by Ivan Doig
The storekeeper glanced up as the pair of us shuffled in. “How do, fellows. What can I get for you?”
“Hi.” Nervously I spread the money on the counter, my voice squeaking as I ordered up, “All the ice you’ve got, please.”
Startled, the man behind the counter asked, “What are you going to do with it all?”
“I’m, we’re from the Boy Scouts. This is our troop leader.” Del did vaguely look like that, in his semi-safari shirt and tan pants. “We’re selling pop to raise money for the big Scout Jamboree that’s going to be at the dam, and our cooler tipped over on the way here and everything melted, and now we need all the ice you’ve got. Please.”
“Funny I hadn’t heard about any big jamboree.” The storekeeper pondered that. “When’s this?”
“Labor Day weekend?”
The thought of a horde of hungry, thirsty boys as customers across a three-day weekend made him sit up and take notice. Still, he questioned our purpose a bit further. “What’ll this pop money you raise be spent on, exactly?”
“We need tents. Lots of tents.”
“Dozens,” Del unexpectedly put in.
“Hundreds,” I adjusted his nice try.
The storekeeper rubbed his jaw. “Gee whiz, I sure hate to run out of ice this early in the day, so many people coming to the dam get-together and all. But if it’s for a good cause—”
Del and I stacked bags of ice in every available nook and cranny of the van, with Pop supervising. “Drive down to the boat ramp,” he directed next. There, he opened up the first of the cases of Great Falls Select stacked solid in the back of the van and dragged out the washtub brought along for this purpose. Professionally he iced the tub of beer with a number of bags of our monumental purchase and stowed some in reserve. The rest of the ice, he had us get rid of in the lake. Looking satisfied for the first time all day, he told Delano: “Get your apparatus ready. People are going to want a tall, cool one, and when they do, we nab them.”
—
IN THE NEXT little while, mudjacks began arriving at Fort Peck as if they had come up the river to spawn. The reunion site was a riverbank park with picnic tables and scrubby wind-bent trees that provided mere spots of shade, and that, too, proved to be part of Pop’s plan. He’d had Del unfurl the camper van’s awning, supported by a couple of aluminum poles, and set up his table and tape recorder squarely beneath it, then supplemented that with a big tarp fastened onto the awning and stretched to the nearest couple of trees. The result was a nice, sizable patch of shade, and the three of us hung back there in the cool shadow, watching cars pour off the approach road and park in the bunchgrass in a mass of glittering windshields and hoods and fenders polished for the occasion, and people in their good clothes climbing out and greeting one another like long-lost relatives. We viewed the handshaking and backslapping and general camaraderie of the reunion until Del grew antsy.
“Ah, Tom, I do want to get as many interviews as I possibly can, so hadn’t I better begin?”
“Not until the hats start to come off.”
“The—?”
Very shortly it became evident what Pop meant. Those in the crowd who remembered what Fort Peck was like on a summer day wore straw cowboy hats or other ventilated headgear. (The three of us had on the best loose-weave Panamas from the back room.) Those who had been less mindful sweltered in Stetsons and fedoras, and they were the first to start lifting their lids and wiping their brows.
“Okay, let’s get at it,” Pop granted, and we sprang into action. He and Del lugged the loaded beer tub from the rear of the van to a prominent spot in the shade of the tarp while I started setting up some folding chairs borrowed from the Gros Ventre Chamber of Commerce’s fishing derby resources. When those were in place, Pop briskly brushed his hands and turned to the waiting two of us.
“Remind me, Delano. Which one is your lame ear?”
“Hmm? The left, why?”
“Keep the good one closest to me so you can hear and try to act like a normal human being, is all. Rusty, just come on along and spectate nice and quiet, got that?” He squared his bow tie and set his jaw. “Come on, let’s go hijack mudjacks.”
