by Ivan Doig
With a shaky finger he pushed a bill to her out of his mess of money and ate an egg in about two bites, chasing it with beer, while she went and made change. “There you go. Have a good time,” she left him with, and moved off to the other end of the bar to dive into her reading again.
Canada Dan wiped his mouth with his sleeve, staring down at the bar, his second egg untouched. He called out, “When’s Tom coming in?”
“He’s not. I’m the regular bartender now,” France informed him coolly. “Lucky you.”
“Huh, yeah.” He was staring down at the bar again. “Girlie? Didn’t I give you a ten-spot?”
France never even glanced up from the page. “Not unless it had Abe Lincoln on it.”
I was dumbfounded. She stubbornly wasn’t making a move toward the cash register, where in accordance with Pop’s rule the greenback in question should have been set aside as proof against any doubt.
Canada Dan swayed on the bar stool but was firm on the money matter. “I’m sure as anything I had a ten, right here”—he jabbed a finger on the cash on the bar—“and now look, I got this chicken feed back from a five. That ain’t right.”
Irritably she called to him, “It was a five. If you’d keep your dough in your pocket, where it belongs, you wouldn’t get so confused.”
The herder argued on, his voice growing louder. “It ain’t fair. Treating a man like a turster. Swipe his money right out from under his nose. What’s this place coming to?”
“Have another beer and forget it,” came her flat reply from down the bar.
“Uh-uh, nothing doing.” With that flair a drunk can sometimes have, all at once he was on his feet, staggering but determined. “Going down to the Pastime,” he declared with injured dignity. “See if they can treat a man honest there.”
“Fine,” France said sweetly. “I’ll miss you with all my heart.”
As he made his unsteady way out without so much as looking at her, alarm grew in me at the prospect this presented. Canada Dan on a weeklong bender, telling his troubles at the rival saloon, run by that gossip Chick Jennings and now frequented by Earl Zane to boot. As surely as night follows day, they’d spread word around town that Tom Harry’s barmaid would swipe money from you right under your nose. And while I wildly hoped not, there was the awful thought that they might be right. But Canada Dan might have been mistaken about a ten-dollar bill, too; I couldn’t let the reputation of Pop and the Medicine Lodge depend on that.
Closing the vent decisively, I slipped down the stairs and out the back door and dashed for the house. Pop was in another session with Del in the Gab Lab, straightening out Fort Peck lingo, and I didn’t dare burst in on them anyway with something like, “France is being called a thief and maybe she is, if she didn’t learn her lesson in juvie.” No, instead I rushed up to my bedroom and the dresser-drawer stash of money from my swamping chores. Pop always paid me off in silver dollars and I let them accumulate until there was a model-plane kit or something else I wanted to buy. To my dismay, I didn’t have as many as I’d thought, and had to scratch together quarters and dimes and nickels to make the final dollar, panicked that I was losing too much time. Jamming the handful of coins large and small in my pocket, I raced down the alley to head off Canada Dan.
I rounded the corner of the block where the Pastime was situated just as he approached the entrance, muttering angrily to himself.
“Dan! Wait!”
“Uh?” He jerked around as I panted up to him.
“Francine”—I wasn’t going to confuse him with her latest name—“sent me. She looked in the cash register again. Said you were right, she shortchanged you, she’s real sorry. Here.”
“Well, ain’t that something.” Drunk as a skunk or not, he closely counted the loose change and four silver dollars I handed him. His sour old face leered down at mine as if we shared some dirty secret.
“Tell her I knowed she was wrong and I’m just glad she caught up with herself,” Canada Dan rasped. “It wouldn’t do to be cheating good customers.”
—
THIS WASN’T LIKE ME, but I didn’t even tell Zoe about the incident, let alone Pop. It was just too murky or too open to question, too something. Canada Dan’s word against France’s? I didn’t want to be responsible for bringing that kind of thing to anyone’s attention. After all, maybe she had made an honest mistake, or not made one at all. I kept telling myself I’d settled the matter—with my own money, even—and that ought to be that.
