Prairie Nocturne

by Ivan Doig

  “Got to go do it,” he said as if sentenced to it. “I’m not gonna gamble this time. I’m not. Honest.” As usual, that word called into question any preceding truth, and it was taking all of Wes’s effort not to turn that protestation against games of chance on its head with a sarcastic I’ll bet.

  “See, if I don’t show my face there, before I start out as a singer,” the rest of it was tumbling out of Monty, “I’m written off. Major? They’ll think I turned uppity. Say I caught that skin condition: white-itis.”

  “And that would be too bad.”

  “It’d be attached to my name. And you never get rid of that.”

  For whatever reason, Monty could see, that hit home. The mighty Major for a moment looked like a boy accused. He of the family that had employed Rathbuns back to almost time beyond memory seemed to stare as if he had never seen such a stranger. Then his face set. The anthracite eyes of a snowman could not have been colder. With rough motions he shoved out of his chair and stalked to the dark green safe in the corner of his office, half knelt, twirled the combination as fast as fingers could move, and in an instant came up with a money caddy that held silver dollars as if they were bleached-out poker chips. He grabbed out a full stack, then a judicious half of another, plunking them side by side on the parquet table by the window. “You might as well take the works.”

  My whole pile? All of a man’s wages usually showed up in a boss’s hand only when the words You’re fired! or I quit! flew through the air. But the lord of pay, there by the safe, so far hadn’t decreed the one and Monty had no intention of uttering the other. He hesitated, then went and scooped up the tall-standing coins. “I’ll stay a stranger to trouble this time, honest.”

  Wes still didn’t say anything. He sat back down to his desk, eyes into the familiar field of paper, as the door closed behind Monty.

  It was not that many blocks to where Clore Street elbowed a gravelly hillside for enough room to cavort, but it was to the city limits of the world known by white Helenans. Among other parts, Clore Street immediately took a nighttime visitor by the ear and nose. “Night bite!” the swooping chant of the street vendor echoed every minute or so among the hard-used few blocks of buildings, brazier smoke and smells of cooking wafting from his cart of savouries. “Baloney cold, molly hot! Night bite here!” Supperless, Monty stopped long enough to devour what was advertised as a tamale. Laughter and protestations between women and men could be heard from second-story rooms overhead, and between that and the cartman’s Tabasco a considerable warmth began to spread in his middle.

  Fortified in at least that much of himself, he quickstepped on up Clore to the destination that announced Saturday night with a good-time wall of noise. In the Zanzibar Club, which had taken on the Prohibition guise of a social card parlor that happened to have a bar still in place along one entire side of the room, the permanently bored barkeep greeted him with the usual:

  “Look what the cat dragged in. Where you been keeping yourself, Sticks?”

  “Home on the range,” one of the nearby regulars furnished, “where the steers and the roping dopes play—that’s still the stomping grounds of Wrangler Rathbun, ain’t it?”

  “Funny as a bunion, Hawkins,” Monty said levelly. Ranch hand that he was accused of being and indubitably was, he stood akimbo a minute at the head of the bar looking over the situation before putting his shoulder to it. Pretty much the usual Saturday-night bunch of jokers, from all appearances. He could pick out the railroaders down the bar by their starched shirts with suitcase folds. Here nearer the door but leaving a newcomer enough space to get his buying hand into action, the customary batch of opportunity drinkers consisted of Hawkins, who had a mouth on him like a terrier but didn’t mean much by it, and the more questionable pair of Loomises, unrelated except in an approach to life that counted on deuces being wild. The one from Petaluma in California was known as Petaloomis, and the one who claimed no fixed previous address was called Nowhere Loomis. Thirst cases that they were, the threesome sat with the patience of long practice while the barkeep did his part: “What do you know for sure?”

  “Not a helluva lot,” Monty went along with the ritual, resting his elbows onto the bar and pattycaking the wood as if he had all the leisure in the world.

  The barkeep began drifting in his direction, drying a glass as if wringing its neck. “Keeping busy?”

