The Bartender's Tale (22 page)

That gave Pop pause, but not for long. “I didn’t bargain for everything piling up on the cockeyed calendar, did I? It’s your tough luck it happens that way.” All too plainly he was ready to drop the topic and the erstwhile young collector of Missing Voices, both. “Anyhow, drink up. You’ll need the nourishment to tackle those mudjacks.”

“Sir,” Delano fashioned a fresh inspiration, helped by some fast gulps of beer, “I heard everything you said against coming along to the reunion, and I respect every word. But at least let me show you the Gab Lab. I have it all ready to go to Fort Peck, you’ll see. It’s parked right across the street. Please? It’ll only take a minute.”

Of course I was off my stool and halfway to the front door by the time he finished saying that, but Pop hesitated before taking his apron off and following him out.

I’ve always thought what awaited Delano Robertson in the main street of Gros Ventre was so unfair. Even yet, I can see it and hear it and almost catch a whiff of it. As he stepped from the sidewalk to eagerly lead us across to a green-and-white Volkswagen van, bearing down on him no more than half a block away was a panicky mob of freshly shorn sheep, peeing and pooping and announcing in other ways how upset they were at being stripped of their fleeces, while in back of them, also supremely agitated, was Canada Dan, cussing the life out of the surprised pedestrian in the path of the flock. Pop and I looked on unsuspectingly at this inhospitable reception for the person who would change our life like night to day.

Our visitor froze in astonishment at the spectacle of a thousand undressed sheep madly advancing on him, which was a mistake on his part. Out front of the others, one ewe that must have lost her lamb as well as her wool and maybe her mind was frantically chasing back and forth, bleating blame at the world and stamping her hooves at anything in the way. She made a maddened run in Delano’s direction. Can a person be buffaloed by a sheep? Whatever the fitting description, he bolted for safety as fast as his legs could carry him.

“They’re just out of the shearing pen across the creek,” Pop informed him as he scrambled ungracefully back to join us in the doorway of the Medicine Lodge. “Makes them a little excited.” We watched the fleeceless animals, their bewildered lambs trailing them, jostle past by the hundreds. Sheep look so naked without their wool, like peeled eggs with legs. Besides that indignity, some of the ewes carried cuts where they had been nicked by the shearers’ power clippers. You see pictures, all the way back to Bethlehem, of peaceful grazing flocks, but this scarred-up, loose-boweled parade would not make anyone envy a sheep’s life. Delano Robertson remained wide-eyed and more than a little nervous about his van with the unsanitary swarm engulfing it. “Does this happen much?”

“Oh, hell yeah,” Pop said, as if this was only ordinary traffic. “The Two Medicine country is deep in sheep. Wool and lambs are its bread and butter.”

Eventually the last echelon of skittery ewes passed us by, along with Canada Dan, who spat a brown stream of tobacco juice toward us and groused, “It’s getting so a man can’t even herd sheep through town without a turster in the way, ain’t it?”

Delano’s face lit up. “The negative interrogative! It’s a linguistic pattern that’s dying out in most places.” His hands flew to one of many shirt pockets again for the notebook and pen as he craned a look at the departing figure, still bristling like a porcupine and spitting in our general direction. “Where’s he from?”

“All over,” said Pop, alluding to the job history of the Two Medicine country’s most hired and fired sheepherder.

“Canada,” I said, giving Pop a look.

“I thought so,” Delano nodded wisely, jotting in the notebook. “Linguistic patterns tend to mix along borders, likely French affecting English in him. The Gallic
n’est-ce pas
must have become
ain’t it
in his cultural subgroup, don’t you think?”

“Something must have affected the ess of a bee,” Pop said, as if his eye still smarted. “That’s Canada Dan for you.”

Delano paused in his scribbling, puzzled now. “What’s a ‘turster’?”

“Tell you later,” said Pop. “Show us this traveling contraption of yours. Watch where you step.” The street was even more of a mess than usual after sheep had gone through, and Delano pretty much tiptoed as he escorted us to the van. Reaching it, he let out a relieved “Whew!” and flung open the double doors in the middle of the beetle-nosed vehicle. “Here it is, the Gab Lab!”

