The Bartender's Tale (6 page)

—

“POP? DID YOU HAVE
to bounce anybody?”

This was the big question, as regular as Saturday night, the minute I heard him in the hallway. Weeknights, regular as clockwork, he would break off anything he was doing in the barroom, serving drinks or negotiating with a customer wanting to hock something, to step into the back room when it was my bedtime, and if I was still there, ritually shoo me home. Saturdays, though, his busiest night, I had to evacuate to the house right after supper—“Just to keep the decks clear, kiddo”—and spend those evenings wondering what I was missing at the saloon.

“Relax and get your beauty sleep,” he usually answered, tired after his long night behind the bar, “nobody got out of hand.” Usually.

The price of my cherished private spot in the back room was a pair of nagging thoughts that would not go away, no matter how I tried to put them out of mind. I will come to the other one soon enough, but my first concern was that Pop served not only as bartender and proprietor and all the other lofty jobs of the saloon, but as bouncer as well. This was tricky, since it almost always involved someone who’d had a drink too many. If asked, Pop would have pointed out that people have been getting intoxicated since the first ripe grape dropped on Adam and Eve. To him, Prohibition was the dumbest thing ever tried, resulting only in bad bootleg booze. But the Medicine Lodge had a reputation to maintain as a respectable joint, and he did not tolerate what he called squirrelly behavior. “Hey, this isn’t the Copabanana,” he would directly warn anyone growing too loud or just plain sloppy drunk. Persist, though, and the offender would be told in no uncertain terms to tone things down right then or clear out. Every once in a while this ultimatum would put the balky customer in a fighting mood, and if he could not be talked into taking it outside, Pop would have to throw him out. The first time I happened to witness this through the vent, scared to watch but too thrilled to look away, I held my breath as he came out from behind the bar, his apron still on and not a hair out of place in his silver-striped pompadour, and got hold of a drunken and combative oil field roughneck. In nothing flat, the guy was in the street; you did not argue the point with Tom Harry.

As soon as I saw him bounce that unwelcome customer, though, the what-ifs swarmed. Suppose the guy had been carrying a knife? A gun? What if he had been an ex-prizefighter, mad at the world and more than capable of beating Pop’s brains out? What if things really got out of hand some Saturday night, always the drinkingest night of the week?

When I confessed that I worried about his role as bouncer, Pop seemed surprised. “I’m not selling milk to kittens, am I. Don’t bother your head with it.”

Mostly, I did not have to, the majority of the evenings of the week when I was across the alley there, seated at what I regarded as my rightful place, with the familiar sounds from the barroom sifting in through the vent. The click of washed glasses lining up on a shelf. The release of metal and air when a fresh beer keg was tapped. The
ching
of the cash register. Much like being backstage while the theater came to life out front. But all you can count on in life is your fingers and toes, right? The script changed mightily for both of us when the page was turned from one decade to the next and the curtain went up on 1960.

—

“CAN’T I GO
with you this once, Pop?”

“You sure as hell can’t.” Bent over like a bear in a berry patch, he was rummaging through the hocked items piled along the walls of the back room, selecting things, rejecting things. “Get that idea out of your head before it leaves a puddle, okay? Cripes, you’d have to miss some school.”

I knew it wouldn’t do any good to argue the point. It never did, when something would set him off this way. This was the other worry I carried through those years, these periodic trips of his to sell off some of the back-room loot, as he jokingly called it, when he would park me with Howie and his wife, Lucille, while he was “away on business” days at a time. He always went alone, so that part did not surprise me now. This abrupt journey, though, was right after New Year’s, a time of year when I thought we were safely settled in for the season, maybe for many frigid months. Out the top of the frosted back window, I could see Igdrasil’s spreading branches humped with snow from the unusually hard winter we were having.

“You didn’t tell me you were gonna do this again.”

“Yeah, well,” he answered without looking up, “things come up and need something done. Rule number one is, don’t wait until you hear from heaven.”

