The Bartender's Tale (43 page)

“Let’s go, derby fans.” Del set off with headphones slung around his neck and the recorder swinging at his side like a suitcase, the three of us in his wake. Swiftly he headed for the speaker-stand truck, where Pop was going over last things with various committee members about to take up their assignments, everyone jaunty as free spenders at a carnival.

Memory heightens these things, but I have my own sound portrait as clear to the inner ear as if it all was happening again now: Francine saying sweetly to Turk Turco and Joe Quigg as we passed their side of the truck, “If it isn’t my favorite customers”; and as quickly as she had gone by, Turk moaning wistfully, “It must be nice to be a ladies’ man”; and Joe telling him, “Eat your heart out, Turco, you’re never gonna have red hair and a crew cut”; and Del glancing back at them with a distracted “Hmm?”; and Zoe silently delighting in it all with me, as we had done so many, many times by the sift of the vent. If only the rest of life were as clear as the voices of that time.

The next was Pop’s, as he greeted Del and Francine with a mock frown, or maybe not, glancing up from dispatching the last of his committee volunteers. “Get lost getting here, did you?”

Right away Francine looked guilty, but one thing about Del, you couldn’t deter him when he had something in mind. “I’m glad we haven’t missed anything,” he went right past Pop’s remark. And immediately inclined his head toward the rushing spillway. “Tom, Mr. Chairman I should say, I need to go out there for a few minutes. It sounds like Niagara. It’ll be phenomenal on tape.”

No doubt remembering the tick episode, Pop gave him a warning look. “Promise not to slip and fall in?”

“Absolutely.”

“Okay, then, I guess, go to it.” He shook his head at Del’s determination to catch noise while several hundred people waited to catch trout. “Make it snappy, we’re about to start the fishing.”

Wasting no time, Del ducked under the rope, holding it up in hopeful fashion for Francine. “Coming?”

“Not this kid.” She and her clean new britches shied back from the muddy dam. “I’ll cheer from here, thanks.” I didn’t blame her, knowing how single-minded Del could be when he had the microphone on and the tape reel hypnotically turning; not exactly lively company. Resigned to going solo, he was already concentrating on his recording gear, checking his multitudinous pockets for things and automatically clamping the headphones onto his ears as he set off across the causeway to the floodgate, careful of his footing while lugging the hefty recorder.

Watching his progress, Pop suggested in a way that did not want any argument that Zoe and I hop up on the truck bed to sit during the derby, so he wouldn’t have any more wanderers to keep track of. The morning confrontation still clouding his brow, he turned and considered Francine standing by herself, looking more than a little lost. “You, too, I guess, toots.” His expression lifted as he jerked his head toward the truck bed. “All the problem children in one bunch, okay?”

Relief flooded her. “Fine,” she said hastily, and started to scooch up onto the truck beside Zoe and me before conscience seemed to catch up with her.

She worked her mouth, as if tasting the words carefully first. “Tom? I’m sorry about . . . you know, everything.”

“That puts you back in the human race,” he accepted gravely. “Come on, rest your bones until Delano gets back.” She hopped up as Zoe and I squirmed over to make room for her.

With the three of us under control, Pop looked all around the reservoir scene and drew a sighing breath, the kind that told me he really wished he had time for a cigarette. His eye caught mine. “I got a fishing derby to run instead, don’t I.” Setting his face the way he did when he was about to open the Medicine Lodge for business, he signaled to Bill Reinking over at the sign-up table that all was in readiness. Seeing this, Turk or Joe did something to the sound system that caused the customary feedback screech, startling everyone but Del, earmuffed as he was by his headphones out on the concrete apron of the spillway, setting down his recorder to punch buttons and read dials. “Cripes, it sounds like we’re murdering a cat,” Pop muttered as he climbed onto the truck in back of where Zoe and I and Francine were perched. Gingerly taking the microphone Joe handed up to him, he cleared his throat a couple of times and began the proceedings.

