by Ivan Doig
He stopped to take stock, of both Francine and the territory he’d covered behind the bar. “Oh, yeah. Next, the concert piano.”
“The huh?” She frowned around the barroom. “Maybe I’m blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other, but where’s there even a jukebox?”
“Don’t need one, here’s what makes music to our ears,” said Pop as he stepped to the cash register, hit the jangly key that opened the till, and began instructing. “Rule number one is, when you make change from paper money, a five or ten or whatever it is, put it over here in this part of the drawer first, instead of in with the rest of the cash. That way if any argument comes up, you can make sure the mistake isn’t yours. In other words, cover your behind.”
Francine smirked at that but didn’t say anything. Pop moved on to showing her the quirks of the ice machine. While there, though, she spotted his reading material tucked beneath the bar at the amen corner. “You dig Mickey Spillane?”
“Sure.” Guardedly: “Why?”
“Me, too. I, the Jury is really something, huh?”
“Strong stuff.” He regarded her afresh, as a hard-boiled master of fiction might have put it. “You read that kind of thing a lot?”
“Every chance I get. Done all the Mike Shayne books, waiting for more.”
“Those’re good, too,” he enthused, the lesson session temporarily forgotten. At the time, tales of tough-guy private eyes and endangered damsels were over my head, or at least at a level I wasn’t supposed to be perusing at my age, so I helped myself to an Orange Crush while the pair of them volleyed titles and characters. In his best humor for days, Pop commended her reading habit. “This’ll help. You’ll have a lot of time on your hands when business is slow.”
“Don’t worry,” Francine said breezily, “I’m good at killing time.”
Deciding she’d had enough behind-the-bar tutelage for now, Pop tossed down his towel. “Couple more things, and we’ll call it good. The first one is what you might call the policy of the house.” He looked at her in great seriousness. “No dating the customers. You get to going steady with some one guy, and the others aren’t gonna like it.” He paused for emphasis. “So no flirting, either direction across the bar, right?”
That seemed to make her bristle at the very idea, but she caught herself. “I get it, I guess. Playing favorites is bad for business, huh? Don’t worry on that score, Tom. Ain’t in this for romance, as my darling mother would say.” Fidgety to have this over with, she asked, “Then what’s the other thing that’s bugging you?”
Running a hand through his hair, Pop looked consciously paternal as he surveyed her from head to toe and back again as she twiddled the leather bracelet. “Your getup.”
Francine all at once looked scared, and it made me think she had a lot to learn about having a father.
He held up his large, capable hands to show her by example. “No fancy rings. Don’t paint up with nail polish, either, now that I think of it. The customers shouldn’t be looking at anything but that nice glass of whatever you’re serving up, savvy?”
“Oboy.” She was fingering the fancy leather bracelet nervously now. “I don’t want to break any rules, but I’m really attached to this.”
Pop studied it and her for a moment. “Yeah, well, okay, I don’t know why you want to wear half a handcuff like that, but I suppose you can keep it on.” He squinted critically. “Let’s talk clothes. That outfit you’ve got on makes you look like something the cat dragged in.” Before she could make so much as a peep of protest, he set her straight about proper apparel, Medicine Lodge style. “First thing, we’ll get you a bow tie. Rusty can teach you how to tie it. And if you’re gonna wear pants—slacks, I mean—get some dark ones. The Toggery will have some. Nice white blouses to go with them.” He looked at her moccasins. “Shoes, too. When you’re bartending, you’re on your feet all the time, squaw slippers won’t do.”
“Hey, wait,” she protested, “didn’t I see some bedroom slippers tucked away under the bar? What’s the difference?”
“It’s my old dogs that are tired”—he meant his feet—“that’s what. You want to keep yours from getting that way as long as you can. You need substantial shoes. Ask in the store for that grandma kind, I don’t know what they’re called.”
Her dismayed expression said she knew what he meant. “Those black clodhoppers? Like nuns wear?”
