The Bartender's Tale (41 page)

Now France really showed the jitters. “Sorry, no can do. I didn’t know you’d blaze in here like this. See, I’m going to the derby with”—she managed a twisty shrug and toss of her head that ended up pointing out the window, toward the Gab Lab parked beneath the bower of Igdrasil—“well, Del.”

I swear Proxy took in the van and the Packard beyond it, shined up for the day’s event, in a single lightning glance.

“It’s like that, is it?” Her tone said she remembered all too well how such things were. “I thought Carrot Top is supposed to be chasing down voices out on the coast by now.”

“He got a grant,” I helpfully provided.

“He’s after sheepherders,” Pop supplied simultaneously.

“He’ll be here for a while yet,” France imparted at the same time.

Proxy scrutinized the trio of us, the crimp between her eyes saying more than she did for a few seconds. “Oh-kay, the young folks will have their fun,” she conceded. If there is such a thing as a warning smile, she gave France one now. “Just don’t let having a good time get in the way of what counts, all right?” With that, she briskly gathered herself. “Well, I guess I might as well hit the road, busy as everybody is around here.”

“Don’t rush off.” Pop’s tone erased the look of relief on France. He looked regretfully at Proxy. “We have something to talk over.” Here it came. I was divided between anticipation and apprehension.

Pop wasted no words: “Things have been going missing.”

Mother and daughter went rigid in the same instant. You could have heard a false eyelash drop in the silence before Proxy at last sighed, “What things?”

“Little things that disappear and then, surprise, surprise, show up again,” Pop said pointedly. “Wouldn’t you say that’s what happens, Francine?”

It is never good news when a parent resorts to your full name. The blood seemed to have drained out of her. “Oboy. That again.” She defensively looked back and forth from Proxy to Pop. “People are always thinking I steal.”

“How come they think that?” he pressed.

The leather bracelet was getting a nervous workout. “See, I did kind of take something, back when I was wet behind the ears”—I did not appreciate that she indicated in my direction as illustration of that condition—“and didn’t know any better. Learned my lesson, honest.”

“In juvie, right?” Pop did not relent. “For auto theft?”

Resigned to that reputation, she dipped her head. “I figured you’d heard about it from one source or another.” With a hurt expression, she gestured around to Proxy and me as if we were the suspects. I couldn’t tell if I was watching a master class in acting or if she was as sincere as the day was long, but she rallied to look Pop in the eye. “It’s not something I wanted to tell you myself, is it. ‘Hi, I’m your daughter and, guess what, I was a teenage convict.’”

“Past history,” Proxy rushed into the full silence following that. “No sense getting excited about something that happened way back there. Tom, anyone deserves a second chance.”

“I don’t want to have to be the one to keep count all the time,” he flung back, as frustrated as I had ever seen him. “Damn it, Proxy,” he exploded, “the two of you don’t get off that easy, especially you.” He looked pained to have to do this to her, but driven to it. “Does it run in the family or what, one Jones after another acting up, until a man can’t count on any kind of behavior but bad?” His old companion from the Blue Eagle days flinched almost to the roots of her milk-blond hair, but sat and took it. “Let’s try a little past history,” his temper kept going, “such as why did I ever give in to you when I knew better? Both times, no less. Second chance,” he ground out woefully, “I could use one myself, every time you show up.”

There may have been more to his outburst, but if so, it did not register on me in my stunned condition, trying to catch up with the thunderclap of what I had just heard.

“If I’d raised you,” he finally switched back to the daughter situation, “you would’ve had that stealing habit taken out of you in the first five minutes.” Dazed as I was, I realized he had the look in his eye that told a customer to settle down or clear out, and Francine knew it, too. “You better get serious about life,” he concluded bluntly, as the object of his ire stood there rigid as a cadet, “or you’ll end up somewhere a hell of a lot worse than juvie.”

Probably it was piling on, but Proxy couldn’t stop herself from saying crossly, “Francine, you told me you’d kicked that kind of fooling around. No more sticking this, that, and the other in your pocket, you promised.”

The younger woman blinked, as if coming to. “Fine, I shouldn’t have done any of that, but why does everybody have to flip about it? I put the stuff back, didn’t I? That’s something in my favor, isn’t it?”

