The Bartender's Tale (36 page)

“No, no, I only came by to say thanks for helping out there when I had to be, ah, searched.” He twitched his shoulders self-consciously. “I hope it wasn’t too embarrassing.”

France responded with that cunning little turn of mouth she had inherited from Proxy; it could serve as a smile or not, depending. “Angel of mercy, that’s me.” Turning more serious, she asked: “You over your bug bite?”

“Pretty much. Still an itchy spot.” Del tried for the bright side: “At least it didn’t result in sudden death.”

“Mm hmm. Well, that’s always good.”

Bomber tailfin abandoned one more time, the two of us at the vent watched in suspense while she rubbed the bar with her towel and he stood there, gangling like a hollyhock.

“Actually,” he came around to as if it was a big decision, “while I’m here, I think I’ll have a drink.”

“Fine. What’ll it be?”

“Hmm? Beer, please. Sorry, let me do it right.” Slapping the bar, Del pulled in his chin to make his voice deeper. “Herd me up a Shellac,
s’il vous plaît
.” Not a bad bit, Zoe and I silently agreed.

France snickered and stepped to the Select spigot. When the glass was brimming to a nice head, she slid it to him. “Here you go, straight from the horse.”

Matters now had reached a pivotal point of bartending ethic, whether to withdraw to a respectful distance and let the drink be imbibed in solitary pleasure, or to stay in the immediate vicinity, doing some little thing and provide small talk and a listening ear if wanted. Pop always knew in a flash which to do. Looking less than certain, France glanced to the amen corner
,
where one of those mystery novels with the perpetually endangered blonde on the cover waited as usual, but then began drying the same beer glasses she’d dried five minutes before. “You’ve really been holed up working, huh? How’s it going?”

“Phenomenal,” Del responded, dabbing away a little beer mustache. “Another week or so and I’ll have all the interview tapes transcribed and sent off. I couldn’t have done it without Tom. Fort Peck was a world all its own.”

“I bet. I’ve heard a ton of that from Proxy.” Another dry glass received a thorough wiping. “Then what? You moving on, I guess?”

“I’m afraid so.” He did the bit with his chin jacked down on his voice box again. “Back on the trail of the Missing Voices.” Zoe and I heard this with a pang we could feel in each other.

“Oboy, this place could use some noise around this time of day,” France skipped past his imminent departure. “Tried to talk Tom into putting in a jukebox, but he says if people want music, they can go sing in church.” She wrinkled her nose at the Buck Fever Case painting across the room. “If I owned the joint, I’d put in a jukie right smack over there.”

Del ventured, “And have to listen to fifty versions of ‘she done me wrong’ songs?”

“Nahh, not just yokel vocals. I’d make sure to sneak in some Mose Allison. ‘One Room Country Shack’ and so on. You dig that kind of thing?”

“Do I! Absolutely!” Del nearly ascended off his bar stool. “Mose Allison is a Mississippi Delta bluesman of the first order. A direct descendant of Leadbelly and Muddy Waters and Blind Lemon Jefferson and—” He rattled off names until building up to an encore of the growly blues he had performed at the reservoir that fishing day with Pop and me.
“Everythin’ nailed down’s comin’ loose. Seems like livin’ ain’t no use.
Sensational stuff, isn’t it? Pure
lingua america
.” Finally he caught himself. “Sorry. I tend to get carried away about musicology.”

“That’s okay,” she said, giving him a strange look. “Passes the time anyway.”

That caused him to check the clock over by the Select Pleasure Establishment plaque and conscientiously down some more of his beer. “I really should get out of your ha—your way so you can go about your business.”

“Aw, feel free to stick around and flirt with me”—she gave him a grin so fresh it was comical—“I need the flattery and you need the practice.” Her face sobered as she saw him redden all the way to his ears. “That’s what’s called a joke, you know.”

“Right, right. Good one.”

