B0085DOTDS EBOK

by Ivan Doig

  And Cloyce Reinking, in one of our last script run-throughs before she went on to dress rehearsals with the Prairie Players, departed from Lady Bracknell enough to let me know: “This town will be a poorer place without your father there in his spot.”

  Listening at the vent after the news got around, I could tell the remarks were getting on Pop’s nerves. The first few days, he would make some vague reply whenever someone asked what he was going to do with the rest of his life, but after that, his standard answer was, “Retire from the human race.”

  Zoe was as downcast as I was. She understood all too well what a change in the Medicine Lodge meant for us.

  “It’s funny,” she said with a long lip, “your dad doesn’t want you in his business and mine can’t wait to put me to waitressing in the dumb cafe.”

  “Yeah. That’s grown-ups for you. By the time we ever figure them out,” I despaired, “we’ll be them.”

  “Won’t either,” she said crossly. “We’ve got our heads screwed on different than that.”

  I had to hope so, did I ever. For there was one implication in Pop’s decision that possibly was worst of all, that I couldn’t bring myself to tell even Zoe about. That “for now” of his about at least keeping the house held a tremor I could feel in the distance, however near or far. It didn’t take any too much imagination to conjure Pop one day saying, as people in our part of the country did when their bones started aching some particular way, “You know what, we maybe ought to consider someplace warm. These winters are getting to be too much.” Someplace warm spelled only one thing to me, Arizona. Worse, Phoenix. The vicinity of Aunt Marge, our only known relative, in case something really bad happened to him in the onset of age and he could no longer bring me up by himself. Treacherous cousins and all else loomed in that, and if my mood could be depressed any further, that was guaranteed to do it.

  We were on the landing, slumped at the desk, listless as puddles. Out front, at this early point of the afternoon, the barroom had no customers yet, but we could hear the small sounds of Pop puttering with things behind the bar, which he was doing a lot more of these days. The idle back room seemed to have caught a mood from the pair of us, rain slickers hanging slack, X-Acto knife looking dull and uninviting, model planes barely stirring in their suspended state. Attic of our imaginations, the big old expanse and its holdings had provided us with treasures beyond measure—costumery, an expanded vocabulary, a hundred bits we did, and of course, the listening post into the adult world. All of that, we knew disconsolately, was about to go. So were times together like this. My throat had been tight for days with that thought, and Zoe looked tragic most of the time now.

  Dismally she whispered, “What’s going to happen to all the stuff?”

  “I wish I knew.” Even Pop didn’t seem to. “Maybe it ought to go with the joint,” he wavered, “although it’s worth something if we hang on to it somehow. We’ll have to see how the cards fall.”

  The familiar swish of the saloon’s front door roused us just enough to peek through the vent slats, more out of habit than interest, to see who had come in. Zoe and I made a face at each other. Mr. Snake Boots himself, Earl Zane, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Hullo, tarbender.” We watched him approach the bar, swaggering like a crow. As usual, he was full of himself, and there was a lot of him to be full of. “How’s business at the old watering hole?”

  “Drying up fast,” said Pop, as if present company accounted for that.

  “Don’t worry your scalp, that’ll change real soon.” Earl straddled a bar stool, beaming into the breakfront mirror as usual. “I’ll buy it.”

  “Buy what?” Pop glanced around the barroom for anything Earl could possibly afford.

  “Your hearing going, Tom? The whole place. The Medicine Lodge.”

  Pop snorted an explosive laugh, the first gust in a storm of mirth that left him clutching the bar for support. I thought he was never going to stop with it. His laughing fit was so infectious, Zoe and I had to stifle our own with hands over our mouths.

  “Damn, Earl”—he gasped and wiped his eyes with a towel as he made his way to the beer tap—“that’s the best one you ever told.”

  “I’m not joking,” Earl protested in a hurt tone. “You can’t understand plain English all of a sudden? I guess I got to say it again. I’ll buy you out, lock, stock, and barrel.”

  Shaking his head, Pop drew a glass of Shellac by feel. “Sure you will. There’s only that one pesky little detail. What do you intend to use for money?”