—
I WISH I HAD adequate words for the performance that followed. Pop sifted into that Fort Peck crowd, meeting and greeting old customers he had not seen for more than twenty years, swapping remarks about how time flew, and in that gathering on that day my father was treated as if he was parting the waters of the Missouri River. “Tom, how you doing?” man after man greeted him joyously, and he would smile a little and respond with something like, “Still teetering and tottering.” No question, the practically Shakespearean newspaper story accounted for some of the regard that enveloped him, fame finding its mark for all to see, but what Pop was experiencing went much deeper than that, I am still convinced. As we trailed in his wake like page boys behind royalty, Del kept slipping me a grin that said, Didn’t I tell you he’s a living legend? And that was openly true, for the people assembled here no longer were fledgling dam builders escaping the Depression for a night out in a boomtown saloon, but middle-aging husbands and fathers who saw in this familiar white-shirted bow-tied figure, with eyebrows knowledgeably cocked, a vision from when they were young and unmarred by what lay ahead of them in life. Memory does that, unerring as a spotlight. I noticed Pop didn’t seem all that displeased, either, with the attention that followed him through the crowd. But he dispensed with it as if he were on the job in back of the bar, staying on the move until, over at the edge of the throng, he spotted a lanky man in bib overalls and an old gray fedora.
“There’s your first victim,” he murmured as Del strained to hear. “Hey, Short-Handed,” he called out, “how’s the world been treating you?”
“Tom Harry, or I’m seeing things!” The bibbed man and Pop swatted each other on the shoulders until Pop managed to step back out of range and bring us in for introduction. “Delano, Rusty, meet Curly Martin.”
“Used to be, anyhow,” Curly told us with a forlorn grin, lifting his hat to display a bald head. Providing Del a handshake that seemed to startle him, our new acquaintance began talking a blue streak. “Son, you’re packing around the best name this side of the Bible. If it wasn’t for old Roosevelt, I’d still be living out in the tumbleweeds and eating gophers.” Then it was my turn for a startling handshake, while Curly expanded the conversation to Pop. “Tom, you old son of a gun, you sure bring back the memories. Remember the time that drunk Swede grabbed that milk-blond taxi dancer—what was her name, anyhow—and tried to drag her up onto the bandstand to sing with him? You threw him out halfway across the street, dang if you didn’t. Came back in with most of your shirt tore off and told us, ‘Play “Roses of Picardy,” get people to dancin’ again.’”
I gaped at my father. Bouncing an objectionable customer halfway across the street was not news. But people danced in the Blue Eagle? Whose very same owner would not permit so much as a jukebox tune in the Medicine Lodge?
“That’s another story, Curly,” Pop coughed that away, “but what Delano here would rather hear about is something like when the dam slid. You were mudjacking that day, don’t I remember?”
“Whoo, you know I was. Right there on the top of the dam when the goshdamn railroad tracks started to bow and the goshdamn ground turned to jelly right under my—”
“Hold it,” Pop suspended the narrative. “See, Delano has come out here all the way from Washington, D.C., to collect stories like that from the old days”—Del was almost nodding his head off, ratifying that—“and so you’d be doing the world a favor by telling this into his tape recorder.”
Instantly Curly dried up like a prune. “Aw, I’d be kind of bashful about doing something like that.” He looked around as if for rescue. “Besides, the fellows and me are gonna see if we remember how to play music at all. I better be getting a
t that. Been nice visiting with you.”
Looking stricken as Curly made his escape, Del started to call after him but Pop beat him to it.
“You know what, though, it’s gonna be kind of hot playing music out in this sun. If it was me, Curly, I’d get myself ready with a nice, cold Shellac over there in the shade while Delano asks you a few things about the big slide.”
Curly halted practically in midstep. “Now you’re talking.” He turned around to Del. “Where’s this little piece of heaven?”
We watched Del eagerly usher him to the Gab Lab, with Curly already talking a mile a minute again. I asked Pop, “Does he really play music?”
“Yeah, with the Melody Mechanics. He’s guitar.”
My hand still was feeling that handshake. “He’s got a couple of fingers missing, doesn’t he?”
“Sure, that’s how he made his musical reputation—Short-Handed Curly.”