“WELCOME, EVERYBODY, TO THE GROS VENTRE FISHING DERBY AGAIN THIS YEAR,” his voice resounded out over the reservoir and the clapping gathering. “HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT BLUE SKY? NO WATER FOR A CHASER TODAY, BY ORDER OF THE MANAGEMENT.”

The crowd applauded louder now, perfectly willing to let the maestro of the Medicine Lodge take credit for the day’s dry weather. Zoe of course watched Pop in his master of ceremonies role as if he were Shakespeare come to life, and Francine gave his opening effort a twitchy grin, but a grin. Myself, I prayed he wouldn’t get carried away and be reminded of a story, as he’d done at the beer banquet; success does not necessarily strike twice when it comes to bartender jokes.

Squinting hard at a sheet of paper the sun was catching, he rolled on: “BEFORE WE GET STARTED THROWING FOOD TO THE FISH, THERE ARE SOME FOLKS I HAVE TO THANK FOR—” and I relaxed about at least one peril.

While he was conscientiously droning through that list, more than ever I felt like a spectator to a colossal dream, memory mingling with all I was witnessing. In the nearest area of contestants strung thick along the reservoir, the little kids pointed their fishing poles in as many directions as quills on a porcupine. Remembering when I was like them, how mature I felt. At the same time, an inch away from me on one side sat wondrous Zoe, the summer’s gift, whom I would have given almost anything to have for a real sister, and all but touching on my other side, the actual one, Francine, the newcomer whose middle name seemed to be Trouble. Trying to fit the contradictory two of them into my own small world, how childish I felt, hopelessly twelve years old in circumstances that would have taxed much older brains. Meanwhile my singular father, author of disappointments and triumphs and regular surprises in between, stood there, bigger than life, on his stage for the day, his voice rolling out over the water and shore, as central a figure in this panorama as he had been on the occasion of the Fort Peck reunion. Tom Harry as historic as Leadbelly. How clear and simple that had seemed before Proxy pulled up in a Cadillac typhoon of dust. Before the story of my life started coming unraveled in me.

Zoe, thank heavens, had been restlessly dandling her legs over the edge of the truck bed and taking everything in while I was so absorbed with myself. I snapped to at her sudden words under Pop’s amplified ones, “Whoa, is that supposed to be like that?”

Francine and I saw in the same instant what she was pointing to on the downstream face of the dam, a portion of the earthen slope that did not look mud-brown like the rest but was glistening, the way the sun reflects off something wet.

“Pop!”

“Tom!”

Our simultaneous yells surprised him to a stop in midsentence, and he must have sensed the situation from the alarm in our shouts. Quicker than I would have thought humanly possible, he was madly motioning everyone to stay back from the causeway and roaring into the mike, “DELANO! GET OFF THE DAM!
DELANO!
”

It was no use, nothing at this distance was. The headphoned figure out there, blissfully tuning in the roar of the spillway, was deaf even to amplified shouts, and Francine’s anguished
“Dellie! Look up, damn it!
” never stood a chance.

I suppose you never know what you will do in such a situation, until you do it. I launched off the truck bed, running as hard as I could toward the dam, Zoe right behind me.

“HEY, NO!” Pop’s shouts now were followed by the death shriek of the mike as he scrambled off the truck in pursuit of us. No one else was near enough to be of any help, except Francine, who with presence of mind caught up with Zoe and wrested her, struggling and howling bloody murder, back toward shore as I raced onto the causeway.

There’s a saying that you run from danger with your heart in your mouth, and that was even more true as I ran headlong into it: not brave, not even close, just blindly determined to reach Del before a reservoir full of water did. As best I can re-create the experience, adrenaline replaced the blood in my system and instinct took over from sanity. I simply ran and ran, the causeway seeming cruelly long, the kneeling figure ahead ever at an awful distance. How I kept to my feet on the muddy top of the dam, I do not know, except maybe through the gripping fear of falling. By now Del, taking his sweet time with his cherished equipment, was just yards away, but I felt the dam do something under me. Stories of the slide at Fort Peck had it all too right; there is an odd sensation of time suspended when the ground begins to move.

