The Bartender's Tale (3 page)

I looked all around the yard for a dog or a cat. Nothing barked and nothing meowed.

Then the horrible thought hit me. Maybe Pop had another kid, another version of me, waiting there in the house, that he had spared telling me about until now. Which meant I would have a brother or a sister to compete with for his affection, to call it that. How was that in any way fair?

I asked fearfully: “Who’s . . . who’s Ig-somebody?”

“The tree, savvy?” I watched in relief but still some confusion as he stepped over and patted the enormous wrinkled trunk. “Had a customer in the old days,” he shook his head, remembering, “Darius Duff, how’s that for a name? He was kind of a political crackpot, but he knew things. He’d start feeling his oats after enough drinks, and one time he got going on Igdrasil, the tree of existence. It’s an old Norskie legend, according to him. I can’t do his Scotch brogue, but the words stuck with me. ‘Igdrasil,’” he recited, squinting to get the words exactly right, “‘the tree of existence. Its roots watered by the fates of past, present, and future. Its top reaching to heaven and stirring the colors of the rainbow. Its bower spreading over the whole universe.’” Gazing up at the mighty expanse of green leaves and gray bark, he shook his head again. “When I bought the joint and the house, the biggest tree in town came along with. That’s Igdrasil for you.” He met my blinking gaze. “I know it’s a headful, but you’ll catch up with it someday. Come on, let’s see if the house is still standing.”

My new home looked as aged as Igdrasil, gray and knotty in its own way. The outside hadn’t tasted paint for a good many years, while the interior was well kept but as old-fashioned as the time it was built, with a dreary parlor and a milkmaid room off the kitchen and those high ceilings of the Victorian era that defied rationale and heating system alike. Perched as it was on a stone foundation of enough height to allow for a dirt cold-cellar where people used to store the canning and potatoes, the house had a cool, earthy smell, even on a summer day like this.

“So, kiddo, this is it,” Pop said as he dumped our belongings by the stairway at the end of the hall and lit up a cigarette. He blew out a wreath of smoke and his brows went up an inch. “Got something for you. Let’s go out back.”

At last! My reward for waiting through a welcoming party of sheep, an excursion through the saloon, and meeting the king of all trees. Nearly skipping with excitement, I followed him through the dining room and the kitchen and into the backyard. At the end of the driveway sat an old car, long and black as a hearse, but no soapbox racer was parked anywhere that I could see. Well, of course, something that precious would be kept in the garage, wouldn’t it? I looked around for the garage. There wasn’t one.

“Here you go.” Pop reached back inside the porch doorway and pulled out a junior-size fishing pole. “All yours. Now, all you have to do is give the fish hell, day after tomorrow.”

An awful truth descended on me as I unsurely held the awkward gift. “Is it going to be a, uh, fishing derby?”

He gave me a look. “What did you think it’d be, a Sunday-school picnic?”

There is that memorably rueful line in Shakespeare,
The soldier’s pole is fall’n.
Despite my effort to be stoic, my newfound one definitely drooped.

Somewhat belatedly, I remembered manners. “Gee, Pop. Thanks. Can I try it out?” English Creek chattered past only a strong cast away, if a person knew how to cast.

“Not here,” he shook his head decisively, “the creek’s too roily. I’ll take you to the real place tomorrow. Come on back inside, we need to get you squared away.”

I followed him in and upstairs, to a warren of bedrooms; the house went with the saloon, I learned, so the original Medicine Lodge owner must have sired a batch of children. Pop thought for a moment and assigned me a room at the back, farthest from his own at the head of the stairs, on the theory that I wouldn’t be disturbed when he came in at all hours from bartending. A bedroom of my own eased disappointment about the lack of a soapbox racer somewhat; at least for now I was under the same roof with my singular father, rather than the world’s worst cousins.

But I could see his mood change markedly while we were putting away my things. He had a habit of squinting while thinking, his eyebrows drawing together until they nearly met. The deeper the squint, the deeper the thought. Whatever was on his mind now appeared bottomless. After kicking my suitcase under the bed—not far enough under to suit me—he stood there facing me, running a hand through the gray streak in the middle of his hair.

“Listen, Rusty,” he said, as if I hadn’t been all ears since the instant he showed up in the Phoenix doorway. “The joint takes damn near every hour I have, day and night, so I can’t be playing nursemaid to you all the time, right? You can stand your own company, can’t you?”

