The Bartender's Tale (34 page)

Her supper arrived, along with Mrs. Constantine’s beaming wish for good appetite, and she dug in, while mine now sat as untouched as Zoe’s.

“Hey, don’t let anything I said put you off your feed,” Francine favored us with as she chewed a piece of liver. “You can’t let other people’s behavior drive you crazy. Learned that in juvie.”

—

MY STOMACH KEPT TURNING
inside out during the rest of that meal. Francine’s offhand gossiping about herself had left me in what Pop would have called a “picklish dilemma.” Was it up to me to tell him his long-lost daughter had a criminal past, at least of the juvenile sort? Would that make me a squealer against my own flesh and blood? What if I did tell him and he took it wrong, thinking I was doing it because I resented her arrival into the family? Would I only be making trouble, and be blamed for bringing up something bothersome from the past? When you go through a gate, close it behind you, remember.

For once, even Zoe was less than certain when we put our heads together at the table after Francine finally went off to tend bar.

“You want him to keep her on so he doesn’t sell the joint—”

“Yeah.”

“—but you don’t want him out of it about what she did to land herself in juvie.”

“No.”

We deliberated silently on the matter.

“Maybe”—inspiration surfaced in Zoe as it so often did—“she’ll take care of it.”

“Who, Proxy? Fat chance. She hasn’t said boo about it so far, so why would she—”

“No, no, not her. Francine, I mean. She about talks her face off, doesn’t she? So she might blab it herself to your dad, like she did with us, sooner or later.”

I seized on that, particularly the “later” part.

“Good thinking, Muscles. Maybe I’ll wait and see what happens.”

9

G
UESS WHAT BILL REINKING
had on his mind today.”

Looking deeply thoughtful, Pop was at his desk on the landing, a typical rainy afternoon, when I came back from the post office.

“Don’t keep me in suspenders, Pop,” I joked as I trotted up the stairs, still clutching the mail under my slicker to keep it dry until I handed it to him—bills, mostly—and went to hang up the dripping coat. At least I hoped I was joking, for the most average thing seemed suspenseful since Francine came onto the scene. I was pretty sure she hadn’t told him about her juvenile detention past yet, if she was ever going to, and the Gros Ventre
Weekly Gleaner
generally had more serious matters on its mind than who had stolen a car way back then, so there was a pretty good chance this wasn’t that.

What was it, though, that had him sitting there, as if waiting to explore the human condition with me? I could tell simply by listening that the vent was safely closed. He had not said anything about keeping it a secret from the new presence in the barroom, but I had the impression he didn’t at all mind it happening that way for the time being. Right now he looked more than ever like the master of all he surveyed, having a cigarette in a relaxed manner that suggested this one didn’t count toward quitting smoking, gazing around the back room, as if collecting his thoughts from the loot assortment. Now that Francine was catching on as bartender enough not to disgrace the joint, he even had the leisure to help Del with mudjacks lingo, the Fort Peck reunion evidently a rosier experience to look back on than when he’d had to face it. So I was not able to pick out any imminent disturbance of the peace in my father’s universe at the moment, and had to let him take his sweet time in telling me what was on the mind of the
Gleaner
editor.

“Okay, picture this,” he said at last when I was more than ready to. “Bill comes in a little while ago and is sitting there having his scotch and I’m just hanging around, visiting with him. Francine minds her manners, goes off to the amen corner to leave us alone, and we’re shooting the bull like always, when guess what he brought up?”

He seemed to be enjoying the story so much I almost hated to parrot back, “Gee, what?”

“He’s president of the Chamber of Commerce, you know,” news to me. Pop paused for effect, but couldn’t hold it in for long. “He asked me to honcho the derby this year.”

This was quite something, all right. While other towns marked the close of summer with harvest festivals and homesteader days and rodeos and such, Gros Ventre had decided the proper way to celebrate was to catch every fish humanly possible. The derby had grown much larger and more popular across the half dozen years since my ill-fated introduction to it. Which was why the best I could come up with at the idea of Pop, chicken-gut fisherman that he was, in charge of the annual rod-and-reel extravaganza at Rainbow Reservoir was “No bee ess?”

He started to correct my language, but then laughed a little sheepishly. “I must be getting a reputation for having time on my hands, you suppose? I don’t know, though.” He looked almost embarrassed. “Being in charge of something like that is awfully damn civic. I’m not sure I have it in me.”

Now, it would have been perfectly fine with me if he decided not to have anything to do with the exalted fishing derby in any way, shape, or form, which would mean I didn’t have to, either. However, if it would give him something to do after Francine could handle the Medicine Lodge by herself and Del departed to wherever Missing Voices led him to next, what could be wrong with that?

Quickly I worked up enthusiasm. “Sure you have. He’s just asking you to boss a bunch of people for their own good, isn’t that what ‘civic’ means?”