Pop and I stared into what looked like a camper combined with the guts of a recording studio. The camper part was straightforward enough: a gateleg table, seats and cushions that converted into a bunk, a white-gas stove cleverly hooked onto one of the double doors, and a small sink with a hand pump for water. Curtains on all the windows, a homey touch. But the rest of the interior held racks and racks of tape reels, as recorders used in those days, and two or three of the bulky machines were tucked away wherever they could fit, while headphones dangled from cabinet knobs. A typewriter was lashed to a little shelf all its own.

Pop could not help but observe, “Kind of tight quarters unless you’re a sardine, isn’t it?”

“Everything is within reach,” Delano defended, sounding a trifle crestfallen.

“So how does this Missing Voices deal work?” Pop wondered. “You corner people and get them to gabbing about themselves and then—”

“—after the interview has been conducted, according to professional standards,” Delano said patiently, “I review it and transcribe it onto paper, right here. It’s fresh in my mind that way, and there aren’t those questions later as to what this word or that was.” He leaned toward us confidentially. “Alan Lomax’s transcription typist thought Leadbelly had written an entire song about ‘swimming’ instead of ‘wimmin’ and it took the Library of Congress folklorists days and days to figure that out and fix it.” That same shy smile. “That’s why I came up with the idea for the Gab Lab and was able to convince the powers that be to let me outfit it like this.” He beamed proudly at the chockful camper van. “It’s the only one of its kind.”

Shaking his head, Pop backed away from the van. “Okay, it’s been seen. Good luck.”

Immediately Delano had that pleading expression again, and began, “Mr. Harry, the Mudjacks Reunion is the chance of a lifetime to—”

It only brought him more head shaking from Pop. “Listen, I can tell you think you can’t do this by yourself, but you’d better make up your mind to. I’m still not gonna be Leadbutt for you and lead you around by the hand to every Fort Pecker who’s got some kind of a story. I gave you my reason and that settles it, right?”

Wrong, if I had anything to do with it. I was trying to come up with whatever would impel him to the reunion instead of signing the death warrant of the Medicine Lodge, when Delano slammed one of the van’s double doors hard enough to show he did have a temper.

“If you’re determined to turn your back on history”—he slammed the other one harder yet—“that’s that.”

Thrusting his hands into side pockets of his bush-jacket shirt and hunching up mournfully, he looked around at the town, mostly at the street with its sheep leavings, some of which he had stepped in. Without much hope, he inquired, “Is there a campground somewhere along the creek?” He was asking me because Pop, still shaking his head, was making a beeline back to the saloon. “Maybe I’d have better luck at fishing,” Delano muttered, scraping his shoe on the curb.

Inspiration sometimes comes from the least likely source. “Fishing?” I repeated loudly. “Gee, I don’t just know where you’d go, the creek has been too roily practically forever.”

Pop stopped short in the middle of the street. He turned his head enough to ask, “You fished much back east?”

“Hmm? Oh, a tad.”

Whatever a tad was, it did it. “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Pop mused, as if it were his own sudden discovery. “We could show you the best fishing spot on the face of the earth, couldn’t we, Rusty.”

—

DELEGATING ME
to escort Del to the house, where he could park his traveling home and office in the driveway overnight for a nice, early start on catching fish, Pop headed back to the Medicine Lodge in lifted spirits, calling over his shoulder: “You’ll have rainbow trout running out your ears before we’re done with you.”

Delano had brightened measurably by the time he and I climbed into the van, probably at the prospect of a safe haven where marauding sheep could not get at him. Riding in the Gab Lab was an adventure in itself—wait till I told Zoe!—what with the recording gear and highway maps and other clutter its usual occupant had to scoop out of the passenger seat to make room for me. He apologized for his housekeeping and I told him not to worry, it matched ours. “There’s only your father and you?” he asked, and I started in full bore about Pop and my mother splitting the blanket when I was real little, but before I could say more, he sympathized by telling me his parents, too, had divorced when he was a child and now were both dead, which effectively put him way beyond me in orphanhood, so I quit babbling.

As he drove, he evidently was still bothered by the events competing with the Mudjacks Reunion. “What is this play that’s so vitally important?” he asked peevishly. “Something by someone local?”

“Oscar Wilde.”

“Oh.”

I figured it was my turn. “What’s ‘bobbasheely’ mean?”

“Mmm, something like moseying along.”

“Then why not just say ‘moseying along’?”

“You wouldn’t want vanilla to be the only flavor of ice cream, would you?” He had me there.

