by Ivan Doig
“It gets kind of lonesome over here by yourself so much, I bet.”
“Maybe just a little.”
“Not that you aren’t doing real good at getting along on your own, don’t get me wrong.”
“Uh-huh. I mean, huh-uh.”
“If I could be two places at once, we could do some things together. Go fishing after supper and stuff like that.”
“That’d be, uh, nice.”
“But I can’t, can I. Be two places at once. It wouldn’t work even if I was Siamese twins.”
“I guess maybe not.”
“So here’s my thinking.” His forehead furrowed with it. “I don’t dare let you be in the barroom when the joint is open, the state liquor board would nail my hide to the wall if they caught us at it.” He spelled out his decision probably as much for his own benefit as mine. “But I see no reason why you can’t be in the back room some when I’m busy out front. After school and maybe until your bedtime. How’s that grab you?”
On those hasty vacation trips of ours to the Grand Canyon, he had let me do what he somehow knew a kid most wanted to do. Held in his strong arms and big hands there at the rock parapet on the rim of the canyon, I would stick my head over the edge as far as I dared and spit a mile, fully believing I was adding my contribution to the Colorado River way, way below. A similar sense of unprecedented thrill took hold of me now. My face must have lit up the dim bedroom, because he added in a hurry, “That don’t mean you can run wild back there. You have to behave yourself around the hocked stuff, it’s like money in the bank for us.”
“I won’t hurt any of it, I promise.”
“There’s something else. The air vent.” His eyes locked onto mine. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”
“Uh-huh.” Who could forget, how sound from the barroom came right in through it, clear as a whistle, when he was at the desk busy being busy with bills and checkbook.
He took a drag on his cigarette, still looking hard at me. “I know you’re gonna listen in to the bar talk, there’s no getting around that. You’re liable to hear some rough language—”
“That’s nothing, Ronny cussed all the time.”
“—and that’s my point, I don’t want you picking up the bad habit.” I shook my head vigorously against the possibility of that ever happening. He had a further thought. “If you’re playing around up there at the desk and the vent’s open, just don’t make any racket and disturb the inmates,” meaning the customers out front. “Savvy that?”
“Sure!”
Hesitating a moment, he drew a deep breath that had nothing to do with smoking. “I’ve got to trust you back there, Russell.” It was the first time within memory that he had used my given name.
“I’ll be good, Pop. Honest!”
“Okay, kiddo, we’ll give it a try.” He turned to go. “Don’t let the ladybugs bite.”
—
I FELL IN LOVE with the back room of the joint from the first possible moment.
I could scarcely believe my good fortune in being allowed to spend hours on end at that comfortable desk perch on the stair landing, reading comic books or building model airplanes or following the misfortunes of the Selectrics in the Great Falls Tribune or letting my imagination wander through the ever-growing collection of hocked treasures piled below. And of course, most of all, listening at the vent, silent as a ghost. Any kid is a master spy until that talent meets itself in the mirror during the teen years and turns hopelessly inward, but life could not have arranged my surveillance of the grown-up world more perfectly. From the barroom side, the air vent high on the rear wall wasn’t even noticeable amid the stuffed animal heads, but there in the back room, that same slatted metalwork grille close by the desk was almost like a fabulous radio I could take a look into and have each scene come to life. I needed only to stretch my neck a little to peek through the vent slats when the street door swung open and a customer appeared, and see and hear everything as my father lived up to his reputation as the best bartender imaginable, his shirt and apron crisp as table linen, his black bow tie lending an air of dignity, his magical hands producing a drink almost before it was thought of, his head tilted just so to take in whatever topic was being introduced on the other side of the bar. The reliably contrary weather of the Two Medicine country? “Sure enough, it’s all gonna dry up and blow away if we don’t get some rain.” The storms of the human heart? “She did that to you? No bee ess?” Philosophy needed after some grievance against fate? “All you can count on in life is your fingers and toes.” And if a known face came in, not saying much of anything, I could count on hearing “Hey, you look like you need a Shellac,” and then the whish of a Great Falls Select being drawn from the beer tap, and the sounds of Pop puttering patiently until this set of vocal cords, too, was oiled enough to reward the waiting ears, his and mine.
