by Ivan Doig
“Hunky-dory,” the herder said, as if he was the soul of cooperation, and staggered over and sat down.
With Dode and me helping to steer him, Pop made it to the amen corner and dropped onto the high-backed stool there, clasping the ice pack to his eye. “Don’t take a fit,” he told us, mostly me, “see, it’s only a shiner.” It was going to be spectacularly that, all right, a real raccoon job of a black eye. I was relieved, but still shaken, too, aghast over that image of him collapsed on the floor until Dode helped him up. As a unit, the three of us looked across the room to the booth where Canada Dan was mumbling his trials to the Buck Fever Case in the picture on the wall. “I hung on to the ess of a bee until you could get here,” Pop told Dode in a resigned exhalation, “he’s yours to deal with now.”
Dode studied the hunched-up herder a trifle longer, then offered: “What do you say I just take him outside and beat the living daylights out of him?”
“You know better than that.”
“Yeah, I’m afraid I do.” The weary sheep raiser grimaced and headed over to the booth, shaking his head. “This is the damnedest year.”
Canada Dan addressed him indignantly as he approached. “Couldn’t wait to track me down and hand me my pay, huh? Write ’er out.”
“I will like hell,” Dode said back to him angrily as he slid into the opposite side of the booth. “I need a herder with those sheep. Even if it’s you.”
Canada Dan sniffed. “I ain’t said I’ll work for you ever again, have I.” He sat in woozy dignity before demanding: “How come you didn’t tell me it was gonna snow so goddamn much?”
“I didn’t catch up with the forecast,” Dode said in a dead voice. “Midge and me were in Great Falls at a woolgrowers’ meeting and didn’t get back until late. Never gave it a thought we’d get dumped on this time of year.”
“That wasn’t any too bright of you.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Long silence.
“You still sore at me for losing them lambs?”
“No more than I was.”
Longer silence.
“That’s sore enough, ain’t it.”
“Yeah, it’ll do. You ready to quit tearing the town up and go back to the ranch?”
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” Wobbling to his feet, Canada Dan called over to where we were watching: “Sorry if I inconvenienced you any, Tom.”
“It could happen to a nun,” Pop said past his ice pack.
The two of us watched through the plate-glass window as the unsteady herder put his arm over his eyes against the glare of the snow and let Dode lead him to the car. Then Pop winced and took a look at his mostly shut discolored eye in the breakfront mirror, and said to my distressed reflection: “Better get at the mopping, so we can open the joint on time.”
—
THIS GOES TO SHOW you how much I knew about handling the embarrassment of a black eye. I’d have been sick with mortification until the telltale mark of a losing battle was fully gone. Not Pop. He practically turned that record shiner into a public attraction, imperturbably tending bar in the same style as ever and answering the obvious question by saying no more than, “Hey, you should have seen the other guy.” And guess what, in the course of all the razzing he took about learning when to duck, customers often had a second drink or a third. “Business has picked up, kiddo,” he reported in my bedroom doorway, untying his bow tie with a flourish, a week or so after the incident in the barroom. “I probably should cut Canada Dan in on the proceeds, but I’m not gonna.”
Relieved as I was at that outcome, it still bothered me to see him going around with that doozy of a shiner, which turned various sickening colors on its gradual route to fading. On the other hand, he hadn’t vanished on a trip since that nightmare one at the start of the year, so if I didn’t have an unblemished father, I at least had one steadily on the premises. Even the weather improved now that the winter that threatened never to leave finally went away for the next thirty years or so, and spring, what little was left of it, settled in.
True, it rained notably more than usual as June approached, but that merely revived the old saying among the customers in the barroom that in Montana too much rain is just about enough, and beside our house, English Creek ran high and lively and Igdrasil greened up in cottonwood glory. I sprouted, too. Almost before I knew it, I awoke one morning a year older than when I had gone to bed. Twelve at last, which immediately felt tremendously better than being merely eleven. In my newfound maturity, I managed to sound enthusiastic—if not totally sincere—about the new fishing pole Pop gave me for my birthday.
