The Bartender's Tale (45 page)

Pop shook his head.

She sighed the way he sometimes did. “Then I guess there’s nothing for me to hang around for.”

I waited breathlessly.

“No,” he said, “there isn’t. I couldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you, after this.”

Proxy showed a flash of pain, remorse, regret, who knows what at those words, but shrugged like the veteran of life that she was. “That’s the problem with being inventive. It’s not always appreciated.” Trying for her tough smile, she turned to Del, who had been listening as comprehensively as I had. “So, Prince Charming. Can I bum a lift back to the camp, see if I can catch a ride to the Falls from there?”

Before he could respond, Pop slid a key along the bar to her. “Never mind. Take the Packard. For good. I have a hunch you’re not gonna see that Cadillac again.”

Hesitantly she reached for the car key and turned it over a time or two before pocketing it. She angled her head a certain way as she looked back along the bar to him. “Who knows, I may bring the old jitney back sometime.”

“Don’t hurry,” he said with emphasis.

She shook her head regretfully. “You’re one of a kind, Tom. Too bad we didn’t take a little time for ourselves in those years at the Eagle and explore that some.”

“Lots of things in life are too bad, Proxy,” he said quietly. “Time to move on.”

My mind a muddle of emotions, I watched her go, the small, sad smile as she gave the barroom one last sideways glance, and then just the back of her, the hair and figure that defied mere motherhood, as she picked her way through the flood’s leavings and out to the old car.

Finding his voice, Del broke the spell she left behind. “Francine told me all of it. She said we’d never be able to stick together, with her habits and me as I am.” Wincing, he went on: “She’s either too honest or too much the opposite. It’s beyond me. Whatever, that’s that, as I’ve heard someone say before.” Looking bleak but trying to get over it, he asked, “Can I use the phone if it’s working? The powers that be are going to be wondering if I still exist.”

“Help yourself. It’d be nice if somebody got something done around here that didn’t draw blood.” Pop signaled me with a motion of his head, and we excused ourselves to the back room.

Light-headed with the mercy of Proxy exiting from our life, I followed him into the strew of waterlogged items, still trying to catch up with all that had happened. Francine gone, leaving everyone a little scorched, more than a little amazed, definitely a standout memory. Even now I half expected her to materialize at the base of the stairs to the landing, black bow tie tied as nicely as the ribbon on a gift box, flashing a sassy grin and saying “Oboy, some mess in here, ain’t it.” Whether or not it was her and her checkered conscience and a Cadillac heading west that was on his mind, too, Pop wore a pensive expression as he gazed around at the watery remains of the Medicine Lodge.

“Pop,” I broke in on his mood, there was no help for it, “can I ask you something?”

“You know I’ve been pretty short of good answers lately,” he said ruefully. “But fire away, I guess.”

“Do you wish she’d been really your daughter?”

He hesitated, studying me as if making sure I could stand the honest answer. “Fifty-fifty,” he teetered a hand. “She wasn’t too bad a bartender, you know.” Stooping, he rescued the Blue Eagle sign from a seaweed-like tangle of horse harness. “How about you? You gonna miss having a sister?”

I started to say no, then veered toward yes, and in the end I simply shook my head in a way that said I didn’t know how to answer that.

“Francine had that effect,” he grunted, standing the hard-used sign in its place against the wall and stepping back as if he had done a day’s work.

This was taking an awful chance, but I had to know. “Are . . . are you going to miss
her
? Our mother, I mean?”

“Who?” He looked over his shoulder at me with a puzzled squint.

“Proxy. She’s my mother, too, isn’t she.”

He went still as death. “How’d you come up with that?”

“From that funny way she was always looking at me like she owned me,” it poured out of me. “And you were in Medicine Hat together back when, from what she said. And you called her a jones, and that’s what you always said my mother was, and you gave in to her both times, you said, and so the second time must have been me, like the first time was supposed to have been Francine, and—”

His expression worsened as I kept on and on. I hoped he wasn’t having a heart attack. Finally he got me stopped. “Rusty, we need to talk this out. Come on up.”

We climbed to the desk on the landing and sat facing each other, the vent soundless, as if listening to us.