The next few days passed without disturbance, and the welcome lull brought the end of the week and a new movie at the Odeon for Zoe and me to capitalize on as usual. By now Charlie Hooper at the ticket window must have thought she was tubercular, but in any case, with a few of her tragic coughs, the crying room was once again ours.
As soon as we were settled in the dark, waiting for the show to start, we prattled about assignations in the Gab Lab and wondered what Del and Francine would do without each other when he left, and otherwise plumbed the mysteries of adult behavior, to call it that. Ourselves, we were joyously splurging, Almond Joy candy bars added to the usual Neccos—thanks to a found dollar I must have missed, back under my socks, in that frantic scramble to ante up to Canada Dan; everything nailed down did seem to have a habit of coming loose lately—and if luxurious entertainment of this sort wouldn’t get my mind off life with a startling sister, what would?
The movie was not likely to wear anyone out with thinking, for sure: G.I. Blues, starring Elvis Presley, with the rest of a cast that no one had ever heard of, deservedly. Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde had nothing to fear from the plot. Tanks roared across the screen, crushing small trees and blowing things up in the opening scene, but this merely served to establish that Elvis was one of a happy-go-lucky bunch of peacetime American soldiers stationed someplace in sunny West Germany, where there didn’t seem to have been a lick of damage done by World War II.
Zoe and I watched in silence except for the sound of Neccos in our mouths as the soldiers made a bet that their leading seducer could not maneuver the town’s standoffish nightclub dancer into a one-night stand. Presto, and the seducer was transferred to Alaska and Elvis had to fill in for him, as well as sing every five minutes, and it took no great guessing where this was headed. Elvis, slender in those days and with a flattop haircut so unmilitarily high that from a distance it looked like the eraser on a pencil, had just wiggled through the title song when a rattle of candy wrapper told me Zoe was putting her attention to an Almond Joy. Even through a mouthful of chocolate and almond she could sound more dramatic than anything happening on the screen: “You’re real worried, aren’t you.”
“About what?”
“Francine. France. Whoever she is right now.”
“Wouldn’t you be if some car snatcher who’s been in juvie showed up out of nowhere and said, ‘Guess what, I’m your sister’?”
Her imagination refused to give in. “What about this: her and Del fall in love and get married, and they run the saloon, and your dad can quit bartending and go fishing all he wants and take you to ball games and everything. What would be the matter with that?”
“Proxy would have her nose in everything even deeper, that’s what.”
“Right. I forgot her.”
I wished I could. Why did she call me Russ and sonny all the time, with that disturbing smile of hers, as if only the two of us were in on some kind of secret?
By this time Elvis was singing on a stage in a rathskeller, when someone punched a selection on the jukebox and it blared “Blue Suede Shoes” loud enough to drown him out. This somehow led to soldiers starting to slug one another. Seasoned critics of this sort of thing by now, we agreed the fight scene did not stack up well against the one in The Alamo cantina; not enough bodies were flying through the air and breaking up furniture. Peace was quickly restored and the story line went b
ack to the bet about a one-night stand.
“How could they ever get married, anyway?” I thought out loud during this break in the action, unwrapping an Almond Joy; it was such great candy, two goodly pieces when you opened it, so that you always felt there was reward ahead. “France and Del, I mean. She calls him College Boy behind his back all the time.”
“She’d have to get over that,” Zoe deliberated. “Learn to call him honeypie or something instead.”
“Oh, sure, can’t you just hear her?” I said, munching. “‘My little chicken dumpling, please pass the salt.’”
“You never know what they’re going to do. Sometimes my mom calls my dad Peterkin.”
“Whoa. What does he call her?”
“Nothing.”