Out of breath, or so scared that my breathing wasn’t working right—it pretty much came to the same—I floundered onto the concrete apron of the spillway and practically bowled Del over as I snatched his headphones off.

“Ow!” He grabbed a smarting ear, a look of surprise on him at my bad manners. “Rusty, what—?”

“The dam’s leaking, come on!”

You most definitely did, Del, but not before scooping up your recording equipment. Not waiting around to argue the point, I already was flinging myself back along the causeway toward where Pop and Turk and Joe and some others had rushed down to the dam and out as far as they could risk on the shifting soil, and were hollering every kind of encouragement, although I have always wondered if any of it ever registered on you, if you were deaf even to Francine’s screams of
“Drop it! Dellie, leave the damn thing!”
and Zoe’s wailing urgings to us both. In any case, when I reached firm enough ground to whirl and look back for a second, you were lugging your precious tape recorder in a struggling crab-legged run, like a man in some ridiculous picnic race.

Which is why I made it to the safety of the shore, and you didn’t.

“Watch out, it’s gonna go!” Pop cried, grabbing me around the waist and practically carrying me with him as the bunch of us stumbled our way up the shoulder of higher ground, Zoe still in Francine’s clutch as pandemonium spread among the crowd. People would be saying for the rest of their lives they were there that day, when the Rainbow dam broke. Actually it was a series of collapses, avalanches almost in slow motion, as pockets of soil big as sidehills slid off the core of the dam, one after another.

The wet patch Zoe had spied proved to be Del’s undoing. He was nearly to the end of the causeway—“Come on, you’ve got it made!” Pop shouted, as I would have if I’d had breath left—when that section simply slipped sideways off the dam, carrying him like a surfboarder riding a wave of dirt.

Surely it happened in a matter of seconds, but in memory it took much more than that, the long-limbed figure swept into the cascade of soil, the tape recorder tumbling to its own fate. Pop clutched me so hard it hurt as we watched Del disappear from sight.

Whatever is worse than a sob burst out of me as I buried my face in my father’s chest, and he ducked his head to mine, still gripping me tight.

“Don’t,” he said brokenly, and choked up in a spasm of his own.

It was Zoe, farther up the slope, who cried out, “There he is!”

Not much of him, actually, the red head the only thing that wasn’t mud-colored there against the side of the bluff, where he had been flung, and was clinging to a rock outcropping like a swimmer to a reef. If she had not spotted him in time, who knows?

He was barely holding on by the time Turk and Joe could scramble down to him, risking themselves so close to the cascade of earth and water. Between them, they managed to drag him up the slope and get him to the truck, where he collapsed on the running board. His head back against the door, Francine hugging him, muddy mess that he was, and Pop and Zoe and me asking him a dozen ways whether he was all right, Del ultimately gasped out, “Now I know what the mudjacks were talking about.”

All of this was happening in the thunder of water as Rainbow Reservoir disgorged a coulee-wide torrent before hundreds of disbelieving eyes. The story of that day was far from over. For the floodwater had no place to go but down the course of the South Fork and on into the English Creek valley, where Gros Ventre lay in its way.

12

T
HIS WAITING IS
driving me up the wall, kiddo.”

Up and over and out into some neighborhood of frustration constructed specially for a proprietor of a historic saloon downstream from a dam disaster, was more accurate. You might think the aftermath of a flood is destined to be an anticlimax. Even biblical stories lose ground after Noah and the Ark, don’t they. Yet I remember fully the suspense of those next days, when Pop and I were reduced to living in the Packard at the swollen Red Cross camp on the cemetery knoll above town, while waiting for the authorities to allow the stranded population of Gros Ventre back to their homes and businesses, if any still fit that description.