“I told Bill I’d think it over.” He glanced at me, as if making sure. “You really figure I could do okay at it?”

“Hunnerd percent cinch, Pop,” I vouched.

“Okay, we’ll see,” he said, and for once it did not sound as if it meant maybe.

—

NEXT CAME THE MORNING,
not long after, when Francine startled me by showing up in the kitchen as I was heating my breakfast. Ordinarily she slept late and I would only eventually know she was out of bed by those constant bathroom sounds of faucets being turned on and off and lids clattering on the sink counter and other toiletry noises that always left males in the dark. In this new order of things, Pop was sleeping in as well, claiming to be catching up on years of late nights, and usually he and she would grab a bite at the Top Spot before setting up the saloon for the day. So I wasn’t prepared when she wandered in this early, her hair not even fixed, more like the black mop back to the day she had arrived, and she had on the same pinkish shirt and over-the-hill blue jeans from then. “What’s buzzin’, cousin?” her usual greeting was delivered with a yawn.

Thrown as I was by her appearance, I mechanically did the polite thing. “Morning. Want some tomato soup?”

“Not hardly.” Instead, she prowled around, opening cabinets, making a face at what she didn’t find. “Don’t you have anything edible in the place, like cornflakes? Oatmeal? Raisins, even?”

“Huh-uh. There’s some old bread we haven’t thrown to the magpies yet. You could maybe make toast.”

“I’ll settle for some joe, thanks just the same.” She prepared the coffeepot and stuck it on the stove while I poured my breakfast into a soup bowl and sat down to it. Joining me at the table while waiting for the coffee to perk, she seemed to have something on her mind. Whatever that was, it didn’t seem right to me for the only sound in the room to be my slurping up soup.

I asked, “Sleep well?”

“Fine.” This was said, though, with another yawn stifled with her sleeve, the leather bracelet sliding a little on her wrist. By now Pop was letting her close up the saloon by herself most nights—“She needs the practice, shutting up of any kind,” he said humorously enough about Francine’s shotgun style of conversation; little did he know—so she was keeping late hours. Rare sunshine was flooding in through the kitchen window on us, not a cloud anywhere beyond Igdrasil’s leafy outline, the old Packard, and Del’s van, sparkling with dewdrops in the morning light. Squinting against the brightness, she asked, as if just reminded, “How’s College Boy doing?”

“No tick fever yet,” I reported. “He’s still awful busy typing up the mudjacks so he doesn’t get canned from his job.”

She smiled with one side of her mouth. “He better not work himself too hard. He gets any skinnier, ticks wouldn’t have anything to climb on, huh?”

I didn’t care to join in on this reminiscence of Del in the flesh, and, coffee now ready, she went and poured a cup and took quick sips before rejoining me at the table.

Francine sat there for a little while, not saying anything, which was unlike her. After enough gabby suppers in the cafe, Zoe and I had become used to her going on at length to the effect that it didn’t matter whether Kennedy or Nixon won the forthcoming presidential election because we were all going to get blown up anyway when Russia and the flyboys cut loose with the missiles out in those silos, and other extended observations that did not help one’s appetite. Yet you couldn’t really write her off, we kept finding to our fascination, even when she was telling us we’d all end up in incinerated fallout shelters with nothing to eat but tubes of toothpaste. Even at her worst she made you think, and that’s worth something in a person.

As now, when she sat there tracing a roundabout pattern on the oilcloth with her thumbnail before giving me a sudden, keen look. “Want to know something?” I kept at my soup. In my experience, when someone said that, they were going to provide the something, whether or not that’s what you wanted.

“You’re the first to find out, bud.” She leaned across the table in confidential fashion. “Decided I’m gonna change my name.”

Just like that? Was she kidding? Could a person do that?

“Oh?” I stammered in surprise, wondering if I ought to get Pop up to hear this. “You mean, from Duff to—ours?”

“Nahh, it’s too late on that,” she tossed the Harry family name exclusively back to Pop and me, to my considerable relief. “I mean the other one. I’m sick of being Francine. It sounds like some constipated saint.”

Now I was fascinated. “What are you going to change to?”

“France.”

The kitchen went so silent, my eye blinks probably could have been heard, until I managed, “Like the country?”

“Mm hmm. Got kind of a romantic touch to it, ain’t it. How’s it grab you?”

“It’s, um, real different.”

“That’s what I thought. Sounds kind of hip, don’t it. ‘France,’” she said in cool-customer fashion, “yeah.” She grinned at me over her coffee cup. “The boys in the joint are gonna have something to get used to, huh?”

So were the rest of us, starting with Pop. When he arrived on the scene somewhat later for a wake-up jolt of coffee, his initial reaction was predictable—“Like the country? Not even ‘Frances,’ like the saint sounds like?”—but shortly he threw up his hands and said she was a grown-up and her name was her own damn business.

