by Ivan Doig
Right where I did not want to be grabbed, that’s where. If it was selfish not to want to share my father’s life and mine with a catamount, then I was hopelessly selfish.
Shocked, Zoe asked, “Your dad wouldn’t really do something like that, would he?”
“Who knows?” Hellish good company, he’d characterized Proxy in their Blue Eagle time together. The first part of that, I could agree with. “He complains about her and how she’s always up to something, but he ends up doing what she wants. That’s what scares me. You saw her in the back room—she’s not making eyes at him just for practice.”
Biting her lip in sympathy, Zoe watched me without knowing what to say, for once. In the stillness of the back room, not even the model planes stirred overhead, and the menagerie of items down on the floor and along the walls was like a museum everyone had passed through but the two of us. I could see her working on my predicament as mightily as I was, but the answer wasn’t revealing itself.
The bang of the door from the barroom side flying open jarred us both.
“There you are.” Pop peered up at us, sounding like a man in all kinds of a hurry. “Time to shake a leg, kiddo, we’ve got to get out to the rezavoy. Your folks will be looking for you, princess.” On whatever checklist a fishing derby chairman has to carry in his head, however, he paused for a regretful second to scratch one off. “Tell your dad we won’t need any chicken guts this time around.”
—
THE DERBY DAY CROWD, even as early as Pop and I and the Packard pulled in to the parking lot on the bluff, already was starting to put the Mudjacks Reunion to shame for size and high spirits, and while the dam was modest compared to Fort Peck, it held an even more impressive amount of water than when I had caught my trophy trout. By now Rainbow Reservoir was practically brimming, as if all the weather of the year had collected within its banks in liquid form. If a hell of a lot of water did mean a hell of a lot of fish, then Pop and Bill Reinking were in luck. As we were getting out the loudspeaker equipment and other derby paraphernalia he was in charge of, being greeted all the while by people bristling with rods and reels, Pop surveyed the scene of the crowd, staking out spots along the gravelly shoreline. “How about that, maybe I knew what I was doing,” he said with satisfaction, looking toward where someone from his committee had roped off the muddy top of the dam, as he’d directed. “Not that it wouldn’t be fun to see a Zane or two slip into the water, hey?”
Just then we heard a familiar twang, Turk Turco calling out from where he had parked a highway department flatbed truck, donated or at least borrowed for the day, on the shoulder of ground just above the dam to serve as the speaker’s stand. “Over here, Tom, we’ll get the glory horn set up for you if Jojo doesn’t electrocute himself doing it.”
“Montana Power to the rescue,” Joe Quigg grunted as he swung heavy batteries onto the truck bed to operate the loudspeaker and amplifier.
Pop gladly yielded the equipment so he could move on to overseeing the refreshments area, more his department, and in my unsettled mood I trailed close behind him as he plunged into all that needed doing, questions to be answered, directions given, decisions made. Booths had to be set up, the Rotarians with their inferior beer, the Constantines at their Top Spot hot dog stand, the Ladies’ Aid with their tables of baked goods, and the Goodwill ones beyond those. Across the years the Gros Ventre Fishing Derby had grown to such importance that the state Fish and Game agency, known as the Frog and Goose guys, now dispatched a couple of game wardens to sell hunting licenses and provide free fish gutting for the contestants; Pop wisely put them and their gut buckets farthest away from the food booths. Even the Air Force flyboys had a booth this year, under the banner THE MINUTEMAN MISSILE—AMERICA’S ACE IN THE HOLE, where they gave away blue ballpoint pens. Then there was the sign-up table and the judges’ setup for measuring and weighing fish, that whole side of the parking lot a community encampment where my fathomless father was something like the temporary mayor.