He worked his jaw a time or two, the wretched look still on his face. “Cripes, where do I start?” He drew a ragged breath and the words came haltingly.

“I can see where you thought Proxy and me had it bad for each other. Particularly me for her—she’s the kind that gets under a guy’s skin, in more ways than one.” Tense as I had ever been, I watched him give a little shake of his head, as if clearing it. “But she and I missed our chance way back there when she fell for Darius. That’s what that fling in the Packard was about, as much as anything. Kind of a consolation prize for both of us, if you see what I mean.”

Maybe I was beginning to. Yet I wasn’t at all prepared for his next words.

“Your mother, your
real
mother, passed away. Earlier this summer. I didn’t have the heart to tell you. She’d been taken care of, the funeral and all, by the time the landlady figured out how to let me know. The phone call came, and you were flying high about how you’re gonna be an actor and so on, and I just couldn’t do it to you then. And things kept coming up, where the time never seemed right to tell you.” Hunched forward with his arms on his knees and his hands clasped, he looked at me as if from far away, although our knees were practically touching. “Kiddo, it was real hard to know what to do, as you can see.”

I could barely hear myself ask, “What did she die of?”

He didn’t answer that for the longest time. Then said with resignation, “That’s the rest of the story. She drank herself to death, finally.”

“Where . . . where was she?”

“Canada.” He nodded. “Medicine Hat. I can see how it threw you when Proxy brought that up, but she was only ever there with me a time or two on those booze runs from the Eagle. Nothing ever happened between us, she was just along for the ride.” His eyes changed. “Different situation with your mother. See, she was a chambermaid in the railroad hotel up there after we . . .” His voice faltered.

“Split the blanket,” I helped.

“Right. Jonelle, that was her name, Jonelle Jones, her folks’ idea of something cute, I guess,” he recited this with care, “Jonesie, she liked to be called—” I could tell he had to drag the next out of himself. “She wasn’t cut out to have a kid. I was scared to death she’d drop you on your head or something. One day when you were only about a month old I came back to the house from the joint for something, and there was a hell of a smell in the place. I could hear you upstairs whimpering—you were good, you didn’t squall much, but when you were hungry, you would kind of whimper like a puppy. I went in the kitchen, and the pan where she’d been heating milk for your bottle had burned through the bottom. I found her in the living room, passed out drunk. That did it. I could see what was going to happen. Somebody who drank like a fish and me with the saloon. You could get a divorce in Nevada about as easy as changing your underwear. I drove her there, and you to Phoenix.”

The unspoken fact of ever since, twelve years’ worth, must have stood out all over me.

“You might as well know the whole thing,” he read my face. “I was paying her to stay away from you all this time.”

“Pay—? Why’d you have to do that?”

“She had custody of you,” he said huskily. “Came with the divorce. That’s the way it works—the woman always gets the kid.”

This news hit me like an anvil. Stunned, I tried to make sense of it. “But you’ve always had me.”

“Yeah, well,” he looked uncomfortable but told it all, “kidnapping is kind of a strong way of putting it, but that’s what the law could have charged me with all along.” I listened as if hypnotized. “And she always held that over me. That she had legal right to you and I didn’t have a leg to stand on if she pressed the case. I had to buy her off, right to the end.”

“Buy her off with—”

“You got it. Those trips. She would call, always late at night in the joint. The same story every time, she’d run out of money, drank it up, I could tell by her voice, and threatened to come down here and get you and call the law on me.” He gazed into the remnants of the hocked items, the glorious loot that held more meaning than even Zoe and I imagined into it. “So, yeah, I’d have to load and go up there to Medicine Hat and sell off whatever I could for fast cash and deal with her, same old way. She could go through money like it was water, so I’d only give her enough to get by on, and parcel out the rest to whoever she owed”—I at last understood the plague of bills down through the years at this desk—“until it happened again.”

It was dizzying, the back room now as deep in drama as when this one-of-a-kind father held me over the rim of the Grand Canyon to spit a mile. He saw me staring toward the tarp that had drifted into the corner, beneath the surviving saddles.

“Rusty, listen. I’ve never stole. Got that?”

A moment of hesitation that was its own explanation.

