The Bartender's Tale (23 page)

The Pastime owner looked deeply disappointed at the lack of gossip to take away. “Tell your daddy for me he beat me to the punch, putting the thing up for sale. The saloon business does wear a man down.” He wagged his head in sympathy I didn’t believe. “I never figured I’d outlast Tom Harry.”

“I’ll be sure to tell my father that.”

Delano was following this, wisely silent. I knew Chick Jennings would not leave until his curiosity was satisfied, so I said: “This is, uh, Mr. Robertson. He’s here to go fishing.”

“That so? Where do you come from, Mr.—”

“Oh, look, your supper sack is ready,” Zoe piped up as Pete Constantine’s hand plopped the brown bag on the serving window.

Actually, it was understandable if Chick Jennings would rather talk than eat the Top Spot’s version of food, but he wagged his head again about the call of duty at the Pastime and went off looking unsatisfied.

“I take it Gros Ventre is a two-saloon town,” said Del, amused.

“His is a dump.” Zoe dismissed the Medicine Lodge’s competition so scornfully it did my heart good. “In Butte,” she confided in the voice she used for secrets, “we call a saloon like that a deaf and dumb institute.”

Professional listener or not, Del looked as if he had not heard that quite right. “Say again?”

Patiently she did, complete with explanation: “A bartender like him will talk you deaf, and you’re dumb to drink there in the first place.”

My turn to issue a warning as her mother sidled along the counter toward us, coffeepot in action. “Here she comes, Zoe, you better get busy eating.”

With a world-class sigh, she fiddled a fork onto her otherwise untouched plate, then eyed Del’s. “I bet you aren’t getting enough supper,” she expressed sudden concern. “Here, you can have some of mine.” Before he could turn down the offer, she was dumping a major chicken-fried helping onto his. When he protested that he could not possibly eat all that, she assured him, “That’s okay, you can just leave it.”

Her mother arrived, clucking approval as she inspected the progress of Zoe’s meal. “That’s what I like to see, honeybunch, good appetite.” Patting Zoe and giving me and my milk shake and cheeseburger her usual doubtful glance, she turned to Del with her most motherly smile. “I hope my little good-for-nothing isn’t being too much of a nuisance.”

“Not at all,” he maintained with a straight face, “she’s no trouble.” That was an underestimation of Zoe if I ever heard one, but as soon as her mother left us, he took care of it. “I have sisters like you. Holy terrors.”

Glowing at the compliment, she went back to peppering him with questions. I concentrated on my burger and shake until, in flirtatious movie style, she reached: “So, Del, are you married?”

“No,” he reported, shy again. I could see something change in his eyes. “I came close right after college, but she chose a finance major from Richmond instead.” He pulled his chin in, almost to his collar button, and intoned in that voice-of-doom style of old newsreels, “This is the way the world ends, not with a whim but a banker.”

Zoe and I looked at each other in the same instant. There was no mistaking it. Shtick doesn’t happen by accident. He had just done a bit.

After that, how could we resist showing him the keenest costume shop this side of Shakespeare’s closet?

—

“HOW INCREDIBLE!”

Del turned in circles in the middle of the back room of the Medicine Lodge, gaping at it all, the hocked haberdashery filling the walls, and the tools and such piled in corners, and the lariat coils gracing the rafters. “There are museums that don’t have this much!” He looked as excited as if he were the third kid in the room. “Where did this all come from?”

I explained Pop’s policy of drinks for loot, as he called it. While I was doing so, Zoe skipped up to us with a set of Stetsons she’d swooped off the wall.

“Here, have a hat.”

“No, really, I—” Del watched each of us clap one on like veteran riders of the plains and stand there looking at him expectantly. He gulped and glanced around, but the back room was an empty stage except for us, so he gingerly took the kangaroo-brown cowboy hat Zoe was thrusting at him—“This one goes nice with your shirt”—and put it on. It was not a bad fit, and feeling braver, he experimentally tugged it lower on one side of his forehead like every movie cowboy. “Git along, little doggies,” he drawled, winning our instant approval.