I know, I know; the listening bartender is a standard character, probably ever since Chaucer. But Pop filled the role so completely, those years when I was the eager but secret audience behind the vent, that the Medicine Lodge became the repository of lore in much the same way as material items piled up in the back-room collection. Sooner or later, everyone has a story to tell, and his tireless towel rubbing up a special sheen in front of a customer seemed to polish the opportunity. If it wasn’t Dode Withrow in from the ranch with yet another tale about one sheepherder or another quitting for the twentieth or thirtieth time, then it was one sheepherder or another there on a bar stool, drinking up his wages and recounting, like the other half of an old married couple, Dode’s shortcomings as an employer down through the years. If it wasn’t absolute strangers relating things that sent Pop’s eyebrows climbing, and mine, then it was the afternoon regulars contributing their share of episodes as well. Earl Zane’s sagas of himself tended to be blowhard accounts of rodeo bronc riding, during which he seemed never to have been bucked off. If the mail happened to be short of alimony checks, then Velma Simms might have a second drink and begin dreaming aloud about her latest cruise of Greek islands, through seas if not wine-dark, at least ginger-ale highball tinted in her recollection. Bill Reinking, with his newspaperman’s memory, often harked back to the 1930s, the testing time of his and Pop’s younger years; Pop kept an old election poster of Franklin D. Roosevelt taped to the mirror beside the cash register in tribute to the president who pulled the nation out of the Depression. And even I, underage occupant of the 1950s, could feel the close breath of history when Turk Turco, the state highway maintenance man, in his distinctive twang, would relate some hair-raising episode from his time as an infantryman in Korea at Pork Chop Hill, and his buddy and arguing partner, the Montana Power lineman Joe Quigg, would match that with the sobering memory of the mushroom cloud shrouding the Pacific sky when he served in the Navy during the hydrogen bomb tests in the Marshall Islands. The voices of the vent still seem so vivid to me, so distinct. It is a sensation I even yet find hard to describe, how those overheard stories kept me occupied, in the truest sense of that word, taking up residence within me like talkative lodgers in the various corners of my mind. As the father who was doing his bachelor best to raise me would have said, I didn’t lack imagination in the first place, and I certainly had no shortage of it as the clandestine eyewitness—or earwitness—to the variety of life as it passed through the Medicine Lodge.
—
“POP? DID YOU HAVE to bounce anybody?”
This was the big question, as regular as Saturday night, the minute I heard him in the hallway. Weeknights, regular as clockwork, he would break off anything he was doing in the barroom, serving drinks or negotiating with a customer wanting to hock something, to step into the back room when it was my bedtime, and if I was still there, ritually shoo me home. Saturdays, though, his busiest night, I had to evacuate to the house right after supper—“Just to keep the decks clear, kiddo”—and spend those evenings wondering
what I was missing at the saloon.
“Relax and get your beauty sleep,” he usually answered, tired after his long night behind the bar, “nobody got out of hand.” Usually.
The price of my cherished private spot in the back room was a pair of nagging thoughts that would not go away, no matter how I tried to put them out of mind. I will come to the other one soon enough, but my first concern was that Pop served not only as bartender and proprietor and all the other lofty jobs of the saloon, but as bouncer as well. This was tricky, since it almost always involved someone who’d had a drink too many. If asked, Pop would have pointed out that people have been getting intoxicated since the first ripe grape dropped on Adam and Eve. To him, Prohibition was the dumbest thing ever tried, resulting only in bad bootleg booze. But the Medicine Lodge had a reputation to maintain as a respectable joint, and he did not tolerate what he called squirrelly behavior. “Hey, this isn’t the Copabanana,” he would directly warn anyone growing too loud or just plain sloppy drunk. Persist, though, and the offender would be told in no uncertain terms to tone things down right then or clear out. Every once in a while this ultimatum would put the balky customer in a fighting mood, and if he could not be talked into taking it outside, Pop would have to throw him out. The first time I happened to witness this through the vent, scared to watch but too thrilled to look away, I held my breath as he came out from behind the bar, his apron still on and not a hair out of place in his silver-striped pompadour, and got hold of a drunken and combative oil field roughneck. In nothing flat, the guy was in the street; you did not argue the point with Tom Harry.
As soon as I saw him bounce that unwelcome customer, though, the what-ifs swarmed. Suppose the guy had been carrying a knife? A gun? What if he had been an ex-prizefighter, mad at the world and more than capable of beating Pop’s brains out? What if things really got out of hand some Saturday night, always the drinkingest night of the week?
When I confessed that I worried about his role as bouncer, Pop seemed surprised. “I’m not selling milk to kittens, am I. Don’t bother your head with it.”
Mostly, I did not have to, the majority of the evenings of the week when I was across the alley there, seated at what I regarded as my rightful place, with the familiar sounds from the barroom sifting in through the vent. The click of washed glasses lining up on a shelf. The release of metal and air when a fresh beer keg was tapped. The ching of the cash register. Much like being backstage while the theater came to life out front. But all you can count on in life is your fingers and toes, right? The script changed mightily for both of us when the page was turned from one decade to the next and the curtain went up on 1960.
—
“CAN’T I GO with you this once, Pop?”
“You sure as hell can’t.” Bent over like a bear in a berry patch, he was rummaging through the hocked items piled along the walls of the back room, selecting things, rejecting things. “Get that idea out of your head before it leaves a puddle, okay? Cripes, you’d have to miss some school.”
I knew it wouldn’t do any good to argue the point. It never did, when something would set him off this way. This was the other worry I carried through those years, these periodic trips of his to sell off some of the back-room loot, as he jokingly called it, when he would park me with Howie and his wife, Lucille, while he was “away on business” days at a time. He always went alone, so that part did not surprise me now. This abrupt journey, though, was right after New Year’s, a time of year when I thought we were safely settled in for the season, maybe for many frigid months. Out the top of the frosted back window, I could see Igdrasil’s spreading branches humped with snow from the unusually hard winter we were having.
