The Bartender's Tale (8 page)

I heard Howie get up in the night. The toilet flushed, the slap-slap of slippers stopped at my bedroom doorway.

“You’re awake, aren’t you.” I could see his bald head in the light from all the snow.

“Uh-huh.”

“How about some warm milk to help you sleep?”

“No, thanks. It would just make me have to get up and take a leak.”

“There’s a path wore in the floor about that,” Howie readily granted. He shuffled back to bed, but not before saying: “Your old man generally knows what he’s doing. He’ll make it back tomorrow, you’ll see.”

Grown-ups are full of painless predictions like that. I was in no mood to have reassurance spooned into me. My worries were altogether too big, nobody else could understand the fix I was in with Pop lost and gone, as I was more and more sure he must be, the inside of my head would give me no rest for as long as I lived, I just knew, and more to the immediate point, I wasn’t going to be able to go to sleep ever again.

—

“HEY. KIDDO.
Rise and shine.”

It was either bright daylight or a dazzling dream. Pop was shaking me awake, peeling away my cocoon of blankets.

“Wh-what time is it?”

“Saturday. Come on, upsy daisy, let’s get over to our place.”

Groggy, so surprised to see my missing father back in existence that I couldn’t put words to it, I fumbled into my clothes while he tidied my bed in the manner expected of a guest. The silence of the house said Howie and Lucille were not up yet.

The two of us floundered out to the Packard, purring like a limousine, through fresh snow up to the top buckles of our overshoes. He looked like he’d been pulled through a knothole, mussed, weary-eyed, distracted. But he drove home capably enough, taking advantage of the deep set of wheel tracks someone earlier had left, then, at the untouched snow of the alley and our driveway, he floored the gas pedal and fishtailed the old car to its natural parking spot beneath the bare-bone branches of Igdrasil. The gunboat Buick, in its spot, was under so much snow it resembled an igloo, and I wished for the same to happen to the Packard, if that’s what it took to keep Tom Harry home.

“Here we are,” he said, calm as cream, and I gave him a look he pretended not to notice.

The house was so chilly, we kept our coats on at first. Neither of us saying anything, I set the table and things like that while he made coffee. He crucially needed some, I saw. He still was looking nearly done in, the lines in his face deeper than ever, his pompadour flopping to the sides. Worst of all, his pouring hand shook a little in filling the coffee cup. But when the house warmed up some, he shed his coat and took over the kitchen as though he were back in the barroom, getting out the soup bowls and big spoons.

“So, kiddo. What’ll it be this morning?”

“Oyster.”

We never fussed any with breakfast, merely heated a can of soup, almost always tomato or chicken noodle, so my choice was enough out of the ordinary that he scrutinized me before going to the cupboard.

“Okay, let’s splurge. Get out the milk and butter.”

When it was ready, we each crumbled crackers into oyster stew until it was nearly solid, and commenced to eat. He still wasn’t saying anything, so I did.

“Howie said the road was closed.”

“Howie is not the last word on every damn thing.” He started to dip his spoon, then felt my look. “It was shut overnight, is all.”

“Then where did you spend the night?”

The only answer was a slurp of soup, which he chased with a swig of coffee.

“Pop? Did you hear? Where’d—”

“In the car, if you really have to know.”

At least he hadn’t been with some woman. Or had he? “Were . . . were you stuck?”

“Hell no. There was just a roadbock until the snowplows got things cleared.”

The trickle of fear in me ever since last night pooled into terror. “But . . . don’t people die from the exhaust, sitting there like that?”

Irritably he tried to spoon up an oyster, which slipped back into the bowl. “I didn’t, did I . . . Will you get your mind off this? The Mounties are the highway cops up there, and they kept checking on all the cars so nobody went to sleep with the motor running. Satisfied now?”

Not by a million miles. I swallowed hard, which had nothing to do with breakfast, and spoke the plain truth. “I don’t want you to go on these trips like you do.”

“I wouldn’t need three guesses on that.”

“They scare me worse than anything.”

“Hey, don’t exaggerate,” he gruffly instructed.

I didn’t think I was. The look on my face told him as much.

With an exasperated sigh he quit trying on his soup and sat back, frowning at me. “Damn it, kiddo, you want to save being scared for something really worth it.”

