The Bartender's Tale (14 page)

“It’s somewhere in the back room.”

“Really? It fell out, you mean?”

“Hell no,” Pop answered offhandedly, “I had it taken out, long time ago. You’d be surprised how hard it is to find a taxidermist who’ll do that. Professional ethics or something. I had to pack that head all over Great Falls before I found one who would agree to it.”

I felt a little dizzy, not just from the altitude of the ladder. Wild! Wait until Zoe heard this!

“Okay, Pop, I’ll bite. Why’d you have poor old bruiser here operated on like that?”

“Think about it,” he said, as if telling me I had missed a speck of dust. “Isn’t a customer gonna be more interested in a one-eyed buffalo than one with twenty-twenty vision? Maybe he’ll get to speculating about where that eye went, like you just were, and order another drink while he’s at it.” He shrugged. “If the guy doesn’t care how many eyes a buffalo has, we don’t want the ess of a bee for a customer anyway.”

I couldn’t argue with any of that. Pop and I moved on from the twinkling buffalo to the elk, with the coyote and deer and bobcat and the others beadily waiting their turn, every eye in the joint starting to shine, mine included. Every little while I looked down at the lord and master of the Medicine Lodge, this father of mine with his bag of secrets, like chicken guts and one-eyed animal heads and who knew what else. Damn, he was difficult to ever stay mad at.

3

W
AS IT THAT
spirit of imagination, which seemed to cling to the Medicine Lodge like the smell of fresh bread to a bakery, that accounted for the next turn of events? Whatever was in the air, Zoe and I found our calling in life that heady summer of 1960, no small achievement for twelve-year-olds.

She’s always claimed she was the one who spied the story in the
Weekly Gleaner
unfolded on Pop’s desk, and I’ve always maintained I spotted it first. There is no argument whatsoever that we both reacted less than surely to that headline lying in invitation on the desk: SHAKESPEARE TO VISIT GROS VENTRE.

“You want to go?”

“I dunno. Do you?”

“I guess. If you do.”

We went. Even if all the world’s a stage, it still was something of a surprise that our own scanty public park in an elbow of English Creek qualified. Or at least a patch of grass there large enough to hold a dozen or so actors and actresses in full raiment. Drama students from the university in Missoula, they were spending the summer traveling around the state in a repainted school bus with THE BARD ON
WHEELS
on its side. The play, cleverly, was
As You Like It
, which let the troupe get away with any kind of outdoor setting; the creek-side cottonwood grove where the park sat served just fine as an eventual forest of exile. Zoe and I settled in a shady spot to spectate. The audience wasn’t numerous, and pretty much predictable: high school teachers, library staff, some women’s clubs, key members of the Chamber of Commerce that had put up sponsorship money, Bill Reinking from the newspaper, and even his wife, Cloyce, who generally held herself above civic doings.

The performance commenced with a herald stepping from behind the bus and announcing, “We begin our revels in the garden of Sir Oliver.” A pair of actors strutted out, speaking in round tones, and the world changed for two twelve-year-olds.

Miracles sometimes come in disguise, and certainly this one came in costume, wearing pumpkin-style pants and puffy dresses long enough to step on and speaking a language such as we had never heard.
As You Like It
is wordy Shakespeare, if that’s not redundant. Much of the ornamented dialogue was over our heads, although lines about copulation of cattle and laughing like a hyena were not. Yet we could catch the strangely wonderful melody of it, issuing out of the characters like spoken music. And things didn’t drag along at an Alamo pace, everybody was always coming, going, thinking out loud to one another.

Zoe sat entranced, as did I, soaking up every gesture and straining to take in every curlicue of language as the student actors exclaimed “How now!” and snapped their fingers grandly to summon or dismiss one another. Under the phony beards, drawn-on mustaches, and lopsided wigs, the cast was miles too young for the parts they were playing, but in some strange way the obvious makeup made them all the more convincing. I am going to say it hit both of us at the same time, like forked lightning. The realization that living, breathing figures, with a sprinkling of greasepaint and a few ruffs of wardrobe, could not only imitate people of centuries before but could mimic life. Life with anything imagination could add onto it, even.

The disguised identities and all the costumes the Bard always had up his sleeve clinched it for us. Zoe’s eyes shone as she watched Rosalind strut around bossily in men’s clothes. I wanted to be Orlando, the suitor dressed to the hilt like a gentleman. Or possibly the chamois-shirted shepherd Silvius—I certainly knew a lot about sheepherders—driven hilariously cross-eyed by love for Phebe. Better yet, maybe, the fast-talking clown Touchstone in crazy, floppy rags.