The better present was school letting out for the summer. A kid’s dream, always, an entire untouched season of liberated days ahead. By habit and inclination I right away all but moved into the back room of the Medicine Lodge, spending as much of my time as I wanted casually listening in at the vent or practicing basketball shots or building model planes or entertaining myself any of the other ways an only child so well knows how, while Pop’s performance of his bar duties went on as clocklike reliable as ever on the other side of the wall. This was how I always wanted things to be, and at last in this peculiar year, here they were, along with summertime and every new day of nature’s making.
Therefore I was unprepared, soon into those first days of freedom, when Pop came back from a meal at the Top Spot, the cafe down the street that was best described as reliably mediocre, with news of a major change. We invariably ate supper at the Spot, although usually separately, because he needed to grab an early bite before his evening of tending bar.
“New couple bought the place,” he reported while slitting open a whiskey case in the back of the saloon. They were Butte people, and his guess was that Pete Constantine, the husband and cook, had been in some kind of scrape—a lot of things could happen in Butte—and the wife, Melina, was determined that the cafe would keep his nose clean, as Pop put it. “I hope to hell they make a go of it. The food’s not any better, but at least it’s no worse.”
Straightening up, he flicked his lighter and lit a cigarette, cocking a look at me in my favorite perch up there on the landing, where I was gluing a challenging twin-tail assembly onto my latest model aircraft, a P-38 Lightning fighter plane. His black eye was down to a greenish purple that I had now almost grown used to. “Guess what. They got a kid about your age.”
Aw, crud, was my first thought. Every youngster knows the complication of such a situation, the burden of being expected to make friends with a new kid just because he was new. Why weren’t twelve-year-olds entitled to the same system as adults, to merely grunt to any newcomer, “How you doing?” and go on about your own business?
“What’s his name?” I asked with total lack of enthusiasm.
“Go get yourself some supper”—Pop blew a stream of smoke that significantly clouded the matter—“and find out.”
As soon as I walked in, the Spot showed it had indeed changed, because Melina Constantine herself was behind the counter in the cleanest waitress apron the cafe had seen in ages. Mrs. Constantine was squat and built along the lines of a fireplug, but with large, warm eyes and a welcoming manner. She greeted me as if I were an old customer—actually, I was—and plucked out the meal ticket Pop had just inaugurated. Activity in the kitchen sounded hectic, and her husband, the cook, hurried past the serving window, giving me a dodgy nod. No kid my age was in sight, which was a relief.
“Now then, Russell,” Mrs. Constantine said, smiling in motherly fashion as I hoisted myself onto my accustomed stool at the end of the counter, “what would you like for supper? The special is pot roast, nice and done.”
Her smile dimmed a bit when I ordered my usual butterscotch milk shake and cheeseburger, but she punched the meal ticket without saying anything.
Wouldn’t you know, though, muffled conve
rsation was taking place in the kitchen, and from where I sat, I could just see the top of a dark mop of hair as someone about my height stood waiting while Pete, cook and father rolled into one, dished up a plate of food and instructed that it all be consumed. I heard the new kid groan at the plateload.
Listening in, Mrs. Constantine beamed in my direction again and provided, “You’re about to have company.” I waited tensely as you do when someone from a different page enters the script of your life. Would he be hard to get along with? Would I?
The kitchen’s swinging door was kicked open—it took a couple of thunderous kicks—and, meal in hand as if it weighed a tragic amount, out came a girl.
“Hi,” she said faintly.
“Hi,” I said identically.
Zoe was her name, and she seemed to come from that foreign end of the alphabet, a Gypsy-like wisp who slipped past me to a table in the back corner before I finished blinking. Her mother corrected that in nothing flat. “Russell, I’ll bring yours over to the table, too, if you don’t mind.”
