lively and Igdrasil greened up in cottonwood glory. I sprouted, too. Almost before I knew it, I awoke one morning a year older than when I had gone to bed. Twelve at last, which immediately felt tremendously better than being merely eleven. In my newfound maturity, I managed to sound enthusiastic—if not totally sincere—about the new fishing pole Pop gave me for my birthday.

The better present was school letting out for the summer. A kid’s dream, always, an entire untouched season of liberated days ahead. By habit and inclination I right away all but moved into the back room of the Medicine Lodge, spending as much of my time as I wanted casually listening in at the vent or practicing basketball shots or building model planes or entertaining myself any of the other ways an only child so well knows how, while Pop’s performance of his bar duties went on as clocklike reliable as ever on the other side of the wall. This was how I always wanted things to be, and at last in this peculiar year, here they were, along with summertime and every new day of nature’s making.

Therefore I was unprepared, soon into those first days of freedom, when Pop came back from a meal at the Top Spot, the cafe down the street that was best described as reliably mediocre, with news of a major change. We invariably ate supper at the Spot, although usually separately, because he needed to grab an early bite before his evening of tending bar.

“New couple bought the place,” he reported while slitting open a whiskey case in the back of the saloon. They were Butte people, and his guess was that Pete Constantine, the husband and cook, had been in some kind of scrape—a lot of things could happen in Butte—and the wife, Melina, was determined that the cafe would keep his nose clean, as Pop put it. “I hope to hell they make a go of it. The food’s not any better, but at least it’s no worse.”

Straightening up, he flicked his lighter and lit a cigarette, cocking a look at me in my favorite perch up there on the landing, where I was gluing a challenging twin-tail assembly onto my latest model aircraft, a P-38 Lightning fighter plane. His black eye was down to a greenish purple that I had now almost grown used to. “Guess what. They got a kid about your age.”

Aw, crud
, was my first thought. Every youngster knows the complication of such a situation, the burden of being expected to make friends with a new kid just because he was new. Why weren’t twelve-year-olds entitled to the same system as adults, to merely grunt to any newcomer, “How you doing?” and go on about your own business?

“What’s his name?” I asked with total lack of enthusiasm.

“Go get yourself some supper”—Pop blew a stream of smoke that significantly clouded the matter—“and find out.”

As soon as I walked in, the Spot showed it had indeed changed, because Melina Constantine herself was behind the counter in the cleanest waitress apron the cafe had seen in ages. Mrs. Constantine was squat and built along the lines of a fireplug, but with large, warm eyes and a welcoming manner. She greeted me as if I were an old customer—actually, I was—and plucked out the meal ticket Pop had just inaugurated. Activity in the kitchen sounded hectic, and her husband, the cook, hurried past the serving window, giving me a dodgy nod. No kid my age was in sight, which was a relief.

“Now then, Russell,” Mrs. Constantine said, smiling in motherly fashion as I hoisted myself onto my accustomed stool at the end of the counter, “what would you like for supper? The special is pot roast, nice and done.”

Her smile dimmed a bit when I ordered my usual butterscotch milk shake and cheeseburger, but she punched the meal ticket without saying anything.

Wouldn’t you know, though, muffled conversation was taking place in the kitchen, and from where I sat, I could just see the top of a dark mop of hair as someone about my height stood waiting while Pete, cook and father rolled into one, dished up a plate of food and instructed that it all be consumed. I heard the new kid groan at the plateload.

Listening in, Mrs. Constantine beamed in my direction again and provided, “You’re about to have company.” I waited tensely as you do when someone from a different page enters the script of your life. Would he be hard to get along with? Would I?

The kitchen’s swinging door was kicked open—it took a couple of thunderous kicks—and, meal in hand as if it weighed a tragic amount, out came a girl.

“Hi,” she said faintly.

“Hi,” I said identically.

Zoe was her name, and she seemed to come from that foreign end of the alphabet, a Gypsy-like wisp who slipped past me to a table in the back corner before I finished blinking. Her mother corrected that in nothing flat. “Russell, I’ll bring yours over to the table, too, if you don’t mind.”

You bet I minded. All my years in Gros Ventre, I had been contentedly eating supper at the counter. In the manner of old customers, I felt I owned that spot at the Spot. But tugboat that she was, Mrs. Constantine had me maneuvered into changing seats before I could think of a way out of it. “Sure, I guess,” I muttered, and reluctantly slid off my prized stool to go over to make friends, as grown-ups always saw it, or to meet the opposition, as kids generally saw it.