France fiddled with something under the bar while Del kept rolling the beer glass back and forth between his palms. “Actually, I need to drink up and go back to transcribing.” As if it had just occurred to him—which may well have been the case—he dug deep to pay. She came, took the money, delivered the change, and began to move off down the bar. Del wrenched around on his stool in that direction.

“Ah, France . . . I was wondering, I mean I wanted to ask. Have you had a chance to see any of the countryside around here? Glacier Park, for instance?”

“Not hardly,” she laughed unhumorously. “Been too busy with—” She rolled her eyes to indicate the totality of the barroom.

He managed to sound bashful and eager at the same time. “What would you think about driving up with me on Sunday? The park is only a couple of hours from here.”

I instantly knew what was going through her mind: the house policy, no dating a customer. Yet, and I was entirely with her on this, too, Del didn’t really qualify as a customer, did he? He was . . . well, Del; practically an attachment to the household; friend of the family, inadvertently; soon to head down the road in pursuit of other Missing Voices. Obviously an exception to any rule, and in my pulling for her to say yes to him, I was not at all alone. I speak for both of us, Zoe was as eager as me to see Rosalind and Orlando, Algernon and Cecily and Jack and Gwendolen, duplicated in front of our eyes.

France did it her own way, grinning a little slantwise as she answered: “Promise we won’t end up picking ticks off each other?”

Even from the length of the barroom away, we could see Del’s ears redden again. “No buggy stuff, scout’s honor.”

“Okay. Sunday’s it.”

—

ALL THAT COULD
be gotten out of them afterward about the Glacier Park trip was “It went fine” from her, and “It was quite the day” from him, not exactly the dramatic dialogue Zoe and I were hungry for. Pop added a few furrows to his brow when he learned of their date, but he only said, “Opposites attract, but usually not for long.”

And in fact, Del did not show his face in the saloon in subsequent days but hunkered in to the Gab Lab again, and France seemed the same as ever, matching wisecracks with customers when she had to and minding her own business in the form of bar chores and hard-boiled novels otherwise. Still waters run deep, though, notoriously so. It was only a few nights into that week when I stirred from sleep with the sense that something was wrong.

Groggily I sat up and sniffed hard; one more time the house was not on fire from Pop smoking in bed, so that wasn’t it. No, what woke me, I realized, was that France had not come in yet, even though the radium green of the alarm clock showed it was considerably past closing time at the saloon. I strained to hear if she might be in the bathroom, but faucets weren’t running, the toilet wasn’t flushing, none of that.

Now I started to be really alarmed. Had something happened to her? Just as I was about to jump out of bed and wake up Pop, I heard small noises outside. For the next minute or so I listened almost hard enough to get ear strain, but it did not really take that much. No matter how careful a person is, the side doors of a VW van opening and closing make some sound. So do creeping up the creaky back steps and easing open the kitchen door and trying to tiptoe through the house in the dark, as she more or less successfully was.

Wait till I tell Zoe about this development, I thought excitedly as I rolled over and pretended to be asleep.

10

H
OW MUCH DID YOU
say them jellied eggs is, girlie? Price gone up again, ain’t it.”

There was only one voice like that in the Two Medicine country, rough as barbwire and about as welcome, and I had heard its grumbles so many times, it simply made me groan to myself as I checked on the barroom out of habit, not many afternoons after Del’s excursion into the joint. Like many another of the sheepherders, Canada Dan drank for a week or so when he got started, and plainly he was launching the kind of drunken spree that Pop dealt with all the time but France had not encountered until now.

She had been in a chipper mood since taking up with Del, but any midnight rendezvous in the van was hours and hours away yet, and in the meantime, here sat this ornery customer taking up residence in the otherwise empty saloon. It would be some while yet before any of the regulars were due in, so I entirely sympathized that she had his less than welcome company to fend with by herself. Even through the vent, I could tell that when she wasn’t having to get up and draw him another beer, she just wanted to be left alone in the amen corner to keep on reading the latest from her and Pop’s shared stash of tough-guy books,
Say It with Bullets
.

