by Ivan Doig
I suppose Pop would have said it all balanced out on the teeter-totter. In any case, Francine now was there behind the bar of the Select Pleasure Establishment of the whole state, apparently as firmly installed as the beer spigot, and people were just going to have to get used to her. That included me.
—
“BILL TELLS ME you have an addition to the family.”
Word surely was all over town if it tickled the ears of even Cloyce Reinking, I deduced when I met up with the former Lady Bracknell at the post office soon after Francine’s bartending debut. You might not think going for the mail constituted hazardous duty, but was I ever finding it so. Occupied as Pop was with nurturing the newcomer behind the bar, he delegated me for the daily post office trip, which I ordinarily would not have minded. Nothing was ordinary since his change of mind about selling the Medicine Lodge, as I found out the first afternoon I had to pass the Zanes’ gas station on my way and Duane popped out like the birdie in a cuckoo clock. “Your old man weaseled out of the deal,” he sneered as I came into range, “he don’t know how to keep his word.” That got to me, but a broad daylight fistfight with a hereditary fool would not help matters in any way I could see, and so I only told him to stuff his remarks where the sun doesn’t shine and from then on took to dodging around the block on my mail errand. Encountering Mrs. Reinking with the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s and a catalog or two cradled in her arms and lofty curiosity in her expression was no similarly possible mortal conflict, but something of a challenge nonetheless.
“Uh-huh,” I tried offhandedly handling her inquiry about Francine having joined our living arrangement. “She’s kind of a surprise.” A little late, I remembered about watching my mouth. “I mean, we were never real close to that side of the family up until now.”
“Is that so?” A persimmon smile in character for the ladyships of the world. “I hope not for anything as serious as leaving a baby in a handbag.”
“Huh-uh. No. Nothing like that.”
When she put her mind to it, Mrs. Reinking could be surprisingly astute about things. “It must make quite a change in the household for you and your father.”
That was putting it mildly. “It takes some adjusting.” I squeezed out enough truth without having to go into our domestic situation further, and hurriedly switched topics to her starring performance as Lady Bracknell, which I’d finally gotten to see when Bill Reinking kindly took me to the final night of the play. “You were outstanding! Zoe thinks so, too.”
Her wintry features thawed into a genuine smile. “The two of you started something,” she confided. “The Prairie Players are going to do Blithe Spirit this winter. I am cast—typecast, you might even say—as Madame Arcati.”
“Neat! Do you get to—” I crossed my eyes to the best of my ability.
“I think not,” she laughed lightly. “But I may resort to a turban. Madame Arcati, you see, is a medium and clairvoyant.” Helpfully she explained that meant the character conducted séances with ghosts and could sense things that other people could not. A kind of fortune-teller of the past as well as the future, it sounded like.
We parted with her promise to enlist Zoe and me when she needed to learn her lines, and my silent wish for clairvoyance to rub off on me.
—
THE FACT OF THE MATTER was that Francine was not like any relative—sister, cousin, something in between as a half sister seemed to be—I could ever have dreamed up. For sure, the presence of a woman in a house that had not known one since I was an infant meant detours in routines Pop and I had followed as habitually as monks. Particularly, she hogged the bathroom for so long each morning that I regularly had to go out behind Igdrasil to take a leak. “They’re that way,” Pop counseled me about that propensity of womankind. But such quirks were the least of learning to live with Francine. Not only did she and I not start off on the same page of the book of siblings, we were not even in the same edition yet. Throughout life you meet people from the past, as natural as anything, but meeting someone from the future is far, far different. History only licenses us to drive in the past; the road ahead is always full of blind curves. Even I did not have nearly enough imagination to fantasize any of what the decade ahead would bring, with the flowering of a generation of Francines, restless and brainier than they knew what to do with and all too often as zany as they were brainy. The music coming that would leave Elvis Presley in the dust. The sprouting of communes and Haight-Ashbury and other such scenes. The whole youth revolt continually fueled by political assassinations, cities burning in racial rage, the despised Vietnam War, national traumas that seemed to come year by year after 1960. All I knew, those summer days and nights when history was forming up over the horizon, was that life had radically changed course with Francine’s arrival, and I was scrambling to keep up.
