The Bartender's Tale (20 page)

“The house, too?”

That brought him up short. The mate to the Medicine Lodge, the way we had lived these whole six years, back and forth across the alley with the spreading bower of Igdrasil sheltering our universe. “It’s always gone with the joint,” he said cautiously, “that was the deal when I bought the business.” He must have seen me sag toward my shoe tops. “Don’t get in a sweat. We’ll see, we could maybe hang on to the house. For now, anyhow.”

“For now?” I stared the question at him: What did that mean?

“Let’s don’t worry about the house for now, is all I meant.” That seemed to me awfully thin reassurance. “We’ve got the joint to deal with, that’s why I had to lay it on you like this.”

The idea of life without the Medicine Lodge still stunned me, but there was something even more daunting to imagine beyond that. Pop without the Medicine Lodge in his daily life. The human race’s preeminent bartender without a bar to tend. Past the lump in my throat, I asked, “Wh-what will you do?”

“Oh, take life easy, I guess.” Which did not sound convincing, even to him. He rubbed the sleek wood of the breakfront a few moments. “Who knows, whoever buys the joint might need somebody to fill in now and then.”

This nightmare kept getting worse. My father’s plan for the rest of his life was to turn into Howie?

“Pop, that’s crazy,” I all but bawled, “you say you’re gonna sell the joint so you don’t have to bartend anymore, and then you turn right around and—”

“Hey, excuse me all to hell for thinking out loud.” He held up his hands to stop my torrent. “We’ll come up with something.” He attempted a smile that didn’t quite take. “Maybe I’ll quit smoking—that’d keep me occupied, right?” Seeing that didn’t convince me of his sanity, he tried again. “Go fishing whenever we want. Maybe we’ll take up fly-fishing.”

By now I was looking at him totally slack-jawed.

“Okay, okay, I don’t just know yet what we’ll do. One headache at a time.” He ran a hand through his hair, as if he could feel the streak of silver against the black. “Rusty, what I do know is time catches up with a person, and I’m trying to stay ahead of it a little.” Gazing around one more time from the long, dark bar to the bright-eyed creatures on the wall to the dazzling bottles of the breakfront, he shook his head again. “Nothing lasts forever.”

—

THE NEWS THAT
Tom Harry was putting the Medicine Lodge up for sale brought on lamentations of practically biblical dimensions.

“Aw, hell, Tom, what do you want to do a terrible thing like that for?” ran the general howl of complaint, usually expressed much more profanely than that, as customers from one end of the Two Medicine country to the other dropped in to pay tribute to the saloon they had always known. Bill Reinking smiled sadly and called it the end of an era. Velma Simms asked Pop if he had lost his mind. The sheepherders were stricken, faced with a future in which they might have to hang out in a merciless dump like the Pastime. Even the flyboys were disturbed, grousing that the only good thing about their hole-in-the-ground duty was being upended.

And Cloyce Reinking, in one of our last script run-throughs before she went on to dress rehearsals with the Prairie Players, departed from Lady Bracknell enough to let me know: “This town will be a poorer place without your father there in his spot.”

Listening at the vent after the news got around, I could tell the remarks were getting on Pop’s nerves. The first few days, he would make some vague reply whenever someone asked what he was going to do with the rest of his life, but after that, his standard answer was, “Retire from the human race.”

Zoe was as downcast as I was. She understood all too well what a change in the Medicine Lodge meant for us.

“It’s funny,” she said with a long lip, “your dad doesn’t want you in his business and mine can’t wait to put me to waitressing in the dumb cafe.”

“Yeah. That’s grown-ups for you. By the time we ever figure them out,” I despaired, “we’ll be them.”

“Won’t either,” she said crossly. “We’ve got our heads screwed on different than that.”

I had to hope so, did I ever. For there was one implication in Pop’s decision that possibly was worst of all, that I couldn’t bring myself to tell even Zoe about. That “for now” of his about at least keeping the house held a tremor I could feel in the distance, however near or far. It didn’t take any too much imagination to conjure Pop one day saying, as people in our part of the country did when their bones started aching some particular way, “You know what, we maybe ought to consider someplace warm. These winters are getting to be too much.” Someplace warm spelled only one thing to me, Arizona. Worse, Phoenix. The vicinity of Aunt Marge, our only known relative, in case something really bad happened to him in the onset of age and he could no longer bring me up by himself. Treacherous cousins and all else loomed in that, and if my mood could be depressed any further, that was guaranteed to do it.