Except for times like this, he and I by now knew each other’s habits blindfolded. Our nearly six years together had taught me that when he said, “Maybe,” it meant “No,” and when he said, “We’ll see,” it meant “Maybe.” When I asked him in those nighttime conversations in my doorway how the day’s take was, if he said, “Not bad,” that meant “Good,” but if he said, “So-so,” that meant “Bad.” Pop could sound gruff—no, wrong, he could be gruff—but I had grown used to that, just as he’d had to become accustomed to my tendency to get carried away by matters. He generally coped with any of my thorny questions about life by giving some vague answer that ended with “That’s the how of it,” while I always wanted the five Ws and an H—who, what, when, where, why, and then the how. If I persisted, he might say something like, “Don’t be a plague of locusts” or he might sigh and provide some actual Ws. It depended.

At various levels, then, there was give-and-take between us, maybe more so than in some supposedly normal households. When it occurred to him, he taught me things for their own sake—I was probably the only kid who could tie a bow tie at the age of six—and I figured out for myself certain habits that made our life easier, such as fixing my own lunch for school, invariably jam sandwiches. I suppose with only each other to count on, reciprocity was a necessity. Whenever I had a class project I needed help with, he leapt to it as if I were an Einstein in the making, and whenever he took a notion to go fishing at Rainbow Reservoir on a summer Sunday, I fished loyally alongside him for as long as the chicken guts held out. True, we occasionally got on each other’s nerves—those ironclad habits of his did not always coincide with my own—but we got off again just about as fast. In short, we probably were as used to each other as two people can get. We ate, slept, and went about life as suited us; one of Pop’s middle-of-the-night hallway pronouncements was, “I don’t give a flying fig what anyone says, we’re not doing too bad with what we got to work with, kiddo.” We weren’t, except for times like this. The truth of the matter was, bad weather was not the only hazard agitating me as I watched him gather to go.

Was he seeing someone on these trips? “Someone” could only mean a woman, in my mind, and “seeing” carried all manner of implications I didn’t want to have to face, ever. I hated to be suspicious of him, but what other explanation was there for these urges that seemed to come over him unpredictably? He wasn’t much of a drinker—in the joint, he was notorious for saying, “I’ll take mine in the till,” and ringing it up whenever someone tried to buy him a round—so I was pretty sure he wasn’t going off on drunken binges. No, man’s other leading temptation was the only thing that made any sense to me about these trips of his. And that one frightened me almost as much as the threat of a blizzard, the danger that he would repeat the kind of ill-advised romance he’d had with my mother, and a woman, a female stranger, would invade our bachelor existence. She would barge into my life as a stepmother, and I’d had enough of being a stepped-on child in the Phoenix part of my life.

So I was spooked by the prospect of us being hit by rough weather of different kinds, but I stuck to the variety out the frosty window. “Pop, it gives me the creeps. What if the car runs off the road and you freeze to death? The radio says there’s another big snowstorm coming.”

“Let ’er come, I was here first,” he said stoically.

“Aw, crud, though,” I switched complaints trying to find one that would work, “can’t you at least take the other car?” The successor to the Hudson was a Buick we called the Gunboat for its series of stylized chrome insets in the lengthy hood like portholes—he liked substantial cars—but parked in the alley, waiting to be loaded, was the old Packard.

“Naw.” He wrestled down a saddle from the wall collection and added it to the growing pile of stuff. “Like I told you before, the old buggy holds more.” That was inarguable. The Packard’s roomy back seat and big trunk had probably the capacity of a small truck. Pausing to catch his breath, he checked on me where I was slumped at the desk on the landing to see how genuinely worried I was. Reading me like an open book, he sighed. Pop could really sigh, what I came to think of as the sigh of ages; like the expelled breath of time itself. If that isn’t in Shakespeare, it ought to be. “Don’t get all worked up.” He followed that with, “Canada is real good about keeping the roads open.” The fact that many miles of blizzardy prairie lay between Gros Ventre and the Canadian border did not enter into the matter, apparently. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

Fat chance of that, my long face said. Why did he always have to go to Canada for this, anyway? Why not direct his urges, whatever they were, to the city of Great Falls, a mere few hours away? Every time I pointed this out, I was told I didn’t understand back-room commerce.