—
THINGS MIGHT HAVE GONE on that way, she in her hemisphere and me in my own, and mostly thin air between despite our best efforts, if the night hadn’t come when she joined Zoe and me for supper. Until then she had been eating early with Pop so they could work the shift in the joint together on through the evening, and also to the point, he could keep on introducing her to all and sundry as his niece. This time he was busy with a beer delivery and sent her on ahead to the Top Spot by herself, and the next thing we knew, here she came giving us a knowing grin about all being in the same boat, eating-wise.
“Room for one more casualty?” she asked, as if Zoe wasn’t openly dying of curiosity about her, and scooted in with us at the back table, already wearing her bartending bow tie and crisp white blouse. She dubiously scanned my usual shake and cheeseburger and Zoe’s barely touched plate of the day’s special. “Liver and onions, ain’t it. That’ll put hair on your chest.” She flapped open a menu for any alternative. “What do they serve here that doesn’t come with ptomaine?” We giggled a little nervously at this frank approach to Top Spot cuisine.
I have wondered since if Francine’s tongue was simply looser than usual without Pop there with her. His wing, when he took you under it, covered a lot of territory. Out on her own, without him or Proxy to intervene, she must have felt—well, who knows what she was feeling, but she rambled on in a relaxed way as she went down the list of the cafe’s none too appetizing offerings. Zoe and I could just sit there and listen to this mercurial visitor from the grown-up world, obviously not thought up by Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde but theatrical enough in her own head-tossing way. I have to stop and remind myself that Francine was only twenty-one at the time. To us she seemed as worldly as Scheherazade.
Zoe’s eye was caught by the handiwork on Francine’s wrist. Wider than a watchband, the wristpiece was an intricate weave of different-colored leather strips like fine basketry, only soft. “Ooh, that’s some bracelet. Where did you get it?”
“Mmm? Made it myself,” Francine still was absorbed in trying to find anything on the menu that appealed. “In leather class.”
That roused my curiosity. “They have that in school where you were?”
“Nahh,” she said offhandedly, still intent on the menu, “but they’re big on it in juvie.”
Zoe and I about fell into our food.
We looked at each other to make sure we had heard right, and we had. Juvie meant only one thing, any way it was said. A juvenile-offender correction facility. Alcatraz for teenagers.
“I give.” Francine surrendered the menu, flopping it closed. “Liver and onions it is, you only die once.” Our faces gave us away. “Whups. I see my mommy didn’t spread the word about that little episode in my youth.” Momentarily she frowned down at the wristband. “I sort of wondered how much my reputation had proceeded me. Not all that much, it looks like.” With the rare realization that she might have said too much, she winked at us in the manner of Proxy. “Tell you what, let’s keep it that way. What people don’t know won’t hurt them, huh?”
&nb
sp; Depend on Zoe, she came right out with it. “How bad a crime was it?”
“I took a car, is all. People got excited. Jeez,” a note of annoyance crept into her voice, “I was going to bring it back later that night. I just got a little delayed.”
“How old were—” Zoe and I blurted together.
“Old enough not to know better,” Francine breezed past that. “Fourteen.” In other words, no great amount of age beyond that of two thunderstruck twelve-year-olds.
If she was going to keep talking, we were going to keep asking. It was my turn. “So how long were you in juvie?”
Frowning, she toyed with a tendril of her hair. “Year and a half. That judge was really touchy about cars.”
“Have you decided, dear?” Mrs. Constantine hovered in briefly to take her order, alternating a warm smile at Francine as a new customer and a stern expression at her non-eating daughter. Zoe and I could hardly wait until she was out of earshot to resume our question barrage.