  “I’ll sell the gas station, natch.” He rolled his shoulders, as if luxuriating in newfound wealth. “Got it all penciled out. That and a mortgage will do the trick.” He confided triumphantly: “I already been by the bank.”

  The three of us listening knew, in a single heartbeat, this was dire.

  “I’ll be an ess of a bee,” Pop uttered in amazement. “You’re serious.” In the same tone of voice he used to tell me not to put beans up my nose, he told Earl: “You know, pouring drinks isn’t like pumping gas.”

  The prospective buyer was offended. “I can pick that up along the way. You had to, sometime or other. C’mon, Tom, is the damn place for sale or isn’t it?”

  I did not imagine this, and Zoe would back me up in saying so: Pop looked up at the vent and the invisible two of us, with apology in his eyes. Then he moved slowly toward Earl, pushing the glass of beer along the bar.

  “I said it’s for sale, so it is. Set things up with the bank, and we’ll get going on the deal.”

  —

  HOW MANY WAYS could life turn inside out in the same year?

  Now the Medicine Lodge not only was going out of our existence, Pop’s and mine and Zoe’s, but was passing into the hands of the person who, if there were such an election, would be the strongest candidate for town fool. On top of that, although Pop hadn’t agreed to it yet, Earl Zane wanted the trove of hocked items to be included in the deal—“It’d get me my belt buckles back”—which would mean our beloved back room and its treasures would fall prey to that weenie Duane, while I would be across the alley eating my heart out.

  I was haunted by what-ifs. What if I hadn’t had the bright idea of filling the swamper job myself, which somehow made my father envision me chained to the joint forever? What if the Great Falls beer makers hadn’t boosted our perfectly nice saloon into the select Shellac shrine of the whole damn state and prompted Bill Reinking’s newspaper story? What if Zoe and I had been caught at that blind bit in the ballpark and spoiled Pop’s big day—wouldn’t that have been better, in the end? It wore me out, thinking about everything. Oh, sure, you can’t undo what’s done, but that doesn’t necessarily get it off your mind. Past actions, guileless at the time, seemed to have a habit of ambushing later on, and that was greatly unnerving to a twelve-year-old sensibility. Suppers with Zoe turned into one long, glum wish list, each of us coming up with muttered hankerings for this or that to happen and miraculously set matters right again. Eyeing us mumbling into our meals that way, her parents plainly wondered what had gotten into us now.

  Even Earl Zane had enough sense to agree with Pop that the sale of the saloon ought to be kept quiet until the absolute last minute. He admitted he had a few details yet to corral, such as working out final terms with the Californian who wanted to buy the gas station because he’d heard the Two Medicine country was such swell fishing, while Pop did not want to face the real howls of the imbibing community when they found out who would be taking over the Medicine Lodge. As soon as Earl strutted out the door that day, Pop was in the back room instructing Zoe and me to keep our lips zipped about what we’d just heard. “It’s not a secret, exactly, we just don’t want anybody to know about it until we say so, got that?” At least in that he was talking our language, and it was nothing for us to stay mum to the whole world, except for each other and our supper plate
s, for the ten days until the sale of the saloon was to be made final. Coincidentally, that was also opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest, and Pop made what amends he could by promising to drive us to Valier to see the play. “Gives you a little something to look forward to, hey?” he tried, without much success, to lift our spirits.

  The majority of those waiting days went somewhere while I still was in my fog of what-ifs, and when Saturday morning came again, I had to be forcefully reminded of my swamping duties.

  With reluctance I took up the broom and mop and pail for what might be the last time and followed Pop into the silent barroom. To my further astonishment lately—what change would he think of next, plastic surgery?—he’d meant it about quitting smoking, and was down to half a pack a day. Every so often he would have a cigarette between his lips and be thumbing the lighter before he remembered, as he did now. With a quick, guilty glance in my direction, he snapped the lighter shut and tapped the cigarette back into the pack, knowing I was vengefully keeping count of his daily total. Weaning himself off nicotine left him cranky, which made two of us. Even the animal heads seemed gloomy, their eyes not yet brightened in the soft morning light.