“Just like I already told you, twenty-five cents, cheap at half the price,” she joked, although she sounded a little strained and sulky. “Girlie” surely was nowhere on her list of preferred names, but then Canada Dan was never going to be a candidate for the diplomatic corps.

“Two bits a cackleberry, Jesus H. Christ, what’s this world coming to?” The grizzled herder pawed around in the wages he’d spilled out onto the bar, another of his less than endearing habits when he was on a bender like this, evidently trying to decide whether he could afford to eat as well as drink.

“What the hell,” he made up his mind, “bring on the hen fruit, one for the gullet ’n’ one for luck.” I had my back-room chores yet to do—Zoe was at hers at the cafe, before she could join me for another session on the perpetually unfinished B-17—but for whatever reason, I couldn’t tear myself away from the duo in the barroom.

What a contrast they made, the unshaven and unsteady gray-headed customer in shabby herding clothes and the feminine young bartender in a sharp white blouse and her raven hair by some bathroom miracle attractively done in ringlets. Appearances aside, France seemed capable of holding her own with the hunched, muttering figure at the end of the bar, gamely bringing the glass crock and serving up a couple of its distasteful contents to him with plate and fork.

With a shaky finger he pushed a bill to her out of his mess of money and ate an egg in about two bites, chasing it with beer, while she went and made change. “There you go. Have a good time,” she left him with, and moved off to the other end of the bar to dive into her reading again.

Canada Dan wiped his mouth with his sleeve, staring down at the bar, his second egg untouched. He called out, “When’s Tom coming in?”

“He’s not. I’m the regular bartender now,” France informed him coolly. “Lucky you.”

“Huh, yeah.” He was staring down at the bar again. “Girlie? Didn’t I give you a ten-spot?”

France never even glanced up from the page. “Not unless it had Abe Lincoln on it.”

I was dumbfounded. She stubbornly wasn’t making a move toward the cash register, where in accordance with Pop’s rule the greenback in question should have been set aside as proof against any doubt.

Canada Dan swayed on the bar stool but was firm on the money matter. “I’m sure as anything I had a ten, right here”—he jabbed a finger on the cash on the bar—“and now look, I got this chicken feed back from a five. That ain’t right.”

Irritably she called to him, “It was a five. If you’d keep your dough in your pocket, where it belongs, you wouldn’t get so confused.”

The herder argued on, his voice growing louder. “It ain’t fair. Treating a man like a turster. Swipe his money right out from under his nose. What’s this place coming to?”

“Have another beer and forget it,” came her flat reply from down the bar.

“Uh-uh, nothing doing.” With that flair a drunk can sometimes have, all at once he was on his feet, staggering but determined. “Going down to the Pastime,” he declared with injured dignity. “See if they can treat a man honest there.”

“Fine,” France said sweetly. “I’ll miss you with all my heart.”

As he made his unsteady way out without so much as looking at her, alarm grew in me at the prospect this presented. Canada Dan on a weeklong bender, telling his troubles at the rival saloon, run by that gossip Chick Jennings and now frequented by Earl Zane to boot. As surely as night follows day, they’d spread word around town that Tom Harry’s barmaid would swipe money from you right under your nose. And while I wildly hoped not, there was the awful thought that they might be right. But Canada Dan might have been mistaken about a ten-dollar bill, too; I couldn’t let the reputation of Pop and the Medicine Lodge depend on that.

Closing the vent decisively, I slipped down the stairs and out the back door and dashed for the house. Pop was in another session with Del in the Gab Lab, straightening out Fort Peck lingo, and I didn’t dare burst in on them anyway with something like, “France is being called a thief and maybe she is, if she didn’t learn her lesson in juvie.” No, instead I rushed up to my bedroom and the dresser-drawer stash of money from my swamping chores. Pop always paid me off in silver dollars and I let them accumulate until there was a model-plane kit or something else I wanted to buy. To my dismay, I didn’t have as many as I’d thought, and had to scratch together quarters and dimes and nickels to make the final dollar, panicked that I was losing too much time. Jamming the handful of coins large and small in my pocket, I raced down the alley to head off Canada Dan.

