by Ivan Doig
That may not have been too far from the truth, I saw when I drew closer to the lengthy black vehicle. I learned it was a 1932 Packard, its characteristic hood nearly as long as the four-door passenger compartment, which looked like it could hold a baseball team. Up close, there was a certain old-fashioned elegance to the car, from its gleaming grille and white-sidewall tires to its outsize headlights mounted on fenders that swooped all the way back to the running board at the door frame. “How come you”—I corrected that as I circled the automotive behemoth—“we have two cars?”
“The Packard still has its uses”—he was busy unfurling something—“you’ll see. You don’t get rid of a good thing just because it’s got a little age on it, right? I’ve had it since Blue Eagle days, up at Fort Peck.” I took in this news with some confusion. My father had been at a fort? But didn’t he tell me the Blue Eagle was a joint, like the Medicine Lodge? That did not seem to go with being a soldier, nor did possessing the biggest, fanciest car I’d ever seen. He was not about to explain anything further, though, cheerfully going at the task at hand. “Here, help me with this banner.”
Accordingly, I held one end of a large oilcloth banner while he tied it across the car’s extensive trunk. Twice a year, it developed, the Packard attained this kind of starring role, this time with the banner reading: THE MEDICINE LODGE SUPPORTS THE GROS VENTRE FISHING DERBY. CATCH ’EM TO THE LIMIT! The other occasion was rodeo time, when it was prominently parked in front of the saloon, bannering the message: THE MEDICINE LODGE SUPPORTS THE GROS VENTRE RODEO. RIDE ’EM TO THE WHISTLE!
“There,” he said in satisfaction, standing back with his hands on his hips. “Ready to go. People get a kick out of seeing the old heap. Besides, it never hurts to advertise.”
So we went to the rezavoy in what Pop regarded as style, and joined what appeared to be the entire populace of the Two Medicine country at the water’s edge. Setting off where he assured me was the best spot on the lake, he was right at home in the festive throng, meeting and greeting people in wholesale numbers, looking like a million dollars in his dress hat, a pearl-gray stockman Stetson, while I felt out of place in my dumb cloth sun hat from Phoenix. Headgear was really the least of what was on my mind, though, in this looming situation of me versus what appeared to be every kid in Montana ready to compete for mysterious rainbow-hued fish.
Churning with apprehension as he assembled my pole for me, I listened distractedly to his recital of the fishing contest rules. He could bait my hook for me in preparation for the initial cast, but after that, “It’s up to you, kiddo.” He reminded me to bury the hook in the bait so it would look good to the fish. And then, when I caught a trout—a prospect I wasn’t at all sure I looked forward to—I would need to land it myself, but he could help me take the hook out of its mouth, because sometimes it got snagged so hard it had to be torn out with pliers. Fishing was more gory than I’d thought. At least there were prizes, in each age category, for catching the biggest fish and the most fish. “Two shots at packing home the money, you can’t beat that,” Pop topped off his pep talk. “Ready? Let’s go give the fish hell.”
First we had to sign up, atop the approach to the dam, where a truck was parked with a loudspeaker crowning its cab. White water was picturesquely gushing through the floodgate out in the middle of the causeway, and the sky could not have been more blue. As Pop and I approached the registration table, the announcer on the flatbed of the truck boomed out, “WELCOME TO THE ROD AND REEL EXTRAVAGANZA YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR, THE SECOND ANNUAL RAINBOW FISHING DERBY!” as if just for us. The woman who took the entry money and pinned a number on my back seemed considerably less hospitable for some reason, eyeing me and then Pop, as if to make sure we matched. He didn’t seem to pay that any mind, kidding with the announcer and the Chamber of Commerce organizers of the festivity who were standing around, looking important. The civic side of my father was complicated, as it can be in a town where everyone knows everyone else’s business. For example, he would not have anything to do with the Rotary Club. “Not until the esses of bees quit stealing money out of my pocket with that beer booth of theirs.” The Kiwanis and Toastmasters, younger strivers hoping for a station in life higher than a saloon, were not sure they wanted anything to do with him. Leave it to Pop, he sorted it all out without blinking: he had no argument with commerce, nor it with him, so the local Chamber received his wholehearted backing.