It was an impressive try, but not even her bravado could withstand two deadly parental stares. I could see her lip quiver as she confessed, “It’s a tough habit to kick. I have to fight it like crazy every time. That’s . . . that’s why I put things back, see.”

“There now.” Proxy saw an opening. “No real harm done, huh? Just a little confusion, and now that everybody savvies the situation, she can straighten herself out like you said, Tom.”

“That isn’t all,” he said ominously.

“Then what is?” She cast a questioning glance at Francine, who was looking genuinely surprised.

“The way she makes change.”

Absorbing that for a moment, Proxy tried to laugh it off. “Tom, you always was one to pinch pennies until Lincoln needed a hernia belt. Come on, you know how it is, all the way back to the Eagle, and I bet it’s no different in this joint—guys get to drinking and they spill chicken feed all over the bar, and you have to make change from it all night long, it won’t come out exactly right a million percent of the time, how can it? A few dimes’ difference here and there—”

“No, he’s right, Mom,” Francine blurted. “I shortchanged a sheepherder because he got my goat.” She faced Pop as if pleading before a judge. “I know what you told me, the old poots come in from six months in sheep camp and don’t always know how to act around people, and we have to just leave them alone to soak up drinks and talk to themselves, and I’ve been doing that, really I have. But this one made me so mad, I took it out on him, five bucks’ worth, in his change.” To Pop’s credit, he listened as if I had not already given him my eyewitness report on Canada Dan and her. “He caught me at it, but I bluffed him down, so nothing came of it,” she finished her side of the story.

Proxy was giving her a look that could be felt ten feet away.

“But see, I made up for that,” Francine protested.

“Made up for it? How?” Pop demanded.

She tugged at the fringe of her vest like a little girl. “I felt kind of bad about doing it to the old coot. So the next customer in, I over-changed.”

“Over . . . ?” He couldn’t believe what he had just heard. “Gave back too
much
change?”

“Sure thing. It was what’s-her-name, the stuck-up one.”

“Velma?” Pop ventured cautiously.

“You got it, her. I slipped the same five into the money back for her drink. Watched her count it a couple of times like she couldn’t believe it. But she didn’t give back the fiver, did she.”

We sat there like the three monkeys, fixed on her. Nothing stirred in the room except Francine’s nervous fingers. Pop came to life first, mustering himself as if facing the most difficult of barroom behavior cases.

“Look, bartending doesn’t work that way. I don’t know what kind of cockeyed conscience you have, but you can’t cheat one customer and pass it along like gravy to another one and have it come out even. All that’ll get you is both of them thinking you’re playing fast and loose with the cash register. And word like that gets around, don’t think it doesn’t. The joint’s reputation would be down the drain in no time.” Plainly this was his limit. “I hate like everything to do it”—he threw up his hands—“but I’m gonna have to can you.”

Francine looked dismally resigned to the verdict, but Proxy did not.

“Cut her a break, Tom,” she pleaded. “She’s just a kid.”

“Twenty-one?”

“Some people grow up slower than others,” Proxy hedged. She turned to her daughter. “Honey,” she said sorrowfully, “you couldn’t have messed up this chance any worse if you’d tried.” She paused for effect. Marilyn Monroe could not have done a better job of creating breathy expectation. “But that’s in the past,” she reasoned, although it barely was. “You’re going to quit doing it, aren’t you, dear. Stop taking dumb-ass things that aren’t worth taking in the first place?”

“I guess I have to get with it or split the scene, don’t I,” came the sulky answer, along with more demure tugging at the vest fringe.

“You’re damn right you do,” Pop weighed in. He looked exasperated but uncertain. If I knew anything about it, his own conscience was giving him too much trouble. I saw him start to say something, stop, squint as if squeezing out a decision, and then deliver it in the slowest of voices: “I’m probably going to kick myself for this, but if I give you another try, will you behave different?”

Francine tossed her head, as if deciding to change her life then and there. “I’ll do better,” she vowed, “but you’ve got to do something for me, Tom. You and Rusty.”

Me? Why? How did I get into the bargaining? Alarm must have been written all over me because Pop said, “Don’t come unglued, kiddo. Let’s hear what she means.”

“Don’t tell Del about what I got myself into?” she practically whispered it. “I mean, let me clue him in, after today.” She gave us an intensely pleading look. “Honest, I’ll tell him everything. Just not right now, okay?”