You bet I minded. All my years in Gros Ventre, I had been contentedly eating supper at the counter. In the manner of old customers, I felt I owned that spot at the Spot. But tugboat that she was, Mrs. Constantine had me maneuvered into changing seats before I could think of a way out of it. “Sure, I guess,” I muttered, and reluctantly slid off my prized stool to go over to make friends, as grown-ups always saw it, or to meet the opposition, as kids generally saw it.
At the table, the two of us sat across from each other as trapped as strangers in a dining car. Given my first full look at Zoe, the wide mouth, the pert nose, the inquisitive gaze right back at me, I must have just stared. My education until then had not included time with a girl. Male and female relationships in school were literally a joke. “Your eyes are like pools. Cesspools. Your skin is like milk. Milk of magnesia.” But the incontrovertible fact facing me was that Zoe Constantine possessed deep brown eyes that were hard to look away from, and she had an olive-skinned complexion that no doubt suntanned nice as toast, unlike mine. Her hair was not quite as richly black as my own, but at the time I thought no one in the world had hair as dark as mine and Pop’s. For all of these arresting features, she was so skinny—call it thin, to be polite—that she reminded me of those famished waifs in news photos of DP refugee camps. But that was misleading, according to the indifferent way she toyed with her food while I waited edgily for mine. I was close to panic, thinking of endless suppertimes ahead with the two of us about as conversational as the salt and pepper shakers. How was this going to work?
She spoke first.
“I bet your dad was in a knock-down, drag-out fight, wasn’t he. That’s some black eye.”
“Uh, yeah. You should have seen the other guy.”
“People get in fights all the time in Butte,” she said in worldly fashion. “It gives them something to do.” Idly mashing potatoes that were already mashed, she caught me even more by surprise as she conspiratorially lowered her voice enough that neither her mother behind the counter nor her father in the kitchen could hear:
“How come he and you eat here? Where’s your mother? Can’t she cook better grub than this?”
“She’s, she’s not around anymore.”
Her voice dropped to an eager whisper. “Did they split the blanket?”
“Uh-huh,” I whispered back, although I wasn’t sure why divorce was a whispering matter. “When I was real little. I wouldn’t know her if I saw her.”
“Wild! Are you making that up?”
“You can’t make something like that up, nobody would believe it.”
“Ooh, you’re a half orphan, then.” That jolted me. Even during my time in Phoenix, trying to dodge Ronny’s knuckles, I had not thought of myself that way. That was nothing to what she said next. “You’re so lucky.”
I was so stunned I could hardly squeak out: “Because I don’t have a mother I’ve ever seen?”
“No, silly, I mean because you’ve got only one parent to boss you around,” she whispered, with either world-weary assurance or perfectly done mischief, it was impossible to tell which. “That’s plenty, isn’t it?” She peered critically toward the kitchen. “I’d give up my dad, I think, if it came to that.”
“Wh-why?” I sneaked a look at her father in his undersized cook’s hat, flipping a slice of Velveeta onto my cheeseburger as if he’d just remembered that ingredient. “What’s the matter with him?”
Zoe waved that away with her fork. “Nothing much. He’s just not swuft about a lot of things.”
This was another stunner from her. Swuft did not merely mean quick at handling things, it meant swift-minded, brainy, sensible, and quite a number of other sterling qualities she evidently found lacking in her father.
“He couldn’t beat up anybody in a fight, like I bet your dad can,” she was saying, as if she would trade with me on the spot. “Besides, my mom could have made your burger while he’s standing around looking at it.” In fact, Mrs. Constantine kept revving the milk shake machine as she waited for the cheeseburger to find its way out of the kitchen; my shake was going to be thin as water.
All kinds of doubts about the Top Spot under its new management must have begun showing on me, as Zoe now amended her view of fathers for my benefit in another fervent whisper.
