The Bartender's Tale (30 page)

I was about to ask more when she swung back to the window, craning to see what she could of town, which was mostly the alley and the backs of the buildings on Main Street. Off in the distance, past Igdrasil’s snowing branches, though, the cemetery knoll showed up greener and prettier than anything else in sight because of the carefully watered grass. “This is one of those towns, huh?” She sounded as if she had been sentenced to Gros Ventre. “Dead people get the view.”

“Maybe they need it more.”

That drew me a keen look and then a sharp laugh. “Aren’t you a kick. I’m glad some kind of sense of humor runs in the family. Something good should.”

“Um, talking about family,” I must have thought nonstop gab constituted hospitality, “I bet you were plenty surprised to find out Pop is your father.”

“Better believe it, I was.” She gave her hair a flip and said carelessly, “Kind of a nice change, though. It beats having a Communist one.”

My jaw dropped. At the time, calling someone that was like saying the person was a mad-dog enemy of all things American. “You mean like in
Russia
?”

“Nahh, I guess not.” Francine treated that as though it did not make much difference one way or another. “From what I picked up from Mom and the relatives, Daddy Darius was his own kind.” For a moment, she looked more thoughtful than she had at any time yet. “As I get it, he figured the Russkies had it backward. His big idea was that people on the bottom ought to run things.” Another flip of the hair, and that keen look at me. “Well, you know, not to stick up for the old devil or anything, but maybe they wouldn’t do any worse job of it than the usual stupes.” She regarded me for a moment, as if making sure, and of course she was. “Anyhow, he set out to remake the world and ended up in a truck in the river with the wrong woman. You heard all about that, I bet.”

“Pop told me when you, um, came into the picture.”

“Fine. Takes care of that.” She stirred from where she’d been standing by the window. “Know what? I better get unpacked.”

And I knew I had better depart before filmy undies and such came into further sight. But I was held by one matter yet. “Francine? Can I ask you something?”

“Try me.”

“We’re supposed to pretend to be . . . cousins, aren’t we?”

“How about that.” She glanced at me over the opened suitcase. “Nothing is ever simple, is it.”

“But we’re really . . . half brother and half sister?” I still was having trouble getting that relationship through my head. Maybe there was some other description of it that I was missing.

“Surprise, surprise, huh?” A sly little smile much like Proxy’s caught me off guard. “So, buddy, which half is your girl part?”

The only response I had to that was a flaming blush. Backing out of the room, I rattled out: “I better let you get moved in. Pop will be here when he gets done at the saloon.”

That’s when I raced to the Spot to fetch Zoe.

—

THE DISCUSSION
in the barroom, if voices raised to such a level can be called that, was reaching a climax when we slipped into the back and flung ourselves up the stairs to the landing. So much had been happening, I’d had time to tell Zoe only bits and pieces, particularly the juicy ones, like the undressed couple in the ill-fated truck, leading up to Proxy’s arrival in the Cadillac at Fort Peck.

Ears and eyes plastered to the vent, the two of us eagerly caught up with what was happening on the other side of the wall. Right away we could tell that Earl Zane was not even touching the beer Pop had served up as a peace offering. Earl was having all he could handle in Proxy Duff.

“See, Tom got a little ahead of himself in putting the joint up for sale,” she was explaining to him ever so nicely in a voice smooth as a purr. “This is what you might call a God clause, like in an insurance policy when an act of nature comes along and makes things go flooey. Tom just didn’t know how much the matter was going to change when my daughter and me expressed our interest in keeping the saloon in family hands.” It really was quite an appealing story in her telling, that if a young woman starting out on her own in life and who incidentally was Pop’s niece merely required a bit of experience in the art of bartending under the tutelage of the master himself, was that so much to ask?

In conclusion, Proxy gave Earl a smile that I was learning to recognize as one with long practice behind it, probably all the way back to taxi dancing. “No reflection on you. These things happen.”

Earl reacted as if the Medicine Lodge was being stolen right out of his pocket. His big red face looked like it would burst. “You can call it that claptrap if you want, lady”—his protest could have been heard all the way to the back room even had Zoe and I not been glued to the vent—“but I say it’s backing out of a deal.”

“Don’t get yourself on fire, Earl,” Pop was heard from, sounding strained.

