The Bartender's Tale (38 page)

Gandering through the windshield at the wall rocks and crags of the national forest that rose and rose all the way to the Continental Divide, he exclaimed, “What luck that he’s not herding somewhere up there. I wonder why not?”

“Maybe he gets nosebleeds in high places,” Zoe theorized.

Del chuckled that away as he turned off the county road onto the rutted set of tracks where I was pointing. A not very large flock of sheep grazed picturesquely at the bottom of the steep coulee. “Likely he’s been given this spot down here because it’s less rugged terrain for a man of his age, wouldn’t you think, Rusty?”

“He’s afraid of the timber.”

“Hmm? Run that by again?”

“Canada Dan is scared to death of herding in the timber, where he can’t see all his sheep every minute and he’s no good at it. The ranchers know it and they don’t put him any closer to the mountains than this.” I did not add that Canada Dan only got herding jobs at all because he was living and breathing and handily available when he wasn’t drunk.

By now the van was jolting down the track to the creek, where the white-canvased sheep wagon sat next to the willows. “I see,” Del said in a less sure voice as a stumpy figure came peering out the Dutch door of the wagon at our approach.

When the van bumped to a stop in the small creek-side clearing, Zoe and I scrambled out while Del composed himself in more professional fashion, smoothing his various pocket flaps and so on. We were met by a mottled white-and-gray sheepdog, growling as it came.

“Quit, Moses,” Canada Dan called off the dog but not his distrustful eyeing of us. “What’s this, a Sunday-school picnic?”

“Whoo,” murmured Zoe, getting her first good look at the herder. People still had goiters then, and Canada Dan had a dandy, as if he had swallowed a lemon. Long underwear yellowed with age showed at the neck of his shirt. The cud of tobacco that had given me so much spittoon work showed in his cheek. The hard effects of time and weather and drink showed on the rest of his face and personage. Not exactly a picture of hospitality standing planted there in the wagon doorway, but Del forged ahead.

“Mr. . . . ah, Dan? I wonder if I could have a little of your time.”

“There’s plenty of it out here in the sticks, that’s for sure.” He gave me a grudging nod out of respect for Pop and included Zoe because she seemed to be with me, but Del received something between a frown and a scowl. “What’s on your mind, when you’re not in the way of my sheep?”

Del forced a chuckle about that incident and explained about his interviewing mission.

“That a fact?” Canada Dan stepped down out of the wagon as though he had to inspect him for common sense. “You come all the way out from town to talk to a mutton conductor?” Spitting an amount of tobacco juice that did not seem to diminish the cud in his cheek, he shuffled over to us and gestured to the nearby grazing ewes and lambs, as if we were welcome to them. “Got the goddamn mutton on the hoof for you, that’s for sure.”

“Rusty,” Zoe was whispering, “what’s wrong with those sheep?”

Before I could tell her, Del had caught up with the bedraggled nature of the creatures in Canada Dan’s care. “What kind of a, mmm, flock do you call this?”

The herder laughed harshly. “What’s it look like? It’s the hospital bunch, next thing to pelters. Some has got maggots. Others got blue bag, can’t nurse their lambs. Some is just old and broken down, like me.”

“I see. Well, that doesn’t really matter, I suppose.” A false supposition, if Zoe and I had ever heard one. Plain as anything, these sheep were down on their luck, and anyone assigned to herd them was even deeper in misfortune. Dode Withrow may have been ready to wring Canada Dan’s neck for that loss of lambs in the spring blizzard, but he had since given him what amounted to a charity job. Tending these cripples and invalids barely qualified as sheepherding. Nonetheless, Del held out an inviting hand toward the open van and its recording equipment waiting at the ready. “Let’s just step in and I’ll get the tape going and—”

“Nothing doing.” The one-man subgroup of Missing Voices backed away from the van. “Come on in the wagon, where we can gab comfortable-like.”

Momentarily thrown, Del was quick to improvise. “I’ll be right there, just let me grab a portable recorder.” It hardly rated that description, Del digging out a hefty machine with a handle on it like a suitcase. While he was hurriedly threading tape reels, Zoe scrambled to find him a spare microphone, and I commiserated in a low voice, “Pop always says if there are any more ways Canada Dan can be a pain in the wazoo, they have yet to be invented.”

“No, no, it’s all right. I’ll get this done,” he said with determination. “I need to send in something in a hurry so my grant doesn’t get pulled. Alan Lomax is always around to scoop up loose funding.”

