The Bartender's Tale (11 page)

At the table, the two of us sat across from each other as trapped as strangers in a dining car. Given my first full look at Zoe, the wide mouth, the pert nose, the inquisitive gaze right back at me, I must have just stared. My education until then had not included time with a girl. Male and female relationships in school were literally a joke. “Your eyes are like pools. Cesspools. Your skin is like milk. Milk of magnesia.” But the incontrovertible fact facing me was that Zoe Constantine possessed deep brown eyes that were hard to look away from, and she had an olive-skinned complexion that no doubt suntanned nice as toast, unlike mine. Her hair was not quite as richly black as my own, but at the time I thought no one in the world had hair as dark as mine and Pop’s. For all of these arresting features, she was so skinny—call it thin, to be polite—that she reminded me of those famished waifs in news photos of DP refugee camps. But that was misleading, according to the indifferent way she toyed with her food while I waited edgily for mine. I was close to panic, thinking of endless suppertimes ahead with the two of us about as conversational as the salt and pepper shakers. How was this going to work?

She spoke first.

“I bet your dad was in a knock-down, drag-out fight, wasn’t he. That’s some black eye.”

“Uh, yeah. You should have seen the other guy.”

“People get in fights all the time in Butte,” she said in worldly fashion. “It gives them something to do.” Idly mashing potatoes that were already mashed, she caught me even more by surprise as she conspiratorially lowered her voice enough that neither her mother behind the counter nor her father in the kitchen could hear:

“How come he and you eat here? Where’s your mother? Can’t she cook better grub than this?”

“She’s, she’s not around anymore.”

Her voice dropped to an eager whisper. “Did they split the blanket?”

“Uh-huh,” I whispered back, although I wasn’t sure why divorce was a whispering matter. “When I was real little. I wouldn’t know her if I saw her.”

“Wild! Are you making that up?”

“You can’t make something like that up, nobody would believe it.”

“Ooh, you’re a half orphan, then.” That jolted me. Even during my time in Phoenix, trying to dodge Ronny’s knuckles, I had not thought of myself that way. That was nothing to what she said next. “You’re so lucky.”

I was so stunned I could hardly squeak out: “Because I don’t have a mother I’ve ever seen?”

“No, silly, I mean because you’ve got only one parent to boss you around,” she whispered, with either world-weary assurance or perfectly done mischief, it was impossible to tell which. “That’s plenty, isn’t it?” She peered critically toward the kitchen. “I’d give up my dad, I think, if it came to that.”

“Wh-why?” I sneaked a look at her father in his undersized cook’s hat, flipping a slice of Velveeta onto my cheeseburger as if he’d just remembered that ingredient. “What’s the matter with him?”

Zoe waved that away with her fork. “Nothing much. He’s just not swuft about a lot of things.”

This was another stunner from her.
Swuft
did not merely mean quick at handling things, it meant swift-minded, brainy, sensible, and quite a number of other sterling qualities she evidently found lacking in her father.

“He couldn’t beat up anybody in a fight, like I bet your dad can,” she was saying, as if she would trade with me on the spot. “Besides, my mom could have made your burger while he’s standing around looking at it.” In fact, Mrs. Constantine kept revving the milk shake machine as she waited for the cheeseburger to find its way out of the kitchen; my shake was going to be thin as water.

All kinds of doubts about the Top Spot under its new management must have begun showing on me, as Zoe now amended her view of fathers for my benefit in another fervent whisper.

“I bet
your
dad is plenty swuft, you can tell that just by looking at him, can’t you. Besides, I heard the old owners tell my folks”—her whisper became even more whispery; what a talent she had—“this cafe gets a lot of its business because the Medicine Lodge brings customers to town from everywhere. I guess it’s real famous around here?”

I nodded nonchalantly. Fame was right up there with swuftness in her estimation, I could tell.

“Do you get to be in your dad’s saloon”—she wrinkled her nose at the less than impressive confines of the cafe—“ever?”

It was my turn to astonish. “Sure! All the time.”

She gave me the kind of look you give a bare-faced liar.

I began convincing her by recounting my job as swamper every Saturday morning. Disdainfully she let me know this did not win me any bragging rights,
her
parentally ordained job was to fill the sugar dispensers, salt and pepper shakers, ketchup bottles, and napkin holders and things like that every single day, from her tone a life sentence of cafe chores.