“I bet your dad is plenty swuft, you can tell that just by looking at him, can’t you. Besides, I heard the old owners tell my folks”—her whisper became even more whispery; what a talent she had—“this cafe gets a lot of its business because the Medicine Lodge brings customers to town from everywhere. I guess it’s real famous around here?”
I nodded nonchalantly. Fame was right up there with swuftness in her estimation, I could tell.
“Do you get to be in your dad’s saloon”—she wrinkled her nose at the less than impressive confines of the cafe—“ever?”
It was my turn to astonish. “Sure! All the time.”
She gave me the kind of look you give a bare-faced liar.
I began convincing her by recounting my job as swamper every Saturday morning. Disdainfully she let me know this did not win me any bragging rights, her parentally ordained job was to fill the sugar dispensers, salt and pepper shakers, ketchup bottles, and napkin holders and things like that every single day, from her tone a life sentence of cafe chores.
No way was I going to be trumped about the joint, though. “Yeah, well,” I responded, elaborately casual, “I just about live in the saloon, I’m there so much. In the back room, I mean.”
Her ears perked up. I expounded about the privileged position provided by the stair landing, and went on at some length about the trove of hocked items housed from floor to ceiling.
Zoe listened as if she had never heard of such a thing, as I suppose she hadn’t.
“All kinds of stuff?” she whispered eagerly. “Years’ and years’ worth? And people are still doing that?”
“You bet. Sometimes the same people, over and over.”
“How do you know that?”
“I hear them at it, don’t I, out front with my dad. Everything that goes on.”
“Whoa, are you serious? Is there some rule,” she scoffed, mischief in her gaze, “they have to talk at the top of their voice to get a drink in this town?”
“Don’t be silly,” I got back at her for that word, “it’s not that. All it takes is—”
Carried away with myself, I told her about the vent.
“Really?” Her voice dropped again to the lowest whisper humanly possible. “You can see and hear them but they can’t see you? They’re down there drinking and carrying on and everything, and you’re up there, invisible?”
“Uhm, yeah.”
Her eyes shone. “That sounds neat! Can I come listen to them, too?”
Before I had to commit
to that, my milk shake and cheeseburger were delivered, along with Mrs. Constantine’s smiling wish for me to have a good appetite and her instructive frown at Zoe’s barely touched victuals. “Eat, missy, or you’ll blow away,” she recited, and left us to it. I attacked my meal. Zoe sighed and speared a single string bean off her plate. It dawned on me I had better make sure just how much we were destined to be around each other, apart from what looked like disconcerting suppertimes ahead. Between milk shake slurps, I inquired, “What grade will you be in?”
“Sixth. Same as you.”
“How’d you know?”
A quick, devilish look. “Your father bragged you up.”
“Uh-huh.” I swirled my milk shake in man-of-the-world fashion. “We’ll have old lady Spencer for a teacher.”
“Is she hard?”
“Terrible. She catches you whispering, you have to stay an hour after.”
The mischievous look again. “In Butte, they cut your tongue out.”
By the time I was done snorting milk shake out of my nose, I was in love with Zoe. I have been ever since.
—
“POP, IS THAT YOU?”
“No, it’s Nikita Khrushchev.”
I had not yet gone to sleep by the time I heard the nightly sounds in the bathroom and then the hallway, my mind turning over and over all that was to be digested from my first meal with Zoe. It should have been exhausting, but it was the opposite.
Pop came and leaned against the doorjamb, smoothing the cloth of his undone bow tie between his hands as he peered at me in the dim bedroom. “How’d you do with your supper partner?”
“She’s”—I cast around for the right way to put it—“different.”
That immediately turned him into the listening bartender.
“Not bad different,” I spelled out. “She’s real smart, for a girl.”
“They can be like that,” he said drily. “Try to get along with her, okay? It puts us in a bind if we can’t grab a meal at the Spot. We’d have to live on pig knuckles and embalmed eggs.” That was meant to be a joke, I understood, but it was not that far from the dietary probability if we had to fend for ourselves every suppertime.