Maybe on that dark drive home from Fort Peck, with more history attached to him than even he had known, he was pulled in paradoxical directions, the same as I was, and wound up teetering away from giving up the Medicine Lodge quite yet. Maybe the stage was set by the sorcery of drama that enveloped two theater-struck twelve-year-olds that certain summer. In any case, Zoe and I were the breathless audience as my father spoke his lines like a man taking his medicine.

“What’s happened is, I need to hang on to the joint for a while and give the girl a chance. I’m sorry as hell you got your hopes up. My mistake, and I’ll make it up to you if you’re out any money on legal fees or whatever, all right?”

A cat will puff itself up when provoked. Earl did something like that now. “What did they serve at that Fort Peck get-together, loco weed? Goddamn it, Tom, you already put off selling the place to me once. It’s getting to be a habit. A deal’s a deal where I come from.”

Zoe turned her head to whisper to me, “Del doesn’t know what he’s missing out on.”

“Is there any ink on any sheet of paper”—this voice, calm and collected, level as a pistol, was Proxy’s—“that spells out what you’re calling a deal?”

“No,” Earl admitted, “but—”

“Have you put down any earnest money?”

“Well, no, Tom understands it’ll be along as soon as—”

“Then it hasn’t reached the deal stage, has it, it’s preliminary discussion, isn’t it. And we’ve just discussed the change of circumstances.”

“She’s got you there, Earl.”

“THAT’S ENOUGH OF THIS!” I might have considered that a cry from the heart if I wasn’t sure Earl, like his mouthy son, had a heart the size of a prune. His eruption had Zoe and me bumping heads at the vent. The scene is indelible in me. Like always, Pop was behind the bar, but in the new order of things, had not put his apron on. Across from him, Proxy leaned against the bar with veteran ease as she faced the wrath of Earl perfectly poker-faced. As for Earl, though, the slats of the vent sectioned him, as if he might fly apart. His face had turned so furiously red, it was a wonder his hat didn’t boil off. In the next slot down, his arms waved in the universal gesture of disgust. Below that, even his beer gut seemed agitated, barely contained by a rodeo belt buckle. “Tom”—he swelled up even more, turning aside from Proxy, as though that might make her vanish—“I’m gonna lay it to you, man to man. I don’t like to have to do this, but you leave me absolutely no choice.”

I tensed all through. I couldn’t begin to imagine the extent of the threat he was working himself up to—a fistfight? a lawsuit?—and an inch from me Zoe was equally frozen in apprehension.

“Until you come to your senses,” we heard him tell Pop in the darkest of tones, “I am going to take my patronage right down the street to the Pastime.” Earl folded his arms magisterially. “See how you like that.”

For the first time since the Mudjacks Reunion, Pop smiled, from ear to ear.

—

THAT WAS THAT,
at least. With Earl Zane out of his hair as a Medicine Lodge customer, let alone as its imminent proprietor, Pop could turn to the Francine matter, and he and Proxy went out the front door of the saloon so she could see the Medicine Lodge in its full glory, with her doing all the talking as they headed around back to the house. Zoe and I stayed put, so I could catch her up, to the extent possible, on the situation that began with that Cadillac making its appearance. The tip of her tongue showed how hard she was concentrating to follow the twists and turns of my report, but in the end she grasped what counted.

“Rusty, you get to be an actor!” She meant, of course, maintaining the pretense to all and sundry that Francine was merely my cousin instead of my new sister. Not the hardest role ever, surely, yet it felt more than a little tricky.

“You’re in on it, too. So do you.”

Plainly the prospect did not displease her. “I suppose. How long will this Francine take to learn bartending?”

“That’s just it, see.” I voiced the uncertainty foremost on my mind. “Maybe she’s here to stay, if she’s good at it.”

A look came into Zoe’s eyes I had not seen before. Careful to make the query sound careless, she asked: “Do you like her?”

“I can’t tell yet. She’s kind of different.”