As it proved out, France, as she was now, guessed right about the flyboys and roughnecks having a good time adjusting to the new her when they came in the joint, with the playful ones teasing her as ‘Frenchy’ at first. But that wore off soon enough, and her adopted name or nickname or whatever it was ceased to be anything I paid particular attention to on life’s list of surprises.

—

PROXY WAS ANOTHER MATTER.
Put it simply, she spooked the daylights out of me whenever she showed up.

Not far into the evolution of Francine into France and the reaction in the saloon, Zoe and I were on our way back from supper, chattering a mile a minute as usual, when we saw the red Cadillac parked in the alley behind the saloon. Leaning against a fender, taking long, thoughtful drags on a cigarette was the unmistakable blond, shapely figure, and we needed to do some fast thinking.

“Just remember,” I whispered urgently, “you’ve seen her—”

“—through the vent, right,” Zoe tallied in a similar rushed whisper.

“—but she’s never seen you—”

“—but she knows I’m in on it about Francine, I mean France—”

“—so you better look surprised or something at meeting her so she doesn’t get suspicious about how you recognize her. Ready?”

“Piece of cake. I’ll just say, ‘I’ve heard your name mentioned, Mrs. Duffy.’”

“No, no,
Duff
, get that straight or she’ll bite your head off. Come on, she’s looking at us.”

You really knew you had been looked at when Proxy gave you the once-over, with that suggestive gaze and tuck of a smile at a corner of her mouth. She studied Zoe to the maximum as we came up, Zoe giving back as good as she got.

“Remind me here,” Proxy saw in a hurry that Zoe was thoroughly attached to me, “you’re exactly who?”

Dramatically Zoe began regaling her with Butte and the Top Spot and suppers together, until I finished off the introduction with what really counted. “She’s in on it.”

“Right,” Proxy said, as if sucking a tooth. Me, she gave a little shake of her head. “You’re starting early, Russ,” whatever that was supposed to mean. Her attention shifted from us, thank goodness, as she restlessly looked up and down the alley. “Is Tom around? He’s not at the house, and I didn’t want to barge into the joint and upset things.”

“He’s gassing up the car”—with Earl Zane still spitting mad over losing out on the saloon, this now had to be done at the truck stop at the other end of town—“he should be back pretty quick.”

“Oh-kay,” Proxy said, grinding out her cigarette with a practiced foot, “we can inspect the scenery until he gets here. So, sonny. How’s that daughter of mine doing at slinging drinks, does he say?”

I was not going to be drawn into any discussion of that. “Pop will want to tell you himself, I don’t want to spoil it.”

She studied me the intent way that made me uncomfortable. “You getting along okay with Francine, I hope?” She included Zoe with a half wink that said any of this was just between us.

“Sure,” we chorused. Then, though, some urge sneaked up on me and I turned this conversation on its head. “She’s changed her name, that’s a little hard to keep up with, but we’re getting pretty much used to it.”

“She’s what?”

“Didn’t you know?” I couldn’t resist, and Zoe beside me was trying to keep an equally straight face. “She goes by ‘France’ now.”

“Like the—?”

“Sure thing.”

“Is that all.” Proxy nonetheless looked a bit bothered by the news, resorting to another cigarette. She smoked the same unregenerate brand of coffin nails my father did, no Kools or Salems for her. “‘France,’ huh? Isn’t that something. Shows she has a mind of her own,” she said as though that was a novelty.

Zoe’s attention was caught by the strange license plate on the Cadillac and used it as an excuse to ask with a wonderful air of innocence, “Do you have a job in Nevada?”

Proxy seemed amused by the question. “More than one, angel eyes. Force of habit.” Well, that tallied with her daughter’s version that she always had something going. Now she slanted a look at Zoe, although I again had the feeling she was speaking mostly to me. “I don’t suppose you know what a stand-in is.”

But we did! We had learned all manner of things theatrical from Cloyce Reinking. Bursting with curiosity, we demanded to know what classic of drama Proxy was attached to.

“Naw, not a play.” She brushed aside a mere stage role. “A movie they’re shooting in Reno and the desert there.”

Suspiciously I asked, “So who are you the stand-in for?”

“Marilyn Monroe, natch.”

Zoe and I fell silent. This couldn’t possibly be true. Could it?

Meanwhile she was telling us she didn’t know why anybody would think it would make a good movie because all it was about was catching wild horses, but Clark Gable was in it, too, “and a bunch of others.” It sounded very much like what a person might pick up from reading a Reno newspaper.

“Then what’s Marilyn—” I began trying to pin her down.

“—really like?” Zoe finished.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Proxy’s voice dipped to a more modest tone, “we’re not buddy-buddy, her and me. I’m part of the furniture, as far as she’s concerned. See, I stand in for her when they’re setting up the shots, is all. The hair and skin and so forth, we register about the same with the cameras.”