The Bartender's Tale (7 page)

Accordingly, by noon hour the main thing on my mind was the game of horse the usual fifth-grade bunch of us gathered for in the gymnasium. The junior high boys were hogging the basketball court as always, but in the alcove leading to the locker room there was a hoop mounted on the wall for practicing free throws, and that served for us.

“Who’s first?”

“Jimmy’s turn. He was horse’s wazoo last time.”

“Ruhss-ull keeps track.” Duane Zane perpetually thought it was funny to mock my name in caveman syllables. “Ruhss-ull
always
keeps track.”

“Somebody has to or it’d be your turn all the time, brain pain.”

Jimmy Hahn and Hal Busby, my closest friends, laughed plenty at that, and even Duane’s buddies, Sid Musgreave and Ted Austin, had to snicker.

Trying again, Duane sneered, “DDT, simp,” short for “drop dead twice.”

“And look like you? Huh-uh, nothing doing.”

Giving me a last dirty look, he flipped the basketball to Jimmy.

“Jump shot,” Jimmy decided. He gave a little hop and with a grunt catapulted the ball toward the basket, hitting the rim. We were just at the age where the basketball no longer seemed as big as a pumpkin to us, but it didn’t yield easily to our shot-making efforts.

Catching the rebound, Sid crooned, “Nice try, guy,” the latest word fad—
guy
this and
guy
that—we had picked up from somewhere. “Watch this.” With a grunt, he shot and hit the backboard, but not the basket.

“Rusty’s up,” Hal said, bouncing the ball to me. “C’mon, guy, show them how.”

To my surprise, if nobody else’s, I did, although my jump shot clattered around the rim for what seemed an interminable time before dropping through.

“Unreal! How’d you make that?”

“How’d you miss it? H,” I announced, because one of our countless and probably unique rules was that you had to call out each letter of H-O-R-S-E as you earned it with a basket; if you forgot to do it before the next player shot, you lost that letter.

“How about that”—Duane still was on my case—“the guy thinks he can spell.”

“‘Duane’ starts with ‘Duh,’ that’s easy enough,” I came right back at him. I had long since learned the one great lesson of early education: To fit in, stand your ground. Duane, my nemesis since that first fishing derby and always the loudest mouth at school, at first had been in the habit of making cracks like, “C’mon, Harry, show us your hairy part!”
I noticed, however, he did not join in when someone smarted off with, “Hey, Rusty, had any of your old man’s medicine lately?” A few playground fistfights settled the worst of that, and by now I wasn’t picked on any more than anyone else. To keep it that way, I made sure to join in on things at the proper volume, loudly playing work-up softball and touch football and horse with the other boys and whispering answers in class to selected girls; you would have had to look hard to single me out from my couple of dozen classmates. It was each day after school that I turned into the loner an only child tends to be. My close buddies, Jimmy and Hal, rode the school bus to where their families ranched, and neither of them—nor anyone else from school—ever laid eyes on the back room of the Medicine Lodge. That was my special spot in life, mine alone, and I intended to keep it that way.

“You guys know the difference between beans and peas?” Duane halted our game, smirking his face off. “You might spill the beans, but you can always take a pea.”

“Funny as a crutch, Zane. C’mon, you gonna shoot the ball or hatch it?”

“It’s not his turn anyway, it’s mine.”

“You’re crazy, it’s mine.”

“He’s right, it’s his.”

“Then let’s see him do something.”

“Here goes, losers.”

“You shoot like a girl, guy.”

“I do not, sparrowhead. That’s a two-handed set shot. Try it and die.”

Overflowing with energy and slander, the half dozen of us took turn after turn at trying to make the basketball go in the basket. In our rules of the game, as fixed as the laws of nature, every player not only had to attempt a shot from the same spot as the first shooter, it had to be the identical kind of shot. That first one, though, could be as creative as any eleven-year-old athlete could come up with. Sometimes we were totally silly in shooting it, sometimes we were cutthroat serious.

With Duane Zane, you couldn’t always tell which was which. “Free throw,” he declared when it came his turn to start the round. His version, however, proved to be an exaggerated underhand heave from down around his ankles.

Wouldn’t you know, the damn ball went in. Just then a blast of wind rattled the high windows at the end of the gym. Most of us let out
brr
s and yearnings for spring, but not Duane.

