The Bartender's Tale (39 page)

The hospital herder set off into the flock at the slowest of gaits, Del right behind him, hefty recorder in one hand and the microphone deployed in the other. Stationed where we were, motionless as sentinels, the coulee began to speak to us, Zoe and I listening for all we were worth. Grasshoppers whirring in flight over the meadow. Creek water rattling musically past. A magpie yattering in the willow thicket. With the headphones alerting him to every slightest sound and using the microphone like a baton, Del was gathering it all out of the air. A few of the sheep blatted restlessly at the moving men, and now a bell tinkled as a dark-fleeced wether hobbled toward them.

“There’s Coalie,” Canada Dan said, as if introducing the animal. “He’s a lead sheep, or anyway was, until he ruptured hisself. I told Dode any number of times we ought to turn him into coyote bait. Here, you old bum.” He dug in his pocket and fed the sheep some pellets of cottonseed cake. “Old good for nothing,” the herder said gruffly, “about like me,” and moved on.

Del kept quiet except for an occasional brief question as Canada Dan eased through his band of casualties. “This ewe, now, she got snagged on a down tree. See that rip in her side? I turpentined it up good, keeps the flies out. She’ll come around.” He pointed to another with blue stains at the bottom of her legs where dip had been applied. “Hoof rot. Awful, ain’t it. There’s just no end of things can go wrong with sheep. Keeps a man hopping to tend to ’em, the poor critters.” Like a doctor on his rounds, the herder led Del through the woolly forms, the mike all the while picking up the ambience of the sheep camp around the rough old voice like no other. You can tell when something remarkable is happening. Zoe had the same spellbound expression I did. This wasn’t the Forest of Arden, Canada Dan definitely was not the smitten shepherd Silvius, but there was a recognizable touch of dramatic magic in the portrait in sound Del was orchestrating.

—

UPON OUR TRIUMPHANT DEPARTURE,
the van was not even out of the coulee before Zoe was leaning in from the back seat, bursting with the question, “So why is he called Canada Dan? How come he’s not Milk River Dan or Polack Dan or something?”

Del had been grinning his head off ever since he shucked the tape out of the portable recorder and hopped in behind the steering wheel. Now he sobered up enough to lift a hand toward me and invite: “Any theory, Sherlock?”

“Uh-huh,” I had been working on this, “I bet it still has to do with him being spooked about the mountains. I can about hear Dode Withrow say something like, ‘He’ll push the sheep out in the open all the way to sonofabitching Canada instead of putting them in the timber.’ You can ask Pop to be sure.”

“Ooh.” Zoe wrinkled her nose at the thought of being tagged that way all through life.

“That would make sense.” Del thought it out as if a grant depended on it. “A behavioral nickname rather than an associative one. I’ll have to note that in the interview transcription.”

“Why, what’s the difference?”

“Well, one is the sort of nickname that comes from some physical characteristic people associate with a person, such as—”

“Short-Handed Curly,” I furnished.

“Exactamente,”
he trilled in whatever language that was. “Behavioral ones, though”—he went back to seriously thinking out loud as the van reached the county road and trundled toward town—“come more from something a person picks up a reputation for doing. Wrong Way Corrigan getting himself turned around on his transatlantic flight. Mittens Mitchell, the shortstop who couldn’t field grounders. That sort of thing.” Del winced a little. “Canada Dan. Poor old bugger,” he did a decent imitation of that barbwire voice. As if reminded, he sent me a puzzled look. “Did I hear right, back there? He called France ‘the piano girl’?”

“Oh, yeah, sure, you know how she is, with those long fingers. We heard him tell her she ought to be playing the piano on stage somewhere, didn’t we, Zoe.”

“You bet,” she made up as fast as I had, “a concert pianoist.”

“Pianist,” said Del, still in a puzzled tone.

“That’s it. Just what he said.”

“Hmm. Imagine him coming up with that. He’s full of surprises.” Del checked over his shoulder with another questioning look. “So, Miss Zoe? Is there a pack rat in the storeroom of the Spot?”

“Oh, no, no, no. Farther away than that. In Butte.”

—

ALONG WITH MY SOUP
and crackers, I was digesting Canada Dan’s knowledge of takers of things when Pop showed up in the kitchen the next morning, uncommonly early for him these days.