During the nerve-wracking wait for the water to go down, he looked more worried than I had ever seen him, his face fixed in a cigarette squint and his hat down on his brow as if it was raining, even though it finally wasn’t. When he and I weren’t pitching in on unloading emergency supplies from trucks or standing in endless toilet lines or eating ladled-out tent meals, I would catch him staring down at the watery ghost town somewhere under its shroud of trees for long spells at a time.

Not that I was very well pulled together myself. Pop hadn’t really said much about my mad dash onto the dam before it broke except to ruffle my hair with a rough hand and mutter, “That was close. Cripes, that was close.” Something of a celebrity around the camp, I kept being greeted and hailed by those who witnessed my feat at the reservoir—even Duane Zane mumbled, “Nice going, guy,” when I bumped into him in the chow line—but it was a good thing heroism is not transparent, because only now did I feel scared through and through. Not so much from that narrow escape, but of whatever lay ahead when the slowly receding water showed what we had been left with.

Until that could happen, Del of all people was our saving grace. Maybe lacrosse had taught him to shake off life’s body blows in a hurry, but in any case, no sooner was the disaster camp being set up and reporters flocking in than he found a radio station van and wangled the loan of a portable recorder. Pop and I were pounding in tent pegs as the latest delivery of emergency shelters was being unrolled when we heard Zoe let out an “Ooh.” We had practically inherited her while her parents volunteered at the meal tent, and depend on it, she first spotted Del striding our way, Francine keeping up with him, as inseparable as his shadow.

Pop straightened up with a grunt at the sight of the two of them, or rather all three, counting the recorder swinging at Del’s side. Suspicious, he asked, “What are you gonna do with that thing?”

Del could hardly contain himself. “Tom, it’s the chance of a lifetime! A sound portrait of this camp,” he gestured around, as if scooping in the atmosphere of the flood aftermath by the armful. “Just think, if we had something like that from right after the Fort Peck slide. It would be historic!”

Certainly there was plenty of sound, diesel generators sputtering to life and the anxious tones of neighbors asking after one another and the bellow of Red Cross bullhorns making announcements and countless other noises of people laboring to get their lives together on a makeshift basis. Pop listened a few moments as if the commotion hurt his ears. “Yeah, well, you’re welcome to it, Delano.”

“Ah, I was hoping,” Del stood on one foot and then the other, “you could go around the camp with me a little and point out people I might talk to. Break the ice, so to speak.”

Pop just looked at him. “You know what, I could do without any more chances of a lifetime for a while.” He cut off Del’s immediate further plea with a tired shake of his head. “Have Francine lead you around, she knows enough of these folks by now.”

She shook her head so fast her hair flew. “Not like you, Tom. Please? Pretty please? Dellie needs you in on this.” She gestured awkwardly. “You . . . you’re trusted.”

That drew another sizable look from Pop. “Dellie needs his head examined,” he growled, “and he’s not the only one.” Puffing out his cheeks, he turned resignedly to Del. “Okay, let’s get at it. You stick close with us, kiddos.”

The two of them set off into the confusion of the camp, Francine and Zoe and I tagging after. You really had to hand it to Philip Delano Robertson, gawky fledgling westerner from points east; not all that many hours before, the worst flood in Two Medicine history had done its best to inundate him, and here he was his bushy-tailed self again, somehow managing to listen to Pop and deploy the microphone toward anything that caught his interest and adjust settings on the recorder slung at his side, all at the same time. For his part, Pop singled out personalities who would stand out in a portrait, sound or otherwise, starting with Cloyce Reinking, sitting outside a tent like a queen in exile. She sent Zoe and me the kind of look that passes among old theatrical confederates, then turned to Del’s mike with aplomb.

“So what do you think, gang?” Francine muttered as we hung back out of range of the interview. “Am I washed up?”

“Wh-why?” I responded, really asking
What now?

“Are you in some kind of trouble like got you thrown in juvie?” Zoe breathlessly went the full route.