“What did Proxy say when you got caught?”
“She wasn’t around to say anything. Hardly ever was.” This was given out carelessly, as if a missing mother was of no concern. “My aunt and uncle weren’t any too happy with me”—she gave the offhand shrug that was becoming familiar—“but what did they expect? If there’d been anything to do besides watch wheat grow, maybe I wouldn’t have swiped that car.”
Zoe was torn, I could tell, between devouring every word of this and dying to fire off more questions, and for that matter, so was I. With extreme mutual willpower, we waited for Francine to go on.
“Anyhow,” she picked up her story as if she had nothing better to do, “me being in juvie got Proxy’s attention for sure. Came and got me when I was sprung. Decided to turn into a real mother and hauled me off to Nevada.” She shrugged again. “It’s been a roller coaster ride ever since.”
For someone who had been locked away for not inconsiderable theft, this new addition to the family sounded blindingly honest when she wanted to. But not, it was dawning on me, to the extent of having volunteered her automotive indiscretion to Pop. Nor had Proxy seen fit to mention the matter, had she. If I was sure of anything, it was that Tom Harry would not put a car thief in charge of the saloon that was his lifeblood. So he didn’t know, but now I did. Talk about the weight of knowledge; it all of a sudden felt like a ton.
Zoe, bless her up, down, and sideways, took up the questioning while I was sitting there, stunned with the burden of truth. “What did you do before coming here? I mean, what kind of work?”
Francine glanced around with an expression as if the hard-used cafe was all too familiar. When not showing a sidelong smile similar to her mother’s, her mouth had a tendency to look like she was tasting something fishy. That dubious approach to life came out in her voice now. “Pearl-dived.” Which meant she washed dishes. “Slung hash.” Waited on tables. “Took rental cars down to Vegas when they ran short, go bring them back when Reno started to run out. Little of this, little of that, not a hell of a lot of anything.” She picked up her spoon and drew idle circles on the tablecloth. “Just between you and me and Pat and Mike and Mustard, I think that’s why that mother of mine came up with this brainstorm of getting me into a line of work that’s got something going for it, like bartending. Don’t you guess, Rusty?”
“Huh? Oh, sure.” How the question popped out of me right then, I don’t know, but when better? “What does your . . . what does Proxy do for a living?”
“Her?” Some more tracing with the spoon in concentrated fashion. “She’s a promoter.” Zoe and I glanced at each other, trying to figure that out—the only promoting we knew anything about was advancing from one grade to the next in school—until Francine took mercy.
“Mom,” she gave the word a sly little twist, as if all three of us knew the strange ways of parents, “is more or less in the divorce business, see. Nevada dude ranches have always been big on divorcees in for the quickie piece of paper. New crops of grass widows. So they send her around up here”—from the vague swing of her head that seemed to include everywhere north of Nevada—“to travel agencies and private investigators and so on, anybody with a stake in marriages going on the rocks. Casinos use her, too, same kind of thing—spreading the word where people might be interested in coming on down to Reno.” She kept looking fixedly at the whorls the spoon was making on the tablecloth. “Those, and some other ways of earning a buck.” The slight lift of the shoulders that was casual, but also not. “She’s usually got something going.”
Her supper arrived, along with Mrs. Constantine’s beaming wish for good appetite, and she dug in, while mine now sat as untouched as Zoe’s.
“Hey, don’t let anything I said put you off your feed,” Francine favored us with as she chewed a piece of liver. “You can’t let other people’s behavior drive you crazy. Learned that in juvie.”
—
MY STOMACH KEPT TURNING inside out during the rest of that meal. Francine’s offhand gossiping about herself had left me in what Pop would have called a “picklish dilemma.” Was it up to me to tell him his long-lost daughter had a criminal past, at least of the juvenile sort? Would that make me a squealer against my own flesh and blood? What if I did tell him and he took it wrong, thinking I was doing it because I resented her arrival into the family? Would I only be making trouble, and be blamed for bringing up something bothersome from the past? When you go through a gate, close it behind you, remember.
