The Bartender's Tale (27 page)

“What’s a taxi dancer?”

“You would ask.” He chewed on my question as well as his hot dog. “Let me put it this way. It’s when you pay a dancer for how long you’ve danced with her, just like cab fare to go someplace.”

“You mean, guys would, uh, hire these partners right there in the Blue Eagle?”

“Yeah, in the joint. It brought in herds of customers, savvy?”

I was starting to, putting two and two together, and it was adding up rapidly. “All those customers and taxi dancers ever did”—I could hear how dubious I sounded—“was just dance?”

He hesitated. “With some of the taxi dancers, that was kind of open for negotiation if the customer wanted to go farther than that, I guess you could say.”

“So,” I pressed on dangerously, “really it was like on First Avenue South in Great Falls?”

The sigh of ages, as the topic of prostitution no doubt has produced down through history. With his forehead scrunched, the famous owner of the Blue Eagle set to the task of explaining matters for me.

“Not every taxi dancer was a whore, if that’s what you’re thinking. Most weren’t. Plenty of them ended up married to those dance partners, I could point out some of them here today.”

He saw me trying to keep up with this and finding it hard.

“Rusty, here’s the how of it. Things were different in the Thirties, and Fort Peck was even differenter, if that’s a word. The Depression, when it hit”—he looked off across the still water of the man-made lake as though searching back into that time—“it did things to people it’s hard to believe now. If you were on a farm out here, chances were your crops dried up and blew away year after year, until all you were left with was tumbleweeds and a foreclosure notice, and you lost everything. If you were a working stiff, you got laid off because some damn fool place called Wall Street crashed, and next thing you knew, the bank down the street went under and took your life’s savings with it.”

I had read all this in school, but hearing it from him sank in vastly deeper. He was grimacing painfully as he spoke.

“It changed people. They had to do whatever they could to get by. Curly wasn’t only kidding about eating gophers—plenty of families in this part of the state were that desperate.” He lowered his voice, as grave as I had ever heard him. “I still don’t know why there wasn’t a revolution. But people toughed it out until Roosevelt came into office and projects like this dam got under way. Then before long there’s these thousands of mudjacks drawing wages, and others who showed up here because the mudjacks had money in their pockets.” His voice gathered itself and he mustered a kind of smile. “Cripes, that was me, too, if you can imagine.”

He drew a breath. “Okay, that’s the long way around the barn to taxi dancing, but it’s all connected, see. There were women who had to make a living, too, and getting out on the floor with a guy for two bits a dance was a way to do it. Any talk of business beyond that, let’s say, was up to them, not me.”

By this point I was practically memorizing his each word. Zoe was going to want every tiniest detail of this.

“The dance partner more than likely would buy the woman a drink or two and a few for himself,” he went on doggedly, “so there’s where it paid off for me. It was what you might call a sideline. Like letting the Medicine Lodge customers hock stuff. Same kind of thing.”

Renting out women didn’t sound to me like the same kind of thing. Was there even any way it sounded legal? The past casts a tricky shadow, I was discovering.

Pop read my face, then gazed off toward the truck bandstand, where the Melody Mechanics were producing another spirited tune and the crowd around them was clapping and whooping.

“Kiddo,” he said softly, “you have to understand, every night in Wheeler was Saturday night.” He listened to the raucous music for a few moments. “It was a different time back then. Everybody was young and hot to trot, excuse my Latin. Sure, people liked to drink in the Blue Eagle, the way I ran the joint, but what they really liked was to drink and dance and kind of get to know each other, the way men and women do. If I was going to be in business here, that’s what had to happen.” He tipped his hat back with a forefinger to look at me more openly. “Got all that?”

“I . . . I guess so.”

“That takes care of that, then,” he said, sounding like he was trying to convince himself as well as me.

“Can I ask you something else?”

“Nothing known to man has stopped you yet. What is it now?”

“Were you a bootlegger, too?”

He winced at
too
. “What makes you think I was?”

“The Packard. Somebody said it’s a bootlegger special.”