“Nahh, that’s not what I meant.” Francine toyed with the leather on her wrist. “My bartender gig. What if the joint is a total wreck?”

Leave it to her to blat it right out. At least her tongue was honest. Zoe wisely left the matter to me. Where I found it in me, I don’t know, but I sounded more like Pop than he himself sometimes did: “You got to play the hand you been dealt. That’s rule number one.”

Francine gave me quite a look for a few seconds, then one of those grins that didn’t leave the corner of her mouth. “Thanks, champ. I’ll remember that.”

On through the course of that day and the next couple, anytime anyone looked up, the tall intent red-topped figure and the tall silver-streaked familiar one were on the prowl through the camp, the one wielding the microphone like a magic wand, the other introducing him around as if he was the sound portraitist of the ages. Through it all, Francine stuck right there at Del’s side, helping out any way she could. Appearances can deceive, but she gave every sign of being genuinely attached to him, rather than, as might have been suspected, snuggling up because the Gab Lab happened to be the coziest accommodation in the camp. He, of course, continued to look at her like she was the perfection of a rose. Zoe had a better sense of these things than I did, and she pointed out that Francine had a lot to offer a man if he did not know about her habit of taking things. Still, I couldn’t help wishing Del savvied what he was getting with her.

—

THE LAST DAY CAME,
with Pop summoned along with some other of the town’s leading lights to a meeting with the camp administrators. Zoe and I were again killing time by trailing after Del and Francine, so we were right there when he slipped the microphone into the circle of law-enforcement officials briefing Bill Reinking and the other reporters on the final tally of lives lost in the flood. Nearly all the victims were tourists who had been camping or fishing or picnicking at creek side, names that meant nothing to us, the kind you read in newspaper stories of distant terrible happenings. Until the Polish-sounding final one.

Swallowing hard, she and I retreated into the maze of tents and makeshift avenues of people either sitting around with nothing to do or rushing this way and that. Hearing Canada Dan’s name read off crushed the best efforts of our imaginations, the possibility that he and Moses had herded the hospital bunch up onto the coulee slope that day and the flood rushed by below, man and dog and ailing sheep safely high and dry. Twelve years old was awfully early to meet up with what inevitability does to possibility. Never had I expected to be choked up over the fate of one ornery old sheepherder, not even a very good one. But that was Canada Dan for you.

In the general hubbub I almost didn’t hear when Zoe said in a tight voice, “What if the dam had gone out that day we were at his sheep camp?”

That was one I hadn’t thought of.

“Curtains, Muscles,” I tried to make light of it but it came out as a kind of croak.

Without saying anything more for a time, we wandered the encampment. Never had I known Zoe to be so downcast. Her eyes glistened, next thing to crying, although I could tell she was fiercely determined not to.

“Don’t get all shook up,” I managed, “we lucked out like crazy at the sheep camp and the dam. That’s something, isn’t it?”

She nodded miserably. “I know. But—”

“But what?”

It took her a couple of tries to say it.

“I heard my dad telling my mom, if the cafe is in real bad shape, we’ll have to go back to Butte.”

I felt as if all the air had been sucked out of me. I was trying to stammer something when Pop’s voice caught up with us.

“Been looking all over for you,” he beckoned impatiently, “let’s get to getting.” He had the news that people who ran essential services, such as the bank and the mercantile and gas stations, were about to be allowed into town ahead of everyone else. The first trace of his old self in many hours flashed across his drawn face. “Guess what, they couldn’t leave the Medicine Lodge off the list. Princess, better go tell your folks what’s up, okay? We’ll see you in town.”

Zoe sped away. Casting around for Francine and Del, Pop spotted them at the edge of the graveyard next to the camp, crouched over the recording equipment, catching the sound of wind in the long grass bordering the cemetery. “Hey, you two!” he hollered. “They’re letting us back in town, if you can tear yourself away from the marble farm. Make it snappy, Proxy’s waiting at the Packard.”

