by Ivan Doig
“I . . . I guess so.”
“That takes care of that, then,” he said, sounding like he was trying to convince himself as well as me.
“Can I ask you something else?”
“Nothing known to man has stopped you yet. What is it now?”
“Were you a bootlegger, too?”
He winced at too. “What makes you think I was?”
“The Packard. Somebody said it’s a bootlegger special.”
“Somebody did, did they?” He frowned in the general direction of Del. “That’s bee ess, kiddo. I just liked the looks of the old buggy. Seemed like a lot of car for the money. Anyway, bootlegging . . .” He took a couple of hungry bites of hot dog before I could come up with any more pesky questions. “Naw, I never did any of that, not the kind you’re thinking of anyway.” This was not the definitive answer I was looking for, he could tell from my expression. “Here’s how it was, see. Fort Peckers were a pretty thirsty bunch, so the joint would run low on booze sometimes ahead of a Saturday night. It’s a hell of a ways to Great Falls or anywhere else out here, so the easiest thing was to run up to Medicine Hat and load up the car with Canadian booze.”
“Why there?”
He shifted uneasily. “The Hat is kind of a crossroads, on the Canadian railroad and the highway to Calgary and like that. You can get a lot of business done there if you hold your mouth right. Anyway,” he plowed on again, “that’s all it was, some cases of rye and other Canuck hooch packed home in the Packard. This was after Prohibition, no law broken, but”—he underscored that last word with a careful look at me—“if the state liquor board didn’t have somebody at the border to collect tax at two or three in the morning, that was their tough luck. Get the picture?”
It could not have been clearer if painted by Charlie Russell, so I nodded. My father, the living legend, maybe had not crossed the line of the law in the Blue Eagle years, but he had danced and driven right up to it, from all it sounded like. Yet, as he said, it was a different time back then. He couldn’t change the past, I couldn’t change it, we had to go on, and together; as he’d proclaimed more than once, we weren’t doing too bad with what we had to work with, and we didn’t give a flying fig for other ways of being father and son. I couldn’t really argue with that.
Gazing off again into the gathering, he asked reflectively: “Now do you get why I wasn’t red hot to come to this? Things happen sometimes that can be misunderstood.”
“But everybody here seems to think you’re”—I stumbled for the words—“something great.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what time can do to you, once in a while. Among other things.” He turned my way, watching me anxiously. “That enough answers for you for one day? Rusty? Things still more or less okay between us after all that, I hope?”
Slowly I nodded again. “Still are, Pop.”
“Right. Come on, eat up and let’s go see how Delano is doing.”
—
IT WAS SLOW GOING through the crowd, with Pop being greeted like strolling royalty by anyone who hadn’t done so before, and as hard as I tried to envision these paunchy men and their broad-beamed wives as lean, young hot-to-trot drinkers and dancers, twenty-five years stood in the way. That was not the case for the majordomo of the Blue Eagle, who accepted slaps on the back and outpourings about the old days in an easy fashion, now that we could see Del industriously interviewing mudjacks, with beer still serving its purpose among those waiting under the shade of the tarp. “He’s got it made,” Pop said with satisfaction as we were closing the distance to the Gab Lab, “so all we need to do is keep everybody happy with plenty of Shellac and—”
He stopped in his tracks so suddenly I bumped into him.
“Damn,” he let out under his breath. “Why doesn’t he have anything better to do than prowl around here?”
“Who, Pop?”
“You’ll see.”
“I might have known who I’d find if I followed the trail of beer bottles,” a voice with a scary amount of authority in it made itself known. A small man in a cowboy hat strutted over to us, looking annoyed. His meager face seemed set in that one expression, like a doll’s head carved out of a dried apple. Everything about him was half pint in size, except for the star-shaped badge on his shirt pocket. “Tom Harry is still among the living, huh? Imagine that.”
“If it isn’t my favorite sheriff.” I could tell from Pop’s voice that the lack of warmth was mutual. “Been a while, hasn’t it, Carl, since you would drop by the Blue Eagle for some recreation of a certain kind.”
