The Bartender's Tale (42 page)

“Been thinking, buddy.” She kept her voice low so it wouldn’t carry to the van. “You did me a real favor by tipping off your—our, dad about me messing up the way I did. So big kissy thanks.”

I was wary. “How was that any favor?”

She tossed her head, as if clearing that black mane of hers out of the way. “It makes me get myself squared away. Don’t have any choice now, do I.”

Skittishly watching her, I wondered if a person could make a jones go away just like that. The one that was giving me a waking nightmare didn’t show any sign of going anywhere.

—

ZOE COULD TELL
right away I was a mental mess.

“What happened?” she asked in a stage whisper, speeding out of the cafe after I feverishly tapped on the window. “A knock-down drag-out?”

“Just about.” There wasn’t time, as we headed like homing pigeons to the Medicine Lodge and the sanctum of the back room, to tell her all that had happened at the house. I rushed through the parts about Proxy showing up unexpectedly and Francine owning up to pack rat behavior and Del being kept in the dark until the right time, whenever that was, while she listened hard. I was wrapping it up, none too tidily, by the time we mounted the landing and claimed our spot under the mute vent, the saloon silent around us, front and back.

She waited until I reached my stopping point to say in some puzzlement, “So didn’t everything work out peachy keen? France-
cine
”—she caught up with the renaming—“has to go straight or hit the road, right?”

“That isn’t all,” I echoed Pop.

Sounding worried, Zoe examined me more closely. “Rusty, you look peaked. You aren’t going to throw up or something, are you?”

“Huh-uh, it’s not that.”

“What, then?”

“I think I found out—”

The words wouldn’t come, until I forced them to.

“I think I found out Proxy is my mother.”

11

I
T MADE A
crazy kind of sense, gaps filled in, veils lifted, the full story revealed after all this time. Pop’s pained version of my mother, whenever I ventured to find out anything whatsoever about her, must have been that she was a jones, a bad habit, not a phone-book Jones as I’d thought. By his own saying so, Proxy fit that; the jonesiest kind of compulsion, according to his outburst in the house, overcoming him twice. It was the
twice
that hit home with me.

The first time, that “one damn time” in the Packard, with Francine as living proof of unrestrained behavior. But the other: it did not take much imagination to conjure it happening in Canada, he on one of those trips to sell off back-room loot and she in the business of taxi dancing or worse, and they cross paths again, by every indication in Medicine Hat. “The railyard district, Tom,” in that silky voice. “No place like it when we used to know it, was there.” And out of that intersection comes me, nine months later. An awful lot was explained that way. Proxy’s fishy manner of looking at me. Pop’s hazy description of my nativity, the housekeeper story much more convenient than one beginning, “See, there’s this taxi dancer I used to know who keeps turning up like a bad penny and we got a few drinks into us one more damn time, and—” As for Francine, she could be in on the secret, or this all could have transpired without her ever knowing, given Proxy’s motherhood record of being absent for years at a time. Either way, it would make me the last to know that the girlishly named missing mother I had tried so hard to imagine was actually a milk-blond hustler full of schemes, wouldn’t it.

As this spilled out of me, Zoe had the logical question. “So why didn’t your dad and Proxy get married when they knew they were having you?”

“I bet she wouldn’t do it,” I hazarded not much of a guess. She was a different breed of cat, Pop had outright said so. And not the marrying kind at the time, particularly with a scandalous first husband to live down. No, it made sense to me that Proxy, as she was then, would have dealt herself out of any matrimony, and probably me into the nearest orphanage, except for Pop saying something like—I could almost hear him—“Then I’ll raise the kid myself,” and depositing me in Phoenix, and the rest was history.

“Whew.” Zoe’s eyes were big with awe at this family saga of mine and, given her dramatic instinct, maybe a touch of envy. “Are you going to let on to your dad that you know?”

“I . . . I can’t make up my mind.” Neither choice held real appeal. I’d been gritting and bearing it ever since two dangerously smiling women came along out of nowhere to upset our perfectly sound bachelor life, and forbearance was getting profoundly wearing. Yet there are some questions you don’t like to ask because of the answers they might bring. What if I mustered myself to question Pop as to whether Proxy was in truth my mother, and he let his conscience run away with itself and replied, “You know what, she is, and now that it’s out in the open, she and I ought to fix this family situation and do it right for a change and get hitched and we all live together. How’s that grab you?”

Right where I did not want to be grabbed, that’s where. If it was selfish not to want to share my father’s life and mine with a catamount, then I was hopelessly selfish.

Shocked, Zoe asked, “Your dad wouldn’t really do something like that, would he?”