“Those are the ones.” He went to the cash register and counted out the wardrobe money for her. “Needless to say, this comes out of your first wages.”
She tucked the money in her jeans, that hint of grin showing ever so slightly. “I haven’t even started and I’m already in the hole? Only kidding.”
Pop stuck to business. “So now you know what’s involved with the joint. I’ll work behind the bar with you the first week or so while you’re breaking in. Get you through Saturday night. Then you’re gonna have to be on your own.”
With a swipe of her hand, Francine cleared the black mop of hair out of her vision. “It won’t be the first time.”
—
THE NEXT DAY CAME with Zoe and me hardly able to decide which subject to put our minds to first, Francine or Del. Since Pop was trooping Francine through the unglamorous side of bartending, such as slitting open whiskey cases, when we poked our heads in the back room, we opted for Del.
“Must of been quite the sight, that there tick on the business end.” Zoe did her John Wayne/Marion Morrison drawl as we approached the driveway where the Gab Lab was parked.
“Cecily, old thing, it would astound the birds out of the trees,” I replied in Wildean tones.
We sobered up and got our sympathy back in order as we reached the silent van, with its curtains drawn. In his tick-bitten condition Del perhaps was sleeping in, although that did not seem like him. In any case, the morning was far enough along that we figured he ought to be up, so we knocked on the big side door.
Only silence answered.
Zoe and I were not prepared for this. We looked at each other in sudden fright. She was the one who said it out loud, “What if he’s dying in there and can’t open the door?”
Why this overcame me so, I still can’t explain, but it seemed a horrible fate to die in a VW van that Pop had likened to a sardine can. I panicked. If Del was breathing his last, there was no time to run for help. The side door was locked when I tried it, and so was the passenger one.
It was considerably belated, but one of us had the bright idea to go around and try the door on the driver’s side. That came right open, and we scrambled in to look into the back of the Gab Lab, expecting the worst, but not what we saw.
In wrinkled fancy pajamas, gray-faced as a ghost, Del was sitting hunched over his tape recorder at the worktable. He had headphones on, big as soup bowls, and as we gaped, he would peer closely down at the recorder, where there was a tiny counting instrument like the odometer on a car, jotting down what the number was at that stage of the tape, then hit the recorder’s PLAY and REVERSE and FORWARD buttons like a piano player playing one-handed. How someone with a crew cut managed to be tousled, I don’t know, but he looked like he’d been worked over with an eggbeater. Thinking back, it strikes me as like something out of Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, with the reel whirring methodically back and forth.
Zoe and I tumbled over the seat, startling Del out of his trance.
“Oh.” Blinking at us, he lifted the headphones off. “Good morning, I guess it is.”
“Does it hurt like crazy,” Zoe asked straightaway, “where the tick got you?”
“Not quite that bad.” He tried to seem sturdier than he looked.
I took a different medical tack. “Um, didn’t the doctor tell you to take it easy?”
“I can’t,” he moaned, looking even more haggard. “I’ll lose my grant! You have no idea how cutthroat the lib
rary world can be!” A wild look came into his eyes. “If I can’t live up to what I promised in my proposal, the powers that be will take the Gab Lab away from me. There’s a real push on to get Missing Voices into the library’s holdings, and if I’m laid up . . .” He let that awful thought dangle. “I can at least transcribe. See?” He whipped the headphones back on, screwed up his face in listening concentration, then typed in blurts, a foot pedal stopping the tape recorder as he caught up with the last phrase. Off came the headphones, as if what we had just witnessed was proof of mental if not physical competence.
He must have caught our glances at each other, and around the interior of the van, mussed on almost every surface with uneven piles of typed transcriptions and scattered reels of tapes. “Things are a trifle out of order because of gaps in the transcriptions,” he was forced to confess. “Talk about lingua america, the mudjacks practically speak a tongue of their own whenever they’re describing something done at the dam.” He shook his head as if to clear it. Gnawing the corner of his mouth, he lifted the nearest stack of typing as if weighing it, then let it drop. “Rusty? I hate to bother him, I know how busy he is, but could you ask your father to help me straighten out some of what I’m hearing on the tapes when he has time?”