By then we were pulling in to the house, met by a stiff breeze along the creek, which was ruffling the front-yard trees. Igdrasil appeared to be doing a rain dance, its boughs swaying rhythmically and its leaves shimmering in countless motions. Fantastic clouds, fat and billowy, hovered beyond the giant tree, as if waiting their turn with the wind. “I hope your father is a good judge of the weather.” Delano glanced up dubiously. “It looks stormy.”

“That’s nothing. We had a thirty-year winter, you know. It never let up from Thanksgiving until—”

“A Packard straight-eight! What a piece of history!”

Unquestionably he had spotted the dark hulk at the end of the driveway. The surprise was mine, next, when he enthused, “Those old babies were absolute wonders—horsepower to burn. Bootlegger specials.” He imitated the rat-a-tat-tat of a tommy gun so effectively, I gave a start. “Did your father pick it up in a government seizure sale, do you know?” I didn’t, but I was sure going to ask now.

“Ah, well,” he responded with a mysterious grin, “if only the godly carriage could talk.”

Grown-ups are like that, I had to accept one more time, evidently even ones barely old enough to shave. Yet somehow Delano was hard not to get attached to—maybe it was the name—and I was prepared to keep him company for the afternoon, but he had work to do. “The Gab Lab is a trusty servant, but a hard master,” he said, if I heard him right. Before I could traipse off and leave him to his undersize laboratory, though, he made the mistake of asking, “Where’s a place in town that serves a good dinner?”

—

“YOU GET PAID MONEY
to listen in on people, Mr. Delano? Like a spy?”

“Hmm? To listen to what they have to say, yes, but it’s actually not like spying because—”

“Oh. You don’t get to sneak up on them without their knowing it?”

“Not at all. Oral history is strictly face-to-face. Interviewer, interviewee, and the mike.”

“But then if you can’t listen to them without their knowing it, how can you tell they’re not lying when they say things right to you? Isn’t that what ‘bare-faced liar’ means?”

To say Delano had his hands full at the corner table in the Top Spot only begins to describe the situation, because along with attempting to eat a chicken-fried steak and contend with Zoe’s barrage of questions, there was the surplus of conversation in the crowded cafe constantly at the edge of one’s hearing. Pop’s maxim that Saturday night buys the rest of the week held as true here as in the Medicine Lodge, as Zoe’s mother bustled along the counter from customer to customer and to the other few tables, apologetically pouring coffee, while Pete Constantine, in his slipping cook’s hat, manhandled matters in the kitchen. Trying to take it all in, our dining partner was having to stretch his attention in a number of directions at once.

“He’s been to college for that, Zoe,” I stuck up for his presumed ability to recognize truth or falsehood when it looked him in the face. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Delano?”

“Just Del, all right? No need to be fancy among friends, hmm?” He took a couple of sips of the Spot’s watery coffee to escape dealing with Zoe’s philosophical inquiry into bare-faced liars, meanwhile trying to listen in on two oil field roughnecks at the counter mystifyingly talking about Christmas tree valves on a mud rig.

“Del”—Zoe dropped her voice to first-name confidentiality—“do they teach acting where you went to college?”

“Come again?” He tipped his head slightly in that habit of his, until she repeated, “Acting.”

“Ah, a drama department, do you mean?” He grinned down at her. “Are you sure you need one?” He worked on his chicken-fried steak, the night’s special, seeming puzzled to not find a recognizable steak under the gluey-looking brown gravy and breading, merely pulverized meat.

“Rusty, what do you know for sure?”

The voice so close behind my chair it made me jump was the nosiest in town, and quick as I was to be on my guard, Zoe’s eyes already were flashing me a warning. Chick Jennings had been the postmaster before buying the Pastime saloon a few years back, and as Pop put it, he liked to know everybody’s business but his own. “He runs that joint like he’s still doing government work,” the best bartender who ever lived scorned this most amateur one. “Doesn’t put in the hours a real saloon needs. And he talks customers into the ground, which is why that joint is so dead.”

Chick Jennings’s jowly face now hung over me like the man in the moon as he lowered his voice confidentially. “Your daddy found a taker for the famous Medicine Lodge yet?”

“Not that he’s told me about.” Which was narrowly true; it had been overheard fair and square through the vent. Zoe radiated approval.