“Somebody did, did they?” He frowned in the general direction of Del. “That’s bee ess, kiddo. I just liked the looks of the old buggy. Seemed like a lot of car for the money. Anyway, bootlegging . . .” He took a couple of hungry bites of hot dog before I could come up with any more pesky questions. “Naw, I never did any of that, not the kind you’re thinking of anyway.” This was not the definitive answer I was looking for, he could tell from my expression. “Here’s how it was, see. Fort Peckers were a pretty thirsty bunch, so the joint would run low on booze sometimes ahead of a Saturday night. It’s a hell of a ways to Great Falls or anywhere else out here, so the easiest thing was to run up to Medicine Hat and load up the car with Canadian booze.”

“Why there?”

He shifted uneasily. “The Hat is kind of a crossroads, on the Canadian railroad and the highway to Calgary and like that. You can get a lot of business done there if you hold your mouth right. Anyway,” he plowed on again, “that’s all it was, some cases of rye and other Canuck hooch packed home in the Packard. This was after Prohibition, no law broken,
but
”—he underscored that last word with a careful look at me—“if the state liquor board didn’t have somebody at the border to collect tax at two or three in the morning, that was their tough luck. Get the picture?”

It could not have been clearer if painted by Charlie Russell, so I nodded. My father, the living legend, maybe had not crossed the line of the law in the Blue Eagle years, but he had danced and driven right up to it, from all it sounded like. Yet, as he said, it was a different time back then. He couldn’t change the past, I couldn’t change it, we had to go on, and together; as he’d proclaimed more than once, we weren’t doing too bad with what we had to work with, and we didn’t give a flying fig for other ways of being father and son. I couldn’t really argue with that.

Gazing off again into the gathering, he asked reflectively: “Now do you get why I wasn’t red hot to come to this? Things happen sometimes that can be misunderstood.”

“But everybody here seems to think you’re”—I stumbled for the words—“something great.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what time can do to you, once in a while. Among other things.” He turned my way, watching me anxiously. “That enough answers for you for one day? Rusty? Things still more or less okay between us after all that, I hope?”

Slowly I nodded again. “Still are, Pop.”

“Right. Come on, eat up and let’s go see how Delano is doing.”

—

IT WAS SLOW GOING
through the crowd, with Pop being greeted like strolling royalty by anyone who hadn’t done so before, and as hard as I tried to envision these paunchy men and their broad-beamed wives as lean, young hot-to-trot drinkers and dancers, twenty-five years stood in the way. That was not the case for the majordomo of the Blue Eagle, who accepted slaps on the back and outpourings about the old days in an easy fashion, now that we could see Del industriously interviewing mudjacks, with beer still serving its purpose among those waiting under the shade of the tarp. “He’s got it made,” Pop said with satisfaction as we were closing the distance to the Gab Lab, “so all we need to do is keep everybody happy with plenty of Shellac and—”

He stopped in his tracks so suddenly I bumped into him.

“Damn,” he let out under his breath. “Why doesn’t he have anything better to do than prowl around here?”

“Who, Pop?”

“You’ll see.”

“I might have known who I’d find if I followed the trail of beer bottles,” a voice with a scary amount of authority in it made itself known. A small man in a cowboy hat strutted over to us, looking annoyed. His meager face seemed set in that one expression, like a doll’s head carved out of a dried apple. Everything about him was half pint in size, except for the star-shaped badge on his shirt pocket. “Tom Harry is still among the living, huh? Imagine that.”

“If it isn’t my favorite sheriff.” I could tell from Pop’s voice that the lack of warmth was mutual. “Been a while, hasn’t it, Carl, since you would drop by the Blue Eagle for some recreation of a certain kind.”

“That’s past history.” The Fort Peck lawman, as much of him as there was, took me in at a glance. “Who’s this? Got yourself a grandkid, you of all people?”

“My son,” Pop said stiffly. “Rusty, meet Carl Kinnick. He’s been sheriff in this county since the grass first grew.”

“Hi.”

Kinnick didn’t answer me, merely nodded as if his neck hurt. “Tom Harry a family man? I’ll be a son of a bitch.” He smirked at Pop. “Will miracles never quit?”

Pop said levelly, “I hope not.”

I started to worry, not even knowing why. At my age I didn’t have Pop’s long experience in reading people’s character, but this person had
mean
written all over him.

Now the sheriff was back to giving Pop a gimlet gaze. “I wouldn’t have thought you was the sentimental type, showing up at a shindig like this.”