  Here was the opening. “And then some. Been taking singing lessons.”

  “You guffing me?” the barkeep kept on mechanically. “You ain’t? What sort of music you studying on? Blues? Hymns? Hers?”

  “Easiest thing to call them is spirituals.”

  “Singer of spirit-you-alls?” The barkeep chortled. “You been holding out on us, Sticks.”

  “Don’t remember you ever asking, Jacob.”

  “So we going to see you famous around town, your mug on every lamp pole?”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Monty said with seeming serenity.

  The barkeep chortled again, his eyes moving off to check various customers’ levels of liquid. “What does an about to be famous person drink?”

  “Canuck beer, same as ever. Give the Sunday school here a round, while you’re at it.” He took out a pocket change purse, leather still new to the touch, and reached in for a couple of silver dollars. Carefully he laid them out on the bar and pushed them one by one toward the bartender as if making checker moves.

  Naturally his every word had been snapped up by the Clore Street telegraph of Hawkins, Loomis, and Loomis, so that was taken care of. He skated his beer bottle down the bar to join them and start fending with their boisterous questions about where had this singing racket come from and where he figured he was going with it. A bottle lasted no time, in the heat of such conversation. He throttled back on the next beer, telling himself, Nursey does it. Can’t keep my guard up if I don’t keep my bottle hand down.

  It was proving to be one of those nights, tough sledding over and over the same ground. “I’m still feeling deprived of this heavenly voice,” Petaloomis ragged him for about the sixth time with Nowhere’s sly backing, “can’t we have a taste? Come on, give us a little render.”

  “Aw, no, don’t,” Hawkins put in. “He’d set off every howling dog from here to Butte.”

  Monty’s hand clamped hard as it could around the beer bottle as matters reached this point. Who would have ever thought being sociable was such exhausting work? The gibe from Hawkins was at least open teasing; the urging expressions on the Loomises were about as sincere as crepe paper bowties. God damn it. Why can’t they ever say, like she does, “You’re getting there.”

  He slammed what was left of his beer to safety an arm’s length away, Hawkins and the Loomises too startled to clear away from him in time. Turning his back to the bar, he boosted his rump onto it, then clambered to his feet on the slick polished wood. The three faces directly below gaped up at him like big baby birds’, all the other heads were turning. It strongly occurred to him he had better give proof of ownership for the attention he was drawing, awful fast. He put out one foot and scooted Petaloomis’s beerglass off the bar with a ringing crash. “What the goddamn hell you doing?” the barkeep shouted, charging toward him. Only to retreat with equal rapidity as Monty’s workshoe booted another stein into the runway behind the bar, where it shattered like shrapnel.

  “Run me a tab on glassware, Jacob. You all wanted singing, I’ll give you some.”

  As careful with his footing as if he were up there on ice skates, Monty took his stance. Remembered the litany, every lilted word of command, every push at his posture. Shoulders level and back, head up but not snootily so. Breathe, all the way down until the flanks registered it. He felt as if he had as many parts as a beehive, honeycomb after honeycomb to be minded, but he was doing his absolute best to tend them all. Every moment of it, he could hear that voice from the North Fork as though she stood at his shoulder. “Lacking proof that you can’t, assume that you can.” Talk about t
aking her at her word: this escapade had better be a high note, higher than any ever delivered from a mere chair, or he was going to have to battle his way out of here, ragmouth by ragmouth. Whatever the outcome, amid all else going on in him he burned with the sudden absurd wish, deep in him as the gather of his breath, that she could see him at this.

  “My friends down at this end of the bar have requested a spiritual,” he told the eyeballing crowd since he had to be telling them something, “and I can’t stop it from getting on those of you at the far end either.” Pouring forth for all he was worth, he gave them the song that his mind had been rehearsing ever since he knew he had to do this, his bold voice stilling the restless bay of faces around him.

  “. . . one more soul down to bone,

  Just another praying Jones.”