“I hope it storms for a month, so my dad keeps on making money pulling people out of ditches with his wrecker,” he proclaimed, his voice strutting with the rest of him after that basket.

Oh, how I wanted to bounce the ball off his fat head. Instead I managed to take revenge by swishing my shot through the net to match his dumb free throw. “Way to go, guy!” cried my adherents, while Duane made a gagging sound.

Noon hour was nearly over after that round, but we always believed if we hurried, we could squeeze in one more before the bell rang. I especially wanted to. With the lucky day I’d been having, all I needed for horse was
e
. Even better, it was my turn to start, and my choice of shot was as unpopular as I’d hoped.

“Aw, not that!”

“Be a guy, give us a break!”

“You and your pukey hook shot.”

Even Jimmy and Hal moaned with the others. A hook shot may not have seemed a likely accomplishment for me—I wasn’t a bad athlete, though I definitely was not a really good one—but at the start of the school year, Pop had put up a basketball hoop for me in a back-room corner that must have been a horse stall originally, and I endlessly practiced over-the-head shots there, pretending I was Wilt Chamberlain or some other hook shooter two or three times my height. Those solo hours paid off now as I catapulted the ball one-handed over the top of my head and it ricocheted off the backboard hard enough to rattle the rim, then toppled through the hoop, to everyone else’s groans and my cry of joy.

The basketball hadn’t hit the floor yet when it was intercepted by the school principal, Mr. Naylor.

“Whoa, boys. We’re sending bus students home early”—he singled out Hal and Jimmy—“on account of the roads. Grab your coats and books and be ready to go.”

“Lucky guys,” Duane mouthed off, while they went to be bussed home through treacherous weather.

I forged my own way from school at the regular time, the slow afternoon hours like enormous shadows dragging behind me. What was the saying, something about the driven snow? This snow was doing its unerring best to drive down my neck, the wind flinging the fat flakes right at me no matter how I turned my head. If this wasn’t the recipe for a thirty-year winter, I didn’t know what was. Beneath the bare cottonwood trees, English Creek was frozen over, an icy pond that went on for miles. The entire town of Gros Ventre looked like something that had been left in the freezer too long.

Anxious, I did not take time to go around to the back of the Medicine Lodge as usual but stumbled in, overshoes, mackinaw, cap, scarf, and mittens coated with snow, through the front entrance. I couldn’t wait to see Pop, safe, sound, big as life, bartending incomparably as usual.

But Howie was behind the bar. The saloon’s only other sign of life was a pair of the red-eyed sheepherders who were fixtures in the Two Medicine country, Canada Dan in from the Withrow ranch on one of his frequent spells of unemployment, and Snoose Syvertsen, likewise in from any number of places he had been hired and fired from down through the years, sitting out the winter in town and hoping for some charitable soul to attend to their thirst. They especially pinned their hopes on “tursters,” as they called tourists, who could be trapped into conversation and free drinks. Pop ritually grumbled about this scruffy pair leaning a hole into the bar but let them hang around because, he said, you couldn’t leave the damn old fools in the lurch; the lurch always sounded like the worst kind of place to be left in.

“Hi, Eskimo.” Howie’s croaky greeting past the cigarette nursed in the corner of his mouth did not tell me what I wanted to know.

“Isn’t . . . isn’t he back yet?”

A shake of the old bald head.

Despair gripped me to the bone. This was my worst fear coming true. What might have been a sympathetic guttural sound came from Canada Dan at the far end of the bar. “It’s sure too bad Tom’s not on hand, ain’t it?” he observed, as if to the world at large. “Depressing weather like this, he’d stand loyal customers a drink now and then to cheer things up.”

Snoose Syvertsen backed that up with vigorous nods. “That’s hunnerd percent gospel truth.”

“You’re so keen on the weather, just keep watching until it hits forty below in hell,” Howie advised them acidly. “That’s about when you’ll get a free drink from me in this joint.” He turned his attention back to me. “You better scoot on over to my place again, you’re still dressed for it. Lucille is gonna be looking for you.”

All I felt like doing was collapsing in a heap, but I put it differently: “I could just stay on here until Pop gets home.”

“No, you aren’t. That father of yours would skin me alive if I let you do that. Besides, I’m pretty quick gonna kick these two out and close the joint early. This weather’s a bugger.” He made a sour face, more than usual. “I’m getting too old for this.”