We were on the landing, slumped at the desk, listless as puddles. Out front, at this early point of the afternoon, the barroom had no customers yet, but we could hear the small sounds of Pop puttering with things behind the bar, which he was doing a lot more of these days. The idle back room seemed to have caught a mood from the pair of us, rain slickers hanging slack, X-Acto knife looking dull and uninviting, model planes barely stirring in their suspended state. Attic of our imaginations, the big old expanse and its holdings had provided us with treasures beyond measure—costumery, an expanded vocabulary, a hundred bits we did, and of course, the listening post into the adult world. All of that, we knew disconsolately, was about to go. So were times together like this. My throat had been tight for days with that thought, and Zoe looked tragic most of the time now.

Dismally she whispered, “What’s going to happen to all the stuff?”

“I wish I knew.” Even Pop didn’t seem to. “Maybe it ought to go with the joint,” he wavered, “although it’s worth something if we hang on to it somehow. We’ll have to see how the cards fall.”

The familiar swish of the saloon’s front door roused us just enough to peek through the vent slats, more out of habit than interest, to see who had come in. Zoe and I made a face at each other. Mr. Snake Boots himself, Earl Zane, grinning from ear to ear.

“Hullo, tarbender.” We watched him approach the bar, swaggering like a crow. As usual, he was full of himself, and there was a lot of him to be full of. “How’s business at the old watering hole?”

“Drying up fast,” said Pop, as if present company accounted for that.

“Don’t worry your scalp, that’ll change real soon.” Earl straddled a bar stool, beaming into the breakfront mirror as usual. “I’ll buy it.”

“Buy what?” Pop glanced around the barroom for anything Earl could possibly afford.

“Your hearing going, Tom? The whole place. The Medicine Lodge.”

Pop snorted an explosive laugh, the first gust in a storm of mirth that left him clutching the bar for support. I thought he was never going to stop with it. His laughing fit was so infectious, Zoe and I had to stifle our own with hands over our mouths.

“Damn, Earl”—he gasped and wiped his eyes with a towel as he made his way to the beer tap—“that’s the best one you ever told.”

“I’m not joking,” Earl protested in a hurt tone. “You can’t understand plain English all of a sudden? I guess I got to say it again. I’ll buy you out, lock, stock, and barrel.”

Shaking his head, Pop drew a glass of Shellac by feel. “Sure you will. There’s only that one pesky little detail. What do you intend to use for money?”

“I’ll sell the gas station, natch.” He rolled his shoulders, as if luxuriating in newfound wealth. “Got it all penciled out. That and a mortgage will do the trick.” He confided triumphantly: “I already been by the bank.”

The three of us listening knew, in a single heartbeat, this was dire.

“I’ll be an ess of a bee,” Pop uttered in amazement. “You’re serious.” In the same tone of voice he used to tell me not to put beans up my nose, he told Earl: “You know, pouring drinks isn’t like pumping gas.”

The prospective buyer was offended. “I can pick that up along the way. You had to, sometime or other. C’mon, Tom, is the damn place for sale or isn’t it?”

I did not imagine this, and Zoe would back me up in saying so: Pop looked up at the vent and the invisible two of us, with apology in his eyes. Then he moved slowly toward Earl, pushing the glass of beer along the bar.

“I said it’s for sale, so it is. Set things up with the bank, and we’ll get going on the deal.”

—

HOW MANY WAYS
could life turn inside out in the same year?

Now the Medicine Lodge not only was going out of our existence, Pop’s and mine and Zoe’s, but was passing into the hands of the person who, if there were such an election, would be the strongest candidate for town fool. On top of that, although Pop hadn’t agreed to it yet, Earl Zane wanted the trove of hocked items to be included in the deal—“It’d get me my belt buckles back”—which would mean our beloved back room and its treasures would fall prey to that weenie Duane, while I would be across the alley eating my heart out.