  When he was done, for perhaps five seconds the only sound was the barkeeper nervously treading on broken glass. Overall, the Zanzibar Club was not quite sure whether to encourage this sort of thing. Then a goodly number clapped and called out, while others shrugged and let it go as one more Saturday-night hijink. A few laughed harshly. Monty noticed, though, that the sharp operators—the tiger riders at the card tables; the hooch merchants; for that matter, both Loomises—were not among those laughing.

  “Give us another,” Nowhere’s voice of insinuation floated up to him, “so we’ll know that wasn’t a fluke.”

  Perfectly ready to oblige, Monty smiled, cleared his throat, and from his Adam’s apple on up, went blank. No such thing as another song seemed to exist anywhere in his frantically upended mind; right then, he could not even have done “Praying Jones” over again, even though it wasn’t much longer ago than an echo. Dread filled him to overflowing as he sensed this bunch watching for him to go into a stumble, the way the rodeo crowd had been when he hit the ground in front of that bull. In a panic, he assumed what he hoped was an appropriately haughty expression and told the lesser Loomis: “Nothing doing. From here on, you can pay good money to hear me.”

  His expression still fixed, he hopped down. He retrieved his beer, took a single solid swig, and dug out enough silver to cover the breakage. The bar crowd turned back to the business of drinking now that he was down here mortal again.

  The Loomises glanced at each other. “Wasn’t that fine,” Petaloomis provided, Nowhere nodding at his every word. “Now we got another situation calling for your talents. Serious shortage, over there at the game. We need a man.”

  “Not this one, you don’t. What I need is my beauty sleep.”

  That was no way to be, they protested. They had listened, civil as anything, and now he was too good for a sociable game with friends?

  Now this part. His heart was thudding harder than it had when he was up there singing. “I’ll watch, little while.”

  The clocks of Danzer’s Time-Repair Shop, on the next street back from Clore, were ticking toward dawn when he finally trudged back to the Major’s place. Manor among manors, the darkened brick mansion sat coolly apart from its couple of streets of peaked and turreted neighbors. Big Helena houses like these usually carried some story about the original owner finding gold flecks in the mud on his boots out at Confederate Gulch or right downtown in Last Chance Gulch. It must be nice, the thought made its way to Monty through his weariness, to have the means to whatever you wanted volunteer itself to you up out of the ground. By the evidence of the big silent houses, a person could then afford sleep. He himself wasn’t the only bedless case at this ridiculous hour, but close; one lone putt-putting jitney of starched waiters heading for the breakfast shift at the Broadwater Hotel seemed to be Helena’s total traffic besides his dragging feet. As he fumbled for the latch on the Major’s front gate he felt done in, drained dry inside but the shirt-drenching sweat of his hours beside the gambling table clammy on his back.

  Wes lay dozing on the divan in his office, a pillow under his bothersome leg. The open and close of the back door brought him awake. “Monty?”

  The footsteps in the hallway halted, then slowly approached the office. To the figure draped in the doorway, Wes asked as tiredly as if he had never slept: “How bad this time?”

  The answering voice was exhausted but even. “I’m in one piece. No battle royal, for a change.”

  After a moment of getting his bearings Monty stepped in, and in the dim light he crossed the room. Wes heard the clink of dollars on the top of the safe.

  “Stayed out of games of chance, too. Could you hang on to the rest of these wages for me? Good night, Major.”

  ANGUS walked Susan to the car with a lantern, handing it to her to hold while he gallantly cranked the black-as-night vehicle. “There, the steed is onto its legs,” he proclaimed as the Model T’s engine coughed to life. “Have a care there at High Centerville by Allan Frew’s gate, mind you.”

  “Don’t worry, all Fords are part goat,” Susan said loyally from behind the wheel. “Angus, thank you again. Go back in there and tickle that wife of yours in the ribs for me. I haven’t had better deer steak since—”

  “—the last time you were here, Saturday night.”