“You didn’t tell me you were gonna do this again.”
“Yeah, well,” he answered without looking up, “things come up and need something done. Rule number one is, don’t wait until you hear from heaven.”
Except for times like this, he and I by now knew each other’s habits blindfolded. Our nearly six years together had taught me that when he said, “Maybe,” it meant “No,” and when he said, “We’ll see,” it meant “Maybe.” When I asked him in those nighttime conversations in my doorway how the day’s take was, if he said, “Not bad,” that meant “Good,” but if he said, “So-so,” that meant “Bad.” Pop could sound gruff—no, wrong, he could be gruff—but I had grown used to that, just as he’d had to become accustomed to my tendency to get carried away by matters. He generally coped with any of my thorny questions about life by giving some vague answer that ended with “That’s the how of it,” while I always wanted the five Ws and an H—who, what, when, where, why, and then the how. If I persisted, he might say something like, “Don’t be a plague of locusts” or he might sigh and provide some actual Ws. It depended.
At various levels, then, there was give-and-take between us, maybe more so than in some supposedly normal households. When it occurred to him, he taught me things for their own sake—I was probably the only kid who could tie a bow tie at the age of six—and I figured out for myself certain habits that made our life easier, such as fixing my own lunch for school, invariably jam sandwiches. I suppose with only each other to count on, reciprocity was a necessity. Whenever I had a class project I needed help with, he leapt to it as if I were an Einstein in the making, and whenever he took a notion to go fishing at Rainbow Reservoir on a summer Sunday, I fished loyally alongside him for as long as the chicken guts held out. True, we occasionally got on each other’s nerves—those ironclad habits of his did not always coincide with my own—but we got off again just about as fast. In short, we probably were as used to each other as two people can get. We ate, slept, and went about life as suited us; one of Pop’s middle-of-the-night hallway pronouncements was, “I don’t give a flying fig what anyone says, we’re not doing too bad with what we got to work with, kiddo.” We weren’t, except for times like this. The truth of the matter was, bad weather was not the only hazard agitating me as I watched him gather to go.
Was he seeing someone on these trips? “Someone” could only mean a woman, in my mind, and “seeing” carried all manner of implications I didn’t want to have to face, ever. I hated to be suspicious of him, but what other explanation was there for these urges that seemed to come over him unpredictably? He wasn’t much of a drinker—in the joint, he was notorious for saying, “I’ll take mine in the till,” and ringing it up whenever someone tried to buy him a round—so I was pretty sure he wasn’t going off on drunken binges. No, man’s other leading temptation was the only thing that made any sense to me about these trips of his. And that one frightened me almost as much as the threat of a blizzard, the danger that he would repeat the kind of ill-advised romance he’d had with my mother, and a woman, a female stranger, would invade our bachelor existence. She would barge into my life as a stepmother, and I’d had enough of being a stepped-on child in the Phoenix part of my life.
So I was spooked by the prospect of us being hit by rough weather of different kinds, but I stuck to the variety out the frosty window. “Pop, it gives me the creeps. What if the car runs off the road and you freeze to death? The radio says there’s another big snowstorm coming.”
“Let ’er come, I was here first,” he said stoically.
“Aw, crud, though,” I switched complaints trying to find one that would work, “can’t you at least take the other car?” The successor to the Hudson was a Buick we called the Gunboat for its series of stylized chrome insets in the lengthy hood like portholes—he liked substantial cars—but parked in the alley, waiting to be loaded, was the old Packard.
“Naw.” He wrestled down a saddle from the wall collection and added it to the growing pile of stuff. “Like I told you before, the old buggy holds more.” That was inarguable. The Packard’s roomy back seat and big trunk had probably the capacity of a small truck. Pausing to catch his breath, he checked on me where I was slumped at the desk on the l
anding to see how genuinely worried I was. Reading me like an open book, he sighed. Pop could really sigh, what I came to think of as the sigh of ages; like the expelled breath of time itself. If that isn’t in Shakespeare, it ought to be. “Don’t get all worked up.” He followed that with, “Canada is real good about keeping the roads open.” The fact that many miles of blizzardy prairie lay between Gros Ventre and the Canadian border did not enter into the matter, apparently. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
Fat chance of that, my long face said. Why did he always have to go to Canada for this, anyway? Why not direct his urges, whatever they were, to the city of Great Falls, a mere few hours away? Every time I pointed this out, I was told I didn’t understand back-room commerce.
“Come on, cheer up.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Tell you what, I’ll bring you a plane kit. What was it that you wanted?”
“A Spitfire.”
“Easy done. Figure out where you’re gonna hang it.” Suspended by fishing line from the rafters above the stair landing and the loft was the swarm of other plane models I had assembled, from his other trips. With the least stirring of air in the back room, the P-39 Airacobra fighter plane and Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber and others danced in little aerial duels with the hanging lariats and hay hooks, an effect I liked. Pop was standing under the swaying aircraft, mentally calculating his load for the car in a way that told me he was mostly done. Mostly.