The Bartender's Tale (9 page)

“Didn’t I?” He came to life. “It was a doozy of a speech, all about the Missouri River and how when the water was put to work, so were people who hadn’t had a job in years.” He tapped the Scotch tape in the palm of his hand in some odd rhythm of memory to envision the scene for himself as well as me. “His train came right to the dam, see, and they had loudspeakers rigged up so when the man himself came out on the rear platform, you could hear that voice of his for a mile. I tell you, kiddo, it was like hearing from heaven, him that day.” Stretching to the FDR poster one more time, he pressed a thumb on a top corner, as if to make sure the tape would hold a good long time. “If Frank Roosevelt walked in here right now,” he was saying pensively, “I’d stand him a drink on the house, you better bet I would.” His brow knotted in brief contemplation. “Cutty Sark and soda, is my guess. He was always classy.”

“Pop, wasn’t he in a wheelchair?”

“Don’t sweat the small stuff, okay?” His gaze still lingered on the posters, the foxy old campaigner side by side with the youthful president-to-be. “Damn it, some people just shouldn’t have to die. They’re too good to put in the ground.” He shook his head. “Life cheats on us sometimes.”

Handing me the tape to put away, he noticed the way I was looking at him. “The toilet needs another scrubbing,” he said gruffly. “Better get at it.”

—

THE BIG ROUND NUMBER
of a new decade on the calendar always brings anticipation with it. After the Depression years of the Thirties, the World War II years of the Forties, the Cold War years of the Fifties, people of my father’s generation were more than ready for the world to behave itself better in the Sixties. All I knew was that 1960 was bringing surprise after surprise, some bad, some good.

“Guess what, Pop!”

The weather was still at it, new snow on top of old, old snow, some weeks later when I hurried home from school, as determined as I was excited. I had shed my coat, cap, and overshoes in the back room and rushed through to the quiet barroom, where he was drying beer glasses. “We have a class assignment about ‘Family History and What It Means to Us.’” I wasn’t going to pass this up. “Things like—”

“History, hey? That’s a deep subject, as the well digger said.” He tossed me his towel. “Snow on your eyebrows.”

I mopped that off. “Things like, how come—”

“Better have a sunshine juice while we think about this.” He uncapped an Orange Crush for me and lit a leisurely cigarette for himself. It was not the first time personal matters of this sort stalled with him. While this father of mine seemed to know everything worth knowing about anyone who ever stepped into the saloon, he never talked about himself. Not for lack of trying, I didn’t know his precise age, and he wouldn’t even let on to me when his birthday was. “Same as last year,” he’d say, and that was that. He stayed equally vague on the subject of genealogy; to judge by him, we might be the only living people without ancestors. Perhaps this murky lineage should not have bothered me as much as it did—a Harry family tree, after all, might be full of rotten apples, if those Phoenix cousins were any example—but I had developed a burning reason for wanting to know more. As I persevered with now before he could sidle away from the topic behind a cloud of cigarette smoke.

“Things like, how come I’m named Russell?”

It bothered me every time I had to write my full name on a school assignment such as this one, or when the teacher called on me, or when some grown-up who didn’t know any better would simper, “My, my, Russell, you’re growing like a weed.” Worst of all, of course, was when Duane Zane would drag it out so it sounded like it was in some idiot language. Thank heaven for “Rusty,” which bought me survival in the schoolyard, but my given name did not seem to fit with anything I could figure out. Half the males in the Two Medicine country were called Bill or Bob or Jim or Joe or, for that matter, Tom, so why had I been tagged with something that seemed more than a bit out of place? Now I looked the question to the person responsible, determined to get an answer out of him.

He barely paused in his toweling of an invisible spot on a glass. “Old family name. Didn’t Marge tell you all that stuff way back?” I shook my head. “Doesn’t matter”—he breezed past that—“nobody amounted to a hill of beans before us anyway. Do your report about you and me and Igdrasil and going fishing and junk like that, why not.”

I wasn’t satisfied, and immediately wrote to Aunt Marge, airmail, in my careful fifth-grade fashion asking about my namesake back there in family history. She wrote back, saying she had no idea what my father was talking about.

Confronted with this, Pop swabbed the wood of the bar this way and that, studying me out of the corner of his eye. “Okay, if it’ll make you quit asking.” He pointed his chin to where
Meat’s Not Meat Till It’s in the Pan
hung slightly askew on the far wall. “You’re named after him.”

I gawked at the scene of the hapless hunter. “That guy? The Buck Fever Case?”