By now Juliet Prowse was fully in the story, as the nightclub dancer whose routine was mostly twirling in circles when she wasn’t doing the splits. She was leggy and toothy, and to our discerning ears didn’t sound German or even French.
“What kind of accent do you call that?” one of us wondered.
“Goulash,” the other readily volunteered.
Things worked out, as they do in movies. Elvis was pressed into babysitting for a G.I. buddy, the baby began squalling—“Just think, if they had crying rooms in Germany, the movie would have to end right there,” I pointed out—and in a panic he called Juliet, who, being a woman, knew to coo over the baby and give it a bottle, and these ministrations somehow took all night, so Elvis won the bet. Sure, after that there was a misunderstanding and a spat, but reconciliation in time for Elvis to sing the last song with Juliet practically turning to butter as she listened. “Uff courze I marry you,” she said before he even asked.
Elvis sang a final song to the assembled troops and fräuleins, and then we were back in the dark for real, the Odeon’s marquee shutting off behind us as headlights of pickups and cars dwindled and vanished while the two of us headed home, quiet the way we sometimes were when one of us had grown-ups on the mind.
“Don’t get all shook up,” Zoe said sympathetically in parting.
“Uff courze not,” I said, as if I believed it.
—
FRANCE AND POP were both behind the bar the next morning, Saturday, when I showed up for my swamping duties.
He was breaking in France on this aspect of bartending, too, so she was washing and shining up an army of glasses while he checked the beverage supply, going over things with her as he did so. “Just remember, if a guy says, ‘Gimme a ditch,’ that’s plain bourbon and water, and you use the cheap stuff down here in the well,” he stipulated, replenishing the supply of run-of-the-mill bottles beneath the bar. “If he wants to drink fancy, he has to ask for a Lord ditch,” he turned and put a hand to the higher-quality Lord Calvert whiskey kept for show in the breakfront. France dabbed in “Fine” and “Got it” at intervals as instruction of that sort went on. They seemed to be becoming more comfortable with each other, despite the generational equator dividing their worlds that made Francine’s lips start to twitch whenever he got going on something from the old days of the Depression and the Blue Eagle era that he and her mother had shared, and that drew a gruff “Don’t get big ideas” from him if she suggested something like the Medicine Lodge serving edible snack food instead of pickled eggs and pig knuckles. At least in that respect, then, they were father and daughter as if handed scripts in pink covers, with me doing my best to ad-lib between the pair of them. It was a role much on my mind again that quiet morning while they went about their chores behind the bar and I did mine in the rest of the barroom, spittoon and toilet duty first, to get the worst out of the way. I had just grabbed my broom and come back in to start sweeping when I heard Pop exclaim, “When did this show up? Been missing since last Saturday night, hasn’t it? I thought you said somebody must have walked off with it.”
I snapped my head around, to see him holding up the eagle shot glass.
“Oh, yeah, meant to tell you,” France said as if the jigger’s reappearance didn’t amount to much. “I came across it behind some stuff under the bar.” She shrugged. “Don’t know how it got away from me.”
“That’ll happen,” Pop said good-naturedly. “Sometimes I’d lose my head if it wasn’t tied on, hey, Rusty?”
“Uh, you said it.”
“But you need to keep track of something like this,” he sermoned for France’s benefit, twirling the shot glass so that the blue eagle caught the light. “Don’t let it be wandering off and get lost for good.”
“Oh-kay,” she said with a slanty smile, “I’ll remember that.”
I was in a trance as I slowly pushed the broom. Was I jumping to the conclusion? Or was the conclusion jumping out at me? My top-drawer dollar had mysteriously disappeared and reappeared exactly the same way, hadn’t it. Put that together with juvie and Canada Dan’s ten-spot, and now I knew I had to tell Zoe.
—
“YOU GOT SOMETHING on your mind besides your hat, Ace,” she sensed right away.
“Funny you bring that up, Muscles. I’m in a sort of a fix.”
“Bad one?”
