The Bartender's Tale (5 page)

I told him, which drew me a beady look and the remark, “Huh, you’re that one. My daddy gets a snootful in your daddy’s saloon when Mom isn’t looking.”

“Uhm, what’s your name?”

“Duane Zane.” He smirked. “I don’t take up much alphabet that way, my folks tell everybody.” By now he had shaken little doughy pellets of some kind out of a bait can and was jabbing his hook through one.

“What’re those?”

Duane smirked again. “Pink marshmallows. My daddy says they’re our secret weapon.” Before I could even blink, he picked up his pole and whipped the line—
whizzzz
—over my head and into the lake.

Gulping, I managed to bait my hook with a sloppy bit of chicken gut and get everything into the water again. As if I didn’t have enough on my mind before, now the holy terror next to me already had another bite and was sidestepping in my direction as he tried to haul the fish to shore. It was then that the wind strengthened, and somewhere down the rank of junior anglers from Duane, a gust caught a line being weakly flung out and blew the hook back onto the boy making the cast. He screeched and threw his pole aside, unfortunately toward the kid next to him. That one panicked, too, and I gaped at fishpoles toppling like dominoes toward Duane and me, with lines and hooks flying crazily. Busy trying to land his catch, he glanced down in irritation when a hook caught in his sleeve, yelped when he saw what it was, and yanked his pole so hard, the fish flew off and his hook flew at me. I yowled as it caught my ear.

Pop was right there in the stampede of parents rushing to tend to aggrieved children. “Don’t get in an uproar,” he told me, cutting the fish line with his jackknife and tilting my head so he could see how the hook was embedded. I had quit yowling, but the tears of fright and pain would not stop.

During this, Duane Zane seemed mostly put out that I was in possession of his fishhook, but his father hovered in, full of advice. “Push it on through and snip the barb off, why don’t you, Tom?”

Pop shook his head grimly. “It’s caught too hard.” Now I was so scared I couldn’t even whimper, thinking of pliers tearing the hook out of my ear the way it would from a fish’s mouth. At least, it turned out, Pop was not going to do it himself, saying he had to get me to town to the doctor.

The CATCH ’EM TO THE LIMIT! banner flapping madly behind us, he drove the gravel road at high speed while I hunched down against the passenger door, a picture of misery, at least to myself. Neither of us had anything to say until he asked, “Doesn’t hurt, does it?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, okay, we’ll get you to the doc in no time.” And the Packard somehow picked up even more speed.

His day off interrupted, the doctor was grumpy, as if someone else’s fishhook sticking in my ear was my fault. Sighing at what people get themselves into, he sat me on the examining table, numbed my ear with something, used a needle-nosed instrument to maneuver the hook out, dabbed some Mercurochrome on my wound, and told me I was as good as new. There wasn’t even any blood in sight, which I have to admit disappointed me.

As we went home, Pop tried to make me feel better by telling me about worse things that had happened to people in his experience. Unloading our fishing gear in the driveway beneath the bower of Igdrasil, he paused when I still hadn’t said anything.

“The ear still bothering?”

“Huh-uh.”

“What’s the matter, then?”

“Are you going to send me back?”

“Where? To Phoenix?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What for?”

“The derby’s over. And I didn’t catch anything, I got caught.”

We looked at each other for a long moment, pretty much a life’s worth, as it turned out, before he muttered: “What kind of an ess of a bee do you think I am?” The fishing poles clattered in his grasp as he headed for the house, motioning me on in. “School starts Monday, we need to get you some pencils and tablets and junk like that.” At the back door, he stopped and looked at me again, his eyebrows cocked.

“Kiddo? About today—the fishing and all. Don’t sweat it. You’ll show them how, next year.”

2

S
O MY SUITCASE
stayed under the bed and I stayed on as half-pint participant in the world of my bartending father. He and I occupied the house behind the saloon like a pair of confirmed bachelors, rattling around in the big old place by ourselves except when the cleaning woman came and moved the dust a little. Having learned his lesson about housekeepers, Pop employed Nola Atkins for this, who was seventy-five if she was a day. Otherwise, the two of us were free to go about domestic matters in our unrestricted male way. Actually, the house was where we slept and kept our clothes. We lived at the Medicine Lodge.