To me now, that culminating day of the summer—of the year, really—seems like one long, twisty dream, everything that began with Proxy’s Cadillac nosing into the driveway and the thunderous disclosures that followed, and then the tremendous gathering at the derby, as if the audience had come to see what Tom Harry would bring about next. There are some days in a person’s life, only ever a few, that are marked to be remembered forever, even while they are happening. As if in a trance, I watched Pop master his chairmanship tasks—“I wouldn’t make too much of that ‘ace in the hole’ business if I were you, Sarge, there are some jokers in this crowd. . . .” “I’m sorry, Louise, but like I told Howie, the ladies will just have to get by with one table for pies. . . .” “You didn’t think to bring a tub of ice, Fred? That’s sure too bad, I guess people will have to get used to warm beer”—the most important person in the Two Medicine country, at least for the day. I should have been busting my buttons with pride for him, and mostly I was, but the repeated history of him and Proxy, creeping closer all the while, incessantly kept haunting me. Her for a mother. What does it take to empty a head of something you do not want there?
Trailing after him with this churning inside me as he strode from one derby duty to the next, I was sticking so close, I was nearly riding his shirttail. It wasn’t until he ducked around to the side of the Frog and Goose booth to catch his breath and have a cigarette that he had a chance to read my face.
“Hey, you doing all right, kiddo?”
“Trying to.”
“Don’t let this morning’s commotion get you down.” He lowered his voice just enough. “We got Francine onto the straight and narrow or else, didn’t we? That’s something.” Busy even when he wasn’t, he was keeping an eye on the derby doings while talking to me. “You know what, I still kind of wish you were fishing today, it’d take your mind off other things.” I must have shown alarm, because he gave me a wry look. “Relax, you’re right, I can’t have the chairman’s son catching the prize rainbow. Go have some fun while I tend to things, can’t you? See what Zoe is up to, how about.”
—
SHE SAW ME COMING as I wended through the crowd to her folks’ hot dog stand, and as quick as she pantomimed blindly eating a ballpark wiener, my spirits climbed, although it still was heavy lifting.
“I’m sprung, Muscles”—at least I wasn’t so far gone I couldn’t feebly do a bit—“what do you say we vacate the space?”
“That’s an idea if I ever heard one, Ace. Let me have a chinnie with the warden.” With business at the Top Spot stand keeping her mother hopping and her father laboring over the grill of curling frankfurters, her parents were as glad to shoo her out of the way as Pop had been with me.
Off we went, life finally feeling right to me with Zoe at my side. She fell quiet as we roved the scene of the event. You could have walked away with the town, so many people from Gros Ventre had come out for the big day. Even Cloyce Reinking was on hand, in spousal loyalty to Bill’s Chamber of Commerce position, we figured. Spying us, she provided a comically elevated eyebrow, very much as Lady Bracknell might have done at the news that people pursued fish when foxes were so much more visible to the eye, and we couldn’t help but giggle.
On the other hand, it was a middle finger lifted in our direction when Duane Zane came tagging after his father, Earl passing Pop’s vicinity with his nose in the air.
As if the Zanes were a bad omen, Zoe grew more somber when we wandered past family bunches visiting gaily with one another along the reservoir shore while waiting for the derby to start. At the section where ten- to thirteen-year-olds were grouped, my horse buddies Jimmy and Hal and some others spotted us and waved and hollered. “Come on,” I tried to put some enthusiasm into my social role, “better say hello to the guys, they’re in our grade.”
“Huh-uh,” she surprised me, squirming her shoulders. “Later.”
I gestured to ou
r curious classmates that we were urgently wanted by waiting parents and we kept going. Zoe was looking vacant eyed in a way that I knew was no bit.
“Something the matter?”
“Ooh, nothing, really.”
“Zo-oe, tell me.”
“It’s hunnerd percent dumb.”
“Come on.” I snapped my fingers all the way back to Shakespeare. “How now, unhappy youth?”
A teeny smile trembled on her at that, but then she looked away and around at the crowd. “You know everybody here. And all the kids. For me, they’re”—she struggled to put it into words—“it’s all going to be new, Rusty.”
As fumbling as her emotion was, I felt in a flash exactly what she meant. The calendar was closing in on us, bringing on the jaundiced feeling that kids get when summer is leaving in a hurry. Without ever having to say so, we shared the haunting sense that our education together would end when school started. And if Zoe was on the verge of crying, that made two of us. It was right there in our faces; there might be other summers, other years, but never again like this.
