The Bartender's Tale (33 page)

“I see,” said Bill, whether or not he actually did. Tipped off ahead of time by Pop, Francine had a bottle of good scotch waiting, and poured generously, and Bill, too, went off satisfied if still more than a little mystified.

It was Velma Simms who provided Francine’s first real challenge. Things started not too badly, with Pop making introductions and Velma only raising an eyebrow a fraction. When Francine brought the ginger-ale highball over to the booth where Velma was going through her mail, though, she lingered and said, “That’s a wild blouse.” It was made of a soft material that seemed to have been poured onto Velma. “You buy it around here?”

“London.”

“No crap! I bet it costs something over there, huh?” During this, Pop had come into the back room for something and wasn’t aware of the one-sided conversation out front until I caught his eye and urgently pointed that direction. He emerged into the barroom as Velma, notoriously companionable only on her own terms, ran a look up and down the younger woman and said, “Like they say, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

“Hey,” Pop called to Francine too late to ward off the frost attack, “give me a hand with the beer glasses here, would you?” I noticed as she retreated behind the bar, looking back at the booth where alimony envelopes were coolly being slit open, that the little dent between her eyes when irritated was a lot like Proxy’s.

After Velma, things went more smoothly, enough customers to keep Francine on her toes but not an overwhelming crowd, and with Pop close at hand as guardian angel, she kept things flowing reasonably well. My thoughts raced back and forth as I watched the activity in the barroom. This crazy year, which a person nearly needed to be an acrobat to follow, in its latest stunt had given me a sister, even if we didn’t seem to be much alike in anything except hair follicles. I knew from my schoolmates that kids were not always happy when a new child came into the family, but did it have to work that same way at the other end of things, when a new grown-up showed up out of the total blue? I didn’t think I actually resented Francine’s arrival into my life and Pop’s. I wasn’t that much of a daddy’s boy, was I? Yet how was a kid supposed to react to such an instantaneous change in the family, and for that matter, in the cherished routine of Medicine Lodge life? And Pop and Francine, this had to be real tricky for them to do, too. Down there at the bar, behind the big fib that they were uncle and niece, were they truly becoming like father and daughter? After all, she was a grown woman, and he admittedly was up there in years, and Pop by word and example had long told me habit dies hard. It bore watching, this dance of the generations.

Such thinking was interrupted as I saw him glance toward the door and stiffen at the sight of the next customers coming in. J. L. and Nan Hill were longtime friends of his and of the joint, but also old Fort Peck hands familiar with the Blue Eagle and its staff, if taxi dancers could be called that. The Hills steered their way to a booth as they always did because of J.L.’s shaking disease, while Pop in low tones instructed Francine in making a pink lady and drawing a beer into a mug with a handle large enough that J.L. could manage it without spilling.

Escorting Francine over with the drinks, Pop began a roundabout explanation of her presence. “I don’t suppose you remember my having a sister, she wasn’t really around Fort Peck so’s you would notice.” Boy, was he stretching the facts to fit the situation. He of course did have a sister, Aunt Marge, who had never been within a thousand miles of Fort Peck. Now, though, the so-called white lie had to be applied. “Anyhow, this is my niece Francine—”

“Pleased to meetcha.” Francine all but curtsied, sensing something perilous from the way Pop was speaking.

“—she’s here getting an education in bartending.”

“This is the place for it,” declared J.L., drawing the beer mug to himself with both trembling hands. “None better from here to China, unless it was the old Blue Eagle in Fort Peck days. I sure do wish we could have got to that reunion, seen all the faces again. I kind of miss the old days, Tom, how about you?”

“Sometimes,” Pop equivocated, while Francine tried not to display the jitters at Fort Peck and Proxy’s bailiwick surfacing in the conversation. And I knew what she did not, that the real threat of discovery was Nan Hill, who as washerwoman to establishments such as the Blue Eagle no doubt had knowledge of people’s dirty laundry in more ways than one. Judiciously sipping her pink drink, she was searching Francine’s face, as if trying to place it.

After enough such scrutiny, she turned to Pop with the verdict three of us were breathlessly waiting for.

“I can see the family resemblance—there’s no mistaking that hair, surely.”

