The Bartender's Tale (32 page)

Skeptically she tried all that, and a presentable glass of beer resulted. Pop nodded. “Okay, that’s half the battle. Go around to the other side,” he directed, “and be the customer for a minute,” flicking his towel to where he wanted her to sit up to the bar.

Francine came around past where I was sweeping for about the sixth time and snuggled onto the bar stool. “This seems more natural.”

“Don’t get ideas,” Pop growled. From a dozen feet away he slid the glass of beer to a perfect stop in front of her.

“I get it. It’s like shuffleboard.”

“I wouldn’t know. I call it a slick touch you only get by learning it. Now you come back here and try. Rusty?” Startled, I nearly dropped my idle broom. “Hop onto that stool like you’re the customer,” Pop directed, “so she can scoot the beer to you.”

This was different, sitting up to the bar as though I was supposed to belong there. Feeling important with the perch, I patty-caked the bar like Earl Zane until Pop gave me a look.

Meanwhile Francine, puckered with determination, was drawing a bead on the spot where the foam-topped glass in her grasp was supposed to glide to a graceful halt.

“Whups,” she said as I reared back out of the way of sloshing beer.

Pop made her try again and again. A lot of Great Falls Select ended up on the bar before she found the knack, more or less.

“Okay, that’s that,” Pop allowed, sopping up the beer spillage. “Now for the hard stuff.”

Hearing this, Francine rolled her eyes, as if anything harder would send her right back to Reno, newly discovered father or no newly discovered father, but I knew Pop only meant the liquor, all the brands crowding the shelves of the breakfront. He reached under the bar. “I dug out a drink book for you. Study up from it when you get a chance and keep it handy here.” He saw she was taken aback by the sizable volume. “Hey, don’t let it throw you. We don’t get much call for fancy concoctions in here.”

“Glad of that.” Saying so, she tilted her head the way he always did, as if reminding herself to be daughterly. “There’s quite a bit to this job, ain’t it.”

“Bartending isn’t tea and crumpets,” Pop replied briskly. “While I think of it, let me show you a pouring secret.” He flourished his favorite shot glass. It had the New Deal blue eagle embossed on the side, no doubt the notion of some federal Roosevelter back in the time of Fort Peck. “Always use this as the house jigger. If anybody wants a shot and water on the side, give them one of those”—he indicated the stubby rank of shot glasses in the breakfront glassware—“but don’t let this one get away. Here, feel why.” He put the jigger in Francine’s uncertain hand. “Feel the eagle on there, the top of its head?” She rubbed the shot glass between her fingers and thumb and nodded. “That helps when you pour, pretty quick you’ll have a feel for when there’s enough in the jigger and you won’t hardly have to look.”

He stopped to take stock, of both Francine and the territory he’d covered behind the bar. “Oh, yeah. Next, the concert piano.”

“The huh?” She frowned around the barroom. “Maybe I’m blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other, but where’s there even a jukebox?”

“Don’t need one, here’s what makes music to our ears,” said Pop as he stepped to the cash register, hit the jangly key that opened the till, and began instructing. “Rule number one is, when you make change from paper money, a five or ten or whatever it is, put it over here in this part of the drawer first, instead of in with the rest of the cash. That way if any argument comes up, you can make sure the mistake isn’t yours. In other words, cover your behind.”

Francine smirked at that but didn’t say anything. Pop moved on to showing her the quirks of the ice machine. While there, though, she spotted his reading material tucked beneath the bar at the amen corner. “You dig Mickey Spillane?”

“Sure.” Guardedly: “Why?”

“Me, too.
I, the Jury
is really something, huh?”

“Strong stuff.” He regarded her afresh, as a hard-boiled master of fiction might have put it. “You read that kind of thing a lot?”

“Every chance I get. Done all the Mike Shayne books, waiting for more.”

“Those’re good, too,” he enthused, the lesson session temporarily forgotten. At the time, tales of tough-guy private eyes and endangered damsels were over my head, or at least at a level I wasn’t supposed to be perusing at my age, so I helped myself to an Orange Crush while the pair of them volleyed titles and characters. In his best humor for days, Pop commended her reading habit. “This’ll help. You’ll have a lot of time on your hands when business is slow.”