Zoe and I trailed him as he toured the room. “That’s a Texican saddle,” he exclaimed, rushing over to the biggest and oldest of the horse gear. “It had to have come north on a cattle drive. That dates it to the eighteen seventies or early eighties, before the winter of ’86.” The first thirty-year winter! Just when you figured he was green as a pea, he would come up with something like that. “I like old things,” he was saying, happy as pie. “You know they’ve lasted for a reason.” Gazing around, he shook his head in awe. “Imagine, nearly the past century stored away in this room. It’s like a King Tut’s tomb of the prairie.” Suddenly he lifted his Stetson as high in the air as his long arm would reach. “Hats off!”

Quick as a heartbeat, Zoe and I were lofting ours, too, even if we didn’t yet know what the bit was that we were doing.

“To Tom Harry!” Del resoundingly completed the tribute, clapping his Stetson back on in emphasis. “Rusty, your father is a gatekeeper of history. A living legend in the Two Medicine country, that’s obvious from all this.” He shook his head in wonder. “The same as he was at Fort Peck.”

Yes, but
is
now teetered on becoming
was
again. As Del sailed off around the room in search of further wonders and Zoe tagged after him, leaving me with a dark-eyed look of understanding, I stayed rooted in the spot where I had taken my hat off to my father. My mind kept spinning back and forth over the fact that these old, familiar surroundings would no longer be ours, very soon. The Select Pleasure Establishment of the Year, the oasis of the Two Medicine country, the back room that was my second home, this would all vanish from my life and his the minute he signed over the Medicine Lodge to a bee esser who could hardly even run a gas station. It didn’t seem fair. Swallowing hard, I gazed up to the stairway landing and could just see that stupid weenie Duane Zane plastering himself to the vent. It pained me even more that this was the last Saturday night, the final time Zoe and I could have huddled there, gleefully listening in on the extravaganza of voices while Pop bartended to perfection, but instead we were stuck with being polite tour guides for this enthusiast of collections of all kinds.

I couldn’t stand it.

In the infinitesimal time it took for the snap of my fingers to travel the length of the room to where he was perusing a wall practically curtained in reins and bridles and quirts and other leather accessories while she chattered at him, Zoe must have read my mind. Del paid no attention whatsoever to my finger snap, but she glided purposefully back to me, already radiating intrigue. We consulted in whispers.

“Should we let him in on it?”

“I dunno. We don’t want him blabbing to people about it.”

“Maybe he’s smart enough not to.”

“Maybe.”

Together we contemplated the redheaded stick figure over there, engrossed in a workhorse harness. One of us shrugged, one of us nodded, and it somehow constituted agreement.

“Del? Can you keep a secret?”

“Hmm? I suppose.” He turned around to us, blinking his way back to the land of the living. “I mean, absolutely.”

Zoe specified: “Swear on the tailbone of a black cat killed in a graveyard at midnight?”

Interested now, he bobbed his head.

“You have to say it,” she directed severely.

Concentrating hard, he recited it to Zoe’s satisfaction. With that settled, we led him up the stairs to the landing and, fingers to our lips, sat him down next to the vent grille. Zoe allowed me to do the honors of silently levering it open and letting in the sounds of Saturday night getting under way in the barroom.

“Dode, I haven’t seen you in hell’s own while. How’d you winter?”

“Oh, I made it through to grass. Jesus H. Christ, though, did you ever see snow like that? I had to put stilts on my snowshoes to get to the barn.”

The voices—mostly male, but with a wife’s or a girlfriend’s occasionally pealing in—came chorusing clearly as ever through the vent, joking and complaining—

“That honyocker was supposed to help out on this fencing deal, but he called up sick. Allergic to postholes, probably. So I guess I got to go at it bald-headed.”

—arguing politics—

“I’m telling you, if the Democrats get back in, this country’s done for.”

“Are you kidding? What the Republicans already did to the country would gag a maggot off a gut wagon.”

—gossiping tooth and nail—

“Didn’t you hear? She left him, for some scissorbill at their high school reunion.”

—toasting to faith in the future—

“Here’s to eighty-pound lambs in the shipping pen and a new checkbook!”

—and ordering another drink just in case—

“Tom, when you get a chance, how about a couple more glasses of vitamin B for us down at this end?”

“You got it, two Shellacs coming right up.”

—all of it as though the Two Medicine country possessed a communal throat that Leadbelly himself might have envied for its lifetimes of verses, all of it fairly singing into the ear Del Robertson was pressing to the vent slats.