With that, Francine passed all the examination any one person should have to undergo the first day on the job, and life in the Medicine Lodge settled to its true business, bartending. She did not do badly, as Pop graded it, on through the rest of the afternoon and evening. The true test to come, of course, would be whether she could handle the saloon by herself. And life with Pop and me.

8

T
HERE IS NOTHING
like a new face behind the bar to either intrigue or alarm a saloon’s patrons, and Francine’s presence in the Medicine Lodge very quickly drew attention far and wide. Word spread like grass fire among the Air Force missile silo contingents and oil field roughnecks and the like, that there was someone young, female, and reasonably attractive now pouring drinks in the old joint, and they began to show up in droves. Saloons in the other towns must have dried up like puddles. And while her bartending skills were still very much in the development stage, right from the start she could hold her own with the flyboys, sassily kidding them as “junior birdmen,” and laugh enough but not too much at the rough jokes of the oil rig hands, and meanwhile fend off flirting from just about every local male in her age range, including prominent bachelors like Turk Turco and Joe Quigg, by tossing off “Sorry, no free samples of the merchandise” along with a little mocking smile that seemed to let them in on the joke. As Pop admitted one night soon in a doorway conversation with me when she was finishing the bartending shift by herself, “She’s got quite a mouth on her. But she maybe had to get one, to keep up with Proxy.”

On the other hand, a number of the Medicine Lodge’s longtime customers, such as Dode Withrow and other old-timers from the ranches, including the sheepherders, were less taken with her saucy manner and quick tongue, and missed having Pop stationed behind the bar in his bedroom slippers, faithfully listening to their stories and letting out “No bee ess?” as appropriate. No matter how attentive to them Francine tried to be, it was nowhere near the same.

I suppose Pop would have said it all balanced out on the teeter-totter. In any case, Francine now was there behind the bar of the Select Pleasure Establishment of the whole state, apparently as firmly installed as the beer spigot, and people were just going to have to get used to her. That included me.

—

“BILL TELLS ME
you have an addition to the family.”

Word surely was all over town if it tickled the ears of even Cloyce Reinking, I deduced when I met up with the former Lady Bracknell at the post office soon after Francine’s bartending debut. You might not think going for the mail constituted hazardous duty, but was I ever finding it so. Occupied as Pop was with nurturing the newcomer behind the bar, he delegated me for the daily post office trip, which I ordinarily would not have minded. Nothing was ordinary since his change of mind about selling the Medicine Lodge, as I found out the first afternoon I had to pass the Zanes’ gas station on my way and Duane popped out like the birdie in a cuckoo clock. “Your old man weaseled out of the deal,” he sneered as I came into range, “he don’t know how to keep his word.” That got to me, but a broad daylight fistfight with a hereditary fool would not help matters in any way I could see, and so I only told him to stuff his remarks where the sun doesn’t shine and from then on took to dodging around the block on my mail errand. Encountering Mrs. Reinking with the
Saturday Evening Post
and
Collier’s
and a catalog or two cradled in her arms and lofty curiosity in her expression was no similarly possible mortal conflict, but something of a challenge nonetheless.

“Uh-huh,” I tried offhandedly handling her inquiry about Francine having joined our living arrangement. “She’s kind of a surprise.” A little late, I remembered about watching my mouth. “I mean, we were never real close to that side of the family up until now.”

“Is that so?” A persimmon smile in character for the ladyships of the world. “I hope not for anything as serious as leaving a baby in a handbag.”

“Huh-uh. No. Nothing like that.”

When she put her mind to it, Mrs. Reinking could be surprisingly astute about things. “It must make quite a change in the household for you and your father.”

That was putting it mildly. “It takes some adjusting.” I squeezed out enough truth without having to go into our domestic situation further, and hurriedly switched topics to her starring performance as Lady Bracknell, which I’d finally gotten to see when Bill Reinking kindly took me to the final night of the play. “You were outstanding! Zoe thinks so, too.”

Her wintry features thawed into a genuine smile. “The two of you started something,” she confided. “The Prairie Players are going to do
Blithe Spirit
this winter. I am cast—typecast, you might even say—as Madame Arcati.”

“Neat! Do you get to—” I crossed my eyes to the best of my ability.