That was the next jolt down to the bottom of my shoes. Now her, all of a sudden, along with everything else?

—

BY NOW THE CAMP
was buzzing, with everyone anxious to find out what shape the town was in, and we wended our way to the cars through a chorus of encouragement to Pop to get the Lodge open for business the first possible minute, and he steadfastly said he would have to see what was what. My mind was taken up with what lay directly ahead, the red Cadillac poking out beyond the black bulk of the Packard, and there she waited, in the lavender slacks and creamy blouse and the hair still the shade of tinsel on a Christmas tree, leaning against a fender as composed as you please. My mother the jones. Abandoner of children until they suited her purpose. Seducer of my father anytime she really put her mind to it. The wild card in the deck.

I asked darkly, “Where’s she been, anyway?”

“They weren’t letting anybody but emergency vehicles through until now,” Pop excused her, naturally. But that was the kind of parent she’d be, all right, I could feel it in my bones. Absent until you least expected her, and then everything had to revolve around her.

Proxy met us with a more off-kilter smile than usual, as if she had been caught up in something that took a tricky amount of thinking. Immediately, though, she fastened onto me with one of her disturbing gazes. “Aren’t you something, Russ. I hear you go around saving people’s lives.”

The only answer I was willing to make to that was something inconclusive, kind of a shrug and nod at the same time, for history was unmistakably in the air, that midnight episode at Fort Peck when a truck went in the river. The story practically cried out in my very being. If something like my action had occurred then, Darius Duff might still be her husband and Francine’s apparent father, and I’d be, what? Nonexistent? The offspring of Pop and someone more fitted to be a mother? It is the kind of thinking that does not get a person anywhere, but it ruthlessly leads you on even so.

“Twice in one lifetime, Tom. What are the cockeyed odds on that?” I caught up with what Proxy was saying as she bummed a cigarette and he lit hers and then his while we waited for the procession into town to get under way.

“We don’t have much luck around dams, do we,” he interpreted that. “I hope it’s not as big a mess as the time at Fort Peck.” He glanced keenly at her. “I still have bad dreams about that, how about you?”

“It can’t be,” she said, ignoring the dreams part. “The slide took a whole frigging year to fix. Don’t be so down in the mouth. Francine will be good help getting the joint back in shape in no time, you’ll see.” The little crimp appeared between her eyes, as if this had just occurred to her. “Fact of the matter is, I can spare some time myself to hang around and try to be useful.”

My heart flip-flopped. Here she came, right into our lives.

“Yeah, well, we’ll see how it all sorts out,” he responded, a far cry from turning her down flat, as I wildly wished would happen. “We need to get ourselves in there first and take a look at things.” Pacing and smoking, he kept an eye on the law-enforcement types in charge of dispatching cars into town, meanwhile frowning around in search of Francine and Del. At the last minute they showed up, dodging their way toward us, still lugging recording equipment and looking like a couple you couldn’t separate without surgery.

Watching Proxy, I had the feeling Del was a complication she gladly would have done without. However, she did the polite thing, remarking to him that he was quite the survivor.

“It’s quite an experience,” he replied, not in his usual bouncy way, but looking straight back at her with Fort Peck knowledge in his eyes.

Evidently his close call was on Francine’s mind, too. While the others went on making talk, she drifted around to the other side of the Packard, where Pop had dispatched me to roll down the windows to let stuffy air out.

Half covering her mouth with her hand so only I could hear, she began, “You want to know something, buddy boy?” Not much choice when it’s put that way, is there. I glanced sideways at her, her expression that same flat-honest one as when she told of being in juvie.

“You were crazy to run out there to Del,” she said so low it was practically a whisper.

Neither admitting nor denying, I cranked down the rear window as if it took all my attention.

“Lucky thing, too,” she murmured, “but that’s not what I mean. Me, I couldn’t have. Didn’t, did I.”