The Bartender's Tale (31 page)

“Hmm? Oh, the angels’ share.”

“That’s stranger than chicken guts, bub,” I did a bit of a bit to prompt him.

He slit into a fish belly. “My father heard it from FDR”—you never knew what dose of history you were in for around Del—“when the Brain Trust and their top aides were called in to celebrate some part of the New Deal that had passed Congress. Eleanor happened to be on hand, and she ran the White House staff by her own lights, so the drinks were poured pretty weak.” He slipped me a grin in acknowledgment of what Pop would have thought of that. “Anyway, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” he of course made the middle name resound, as if it was the main one, “takes a sip of his and holds the glass up to the light and says,” here came a good imitation of that famous Fireside Chat voice, “‘Gentlemen, we seem to be experiencing that phenomenon of evaporation called the angels’ share.’”

I laughed but still didn’t see what that had to do with fish. Rubbing the side of his head with a sleeve to satisfy an itch, mental or otherwise, Del went on. “It’s silly, I suppose, but that saying caught on in our family.” From being around Pop, I knew sayings were almost a second language, so I listened religiously to add this one to the collection. “Anytime a sock went missing or we ran short of milk at breakfast,” Del elaborated, “we’d say it was the angels getting theirs. My father and I turned it into a joke when we fished together. We’d never catch the absolute last fish to fill out our limit. Leave that one for you know who. I won’t say we were superstitious, but close enough.” He spoke in that sober way the dead are recalled. “Families aren’t easy to figure out, maybe you’ve noticed.”

Was that ever the truth. Both lost in thought, we companionably thumbed guts out of split-open trout until Del rinsed a hand so he could scratch at a rib. “Phew. That is one brushy creek,” he said in tribute to the hard-won trout. “There were places I had to get down on my hands and knees to crawl in to where I could cast.”

“What’s all the scratching about?”

“Oh, nothing. I just keep finding some kind of ladybugs on me. There must have been quite a hatch.” He pulled up his trouser leg and rubbed his shin. He paused and peered at the back of his hand. “There’s another one.”

I looked with horror at the tiny dot crawling across his skin. “Don’t go anywhere. Let me get Pop.”

I raced across the alley and burst into the barroom. To my shock, there was Francine behind the bar by herself, already looking things over as if she owned the place, and Pop nowhere around. When I stammered out the question, she jerked her head toward the back of the barroom. “Said he needed to take a leak. What’s up?”

This was no time for good manners. I went and pounded on the toilet door and hollered, “Del’s got ticks!”

“Damn, what next?” came the muffled reply, along with the sound of flushing. Pop was out of there in record speed and headed out the back of the saloon for the house, with me chasing after and Francine belatedly following us.

We got there as Del was finishing with the fish, in between scratching. He looked up in surprise at all of us piling into the kitchen. “Are ladybugs this much of an attraction?”

“Ladybugs, nothing,” Pop informed him grimly, “those are sage ticks. Quick, get upstairs to the bathroom. Stand in the bathtub and take all your clothes off.”

“All my . . . ? Why?”

“You don’t want them biting you, that’s why. Hurry up, so we can look you over.” Pop was already at the doorway and motioning urgently, standing flat against the wall so Del would not brush against him.

Francine hadn’t said a thing during any of this, simply backing away to the safety of the living room, but from the crimp in her brow she must have wondered if this was what life in our household was going to be like.

“Come on.” Pop surprised her as the others of us hustled up the stairs. “We need all the eyes we can get.”

That may have been so, but with Francine crowded into the bathroom with us, Del hesitated at jumping in the tub and stripping, until Pop said impatiently: “She’s not gonna see anything new in the human experience, get going.” I was directed to cram his clothes in the wastebasket as he shed them, for soaking. “It’s this tan getup of yours.” Pop shook his head as Del peeled off the shirt of many pockets. “Makes you the color of a deer. Ticks see that and think you’re their favorite food, venison.”

I watched and certainly Francine did, while the naked Del, who had more to him than expected, stood shivering in the clammy tub as Pop started to examine him all over for unwelcome visitors.

“Francine, quit window shopping and go through his hair,” Pop snapped her out of her attention to the other part of his anatomy.