“Recuperated from the excitement of sheep camp yet?” he asked as he poured some condensed milk into the pan to stretch the breakfast soup for himself.

“Getting there, I guess.”

“Glad that worked out. I kind of wondered, looking at you and Zoe when you got back, but Delano seemed as happy as if he had good sense.” The Romeo of the VW van doubtless had spent an even happier night, according to how late France had come in, but I kept my mouth shut about that.

Pop himself was looking pleased about something. Before even firing up the coffeepot, he announced, “The weather’s better,” which meant it was not raining pitchforks that very minute. “What do you say we go up to the rezavoy? I ought to look things over before the derby.” He was in such a good mood, I could tell what was coming next. “We’ll grab our fishpoles, just in case we feel the urge to catch rainbows while we’re there, hey?”

If fishing would gladden his heart, even temporarily, it was up to me to try to muster the urge, and I took over fixing the thermos of coffee while he rustled up a bait can of choice chicken guts out of the freezing compartment of the refrigerator. Taking care to be quiet while leaving the house and crossing the yard—France and Del still were in bed, innocently separate beds at this time of day—we skirted around to where the cars were parked under Igdrasil’s leafy care. To my surprise, Pop opened the trunk of the Packard instead of the Buick to deposit our fishing gear.

“We’ll give the old buggy some exercise,” he answered my questioning look, “get it ready for the big day. Climb in.” A little leery of the vehicle, I did so, as happened usually only once a year, Derby Day itself. Big and boxy as the Packard was, you might expect it to be as gloomy inside as a hearse, but it wasn’t, really, with the luxurious seats almost like sofas and the instruments on the dashboard set in fancy chrome and a good, hardy smell to it all, like that of the Medicine Lodge’s back room, of old leather and hat sweatbands and other traces of men at work, no doubt lingering from Pop’s last loot trip to Canada. Installed behind the fine-grained wooden steering wheel as the straight-eight cylinders purred us out of town, he looked so contented that I was determined not to get carried away with the car’s history, especially that event in the back seat involving him and Proxy and subsequently Francine, as she came to be. However, I may have been noticeably untalkative on the way up the creek valley to the reservoir, as he glanced over across the spacious front seat every so often and remarked on the hay crop or Canada Dan’s sheep camp as we passed it or other this and that. I responded as best I could, although it is hard to get something off your mind—the consequential back seat was right there behind me like a historical exhibit—when it doesn’t want to leave.

The reservoir was discharging water plentifully when we arrived, the spillway frothing in a way Pop remarked he hadn’t seen it do in years. Even so, there seemed to be a lot more lake than usual, the blue surface reflecting the sky like a closely held mirror.

“It’s kind of high for fishing,” I invoked the only angler lore I possessed as Pop busied himself with our gear, “isn’t it?” For starters, the boulders where we usually stood to cast our lines were underwater.

“Bill Reinking has been hearing that from folks, too,” he acknowledged, with a mild frown at the level of the lake. “We’ve decided to say a hell of a lot of water means a hell of a lot of fish. It stands to reason, right?”

This dictated fishing from the bank, a challenge to my already questionable casting ability, and I immediately began to worry about making a fool of myself on Derby Day if I couldn’t get my hook and line out farther than, say, those rocks we ordinarily stood on. That weenie Duane Zane would be right there, sneering and making mocking remarks, I could count on that. Determinedly I postponed this particular fret, not wanting to spoil Pop’s outing today. “That’s nature for you,” he was shrugging off the extra feet of water for trout to hide under, “you got to play the hand it deals you.”

For once we were not out in the first blinks of dawn, but otherwise this fishing trip was almost like a memory coming to life, the morning brilliantly blue over us, the mountain cliffs so near and high, the timbered canyon bending away out of sight behind Roman Reef at the far end of the lake, and in the other direction, the olive-green stands of willow and greener cottonwoods marking the course of the South Fork and eventually English Creek, all the way to town, distantly visible beyond the dirt face of the dam. Much else seemed so close to the same as it was our first time here, six years before. Pop appreciatively taking in the scenery while he had a cigarette and drank coffee from the thermos and fitted together our fishing poles—it was a ritual I’d known by heart ever since. Yet while it was the same two of us here, the picture had changed with us, from then to now. The difference was that I had grown taller while he had only grown older, time’s unfair trick on a father and for that matter, a mother.