Anticipatory audience of two, Zoe and I followed as he swung the recorder and then himself into the sheep wagon. The design of a sheep wagon is on a narrower wagon bed than, say, the prairie schooner we all know from history books, and the canvas roof is more snug and igloo-like, compressing the inside into something remarkably on the order of a grown-up dollhouse: small stove, miniature cabinets, a bunk where one person will just fit. A really dirty dollhouse, in the case of Canada Dan’s abode. The grimy cooking utensils on the blackened stove showed he had the cooking philosophy that a washed pot never boils. I recoiled at how tight the quarters were, and sensed Zoe doing the same, but Del seemed right at home. Setting up the tape recorder and microphone on the little gateleg table where Canada Dan had slid in on one side, he took the other, and practically knee to knee, he beamed across at his interview subject. “Ready for some conversation, are you?”

“I guess I got nothing better to do,” the herder muttered unpromisingly. Since Zoe and I would practically be on top of the pair of them no matter where we tried to sit, I took the initiative in saying we’d wait outside, if that was all right. “Suit yourself,” our host grunted. “Moses is shaded up under the wagon. He might growl at you now and again, but he don’t mean it.”

Shading up sounded right to us, and we scooted under the wagon box, where we could lounge against some sacks of sheep salt and cottonseed cake in something like comfort. The dog kept watch on us with those pale border collie eyes, but made no sound. Zoe reached to pet him. “Huh-uh,” I warned in a whisper. “Sheepherders don’t like to have their dogs spoiled by petting.”

“Poor pooch,” she whispered solemnly.

“Shall we get started?” Del’s voice reached us. We grinned at each other. We could hear everything, right overhead. This was as good as the vent at the saloon. “Your full name is . . . ?”

“Daniel Korzenowski.”

“Age, please, Mr. Korzenowski?”

“Too goddamn much of it, that’s for sure.”

Del chuckled a little, waiting, but that seemed to be the full answer. “I’m only asking for archival purposes, you understand. So, the year of your birth?”

“Back there a ways, let’s just say.”

“Mr. Korzenowski—Dan. Surely you don’t want me to have to guess the year you were born.”

“Don’t matter to me.”

“Very well, then. Eighteen hundred and ninety-”

“Eighteen hundred nothing! Nineteen hundred even, damn it.”

“That makes you sixty, am I right? As old as the century.”

“Both of us are showing it, too.”

“And born where in Canada?”

“Who said I was hatched up there? I’m pure hunnerd percent American. Born right up here this side of the border, on the Milk River. My folks was homesteading, or thought they was. I don’t know where you got that Canada notion.”

“Hear that?” Zoe was whispering in wonderment. “He doesn’t know he’s called Canada Dan?”

“He knows. He just doesn’t want to.”

“Sorry about that, I must have misheard something,” Del scrambled to recover. “What can you tell me about life on the homestead? It must have been rugged in those days.”

“Rugged! That don’t begin to say it.” This set the raspy voice going without stop. The family was skunk broke most of the time, to hear him tell it. If grasshoppers didn’t get the crops, hail did. The nearest neighbors were a mile away and the nearest town was thirty, so if a person was sick or hurt in an accident, you might as well say your prayers. Zoe and I listened hard as he came to the part about riding horseback to a one-room school. “My schooling stopped in the third grade. Had to help out at home, it didn’t matter none that I was just a kid.” That gave me a twinge of sympathy for him, although a person can be deprived and still be naturally ornery. Del let him talk on, occasionally nudging or coaxing with a quick question, until steering him toward the sheepherding life.

“It ain’t for everybody,” the coarse voice started in slowly. “You see this sheep wagon—not exactly the Waldorf, is it. Out like this, you have to live with muskeeters and mice and skunks and pack rats and all those. Hell, I been in places where I couldn’t leave my bridgework out at night.”

Beyond that, though, the interview turned rocky. Del would try to keep things on a historical track, and his veteran of sheepherding would wander off to some topic like the weather. I had listened in at Fort Peck enough to know that, thanks to Del’s lines of questioning, the mudjacks’ stories had a beginning, middle, and an end. Canada Dan’s started anywhere and went no particular direction. Del’s patient tries at getting him to describe the herding life down through the years produced mainly prolonged gripes about gut-robbing ranchers and tardy camp tenders. “You wouldn’t believe what a man has to put up with.”