“Who knows?” Hellish good company, he’d characterized Proxy in their Blue Eagle time together. The first part of that, I could agree with. “He complains about her and how she’s always up to something, but he ends up doing what she wants. That’s what scares me. You saw her in the back room—she’s not making eyes at him just for practice.”

Biting her lip in sympathy, Zoe watched me without knowing what to say, for once. In the stillness of the back room, not even the model planes stirred overhead, and the menagerie of items down on the floor and along the walls was like a museum everyone had passed through but the two of us. I could see her working on my predicament as mightily as I was, but the answer wasn’t revealing itself.

The bang of the door from the barroom side flying open jarred us both.

“There you are.” Pop peered up at us, sounding like a man in all kinds of a hurry. “Time to shake a leg, kiddo, we’ve got to get out to the rezavoy. Your folks will be looking for you, princess.” On whatever checklist a fishing derby chairman has to carry in his head, however, he paused for a regretful second to scratch one off. “Tell your dad we won’t need any chicken guts this time around.”

—

THE DERBY DAY CROWD,
even as early as Pop and I and the Packard pulled in to the parking lot on the bluff, already was starting to put the Mudjacks Reunion to shame for size and high spirits, and while the dam was modest compared to Fort Peck, it held an even more impressive amount of water than when I had caught my trophy trout. By now Rainbow Reservoir was practically brimming, as if all the weather of the year had collected within its banks in liquid form. If a hell of a lot of water did mean a hell of a lot of fish, then Pop and Bill Reinking were in luck. As we were getting out the loudspeaker equipment and other derby paraphernalia he was in charge of, being greeted all the while by people bristling with rods and reels, Pop surveyed the scene of the crowd, staking out spots along the gravelly shoreline. “How about that, maybe I knew what I was doing,” he said with satisfaction, looking toward where someone from his committee had roped off the muddy top of the dam, as he’d directed. “Not that it wouldn’t be fun to see a Zane or two slip into the water, hey?”

Just then we heard a familiar twang, Turk Turco calling out from where he had parked a highway department flatbed truck, donated or at least borrowed for the day, on the shoulder of ground just above the dam to serve as the speaker’s stand. “Over here, Tom, we’ll get the glory horn set up for you if Jojo doesn’t electrocute himself doing it.”

“Montana Power to the rescue,” Joe Quigg grunted as he swung heavy batteries onto the truck bed to operate the loudspeaker and amplifier.

Pop gladly yielded the equipment so he could move on to overseeing the refreshments area, more his department, and in my unsettled mood I trailed close behind him as he plunged into all that needed doing, questions to be answered, directions given, decisions made. Booths had to be set up, the Rotarians with their inferior beer, the Constantines at their Top Spot hot dog stand, the Ladies’ Aid with their tables of baked goods, and the Goodwill ones beyond those. Across the years the Gros Ventre Fishing Derby had grown to such importance that the state Fish and Game agency, known as the Frog and Goose guys, now dispatched a couple of game wardens to sell hunting licenses and provide free fish gutting for the contestants; Pop wisely put them and their gut buckets farthest away from the food booths. Even the Air Force flyboys had a booth this year, under the banner THE MINUTEMAN MISSILE—AMERICA’S ACE IN THE HOLE, where they gave away blue ballpoint pens. Then there was the sign-up table and the judges’ setup for measuring and weighing fish, that whole side of the parking lot a community encampment where my fathomless father was something like the temporary mayor.

To me now, that culminating day of the summer—of the year, really—seems like one long, twisty dream, everything that began with Proxy’s Cadillac nosing into the driveway and the thunderous disclosures that followed, and then the tremendous gathering at the derby, as if the audience had come to see what Tom Harry would bring about next. There are some days in a person’s life, only ever a few, that are marked to be remembered forever, even while they are happening. As if in a trance, I watched Pop master his chairmanship tasks—“I wouldn’t make too much of that ‘ace in the hole’ business if I were you, Sarge, there are some jokers in this crowd. . . .” “I’m sorry, Louise, but like I told Howie, the ladies will just have to get by with one table for pies. . . .” “You didn’t think to bring a tub of ice, Fred? That’s sure too bad, I guess people will have to get used to warm beer”—the most important person in the Two Medicine country, at least for the day. I should have been busting my buttons with pride for him, and mostly I was, but the repeated history of him and Proxy, creeping closer all the while, incessantly kept haunting me. Her for a mother. What does it take to empty a head of something you do not want there?

Trailing after him with this churning inside me as he strode from one derby duty to the next, I was sticking so close, I was nearly riding his shirttail. It wasn’t until he ducked around to the side of the Frog and Goose booth to catch his breath and have a cigarette that he had a chance to read my face.

“Hey, you doing all right, kiddo?”

“Trying to.”