“Got the chicken guts ready, kiddo?” His question snapped me out of such thoughts, and I began cutting up gooey strips of the guaranteed surefire bait, a nasty task that had not changed at all over the years. Meanwhile, committee chairman to the hilt, he was surveying the setting for the derby, figuring out loud where portable picnic tables and extra trash cans ought to go—the Mudjacks Reunion was turning out to be a valuable rehearsal—and shrewdly settling on a strategy against the Rotarians and their despised beer booth. “Gonna let the esses of bees do it, same like always,” he confided to me, “I don’t want any ruckus over that. But I’m having Zoe’s folks set up a food booth, and nobody can kick if they just happen to sell soft drinks along with the grub, right?” He chuckled in satisfaction. “Lots of wives will steer hubbies right past that Rotary beer, you can bet your bottom dollar.”

“Swuft, Pop,” I had to hand it to him. Now, were it not for the fishing part of the fishing derby, I could look forward to the occasion with something approaching anticipation. Slim hope of that, though. In all the years I still had not caught anything that rated more than honorable mention in the posted results, and anyone with a pole got that. Sighing to myself over the stubbornness of fate, I picked up the bait can and my rod and reel and trailed Pop along the causeway of the dam, to where he declared the rainbow trout were surely awaiting us hungrily.

The footing was not any too good without the boulders to stand on and with the soil of the dam soaked from all the rain, causing him to crease his brow and think out loud that the derby crowd had better be confined to the shore bank, so that he and the committee wouldn’t spend the whole damn day pulling people out of the lake. I agreed that sounded like further shrewd chairmanship. Satisfied, he tested his reel and his wrist, addressing the hidden population of the reservoir. “Watch out, rainbows, here we come.”

I stood back and let him cast first, so I could watch the knack, as he called it. It had something to do with the flip of the wrist, which whenever I tried it merely sent my baited hook whirring out in a feeble arc instead of sailing a good distance into the water. Practice was supposed to make perfect? It hadn’t even made me passable in casting, as yet.

Be that as it may, I was about to give it the usual try when I recalled Del’s introduction to Rainbow Reservoir those weeks ago. Surf casting, he’d called his strenuous let-it-fly overhand style. I thought about that for a minute. Where was it in any rules of fishing that you needed to have an ocean of surf instead of a lapping lake in order to cast like that? Sneaking a quick look at Pop, obliviously busy with his own fishing, I decided to hell with flip of the wrist. I planted my feet, gripped my pole with both hands like a baseball bat, and with a mighty grunt gave a two-fisted heave that sent my hook and line sailing way, way out into the reservoir.

“Hey, not bad,” Pop called over when he saw the ring on the water where my line had gone in. “You’re getting the knack.”

I would have settled for that cast for the whole day, content to let the morsel of chicken gut sit on the bottom of the lake or wherever it had ended up. But something that felt like it wanted to start a tug-of-war had other ideas.

“I’ve got a bite!” I hollered, although I had much more than that, my pole curving as the fish nearly pulled me in the water. I dug my feet in as best I could on the slippery dam bank and gripped the pole for dear life while trying not to lose my head. Supposedly the greatest allure of fishing is the thrill of the fish putting up a fight. I say it’s tricky work, attempting to levitate an extremely reluctant living object out of the water on the end of a thin line and a long stick.

“Hang on to him!” Pop grew excited now, puttting aside his pole to scramble over and coach me. “Don’t horse him, just keep your line tight and reel in slow and walk him out, that’s the way.”

It took what seemed an unearthly amount of time, with the stubborn fish thrashing and twisting and turning but gradually drawing closer to shore. We were of the drag-’em-out school, not bothering with fanciness like a net, so in the end I tottered backward up the bank, towing the glistening trout out onto solid ground, and Pop pounced on it before it could flop back in the water.

It was a beauty, royally speckled with the colors of the rainbow that gave the species its name. And it was king-size, a foot and a half long if it was an inch. Pop looked even more proud of it, and me, than I was myself. The two of us stood gazing down at my whopper of a catch, thinking the exact same thing. He was the one who spoke it.