“Don’t worry,” Francine said breezily, “I’m good at killing time.”

Deciding she’d had enough behind-the-bar tutelage for now, Pop tossed down his towel. “Couple more things, and we’ll call it good. The first one is what you might call the policy of the house.” He looked at her in great seriousness. “No dating the customers. You get to going steady with some one guy, and the others aren’t gonna like it.” He paused for emphasis. “So no flirting, either direction across the bar, right?”

That seemed to make her bristle at the very idea, but she caught herself. “I get it, I guess. Playing favorites is bad for business, huh? Don’t worry on that score, Tom. Ain’t in this for romance, as my darling mother would say.” Fidgety to have this over with, she asked, “Then what’s the other thing that’s bugging you?”

Running a hand through his hair, Pop looked consciously paternal as he surveyed her from head to toe and back again as she twiddled the leather bracelet. “Your getup.”

Francine all at once looked scared, and it made me think she had a lot to learn about having a father.

He held up his large, capable hands to show her by example. “No fancy rings. Don’t paint up with nail polish, either, now that I think of it. The customers shouldn’t be looking at anything but that nice glass of whatever you’re serving up, savvy?”

“Oboy.” She was fingering the fancy leather bracelet nervously now. “I don’t want to break any rules, but I’m really attached to this.”

Pop studied it and her for a moment. “Yeah, well, okay, I don’t know why you want to wear half a handcuff like that, but I suppose you can keep it on.” He squinted critically. “Let’s talk clothes. That outfit you’ve got on makes you look like something the cat dragged in.” Before she could make so much as a peep of protest, he set her straight about proper apparel, Medicine Lodge style. “First thing, we’ll get you a bow tie. Rusty can teach you how to tie it. And if you’re gonna wear pants—slacks, I mean—get some dark ones. The Toggery will have some. Nice white blouses to go with them.” He looked at her moccasins. “Shoes, too. When you’re bartending, you’re on your feet all the time, squaw slippers won’t do.”

“Hey, wait,” she protested, “didn’t I see some bedroom slippers tucked away under the bar? What’s the difference?”

“It’s my old dogs that are tired”—he meant his feet—“that’s what. You want to keep yours from getting that way as long as you can. You need substantial shoes. Ask in the store for that grandma kind, I don’t know what they’re called.”

Her dismayed expression said she knew what he meant. “Those black clodhoppers? Like nuns wear?”

“Those are the ones.” He went to the cash register and counted out the wardrobe money for her. “Needless to say, this comes out of your first wages.”

She tucked the money in her jeans, that hint of grin showing ever so slightly. “I haven’t even started and I’m already in the hole? Only kidding.”

Pop stuck to business. “So now you know what’s involved with the joint. I’ll work behind the bar with you the first week or so while you’re breaking in. Get you through Saturday night. Then you’re gonna have to be on your own.”

With a swipe of her hand, Francine cleared the black mop of hair out of her vision. “It won’t be the first time.”

—

THE NEXT DAY CAME
with Zoe and me hardly able to decide which subject to put our minds to first, Francine or Del. Since Pop was trooping Francine through the unglamorous side of bartending, such as slitting open whiskey cases, when we poked our heads in the back room, we opted for Del.

“Must of been quite the sight, that there tick on the business end.” Zoe did her John Wayne/Marion Morrison drawl as we approached the driveway where the Gab Lab was parked.

“Cecily, old thing, it would astound the birds out of the trees,” I replied in Wildean tones.

We sobered up and got our sympathy back in order as we reached the silent van, with its curtains drawn. In his tick-bitten condition Del perhaps was sleeping in, although that did not seem like him. In any case, the morning was far enough along that we figured he ought to be up, so we knocked on the big side door.

Only silence answered.

Zoe and I were not prepared for this. We looked at each other in sudden fright. She was the one who said it out loud, “What if he’s dying in there and can’t open the door?”

Why this overcame me so, I still can’t explain, but it seemed a horrible fate to die in a VW van that Pop had likened to a sardine can. I panicked. If Del was breathing his last, there was no time to run for help. The side door was locked when I tried it, and so was the passenger one.