I rounded the corner of the block where the Pastime was situated just as he approached the entrance, muttering angrily to himself.

“Dan! Wait!”

“Uh?” He jerked around as I panted up to him.

“Francine”—I wasn’t going to confuse him with her latest name—“sent me. She looked in the cash register again. Said you were right, she shortchanged you, she’s real sorry. Here.”

“Well, ain’t that something.” Drunk as a skunk or not, he closely counted the loose change and four silver dollars I handed him. His sour old face leered down at mine as if we shared some dirty secret.

“Tell her I knowed she was wrong and I’m just glad she caught up with herself,” Canada Dan rasped. “It wouldn’t do to be cheating good customers.”

—

THIS WASN’T LIKE ME,
but I didn’t even tell Zoe about the incident, let alone Pop. It was just too murky or too open to question, too something. Canada Dan’s word against France’s? I didn’t want to be responsible for bringing that kind of thing to anyone’s attention. After all, maybe she had made an honest mistake, or not made one at all. I kept telling myself I’d settled the matter—with my own money, even—and that ought to be that.

The next few days passed without disturbance, and the welcome lull brought the end of the week and a new movie at the Odeon for Zoe and me to capitalize on as usual. By now Charlie Hooper at the ticket window must have thought she was tubercular, but in any case, with a few of her tragic coughs, the crying room was once again ours.

As soon as we were settled in the dark, waiting for the show to start, we prattled about assignations in the Gab Lab and wondered what Del and Francine would do without each other when he left, and otherwise plumbed the mysteries of adult behavior, to call it that. Ourselves, we were joyously splurging, Almond Joy candy bars added to the usual Neccos—thanks to a found dollar I must have missed, back under my socks, in that frantic scramble to ante up to Canada Dan; everything nailed down did seem to have a habit of coming loose lately—and if luxurious entertainment of this sort wouldn’t get my mind off life with a startling sister, what would?

The movie was not likely to wear anyone out with thinking, for sure:
G.I. Blues
,
starring Elvis Presley, with the rest of a cast that no one had ever heard of, deservedly. Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde had nothing to fear from the plot. Tanks roared across the screen, crushing small trees and blowing things up in the opening scene, but this merely served to establish that Elvis was one of a happy-go-lucky bunch of peacetime American soldiers stationed someplace in sunny West Germany, where there didn’t seem to have been a lick of damage done by World War II.

Zoe and I watched in silence except for the sound of Neccos in our mouths as the soldiers made a bet that their leading seducer could not maneuver the town’s standoffish nightclub dancer into a one-night stand. Presto, and the seducer was transferred to Alaska and Elvis had to fill in for him, as well as sing every five minutes, and it took no great guessing where this was headed. Elvis, slender in those days and with a flattop haircut so unmilitarily high that from a distance it looked like the eraser on a pencil, had just wiggled through the title song when a rattle of candy wrapper told me Zoe was putting her attention to an Almond Joy. Even through a mouthful of chocolate and almond she could sound more dramatic than anything happening on the screen: “You’re real worried, aren’t you.”

“About what?”

“Francine. France. Whoever she is right now.”

“Wouldn’t you be if some car snatcher who’s been in juvie showed up out of nowhere and said, ‘Guess what, I’m your sister’?”

Her imagination refused to give in. “What about this: her and Del fall in love and get married, and they run the saloon, and your dad can quit bartending and go fishing all he wants and take you to ball games and everything. What would be the matter with that?”

“Proxy would have her nose in everything even deeper, that’s what.”

“Right. I forgot her.”