“We will begin these rites,”
the rosy-cheeked actor with a scruff of beard that made him a duke proclaimed, forming up the dance after all the lovers finally got their identities sorted out, “as we do trust they’ll end, in true delights.”

Truer words were never orated. The play ended, but not our state of excitement as we left the park.

“So let’s get this straight, he was proposing to her even though he didn’t know it was her—”

“Sure, silly, because she was pretending to be a man—”

“—who he thought all the time was just rehearsing him—”

“—for when he proposed to her for real. Wild, huh?”

“Weren’t they great at talking that stuff?”

“Wow, their tongues must be tired.”

Hearing us at this, the Reinkings slowed down in front of us until we caught up with them. “Vox populi, I believe I hear,” Bill addressed us gravely but with a glint behind his eyeglasses, “just what an overworked editor needs to fill space. So tell me, as patrons of the thespian art”—despite the jokey way of putting it, he appeared to be professionally curious—“what did you think of the play?”

“Swuft!” we cried simultaneously.

His mustache twitched. “I’ll have to try to work that plaudit into my column.”

“I’ve never heard of anything you couldn’t, Bill,” his wife twitted him puckishly, if that was the word, as Zoe and I fell in step with them. Cloyce Reinking was generally known around town for being as frosty as her silvery hair—the story was that she came from a family that made movies in the early days, and Gros Ventre was a longer way from Hollywood than a map could measure—but even she seemed to have liked
As You Like It
, although that didn’t stop her from assuming the role of drama critic. She went over the finer points of the performance to her patiently listening husband while we drank it all in, until she came to Silvius, the cross-eyed shepherd, when she had to outright laugh in tribute. “The business with the eyes, wasn’t he good at it, Bill? That goes back to Ben Turpin, before talkies. Remember? It’s been years and years since I’ve seen anyone do that bit.”

Those last three words went off with a bang in twelve-year-old minds. Instantly Zoe was looking at me, mouthing a silent
Ooh
,
and I must have done the same. What a revelation, that when we did gangster talk or mimicked sheepherders, it wasn’t just kid stuff of trying to be funny—we were doing bits! Performing little tricks of stage magic as old as Shakespeare, and we hadn’t known it! Then and there, the two of us entered into the company of Groucho Marx wiggling his eyebrows like caterpillars and Bette Davis dropping the words “What a dump” like a stink bomb and the rest of history’s glorious virtuosos of lasting gags. How those careers got started, we had no idea, but for us, we had just been given a license—learner’s permits, of course—to dream up the performing mischief that went under the honorable old theatrical name of “shtick.”

After the Reinkings turned at their street to go home, Zoe and I jabbered about the play and the performers’ bits, as we now collegially knew them, all the way back downtown. Still in the spell, one of us finally dared to say it.

“We could be like them, I bet. Be actors, I mean. When we’re a little older.”

“Yeah. Wouldn’t that be neat?”

“Traveling around that way—”

“Dressing up like that—”

“—getting paid for it and everything.”

Out front of the Top Spot, Zoe sighed a gale at having to part with Shakespeare and me. “See you at supper.”

Never let it be said of me that, at such an opportunity, I did not do my bit. Goofily I crossed my eyes, more or less, and gabbled, “How now?”

She stifled a giggle and snapped her fingers bossily. “Be gone!”

My mind going like an eggbeater, I cut through the alley to the rear of the Medicine Lodge. The back room seemed newly magical to me, the biggest costume trunk imaginable. I seemed to float up to the desk on the stair landing. Eagerly checking through the vent, I was in luck. The saloon was empty except for Pop, who was on the phone. “No, that’s okay, I appreciate it, really. . . . Yeah, g’bye.” As soon as he hung up, I raced down the stairs.

“Pop!”

Looking spooked, he whirled from where the phone silently sat.

“Guess what, I’m gonna be an actor!”

His brow cleared slightly, then clouded again. I knew I was not supposed to be in the barroom when the saloon was open and wouldn’t have been, except for my uncontainable excitement, but he simply looked at a loss about how to deal with me. “Rusty, listen, kiddo—” He stopped, whatever he was about to say eclipsed by the gleeful shine on my face.

“Actor, hey?” he switched to, flicking his lighter a couple of times to start a cigarette. “Better drink an orange and tell me about it.” Digging the bottle of pop out of the cooler and handing it to me, he studied me with a deep squint. “Like the shoot-’em-up guys in the movies?”

“No, in plays! Shakespeare and stuff!” As I rattled on about the performance in the park, he smoked and listened.

