The Bartender's Tale (24 page)

So saying, he shook out a prime chicken gut from the bait can and cut it into strips. Del cautiously watched us bait up before touching his share of the gooey stuff.

“Come on, you two.” Pop lost no time picking his way down to the waterline, calling over his shoulder, “You can’t catch fish if you don’t have your hook in the water.”

That may have been so, but a pesky breeze was riffling the lake as usual, and I was determined not to have my hook blown back in the direction of my ears. Using pliers, I put an extra sinker, like an enlarged lead BB, on my line, close to the hook and spinner. After watching me at it, Del took the pliers and, to my astonishment, crimped several sinkers onto his line. Busily casting, Pop was not paying attention to anything beyond persuading trout to take a bite of chicken guts.

I don’t know that this is in the Bible, but there is a time to participate and a time to spectate. Something told me to hang back on the reservoir bank and see what Del was about to do.

First of all, he advanced to the lake by degrees, tinkering with his reel, plucking at his line, making twitchy little back-and-forth tries with his pole. Finally he reached the water, but as if sneaking up on it sideways. I had seen many, many peculiar stances in the fishing derbies, but never this. Gripping the pole in both hands like a baseball bat, he swung it all the way back until the tip nearly reached the ground behind him, then whipped it forward in a tremendous arc. Carried by the weight of the sinkers, the hook and line sailed and sailed, until dimpling into the lake three or four times farther out than Pop’s cast.

“Where the hell did you learn that?” asked Pop, staring at the extent of fish line beyond his.

“Surf casting. In the Atlantic. Oops, got a bite.”

It was the first of a good many. I was kept busy stringing Del’s catch of rainbow trout onto a forked willow stick and cutting up bait for him, which I volunteered for to evade thrashing the water with my own pole, as usually happened. Pop was not ready to change a lifelong style of casting and take up catapulting, but I noticed his casts were more muscular than usual, and fish out toward the middle began finding his bait, too. The two men struck up the kind of conversation that catching fish on a scenic lake under a blue sky can lead to, Del asking this and that about the Two Medicine country and Pop inquiring in turn about life on the road in the Gab Lab.

“It still seems to me you’re a glutton for punishment, Delano”—he shook his head but in a humorous way—“traveling around in a glorified tin can. It can’t be any too much fun, either, when someone sees that microphone of yours and comes down with mental laryngitis. So what keeps you doing it?”

That question seemed to flip a switch in Del. “Sir,” he began in a serious voice—

“Hey, I’m not your commanding officer, am I.”

“Sorry, Mr. Harry. The interviews—”

“Cripes, are you allergic to first names?”

Somewhat bashfully, Del managed to come out with “Tom” and get back onto his train of thought.

“The interviews fill a historical need. If we don’t capture people’s own stories, history is told from the top down. Rome fell, and that’s that, period. But the Roman Empire was so much more than the Caesars and gladiators and such,” he went on like a classroom instructor, “it was a way of life and language that lasted on and on in ordinary people. That’s where a hybrid language such as
lingua franca
spoken around the Mediterranean came from, people of all walks of life spreading the words, sorry about the pun.” By now he was really getting wound up, a lot busier with this than with fishing. “And here in our own time, we have the technical means to actually document it when people put history into their own words and vice versa.” He looked momentarily pleased with himself. “Actually, I put some of this in my grant proposal for the Missing Voices project. It seems to have worked.” He sobered again. “But traveling around in the Gab Lab is going to produce oral history of a particularly valuable kind, I’m absolutely sure of it. Wherever I can manage to point that microphone, it’s waiting to be found,
lingua america.
”

He paused, suddenly embarrassed about sounding like he was reading all this off a card he carried in his wallet. “Alan Lomax has it easier in a way,” he admitted with the shy grin that made him likable, “he only has to say he’s crazy about the blues.
‘Everythin’ nailed down’s comin’ loose,’”
he growled illustratively.
“‘Seems like livin’ ain’t no use.’
That kind of thing, you know.”

Pop was listening as only he could, taking in every word while still tending to the business of baiting up and casting. “So why be crazy about history,” he prodded, “when you can’t even sing it?”