“Sure, I guess.”

“You don’t miss Danny and Ronny?”

“Huh-uh. I hate their guts.”

“That’s pretty much what I figured.” He muttered, “Too bad they didn’t run down Arvin’s leg.”

“Too bad they didn’t what, Pop?”

“Never mind. You’re here now, that’s what counts.” He started to say something more, then gruffly broke off to: “Dress warm tomorrow for fishing.”

—

TOMORROW CAME
all too soon. Pop must have believed fish got up before dawn. Cats were just then scooting home from their nightly prowls, eyes glittering at us in the Hudson’s headlights, as he drove out of town and onto a gravel road that seemed to go on and on. I was more asleep than awake when eventually he stopped the car. “Here it is. Set your mouth for catching fish.”

Groggily I climbed out after him, and Montana opened my eyes for good.

The Rocky Mountains practically came down from the roof of the continent to meet us. The highest parts lived up to their name in solid rock, bluish-gray cliffs like the mightiest castle walls imaginable, with timber thick and dark beneath and the morning sky boundless beyond. Canyons, mysterious by nature, led off between the awesome rims of stone. I know now that the clear air and time of day made it all seem so wonderfully near and distinct; in the first morning of the world the light must have been like that.

Such was my introduction to the Two Medicine country, larger than some eastern states and fully as complicated. The Two, taking its name from the Two Medicine River in ancestral Blackfeet land some thirty miles north of town, was an extravagant piece of geography in all directions. The sizable canyon of the river cutting through the eastward plains was joined by a succession of fast-running creeks, with generous valleys nicely spaced along the base of the mountains. Benchlands flat as anvils and dramatically tan as buckskin separated these green creek valleys, while to the west, the peaks and crags of the Rockies went up like the farthest rough edge of everything. The Two Medicine National Forest began in the foothills and stretched up and over the Continental Divide, and that forest grazing land and the wild hay in the creek bottomlands had made the Two Medicine country a historical stronghold of sheep ranching, with one huge cattle ranch, the Double W, thrown in for contrast. That restless landscape working its way up to the summit of the continent seemed to me then a dramatic part of the earth, and still does.

Taking in the view between assembling our fishing poles, having a cigarette, and drinking coffee from a thermos, my father summed up the surroundings in his own way: “Nature. Damn hard to beat.”

What he was viewing most appreciatively, I suspected, was the body of blue water in the foreground, so big that it stretched around the nearest mountain and out of sight. RAINBOW RESERVOIR, according to the sign at the edge of the lake. I was to learn that the dirt dam of the reservoir—rezavoy, Pop pronounced it—impounded the South Fork of English Creek, there at the canyon that rounded the towering rimrock called Roman Reef. At the time, it was simply an oversize fishing hole I had been dragged to.

Rocks large enough to stand on lined the inner curve of the dam, and Pop scrambled down to the water’s edge, with me following uncertainly. Perching us on a boulder that seemed to suit him, he blew into his hands to warm them and began fiddling with our fishing poles and a bait can. “This is just our secret, got that?” He glanced around, even though there wasn’t a sign of anyone for miles, then carefully shook out a few of the grayish slimy contents onto the rock and started cutting small strips with his jackknife. “Fish knock each other’s brains out trying to get to these.”

“What are they?” In what I hoped was the spirit of fishermanliness, I picked one up to examine it, drippy and sort of oozing though it was.

“Chicken guts.”

I determinedly did not puke. Close, though. Pop busied himself showing me how to hold the fishhook steady by its shank and work the hunk of icky bait past the barb so that it covered the shine of the hook.

Trying it, I was nervous and stuck myself. I yelped, and tears started.

“Cripes, don’t bawl,” he soothed, getting me to wash the spot of blood off my finger in the frigid lake. “Stick it in your mouth and it’ll stop bleeding. Here, I’ll bait up for you, this once.”

I sucked on the finger and sniffled myself dry, watching as he took up his pole, fussed with the line and reel, drew back, and sent the hook and sinker sailing to where the fish were dreaming of chicken guts. “Now you try.”

Awkwardly I whipped my pole and the line plooped into the water about six feet from the bank. “That’s a start,” he commended my effort to the extent he could. “You want to go a little more easy when you cast, okay? It’s not like you’re chopping wood.”