  Neither of us said anything as we began our chores. As ever, he was behind the bar doing this and that in a rhythm all his own, although I noticed he went at things solemnly. With a lump in my throat, I was sweeping near the front door when the doorknob rattled.

  “We’re closed,” I called out rather shrilly.

  The doorknob rattled some more.

  “Pop, somebody wants in. Real bad, it sounds like.”

  “That’s their tough luck,” he said, continuing to fuss behind the bar.

  Now there was urgent knocking, so much so that I looked questioningly in Pop’s direction.

  “Can’t they take a hint?” he grumbled. “Okay, if it’ll stop the racket, see who it is.”

  I unlocked the door to someone no more than twice my age, but also twice my height and narrowly built, in sharply pressed tan slacks and a shirt with all kinds of pockets and flaps, as if he were on a safari. With reddest red hair topping that slender build, he looked like a man-size matchstick. He gave me and my broom an uncertain smile, then a lit-up one to Pop.

  It took more than the latest odd variety of tourist to faze my father. “The joint’s not open yet, chum,” he called from behind the bar. “Come back in a couple of hours and I can take care of whatever ails you so bad.”

  “Actually, I’m not trying to buy a drink.” The voice was as reedy as the rest of this apparition. He slipped past me and up to the bar in about four steps. “Are you Tom Harry? The Tom Harry?”

  “The only one I know of. What makes you ask?”

  The redheaded stranger smiled even more brightly. “Sir, it’s such an honor simply to be in your presence. And what a break for me. If I hadn’t found you, I hate to think—” He clucked at what a tragedy that would have been. Gazing around the barroom as if it were an uncovered temple, he began in a spellbound tone: “I’m Del Robertson of the Missing Voices Oral History Project at the Library of Congress, and—”

  He broke off, peering past Pop’s shoulder. “There it is!”

  Pop whipped around as if some genie had escaped from one of the countless liquor bottles.

  “The Roosevelt poster!” A long arm and finger extended past Pop, as if he couldn’t see what was under his nose. “Right by the cash register, where I was told you always kept one. How perfect!”

  “Glad you like the deecor”—Pop wearily started to come from behind the bar, not a good sign for the person on the other side—“and now that you’ve had a look, you might as well get on with your business somewhere else, okay? We don’t have any missing voices around here.”

  The young man shook his head, chuckling. “You certainly haven’t lost the gift of gab, Mr. Harry,” he said, practically bouncing with enthusiasm. “No wonder you and your saloon are legendary.”

  If it was possible for my ears to perk up any more than they already had, they did so now. My own father and the Medicine Lodge, actual legends? Was that what a newspaper story could do?

  “That’s pretty flattering to me and the old joint here,” Pop stopped short at the end of the bar, looking curiously at the interloper. “But that’s about to be over with, so I don’t think I’m worth your time, whatever it is you have in mind.”

  “Hmm?” Still gazing reverently at Pop, our caller had that head-cocked attitude of hearing only what he wanted. “No, no, not this saloon, although don’t get me wrong, it looks like a perfectly nice place.”

  Pop started to say something, but my blurt beat him, startling all three of us. “What saloon, then?”

  “The Blue Eagle, of course”—Del Robertson gave that out like a song known by heart—“when history was being made at Fort Peck.”

  4

  HISTORY IS ALWAYS being made, let’s face it, but Fort Peck did so on a scale all its own. The dam there was the biggest in the world when it was built, and the huge workforce brought in for what no less an authority than my fifth-grade history book called “the engineering miracle on the Missouri River” constituted a major New Deal effort to jack Montana up out of the Depression. All that was common knowledge. What was not, to the boggled twelve-year-old of the moment, was that the old saloon sign tucked away in the back room wasn’t merely a collector’s item from the mists of my father’s early days of hiring on as a bartender, it was a proclamation of proprietorship. Right there at the famous site of the Franklin D. Roosevelt speech and who knew what other exploits of the time.