I assured him I’d ask Pop right away, anything to make him feel better. “He said to tell you not to work yourself to death, there are more interesting ways to go,” I passed along.
“Don’t I wish he was in charge of the Library of Congress as well as the Medicine Lodge,” he replied forlornly, grabbing for the next reel of tape.
—
FRANCINE’S DEBUT at the Medicine Lodge was as carefully supervised by Pop as if she was about to perform for royalty. “You aren’t nervous or anything, are you?” he asked edgily before he opened the place for business that first day. “I’ll be right here, just give me the high sign if anything stumps you, okay?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she recited yet again, taking her post at the end of the bar nearest the street door as I watched every move through the vent. Zoe would have given skin to be here for this, but she could not talk her way out of chores at the cafe, and it was up to me to provide a full report at supper. Whatever was going to happen, the stage was surely set, with the barroom practically gleaming after all my sweeping and mopping and Pop’s attention to everything Francine could conceivably need. Spiffed up according to Pop’s dictates, in dark slacks and white blouse and a black bow tie that I had shown her how to master after half a dozen tries and with her hair even fixed better, she looked like a bartender. Some version of one, anyway.
As luck would have it, her first customers were a tourist couple on their way to Glacier National Park, and setting them up with a couple of beers was a cinch. They did appear puzzled as to why there was an equal number of bartenders to customers in this particular saloon on a quiet afternoon, but shortly they were on their way and Francine grinned down the bar to Pop. “I haven’t disgraced the joint yet, huh?”
The first regular to come in was Bill Reinking, and I just knew he was going to be instinctively inquisitive at the sight of a young woman in back of the bar. So did Pop, even more so. Before Bill could get a word out, he hurriedly produced the explanation he was going to have to make dozens if not hundreds of times: “New blood. My sister’s kid, gonna learn the ropes about bartending.”
“I see,” said Bill, whether or not he actually did. Tipped off ahead of time by Pop, Francine had a bottle of good scotch waiting, and poured generously, and Bill, too, went off satisfied if still more than a little mystified.
It was Velma Simms who provided Francine’s first real challenge. Things started not too badly, with Pop making introductions and Velma only raising an eyebrow a fraction. When Francine brought the ginger-ale highball over to the booth where Velma was going through her mail, though, she lingered and said, “That’s a wild blouse.” It was made of a soft material that seemed to have been poured onto Velma. “You buy it around here?”
“London.”
“No crap! I bet it costs something over there, huh?” During this, Pop had come into the back room for something and wasn’t aware of the one-sided conversation out front until I caught his eye and urgently pointed that direction. He emerged into the barroom as Velma, notoriously companionable only on her own terms, ran a look up and down the younger woman and said, “Like they say, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”
“Hey,” Pop called to Francine too late to ward off the frost attack, “give me a hand with the beer glasses here, would you?” I noticed as she retreated behind the bar, looking back at the booth where alimony envelopes were coolly being slit open, that the little dent between her eyes when irritated was a lot like Proxy’s.
After Velma, things went more smoothly, enough customers to keep Francine on her toes but not an overwhelming crowd, and with Pop close at hand as guardian angel, she kept things flowing reasonably well. My thoughts raced back and forth as I watched the activity in the barroom. This crazy year, which a person nearly needed to be an acrobat to follow, in its latest stunt had given me a sister, even if we didn’t seem to be much alike in anything except hair follicles. I knew from my schoolmates that kids were not always happy when a new child came into the family, but did it have to work that same way at the other end of things, when a new grown-up showed up out of the total blue? I didn’t think I actually resented Francine’s arrival into my life and Pop’s. I wasn’t that much of a daddy’s boy, was I? Yet how was a kid supposed to react to such an instantaneous change in the family, and for that matter, in the cherished routine of Medicine Lodge life? And Pop and Francine, this had to be real tricky for them to do, too. Down there at the bar, behind the big fib that they were uncle and niece, were they truly becoming like father and daughter? After all, she was a grown woman, and he admittedly was up there in years, and Pop by word and example had long told me habit dies hard. It bore watching, this dance of the generations.