It was considerably belated, but one of us had the bright idea to go around and try the door on the driver’s side. That came right open, and we scrambled in to look into the back of the Gab Lab, expecting the worst, but not what we saw.

In wrinkled fancy pajamas, gray-faced as a ghost, Del was sitting hunched over his tape recorder at the worktable. He had headphones on, big as soup bowls, and as we gaped, he would peer closely down at the recorder, where there was a tiny counting instrument like the odometer on a car, jotting down what the number was at that stage of the tape, then hit the recorder’s
PLAY
and
REVERSE
and
FORWARD
buttons like a piano player playing one-handed. How someone with a crew cut managed to be tousled, I don’t know, but he looked like he’d been worked over with an eggbeater. Thinking back, it strikes me as like something out of Beckett,
Krapp’s Last Tape
, with the reel whirring methodically back and forth.

Zoe and I tumbled over the seat, startling Del out of his trance.

“Oh.” Blinking at us, he lifted the headphones off. “Good morning, I guess it is.”

“Does it hurt like crazy,” Zoe asked straightaway, “where the tick got you?”

“Not quite that bad.” He tried to seem sturdier than he looked.

I took a different medical tack. “Um, didn’t the doctor tell you to take it easy?”

“I can’t,” he moaned, looking even more haggard. “I’ll lose my grant! You have no idea how cutthroat the library world can be!” A wild look came into his eyes. “If I can’t live up to what I promised in my proposal, the powers that be will take the Gab Lab away from me. There’s a real push on to get Missing Voices into the library’s holdings, and if I’m laid up . . .” He let that awful thought dangle. “I can at least transcribe. See?” He whipped the headphones back on, screwed up his face in listening concentration, then typed in blurts, a foot pedal stopping the tape recorder as he caught up with the last phrase. Off came the headphones, as if what we had just witnessed was proof of mental if not physical competence.

He must have caught our glances at each other, and around the interior of the van, mussed on almost every surface with uneven piles of typed transcriptions and scattered reels of tapes. “Things are a trifle out of order because of gaps in the transcriptions,” he was forced to confess. “Talk about
lingua america
, the mudjacks practically speak a tongue of their own whenever they’re describing something done at the dam.” He shook his head as if to clear it. Gnawing the corner of his mouth, he lifted the nearest stack of typing as if weighing it, then let it drop. “Rusty? I hate to bother him, I know how busy he is, but could you ask your father to help me straighten out some of what I’m hearing on the tapes when he has time?”

I assured him I’d ask Pop right away, anything to make him feel better. “He said to tell you not to work yourself to death, there are more interesting ways to go,” I passed along.

“Don’t I wish he was in charge of the Library of Congress as well as the Medicine Lodge,” he replied forlornly, grabbing for the next reel of tape.

—

FRANCINE’S DEBUT
at the Medicine Lodge was as carefully supervised by Pop as if she was about to perform for royalty. “You aren’t nervous or anything, are you?” he asked edgily before he opened the place for business that first day. “I’ll be right here, just give me the high sign if anything stumps you, okay?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she recited yet again, taking her post at the end of the bar nearest the street door as I watched every move through the vent. Zoe would have given skin to be here for this, but she could not talk her way out of chores at the cafe, and it was up to me to provide a full report at supper. Whatever was going to happen, the stage was surely set, with the barroom practically gleaming after all my sweeping and mopping and Pop’s attention to everything Francine could conceivably need. Spiffed up according to Pop’s dictates, in dark slacks and white blouse and a black bow tie that I had shown her how to master after half a dozen tries and with her hair even fixed better, she looked like a bartender. Some version of one, anyway.

As luck would have it, her first customers were a tourist couple on their way to Glacier National Park, and setting them up with a couple of beers was a cinch. They did appear puzzled as to why there was an equal number of bartenders to customers in this particular saloon on a quiet afternoon, but shortly they were on their way and Francine grinned down the bar to Pop. “I haven’t disgraced the joint yet, huh?”

The first regular to come in was Bill Reinking, and I just knew he was going to be instinctively inquisitive at the sight of a young woman in back of the bar. So did Pop, even more so. Before Bill could get a word out, he hurriedly produced the explanation he was going to have to make dozens if not hundreds of times: “New blood. My sister’s kid, gonna learn the ropes about bartending.”