I tried to make the best of it. “School doesn’t get us for a couple days yet.”
“Saved until the bell, I guess,” she said with the bravado I loved in her.
“Don’t worry ahead,” I said as if I wasn’t a prime example. “We’ll employ our brains and think of something, Muscles.”
That twitched a grin out of her, and at the same time I saw her eyes widen as dramatically as ever. “Here they are,” she whispered, ready for the next act, “the piano girl and her main squeeze.”
—
WHATEVER THEY had been up to, Del and Francine were conspicuously tardy in arriving. I could tell by the giddy expression on him as he hopped out of the van that she had not yet told him anything, except maybe any cooing between kisses. Francine met us with her best poker face, and I supposed it counted in her favor if she was dead set on bluffing her way through the day without upsetting Del in his work. But then?
That was when and this was now, Del all business as he flung open the side doors of the Gab Lab. “And now, for a sound portrait of the Gros Ventre Fishing Derby, stay tuned,” he intoned like the most baritone of radio announcers, and began scooping up recording gear.
Zoe and I had watched him at this before, but it was new to Francine, as were the glistening reservoir and the natural setting tucked against the mountains and the mob of people at the booths and the throng down along the shoreline. “Jeez, Dellie, everybody and his twin brother are at this bash. How do you go about this?”
“An estimable question, mademoiselle.” He paused in checking the connections on the portable tape recorder and scanned the busy scene. The answer seemed to come to him from the dam, where so much overflow was gushing out the floodgate and cascading down into the South Fork that it sounded like a natural waterfall. “Aha!” He cocked his good ear. “The sound of white water, as some poet must have said.”
“Ambience,” Zoe confidently defined for Francine’s benefit, who looked like she needed it.
“Let’s go, derby fans.” Del set off with headphones slung around his neck and the recorder swinging at his side like a suitcase, the three of us in his wake. Swiftly he headed for the speaker-stand truck, where Pop was going over last things with various committee members about to take up their assignments, everyone jaunty as free spenders at a carnival.
Memory heightens these things, but I have my own sound portrait as clear to the inner ear as if it all was happening again now: Francine saying sweetly to Turk Turco and Joe Quigg as we passed their side of the truck, “If it isn’t my favorite customers”; and as quickly as she had gone by, Turk moaning wistfully, “It must be nice to be a ladies’ man”; and Joe telling him, “Eat your heart out, Turco, you’re never gonna have red hair and a crew cut”; and Del glancing back at them with a distracted “Hmm?”; and Zoe silently delighting in it all with me, as we had done so many, many times by the sift of the vent. If only the rest of life were as clear as the voices of that time.
The next was Pop’s, as he greeted Del and Francine with a mock frown, or maybe not, glancing up from dispatching the last of his committee volunteers. “Get lost getting here, did you?”
Right away Francine looked guilty, but one thing about Del, you couldn’t deter him when he had something in mind. “I’m glad we haven’t missed anything,” he went right past Pop’s remark. And immediately inclined his head toward the rushing spillway. “Tom, Mr. Chairman I should say, I need to go out there for a few minutes. It sounds like Niagara. It’ll be phenomenal on tape.”
No doubt remembering the tick episode, Pop gave him a warning look. “Promise not to slip and fall in?”
“Absolutely.”
“Okay, then, I guess, go to it.” He shook his head at Del’s determination to catch noise while several hundred people waited to catch trout. “Make it snappy, we’re about to start the fishing.”
Wasting no time, Del ducked under the rope, holding it up in hopeful fashion for Francine. “Coming?”
“Not this kid.” She and her clean new britches shied back from the muddy dam. “I’ll cheer from here, thanks.” I didn’t blame her, knowing how single-minded Del could be when he had the microphone on and the tape reel hypnotically turning; not exactly lively company. Resigned to going solo, he was already concentrating on his recording gear, checking his multitudinous pockets for things and automatically clamping the headphones onto his ears as he set off across the causeway to the floodgate, careful of his footing while lugging the hefty recorder.
