The Bartender's Tale (35 page)

Zoe barely beat me to the next question. “How’d you get a neat job like that?”

Proxy shrugged as if there was nothing to it. “I’m in Harrah’s one night, just seeing what’s going on, and I reach out and give one of the slot machines a yank as I go by. ‘Why’d you do that, doll?’ a guy behind me asks. ‘This machine loves me,’ I tell him. He laughs and says, ‘Wait a minute, stand over here in the light, would you?’ He turns out to be the movie director on his way to the blackjack table.” She shrugged again. “Long and short of it is, he tells me they need somebody awfully blond for a stand-in, and how about me, so I said why not?” She laughed in a dry way. “You watch, I bet they swipe my line about the slot machine. Those movie people.”

Whether or not there was a lick of truth in any of that, she could weave a story, for sure. Skeptical as we were, Zoe and I had listened as if hypnotized. “But if they need you to be the stand-in,” I finally challenged insofar as I could, “how come you aren’t there instead of here?”

“Oh, that. The shooting’s shut down awhile. See, they have to dry Marilyn out. Booze and pills together.” She twirled a finger at her temple. “Real bad idea.”

That still was the kind of gossip that probably could be picked up at any Reno slot machine. Like me, Zoe didn’t know how much to believe, but it sounded so good in the telling, it seemed a shame to write it off entirely. “Maybe she’ll go on the wagon and you’ll have to turn right around and go back to Nevada,” she tested out, knowing I would feel a lot better about matters if that happened.

“I’m not holding my breath. Things happen when they happen, buttercup.” Proxy was growing restless about waiting around in the open and glanced at me. “What do you suppose is keeping that father of yours?”

I shrugged and should have quit with that, but instead did something I could have kicked myself for afterward.

“We could wait for him in the back room, I guess,” I more or less invited before Zoe’s expression told me that was not the best idea.

In a blink Proxy dispatched her latest cigarette. “Lead on, I’m housebroken.”

—

THE BACK-ROOM ASSORTMENT
caught her interest the moment we stepped in. “Well, looky here. Tom didn’t tell me he was running a pawnshop as well as the joint.” Damn, she was swift at sizing things up. I had to hope she wasn’t swuft as well.

“This is some bunch of stuff,” she marveled, looking every which way. “Kind of like money in the bank, huh?”

I mumbled an explanation about drinkers sometimes running short of money, avoiding any mention of Pop selling off the loot, as I wished he hadn’t called it, on those trips of his.

A reminiscent gleam came into her eye. “Yeah, that had a habit of happening at the Blue Eagle, too.” She gave a throaty laugh. “You wouldn’t believe what some of those characters wanted to trade.”

Zoe had been darting fearful glances at the slicker covering the vent, but when Proxy’s back was turned I silently mouthed, “It’s okay, it’s closed,” and she relaxed into the natural role of tour guide. With Zoe showing off the variety of items from cowboy hats to crowbars, Proxy was unexpectedly interested in it all, like a shopper turned loose in a shut department store. I hung back a little, staying out of the way, brooding over the way this milk-blond force of nature kept showing up out of nowhere and disrupting things.

“What the devil is this, a gospel meeting?”

So taken up with Proxy’s visitation, I hadn’t heard Pop’s car, and I came to with a start as he stepped in from the alley. He did not sound all that pleased at finding the three of us in the back room, and I edged in behind Proxy to let her handle it. Zoe wisely had shut up, too.

“How’s every little thing, Tom? I figured I’d stop by and find out how our girl is doing, besides lopping her name in half,” Proxy said casually. “I see you’re letting her run the joint by herself.”

“Some of the time,” Pop allowed, coming over to where we were clustered by the saddles and spurs. “She’s got to learn to be on her own.”

“So?” Proxy’s eyebrows alone pretty much asked the question. “How’s she shaping up behind the bar?”

“Not bad.” He paused, glancing at Zoe and me and then giving up on keeping us away from grown-up talk. “The flyboys and roughnecks are like bees to honey around her, but she knows I mean it about no dating the inmates, and she hasn’t been.”

“I’ll lay down the law to her about strictly sticking to the job, too,” Proxy said, looking relieved. “Men, they are such a nuisance. Present company excepted, natch.” She generously included me in the grinning glance she gave Pop.