“It’s kind of a fine line, maybe,” he started in slowly, “handling things that don’t come with a bill of sale, but every pawnshop in the world has to deal like that. If a foreman on a big road job or an oil rig showed up late at night and said he had some surplus stuff he’d like to trade in, I didn’t figure it was up to me to ask any too many questions. Maybe the stuff had walked off the job, maybe it hadn’t.”

This seemed the hardest part yet for him. He started to say something more, halted, then turned up his hands as if letting the words free.

“Kiddo, I’m no saint on the wall. That’s been my history, I guess you’d have to say. What I did at Fort Peck, throwing the Eagle open for the taxi dancing and what Proxy got up to, it meant I could afford to come to this town and buy this joint. Anything I did here, it let me afford you.” He looked squarely at me, anxiety etched deep in his face. “Okay?”

You got to play the hand you been dealt. He always had, and if I was going be the son he deserved, I could do nothing less. To this day I have not regretted saying, “Okay, Pop, if that’s the how of it,” which seemed to be all that needed to be said.

His relief was brief, as was mine. “Can I come in?” Zoe called from the back doorway, coming in. “Whoo, this is some mess.”

“That’s for sure, princess,” Pop greeted her, tiredly passing a hand over his face. “How is it at the cafe?” I tensed for the next turn of fortune in this epic day.

Dodging her way through the clutter on the floor, she shrugged elaborately but couldn’t hold in the news. “My mom says she’s seen worse in Butte. She has my dad already trying to cook hamburgers.”

Her big grin faded as she trotted up the stairs and got a close look at us. “What happened? Where is everybody?”

“Mother and daughter are no longer with us,” Pop said levelly. “Rusty can tell you the whole tale.”

Zoe edged along the railing of the landing, sensing trouble. “When will you get the saloon open?”

Pop did not say anything for a moment, then sighed. “Princess, I won’t. I can’t hack it.” He flung out a hand toward the barroom. “The joint would need new booths, stools, ice machine,” he went on down the list. “New bartender, for that matter.” He was speaking as if to Zoe; I knew this was his way of softening the blow for me, but I still felt the words hit my heart. “I’m gonna have to sell the joint for salvage,” he finished. He looked over at me apologetically, which hurt worse yet. “I don’t see any choice, kiddo.”

“Ah, Tom?”

All three of us jumped at the sound of Del’s voice calling through the vent. We were not used to being listened to from the barroom. “If you’re through, can I duck around for a minute and discuss something with you?”

“Sure, come on back,” Pop spoke up. “We’ll compare war wounds. You and me, Delano. We sure know how to pick women, don’t we.”

“Maybe it’s not an exact science, Tom.”

In no time Del joined us in the back room, halting at the bottom of the stairs, as if too bashful to come up. The bleak expression was gone, replaced by something mixed. He shuffled a little, as if looking for where to start, then began with it.

“That was quite some phone call. The powers that be loved the sheep camp sound portrait.” He looked embarrassed, happily so. “They played it for Alan Lomax and he called it a phenomenal piece of Americana. He said Canada Dan’s voice was the most original he’d heard since Leadbelly’s.”

Putting his hands in his pockets and lifting his shoulders, Del swayed a little as he spoke the next words.

“They want me to stay on and do as many Two Medicine sound portraits as I can for as long as it takes. Ranchers, roughnecks, hay hands, game wardens, forest rangers, any field of work I can think of—maybe even a bartender,” he said hopefully. “That’s besides the Missing Voices, of course. With everything involved, I figure it might take me all fall and maybe the winter, and that set me to thinking.” He gazed up with that bright-eyed expression from the first time he had set foot into the Medicine Lodge. “Since I’m going to be here anyway, Tom, if you could stand some help—in the saloon, I mean—behind the bar, I mean—well, here I am.”

Zoe and I were as still as statues, a moment that stays with me a half century later. We watched my father’s face change. Slowly he asked, “You mean, if I could pound enough bartending into Francine’s head to get by, I might be able to do the same on you?”

“That’s more or less what I was thinking.”

“Bartending isn’t tea and crumpets, Delano.”

“Probably not.”

“It’s long hours and short rest.”

“So is oral history, actually.”

“The pay’s not much, you know.”

Del grinned. “Then I’ll have to count on the rewards being great, won’t I.”