Obviously there was a lot to learn about what went on in the Blue Eagle. But I didn’t have time to pursue that because Pop kept on the move, picking out people to steer to Del, murmuring the names to me as faces fit his memory. “Cece Medwick from the boatyard, yeah, he’d be good. . . . Taine, he was the diving-barge boss, he’d have a lot to tell about the slide. . . . Chick Siderius, naw, he was always a management stooge. . . . Hey, there’s Ron and Dola, they’d be just what Delano wants. They ran a cafe, more like a hash joint.”
“What was it called?”
“What do you think, the Rondola.”
All too soon, he sent me scooting off to keep the beer tub filled while he sorted through the crowd for other mudjacks to send over. Before long, quite a gang of them was bunched around that tub and the only ice anywhere to be found, and if these had been Missing Voices, they weren’t by the time they had a couple of Shellacs and sat down under the Gab Lab awning to be interviewed by Del. I have to say, I was amazed at him. He was working at high speed yet somehow managing to draw the best out of each Fort Peck veteran. As he had tried to make us understand, his bad ear didn’t matter when the person was seated across the microphone from him because he listened with all of himself, from his intent brow down his whole body, at times practically doubled up with anticipation and other times thrust back in his chair at the wonder of what was being said. Throughout, he made nearly silent clucks of encouragement between dealing out questions cannily attuned to whatever was being said, the five Ws and an H taken care of in the most natural kind of way. Maybe he was doing a bit each time or maybe it was just Del, but whatever the topic, he radiated such keen interest in the person in the interview chair that I almost wanted to jump in and start talking into his microphone myself. Besides that, he turned out to be a whiz with the tape reels; when the little counter on the recorder, like the odometer on a car, hit a certain number, he was there in a flash with a fresh reel, threading it on so quickly, I would have bet he had practiced it blindfolded. Even the safari shirt proved itself, its pockets producing batteries to keep the recorder rolling, old clippings about Fort Peck to help jog memories, labels to slap names onto the reels, and other supplies that kept things rolling smoothly. If only Zoe had been there to applaud his performance properly with “Swuft!”
I listened all I could between making runs of Select to the slushy tub; listened, entranced, to the mythic Thirties coming to life, little knowing that the Sixties would someday echo the same way. The interviews, as conducted by Del, were like jazz, or, yes, the blues; riffs of memory in a language all their own. So I learned that Fort Peck’s populace had been such working fools that even the barbers wore bib overalls, and shantytown living conditions were so barny, you’d half expect to wake up in the morning next to a horse, but that never stopped married couples from pouring foundations in the dark—I figured out this meant making babies happen—and a job at the dam was as welcome as Christmas because when the eagle laid—payday—a person so broke he was dragging the ground would at last have some cartwheels—silver dollars—to rub together. And over and over, it was said that the day of the big slide, you’d have thought hell was afloat and the river rising.
What is it about human nature that dwells on close calls? As Del and I hung on their stories, the mudjacks, almost to a man, had stories of terror when the face of the dam slid, of riding the pipeline down the avalanche of mud as if on the back of a dragon, of being pulled from the island of mud and debris, of narrowly escaping drowning before the rescuers could get there. I listened with shivers, especially as they all said in one way or another that if the dam had broken, it would have been the damnedest flood ever.
But that was what this day was for, those memories, those tales. Del was supremely in his element, and the mudjacks gloriously in theirs, and the reels of tape ran and ran, the voices becoming permanent echoes of a certain time, a certain place, a rediscovered lingua america.
Eventually Pop showed up with another fresh supply of interview candidates, listened for a few minutes, then signaled me with a jerk of his head. “That ought to hold Delano for a while,” he said with satisfaction. “Let’s grab some grub.”