—

“—THE GUY LOOKS
over at her in bed when they hear her husband come in downstairs and says, ‘Can you cache a small Czech?’ Get it, Tom? The c-a-c-h-e kind of ‘cash,’ see, and he’s—”

“Can’t help but get it, Earl. You rich enough for another Shellac or do I have to cut you off?”

“How would you feel about a silver inlaid belt buckle, on account?”

“On account of you’re broke again, you mean? Let’s see the damn thing.”

The Medicine Lodge did not have a monopoly on the drinking trade in Gros Ventre and the Two Medicine country, but close enough. The main competition, the Pastime Bar at the other end of town, was, well, past its time; run-down, erratic in its hours, gloomy, smelling a little funny. And the lounge bar across at the hotel had the hereditary failing of its kind, lack of pep. This meant that besides the jackpot of Saturday-night crowds—“Saturday night buys the rest of the week, kiddo” was one of Pop’s favorite pronouncements—the singular saloon with FULL BAR AND THEN SOME added beneath its name drew a day-in, day-out traffic of steady customers. This imbibing community, to call it that, which showed up in my father’s venerable place of business, was mainly wetting its collective whistle now and then as people have done since time immemorial, exchanging gossip or talking just to be talking. The back-and-forth whiled away time and its concerns, of which those last years of the Fifties held their dire share, as was usual in human history. The familiar voices would start up in the late afternoon, when Earl Zane slipped in to swap a joke barely worth telling and whatever was loose on his person for a series of beers before his wife appeared to drag him back to their gas station. To be followed, more often than not, by gray-mustached Bill Reinking on the way home to supper after putting in his day as editor, star reporter, and linotype operator of the Gros Ventre
Weekly Gleaner
.

“What you have in your hand looks like just what the doctor ordered, Tom, bless you.”

“It’s the best scotch in the joint, comes in a bottle and everything. The world going to hell enough to suit you?”

“It keeps me in business, alas. Any juicy news in here I can hold up to the light of day?”

And in the clockwork of human habit, no sooner would Bill Reinking be out the door after his single drink than Velma Simms would sail in for hers. By the nature of things, the Medicine Lodge was a watering hole for men, just as the beauty parlor down the street served as a social oasis for women. This particular customer did not treat that as a fact of life; quite the contrary. Her husky voice never varied as she headed for her usual booth. “It’s that time of day, Tom.”

“Funny how that happens about now, Velma.” Pop did not quite treat this patron as if she was radioactive, but it approached that category. She’d had four or five husbands, and her history of divorce settlements scared the daylights out of every man in town. Velma was around Pop’s age, so the chestnut hair surely had help from the drugstore, but in tailored slacks and a silky blouse, she still drew second looks. Her custom was to nestle into the booth, instantaneously get a cigarette going with a flash of her silver lighter, and begin riffling through her mail, in all probability on the lookout for alimony checks. Pop meanwhile mixed a G-ball, conscientiously using a decent bourbon and opening a fresh ginger ale so the drink wouldn’t taste flat. After delivering it to the booth, he would retreat all the way behind the bar before initiating conversation.

“Been anywhere?”

“Hawaii. Waikiki Beach isn’t what it used to be.”

Those regulars and others, early birds before the saloon became fully populated for the evening with ranchers on their way back from tending sheep camp, tourists on their way north to Glacier National Park, fishermen who had tried their luck at the reservoir, seasonal hunters hoping to do better than the Buck Fever Case on the wall, state highway crews on perpetual maintenance jobs, construction workers passing through at the end of their workweek on the Minuteman missile silo sites starting to dot the northern plains of Montana, roughnecks who maintained the donkey pumps and storage tanks of the minor oil field south of town, hay hands from the big Double W cattle ranch, local couples treating themselves to a night out, sheepherders in for a spree; if the ocean ever comes back to the Rockies, archaeologists of that time can dive to the site of the Medicine Lodge and determine how a segment of mid-twentieth-century America assuaged its social thirst.

I absorbed every bit of this, because, thanks to the father I happened to have, the joint became something like my second parent.

—

“GOT AN IDEA,
kiddo. Let’s cross our fingers and toes it’s a good one.”