“Come on, cheer up.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Tell you what, I’ll bring you a plane kit. What was it that you wanted?”

“A Spitfire.”

“Easy done. Figure out where you’re gonna hang it.” Suspended by fishing line from the rafters above the stair landing and the loft was the swarm of other plane models I had assembled, from his other trips. With the least stirring of air in the back room, the P-39 Airacobra fighter plane and Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber and others danced in little aerial duels with the hanging lariats and hay hooks, an effect I liked. Pop was standing under the swaying aircraft, mentally calculating his load for the car in a way that told me he was mostly done. Mostly.

“Okay, I’m about ready to hit the road.” Looking up, he saw me still morosely watching. He frowned the way a person does when trying to be super-patient. “Don’t you have schoolwork to do?”

“Arithmetic, is all. My book’s at the house.”

“Just make sure to get at it. Numbers aren’t as easy as pie.” I have since wondered whether he actually meant pi; it was tricky to know how much to read into him.

Giving me another serious look, he made a shooing motion. “Go get yourself some supper at the Spot.”

“Can’t I help you load?”

“Go get yourself some supper,” he repeated, as if I hadn’t heard him the first time. “Howie and his missus are ready for you these next couple of nights.” One last look of that kind and he said, as I expected him to, “Don’t put beans up your nose.”

I can smile now at his usual proscription against doing anything foolish. At the time, though, I was too busy nursing my grievance to appreciate it. By then I was very nearly twelve, as I liked to think of it, even though my birthday was months off, an age when notions can come into a person’s head as fast as chain lightning and it’s hard to tell which of them are crazy or not. This particular conviction had been growing in me since the first big snowstorm, on Thanksgiving Day. I was convinced we were in a thirty-year winter.

That was not to say that I expected the deep snowdrifts and below-zero temperatures gripping the Two Medicine country to last for the next three decades, like a meteorological version of some medieval war that hopelessly went on and on. No, when Pop and the Medicine Lodge denizens spoke of a thirty-year winter, they meant a hard one such as came once in a generation, season-long weather disasters that stood out in history. The cattlemen’s winter of 1886, when the open range was dotted with cow carcasses in the tens of thousands by the time spring finally came. The sheepmen’s winter of 1919, when ranchers’ hay sleds had nothing to offer starving animals but measly slew grass. The snowbound winter of 1948, when airplanes dropped medical supplies to communities cut off from the world by impassable roads. Tales of those last two still were told and retold in the Medicine Lodge every time a siege of freezing weather set in. Not only did I hang on those sagas at my listening post at the vent, but there was always something like the twangy exchange between Turk Turco and Joe Quigg, over which of them had it worse in this kind of winter.

“You in here warming your insides already, Turco? It must be nice to be on a state pension.”

“Try running a snowplow for twelve goddamned hours when you can’t even see the goddamned side of the road, and then tell me if it’s the soft life, Jojo.”

“Hah. Try hanging forty feet off the ground in the goddamned wind with the goddamned snow in your face.”

Every such morsel fed my imagination, my conviction that this was a time that still would be exclaimed about—“Back there in ’60, it’d freeze parts right off you!”—when I was old and gray. True, there was the point that it had been only a dozen years since the last thirty-year winter. But that might mean this one was so ferocious it overrode the usual weather arithmetic, mightn’t it?

Besides, if any further proof was needed of the nature of this season, Velma Simms had pulled out for Mexico, saying she wasn’t coming back to this icebox of a town until June.

In short, a killer winter, and Pop somewhere out there in it in an old crate of a car. I tried my best not to think about him swallowed up in the polar wastes of Canada, although I could not get it off my mind for very long. If this was a fair sample of being fatherless, it gave new meaning to
cruddy
.

My spirits did begin to lift—the only direction for them to go—the day he was due to come home. All I had to do was to get through the hours of school, I kept telling myself, and there he’d be behind the bar, the same as ever, fresh white shirt putting the snow to shame, when I burst into the joint through the back door, and that would be that, no more of his trips until this weather monster was in the record books. You can talk yourself around to almost anything when you really try.