As now, when he steered me past the army of adults attacking trout with rod and reel to the stretch of lakeshore reserved, according to the banner flapping in the breeze, for JUNIOR ANGLERS. Boys my age or a year or so younger, and a sprinkling of girls, were being stationed far enough apart that we wouldn’t spear one another with our fishpoles during energetic casts. Pop got me settled in my spot, slipped me the bait can of chicken guts cut into gooey strips, told me again to give the fish hell, and retreated up the bank a safe distance, where other parents were clustered. My head was spinning. Second annual extravaganza; why wasn’t I plucked from Phoenix for this a year ago? Another nettlesome thought: If it wasn’t for the fishing derby, would I still be . . .
I did not have time to dwell on that, because the announcer’s voice was booming again. “AND NOW WE COME TO THE SPECIAL FEATURE OF THE DERBY, THE CONTEST WHERE THE KIDDIES SHOW US HOW IT’S DONE. READY, JUNIOR ANGLERS? GET SET . . . START FISHING!”
Hooks and lines swished through the air at all different altitudes, and the tips of more than a few fishing poles dunked in the lake, mine included.
A pause ensued, as those of us who had thrashed bait into the water wondered what to do next, beyond hanging on to the fishing rod with both hands, while the grown-ups shouted conflicting advice—“Try a longer cast!” “Keep your hook in the water, not in the air!” Stealing a peek over my shoulder, I saw Pop standing with his arms folded, the picture of patience, confident that the secret bait would lure fish in my direction in a frenzy. Even though my line sagged out into the lake only a little way, I decided to let it sit there. The breeze had picked up—it would have been news when the wind wasn’t blowing at Rainbow Reservoir—so I didn’t want to risk another cast; the fish could jump ashore if they wanted chicken guts badly enough, as far as I was concerned.
To my surprise, suddenly there was a sharp tug on my line. I yanked my pole up and back as hard as I could, the hook and line sailing over my head in a mighty arc. But no fish. Worse than that, I realized, no bait.
“Hot damn, they’re biting!” Pop yelled encouragement. “Don’t horse it like that, though, just pull the next one in real easy. Bait up and go get him.”
During this, the boy nearest me had actually landed a fish. “Way to go, buckshot!” His father, a chesty man with a red face broad as a fire bucket, came charging down the bank to unhook the catch and gill it onto a stringer. The trout was a good size, but I was disappointed to see it was not striped like a rainbow, merely brightly speckled on the sides. As both of us faced the challenge of baiting our hooks, I said to the chunky kid in sportsmanlike fashion, “Nice fish.”
“If you like something slimy as snot.” He made a face. “I hate fishing, I wish it had never been invented.” Narrowing his critical view of things to me, he demanded: “Who’re you, anyway?”
I told him, which drew me a beady look and the remark, “Huh, you’re that one. My daddy gets a snootful in your daddy’s saloon when Mom isn’t looking.”
“Uhm, what’s your name?”
“Duane Zane.” He smirked. “I don’t take up much alphabet that way, my folks tell everybody.” By now he had shaken little doughy pellets of some kind out of a bait can and was jabbing his hook through one.
“What’re those?”
Duane smirked again. “Pink marshmallows. My daddy says they’re our secret weapon.” Before I could even blink, he picked up his pole and whipped the line—whizzzz—over my head and into the lake.
Gulping, I managed t
o bait my hook with a sloppy bit of chicken gut and get everything into the water again. As if I didn’t have enough on my mind before, now the holy terror next to me already had another bite and was sidestepping in my direction as he tried to haul the fish to shore. It was then that the wind strengthened, and somewhere down the rank of junior anglers from Duane, a gust caught a line being weakly flung out and blew the hook back onto the boy making the cast. He screeched and threw his pole aside, unfortunately toward the kid next to him. That one panicked, too, and I gaped at fishpoles toppling like dominoes toward Duane and me, with lines and hooks flying crazily. Busy trying to land his catch, he glanced down in irritation when a hook caught in his sleeve, yelped when he saw what it was, and yanked his pole so hard, the fish flew off and his hook flew at me. I yowled as it caught my ear.
Pop was right there in the stampede of parents rushing to tend to aggrieved children. “Don’t get in an uproar,” he told me, cutting the fish line with his jackknife and tilting my head so he could see how the hook was embedded. I had quit yowling, but the tears of fright and pain would not stop.