“Life’s full of surprises,” Pop offered with deceptive casualness. “Didn’t I read somewhere that you’ve switched to Republican? After all those times of riding Roosevelt’s coattails here?”

This evidently hit a touchy spot on Sheriff Kinnick. “The Democrats weren’t worth it anymore,” he huffed. “Adlai Stevenson was a loser if there ever was any invented.”

“Kennedy maybe won’t be,” Pop laughed, “if the other choice is Dickybird Nixon.”

“I’ll take my chances,” the sheriff said, as if it was costing him teeth. He went up on his toes to peek past us to the Gab Lab, where Del was poising the microphone just so while a lean gray veteran of dam work regaled him between swigs of beer. “Who’s the jaybird over there people are yakking to?”

“Delmer Robertson,” Pop improvised politically. “High-powered historian from back east. Talking to folks about working on the dam. Rusty and me are helping him with his on-the-ground research.”

“They start them awful young in on-the-ground research, don’t they,” the sheriff said with a suspicious look at Del and then at me. “Present company excepted, huh, barkeep?” he shifted his beady attention to Pop. “Just to keep things on the legal up-and-up, let’s see your event permit for selling beer.”

I knew it. We were going to be thrown in the clink because this badge-wearing retreaded Republican son of a bitch—he used the word on himself—didn’t like the looks of us.

“No need,” Pop saved us, “I’m giving the hooch away.”

Surprised, the sheriff laughed unpleasantly. “That isn’t like you.”

“Good works sneak up on a person, haven’t you ever noticed?”

“Not hardly—I didn’t get where I am by believing in fairy tales.” Peering from under his cowboy hat, the little lawman watched one person after another fish out a bottle of beer from the icy tub and walk away without any show of money. He took another long look at Del and the recording apparatus, then sourly moved off, saying over his shoulder to my father: “Better be careful spreading those good works in my jurisdiction, hear? Every twenty-five years is about right.”

I began to breathe again. My feeling of relief lasted only as long as it took Pop to get a gleam in his eye and call after the retreating figure, “Hey, Sheriff? Speaking of past history. Anything ever come of that case of the truck in the river?”

Kinnick halted and turned around, scowling. “Don’t be funny. I’m still working on it. You’d have heard it all over the state if I got that solved.”

“Just wondering. You know I always had an interest in law enforcement.”

That unpleasant laugh again. “From a healthy distance, yeah.”

Pop persisted: “Any of the Duffs here?”

“That tribe? Hah. They wouldn’t show their faces after that.”

“People surprise you sometimes, though, don’t you find?”

Before turning to go, the sheriff preened up on his toes again, shaking his head. “You’re getting soft, Tom. That’s bad for your health.”

I held in what I was dying to ask until the badge-wearing runt was out of earshot.

“What truck in the river?”

“Can’t you take lessons from Delano in being hard of hearing?” Pop sounded on edge, although my question seemed to me perfectly natural. He still was watching the sheriff recede. Aware that I was not going to let the question rest, he lowered his voice and began: “If you really have to know, it was something that happened in ’38, not long after the slide. A couple were parked in a truck on the dam one night. The thing somehow rolled into the water and drowned them both.”

Put that way, it sounded like a pure accident. But if so . . .

“Why is the sheriff still working on it?”

“Kiddo”—Pop wrinkled his brow at me—“I don’t know where you get it from, but sometimes you know more than the situation calls for.”

He pulled out his day’s half pack of cigarettes and found it was empty. “Damn,” he said through his teeth, and opened a fresh pack. I didn’t say anything. The commotion of the reunion picked up as the Melody Mechanics swung into “Pennies from Heaven” and much of the crowd sang along. Over at the van, Del could be seen, absorbed as ever in mudjack gab. The sun shone, the famous dam stood strong as eternity, the Blue Eagle was worshipped in memory, the sheriff was taken care of, everything was clicking just right for Pop on this day of days, except for the bundle of inquisitiveness relentlessly tagging at his side.

“Okay, if it’ll get it out of your system,” he said, as if it had better, “I’ll tell you.” He lit the sinful cigarette, blew a wreath of smoke, and began. “Like I said, the two of them were in the truck in the middle of the night when it rolled. But that was only the half of it. They were—”