“Let’s don’t get into that can of worms.” I noticed he was giving her the same funny look he had when she pulled in after the Fort Peck reunion, guarded yet attracted. Shaking that off, he turned away to where his apron was hanging on its usual hook by the landing. “I know you’ll want to visit with Francine—I mean, France. Cripes, why couldn’t you give her a name that can’t be fiddled with?” Zoe’s eyes sparkled at that. “I’ll take over out front”—he tied the apron on—“and send her—”

“Before you do that,” Proxy interjected. Zoe and I took note of the actressy way she looked around the room, as if only then discovering its treasures. “Quite the collection you have here.”

Pop paused, looking unsure whether he wanted to hear this. “It adds up, if you stay in business long enough.”

“If I know my history from the old days in the Eagle, customers don’t always make good on paying up later.” She patted the weathered stirrup of a saddle that obviously dated back to roundups long ago. “I bet a bunch of this is never gonna be got out of hock and it’s yours to do with, am I right?”

“That happens some. Why, you in the market for a saddle for the Caddie?”

Proxy didn’t crack a smile. “I was just thinking of someplace where they buy all sorts of stuff, and there must be a junior fortune here if it was handled right.” Clearly she thought she was talking over the heads of Zoe and myself, which showed she didn’t know our heads. We put on bored faces, idly spinning the rowels of the rank of spurs while listening with all our might.

“You were, were you,” Pop was saying gingerly. “And where is it you think something like that takes place?”

“Canada, slowpoke.”

My insides lurched.

“The railyard district in Medicine Hat,” she specified. “Come on, Tom, you know what I’m talking about. No place like it when we used to know it, was there.” The kind of slick, knowing smile I didn’t want to see accompanied that. “Still that kind of place, if I know anything about it,” she sailed right on. “I’ve been back to the district now and then since, doing business, and you’d be surprised at what they can come up with when they like what they see.” I suppose she did not actually bat her eyes, but she might as well have. Proxy’s general type of business already had involved Pop with a surprise daughter. Now it was threatening to set him off again on those trips I hated so much. As far as I could see, she was a specimen of catamount that made the wildcat mounted on the wall seem like a kitten. Catching my distress, Zoe nibbled her lip anxiously.

Pop squinted as if trying to draw a bead on what to say next. I couldn’t tell if he really was tempted or simply thrown by Proxy’s latest big notion. In any case, hesitation was not a good sign in him around her.

“I’m kind of busy with something else,” he put her off. Who knew I would ever be thankful for the fishing derby? “For now,” he went back to safer ground, “let’s just concentrate on the bartending daughter.”

Agreeably enough, Proxy said that was fine and dandy with her, and as he went in to mind the barroom, she left Zoe and me with a grinning
adios
and went out to the Cadillac to wait for France. It is strange what you have to pin your hopes on in this life. I now had to wish for Marilyn Monroe to be dried out enough to need a stand-in, if she really did, because when Proxy was here instead of there, I could feel my father being lured away from me a little at a time.

—

BY NOW DEL
was showing signs of emerging from his camper cocoon. Much to his relief, Pop’s sessions of helping with the mudjack lingo had enabled him to send off a first batch of Fort Peck tapes and transcriptions to the powers that be at the Library of Congress, and with every new day bringing no sign of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Zoe and I no longer had to dole out sympathy when we dropped by the van to see how he was doing. Our report of Proxy’s visit elicited his old bushy-tailed interest, right down to that deathless detail, that she claimed she was a stand-in for Marilyn Monroe.

“If that’s so, Marilyn Monroe had better watch out she doesn’t end up as a stand-in for Proxy,” he said with a chuckle. Actually taking a break for a minute from the tape recorder and typewriter, he yawned and stretched in the Gab Lab chair. “By the way, how’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Niece’ playing to the audience at large?” This was different. He hadn’t brought up Francine to us before, still embarrassed over the tick on his business end, we figured.

Zoe looked at me meaningfully, and I had to nod in surrender. After all, I’d had the privilege of dropping the news on Proxy.

“Not bad,” she took over with that arch hint of more to come that we had picked up from
The Importance of Being Earnest
. “People are going to have to get used to the fact she’s changed her name, though.”

“Say again?” Del tilted his head to employ his good ear.