“That’s really something,” he provided when I finally ran down. He gazed at me a moment more, then started busying himself at the sink under the bar. “An actor has to memorize a lot, you know.” I nodded nonchalantly; he himself said I had a memory that wouldn’t quit. “And learn how to walk around without knocking over the scenery.” That hadn’t occurred to me in the acreage of the park. Still making conversation with his head down, he went on: “Slick work if you can get it, I suppose. Spend a couple of hours pretending to be somebody else and get paid for it. Not bad. Beats running a joint, I bet.” He cleared his throat and looked up from the sink work. “Speaking of that, it’s business hours and you better scoot into the back before some ess of a bee reports us.” He made enough of a face to soften that, and I grinned my way out of the barroom, each of us drifting back to our clouds of thought.

—

I SPENT DAYS AFTER
that in that same stagestruck haze, sneaking off to a mirror every so often to practice crossing my eyes and other actorly expressions. I know Zoe was doing the same when we weren’t prancing around the back room dressed up in rain slickers and cowboy hats and other costumes Shakespeare surely would have approved of if he’d had the chance.

Suppertimes at the Spot, we had to behave ourselves like civilized people, but that didn’t stop us from whispering up a storm about what life as actors would be like, all the while secretly watching the cafe customers for bits to do later. The tourist couple from somewhere unimaginably South, for instance, who had to ask Zoe’s mother three times whether there was a grudge in town where they could get their tar fixed before she figured out to direct them to a garage that fixed tires. Or the Double W hay hand, a little worse for wear from a prior stop at the Medicine Lodge, blearily holding the menu so close it appeared he was about to kiss it. Pickings were good and the two of us were gliding along in our amateur mischief until the mealtime when Bill Reinking came in, which was unusual in itself, and went straight to the counter to lean over and say something to Zoe’s mom and they both headed into the kitchen to talk to Pete.

Watching, Zoe groaned in concern. “I hope my dad didn’t stiff him on this week’s ad.” Aw, crud, was my own reaction to the kitchen conference; now my milk shake was going to be lumpy and my cheeseburger burned crisp as a shingle.

Directly, the gray-mustached editor emerged from the kitchen and startled us by coming in our direction, even though there were plenty of empty places to sit. “May I join you?”

“Help yourself,” we blurted in chorus, both trying to think what we had possibly done to attract the attention of the Gros Ventre
Weekly Gleaner.
The saying was that a newspaper was the first draft of history, and the
Gleaner
week by week told the story of Two Medicine country to a remarkable degree. Far and wide, people read it to catch up on the doings of their neighbors across the distances of benchlands and prairie and mountain slopes, and for perspective on the world beyond. A life could be changed by those words in ink, because an article in the
Gleaner
meant that some set of ambiguous circumstances had been distilled by Bill Reinking or one of his rural correspondents into recorded fact, replete with those basic ingredients of truth, five
W
s and an
H
. Zoe and I then had only a beginning grasp of this, but we understood that a very important grown-up was pulling up a chair to our table for some reason.

“You’re no doubt wondering why I called this meeting,” our visitor joked seriously to start with. Taking off his glasses, he breathed on each lens and polished them with a paper napkin as he deliberated to us. “I’ve checked with the powers that be”—we understood that to mean Zoe’s folks and evidently Pop—“to see if it’s all right to offer the two of you a job.”

Zoe with her Butte smarts asked first: “What kind of a job, and what would we get?”

“It’s one well suited to junior thespians,” Bill Reinking was saying gravely as he fitted the specs on one ear at a time. Zoe and I traded glances. Did that mean what we think it do?

Evidently so, as the
Gleaner
editor, who was said to be smart as a dictionary, now invoked Shakespeare. “The play’s the thing, and all that. Cloyce”—catching himself, he cleared his throat significantly—“Mrs. Reinking, as you may or may not know, sometimes performs with the Prairie Players in Valier when the proper role comes up. There’s one such now, and she needs someone to help her with her lines before rehearsals start. This has created a crisis.”

Glancing around the cafe as if the three of us were conspirators, he lowered his head and looked at us over the tops of his glasses, confiding: “The crisis is, if you don’t do it, I’ll have to.”

Naturally we were wild to, and the dab of pay he named for each session of thespianism or whatever it was didn’t hurt.

“You’ve spared me.” He smiled with relief and told us the curtain would go up, so to speak, at ten the next morning at their house. “If you want to stay on the good side of Mrs. Reinking”—he cleared his throat again—“be on time.”

—

“HOW ARE WE DOING?”
Zoe asked anxiously.

I was carrying the pocket watch, complete with a Benevolent and Protective Order of the Moose tooth fob, that someone must have dug out of a father’s or grandfather’s trunk to hock and Pop had let me borrow from the back room for the occasion. It was raining torrents again and I had to wipe the watch crystal to read the time.