“Not yet, but it could get there.” If I was learning anything this adolescent year, it was that pretense can be one hundred percent serious underneath. “So here’s the setup.” I stayed in character in more hardy fashion than I felt. “There’s this person, see, who maybe keeps doing something not too legal but doesn’t get caught at it, and then turns around and undoes it on account of guilty conscience or something, if you get what I mean. Pretty risky way to behave, you think?”
Zoe gasped. “Doesn’t France have any more smarts than that? She’s not back to taking cars, is she?”
“No, that’s the weird part, it’s dumb little things.” I ticked off my missing dollar that came back and the shot glass story, getting around to what had happened with Canada Dan. Zoe listened as only she could, her dark eyes never leaving mine, her generous mouth pursed in contemplation.
The instant I was done, she said, “And you’re in a fix about whether to tell your dad or not.”
“You got it.”
The tip of her tongue indicated deep thinking about my dilemma while I waited in agony. “Maybe,” she said at last, “maybe she’s a kleptomaniac.”
“Wh-what kind of maniac is that?”
“It means somebody who steals, they can’t help it. It’s in their blood or something,” she said knowledgeably. “There was a rich lady in Butte, when she went in Hennessy’s department store, a clerk would follow her around and write down what she tucked in her dress. At the end of the month they’d send her a bill.”
“That wouldn’t work on France,” I despaired. “Zoe, what am I gonna do? What if she gets to be more and more of a stealing maniac? Takes a car”—the Buick; the Packard, even; once I started imagining, there seemed no limit to where her acquisitive habit might lead, this was no mere matter of the angels’ share—“or all the money she can lay her hands on, or something?” I concluded helplessly, “But if I squeal on her to Pop, that’s that for her bartending.”
“Del.”
Zoe left it at that until I gasped, “You think he’s one, too?”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said impatiently. “Del must know her pretty well by now, don’t you think?”
“Sure. Right down to the skin.”
“So maybe he could”—she spun her hands that way he did when trying to come up with the right phrase—“sort of give her the word. Tell her somehow that she’s got to quit taking things that don’t belong to her. Some nice roundabout way, he’s good at that. He’s about to leave anyway, isn’t he?”
“Any day now, he says, as soon as he hears from the powers that be.”
“There you go, then. Piece of cake, Ace.”
“Yeah, well, maybe.” I drew a deep, deep breath of resolve. �
��Let’s go ask him.”
—
“AH. THE FEARSOME TWOSOME.”
Del was not doing a bit, though, when he admitted us into the van and sank back into his Gab Lab seat, only acknowledging us in a distracted way. He had a peculiar glazed expression while he kept gazing around the Gab Lab as if enumerating every item in it. I fidgeted, waiting for him to show attention in our direction, but there was no sign of it. Zoe urged me on with a little snap of her fingers that he didn’t hear.
I mustered, “Del, I was sort of wondering if you could help me out—us out, I mean—by . . . what’s wrong?”
He sat up so abruptly it made me step back. “Where’s your father?”
“In the back room. Paying bills. Why?”
“I just found out something he had better know.” He shot to his feet, still wearing that queer look as he ducked out the van door. “Come on. You may as well hear this.”
Zoe and I looked at each other, agape with the sense of deliverance. From the way Del was behaving, France must have walked off with something of his, and now he knew the situation without my having to spell it out to the end of the alphabet. Hurriedly, we trailed him as he marched down the driveway and across the alley to the Medicine Lodge. He stepped into the back room like a man on a mission. Pop looked down from the landing, cocking an eyebrow at the sight of our contingent.
“Hey, Delano.” His greeting carried a note of surprise. “Stuck on something a mudjack said?”
“Can you have France come in here? It’s important.”
“What for?”
“It’s important.”
“I grasp that it is,” said Pop, studying him from A to why. “Hold on, if there’s nobody at the bar, I’ll have her lock up for a few minutes.”