No way was I going to be trumped about the joint, though. “Yeah, well,” I responded, elaborately casual, “I just about live in the saloon, I’m there so much. In the back room, I mean.”

Her ears perked up. I expounded about the privileged position provided by the stair landing, and went on at some length about the trove of hocked items housed from floor to ceiling.

Zoe listened as if she had never heard of such a thing, as I suppose she hadn’t.

“All kinds of stuff?” she whispered eagerly. “Years’ and years’ worth? And people are still doing that?”

“You bet. Sometimes the same people, over and over.”

“How do you know that?”

“I hear them at it, don’t I, out front with my dad. Everything that goes on.”

“Whoa, are you serious? Is there some rule,” she scoffed, mischief in her gaze, “they have to talk at the top of their voice to get a drink in this town?”

“Don’t be silly,” I got back at her for that word, “it’s not that. All it takes is—”

Carried away with myself, I told her about the vent.

“Really?” Her voice dropped again to the lowest whisper humanly possible. “You can see and hear them but they can’t see you? They’re down there drinking and carrying on and everything, and you’re up there, invisible?”

“Uhm, yeah.”

Her eyes shone. “That sounds neat! Can I come listen to them, too?”

Before I had to commit to that, my milk shake and cheeseburger were delivered, along with Mrs. Constantine’s smiling wish for me to have a good appetite and her instructive frown at Zoe’s barely touched victuals. “Eat, missy, or you’ll blow away,” she recited, and left us to it. I attacked my meal. Zoe sighed and speared a single string bean off her plate. It dawned on me I had better make sure just how much we were destined to be around each other, apart from what looked like disconcerting suppertimes ahead. Between milk shake slurps, I inquired, “What grade will you be in?”

“Sixth. Same as you.”

“How’d you know?”

A quick, devilish look. “Your father bragged you up.”

“Uh-huh.” I swirled my milk shake in man-of-the-world fashion. “We’ll have old lady Spencer for a teacher.”

“Is she hard?”

“Terrible. She catches you whispering, you have to stay an hour after.”

The mischievous look again. “In Butte, they cut your tongue out.”

By the time I was done snorting milk shake out of my nose, I was in love with Zoe. I have been ever since.

—

“POP, IS THAT YOU?”

“No, it’s Nikita Khrushchev.”

I had not yet gone to sleep by the time I heard the nightly sounds in the bathroom and then the hallway, my mind turning over and over all that was to be digested from my first meal with Zoe. It should have been exhausting, but it was the opposite.

Pop came and leaned against the doorjamb, smoothing the cloth of his undone bow tie between his hands as he peered at me in the dim bedroom. “How’d you do with your supper partner?”

“She’s”—I cast around for the right way to put it—“different.”

That immediately turned him into the listening bartender.

“Not
bad
different,” I spelled out. “She’s real smart, for a girl.”

“They can be like that,” he said drily. “Try to get along with her, okay? It puts us in a bind if we can’t grab a meal at the Spot. We’d have to live on pig knuckles and embalmed eggs.” That was meant to be a joke, I understood, but it was not that far from the dietary probability if we had to fend for ourselves every suppertime.

“Sure thing, Pop,” I said, as if there really was such a thing.

—

PEOPLE COME AND GO
in our lives; that’s as old a story as there is. But some of them the heart cries out to keep forever, and that is a fresh saga every time. So it was with me and the unlooked-for supper partner who quickly became so much more than that. Zoe proved to be something like a pint-size force of nature, thin as a toothpick and as sharp. Her face was always a show, her generous mouth sometimes sly, sometimes pursed, the tip of her tongue indicating when she was really thinking, her eyes going big beyond belief when something pleased her, and when something didn’t, she could curl her lip practically to the tip of her nose. To say that she was not the kind of company I could ever have expected in that summer of my life is a drastic understatement.