  “The singing and the cards, smartypants, they came out different this time though, didn’t they. You have to admit Adair and I cleaned your clock at both.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d believe I held back out of modesty? I didn’t think so. Good night and best of dreams, Susan.” He held the lantern hoisted until she navigated out of the yard, then retraced his steps back inside to Adair.

  Susan sang her way home from their place. Reliable night; how it always welcomed a song for company. The moon itself seemed to keep coming back for more, poking a plump encouraging ear from behind the blowing chintz of clouds every so often.

  “Had we never loved so kindly,

  Had we never loved so blindly—”

  The old trouper of a song lent well to alto persuasions, if she did have to say so herself. Angus was right yet again: that rascal Burns knew how to pour the words. During the evening’s spates of songs that Wes inescapably would have called heather-and-thither, the look on Adair’s usually sheltered face became a girl’s at Christmas.

  “Never met, or never parted,

  We’d not sing now so broken-hearted . . .”

  “Bravissimo, Robbie,” she accorded the plowman poet, absent from the evening by a mere hundred and some years, as she steered around the stretch of deep ruts Angus had warned her about. A jackrabbit jigged in agitation in the thin corridor of her headlights, then found a sagebrush avenue back to its universe and vanished.

  Her mind itself was on the move, this night. Scotch Heaven could do that to a person, most especially on a proper night of summer like this, with the darkened buttes stationed up so close to the stars that sky and earth seemed one perfect geography, the willowed creek every now and then dappling in the car lights companionably to show the road the way. And the day had been of the same inspirational flavor. (She made a mental note to capture that phrase in the diary.) This morning Monty and Dolph had ridden up in improved moods—men and their Saturday nights—and the day’s session had gone like a dream: she would gladly give her all to pupils for the next two hundred years straight if each lesson could go like that. And she would have bet a considered sum that Monty had been bolstered by the day’s progress as well. Only rough edges remained to be taken off, the main one his tendency to lose himself in what he was singing at any given moment with no strategy beyond the song’s last syllable. (Presentation, she made a further mental note, was another; bless him, he still tended to introduce a song as if he were addressing a chicken-thief joke to the back row of a rodeo grandstand.) “You can’t just pop out with one song,” she had explained. “A careful program, a repertoire, is needed and you must have it in mind as clear as a list at all times.” At that, he tilted his head and looked ready to say something. But all that came was one of his inchlong nods, and on they went in fashioning the creekside spirit songs into some sort of order. Now to her own somewhat surprised ears she he
ard herself experimenting with one of those.

  “This old pig-iron world

  Keeps trying to put its mark on me—”

  She didn’t carry it very far, merely tasting the song with her voice, curious how it clung. Monty’s inherited trove all carried that immemorial pungency, made up of his mother’s washboard life and the misery-whip labors and testifyings of those itinerant sawyers, as if each song had been aged in a kind of smokehouse. Steeped in sing-to-get-by as Burns’s were in peasant prance of rhyme. “People are gonna like those old things, you think?” Monty had guardedly asked her. People were going to have to grow used to having their ears in love with the words and music of Montgomery Rathbun, if she knew beans about it.

  A pang came with that knowledge. Monty’s time under her tutelage was now down to a matter of mere weeks rather than the infinity when they started at this. Her calendar of herself was going to have to change again as surely as that moon would find a next phase. But to an unexpected degree—she had been a teacher more than long enough to know that every pupil took wing—she found in this case she was resenting that, resisting it even. There was something beguiling about Monty, even when he was in his worst snits about the exercises. The storm before the calm, she had come to think of those heavy-browed moods. By now she was convinced he had the mental substance to go with that extravagant gift of voice, and while she was having teacherly longings she let them carry all the way to the wish that she could pick out the stage for him to debut on, the acoustics where the spirit songs could so wonderfully linger. No, though, pretty soon Monty’s career was going to have to be up to Monty, and she and Wes would only watch from the wallpaper. To herself as the Model T made the turn into the gateway of the homestead almost of its own accord, Susan smiled one of the harder smiles: she and Wes had taught each other all there was to know about losing an object of the heart. Or had they.