“Don’t let this morning’s commotion get you down.” He lowered his voice just enough. “We got Francine onto the straight and narrow or else, didn’t we? That’s something.” Busy even when he wasn’t, he was keeping an eye on the derby doings while talking to me. “You know what, I still kind of wish you were fishing today, it’d take your mind off other things.” I must have shown alarm, because he gave me a wry look. “Relax, you’re right, I can’t have the chairman’s son catching the prize rainbow. Go have some fun while I tend to things, can’t you? See what Zoe is up to, how about.”

—

SHE SAW ME COMING
as I wended through the crowd to her folks’ hot dog stand, and as quick as she pantomimed blindly eating a ballpark wiener, my spirits climbed, although it still was heavy lifting.

“I’m sprung, Muscles”—at least I wasn’t so far gone I couldn’t feebly do a bit—“what do you say we vacate the space?”

“That’s an idea if I ever heard one, Ace. Let me have a chinnie with the warden.” With business at the Top Spot stand keeping her mother hopping and her father laboring over the grill of curling frankfurters, her parents were as glad to shoo her out of the way as Pop had been with me.

Off we went, life finally feeling right to me with Zoe at my side. She fell quiet as we roved the scene of the event. You could have walked away with the town, so many people from Gros Ventre had come out for the big day. Even Cloyce Reinking was on hand, in spousal loyalty to Bill’s Chamber of Commerce position, we figured. Spying us, she provided a comically elevated eyebrow, very much as Lady Bracknell might have done at the news that people pursued fish when foxes were so much more visible to the eye, and we couldn’t help but giggle.

On the other hand, it was a middle finger lifted in our direction when Duane Zane came tagging after his father, Earl passing Pop’s vicinity with his nose in the air.

As if the Zanes were a bad omen, Zoe grew more somber when we wandered past family bunches visiting gaily with one another along the reservoir shore while waiting for the derby to start. At the section where ten- to thirteen-year-olds were grouped, my horse buddies Jimmy and Hal and some others spotted us and waved and hollered. “Come on,” I tried to put some enthusiasm into my social role, “better say hello to the guys, they’re in our grade.”

“Huh-uh,” she surprised me, squirming her shoulders. “Later.”

I gestured to our curious classmates that we were urgently wanted by waiting parents and we kept going. Zoe was looking vacant eyed in a way that I knew was no bit.

“Something the matter?”

“Ooh, nothing, really.”

“Zo-oe, tell me.”

“It’s hunnerd percent dumb.”

“Come on.” I snapped my fingers all the way back to Shakespeare. “How now, unhappy youth?”

A teeny smile trembled on her at that, but then she looked away and around at the crowd. “You know everybody here. And all the kids. For me, they’re”—she struggled to put it into words—“it’s all going to be new, Rusty.”

As fumbling as her emotion was, I felt in a flash exactly what she meant. The calendar was closing in on us, bringing on the jaundiced feeling that kids get when summer is leaving in a hurry. Without ever having to say so, we shared the haunting sense that our education together would end when school started. And if Zoe was on the verge of crying, that made two of us. It was right there in our faces; there might be other summers, other years, but never again like this.

I tried to make the best of it. “School doesn’t get us for a couple days yet.”

“Saved until the bell, I guess,” she said with the bravado I loved in her.

“Don’t worry ahead,” I said as if I wasn’t a prime example. “We’ll employ our brains and think of something, Muscles.”

That twitched a grin out of her, and at the same time I saw her eyes widen as dramatically as ever. “Here they are,” she whispered, ready for the next act, “the piano girl and her main squeeze.”

—

WHATEVER THEY
had been up to, Del and Francine were conspicuously tardy in arriving. I could tell by the giddy expression on him as he hopped out of the van that she had not yet told him anything, except maybe any cooing between kisses. Francine met us with her best poker face, and I supposed it counted in her favor if she was dead set on bluffing her way through the day without upsetting Del in his work. But then?

That was when and this was now, Del all business as he flung open the side doors of the Gab Lab. “And now, for a sound portrait of the Gros Ventre Fishing Derby, stay tuned,” he intoned like the most baritone of radio announcers, and began scooping up recording gear.

Zoe and I had watched him at this before, but it was new to Francine, as were the glistening reservoir and the natural setting tucked against the mountains and the mob of people at the booths and the throng down along the shoreline. “Jeez, Dellie, everybody and his twin brother are at this bash. How do you go about this?”

“An estimable question, mademoiselle.” He paused in checking the connections on the portable tape recorder and scanned the busy scene. The answer seemed to come to him from the dam, where so much overflow was gushing out the floodgate and cascading down into the South Fork that it sounded like a natural waterfall. “Aha!” He cocked his good ear. “The sound of white water, as some poet must have said.”

“Ambience,” Zoe confidently defined for Francine’s benefit, who looked like she needed it.