Whether or not we were made for each other, the two of us were definitely made for the back room of the Medicine Lodge. From the very start of our exploring of its wonders together, she couldn’t get enough of the assortment of stray and odd items that had been traded in down through time, and I couldn’t get enough of her prodigious imagination. Prowling in some cluttered quarter, she would stumble onto a stray article such as a suitcase made of that old pebbled phony black leather and away she would go. “Ooh, I bet this has been lots of places. Let’s look in it.” We would. Empty, every time. No matter, the lack of content only spurred her speculation. “Just think, all he has is the clothes on his back. I bet there was a fire. In the bunkhouse. He was all played out from punching cows all day and was laying there smoking in bed and went to sleep and the old army blanket caught fire”—for a twelve-year-old, Zoe had a remarkably graphic view of life—“and everything burned up, and he had to run for his life, and the only thing he had time to grab was his suitcase. Everything else,
ka-whoosh!
”

You always hate to disrupt an artist, so I did not tell her the inspirational piece of luggage actually was owned by some snoose-chewing herder whose belongings were securely in his sheep wagon out in the foothills while he hocked the suitcase when his money ran out before finishing off a big drunk. Besides, Pop’s habit of that last cigarette at bedtime made
ka-whoosh!
something I didn’t like thinking about.

I had to ask, though. “Does your dad smoke in bed?”

“All the time,” she said, rolling her eyes to fullest effect. “I bet your dad knows better.”

“Oh, sure.”

That was cast into doubt, however, by her next find. The shoe box half full of metal cigarette lighters. Zoe’s eyes went big in amazement. “Who smokes this much?”

“No one guy,” I responded like the back-room veteran I was. “See? They’re engraved. Soldiers trade them in.” And had been doing so for a long time. Rummaging, we found a tarnished lighter with the engraving
MONTANEER JUNGLE FIGHTERS
, which dated back to the Montana National Guardsmen who served in the tropical hell of New Guinea in World War II. Another one read
INCHON SEPT. 1950 THE MARINES HAVE LANDED
from the Korean War. Newest and shiniest were some engraved with
MINUTEMAN MISSILEMEN
—
AMERICA’S ACE IN THE HOLE
, from Air Force troops, flyboys, as we somewhat inaccurately called them, stationed in missile silos out there under the prairie. “Pop takes one out and uses it until the flint wears out,” I explained the plenitude of lighters. “He says he got tired of running out of matchbooks all the time.”

“Smart,” Zoe commended, but by now her attention had been caught by a collection of shoes ranged along the bottom of one wall: cowboy boots and work shoes but also well-shined oxfords. “That’s wild!” she gasped. “People even trade in their dress shoes?”

“You bet. Like Pop says, they can’t drink with their feet.”

She giggled and went over to the footwear assortment, drawn by one particularly extravagant-looking pair of items. They resembled cowboy boots, but were higher topped and the leather was of an odd texture and funny greenish shade. “What are these fancy things?” she wondered, fingering one.

“Snake boots.”

“Rusty, you’re making that up.” Nonetheless she jerked her hand away.

“Huh-uh, cross my heart up, down, and sideways. It’s snakeskin of some kind, they’re made in Texas,” I held forth knowledgeably because I had asked Pop the identical question a few days before, when Earl Zane traded them in to drink on. I started to fill her in on the Zane family propensities, but she was so canny she had already caught on to those, including Duane’s. “That kid at the gas station?” She curled her lip dismissively. “What a weenie.”

Snooping past the boots and shoes, she next found the hiding place of the Blue Eagle sign under the rain slickers, just as I had when the back room was a new world to me. Watching a dark-eyed imp of a girl repeat my discovery so exactly was remarkable and somewhat spooky. I’ve said this was starting off as not a usual summer.

Unlike me, however, Zoe saw nothing odd about the eagle being blue. “I bet it’s the only paint they had that day,” she resolved the question, and moved on.

As inevitably as B follows A, she next stumbled onto the latest quantity of items tucked away even farther with the tarp over them. “What are all these tools for?”

My guess was that they were implements used in oil field work, but I only repeated what Pop told me whenever I happened to ask about the stuff that every so often multiplied under the tarpaulin, as if it was a magician’s cloth. “It’s just surplus somebody didn’t know what else to do with.”

“This place is really something, Rusty,” she marveled.

And that was before I even introduced her to the vent.

“It’s that time of day, Tom,” the alimony purr in that voice drifted up to us when we hunched in at the desk on the landing and I grandly levered the vent slats open.