At last Del managed to slip in: “The Two Medicine country is known for its fine summer grazing in the mountains. What can you tell me about that kind of herding?”

This may sound strange, but Canada Dan could be heard not saying anything for some moments.

Zoe and I looked at each other. Was this it? Was he going to kill off the interview and throw Del out of the wagon?

Then we heard him say tightly, “Them mountains. It’s rough up there. Coyotes. Bear. Poison lupine. If it ain’t one thing to raise hell with your sheep, it’s a goddamn ’nother. I’m more of a flatlander myself, in my herding. Makes better sense. Now, if them ranchers had any brains worth mentioning—”

“You were right,” Zoe mouthed silently to me. “Afraid of the timber.”

Del gamely kept on with questions for a while, but there is a limit to how many sheepherder gripes you can listen to in one stretch, and we were growing bored by the time we heard him wrapping up the interview. We were out from under the wagon as he exited it, the herder right behind him, and I was more than ready to depart the company of Daniel Korzenowski and go back to town. To my surprise, Zoe piped up, “Can I ask Mr. Dan something?”

Del was looking worn but, trouper that he was, he said of course she could, “But let’s get it for posterity.” He knelt and had the recorder going almost instantly. “This next voice is Zoe Constantine,” he intoned into the mike, “at the advanced age of twelve, trying out a career as a seeker of Missing Voices. Go ahead, Zoe.”

He passed her the mike and she took it in both hands and asked Canada Dan, innocent as anything: “Have you been around pack rats much?”

I could have kissed her. Why hadn’t I thought to ask this myself?

“Only about as many as there is Chinamen in China,” Canada Dan said gruffly into the microphone she was aiming practically down his gullet. “Why’re you asking, girlie?”

“I was only wondering. When a pack rat takes a thing . . . does it ever bring it back?”

“Funny question, ain’t it.” The herder rubbed his whiskery jaw. “But I’ve known it to happen. Something shinier catches its eye and maybe it’ll leave the first thing out where you can find it.”

Now we knew, did we? Francine was maybe a pack rat kind of kleptomaniac. Surely a less serious sort, right? Not the kind that I should get up my nerve and tell Pop about?

Zoe thanked Canada Dan sweetly, and Del shut off the tape recorder, and that should have been that. Except Canada Dan turned to me with a crude grin.

“How’s the piano girl doing in the bar? Learning any new tunes?”

I didn’t have time to think, only react. “She’s doing fine,” I answered nervously. “Pop is awful glad to have her helping out, you know how hard it is to find good help.”

“Yeah, it’s a bugger”—he gave me more of that nasty grin—“getting somebody who knows what they’re doing behind a bar.”

Del had only half caught our exchange, broodily heading toward the van. All at once he stopped and turned back.

“Ah, Dan, before we leave, I’d like to try something, if I may. Could you walk through the sheep with me? I’d like to pick up some ambient sound to add to the interview, if you wouldn’t mind.”

“You want to take a constitutional through a hospital bunch of sheep?” Canada Dan cackled. “I thought I’d heard of everything.” Capitalizing on what would plainly be a good tale to tell during the next drinking spree, he swept an arm toward the grazing ewes and lambs, those healthy enough to be on their feet. “Sashay on in, the mutton population is ready and waiting.”

“I need something from the van, I’ll be right back.”

Giving each other the look that says, Now what, Zoe and I tagged close after Del as he vaulted into the Gab Lab and grabbed his headphones from the desk equipment. “What do you want those for? What’s ‘ambient’ mean?” we demanded in whispers.

“That interview needs all the help it can get,” he said grimly. “I’m going to try for a sound portrait. I’ll explain later.” He plugged the headphones into the portable recorder and clapped them over his ears. “Wish me luck,
amigos
.”

Drawing on whatever limited wisdom he possessed, Canada Dan had been doing some thinking. “Sheep don’t take real good to being disturbed. You kind of got to pussyfoot through ’em, and even so, they spook easy.” You just never know when things will mysteriously chime. Del was being instructed in how to bobbasheely, sheepherder-style. The squinched-up keeper of sheep next took charge of Zoe and me before we knew what was happening. “You shavetails stand there and there; don’t let the buggers get in the brush. Stay, Moses.” He pointed the disappointed dog to the wagon. In the same rough tone, he told Del, “C’mon, if you’re still of a mind to do this.”