No further prompting needed, Zoe delved into Francine becoming France, with me furnishing the crucial detail she’d always thought Proxy had burdened her with a name that sounded like a constipated saint.

“She thinks she got a bum deal on her birth certificate”—Del did a wickedly effective Groucho Marx bit with his eyebrows—“she should try being named after a president.”

“Yeah, but,” Zoe was struck with a thought that nobody else saw coming, “that was his middle name, sitting there waiting. President Roosevelt’s, I mean. So you got off pretty easy, people usually have dumb middle names. What’s yours?”

“Oh, nothing worth mentioning. Now, if you don’t mind—”

“That’s not fair. We’ll tell you ours, won’t we, Rusty.”

“Sure. You first.”

“Theodosia. It’s Greek.”

“Thomas,” I owned up to. “Like Pop.”

Still nothing from Del. “Listen, I have work to do and—”

“I bet it’s something like Sylvester, isn’t it,” Zoe persisted as devilishly as only she could. “Or Algernon. Or—”

“All right, all right.” He picked up a pencil and threw it down. We kept waiting.

“It’s Delano.”

As soon as the word was out of his mouth, Zoe knew something was up. I was already staring bullets at him.

“For your edification,” he none too willingly was admitting to, “my full name is Philip Delano Robertson. My father thought if you speak it fast, it sounds kind of like . . . well, you know.”

I did not even have to say anything, merely kept staring at him. Was any grown-up trustworthy at all?

“I know what you’re thinking, Rusty”—and he was all too right—“but it wasn’t like that, honestly. I didn’t turn Phil into Del to win over your father, I decided to make the change when I left Washington to come out here.”

“Cross your heart and swear to go to heaven in a flash of—”

“Absolutely. Look, I’m using it on the Missing Voices tapes”—he grabbed the nearest one to show us the grease-penciled label on the reel—“and the transcriptions and all else. Professionally and”—he spun his hands as if making the one catch up with the other—“personally as well, I go by Delano now. It’s a better name, it has more to it,” he said with conviction. “I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to do it. Slow learner.”

He must have seen we needed more convincing. “Honestly, it’s an old, old tradition of new arrivals to this part of the country,” he resorted to, “and I can absolutely see why Francine, I mean France, would do it.”

“What, call herself after someplace in Europe?”

“No, change her name to the extent she has. Amending it, let’s say, the way I’m doing with Delano. History is full of examples,” he said, as if that was justification enough, “people did it all the time when they came west.” He hit on an inspiration. “Alan Lomax even discovered a song about it.” Clearing his throat, necessarily or not, he proceeded to twang out:

Oh, what wuz yer name in the States?

Wuz it Jackson or Johnson or Bates?

Mebbe Gaitskill or Gaither or Gates?

Oh, what wuz yer name in the States?

We clamored for more, but he declined. “I really shouldn’t have got going on this matter of France, as she now is,” he reproved himself. “Terrible manners. I don’t know what’s getting into me. I’ve never even thanked her for pitching in at picking deadly insects off me.” Serious to the roots of his crew cut now, he looked out the van window toward the Medicine Lodge, as if setting his sights on it. “I suppose I really ought to take care of that when I get a chance.”

Right then we should have seen what was coming, shouldn’t we.

—

THE VERY NEXT DAY,
another wet one keeping us inside at the back-room desk, Zoe and I were settling in over the Flying Fortress that still lacked a tail, what with all else that had been taking up our time. Out front, the saloon had just opened and was still empty, with only the distant clink of glassware as France—we were calling her that with hardly a second thought now—fussed with chores behind the bar. Zoe was ritually checking the vent, which we were about to shut so we could jabber all we wanted while we worked on the bomber tail.

“Ooh,” she whispered as I was starting to cut out the balsa wood tailfin with the X-Acto knife. “Rusty, guess who.”

Looking much as he did when he appeared in the Medicine Lodge that first day, all legs and pockets and red head, Del was stepping up to the bar, shaking off the worst of the rain as he came.

“Top of the afternoon,” he said lightly. “Good weather for amphibians.”

“Yeah, ain’t it.” France came partway down the bar, wiping her hands on a fresh towel. “Two Medicine country liquid sunshine, everyone tells me this is.” She glanced up at the clock. “Looking for Tom? He’s at the Spot having lunch with his fish derby committee, so he’ll maybe be a while.”