I will say, she was equal to the task, telling Del, “Close your eyes, chum, here I come,” as she straddled up to the bathtub.

Helplessly he ducked his head as she ran her fingers over his scalp. You would think a person with a crew cut did not offer much in the way of hiding places up there. Not so. “Ick, here’s one,” Francine exclaimed when she felt into the hair at the back of his neck. Pop told her to pick it off if it wasn’t dug in, and she gamely did so, squeezing past me to drop it in the toilet bowl. That was the fate it deserved, as far as I was concerned. I hated ticks. That awful little goosey feeling on a section of skin as all those tiny legs kept the thing crawling slowly, as if exploring every pore. A tick wasn’t like a mosquito, zeroing in and then gone. It kept on creeping for a prime spot to suck blood from. What was worse, the things were dangerous. Even if you didn’t get Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which could kill you, a tick bite could hurt and itch for a long time. I silently cheered as Pop picked each one off Del’s body and flicked it in the toilet bowl. By now there were three or four dark little bodies floating there. Then I saw the worst thing possible.

“There’s one on his business end!”

Both men looked down as if afraid to, and Francine’s eyes widened. The tick was at the start of things there, having crept from the red pubic hair as if coming out of the brush to find a picnic spot on a knoll.

Pop backed away a step, grimacing. “They head for the softest parts of the body, the damn things like to bite there. Is it moving any?”

“I . . . I can’t tell,” Del said shakily, staring at his threatened part.

“Real careful now,” Pop advised in a delicate voice, “see if you can scooch it off with your fingernail. If it’s bit into you, we’ll have to try something a whole lot worse.”

The other three of us held our breath as Del attempted to prod the insect just enough. Under his poking finger it seemed to move almost infinitesimally, and he took that as a sign to wildly bat it off, at some cost to himself. Wincing, he studied the area with all due care. “I don’t see any bite.”

“Good,” Pop let out in an extended breath. “The rest of the family jewels okay?”

Cautiously Del felt around between his legs and reported, “Nothing there that doesn’t belong there. Whew.” We shared in his relief as he put his hands under his arms, hugging himself against the chill of standing naked in the bathtub this long. Abruptly the relief left him. “Oops.”

“Let me see,” Pop groaned.

When Del lifted an arm for him to look, an ugly dark dot was there, squarely in the middle of the armpit. I immediately felt queasy, and the tick wasn’t even on me. “This one bit you, sure enough,” Pop said, swearing suitably. “Full of blood.” Rapidly he told Del to sit on the edge of the tub and me to go get a coat hanger. “Francine, there’s some kitchen matches in the medicine cabinet, hand me some.”

When I hustled back with the wire hanger, Pop mashed and twisted it, straightening the hook, until he had something holdable, with a prong sticking out. He lit a match with his thumbnail, the sulfur smell curling Del’s nostrils and mine and Francine’s, and heated the end of the prong in the flame.

“Lift your arm,” he told Del, and directed Francine to get a good grip on it and hold it steady in case he flinched. “This is gonna be a little warm. I have to make the tick back itself out, so the head doesn’t break off in you.”

It took exceedingly careful application of the hot wire onto the rump, if that’s what insects have, and a bunch more matches, but at last the gorged tick gave up and dropped into the bathtub. I didn’t have to be told to turn on both faucets full blast to swash the thing down the drain.

“How you feeling?” Pop checked with Del apprehensively.

“Not so good. It kind of burns.”

“Right. We need to get you to the doc. Where can Rusty find you some clothes in the van?”

Duly instructed, I thundered down the stairs, while behind me Francine said she’d clear out, too, not to be in the way of medical progress.

Mere minutes later, as the two of us stood beneath the leafy sweep of Igdrasil, watching Pop and Del speed away in the Buick, she had to admit: “This burg isn’t as dull as it looks.”

—

AS POP TOLD IT
when they returned from the doctor’s office and a very pale Del had excused himself to take refuge in the Gab Lab, the tick-bite victim had been given some pills and a strong talking-to about the idiocy of crawling around on the ground during tick season and the prognosis that Rocky Mountain spotted fever could take as much as a couple of weeks to develop, and there was nothing to do until then except to watch himself for strange rashes and fevers. “So he’s not going anywhere for a while,” Pop concluded, trying to settle himself down with a cigarette despite my frown at how many he’d already had since Francine stepped out of that Cadillac of Proxy’s and into our existence.