Such thinking was interrupted as I saw him glance toward the door and stiffen at the sight of the next customers coming in. J. L. and Nan Hill were longtime friends of his and of the joint, but also old Fort Peck hands familiar with the Blue Eagle and its staff, if taxi dancers could be called that. The Hills steered their way to a booth as they always did because of J.L.’s shaking disease, while Pop in low tones instructed Francine in making a pink lady and drawing a beer into a mug with a handle large enough that J.L. could manage it without spilling.
Escorting Francine over with the drinks, Pop began a roundabout explanation of her presence. “I don’t suppose you remember my having a sister, she wasn’t really around Fort Peck so’s you would notice.” Boy, was he stretching the facts to fit the situation. He of course did have a sister, Aunt Marge, who had never been within a thousand miles of Fort Peck. Now, though, the so-called white lie had to be applied. “Anyhow, this is my niece Francine—”
“Pleased to meetcha.” Francine all but curtsied, sensing something perilous from the way Pop was speaking.
“—she’s here getting an education in bartending.”
“This is the place for it,” declared J.L., drawing the beer mug to himself with both trembling hands. “None better from here to China, unless it was the old Blue Eagle in Fort Peck days. I sure do wish we could have got to that reunion, seen all the faces again. I kind of miss the old days, Tom, how about you?”
“Sometimes,” Pop equivocated, while Francine tried not to display the jitters at Fort Peck and Proxy’s bailiwick surfacing in the conversation. And I knew what she did not, that the real threat of discovery was Nan Hill, who as washerwoman to establishments such as the Blue Eagle no doubt had knowledge of people’s dirty laundry in more ways than one. Judiciously sipping her pink drink, she was searching Francine’s face, as if trying to place it.
After enough such scrutiny, she turned to Pop with the verdict three of us were breath
lessly waiting for.
“I can see the family resemblance—there’s no mistaking that hair, surely.”
With that, Francine passed all the examination any one person should have to undergo the first day on the job, and life in the Medicine Lodge settled to its true business, bartending. She did not do badly, as Pop graded it, on through the rest of the afternoon and evening. The true test to come, of course, would be whether she could handle the saloon by herself. And life with Pop and me.
8
THERE IS NOTHING like a new face behind the bar to either intrigue or alarm a saloon’s patrons, and Francine’s presence in the Medicine Lodge very quickly drew attention far and wide. Word spread like grass fire among the Air Force missile silo contingents and oil field roughnecks and the like, that there was someone young, female, and reasonably attractive now pouring drinks in the old joint, and they began to show up in droves. Saloons in the other towns must have dried up like puddles. And while her bartending skills were still very much in the development stage, right from the start she could hold her own with the flyboys, sassily kidding them as “junior birdmen,” and laugh enough but not too much at the rough jokes of the oil rig hands, and meanwhile fend off flirting from just about every local male in her age range, including prominent bachelors like Turk Turco and Joe Quigg, by tossing off “Sorry, no free samples of the merchandise” along with a little mocking smile that seemed to let them in on the joke. As Pop admitted one night soon in a doorway conversation with me when she was finishing the bartending shift by herself, “She’s got quite a mouth on her. But she maybe had to get one, to keep up with Proxy.”
On the other hand, a number of the Medicine Lodge’s longtime customers, such as Dode Withrow and other old-timers from the ranches, including the sheepherders, were less taken with her saucy manner and quick tongue, and missed having Pop stationed behind the bar in his bedroom slippers, faithfully listening to their stories and letting out “No bee ess?” as appropriate. No matter how attentive to them Francine tried to be, it was nowhere near the same.