“Why isn’t he back by now?”

“He’s delayed, is why,” Howie said crabbily. He parted with his cigarette long enough to pluck a shred of tobacco off his tongue. “The road’s closed, up there.” Apology was not in Howie’s vocabulary, but his tone softened a trifle as he said, “He’ll show up. Now scoot.”

Head down, I traipsed the length of the barroom to go out the back of the saloon. “Your old man’s away for quite a while, eh?” Canada Dan remarked as I glumly went past. “He’s sure missed around here.”

Snoose Syvertsen wagged his head sadly. “Hunnerd percent.”

—

LIKE NANOOK RETURNING
to the ice floe, I trudged through snowdrifts to the bungalow across town, where Lucille greeted me in her nice, quiet way. She was as aged and sparrowlike as Howie, and while both of them treated me like a best guest, theirs was a house that had not known a child for many years. Prominent on the living room wall was the photograph of their Marine son who had been killed in the invasion of Tarawa in 1943.

This night was the darkest of my life in every way. I lay under strange old heavy blankets in that musty bedroom, listening to the wind, knowing it was whipping up the snow into a ground blizzard, the absolute worst thing for Pop if he was out there somewhere trying to drive home. My thoughts swirled and whirled as well. I blamed him for going by himself in this terrible weather, I blamed myself for not throwing such a fit he’d have taken me with him, for if I had gone along he would not have dared to let anything disastrous happen, right? In theory, anyway. This night I resented the existence of thirty-year winters, this night I could not get rid of the fear under the covers with me, fear that this time Pop’s trip was going to lead to unimaginable disaster, except I was imagining it.

There in the bone-chilling dark, the two dangers of his trips merged treacherously in my mind. If he had a love interest that kept drawing him north, there was an insidious side to such an affair. Namely, what if he stumbled into “maddermoany,” as he’d done once already, and this woman didn’t want a kid around? Wouldn’t he be forced to abandon me, in one unwelcome direction or the other? Then which was worse, Arizona or somewhere unknown? In my years with him, Phoenix had gradually diminished to Christmas cards and birthday cards curtly signed, “Ever, Aunt Marge.” It still was very much on the map, though, down there with the sand and sidewinders and cactuses. Ending up back in Aunt Marge’s maniac den with Ronny and Danny seemed to me a one-way ticket to hell. But against that known peril was the great unknown one, my vanished mother. I simply knew virtually nothing about the woman who had borne me. She existed only in my father’s extremely few remarks about her, mainly this one: “We split the blanket when she pulled out on me and you, and that’s that.” It wasn’t, as far as I was concerned.

I had learned her maiden name the hard way, by innocently asking Pop after I understood enough about marriage to be curious about that. “Joanie Jones if there ever was one,” he let out in one long, exasperated breath. “Why?” My stammered answer must have amounted to, Because. He reminded me yet again she had pulled out on us when I was still in the cradle and it was best for all concerned to have her out of our life. And while that was that one more time, I came out of it finally able to fit “Joanie Jones” onto the hazy outline of the woman who gave me birth. I went to school with a Janie and a Susie, so the girlish first name did not trouble me, although if you had a choice, you’d want your mother to be named something nice like Gwendolyn, wouldn’t you. “Jones” I found harder to deal with; how anything about her could be figured out from that, I hadn’t arrived at. In any case, her name could not tell me why she up and left a husband and a baby, and I harbored my own version of what must have divorced her from Pop and, for that matter, me. The Medicine Lodge, what else? It made sense. If, say, she disapproved of liquor, as there were people in the world who did, would she stay married to a bartender? Plainly not. Admittedly, leaving me—by way of Pop—to the clutches of Aunt Marge’s clan did not win her any high marks as a mother, but parents do whatever suits them, for good reason or not, every kid learns that.

Yet, gone from almost my entire life though my mother was, what if I was handed over to her if the worst happened to Pop? Would she even want me, reared in saloon circumstances as I was and by a man she couldn’t stand? For that matter, would I want to be with her, a total stranger, a dozen years of separation the only thing we had in common?

My thoughts kept jittering back and forth: better the demon I knew—Ronny—or the phantom I didn’t—her—if this diabolical trip did my father in, one way or another? Everything churned in my mind, except anything resembling a right answer. I huddled miserably under the covers, ashamed that I was near tears not only for him but for myself.