Another swish, another ploop, maybe seven feet out from the bank this time. And, again, no interested response from any fish. I was beginning to get the feeling that progress came slowly in fishing. Not only that, but my hands and feet were cold, and the rest of me in between was not much better. Beautiful as the crisp scenic morning was, it would have been even more attractive from inside the car with the heater on.

“Don’t sweat it”—Pop at least was undiscouraged—“you’ll get the hang of it.”

Not, as it proved out, before losing my bait every few casts and having to deal with the hook and chicken guts a number of times more.

Something else troubled me. I could accept that the sign was right about this being a reservoir, but the other part I had my doubts about. Any rainbow I had ever seen—Arizona at least had those—needed its distance, an expanse of sky to stretch its band of colors from end to end. Here, though, the way the lake was pressed against the mountains, you would sprain your neck looking overhead for any sign of one. I asked Pop about it, and he just laughed. “It’s on the fish. Rainbow trout. The rezavoy is stocked with them.”

“Really?” I was more interested now, if chicken guts were going to lead to amphibians with red, yellow, green, blue, and purple stripes. Time passed, however, and cast after cast, with me growing more and more numb and no tug at my line—or, for that matter, at Pop’s—from any trout, rainbow-colored or otherwise.

Ultimately I was saved by the wind, which kicked up a strong riffle on the water and made his casts hard to control and mine hopeless. “Well, hell, they aren’t biting anyway,” he conceded at last, securing his hook into the cork handle of his pole and doing mine for me. “It just leaves that many more for you to catch in the derby.” I shivered from more than the cold as we climbed back to the car.

—

BACK IN TOWN,
it began to dawn on both of us that my father did not quite know what to do with me once the fishing poles were put away. So there I was again, tagging after him as he went to tend to business at the saloon. Howie, smoking a cigarette as if he couldn’t breathe without it, was doing the same things behind the bar he’d been doing twenty-four hours before, but with a fresh gripe.

“Tom, you’re gonna have to do something about Earl Zane. Teach him to read, if nothing else.” He jerked his head toward the sign prominent above the cash register: MOSES FORGOT THE ONE ABOUT CREDIT: THOU SHALT NOT ASK. “The no-good son of a bitch wanted to keep on drinking after his money ran out, but I told the prick to—”

“Hey, not in front of the kid,” Pop cut him off, just when I was getting interested. At least in my vicinity, my father brought his own rules to the etiquette of bad language.
Damn
and
hell
salted and peppered his remarks to me as well as to everyone else, but he made an effort to swear off, so to speak, the worse words when I was around.
Cripes
stood in for what Bill Reinking, the newspaper editor and the town’s acknowledged wise man on matters of language, would have called invoking the Nazarene. And
ess of a bee
I soon figured out was his abbreviated version of
son of a bitch
rather than anything to do with collecting honey.
Bee ess
, on the other hand, baffled me until some overheard conversation enlightened me with the key word
bull
.

Now Howie tucked his tongue in his cheek to keep from saying anything, which nevertheless made all the statement needed about protecting my tender ears, and resumed his bar chores. Pop meanwhile was scooping unpaid bills from a drawer by the cash register. “Come on in the back while I’m busy being busy with these damn things,” he told me as if he saw no other choice. “You can help me count the booze.”

—

I HAD NEVER
been in a museum, but the colossal back room of the Medicine Lodge immediately fixed that. The two-story space was like some enormous attic that had settled to the ground floor under the weight of its treasures. Ranch things were everywhere, most with the dust of time on them. Saddles, bridles, pairs of chaps, sets of harness—one entire wall was leather items of that sort, as if the horses had just left. Automobile jacks and tires neighbored with the equine gear. Elsewhere, axes and shovels and even a sledgehammer shared space with softer goods such as bedrolls and bright yellow rain slickers and hats of the Stetson sort. A guitar leaned against a pile of well-traveled suitcases. I couldn’t help but notice a clutch of fishing poles poking up in one corner, in with some long-handled crook-headed things that proved to be sheep hooks. As though one floor wasn’t enough for it all, the room had a loft—doubtless the haymow in the early days, when this extensive space had been the stable behind the saloon—and lighter items such as lariats and hay hooks, like the kind stevedores used, hung from the rafters there.