Generally a reunion is an occasion with the worst of the past rinsed away by the passage of time, and this one now was determinedly lighthearted. On the flatbed of a truck the Melody Mechanics were playing vigorously—sure enough, Curly was strumming a guitar as if a few fingers were plenty—and between numbers an announcer with the patter of a livestock auctioneer worked the crowd to find out who had come the longest distance, who had produced the most children, and so on. The air had turned heavy—big prairie thunderheads were building up in the distance; I could tell what Pop meant about nature having it in for Fort Peck—but no one seemed to mind the weather this day. Skirting the throng, he and I stayed on course down to the riverbank, where the food tables were, then found a spot to sit under a scrawny shade tree with our paper plates of macaroni salad and hot dogs. We were barely settled before I could not contain the question one moment longer.
“What’s a taxi dancer?”
“You would ask.” He chewed on my question as well as his hot dog. “Let me put it this way. It’s when you pay a dancer for how long you’ve danced with her, just like cab fare to go someplace.”
“You mean, guys would, uh, hire these partners right there in the Blue Eagle?”
“Yeah, in the joint. It brought in herds of customers, savvy?”
I was starting to, putting two and two together, and it was adding up rapidly. “All those customers and taxi dancers ever did”—I could hear how dubious I sounded—“was just dance?”
He hesitated. “With some of the taxi dancers, that was kind of open for negotiation if the customer wanted to go farther than that, I guess you could say.”
“So,” I pressed on dangerously, “really it was like on First Avenue South in Great Falls?”
The sigh of ages, as the topic of prostitution no doubt has produced down through history. With his forehead scrunched, the famous owner of the Blue Eagle set to the task of explaining matters for me.
“Not every taxi dancer was a whore, if that’s what you’re thinking. Most weren’t. Plenty of them ended up married to those dance partners, I could point out some of them here today.”
He saw me trying to keep up with this and finding it hard.
“Rusty, here’s the how of it. Things were different in the Thirties, and Fort Peck was even differenter, if that’s a word. The Depression, when it hit”—he looked off across the still water of the man-made lake as though searching back into that time—“it did things to people it’s hard to believe now. If you were on a farm out here, chances were your crops dried up and blew away year after year, until all you were left with was tumbleweeds and a foreclosure notice, and you lost everything. If you were a working stiff, you got laid off because some damn fool place called Wall Street crashed, and next thing you knew, the bank down the street went under and took your li
fe’s savings with it.”
I had read all this in school, but hearing it from him sank in vastly deeper. He was grimacing painfully as he spoke.
“It changed people. They had to do whatever they could to get by. Curly wasn’t only kidding about eating gophers—plenty of families in this part of the state were that desperate.” He lowered his voice, as grave as I had ever heard him. “I still don’t know why there wasn’t a revolution. But people toughed it out until Roosevelt came into office and projects like this dam got under way. Then before long there’s these thousands of mudjacks drawing wages, and others who showed up here because the mudjacks had money in their pockets.” His voice gathered itself and he mustered a kind of smile. “Cripes, that was me, too, if you can imagine.”
He drew a breath. “Okay, that’s the long way around the barn to taxi dancing, but it’s all connected, see. There were women who had to make a living, too, and getting out on the floor with a guy for two bits a dance was a way to do it. Any talk of business beyond that, let’s say, was up to them, not me.”
By this point I was practically memorizing his each word. Zoe was going to want every tiniest detail of this.
“The dance partner more than likely would buy the woman a drink or two and a few for himself,” he went on doggedly, “so there’s where it paid off for me. It was what you might call a sideline. Like letting the Medicine Lodge customers hock stuff. Same kind of thing.”
Renting out women didn’t sound to me like the same kind of thing. Was there even any way it sounded legal? The past casts a tricky shadow, I was discovering.
Pop read my face, then gazed off toward the truck bandstand, where the Melody Mechanics were producing another spirited tune and the crowd around them was clapping and whooping.
“Kiddo,” he said softly, “you have to understand, every night in Wheeler was Saturday night.” He listened to the raucous music for a few moments. “It was a different time back then. Everybody was young and hot to trot, excuse my Latin. Sure, people liked to drink in the Blue Eagle, the way I ran the joint, but what they really liked was to drink and dance and kind of get to know each other, the way men and women do. If I was going to be in business here, that’s what had to happen.” He tipped his hat back with a forefinger to look at me more openly. “Got all that?”