“I think not,” she laughed lightly. “But I may resort to a turban. Madame Arcati, you see, is a medium and clairvoyant.” Helpfully she explained that meant the character conducted séances with ghosts and could sense things that other people could not. A kind of fortune-teller of the past as well as the future, it sounded like.

We parted with her promise to enlist Zoe and me when she needed to learn her lines, and my silent wish for clairvoyance to rub off on me.

—

THE FACT OF THE MATTER
was that Francine was not like any relative—sister, cousin, something in between as a half sister seemed to be—I could ever have dreamed up. For sure, the presence of a woman in a house that had not known one since I was an infant meant detours in routines Pop and I had followed as habitually as monks. Particularly, she hogged the bathroom for so long each morning that I regularly had to go out behind Igdrasil to take a leak. “They’re that way,” Pop counseled me about that propensity of womankind. But such quirks were the least of learning to live with Francine. Not only did she and I not start off on the same page of the book of siblings, we were not even in the same edition yet. Throughout life you meet people from the past, as natural as anything, but meeting someone from the future is far, far different. History only licenses us to drive in the past; the road ahead is always full of blind curves. Even I did not have nearly enough imagination to fantasize any of what the decade ahead would bring, with the flowering of a generation of Francines, restless and brainier than they knew what to do with and all too often as zany as they were brainy. The music coming that would leave Elvis Presley in the dust. The sprouting of communes and Haight-Ashbury and other such scenes. The whole youth revolt continually fueled by political assassinations, cities burning in racial rage, the despised Vietnam War, national traumas that seemed to come year by year after 1960. All I knew, those summer days and nights when history was forming up over the horizon, was that life had radically changed course with Francine’s arrival, and I was scrambling to keep up.

—

THINGS MIGHT HAVE GONE
on that way, she in her hemisphere and me in my own, and mostly thin air between despite our best efforts, if the night hadn’t come when she joined Zoe and me for supper. Until then she had been eating early with Pop so they could work the shift in the joint together on through the evening, and also to the point, he could keep on introducing her to all and sundry as his niece. This time he was busy with a beer delivery and sent her on ahead to the Top Spot by herself, and the next thing we knew, here she came giving us a knowing grin about all being in the same boat, eating-wise.

“Room for one more casualty?” she asked, as if Zoe wasn’t openly dying of curiosity about her, and scooted in with us at the back table, already wearing her bartending bow tie and crisp white blouse. She dubiously scanned my usual shake and cheeseburger and Zoe’s barely touched plate of the day’s special. “Liver and onions, ain’t it. That’ll put hair on your chest.” She flapped open a menu for any alternative. “What do they serve here that doesn’t come with ptomaine?” We giggled a little nervously at this frank approach to Top Spot cuisine.

I have wondered since if Francine’s tongue was simply looser than usual without Pop there with her. His wing, when he took you under it, covered a lot of territory. Out on her own, without him or Proxy to intervene, she must have felt—well, who knows what she was feeling, but she rambled on in a relaxed way as she went down the list of the cafe’s none too appetizing offerings. Zoe and I could just sit there and listen to this mercurial visitor from the grown-up world, obviously not thought up by Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde but theatrical enough in her own head-tossing way. I have to stop and remind myself that Francine was only twenty-one at the time. To us she seemed as worldly as Scheherazade.

Zoe’s eye was caught by the handiwork on Francine’s wrist. Wider than a watchband, the wristpiece was an intricate weave of different-colored leather strips like fine basketry, only soft. “Ooh, that’s some bracelet. Where did you get it?”

“Mmm? Made it myself,” Francine still was absorbed in trying to find anything on the menu that appealed. “In leather class.”

That roused my curiosity. “They have that in school where you were?”

“Nahh,” she said offhandedly, still intent on the menu, “but they’re big on it in juvie.”

Zoe and I about fell into our food.

We looked at each other to make sure we had heard right, and we had. Juvie meant only one thing, any way it was said. A juvenile-offender correction facility. Alcatraz for teenagers.

“I give.” Francine surrendered the menu, flopping it closed. “Liver and onions it is, you only die once.” Our faces gave us away. “Whups. I see my mommy didn’t spread the word about that little episode in my youth.” Momentarily she frowned down at the wristband. “I sort of wondered how much my reputation had proceeded me. Not all that much, it looks like.” With the rare realization that she might have said too much, she winked at us in the manner of Proxy. “Tell you what, let’s keep it that way. What people don’t know won’t hurt them, huh?”