We fell silent. Empty but for us, the Medicine Lodge for once was quiet in both its halves, the back room that had costumed our imaginations so many times that summer, and the barroom out front, where the grown-up world did its own performing. One and then the other, we gazed longingly at the vent that was our keyhole to that world, knowing our times of listening in secrecy depended on Pop’s indulgence of us. Whatever else she proved to be, Francine did not seem to me the indulging type. What a rotten shame to lose our listening post just because she had arrived out of nowhere, I thought to myself, my mind stumbling this way and that until it hit on the obvious.

“Tell you what I’m gonna do, Muscles,” I resorted to my best gangster growl.

“What would that be, Ace?”

“This.” I reached over to where a spare rain slicker that Howie sometimes used was hanging and moved it to a peg where it concealed the vent.

“Real swuft thinking, Ace,” Zoe ratified with a growl of her own.

—

BY THEN
it was time for Zoe to dart off to her cafe chores, and I needed to catch up on developments at the house. Just as I got there, Proxy was making her farewells. Before getting into the big red car, she drilled Francine on the shoulder with a finger. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, cookie.”

“Some leeway there,” Francine joked, or maybe not.

“I’ll be back before you know it,” Proxy was saying, as if anyone had asked, “to see how things are going. Have fun showing her the tricks of the trade, Tom.”

Pop responded with a sort of grunt while tensely lighting a cigarette. Opening the door of the Cadillac, Proxy paused to consider me, as if deciding on the right good-bye, and gave me a wicked wink that I would rather not have had. I didn’t know why any attention from her got to me so much, but it made me feel like I was a target in her sights. Then, in a crush of gravel, she was gone.

There was an awkward gap now as Francine and Pop considered each other, as I supposed they were entitled to after twenty-one years of sheer ignorance of one another’s existence.

As that started to stretch too long, he roused himself and her and me as well.

“Hey, no sense standing around like lawn ornaments, is there. Come on, I better show you the joint. Not you, kiddo.” He’d evidently decided Francine was enough to deal with for the moment. “Hang on here and when Delano shows up, tell him I want to see him right away, savvy?”

Of course I did not like being left out of things, but I thoroughly savvied that Del had to be clued in quick on the make-believe niece. Pop, Francine, myself, Zoe, Del; this was becoming a bit with quite a cast. I drifted to the house in a mood new to me. The old place had not known a woman’s touch, except for Nola’s feathery occasional housekeeping, since the year of my birth. As if drawn to the source of difference as distinct as perfume in the air, I went upstairs again and gazed into the neighboring bedroom that was now Francine’s. Her suitcase remained open on the bed, with female undies spilling out. An old blue denim jacket with a beaded yoke had been tossed over the back of a chair. From what I could see, the only thing that had been put away somewhere was the whopping kit bag, but I figured she had to start somewhere. Housekeeping did not seem to be her strong point any more than it was ours, so maybe that much of our habit pattern was safe. Yet disturbance of some sort was on its way, I couldn’t help but feel it coming, almost like a change in the weather. Already it felt strange to have someone else in the gallery of bedrooms that Pop and I had shared, just ourselves, for the past half dozen years. There are some days in a person’s life, definitely not many, that mark themselves into memory almost from first minute to last. The one thing I knew for sure was that this Sunday was not going to leave me any time soon.

“Anyone home?” Del’s cheery hello downstairs snapped me to. “The angler returns in triumph!”

I was down there in a flash, bursting into the kitchen, where he was emptying his creel of fish into the sink. “She’s here, over at the joint with Pop,” I reported all in one breath, “he wants to see you. Right away, he said.”

Still full of pride at his catch, Del grinned over his shoulder at me. “I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what the hurry is?”

“Huh-uh, it’d take too long. I’ll start cleaning the fish.”

As he went out, I began gutting the batch of trout, nice rainbows of a good eating size and a goodly number of them. Fifteen was the legal limit. I counted twice, and Del’s catch was fourteen. That was odd, for someone fishing up a storm as he obviously had been, to be skunked on the last fish.

He was back before I was half through dealing with fish guts. His cheerful look was gone. “Quite a change of script by your father, isn’t it. I guess he knows what he’s doing.” He scratched behind an ear. “Francine didn’t seem exactly friendly.”

“Maybe she just needs to get used to us,” I tried to put the best face on things as he came over to the sink to pitch in on cleaning the rest of the fish, searching his maze of pockets for a jackknife. “How come you didn’t limit?”