by Ivan Doig
Quickly I worked up enthusiasm. “Sure you have. He’s just asking you to boss a bunch of people for their own good, isn’t that what ‘civic’ means?”
“I told Bill I’d think it over.” He glanced at me, as if making sure. “You really figure I could do okay at it?”
“Hunnerd percent cinch, Pop,” I vouched.
“Okay, we’ll see,” he said, and for once it did not sound as if it meant maybe.
—
NEXT CAME THE MORNING, not long after, when Francine startled me by showing up in the kitchen as I was heating my breakfast. Ordinarily she slept late and I would only eventually know she was out of bed by those constant bathroom sounds of faucets being turned on and off and lids clattering on the sink counter and other toiletry noises that always left males in the dark. In this new order of things, Pop was sleeping in as well, claiming to be catching up on years of late nights, and usually he and she would grab a bite at the Top Spot before setting up the saloon for the day. So I wasn’t prepared when she wandered in this early, her hair not even fixed, more like the black mop back to the day she had arrived, and she had on the same pinkish shirt and over-the-hill blue jeans from then. “What’s buzzin’, cousin?” her usual greeting was delivered with a yawn.
Thrown as I was by her appearance, I mechanically did the polite thing. “Morning. Want some tomato soup?”
“Not hardly.” Instead, she prowled around, opening cabinets, making a face at what she didn’t find. “Don’t you have anything edible in the place, like cornflakes? Oatmeal? Raisins, even?”
“Huh-uh. There’s some old bread we haven’t thrown to the magpies yet. You could maybe make toast.”
“I’ll settle for some joe, thanks just the same.” She prepared the coffeepot and stuck it on the stove while I poured my breakfast into a soup bowl and sat down to it. Joining me at the table while waiting for the coffee to perk, she seemed to have something on her mind. Whatever that was, it didn’t seem right to me for the only sound in the room to be my slurping up soup.
I asked, “Sleep well?”
“Fine.” This was said, though, with another yawn stifled with her sleeve, the leather bracelet sliding a little on her wrist. By now Pop was letting her close up the saloon by herself most nights—“She needs the practice, shutting up of any kind,” he said humorously enough about Francine’s shotgun style of conversation; little did he know—so she was keeping late hours. Rare sunshine was flooding in through the kitchen window on us, not a cloud anywhere beyond Igdrasil’s leafy outline, the old Packard, and Del’s van, sparkling with dewdrops in the morning light. Squinting against the brightness, she asked, as if just reminded, “How’s College Boy doing?”
“No tick fever yet,” I reported. “He’s still awful busy typing up the mudjacks so he doesn’t get canned from his job.”
She smiled with one side of her mouth. “He better not work himself too hard. He gets any skinnier, ticks wouldn’t have anything to climb on, huh?”
I didn’t care to join in on this reminiscence of Del in the flesh, and, coffee now ready, she went and poured a cup and took quick sips before rejoining me at the table.
Francine sat there for a little while, not saying anything, which was unlike her. After enough gabby suppers in the cafe, Zoe and I had become used to her going on at length to the effect that it didn’t matter whether Kennedy or Nixon won the forthcoming presidential election because we were all going to get blown up anyway when Russia and the flyboys cut loose with the missiles out in those silos, and other extended observations that did not help one’s appetite. Yet you couldn’t really write her off, we kept finding to our fascination, even when she was telling us we’d all end up in incinerated fallout shelters with nothing to eat but tubes of toothpaste. Even at her worst she made you think, and that’s worth something in a person.
As now, when she sat there tracing a roundabout pattern on the oilcloth with her thumbnail before giving me a sudden, keen look. “Want to know something?” I kept at my soup. In my experience, when someone said that, they were going to provide the something, whether or not that’s what you wanted.
“You’re the first to find out, bud.” She leaned across the table in confidential fashion. “Decided I’m gonna change my name.”
Just like that? Was she kidding? Could a person do that?
“Oh?” I stammered in surprise, wondering if I ought to get Pop up to hear this. “You mean, from Duff to—ours?”