Depend on Zoe, she came right out with it. “How bad a crime was it?”

“I took a car, is all. People got excited. Jeez,” a note of annoyance crept into her voice, “I was going to bring it back later that night. I just got a little delayed.”

“How old were—” Zoe and I blurted together.

“Old enough not to know better,” Francine breezed past that. “Fourteen.” In other words, no great amount of age beyond that of two thunderstruck twelve-year-olds.

If she was going to keep talking, we were going to keep asking. It was my turn. “So how long were you in juvie?”

Frowning, she toyed with a tendril of her hair. “Year and a half. That judge was really touchy about cars.”

“Have you decided, dear?” Mrs. Constantine hovered in briefly to take her order, alternating a warm smile at Francine as a new customer and a stern expression at her non-eating daughter. Zoe and I could hardly wait until she was out of earshot to resume our question barrage.

“What did Proxy say when you got caught?”

“She wasn’t around to say anything. Hardly ever was.” This was given out carelessly, as if a missing mother was of no concern. “My aunt and uncle weren’t any too happy with me”—she gave the offhand shrug that was becoming familiar—“but what did they expect? If there’d been anything to do besides watch wheat grow, maybe I wouldn’t have swiped that car.”

Zoe was torn, I could tell, between devouring every word of this and dying to fire off more questions, and for that matter, so was I. With extreme mutual willpower, we waited for Francine to go on.

“Anyhow,” she picked up her story as if she had nothing better to do, “me being in juvie got Proxy’s attention for sure. Came and got me when I was sprung. Decided to turn into a real mother and hauled me off to Nevada.” She shrugged again. “It’s been a roller coaster ride ever since.”

For someone who had been locked away for not inconsiderable theft, this new addition to the family sounded blindingly honest when she wanted to. But not, it was dawning on me, to the extent of having volunteered her automotive indiscretion to Pop. Nor had Proxy seen fit to mention the matter, had she. If I was sure of anything, it was that Tom Harry would not put a car thief in charge of the saloon that was his lifeblood. So he didn’t know, but now I did. Talk about the weight of knowledge; it all of a sudden felt like a ton.

Zoe, bless her up, down, and sideways, took up the questioning while I was sitting there, stunned with the burden of truth. “What did you do before coming here? I mean, what kind of work?”

Francine glanced around with an expression as if the hard-used cafe was all too familiar. When not showing a sidelong smile similar to her mother’s, her mouth had a tendency to look like she was tasting something fishy. That dubious approach to life came out in her voice now. “Pearl-dived.” Which meant she washed dishes. “Slung hash.” Waited on tables. “Took rental cars down to Vegas when they ran short, go bring them back when Reno started to run out. Little of this, little of that, not a hell of a lot of anything.” She picked up her spoon and drew idle circles on the tablecloth. “Just between you and me and Pat and Mike and Mustard, I think that’s why that mother of mine came up with this brainstorm of getting me into a line of work that’s got something going for it, like bartending. Don’t you guess, Rusty?”

“Huh? Oh, sure.” How the question popped out of me right then, I don’t know, but when better? “What does your . . . what does Proxy do for a living?”

“Her?” Some more tracing with the spoon in concentrated fashion. “She’s a promoter.” Zoe and I glanced at each other, trying to figure that out—the only promoting we knew anything about was advancing from one grade to the next in school—until Francine took mercy.

“Mom,” she gave the word a sly little twist, as if all three of us knew the strange ways of parents, “is more or less in the divorce business, see. Nevada dude ranches have always been big on divorcees in for the quickie piece of paper. New crops of grass widows. So they send her around up here”—from the vague swing of her head that seemed to include everywhere north of Nevada—“to travel agencies and private investigators and so on, anybody with a stake in marriages going on the rocks. Casinos use her, too, same kind of thing—spreading the word where people might be interested in coming on down to Reno.” She kept looking fixedly at the whorls the spoon was making on the tablecloth. “Those, and some other ways of earning a buck.” The slight lift of the shoulders that was casual, but also not. “She’s usually got something going.”