During this, Duane Zane seemed mostly put out that I was in possession of his fishhook, but his father hovered in, full of advice. “Push it on through and snip the barb off, why don’t you, Tom?”
Pop shook his head grimly. “It’s caught too hard.” Now I was so scared I couldn’t even whimper, thinking of pliers tearing the hook out of my ear the way it would from a fish’s mouth. At least, it turned out, Pop was not going to do it himself, saying he had to get me to town to the doctor.
The CATCH ’EM TO THE LIMIT! banner flapping madly behind us, he drove the gravel road at high speed while I hunched down against the passenger door, a picture of misery, at least to myself. Neither of us had anything to say until he asked, “Doesn’t hurt, does it?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, okay, we’ll get you to the doc in no time.” And the Packard somehow picked up even more speed.
His day off interrupted, the doctor was grumpy, as if someone else’s fishhook sticking in my ear was my fault. Sighing at what people get themselves into, he sat me on the examining table, numbed my ear with something, used a needle-nosed instrument to maneuver the hook out, dabbed some Mercurochrome on my wound, and told me I was as good as new. There wasn’t even any blood in sight, which I have to admit disappointed me.
As we went home, Pop tried to make me feel better by telling me about worse things that had happened to people in his experience. Unloading our fishing gear in the driveway beneath the bower of Igdrasil, he paused when I still hadn’t said anything.
“The ear still bothering?”
“Huh-uh.”
“What’s the matter, then?”
“Are you going to send me back?”
“Where? To Phoenix?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What for?”
“The derby’s over. And I didn’t catch anything, I got caught.”
We looked at each other for a long moment, pretty much a life’s worth, as it turned out, before he muttered: “What kind of an ess of a bee do you think I am?” The fishing poles clattered in his grasp as he headed for the house, motioning me on in. “School starts Monday, we need to get you some pencils and tablets and junk like that.” At the back door, he stopped and looked at me again, his eyebrows cocked.
“Kiddo? About today—the fishing and all. Don’t sweat it. You’ll show them how, next year.”
2
SO MY SUITCASE stayed under the bed and I stayed on as half-pint participant in the world of my bartending father. He and I occupied the house behind the saloon like a pair of confirmed bachelors, rattling around in the big old place by ourselves except when the cleaning woman came and moved the dust a little. Having learned his lesson about housekeepers, Pop employed Nola Atkins for this, who was seventy-five if she was a day. Otherwise, the two of us were free to go about domestic matters in our unrestricted male way. Actually, the house was where we slept and kept our clothes. We lived at the Medicine Lodge.
—
“—THE GUY LOOKS over at her in bed when they hear her husband come in downstairs and says, ‘Can you cache a small Czech?’ Get it, Tom? The c-a-c-h-e kind of ‘cash,’ see, and he’s—”
“Can’t help but get it, Earl. You rich enough for another Shellac or do I have to cut you off?”
“How would you feel about a silver inlaid belt buckle, on account?”
“On account of you’re broke again, you mean? Let’s see the damn thing.”
The Medicine Lodge did not have a monopoly on the drinking trade in Gros Ventre and the Two Medicine country, but close enough. The main competition, the Pastime Bar at the other end of town, was, well, past its time; run-down, erratic in its hours, gloomy, smelling a little funny. And the lounge bar across at the hotel had the hereditary failing of its kind, lack of pep. This meant that besides the jackpot of Saturday-night crowds—“Saturday night buys the rest of the week, kiddo” was one of Pop’s favorite pronouncements—the singular saloon with FULL BAR AND THEN SOME added beneath its name drew a day-in, day-out traffic of steady customers. This imbibing community, to call it that, which showed up in my father’s venerable place of business, was mainly wetting its collective whistle now and then as people have done since time immemorial, exchanging gossip or talking just to be talking. The back-and-forth whiled away time and its concerns, of which those last years of the Fifties held their dire share, as was usual in human history. The familiar voices would start up in the late afternoon, when Earl Zane slipped in to swap a joke barely worth telling and whatever was loose on his person for a series of beers before his wife appeared to drag him back to their gas station. To be followed, more often than not, by gray-mustached Bill Reinking on the way home to supper after putting in his day as editor, star reporter, and linotype operator of the Gros Ventre Weekly Gleaner.