“I can’t help it.” I was determined not to blubber, but my eyes were getting moist and my voice had started to quiver. “You go away like that, and I don’t even know where for sure, and then there’s a blizzard, and if you’re out in it froze stiff or gassed to death and I don’t have you anymore—how am I supposed to not be scared?”

“Rusty, I don’t like doing it,” his voice was as strained as mine, “any more than you like me doing it.”

“Then why do you have to?”

“There are things that just won’t wait.”

“What things?”

“Things,” he despaired, as if those were too numerous to face over breakfast. “You see me fighting the bills like I do, sometimes it’s just worse, is all.” He started to say something more, but stopped and ran a hand through his hair, smoothing the black in with the silver. “Rule number one is, you got to play the hand you been dealt.”

“I thought it was don’t wait until you hear from—”

“Don’t split hairs at this time of day, okay?” With obvious effort he steadied his voice and his gaze at me. “The back-room loot helps out with things, that’s all there is to it.”

“But why do you need to go all the way to Canada? Why can’t you just make a trip to someplace close for a change, like Great Falls? When it’s not snowing like crazy?”

“It pays off better up there,” he said in frustration. “Cripes, I’d have thought you figured that out a long time ago.”

I must have looked immovably skeptical.

“All right, then, Mr. Dubious.” He rose and went to where his coat was hung. Reaching into a pocket I didn’t even know was there, he pulled out an envelope and dropped it on the table next to my soup bowl. “Take a look.”

It was bulging with money. Nothing smaller than tens and twenties, either. More money than I had ever seen, even when the bar’s cash register was full after a Saturday night.

“Really? That much? For those old things?”

“Miracles happen, if you give them enough help.” He sat back down heavily, retrieving the money, as if to make sure it didn’t get away. “There’s your answer on these trips, okay?”

“Now you don’t have to do it again,” I pressed on hopefully, “until winter is over, I bet.”

“We’ll see. Pass the crackers.”

—

A SATURDAY,
even in the heart of winter, meant getting ready for Saturday night, and so he pretty soon directed himself to the saloon, and I stuck right with him, making up for lost time if I could. Howie wisely had left the heat up overnight and the place was livable when we stepped in and started doing things. Pop took a look in the barroom, where the floor showed all the evidence of snowy feet tracking in while he was away, but he only muttered, “First mess first,” and climbed the stairs to the landing to contend with the stack of bills that had come in at the end of the year. I kept busy down below at my small chores of sorting empty bottles and seeing to the supply of towels and aprons while he sat at his desk, writing checks. I noticed him looking at his watch a number of times, and when the phone rang, he already was frowning as he answered it.

“Wouldn’t you know it,” he groaned after hanging up. “The Finletter kid didn’t make it home last night—the basketball team’s snowed in up at Cut Bank. Not the first time he’s stood me up that way.” A high school boy always was hired—they came cheap in those days—to clean up the barroom on Saturday morning for that night, the peak of the week’s business. “I’m gonna have to can him and find a new swamper, that’s all there is to it.”

I would like to say I had been waiting for this chance. The truth is, I spoke up before really thinking about it.

“Can’t you just hire me? I can do all that stuff.”

He looked at me in surprise. “You aren’t even—”

“Yes I am! Almost.”

“—twelve.” He eyed me the way he did a customer asking to be put on the tab. “You really think you can do everything that needs doing?”

“Sure!”

“Sweep and mop and dust the whole joint?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Clean the spittoons?”

I hesitated, then nodded.

“The toilets?”

I had to gulp hard on that, but managed to nod again.

He still did not look entirely convinced. “Okay, I’ll give you a try. But you better be up to the mark. I’d hate to fire my own kid.”

—

THAT WAS MY INTRODUCTION
to broom and mop and toilet brush. And in one of those tricks life likes to play on us, that first Saturday forenoon and the ones to follow I came to truly know my father as a bartender.