“Nahh, it’s too late on that,” she tossed the Harry family name exclusively back to Pop and me, to my considerable relief. “I mean the other one. I’m sick of being Francine. It sounds like some constipated saint.”
Now I was fascinated. “What are you going to change to?”
“France.”
The kitchen went so silent, my eye blinks probably could have been heard, until I managed, “Like the country?”
“Mm hmm. Got kind of a romantic touch to it, ain’t it. How’s it grab you?”
“It’s, um, real different.”
“That’s what I thought. Sounds kind of hip, don’t it. ‘France,’” she said in cool-customer fashion, “yeah.” She grinned at me over her coffee cup. “The boys in the joint are gonna have something to get used to, huh?”
So were the rest of us, starting with Pop. When he arrived on the scene somewhat later for a wake-up jolt of coffee, his initial reaction was predictable—“Like the country? Not even ‘Frances,’ like the saint sounds like?”—but shortly he threw up his hands and said she was a grown-up and her name was her own damn business.
As it proved out, France, as she was now, guessed right about the flyboys and roughnecks having a good time adjusting to the new her when they came in the joint, with the playful ones teasing her as ‘Frenchy’ at first. But that wore off soon enough, and her adopted name or nickname or whatever it was ceased to be anything I paid particular attention to on life’s list of surprises.
—
PROXY WAS ANOTHER MATTER. Put it simply, she spooked the daylights out of me whenever she showed up.
Not far into the evolution of Francine into France and the reaction in the saloon, Zoe and I were on our way back from supper, chattering a mile a minute as usual, when we saw the red Cadillac parked in the alley behind the saloon. Leaning against a fender, taking long, thoughtful drags on a cigarette was the unmistakable blond, shapely figure, and we needed to do some fast thinking.
“Just remember,” I whispered urgently, “you’ve seen her—”
“—through the vent, right,” Zoe tallied in a similar rushed whisper.
“—but she’s never seen you—”
“—but she knows I’m in on it about Francine, I mean France—”
“—so you better look surprised or something at meeting her so she doesn’t get suspicious about how you recognize her. Ready?”
“Piece of cake. I’ll just say, ‘I’ve heard your name mentioned, Mrs. Duffy.’”
“No, no, Duff, get that straight or she’ll bite your head off. Come on, she’s looking at us.”
You really knew you had been looked at when Proxy gave you the once-over, with that suggestive gaze and tuck of a smile at a corner of her mouth. She studied Zoe to the maximum as we came up, Zoe giving back as good as she got.
“Remind me here,” Proxy saw in a hurry that Zoe was thoroughly attached to me, “you’re exactly who?”
Dramatically Zoe began regaling her with Butte and the Top Spot and suppers together, until I finished off the introduction with what really counted. “She’s in on it.”
“Right,” Proxy said, as if sucking a tooth. Me, she gave a little shake of her head. “You’re starting early, Russ,” whatever that was supposed to mean. Her attention shifted from us, thank goodness, as she restlessly looked up and down the alley. “Is Tom around? He’s not at the
house, and I didn’t want to barge into the joint and upset things.”
“He’s gassing up the car”—with Earl Zane still spitting mad over losing out on the saloon, this now had to be done at the truck stop at the other end of town—“he should be back pretty quick.”
“Oh-kay,” Proxy said, grinding out her cigarette with a practiced foot, “we can inspect the scenery until he gets here. So, sonny. How’s that daughter of mine doing at slinging drinks, does he say?”
I was not going to be drawn into any discussion of that. “Pop will want to tell you himself, I don’t want to spoil it.”
She studied me the intent way that made me uncomfortable. “You getting along okay with Francine, I hope?” She included Zoe with a half wink that said any of this was just between us.
“Sure,” we chorused. Then, though, some urge sneaked up on me and I turned this conversation on its head. “She’s changed her name, that’s a little hard to keep up with, but we’re getting pretty much used to it.”
“She’s what?”
“Didn’t you know?” I couldn’t resist, and Zoe beside me was trying to keep an equally straight face. “She goes by ‘France’ now.”
“Like the—?”
“Sure thing.”