  “Pop, you didn’t ever tell me the Blue Eagle was your own—”

  “Yeah, yeah, never mind, that’s another story.” He studied our visitor more closely, as did I. Crew-cut and lean, handsome enough in a college-boy kind of way, Del Robertson had the dashing look in vogue in the time of Kennedy, as if wishing for a torpedo boat under him. He stood there restlessly, all pockets and ambition. Even to me, newly hatched from childhood into adolescence, he seemed young in a way other than years—Pop would have said wet behind the ears—which made his appearance in the Medicine Lodge all the more odd.

  “Look, fellow, you’ve caught me”—Pop glanced at me standing there with the broom forgotten in my hand—“us at kind of a busy time. And I don’t really have anything colossal to tell you about bartending, it was all pretty much in there in the newspaper.”

  “It was? Which paper?” Out came a notebook and pen from one of the various pockets. “I’ll have to look that up.”

  That stopped Pop. “If you didn’t see the newspaper story, how the hell did you find me?”

  “Hmm? Oh, I took some rolls of quarters into a phone booth and started calling every newspaper editor in the state to ask if they knew of a bartender by your name in their town.” A modest shrug accompanied the telling of this. “Luckily, Gros Ventre isn’t far down the alphabet.”

  Pop shut his eyes for a second, then opened them, blinking like an owl. “Bill Reinking is taking over from God.” Sighing mightily, he turned back to the matter of the perplexing visitor. “Okay, so you know about the Blue Eagle,” he granted, looking discomfited. He could see curiosity sticking out all over me. “Why’d you come hunting me up about something way back when?”

  “Sir,” Del Robertson’s tongue practically tripped over itself in the rush to answer, “you’re the Leadbelly of Fort Peck.”

  “I’m the what?”

  “Don’t take it wrong, let me explain,” came stumbling out next. “You’ve heard of Alan Lomax, I hope?”

  Pop squinted impatiently. “Didn’t he use to pitch for the Yankees?”

  “Ah, no. Lomax is a musicologist, the best there is.” The word was new to both Pop and me. Someone who cured people of music?

  Evidently not, according to the copious explanation that ens
ued—I took a seat on a bar stool during it, and Pop leaned back against the cash register with his arms folded—to the effect that this Lomax person collected folk songs, in the old days lugging a recording machine like a big suitcase through the hollows and swamps of the South until, to cut the story short, he heard about a colored man in a Louisiana prison who played a guitar and wrote songs like nobody else’s.

  “Leadbelly,” our young informant concluded, as if saying the name in church. “Huddie Ledbetter. Possibly the greatest blues performer ever. The songs poured out of him like, like down-and-out poetry. The essence of the blues.” In illustration, he cleared his throat and tried to make his voice deep and growly. “I’s got to bobbasheely through life alone, ’cause I got no constant home. Classics like that.”

  Boy oh boy, did I ever wish Zoe was here for this.

  It intrigued me that something of the sort qualified as music, but Pop was unmoved. “Don’t turn into a damn jukebox, okay? What’s Leadbottom got to do with me?”

  Another explanation poured out, the point being that after the songcatcher Lomax convinced Huddie Ledbetter to sing into the machine, other blues singers let him record them at it, too. “Muddy Waters, Jelly Roll Morton, the greats. It grew into one of the greatest collections ever done, all because Leadbelly led the way with that first session, if you see what I mean.” Just in case, our overeager visitor spelled it out. “When potential interviewees are a trifle, ah, shy, an oral historian needs someone known and trusted to sort of”—he spun his hands as if churning up the proper words—“break the ice, let’s say. With your reputation, Mr. Harry, along with the Blue Eagle’s, you are the absolutely natural one for the Fort Peck project. You’re the perfect”—at least he didn’t say Leadbelly this time—“icebreaker.”

  “You want me to get Fort Peckers to spill their guts for you,” Pop wasted no time cutting through that. “What kind of an ess of a bee do you think I am? Not a snowball’s chance. Stick to blue music.”