Spending the time there in the front of the joint with him as he puttered behind the long, dark bar getting everything ready for opening time, his reflection playing hide-and-seek behind him in the breakfront’s angles of mirror as he arranged glasses and bottles, was altogether different from the constrained view through the vent. The tall man with shoulders that stretched his white shirt roved from one housekeeping chore to the next in the room-long aisle in back of the bar, as if primping delicate blossoms.
Loving
may not be the most apt word for the kind of care he gave to his bartending domain, but it’s close. With him, finesse equaled preparation; his just-so way of doing things gave me plenty to live up to in my new role as swamper. Seeing out of the corner of one’s eye is not an entirely unusual ability, but I swear, he seemed to have such second sight all the way back to his ears, as I found if I failed to clean out the dried-up spider parts in some tucked-away corner and would immediately hear, “Missed a spot. Get with it, kiddo.”

In spite of such scrutiny, I was proud and pleased to have the job and particularly the pay, not that it was much. My favorite part of swamping out the saloon was mopping behind the bar, where I got to see what a master bartender kept out of sight under the bar top. A sock filled with metal washers to bust apart ice cubes. Bottle openers of every design. Countless swizzle sticks. A hot plate with a coffeepot to keep him going through the long shifts. A plump stash of fresh towels, the secret behind his always having a clean white one in hand. The Medicine Lodge clientele preponderately took its drinks straight, but just in case someone came in wanting something more fancy, he had a storehouse of makings ready under there: maraschino cherries and a few limes and lemons and bottled olives and even cinnamon sticks—a regular little grocery shelf, it seemed to me. And down at the far end of the bar, the amen corner as he called it, was tucked away a stack of those paperback mysteries with racy covers for reading when business was dead, and a pair of bedroom slippers to give his feet some relief in the long hours behind the bar. All this was like seeing a secret side of Pop, and as Saturdays went by, I never was back there in his working domain with the winter light casting a kind of hush over everything without feeling I was someplace special to him, and therefore to me.

The one thing he did keep out in the open, prominent and practically as big as life, was that FDR campaign poster, always in place on the breakfront mirror, right next to the cash register. And before 1960 was very far along, it was joined by another. Looking over my shoulder then as I swabbed the floor was not only Franklin D. Roosevelt, eternally jaunty in his fourth successful run for president, sixteen years before, but also the current Democratic hopeful making his way through the primaries, John F. Kennedy, combed and groomed until he shone. Pop was more than ready for a new political champion, having suffered through two Republican terms of Eisenhower, whom he always called Eisenhoover. I was dutifully sweeping the floor one of these mornings, not far along in my career as swamper, when he let out a “Cripes!” that made me look up. He had noticed that the campaign posters were peeling away from the glass, a state of affairs that could not be tolerated. “Get me the Scotchman tape, why don’t you.”

When I fetched it from the back room, he ever so carefully Scotch-taped the corners of the campaign posters that restored Democrats to their rightful eminence, and stood back.

“This Kennedy maybe has what it takes,” he said with satisfaction. “FDR, though, he topped them all. A giant among men. We maybe wouldn’t be up against so much of it,” he ruminated, as if to a listening customer, although I was the only one around, “the Russians acting up the way they do and this Castro in Cuba and the country going to the dogs, if Franklin Delano Roosevelt was still the man in charge.” He gazed at the large face of FDR some moments more. “I heard him give a speech once, you know.”

“Really? Here?”

“Not by a long shot,” he dismissed Gros Ventre’s eligibility for a presidential visit. “Up at the dam.” I could tell he spoke the next two words simply for the sound of them. “Fort Peck.”

This was new of him. I knew vaguely that he had tended bar there during the construction of the big dam, sometime before working his way up to buy the Medicine Lodge. Occasionally someone he had known in those years, such as J. L. and Nan Hill, who now ranched on upper English Creek, would drop in for a drink on their way home and they would get going on something that happened in the old dam days, as they liked to call that Depression period. From school I knew a little about the Fort Peck Dam, built by the government in the 1930s, when projects of the New Deal were being set up as fast as the alphabet could be divvied out. According to the schoolbook, the enormous dirt-fill dam on the Missouri River had given ten thousand people jobs and wages and hope. Doubtless they were ready for a drink, too, after all that shoveling or whatever other manual labor dam workers worked at, and from the sound of it when the Hills and Pop got to laughing about some saloon episode back then, tending bar there must have been a good job for someone starting out in life. I had never paid any great attention to such reminiscing as it drifted through the vent, the way we can’t quite credit parents with real existences before we came along in their lives. But this time, perhaps it was the look on Pop’s face as he stood there studying his political hero that made me prompt him: “You never told me about that.”