The Bartender's Tale (37 page)

I snapped my head around, to see him holding up the eagle shot glass.

“Oh, yeah, meant to tell you,” France said as if the jigger’s reappearance didn’t amount to much. “I came across it behind some stuff under the bar.” She shrugged. “Don’t know how it got away from me.”

“That’ll happen,” Pop said good-naturedly. “Sometimes I’d lose my head if it wasn’t tied on, hey, Rusty?”

“Uh, you said it.”

“But you need to keep track of something like this,” he sermoned for France’s benefit, twirling the shot glass so that the blue eagle caught the light. “Don’t let it be wandering off and get lost for good.”

“Oh-kay,” she said with a slanty smile, “I’ll remember that.”

I was in a trance as I slowly pushed the broom. Was I jumping to the conclusion? Or was the conclusion jumping out at me? My top-drawer dollar had mysteriously disappeared and reappeared exactly the same way, hadn’t it. Put that together with juvie and Canada Dan’s ten-spot, and now I knew I had to tell Zoe.

—

“YOU GOT SOMETHING
on your mind besides your hat, Ace,” she sensed right away.

“Funny you bring that up, Muscles. I’m in a sort of a fix.”

“Bad one?”

“Not yet, but it could get there.” If I was learning anything this adolescent year, it was that pretense can be one hundred percent serious underneath. “So here’s the setup.” I stayed in character in more hardy fashion than I felt. “There’s this person, see, who maybe keeps doing something not too legal but doesn’t get caught at it, and then turns around and undoes it on account of guilty conscience or something, if you get what I mean. Pretty risky way to behave, you think?”

Zoe gasped. “Doesn’t France have any more smarts than that? She’s not back to taking cars, is she?”

“No, that’s the weird part, it’s dumb little things.” I ticked off my missing dollar that came back and the shot glass story, getting around to what had happened with Canada Dan. Zoe listened as only she could, her dark eyes never leaving mine, her generous mouth pursed in contemplation.

The instant I was done, she said, “And you’re in a fix about whether to tell your dad or not.”

“You got it.”

The tip of her tongue indicated deep thinking about my dilemma while I waited in agony. “Maybe,” she said at last, “maybe she’s a kleptomaniac.”

“Wh-what kind of maniac is that?”

“It means somebody who steals, they can’t help it. It’s in their blood or something,” she said knowledgeably. “There was a rich lady in Butte, when she went in Hennessy’s department store, a clerk would follow her around and write down what she tucked in her dress. At the end of the month they’d send her a bill.”

“That wouldn’t work on France,” I despaired. “Zoe, what am I gonna do? What if she gets to be more and more of a stealing maniac? Takes a car”—the Buick; the Packard, even; once I started imagining, there seemed no limit to where her acquisitive habit might lead, this was no mere matter of the angels’ share—“or all the money she can lay her hands on, or something?” I concluded helplessly, “But if I squeal on her to Pop, that’s that for her bartending.”

“Del.”

Zoe left it at that until I gasped, “You think he’s one, too?”

“That’s not what I meant,” she said impatiently. “Del must know her pretty well by now, don’t you think?”

“Sure. Right down to the skin.”

“So maybe he could”—she spun her hands that way he did when trying to come up with the right phrase—“sort of give her the word. Tell her somehow that she’s got to quit taking things that don’t belong to her. Some nice roundabout way, he’s good at that. He’s about to leave anyway, isn’t he?”

“Any day now, he says, as soon as he hears from the powers that be.”

“There you go, then. Piece of cake, Ace.”

“Yeah, well, maybe.” I drew a deep, deep breath of resolve. “Let’s go ask him.”

—

“AH. THE FEARSOME TWOSOME.”

Del was not doing a bit, though, when he admitted us into the van and sank back into his Gab Lab seat, only acknowledging us in a distracted way. He had a peculiar glazed expression while he kept gazing around the Gab Lab as if enumerating every item in it. I fidgeted, waiting for him to show attention in our direction, but there was no sign of it. Zoe urged me on with a little snap of her fingers that he didn’t hear.

I mustered, “Del, I was sort of wondering if you could help me out—us out, I mean—by . . . what’s wrong?”

He sat up so abruptly it made me step back. “Where’s your father?”

“In the back room. Paying bills. Why?”