“Hell no, use your thinking part,” came the impatient answer. “The painter.”

Now I gaped at the father who had plucked a name for me off the nearest Charlie Russell purplish rendering. My dismay surely showed, as he said defensively: “You had to be called something.”

“I guess so, but I can’t just hand in that I’m named after somebody I’m not even related to, can I. That’s not family history, Pop.” Suddenly something cunning came to me. Now was the time, now if ever. “Hey, I know what! I bet I’d get an A on stuff you can tell me about”—how to put it?—“the other side of my family.”

He winced the way he always did when things led in this direction. “Rusty, you’re better off if I don’t say anything about your mother.” Rubbing the side of his head as if it ached, he continued: “When you go through a gate, close it behind you, right? That’s how it is with me and her.” A shrug. “I’ve told you she was nothing but a Jones, anyway. Hard to do anything with that.”

I was disappointed but not surprised; so much for anything maternal, one more time. He was determinedly steering matters back toward the namesake who had done the Buck Fever masterpiece on the wall. “If I was you, I’d stick with good old Charlie Russell and—”

When I wailed that I’d flunk the assignment if I didn’t have anything better than that to turn in, he held up his hands like a traffic cop. “Don’t get hydrophobia about this. Make something up.”

“I can’t, Pop. It’s school.”

“What”—his eyebrows climbed—“getting yourself out of something that has you stuck doesn’t count? You’ve got to learn that, too.” My dubious expression made him sigh hard. “Well, hell,” he said to himself, “there’s always the proxy method,” whatever that was supposed to mean. Then to me: “All right, we’ll come up with some kind of pedigree and you can put your name onto it like you’re trying it out for a little while, okay? It’s sort of like renting a house.” It did not sound exactly okay to me, but I was past the point of arguing. He checked the clock. “Your whole class has the same assignment to dig up family stuff?”

“Huh-uh,” I said, although I couldn’t see why it mattered, “just us in the first half of the alphabet. The others are doing town history and what it means to them.”

“You’ve got it made, kiddo. Grab your tablet and get up there in the back room, where you can hear.”

I did so, my ears practically into the air vent. Very nearly to the minute, in came Earl Zane, practically licking his chops for the beer my father was already drawing from the tap. Large-headed and bigheaded both, he was one of those characters who had to be put up with in a town as small as Gros Ventre, where not only people but businesses needed to get along with one another. Pop normally gassed up at Earl’s service station, and unfortunately Earl returned that kind of patronage, strutting in as he did now with his belly lopping over his belt buckle, a moonfaced grin breaking out on him as usual; he was the kind who winked with half his face. I could tell from the set of Pop’s shoulders he was braced to be civil, even though this customer was the town’s leading windbag.

What passed for conversation with Earl Zane ensued. “Ever hear the one about Pat and Mike and Mustard and the toilet brush, Tom?”

I never would understand why two Irishmen and someone named Mustard figured in half the jokes told by Earl and, for that matter, the entire male clientele of the Medicine Lodge, but they seemed indispensable. Biting my pencil to keep from groaning out loud as the joke played out, I sneaked a peek through the vent slats at Earl toasting himself with his beer. “Know where I first heard that? Around the bucking chutes, at the Calgary Stampede in the old days. Laugh, I thought I’d cry.”

“Nobody remembers them like you, Earl, that’s for sure.” Pop manfully chatted for a couple of minutes while the beer went down in swigs. “Ready for some more holy water?”

“I meant to talk to you about that. This month’s caught me a little short of—”

“Don’t sweat it, catch up next time.” As he slid the foam-topped glass to a surprised Earl, Pop said casually, “Hey, speaking of the old days, somebody was in here the other day saying he knew some Zanes in North Dakota, back when he was yay-high. Relatives of yours?”

“In North Dakota? I’d rather have relatives from South Hell than there.” Earl got his mouth in gear. “Didn’t I ever tell you we’re Minnesota people, as far back as it goes?” Getting the idea, I made that Wisconsin in the Harry family version. “We’d still be there, breeding with Swedes, if it wasn’t for my granddad Herman.” Scribbling away, I drew a decisive breath and changed that to Russell. I suppose I should have been remorseful about pirating Duane Zane’s forebears, but because he was Duane, I wasn’t. “The old boy hopped on a train back there in Saint Paul in nineteen-aught-three,” Earl rolled on, “he’d heard there was all this free land in Montana being thrown open to homestead—” I wrote as fast as it spilled out of him, more than enough history for any family to rent. And it got an A.