Pop seemed to consider this from up, down, and sideways before finally replying. “As far as I can tell, you haven’t been shortchanging Delano,” he said drily. “If he’s happy to be in the dark, we’ll keep our traps shut for now. Right, Rusty?”

“Uh, okay.”

Proxy had the last word. “See how things work out when you don’t get excited?”

—

BUSY FUSSING
the Gab Lab into readiness, Del looked on curiously as we poured out of the house, Pop rushing off to deal with last-minute derby details, Proxy gunning the Cadillac down the alley, Francine giving a quick yoo-hoo wave and calling out that she’d be ready after one more little thing in the bathroom, and me scooting across the yard to stay safely out of her vicinity.

“The family gathering go all right?” Del asked, a smile on him as big as the day, when I reached the van. He was busy stuffing extra tape reels and other odds and ends of recording gear into his safari shirt.

“Right as rain,” one of Pop’s sayings that I never understood in the first place came to my rescue. I still was trying to cope with the mental lightning strike back there in the middle of his tirade to Proxy. I had to try to find out in a hurry, France would be there any minute. “Say, mister,” I piped up in a stagey voice, “how are you fixed for answers?”

“They’re running out my ears, my good fellow,” Del generously joined in the bit while still putting things here and there in his shirt. “In what manner may I enlighten you?”

“Is Jones ever one those nicknames, like Canada Dan?”

He stopped loading his pockets to think that over. “A behavioral one? I can’t imagine how, a plain standard family name like that. What makes you ask?”

“Oh, there were a couple of tourists in the bar,” I made up as fast as I could think, which was none too fast, “and so, one of them did something the other one didn’t like, and the other one seemed to be calling him a name like that, something about how with him it was one Jones after another acting up until you couldn’t count on any kind of behavior from him but bad, so I wondered.”

He clucked his tongue in sudden understanding. “Ah, of course,
that
kind of jones. Small
j
. It means a compulsion, something you keep doing, against better judgment. Monkey on the back,” he did a sudden scary bit, twitching jerkily, as if trying to shake off a clinging simian. “Got a jones about that, man.” I stood petrified, needing to hear no more but at the mercy of Del’s encyclopedic tendency as he parsed the matter further. The expression, he guessed, might have come from the jazz world, where various kinds of unwise behavior were not unknown. “That tourist must be a real problem case,” he finished.

“Huh? Yeah. Awful.”

“Who’s a problem case?” The whippy voice caught us by surprise. “Nobody I know, I hope.” Coming up on the van from the yard side, the piano girl, as I couldn’t help thinking of her ever since hearing it from Canada Dan, looked tense as a tightwire walker, but then she often did. Her fixed grin of greeting, if that’s what it was, flashed at me before settling onto Del. I shook my head so swiftly my eyeballs rattled, to show her I hadn’t told him about her pack rat episodes and the rest.

“La belle France,”
he greeted her in a goofy boyfriend way. “You look sensational,” he admired, taking a good, long look. “Ready for all the fishing?”

“Can’t hardly wait.” Her fingers played in the buckskin vest fringe as she worked up to saying, “You know what? I’ve gone back to Francine. By popular demand, sort of.”

“Hmm?” Del puzzled over her name switcheroo a moment, then smiled unconcernedly. “‘By any other name,’ as the poet said,” he proclaimed, a gallantry that evidently was as far over her head as mine. Nonetheless, Francine gave him a gaze full of reward.

The lovey atmosphere was growing too thick for me. Besides, I badly needed a chance to sort things out in my head. “I have to put the banner on the Packard,” I started to make my escape, “I better get at that.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” said Francine.

“No, no, I can do it myself, honest.”

“Uh-uh, I insist.”

Knowing I was in for it from her—Pop obviously had not learned about the shortchanging episode from the angel Gabriel—I fetched the banner out of storage and trudged down the driveway to the hulking old car, my problematic half sister shadowing me as if I might get away. Behind us, Del was happily trying his portable tape recorder, “Testing, one, two, three . . .”

I wondered if she knew the Packard was where it happened—
she
happened—because of its spacious damn back seat. If so, she didn’t let on, and simply surveyed the banner as I flopped one part of it—CATCH ’EM—onto the trunk and then the other—TO THE LIMIT! She still didn’t say anything until we were nearly done tying the thing to the taillights and trunk handle and so on.