“What you have in your hand looks like just what the doctor ordered, Tom, bless you.”
“It’s the best scotch in the joint, comes in a bottle and everything. The world going to hell enough to suit you?”
“It keeps me in business, alas. Any juicy news in here I can hold up to the light of day?”
And in the clockwork of human habit, no sooner would Bill Reinking be out the door after his single drink than Velma Simms would sail in for hers. By the nature of things, the Medicine Lodge was a watering hole for men, just as the beauty parlor down the street served as a social oasis for women. This particular customer did not treat that as a fact of life; quite the contrary. Her husky voice never varied as she headed for her usual booth. “It’s that time of day, Tom.”
“Funny how that happens about now, Velma.” Pop did not quite treat this patron as if she was radioactive, but it approached that category. She’d had four or five husbands, and her history of divorce settlements scared the daylights out of every man in town. Velma was around Pop’s age, so the chestnut hair surely had help from the drugstore, but in tailored slacks and a silky blouse, she still drew second looks. Her custom was to nestle into the booth, instantaneously get a cigarette going with a flash of her silver lighter, and begin riffling through her mail, in all probability on the lookout for alimony checks. Pop meanwhile mixed a G-ball, conscientiously using a decent bourbon and opening a fresh ginger ale so the drink wouldn’t taste flat. After delivering it to the booth, he would retreat all the way behind the bar before initiating conversation.
“Been anywhere?”
“Hawaii. Waikiki Beach isn’t what it used to be.”
Those regulars and others, early birds before the saloon became fully populated for the evening with ranchers on their way back from tending sheep camp, tourists on their way north to Glacier National Park, fishermen who had tried their luck at the reservoir, seasonal hunters hoping to do better than the Buck Fever Case on the wall, state hi
ghway crews on perpetual maintenance jobs, construction workers passing through at the end of their workweek on the Minuteman missile silo sites starting to dot the northern plains of Montana, roughnecks who maintained the donkey pumps and storage tanks of the minor oil field south of town, hay hands from the big Double W cattle ranch, local couples treating themselves to a night out, sheepherders in for a spree; if the ocean ever comes back to the Rockies, archaeologists of that time can dive to the site of the Medicine Lodge and determine how a segment of mid-twentieth-century America assuaged its social thirst.
I absorbed every bit of this, because, thanks to the father I happened to have, the joint became something like my second parent.
—
“GOT AN IDEA, kiddo. Let’s cross our fingers and toes it’s a good one.”
Things happened fast around Pop. After my rescue from Phoenix and induction into fishing and all else, I had been in school barely a week before he concluded that our household, such as it amounted to, needed serious adjustment. He had been smart to start me in Gros Ventre when he did; in the first grade everyone is a new kid, the ABCs see to that. Thus, school itself was no big problem, if I didn’t count Duane Zane snickering at my wounded ear until he grew tired of it, but after school was another matter. That time of day and on through the evening was when the Medicine Lodge did most of its business and Pop had to be there to maintain the level of bartending that made the saloon’s reputation, leaving me to the sparse company of the empty house and Igdrasil the tree. Even as inexperienced as he was at raising a kid, it evidently didn’t feel quite right to him for us to see each other only at breakfast, supper, and after closing time at the joint. Which is why he reached the decision that needed fingers and toes crossed. He announced it as usual, with a puff of smoke.
He stood there outlined in the doorway of my darkened bedroom, bow tie loosened against white shirt, the next-to-last cigarette of the day—one of my worries was that he continued to smoke in bed just as if Uncle Arvin the fireman never existed—aglow between his fingers. Already it was a ritual between us that I would snap awake when I heard him come in late at night and as soon as he finished in the bathroom I would call out, “Is that you, Pop?” and he would answer something like, “No, it’s the Galloping Swede.” The notion of Montana’s immigrant governor, Hugo Aronson, galumphing in on Scandinavian size-fourteens to use our bathroom would set me off into a fit of giggles, and Pop would lean against the door frame a minute and ask me what I’d been up to since supper, which was seldom much beyond listening to the radio and reading comic books until my eyelids drooped. After a little of that exchange, he would say, “Let’s catch some shut-eye—don’t let the ladybugs bite” and tread down the hall to his own bedroom. So I grew even wider awake than usual this night as he hung on there in the doorway, squinting and smoking.