Things happened fast around Pop. After my rescue from Phoenix and induction into fishing and all else, I had been in school barely a week before he concluded that our household, such as it amounted to, needed serious adjustment. He had been smart to start me in Gros Ventre when he did; in the first grade everyone is a new kid, the ABCs see to that. Thus, school itself was no big problem, if I didn’t count Duane Zane snickering at my wounded ear until he grew tired of it, but after school was another matter. That time of day and on through the evening was when the Medicine Lodge did most of its business and Pop had to be there to maintain the level of bartending that made the saloon’s reputation, leaving me to the sparse company of the empty house and Igdrasil the tree. Even as inexperienced as he was at raising a kid, it evidently didn’t feel quite right to him for us to see each other only at breakfast, supper, and after closing time at the joint. Which is why he reached the decision that needed fingers and toes crossed. He announced it as usual, with a puff of smoke.

He stood there outlined in the doorway of my darkened bedroom, bow tie loosened against white shirt, the next-to-last cigarette of the day—one of my worries was that he continued to smoke in bed just as if Uncle Arvin the fireman never existed—aglow between his fingers. Already it was a ritual between us that I would snap awake when I heard him come in late at night and as soon as he finished in the bathroom I would call out, “Is that you, Pop?” and he would answer something like, “No, it’s the Galloping Swede.” The notion of Montana’s immigrant governor, Hugo Aronson, galumphing in on Scandinavian size-fourteens to use our bathroom would set me off into a fit of giggles, and Pop would lean against the door frame a minute and ask me what I’d been up to since supper, which was seldom much beyond listening to the radio and reading comic books until my eyelids drooped. After a little of that exchange, he would say, “Let’s catch some shut-eye—don’t let the ladybugs bite” and tread down the hall to his own bedroom. So I grew even wider awake than usual this night as he hung on there in the doorway, squinting and smoking.

“It gets kind of lonesome over here by yourself so much, I bet.”

“Maybe just a little.”

“Not that you aren’t doing real good at getting along on your own, don’t get me wrong.”

“Uh-huh. I mean, huh-uh.”

“If I could be two places at once, we could do some things together. Go fishing after supper and stuff like that.”

“That’d be, uh, nice.”

“But I can’t, can I. Be two places at once. It wouldn’t work even if I was Siamese twins.”

“I guess maybe not.”

“So here’s my thinking.” His forehead furrowed with it. “I don’t dare let you be in the barroom when the joint is open, the state liquor board would nail my hide to the wall if they caught us at it.” He spelled out his decision probably as much for his own benefit as mine. “But I see no reason why you can’t be in the back room some when I’m busy out front. After school and maybe until your bedtime. How’s that grab you?”

On those hasty vacation trips of ours to the Grand Canyon, he had let me do what he somehow knew a kid most wanted to do. Held in his strong arms and big hands there at the rock parapet on the rim of the canyon, I would stick my head over the edge as far as I dared and spit a mile, fully believing I was adding my contribution to the Colorado River way, way below. A similar sense of unprecedented thrill took hold of me now. My face must have lit up the dim bedroom, because he added in a hurry, “That don’t mean you can run wild back there. You have to behave yourself around the hocked stuff, it’s like money in the bank for us.”

“I won’t hurt any of it, I promise.”

“There’s something else. The air vent.” His eyes locked onto mine. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”

“Uh-huh.” Who could forget, how sound from the barroom came right in through it, clear as a whistle, when he was at the desk busy being busy with bills and checkbook.

He took a drag on his cigarette, still looking hard at me. “I know you’re gonna listen in to the bar talk, there’s no getting around that. You’re liable to hear some rough language—”

“That’s nothing, Ronny cussed all the time.”

“—and that’s my point, I don’t want you picking up the bad habit.” I shook my head vigorously against the possibility of that ever happening. He had a further thought. “If you’re playing around up there at the desk and the vent’s open, just don’t make any racket and disturb the inmates,” meaning the customers out front. “Savvy that?”

“Sure!”

Hesitating a moment, he drew a deep breath that had nothing to do with smoking. “I’ve got to trust you back there, Russell.” It was the first time within memory that he had used my given name.