“I just found out something he had better know.” He shot to his feet, still wearing that queer look as he ducked out the van door. “Come on. You may as well hear this.”

Zoe and I looked at each other, agape with the sense of deliverance. From the way Del was behaving, France must have walked off with something of his, and now he knew the situation without my having to spell it out to the end of the alphabet. Hurriedly, we trailed him as he marched down the driveway and across the alley to the Medicine Lodge. He stepped into the back room like a man on a mission. Pop looked down from the landing, cocking an eyebrow at the sight of our contingent.

“Hey, Delano.” His greeting carried a note of surprise. “Stuck on something a mudjack said?”

“Can you have France come in here? It’s important.”

“What for?”

“It’s important.”

“I grasp that it is,” said Pop, studying him from A to why. “Hold on, if there’s nobody at the bar, I’ll have her lock up for a few minutes.”

While he went and attended to that, Del walked in a tight circle, hands thrust in his pockets and shoulders hunched so high he looked like a scarecrow, still wearing that strange expression he’d had in the confines of the van. Watching him, Zoe picked at her elbow nervously and I kept swallowing with a dry throat. Was he going to charge France with something so awful, it would get her thrown into the adult version of juvie? That was more than I bargained for, but it was out of my hands now.

Pop arrived back, took one look at the circling figure, and simply folded his arms and waited.

France came buzzing through the door from the front, towel still in hand like a true bartender. “What was it you wanted, T—”

She jammed to a halt at the sight of us all. Natalie Wood stopped by a cop for something. Apprehensively she asked, “Somebody call a prayer meeting?”

Pop inclined his head to the determined keeper of the Gab Lab. “So, Delano, what’s eating you?”

As though an electrical current was running between us, Zoe and I shared that held-breath feeling of drama, the theatrical high point when Rosalind reveals her identity to Orlando, when Lady Bracknell bestows her lofty blessing on Algernon and Cecily and Jack and Gwendolen, when the confusions of love are solved and all’s well that ends well. Only in this case, one lover was about to lower the boom on the other.

Del shifted restlessly, looked around at us all, and blurted it out.

“I’m not leaving.”

The big room was silent as this registered on us in individual ways. I nearly swallowed my Adam’s apple for good.

“Isn’t that phenomenal?” Del was grinning as much as his face could hold. “The powers that be were so impressed with the mudjacks tapes and transcripts, they want me to stay and keep right on with the Missing Voices, here. Do another series of interviews before a subgroup vanishes from history.” He beamed at each of us in turn, last and longest at France. “They, ah, gave me another grant.” He looked almost bashful. “Alan Lomax usually gets them all.”

There went that, I savvied before he was even finished speaking. Not a chance in the world that a diagnosis of kleptomania would be forthcoming from him if the midnight meetings in the van were going to go merrily on. According to the way he was gazing at her, France could be stealing the fillings out of his teeth and he wouldn’t notice. Beside me, Zoe was thinking the same, I could tell. We had to be happy for Del, fellow bit player that he was, and glad he wasn’t going away yet, but we knew there was no approaching him about France and her problematic habit, now. We weren’t up to the role of heartbreakers yet.

“Well, swell, Dellie.” France sounded relieved and enthusiastic all in the same breath. She gave him the nicest kind of smile. “We’d miss you around here.”

“Yeah, we wouldn’t want things to get dull,” Pop seconded that. He squinted companionably at his partner in mudjack lingo. “So, Delano, who’s got their voices missing now?”

“Sheepherders.”

Roomful of silence again.

No one wanted to be the first to say it. Finally, twisting her towel as if wringing out the words, France ventured, “You dead sure about that, Dellie?”

Pop was looking nearly as stunned as if he had been hit by a flying elbow. “She’s right, where the hell do you get the idea sheepherders are vanishing? Cripes, most of the time you can hardly turn around in the Two Medicine country without bumping into one. Delano, are you sure you don’t have any tick fever?”

“Trust me on this.” Del held up his hands as if heading all of us off. “I did some research, before I came out here from the Library. You have to understand, the sheep business is in what economists call a gravitational decline, which means steep. Sheepmen are simply up against too much.” He fingered his elaborate shirt, not a stitch of wool in it, as evidence. “Synthetics, cheaper imported lamb, new grazing regulations, higher costs of everything—the usual kinds of horsemen of the apocalypse that do in old family businesses.” He paused somberly. “It’s sad, of course, but it can’t be helped. And when sheep ranchers go, it’s perfectly plain what that will mean for herders.”