I was haunted by what-ifs. What if I hadn’t had the bright idea of filling the swamper job myself, which somehow made my father envision me chained to the joint forever? What if the Great Falls beer makers hadn’t boosted our perfectly nice saloon into the select Shellac shrine of the whole damn state and prompted Bill Reinking’s newspaper story? What if Zoe and I had been caught at that blind bit in the ballpark and spoiled Pop’s big day—wouldn’t that have been better, in the end? It wore me out, thinking about everything. Oh, sure, you can’t undo what’s done, but that doesn’t necessarily get it off your mind. Past actions, guileless at the time, seemed to have a habit of ambushing later on, and that was greatly unnerving to a twelve-year-old sensibility. Suppers with Zoe turned into one long, glum wish list, each of us coming up with muttered hankerings for this or that to happen and miraculously set matters right again. Eyeing us mumbling into our meals that way, her parents plainly wondered what had gotten into us now.

Even Earl Zane had enough sense to agree with Pop that the sale of the saloon ought to be kept quiet until the absolute last minute. He admitted he had a few details yet to corral, such as working out final terms with the Californian who wanted to buy the gas station because he’d heard the Two Medicine country was such swell fishing, while Pop did not want to face the real howls of the imbibing community when they found out who would be taking over the Medicine Lodge. As soon as Earl strutted out the door that day, Pop was in the back room instructing Zoe and me to keep our lips zipped about what we’d just heard. “It’s not a secret, exactly, we just don’t want anybody to know about it until we say so, got that?” At least in that he was talking our language, and it was nothing for us to stay mum to the whole world, except for each other and our supper plates, for the ten days until the sale of the saloon was to be made final. Coincidentally, that was also opening night of
The Importance of Being Earnest
,
and Pop made what amends he could by promising to drive us to Valier to see the play. “Gives you a little something to look forward to, hey?” he tried, without much success, to lift our spirits.

The majority of those waiting days went somewhere while I still was in my fog of what-ifs, and when Saturday morning came again, I had to be forcefully reminded of my swamping duties.

With reluctance I took up the broom and mop and pail for what might be the last time and followed Pop into the silent barroom. To my further astonishment lately—what change would he think of next, plastic surgery?—he’d meant it about quitting smoking, and was down to half a pack a day. Every so often he would have a cigarette between his lips and be thumbing the lighter before he remembered, as he did now. With a quick, guilty glance in my direction, he snapped the lighter shut and tapped the cigarette back into the pack, knowing I was vengefully keeping count of his daily total. Weaning himself off nicotine left him cranky, which made two of us. Even the animal heads seemed gloomy, their eyes not yet brightened in the soft morning light.

Neither of us said anything as we began our chores. As ever, he was behind the bar doing this and that in a rhythm all his own, although I noticed he went at things solemnly. With a lump in my throat, I was sweeping near the front door when the doorknob rattled.

“We’re closed,” I called out rather shrilly.

The doorknob rattled some more.

“Pop, somebody wants in. Real bad, it sounds like.”

“That’s their tough luck,” he said, continuing to fuss behind the bar.

Now there was urgent knocking, so much so that I looked questioningly in Pop’s direction.

“Can’t they take a hint?” he grumbled. “Okay, if it’ll stop the racket, see who it is.”

I unlocked the door to someone no more than twice my age, but also twice my height and narrowly built, in sharply pressed tan slacks and a shirt with all kinds of pockets and flaps, as if he were on a safari. With reddest red hair topping that slender build, he looked like a man-size matchstick. He gave me and my broom an uncertain smile, then a lit-up one to Pop.

It took more than the latest odd variety of tourist to faze my father. “The joint’s not open yet, chum,” he called from behind the bar. “Come back in a couple of hours and I can take care of whatever ails you so bad.”

“Actually, I’m not trying to buy a drink.” The voice was as reedy as the rest of this apparition. He slipped past me and up to the bar in about four steps. “Are you Tom Harry?
The
Tom Harry?”

“The only one I know of. What makes you ask?”

The redheaded stranger smiled even more brightly. “Sir, it’s such an honor simply to be in your presence. And what a break for me. If I hadn’t found you, I hate to think—” He clucked at what a tragedy that would have been. Gazing around the barroom as if it were an uncovered temple, he began in a spellbound tone: “I’m Del Robertson of the Missing Voices Oral History Project at the Library of Congress, and—”