“I hope that’s the excitement for the day,” he let out along with a blue zephyr of smoke. Squinting as if trying to make up his mind about something, he checked with Francine as she stood there with her hands parked in her ratty jeans and her bust testing the threadbare shirt. “Think you’re ready to learn some bartending?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she responded, probably truthfully enough.

When they made their entrance into the closed and deathly still Medicine Lodge—somehow there is an added dimension of silence in a saloon on a Sunday—I trailed them into the barroom. Pop glanced over his shoulder at me, and before he could ask what I was hanging around for, I alibied: “I thought I’d, you know, sweep and mop and like that.”

Since I had done those swamping chores only the day before, after our return from Fort Peck, I could tell he was about to ask if I had left my mind out to dry. Luckily for me, he caught on in time that I was pining to be in on the session of educating Francine.

“Okay, maybe not too bad an idea,” he granted. “Just stay out of our way where we’re holding school.” In pretty much one motion he donned his apron and plucked up a fresh towel and gestured for her to come on behind the bar, and she did so, pushing her hair away from her eyes as if readying for business.

“You know anything about this at all?” Pop began as he swished the towel tenderly on the bar wood.

“Sure, I’ve been in joints before.”

“There’s a world of difference being on the other side there with your fanny on a stool,” he said evenly. “I should have asked before we started. Do you drink, yourself?”

“If you mean will I get tanked to the gills on the job,” she laughed that off, “no, I won’t. Give me credit for that many smarts”—that tiny pause—“Tom.”

“That’s only half the story. How about after work?”

She grinned saucily. “Maybe a little something before bedtime to settle down from this exciting town might be what the doctor ordered, huh?”

Uh-oh. I knew she was awfully close to putting beans up her nose with that answer.

Pop scowled. “Francine, you can’t party and run a saloon. It’s like any other business. You’ve got to be real serious about it or you might as well pick out your room at the poorhouse before you even start.”

Sobered in more ways than one by this sermon, she bobbed her head. “All right, I won’t drink the joint dry either before or after, honest.”

“That’s better.” Pop led her down half the length of the bar to the beer spigot. “Here’s where we start.” He patted the draft handle. “The Shellac pump.”

“The which? Wait, I bet I know. The Select whizzy that made this place famous.”

“See, this isn’t so hard if you have half a brain. First thing is”—he reached to the breakfront without looking and plucked a beer schooner—“you need to know how to fill a glass.”

Francine pursed up without saying anything, unsure whether that was a joke. Pop drew perhaps the millionth beer of his career from the Shellac tap, and it sat there brimming to a head, pretty as a picture. He conjured another shiny empty glass from the breakfront and handed it to her. “Give it a try.”

With a little lift of her shoulders, Francine stepped up to the beer spigot as casually as if it was a kitchen sink faucet.

I dawdled as close to this as I dared, slowly sweeping nonexistent dirt, because what she was about to try amounted to nothing less than the bartending skill of hand that had made the Medicine Lodge the cherished oasis it was. For without a basic good glass of beer, properly drawn and presented, a saloon was merely a booze trough. And while I knew it was an illusion, all the eyes in the place seemed to be watching her at this, every creature on the walls, for they were all of the male species, or at least had been. The horned ones, the deer and the antelope and the elk, with that antlered astonishment they carried into eternity. The wildcat with the blaze in its eyes. The buffalo with its one-sided gaze, like an old pirate’s. Even the Buck Fever Case in the Charlie Russell painting appeared to be scratching his head at the sight of a female behind the bar.

Francine gushed the glass full. It was all foam.

Swearing silently, she tried with another glass. This one overflowed, a lot of good Shellac flooding into the sink under the tap.

“Fine, I give,” she muttered to Pop. “What’s the holy secret?”

“Draw it slow and easy, with the glass tilted a little. Then let it sit until the head forms just right.”

Like a kid faced with a long-division problem, she nibbled her lip. “How much time is that supposed to take?”

“Hum ‘Home on the Range’ to yourself all the way through.”