For once, even Zoe was less than certain when we put our heads together at the table after Francine finally went off to tend bar.
“You want him to keep her on so he doesn’t sell the joint—”
“Yeah.”
“—but you don’t want him out of it about what she did to land herself in juvie.”
“No.”
We deliberated silently on the matter.
“Maybe”—inspiration surfaced in Zoe as it so often did—“she’ll take care of it.”
“Who, Proxy? Fat chance. She hasn’t said boo about it so far, so why would she—”
“No, no, not her. Francine, I mean. She about talks her face off, doesn’t she? So she might blab it herself to your dad, like she did with us, sooner or later.”
I seized on that, particularly the “later” part.
“Good thinking, Muscles. Maybe I’ll wait and see what happens.”
9
GUESS WHAT BILL REINKING had on his mind today.”
Looking deeply thoughtful, Pop was at his desk on the landing, a typical rainy afternoon, when I came back from the post office.
“Don’t keep me in suspenders, Pop,” I joked as I trotted up the stairs, still clutching the mail under my slicker to keep it dry until I handed it to him—bills, mostly—and went to hang up the dripping coat. At least I hoped I was joking, for the most average thing seemed suspenseful since Francine came onto the scene. I was pretty sure she hadn’t told him about her juvenile detention past yet, if she was ever going to, and the Gros Ventre Weekly Gleaner generally had more serious matters on its mind than who had stolen a car way back then, so there was a pretty good chance this wasn’t that.
What was it, though, that had him sitting there, as if waiting to explore the human condition with me? I could tell simply by listening that the vent was safely closed. He had not said anything about keeping it a secret from the new presence in the barroom, but I had the impression he didn’t at all mind it happening that way for the time being. Right now he looked more than ever like the master of all he surveyed, having a cigarette in a relaxed manner that suggested this one didn’t count toward quitting smoking, gazing around the back room, as if collecting his thoughts from the loot assortment. Now that Francine was catching on as bartender enough not to disgrace the joint, he even had the leisure to help Del with mudjacks lingo, the Fort Peck reunion evidently a ros
ier experience to look back on than when he’d had to face it. So I was not able to pick out any imminent disturbance of the peace in my father’s universe at the moment, and had to let him take his sweet time in telling me what was on the mind of the Gleaner editor.
“Okay, picture this,” he said at last when I was more than ready to. “Bill comes in a little while ago and is sitting there having his scotch and I’m just hanging around, visiting with him. Francine minds her manners, goes off to the amen corner to leave us alone, and we’re shooting the bull like always, when guess what he brought up?”
He seemed to be enjoying the story so much I almost hated to parrot back, “Gee, what?”
“He’s president of the Chamber of Commerce, you know,” news to me. Pop paused for effect, but couldn’t hold it in for long. “He asked me to honcho the derby this year.”
This was quite something, all right. While other towns marked the close of summer with harvest festivals and homesteader days and rodeos and such, Gros Ventre had decided the proper way to celebrate was to catch every fish humanly possible. The derby had grown much larger and more popular across the half dozen years since my ill-fated introduction to it. Which was why the best I could come up with at the idea of Pop, chicken-gut fisherman that he was, in charge of the annual rod-and-reel extravaganza at Rainbow Reservoir was “No bee ess?”
He started to correct my language, but then laughed a little sheepishly. “I must be getting a reputation for having time on my hands, you suppose? I don’t know, though.” He looked almost embarrassed. “Being in charge of something like that is awfully damn civic. I’m not sure I have it in me.”
Now, it would have been perfectly fine with me if he decided not to have anything to do with the exalted fishing derby in any way, shape, or form, which would mean I didn’t have to, either. However, if it would give him something to do after Francine could handle the Medicine Lodge by herself and Del departed to wherever Missing Voices led him to next, what could be wrong with that?