Del laughed slightly, then turned serious.

“I suppose this will sound idealistic, but why not? To try to understand human nature a little better, according to every history professor I ever had. They could all quote George Santayana in their sleep.” His voice went so deep it seemed to come from his shoe tops: “‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’”

His fishpole swished as he made another two-fisted cast toward the middle of the reservoir. “Besides, I just somehow find it the most interesting thing in the world, listening to people tell about their lives. Maybe it started all the way back in nursery rhymes, but I can’t get enough of stories.”

Watching Pop, I could see that registered on him, but maybe not the way I hoped. “I don’t know about you and Santa Ana,” he said skeptically as he cast for more trout, “but I hear all kinds of bee ess when people start telling me their life stories. So, how do you know you’re getting anything halfway true when they rattle off to you?” There: Zoe’s question exactly.

“Tom, you might be surprised at the sobering effect of a microphone and a tape recorder,” Del replied mildly. “When they know that their words will be preserved in an archive, most people stay quite honest. Careful in how much they say, maybe, but on the up and up with what memories they are willing to share.” He was back to reciting, as if it was a creed. “Oral historians have to count on what’s called the moral edifice embodied in remembrance.”

“What’s morals got to do with it?” Pop squinted across the boulders in Del’s direction, twitting him a little or maybe not. “If you think you’re gonna get anywhere at Fort Peck, you’d better not be picky about what some of those folks were up to back then.” My ears pricked up, but he stopped at that.

“That’s no problem.” Del was grinning. “You know how it is, all sorts of things end up in a collection, mine as well as yours.”

His pole swished in a fresh cast. Pop’s did not.

“I’ll go clean the fish,” I said, grabbing up the whole catch and scrambling off along the bank toward the spillway to escape Pop’s look. But I couldn’t get away from what he was saying, loud and clear: “You know what, it sounds like somebody just might have let you snoop around the back room of the joint.”

“Rusty was kind enough to let me poke my head in.” Del’s voice faltered a bit, then rallied. “It’s a marvel, Tom, to see what you’ve gathered. How you’ve done it all—” He shook his head in tribute. “The Rockefellers spent millions on collecting for Williamsburg.”

“It’s a lot of years’ worth of taking stuff in when cash isn’t there, for sure,” I could barely hear the gruff response over the rushing sound of the spillway. “That’s over, a couple days from now.”

—

THE REST OF
that Sunday has blurred in me, the way a long stay in a hospital waiting room dulls away into a memory of dread at what was waiting ahead. I’m confident in saying fried rainbow trout was the special at the Top Spot that suppertime, but beyond that, all I am sure of is that Pop was busy at being busy going over the saloon’s accounts one last time, Del was holed up in the Gab Lab doing whatever he could to get ready for the multitude at Fort Peck, and Zoe and I spent a pitiful afternoon in the deathly quiet Medicine Lodge, with not even the farewell whisper of a voice sifting from the barroom to the back room. It was like an all-day funeral.

Which changed like a thunderclap around bedtime that night.

Or rather, like the surprise barrage of thunder that could be felt in the floorboards of the house as lightning made the lights flicker, causing Pop to jump up from the kitchen table and his spread of paperwork while I scrambled to turn off the Selectrics game I was halfheartedly listening to, lest the radio tubes be blown out.

As the next terrific rumble arrived, we rushed to a side window, the same thing on both our minds. There, squarely beneath Igdrasil’s biggest limbs, perfectly targeted if lightning struck the old tree, sat the VW van, just as Del had parked it.

Had it been either of us out there, the erstwhile Gab Lab already would be roaring to life and hightailing out from under that threat. The undisturbed faint light behind its drawn curtains indicated no such thing had occurred to its oblivious occupant.

By now the wind was picking up and rain had cut loose with the other elements, drumming down so hard we couldn’t be heard if we yelled out to him. “Damn,” said Pop, and some more than that. The situation was as plain as the repeated lightning flashes and rolls of thunder. One of us would have to go out in the storm, and I hoped it didn’t have to be me.

I underestimated. Pop was putting on his slicker, but handing me mine, too. “I’m gonna have to move the Packard some so he can pull in behind it at the end of the driveway. Quick, go tell him to hurry up about it.”