“Is that all.” Proxy nonetheless looked a bit bothered by the news, resorting to another cigarette. She smoked the same unregenerate brand of coffin nails my father did, no Kools or Salems for her. “‘France,’ huh? Isn’t that something. Shows she has a mind of her own,” she said as though that was a novelty.
Zoe’s attention was caught by the strange license plate on the Cadillac and used it as an excuse to ask with a wonderful air of innocence, “Do you have a job in Nevada?”
Proxy seemed amused by the question. “More than one, angel eyes. Force of habit.” Well, that tallied with her daughter’s version that she always had something going. Now she slanted a look at Zoe, although I again had the feeling she was speaking mostly to me. “I don’t suppose you know what a stand-in is.”
But we did! We had learned all manner of things theatrical from Cloyce Reinking. Bursting with curiosity, we demanded to know what classic of drama Proxy was attached to.
“Naw, not a play.” She brushed aside a mere stage role. “A movie they’re shooting in Reno and the desert there.”
Suspiciously I asked, “So who are you the stand-in for?”
“Marilyn Monroe, natch.”
Zoe and I fell silent. This couldn’t possibly be true. Could it?
Meanwhile she was telling us she didn’t know why anybody would think it would make a good movie because all it was about was catching wild horses, but Clark Gable was in it, too, “and a bunch of others.” It sounded very much like what a person might pick up from reading a Reno newspaper.
“Then what’s Marilyn—” I began trying to pin her down.
“—really like?” Zoe finished.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Proxy’s voice dipped to a more modest tone, “we’re not buddy-buddy, her and me. I’m part of the furniture, as far as she’s concerned. See, I stand in for her when they’re setting up the shots, is all. The hair and skin and so forth, we register about the same with the cameras.”
Zoe barely beat me to the next question. “How’d you get a neat job like that?”
Proxy shrugged as if there was nothing to it. “I’m in Harrah’s one night, just seeing what’s going on, and I reach out and give one of the slot machines a yank as I go by. ‘Why’d you do that, doll?’ a guy behind me asks. ‘This machine loves me,’ I tell him. He laughs and says, ‘Wait a minute, stand over here in the light, would you?’ He turns out to be the movie director on his way to the blackjack table.” She shrugged again. “Long and short of it is, he tells me they need somebody awfully blond for a stand-in, and how about me, so I said why not?” She laughed in a dry way. “You watch, I bet they swipe my line about the slot machine. Those movie people.”
Whether or not there was a lick of truth in any of that, she could weave a story, for sure. Skeptical as we were, Zoe and I had listened as if hypnotized. “But if they need you to be the stand-in,” I finally challenged insofar as I could, “how come you aren’t there instead of here?”
“Oh, that. The shooting’s shut down awhile. See, they have to dry Marilyn out. Booze and pills together.” She twirled a finger at her temple. “Real bad idea.”
That still was the kind of gossip that probably could be picked up at any Reno slot machine. Like me, Zoe didn’t know how much to believe, but it sounded so good in the telling, it seemed a shame to write it off entirely. “Maybe she’ll go on the wagon and you’ll have to turn right around and go back to Nevada,” she tested out, knowing I would feel a lot better about matters if that happened.
“I’m not holding my breath. Things happen when they happen, buttercup.” Proxy was growing restless about waiting around in the open and glanced at me. “What do you suppose is keeping that father of yours?”
I shrugged and should have quit with that, but instead did something I could have kicked myself for afterward.
“We could wait for him in the back room, I guess,” I more or less invited before Zoe’s expression told me that was not the best idea.
In a blink Proxy dispatched her latest cigarette. “Lead on, I’m housebroken.”
—
THE BACK-ROOM ASSORTMENT caught her interest the moment we stepped in. “Well, looky here. Tom didn’t tell me he was running a pawnshop as well as the joint.” Damn, she was swift at sizing things up. I had to hope she wasn’t swuft as well.
“This is some bunch of stuff,” she marveled, looking every which way. “Kind of like money in the bank, huh?”
I mumbled an explanation about drinkers sometimes running short of money, avoiding any mention of Pop selling off the loot, as I wished he hadn’t called it, on those trips of his.
