The Bartender's Tale (16 page)

With an eyebrow arched, Mrs. Reinking watched this. “Child, do you ever touch food?”

“Y-e-esss,” Zoe said back. True as far as it went; I had seen her move it around on her plate like a card-trick artist. Mrs. Reinking was getting to know us, but she still had a lot to find out, such as how fast Zoe could change the subject. “Did you really live in Hollywood?”

“Of course,” came the surprised answer. “Why?”

“What was it like?” Zoe said eagerly, and I followed up with, “Who was there?”

Cloyce Reinking shifted restlessly. “You really want to know, do you. All right, my parents were among the pioneers, you might say, in the film business. Movies were silents then, so at parties, there might be Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, people of that sort.” She twirled her glasses while thinking back to that time. “Everyone had mansions, including us—I sound like Lady Bracknell, don’t I,” she laughed slightly in spite of herself. “But it was true. I suppose”—she looked uneasily at us and our circumstances—“it made me a little spoiled. For instance, my parents let me use their roadster whenever I wanted when I was only a few years older than you.” Zoe and I goggled at that. “Of course I couldn’t drive in public quite yet,” she went on, as if even the rich faced certain drawbacks, “but up and down our orange groves, I probably was a holy terror.”

Plainly, living in Gros Ventre was small potatoes after that. But that’s where we all were, and Zoe now brought matters back to earth.

“Boy oh boy, they sound like the best parents ever. Are they still around?”

The woman in the chair opposite us went rigid, as if she might not answer. But then: “They were killed in a car wreck. Right after Bill and I were married. We were young, still teenagers really, and the movie company fell into other hands.” She made a gesture as if brushing all that away. “These things happen in real life.”

“Wow,” one of us said softly, it may have been me.

“Well,” Mrs. Reinking stirred uncomfortably and picked up her script but didn’t open it. “Back to
The Importance of Being Earnest
.” The dubious expression had returned to her. “Or not.” Abruptly she threw her glasses down on the coffee table. “Bill must be out of his mind, pushing me into this,” she said angrily. Zoe and I traded apprehensive looks. “I’m sorry, children, but I really think we’re not getting anywhere and had better give this up as a bad—”

We had talked this over and agreed it would be best coming from Zoe. “Mrs. Reinking?” she interrupted. “Before we start again,” just as if we were going to. “Can you do that bit for us? The Ben somebody one you told us about after Shakespeare that day?”

She frowned, taking a minute to remember. “The crossed eyes? No, why should I fool around with that?”

I leapt in. “Don’t you think it might be kind of funny if somebody as, uh, stuck-up as Lady Bracknell did that? Not all the time, but every once in a while?”

Drawing farther into her chair as if backing away from the suggestion, she looked askance at our eager faces. “Children, I don’t think that’s in my repertoire.”

“Just try?” we pleaded.

With considerable reluctance she did, slowly directing her eyes as if trying to see the end of her nose. Her attempt was more wall-eyed than cross-eyed, but it altered her looks fantastically, pulling her strong features into a comical prune face.

Zoe and I grinned, giggled, outright laughed. “You should see yourself.”

“You two.” She shook her head, but looked around for a mirror. Getting up swiftly, she led us into the hall, interrupting the cat at its business in the box. “Scat, Sheba, that will have to wait.” Posting herself at the mirror beside the hat rack, she drew herself up, took a breath to compose herself in the reflection, and said: “Give me a line, please.”

Zoe recited in her Cecily voice: “‘Mr. Moncrieff and I are engaged to be married, Lady Bracknell.’”

“‘I do not know whether there is anything peculiarly exciting in the air of this part of Hertfordshire,’” even the dowager voice sounded better, “‘but the number of engagements that go on seems to me considerably above the proper average that statistics have laid down for our guidance.’”

The three of us gazed into the mirror as she held the expression leading up to the finish of that. Her try at crossing her eyes at the climax of this did not actually yield dueling eyeballs, but it did produce a classic caricature of a snooty lady looking down her nose.

Letting her face relax, Mrs. Reinking nodded slowly to her reflection and the pair of us. “It has possibilities.”