As the two of us slogged into the dark backyard like sailors in rough weather, I barely heard his shout to me over the rain: “And tell the clueless ess of a bee to come sleep in the house out of this racket.”

I splashed out to the van with the merciful message. Give Del some credit, he had that van going almost before I could scramble into the passenger seat out of the downpour. After parking out from under Igdrasil, he speedily threw pajamas and such in a bag and made a dash for the house with me.

Pop was there ahead of us, mopping his face and hair with a kitchen towel. I shucked off my dripping slicker in the hallway, while Del just dripped. “Whew. There’s a lot of weather in this part of the country.”

“You haven’t seen any weather until you get to Fort Peck,” Pop informed him. “Let’s get you a bedroom. That one next to yours, Rusty.”

However, Del seemed in no hurry to retire for the night now that he was under secure shelter, gazing around the house in that deer-eyed way of his and asking about this and that and the other. I kept hovering at the bottom of the stairway to show him to his bedroom, more than ready for my own after a day that had begun with fishing and gone downhill from there. I suppose I was out of sorts. All right, I was definitely out of sorts, yawning impatiently as Del toured the downstairs rooms as if this was Williamsburg West.

“Is this the original wainscoting?” he was asking as he trailed through the hallway a second time, running his fingers along the nicely carved panel wood. “How interesting. I haven’t seen this kind since my grandfather’s country place.”

“I don’t know whether it’s original,” Pop muttered carelessly, plainly thinking about bed himself, “but it’s old as hell.”

“Come again?” Del already was looking off to one side, maybe interested in the ceiling plaster now. That irritating haughty little habit of asking for something to be repeated got to me. Couldn’t he for crying out loud pay attention to what was being said, the first time around? Couldn’t he—

Suddenly I wondered. That slight stiff-necked turn of Del’s head, as if to let in what he deigned to hear. Taking advantage of that to shuffle sideways a few feet, just past the corner of his eye, I experimentally snapped my fingers.

Del showed no response, although Pop showed plenty. Eyes narrowed and voice low, he directed me, “Do that again.”

I instantaneously did, with the same result.

“Hmm? Do what?” Inquisitively Del looked around at Pop, then at me. There was no mistaking it, he had missed my finger snap both times.

“Delano,” Pop was saying in the deadly tone he used on drunks who had to shape up or ship out, “am I right that you don’t hear so good?”

Del drew himself up against that implication, or at least tried to. “What makes you think that?”

Hard stares from both of us were his answer.

I have to say, his confession was wrenching to watch as well as to listen to. You never saw a guy look so guilty of something not of his own doing.

“All right, now you know. I’m deaf in that left ear,” he said miserably. He rubbed a hand tenderly across it, as if trying to feel the lost sense of hearing. “A lacrosse accident, when I was about Rusty’s age. It broke the eardrum.”

“Then why in all hell are you in a line of work where you have to catch every word people say?”

“Tom, this may sound paradoxical,” he launched into desperate explanation, “but . . . what I
can
hear, I
really
hear. When a person is sitting on the other side of the microphone from me, I don’t miss a thing, I absolutely don’t.” From the look of him, everything in Delano Robertson, ostensible oral historian, strained to make this understood. “It goes deeper in me than just catching some nice turn of phrase, I can
feel
the language making itself. It’s, it’s the words, yes, but the history they draw from takes me over in almost a kind of trance when people tell me their lives in their own way. An instinct kicks in, it seems like, and I know what to ask, how to keep them talking, what will draw them out.” He spun his hands in front of him, as if trying to get traction on the notion. “It’s hard to describe, but when I’m collecting people’s stories, there’s always that feeling I’m capturing more than what’s being said. A kind of sixth sense of how much
else
there is, in back of the words.” Stopping to read our faces, he weakly imitated Canada Dan: “I hope that’s clear, ain’t it?”

Give Pop full credit; he did not tell Del a bartender hardly needed a disquisition on the art of listening. Nor did he suggest the equally obvious, that a person with hearing loss might seek to compensate for it the same as someone with a voice like a bullfrog would take up blues singing. He stuck with the heart of the matter.