A reminiscent gleam came into her eye. “Yeah, that had a habit of happening at the Blue Eagle, too.” She gave a throaty laugh. “You wouldn’t believe what some of those characters wanted to trade.”
Zoe had been darting fearful glances at the slicker covering the vent, but when Proxy’s back was turned I silently mouthed, “It’s okay, it’s closed,” and she relaxed into the natural role of tour guide. With Zoe showing off the variety of items from cowboy hats to crowbars, Proxy was unexpectedly interested in it all, like a shopper turned loose in a shut department store. I hung back a little, staying out of the way, brooding over the way this milk-blond force of nature kept showing up out of nowhere and disrupting things.
“What the devil is this, a gospel meeting?”
So taken up with Proxy’s visitation, I hadn’t heard Pop’s car, and I came to with a start as he stepped in from the alley. He did not sound all that pleased at finding the three of us in the back room, and I edged in behind Proxy to let her handle it. Zoe wisely had shut up, too.
“How’s every little thing, Tom? I figured I’d stop by and find out how our girl is doing, besides lopping her name in half,” Proxy said casually. “I see you’re letting her run the joint by herself.”
“Some of the time,” Pop allowed, coming over to where we were clustered by the saddles and spurs. “She’s got to learn to be on her own.”
“So?” Proxy’s eyebrows alone pretty much asked the question. “How’s she shaping up behind the bar?”
“Not bad.” He paused, glancing at Zoe and me and then giving up on keeping us away from grown-up talk. “The flyboys and roughnecks are like bees to honey around her, but she knows I mean it about no dating the inmates, and she hasn’t been.”
“I’ll lay down the law to her about strictly sticking to the job, too,” Proxy said, looking relieved. “Men, they are such a nuisance. Present company excepted, natch.” She generously included me in the grinning glance she gave Pop.
“Let’s don’t get into that can of worms.” I noticed he was giving her the same funny look he had when she pulled in after the Fort Peck reunion, guarded yet attracted. Shaking that off, he turned away to where his apron was hanging on its usual hook by the landing. “I know you’ll want to visit with Francine—I mean, France. Cripes, why couldn’t you give her a name that can’t be fiddled with?” Zoe’s eyes sparkled at that. “I’ll take over out front”—he tied the apron on—“and send her—”
“Before you do that,” Proxy interjected. Zoe and I took note of the actressy way she looked around the room, as if only then discovering its treasures. “Quite the collection you have here.”
Pop paused, looking unsure whether he wanted to hear this. “It adds up, if you stay in business long enough.”
“If I know my history from the old days in the Eagle, customers don’t always make good on paying up later.” She patted the weathered stirrup of a saddle that obviously dated back to roundups long ago. “I bet a bunch of this is never gonna be got out of hock and it’s yours to do with, am I right?”
“That happens some. Why, you in the market for a saddle for the Caddie?”
Proxy didn’t crack a smile. “I was just thinking of someplace where they buy all sorts of stuff, and there must be a junior fortune here if it was handled right.” Clearly she thought she was talking over the heads of Zoe and myself, which showed she didn’t know our heads. We put on bored faces, idly spinning the rowels of the rank of spurs while listening with all our might.
“You were, were you,” Pop was saying gingerly. “And where is it you think something like that takes place?”
“Canada, slowpoke.”
My insides lurched.
“The railyard district in Medicine Hat,” she specified. “Come on, Tom, you know what I’m talking about. No place like it when we used to know it, was there.” The kind of slick, knowing smile I didn’t want to see accompanied that. “Still that kind of place, if I know anything about it,” she sailed right on. “I’ve been back to the district now and then since, doing business, and you’d be surprised at what they can come up with when they like what they see.” I suppose she did not actually bat her eyes, but she might as well have. Proxy’s general type of business already had involved Pop with a surprise daughter. Now it was threatening to set him off again on those trips I hated so much. As far as I could see, she was a specimen of catamount that made the wildcat mounted on the wall seem like a kitten. Catching my distress, Zoe nibbled her lip anxiously.