—

GIDDY WITH THE ASSURED
prospect of further rehearsals—“Ten sharp, remember,” we had been reminded with a smile that was at once tart and sweet—Zoe and I practically sailed back downtown, talking a mile a minute. As we rounded the corner to the Medicine Lodge, however, I caught sight of something that made me tighten inside. Howie’s bald head instead of Pop’s dark one showing through the plate-glass window. Zoe was so busy chattering she didn’t notice, and I managed not to say anything beyond our usual “Later, gator” as she sashayed off to her chores at the Spot.

Hurrying around to the back of the saloon, I checked across the alley. The Packard was parked where it always was, so at least Pop wasn’t loading up for another trip. Yet.

I charged into the back room and there he was, idly rambling around the room to no clear purpose that I could tell, hands in his hip pockets, gandering at this and that like a museumgoer. “Hey, how’d it go today?” he greeted me, still looking around. “Did Cloyce Reinking need much help being theatrical?”

“What . . . what are you doing? Why’s Howie here?”

“Just kind of looking things over,” he said, gruff at having been caught at it. “Howie’s handling a shift while I take a little inventory up here.” He tapped his temple, circling the room some more. “Cripes, there’s stuff tucked away here I’d forgot about.”

I watched him, not knowing what to think. He looked the way he had lately, as if there was a lot on his mind. Maybe the weather was getting to him. There hadn’t been a chance to go fishing yet this crazy year. That was the least of it, though. Summoning my courage, I sneaked a look at the tarp. To my surprise, it didn’t appear to have any surplus under it. Still, I asked suspiciously, “You’re not gonna make a trip again already, are you?”

By now he was over at the shoe box of cigarette lighters, burying a played-out one to the bottom and trying out a shiny Ace in the Hole type. When it flamed on first try, he grunted and closed the lid, tapping the lighter in the palm of his hand contemplatively as he looked at me. “Naw, not right away, anyhow, you don’t have to worry your hair off about that.” He held his gaze on me. “Guess what. If and when I do, it’ll be a short one, maybe a day.” He made this sound casual, although it was anything but. “Down to the Falls, most likely.”

Did I hear him right? Those trips that plagued me like nothing else, over and done with, in just that many words? My voice thick with hope, I made sure: “Not Canada anymore? Ever?”

“That’s about the size of it,” he said, resuming his inventory stroll again. “Tell me about the rehearsal.”

—

IT WAS AMID
this run of luck that I stepped out of the house one morning to the strangest sight: All over town, the cottonwoods were suddenly snowing, the fluffy seed filaments they were named for drifting down like the most tardy flakes of the thirty-year winter, and there, through the heart of this soft storm out of old wrinkled Igdrasil and fellow trees, a rainbow was glowing. I stopped, amazed, as if the mighty seasons of this year were colliding in front of my eyes. Glimmers of rainbows had not been uncommon after all the rains, but this was a true one, a hypnotic arch stretching from somewhere beyond the Medicine Lodge and the other downtown buildings to the far hay fields of the creek valley. I watched, riveted, its full band of colors from red through yellow to violet phenomenally mixed with the snow-white fluff, until it gradually faded, and I think of that signal morning whenever I look back to that time now half a century ago, as if to the pigments of that many-hued year.

Still under the spell of that spectacle, I went on my way across the alley to the Medicine Lodge to await Zoe as usual, for our next session of being Ernest and Algernon and Cecily and so on. The beer truck with GREAT FALLS SELECT blazoned on its side in big red letters—and below, that immortal slogan
When you Select, it’s a pleasure!—
was backed up to the rear door, as it was every week. The beer man Joe greeted me like an old comrade as he rattled a last case of empty bottles into the truck, while Pop was occupied in reading something that must have come with the usual invoice. I noticed that the more he read, the more his eyebrows climbed. Finally he could not contain himself: “No bee ess? This on the level, Joe? They chose this joint?”

The beer man laughed and thumped him on the back. “Says so right there in the letter, don’t it? You’ve been an A-one customer all these years, Tom, it’s only fair. Have a helluva good time in the Falls.” Climbing into the truck, he gave us a beep of salute and pulled out, leaving Pop standing there reading over the piece of paper, looking as pleased as I’d ever seen him. I almost didn’t want to interrupt the moment.

“Who’s it from, Pop?”

“Some bigwig at the brewery, no less. Guess what, kiddo. The Medicine Lodge is the Select”—he drew it out into
Seee-lect—“
Pleasure Establishment of the Year. It beat out every other joint in the entire state. How about that, hey?”