“The marble farm,” Zoe said in a ghostly voice.

“Well, no, they’re not exactly going to die off like dinosaurs,” Del belatedly sought to temper that. “But their numbers are bound to decline, and now’s the best chance to record their lives for the archive.” He paused again, as if a thought had only now struck him, or at least gave a good imitation of it. “Ah, Tom, I wonder if I might ask you for a favor.”

“While that’s going on,” France saw her chance, “hadn’t I better get back to tending bar?”

“What? Yeah. Do that.” Pop and the other two of us tried not to be too obvious about looking on while she and Del did not quite blow kisses to one another, but the hint was there. As soon as she was gone, Del turned to Pop, bright as a button. “What I was wondering . . .”

“Delano, I know all about your wondering and the answer is no. I cannot trot around hunting up sheepherders with you, I have a fishing derby to get everything ready for and a joint with a green bartender to oversee and every other damn thing that takes up time in life. Got that?”

Even if his words had not registered on Del, Pop’s dangerously wrinkled brow would have. “I just thought I’d ask,” he murmured, burying his hands in his pockets again.

“Besides”—Pop started to reach for his cigarettes until he saw me looking—“herders aren’t anywhere you can get to them right now, anyway.”

Del went stone still. He turned his head to one side as if to make sure he’d heard what he’d heard. “They’re not? Where did they go?”

“Where they always do this time of year,” Pop said impatiently, “when they’re not in here drinking their wages away. Way to hell and gone up in the mountains, herding on the national forest.”

Zoe was nodding, even she knew that. Evidently the self-trained expert on the subgroup called sheepherders did not.

“But . . . but,” Del spluttered, “when do they come back down?”

“Shipping time,” said Pop. “That’s, oh, three or four weeks yet. You can take life easy for a while.”

“No, I can’t! My grant calls for an immediate start,” the ins and outs of oral history practically poured forth in a babble, “the powers that be think I already have interviews lined up and waiting. I had to, ah, stretch matters a trifle in the proposal.”

“You got to be kind of careful in proposing,” Pop advised. But he didn’t like to see Del in distress any more than we did. Squinting in thought, one eye in particular toward half closed, he muttered: “Of course, there’s always that ess of a bee Canada Dan.”

Del brightened as if a switch had been thrown. “Perfect! I never did get to ask him what a
turster
is!”

“Dode has him herding some kind of bunch up the South Fork,” Pop was saying to me. “Seen the wagon on the way to fishing, remember?” Before I could even bob my head, Del was asking eagerly, “Do you think he’d consent to be interviewed?”

“I wouldn’t predict what he’ll do from one breath to the next”—Pop seemed bemused at the thought of Canada Dan fending with Del and vice versa—“but you can try him.” Then his conscience must have kicked in. “Better take Rusty along, he knows Dan. That might help.”

Del was back to buoyant just that fast. Gravely he bowed in our direction. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in coming along, Miss Zoe, parental authorities permitting?”

“Pleeeaase?”

“Don’t worry, Tom. I’ll keep an eye on them.”

“I was more thinking about them keeping an eye on you.”

—

I WAS NOT ANY
too enthused about being assigned to this. To me, Canada Dan represented several kinds of a headache, from that wayward elbow that floored Pop, up to and including the dispute with France that had cost me five dollars. As far as I was concerned, he could fester in obscurity forever and it would serve him right.

Pop did have a point, though. It would be just like the old cuss to give Del a hard time or even run him off, simply because he could. With me on hand representing Pop and the Medicine Lodge, sort of, his manners might—
might
—improve. Riding in the passenger seat to be navigator, I was silent with such thoughts—at least it was a brief respite from having a kleptomaniac half sister on my mind—as Del drove us toward the sheep camp that afternoon, a rare sunny one. Dode Withrow’s pasture was nice green bottomland where the South Fork of English Creek ran down a long coulee. With the mountain cliffs stretching up and away everywhere ahead of us and the Rainbow Reservoir dam at the far end of the creek, like the front step to their succession of heights, our journey from town was actually quite a scenic excursion. Zoe occupied the back of the van, perched behind the seat as I had been on the Fort Peck trip, she and Del talking away.