Watching his progress, Pop suggested in a way that did not want any argument that Zoe and I hop up on the truck bed to sit during the derby, so he wouldn’t have any more wanderers to keep track of. The morning confrontation still clouding his brow, he turned and considered Francine standing by herself, looking more than a little lost. “You, too, I guess, toots.” His expression lifted as he jerked his head toward the truck bed. “All the problem children in one bunch, okay?”
Relief flooded her. “Fine,” she said hastily, and started to scooch up onto the truck beside Zoe and me before conscience seemed to catch up with her.
She worked her mouth, as if tasting the words carefully first. “Tom? I’m sorry about . . . you know, everything.”
“That puts you back in the human race,” he accepted gravely. “Come on, rest your bones until Delano gets back.” She hopped up as Zoe and I squirmed over to make room for her.
With the three of us under control, Pop looked all around the reservoir scene and drew a sighing breath, the kind that told me he really wished he had time for a cigarette. His eye caught mine. “I got a fishing derby to run instead, don’t I.” Setting his face the way he did when he was about to open the Medicine Lodge for business, he signaled to Bill Reinking over at the sign-up table that all was in readiness. Seeing this, Turk or Joe did something to the sound system that caused the customary feedback screech, startling everyone but Del, earmuffed as he was by his headphones out on the concrete apron of the spillway, setting down his recorder to punch buttons and read dials. “Cripes, it sounds like we’re murdering a cat,” Pop muttered as he climbed onto the truck in back of where Zoe and I and Francine were perched. Gingerly taking the microphone Joe handed up to him, he cleared his throat a couple of times and began the proceedings.
“WELCOME, EVERYBODY, TO THE GROS VENTRE FISHING DERBY AGAIN THIS YEAR,” his voice resounded out over the reservoir and the clapping gathering. “HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT BLUE SKY? NO WATER FOR A CHASER TODAY, BY ORDER OF THE MANAGEMENT.”
The crowd applauded louder now, perfectly willing to let the maestro of the Medicine Lodge take credit for the day’s dry weather. Zoe of course watched Pop in his master of ceremonies role as if he were Shakespeare come to life, and Francine gave his opening effort a twitchy grin, but a grin. Myself, I prayed he wouldn’t g
et carried away and be reminded of a story, as he’d done at the beer banquet; success does not necessarily strike twice when it comes to bartender jokes.
Squinting hard at a sheet of paper the sun was catching, he rolled on: “BEFORE WE GET STARTED THROWING FOOD TO THE FISH, THERE ARE SOME FOLKS I HAVE TO THANK FOR—” and I relaxed about at least one peril.
While he was conscientiously droning through that list, more than ever I felt like a spectator to a colossal dream, memory mingling with all I was witnessing. In the nearest area of contestants strung thick along the reservoir, the little kids pointed their fishing poles in as many directions as quills on a porcupine. Remembering when I was like them, how mature I felt. At the same time, an inch away from me on one side sat wondrous Zoe, the summer’s gift, whom I would have given almost anything to have for a real sister, and all but touching on my other side, the actual one, Francine, the newcomer whose middle name seemed to be Trouble. Trying to fit the contradictory two of them into my own small world, how childish I felt, hopelessly twelve years old in circumstances that would have taxed much older brains. Meanwhile my singular father, author of disappointments and triumphs and regular surprises in between, stood there, bigger than life, on his stage for the day, his voice rolling out over the water and shore, as central a figure in this panorama as he had been on the occasion of the Fort Peck reunion. Tom Harry as historic as Leadbelly. How clear and simple that had seemed before Proxy pulled up in a Cadillac typhoon of dust. Before the story of my life started coming unraveled in me.
Zoe, thank heavens, had been restlessly dandling her legs over the edge of the truck bed and taking everything in while I was so absorbed with myself. I snapped to at her sudden words under Pop’s amplified ones, “Whoa, is that supposed to be like that?”
Francine and I saw in the same instant what she was pointing to on the downstream face of the dam, a portion of the earthen slope that did not look mud-brown like the rest but was glistening, the way the sun reflects off something wet.