“Wow! Is there a big prize?”

“Let me see here.” He ran his thumb down the letter. “A twenty-five-percent discount on next week’s beer order—that’s better than a kick in the pants, anyway—plus a tour of the brewery, an award luncheon, and guest seats in the company box at the Selectrics game this Sunday.”

“Outstanding, Pop! Can I—”

“Don’t sweat it, you’re along. It says right here ‘honoree and family.’”

“Can Zoe come with us?”

“What am I, an adoption agency?” That did not sound promising, but if I played my cards right, it might not be the last word, I sensed. Seeing my face fall and stay that way, he reconsidered. “Just the two of us”—he rubbed his jaw as if taking count—“I guess we are a little short on family. If her folks say it’s okay, I don’t see any overpowering reason why she can’t come.”

—

THE DAY DAWNED BRIGHT
and clear, like stage lights turned high. Dressed to the teeth as Pop and I also were, Zoe sat in the middle in the car, because that’s what females did in those days of front seats that held three people. The drive to Great Falls felt like a storybook journey, the polar crags of the Rockies beyond, the nearer fields so unbelievably green the color needed a new name, the creeks and rivers running high, wide, and handsome in a countryside usually starting to gasp for moisture this time of year. Pop declared he could not remember a summer quite like this, and Zoe and I could readily believe it. He was in an expansive mood as our route stepped us down from the altitude of the Two Medicine country, pointing out for my benefit a landmark square butte that Charlie Russell had painted any number of times, and for Zoe’s, the sky-high smelter smokestack, visible from thirty miles away, where copper mined in Butte ended up. Never mind the Pyramids, the Alps, the topless towers of cities of legend, we had sufficient marvels to behold as the Buick gunboat sailed us along.

As the name implies, Great Falls has a river at its heart, the renowned Missouri, and the broad, powerful current was brimming almost into the bank-side brewery, as though the water could hardly wait to become beer, when we pulled up to the front of the big brick building. The brewery looked disappointingly like a factory, one from long ago at that. There could not have been anything more up to date, however, than the gigantic electrical sign up on the roof spelling out GREAT FALLS SELECT, with that vital last word blinking bright red every few seconds.

“This seems to be the place,” Pop said with a straight face as we got out. While he bent down to adjust his bow tie in the reflection of the car window, Zoe and I gawked around. Both of us had trouble keeping our eyes off the hypnotic sign. Suddenly the thought hit Zoe: “Mr. Harry, is this the beer they call Shellac?”

“The exact same one, princess,” he replied, straightening up to his full height, “although none of us are going to say that word again today from this minute on.” He looked at her forcefully, then the same at me. “Got that?”

We bobbed our heads like monks in a vow of silence, but you know how difficult it is when you deliberately try to put something out of your mind.
Shellac, Shellac, Shellac,
the huge sign seemed to register in its every blink.

Checking his watch, Pop hustled us into the brewery. Waiting for us was a well-dressed man of large girth, who introduced himself as the vice president in charge of brewing operations. “I see to it the barley comes in and the beer goes out.” He gave an encompassing sweep of his hand as if that explained everything.

Talking every step of the way, he led us off on the tour of the brewery. There was a bewildering variety of vats and boilers and other equipment strung throughout the building, with an army of workers reading gauges and adjusting dials and opening and closing valves and so on. The manufacture of beer, it turned out, was full of words that Zoe and I thought we knew but took on evidently far different meanings when spoken by the vice president, such as
malt
and
mash
and
hops.
It might not be everyone’s idea of a prize outing, but trooping through the Select production maze behind our indefatigable tour guide was decidedly educational, I suspect even for Pop, although he kept nodding wisely and murmuring
mm hmm
, as if he knew all about how beer was made.

Naturally the brewery had an intoxicating aroma, a heady odor that seemed to go farther up the nostrils than other smells. While the vice president gabbed to Pop, with us trailing behind, Zoe could not resist crossing her eyes as if she was drunk, and I had to make myself not dissolve in giggles. I got back at her by whispering, “Don’t look so shellacked.” She puckered up at the forbidden word, and now we couldn’t help it, both of us laughed through our noses as if sneezing.