“How amaz—” he started to say out loud, before two sets of small hands covered his mouth.

“Sorry,” he whispered as Zoe and I withdrew our hands. “But it is amazing! Voices like these are usually so scattered, you can never collect this many in one place.” He took on a tone of awe. “This is like discovering the Mississippi Delta of gab. Now I know how Alan Lomax felt.” We smiled smugly. “I have to get some of this down,” he muttered while urgently searching into the flap pockets of his shirt for the notebook and pen that held Canada Dan’s contribution to the language. “It’s pure
lingua america
.”

“It’s what?” Zoe or I or more likely both of us immediately whispered.

“I’ll explain later. Let’s listen.”

As often as not, though, the lingo coming into his ear was also over his head. “I’m calling it a night,” said someone, who indeed sounded as though he had spent a liquid evening, “I got to go out in the morning and do the round dance.”

Hesitating in his scribbling, Del looked at us as if he wasn’t sure he had heard right.

“Plow a field,” my murmur enlightened him, “around and around.”

“Mm hmm, how apt.” He scrawled away madly until another in the chorus of lubricated voices proclaimed that if things didn’t pick up in the sheep business pretty soon, his herder was going to have to live on sidehill pork.

Zoe took that one. “Poached deer.” From Del’s expression, you could tell he was thinking along the line of Top Spot specialties such as chicken-fried steak, until she rolled her eyes. “You know,” she practically hissed in his ear, “shot out of season.”

It went on that way, with him industriously listening and jotting until one of us asked, “Why don’t you just set up your recorder?”

“I’d love to, but I can’t. It’s not ethical.”

“Then why are you writing stuff down?”

“That’s different,” he maintained, not totally convincingly, “it’s only random collecting.”

“Like spying, you mean.”

“No,” he whispered insistently, “I don’t mean that. All this is,” he sounded like he was coming up with it from some rule book, “is a set of unstructured linguistic encounters.”

Whatever it was, the three of us took in everything the vent had to offer until at last Zoe sighed fatalistically. “It’s nine, I have to go. Bedtime,” she pronounced, as if it were a jail sentence.

“Me, too.” I looked at Del, but still wrapped up in the
language
of Saturday night in the Medicine Lodge, he had not taken the point. “You’d better, too, if you’re going fishing with Pop.”

—

RAINBOW RESERVOIR
looked much murkier than I remembered—even though my memory of it was perpetually colored by being skunked in the derby every year and not catching much on these spontaneous outings of Pop’s—and considerably deeper, given the runoff from the winter of big snows and then the spring blizzard and the unseasonal rains ever since. The water was lapping right up to the rocks we usually stood on to fish. Pop seemed unbothered by that fact. Lots of water meant lots of fish, he assured us, an equation Del lifted sleepy eyebrows at but didn’t question.

“Pop?” Recent circumstances made me curious about the reservoir dam, an earthen slope between the piney bluff where the parking lot was located and the similar shoulder of land across the way. “How does dirt hold back the water?”

He followed my gaze to the dam and the concrete spillway in its middle, with white water rushing down to where the South Fork of English Creek resumed, then shrugged. “Pile enough dirt together and it just does, that’s all.”

“I bet that took a lot of dirt at Fort Peck, huh?” I asked cagily.

“‘The damnedest dirt dam in all of Creation,’ as it used to be called?” He frowned at me and the topic. “Yeah, I’d say it took plenty.”

“More earth than was moved in the digging of the Panama Canal,” Del provided between yawns.

“There, see?” Pop told me. “All you have to do is ask something and a monkey comes out of a tree with the answer.” He said it jokingly enough, however, finishing off the coffee in his thermos cup and taking last drags on a precious cigarette of his daily ration as he gazed up at the mountain skyline, which still held the pink of dawn. “Can’t beat this if you want nature,” he provided his customary tribute to the scenery practically in our faces, then got busy digging out fishing gear from the car trunk. Assembling his rod and reel with alacrity while the other two of us a lot more slowly did our own, it occurred to him to make sure Del was not incurably addicted to fancy fishing.

“Ever use bait instead of flies made out of feathers, did you, back east?”

“All the time.”

“That’s good, it ought to be in the Constitution that people have to fish with real bait. Here’s how we do it, but don’t tell nobody, got that?”