“I’ll be good, Pop. Honest!”

“Okay, kiddo, we’ll give it a try.” He turned to go. “Don’t let the ladybugs bite.”

—

I FELL IN LOVE
with the back room of the joint from the first possible moment.

I could scarcely believe my good fortune in being allowed to spend hours on end at that comfortable desk perch on the stair landing, reading comic books or building model airplanes or following the misfortunes of the Selectrics in the Great Falls
Tribune
or letting my imagination wander through the ever-growing collection of hocked treasures piled below. And of course, most of all, listening at the vent, silent as a ghost. Any kid is a master spy until that talent meets itself in the mirror during the teen years and turns hopelessly inward, but life could not have arranged my surveillance of the grown-up world more perfectly. From the barroom side, the air vent high on the rear wall wasn’t even noticeable amid the stuffed animal heads, but there in the back room, that same slatted metalwork grille close by the desk was almost like a fabulous radio I could take a look into and have each scene come to life. I needed only to stretch my neck a little to peek through the vent slats when the street door swung open and a customer appeared, and see and hear everything as my father lived up to his reputation as the best bartender imaginable, his shirt and apron crisp as table linen, his black bow tie lending an air of dignity, his magical hands producing a drink almost before it was thought of, his head tilted just so to take in whatever topic was being introduced on the other side of the bar. The reliably contrary weather of the Two Medicine country? “Sure enough, it’s all gonna dry up and blow away if we don’t get some rain.” The storms of the human heart? “She did that to you? No bee ess?” Philosophy needed after some grievance against fate? “All you can count on in life is your fingers and toes.” And if a known face came in, not saying much of anything, I could count on hearing “Hey, you look like you need a Shellac,” and then the whish of a Great Falls Select being drawn from the beer tap, and the sounds of Pop puttering patiently until this set of vocal cords, too, was oiled enough to reward the waiting ears, his and mine.

I know, I know; the listening bartender is a standard character, probably ever since Chaucer. But Pop filled the role so completely, those years when I was the eager but secret audience behind the vent, that the Medicine Lodge became the repository of lore in much the same way as material items piled up in the back-room collection. Sooner or later, everyone has a story to tell, and his tireless towel rubbing up a special sheen in front of a customer seemed to polish the opportunity. If it wasn’t Dode Withrow in from the ranch with yet another tale about one sheepherder or another quitting for the twentieth or thirtieth time, then it was one sheepherder or another there on a bar stool, drinking up his wages and recounting, like the other half of an old married couple, Dode’s shortcomings as an employer down through the years. If it wasn’t absolute strangers relating things that sent Pop’s eyebrows climbing, and mine, then it was the afternoon regulars contributing their share of episodes as well. Earl Zane’s sagas of himself tended to be blowhard accounts of rodeo bronc riding, during which he seemed never to have been bucked off. If the mail happened to be short of alimony checks, then Velma Simms might have a second drink and begin dreaming aloud about her latest cruise of Greek islands, through seas if not wine-dark, at least ginger-ale highball tinted in her recollection. Bill Reinking, with his newspaperman’s memory, often harked back to the 1930s, the testing time of his and Pop’s younger years; Pop kept an old election poster of Franklin D. Roosevelt taped to the mirror beside the cash register in tribute to the president who pulled the nation out of the Depression. And even I, underage occupant of the 1950s, could feel the close breath of history when Turk Turco, the state highway maintenance man, in his distinctive twang, would relate some hair-raising episode from his time as an infantryman in Korea at Pork Chop Hill, and his buddy and arguing partner, the Montana Power lineman Joe Quigg, would match that with the sobering memory of the mushroom cloud shrouding the Pacific sky when he served in the Navy during the hydrogen bomb tests in the Marshall Islands. The voices of the vent still seem so vivid to me, so distinct. It is a sensation I even yet find hard to describe, how those overheard stories kept me occupied, in the truest sense of that word, taking up residence within me like talkative lodgers in the various corners of my mind. As the father who was doing his bachelor best to raise me would have said, I didn’t lack imagination in the first place, and I certainly had no shortage of it as the clandestine eyewitness—or earwitness—to the variety of life as it passed through the Medicine Lodge.