I wished I could. Why did she call me Russ and sonny all the time, with that disturbing smile of hers, as if only the two of us were in on some kind of secret?

By this time Elvis was singing on a stage in a rathskeller, when someone punched a selection on the jukebox and it blared “Blue Suede Shoes” loud enough to drown him out. This somehow led to soldiers starting to slug one another. Seasoned critics of this sort of thing by now, we agreed the fight scene did not stack up well against the one in
The Alamo
cantina; not enough bodies were flying through the air and breaking up furniture. Peace was quickly restored and the story line went back to the bet about a one-night stand.

“How could they ever get married, anyway?” I thought out loud during this break in the action, unwrapping an Almond Joy; it was such great candy, two goodly pieces when you opened it, so that you always felt there was reward ahead. “France and Del, I mean. She calls him College Boy behind his back all the time.”

“She’d have to get over that,” Zoe deliberated. “Learn to call him honeypie or something instead.”

“Oh, sure, can’t you just hear her?” I said, munching. “‘My little chicken dumpling, please pass the salt.’”

“You never know what they’re going to do. Sometimes my mom calls my dad Peterkin.”

“Whoa. What does he call her?”

“Nothing.”

By now Juliet Prowse was fully in the story, as the nightclub dancer whose routine was mostly twirling in circles when she wasn’t doing the splits. She was leggy and toothy, and to our discerning ears didn’t sound German or even French.

“What kind of accent do you call that?” one of us wondered.

“Goulash,” the other readily volunteered.

Things worked out, as they do in movies. Elvis was pressed into babysitting for a G.I. buddy, the baby began squalling—“Just think, if they had crying rooms in Germany, the movie would have to end right there,” I pointed out—and in a panic he called Juliet, who, being a woman, knew to coo over the baby and give it a bottle, and these ministrations somehow took all night, so Elvis won the bet. Sure, after that there was a misunderstanding and a spat, but reconciliation in time for Elvis to sing the last song with Juliet practically turning to butter as she listened. “Uff courze I marry you,” she said before he even asked.

Elvis sang a final song to the assembled troops and fräuleins, and then we were back in the dark for real, the Odeon’s marquee shutting off behind us as headlights of pickups and cars dwindled and vanished while the two of us headed home, quiet the way we sometimes were when one of us had grown-ups on the mind.

“Don’t get all shook up,” Zoe said sympathetically in parting.

“Uff courze not,” I said, as if I believed it.

—

FRANCE AND POP
were both behind the bar the next morning, Saturday, when I showed up for my swamping duties.

He was breaking in France on this aspect of bartending, too, so she was washing and shining up an army of glasses while he checked the beverage supply, going over things with her as he did so. “Just remember, if a guy says, ‘Gimme a ditch,’ that’s plain bourbon and water, and you use the cheap stuff down here in the well,” he stipulated, replenishing the supply of run-of-the-mill bottles beneath the bar. “If he wants to drink fancy, he has to ask for a Lord ditch,” he turned and put a hand to the higher-quality Lord Calvert whiskey kept for show in the breakfront. France dabbed in “Fine” and “Got it” at intervals as instruction of that sort went on. They seemed to be becoming more comfortable with each other, despite the generational equator dividing their worlds that made Francine’s lips start to twitch whenever he got going on something from the old days of the Depression and the Blue Eagle era that he and her mother had shared, and that drew a gruff “Don’t get big ideas” from him if she suggested something like the Medicine Lodge serving edible snack food instead of pickled eggs and pig knuckles. At least in that respect, then, they were father and daughter as if handed scripts in pink covers, with me doing my best to ad-lib between the pair of them. It was a role much on my mind again that quiet morning while they went about their chores behind the bar and I did mine in the rest of the barroom, spittoon and toilet duty first, to get the worst out of the way. I had just grabbed my broom and come back in to start sweeping when I heard Pop exclaim, “When did this show up? Been missing since last Saturday night, hasn’t it? I thought you said somebody must have walked off with it.”