—

THAT BIG WINTER
of ’60 kept up its weather tricks, storming as if it would never quit and then abruptly thawing everything with a chinook wind warm as an opened oven. This happened time and again, until the calendar finally said it was spring, whether or not the weather agreed. In between snow squalls, the Two Medicine country waded in mud up to its shoe tops, which gave me plenty to do in my job as swamper. One of those Saturday mornings of what was supposed to be spring, Pop considered the tracks on the barroom floor and joked, “Maybe we just ought to hose out the joint.” At least I thought he was joking. But he wasn’t when he contemplated the white slushy street. “So much for the opening day of fishing at the rezavoy.”

Secretly I didn’t mind if fishing season was delayed. As far as I was concerned, the rainbow trout could swim in peace indefinitely. I was content to be in the company of my busy father and the zoo of animal heads and the other comfortable surroundings of the barroom—even the dumb hunting painting by my namesake painter—on mornings like this, with Pop more like his old self now that we both had settled down some after that Canada trip of his. Money makes a difference in life, I had to admit, and since that trip he showed no sign that we were running out anytime soon, paying bills with only the usual muttering to himself.

Things were back on track enough that I was daydreaming a little when I started my chores with the push broom to get up the worst of the mud before mopping, still in the thrall of living through a historic time, although even for me, the winter had proved its point by now. This latest surprise storm had dumped several inches of heavy, wet snowfall not twenty-four hours before, and now the day was innocently bright and clear. The barroom was washed in light from sunshine reflecting off the snow, although
washed
may not be the most appropriate word, given the dusty places atop the booths and other surfaces showing up in the unaccustomed brightness. Pop had not pointed out my housekeeping lapses yet, but I knew I was in for an extended session with the dust cloth after I finished sweeping and mopping, and I felt put out at the weather. I wasn’t the only one. “This isn’t exactly great for business,” Pop muttered, irritably flicking his towel at an imaginary mote on the bar.

He scarcely had the words out of his mouth when, to our surprise, Canada Dan slogged in, stomping snow onto the mat by the door and grumbling to himself while he kicked his overshoes off, even though we weren’t open for business yet.

“Hey,” Pop met him with, “I thought you went bunch herding for Dode.” Curious myself, I perked my ears while I swept dried mud into the dustpan. Lambing time had started weeks ago, the season when sheepherders migrated back to work on ranches all across the Two.

“I did,” came the sour reply. “He canned me. Ran me off the place. I caught a ride in with the county plow.”

Pop and I almost had to laugh at this latest in the long-standing story of cantankerous herders and fed-up ranchers. But the look on Dan’s face stopped us. We watched silently as he hoisted himself onto a bar stool with a grunt and grimaced toward Pop. “Something wrong with your pouring hand?”

“It hasn’t woke up yet,” Pop said mildly, taking his time about reaching for a shot glass and bottle.

“I ain’t mooching, Tom, if that’s what’s bothering you.” Canada Dan pulled out some crumpled bills and loose change in a spill onto the bar. “Gimme some bar grub while you’re at it.” This was another bad sign. Only someone too drunk to leave a bar stool ever ate the pickled pigs’ knuckles and preserved boiled eggs swimming in big jars of bluish brine at the very back of the breakfront. Canada Dan plainly wanted to get that way as fast as humanly possible. Reaching for his drink almost before Pop finished pouring it, he said in a deadened voice, “Here’s to them things called lambs. What’s left of them.”

Pop stood motionless and my broom and dustpan halted.

The grizzled sheepherder clutched the shot glass so tightly he seemed to be drinking out of his fist. “I lost a couple hunnerd in this storm,” he said hollowly, “never had it happen before in all the years. Had them out in bunches like I was supposed to, so the ewes could eat a little new grass to help their milk. It started blizzarding so goddamn fast I only got about half the bunches into the shed. The others, they’re froze under snowdrifts.” Shoulders hunched miserably, he looked like he was about to cry. “It wasn’t only my fault. Dode listens to them radio forecasts like they was religion. And he never did drive down to the lower shed and tell me a foot of snow was gonna hit, whatever the hell got into him.” He tossed down the rest of his drink as if the whiskey was water. “Then this morning first thing, here he comes and blows up at me something fierce. Tells me to get out of his sight. What kind of a way is that to treat a man, I ask you.” Choking up, Canada Dan twirled the shot glass on the bar wood. “C’mon, Tom. I know you got more where that came from.”