“That’s past history.” The Fort Peck lawman, as much of him as there was, took me in at a glance. “Who’s this? Got yourself a grandkid, you of all people?”
“My son,” Pop said stiffly. “Rusty, meet Carl Kinnick. He’s been sheriff in this county since the grass first grew.”
“Hi.”
Kinnick didn’t answer me, merely nodded as if his neck hurt. “Tom Harry a family man? I’ll be a son of a bitch.” He smirked at Pop. “Will miracles never quit?”
Pop said levelly, “I hope not.”
I started to worry, not even knowing why. At my age I didn’t have Pop’s long experience in reading people’s character, but this person had mean written all over him.
Now the sheriff was back to giving Pop a gimlet gaze. “I wouldn’t have thought you was the sentimental type, showing up at a shindig like this.”
“Life’s full of surprises,” Pop offered with deceptive casualness. “Didn’t I read somewhere that you’ve switched to Republican? After all those times of riding Roosevelt’s coattails here?”
This evidently hit a touchy spot on Sheriff Kinnick. “The Democrats weren’t worth it anymore,” he huffed. “Adlai Stevenson was a loser if there ever was any invented.”
“Kennedy maybe won’t be,” Pop laughed, “if the other choice is Dickybird Nixon.”
“I’ll take my chances,” the sheriff said, as if it was costing him teeth. He went up on his toes to peek past us to the Gab Lab, where Del was poising the microphone just so while a lean gray veteran of dam work regaled him between swigs of beer. “Who’s the jaybird over there people are yakking to?”
“Delmer Robertson,” Pop improvised politically. “High-powered historian from back east. Talking to folks about working on the dam. Rusty and me are helping him with his on-the-ground research.”
“They start them awful young in on-the-ground research, don’t they,” the sheriff said with a suspicious look at Del and then at me. “Present company excepted, huh, barkeep?” he shifted his beady attention to Pop. “Just to keep things on the legal up-and-up, let’s see your event permit for selling beer.”
I knew it. We were going to be thrown in the clink because this badge-wearing retreaded Republican son of a bitch—he used the word on himself—didn’t like the looks of us.
“No need,” Pop saved us, “I’m giving the hooch away.”
Surprised, the sheriff laughed unpleasantly. “That isn’t like you.”
“Good works sneak up on a person, haven’t you ever noticed?”
“Not hardly—I didn’t get where I am by believing in fairy tales.” Peering from under his cowboy hat, the little lawman watched one person after another fish out a bottle of beer from the icy tub and walk away without any show of money. He took another long look at Del and the recording apparatus, then sourly moved off, saying over his shoulder to my father: “Better be careful spreading those good works in my jurisdiction, hear? Every twenty-five years is about right.”
I began to breathe again. My feeling of relief lasted only as long as it took Pop to get a gleam in his eye and call after the retreating figure, “Hey, Sheriff? Speaking of past history. Anything ever come of that case of the truck in the river?”
Kinnick halted and turned around, scowling. “Don’t
be funny. I’m still working on it. You’d have heard it all over the state if I got that solved.”
“Just wondering. You know I always had an interest in law enforcement.”
That unpleasant laugh again. “From a healthy distance, yeah.”
Pop persisted: “Any of the Duffs here?”
“That tribe? Hah. They wouldn’t show their faces after that.”
“People surprise you sometimes, though, don’t you find?”
Before turning to go, the sheriff preened up on his toes again, shaking his head. “You’re getting soft, Tom. That’s bad for your health.”
I held in what I was dying to ask until the badge-wearing runt was out of earshot.
“What truck in the river?”
“Can’t you take lessons from Delano in being hard of hearing?” Pop sounded on edge, although my question seemed to me perfectly natural. He still was watching the sheriff recede. Aware that I was not going to let the question rest, he lowered his voice and began: “If you really have to know, it was something that happened in ’38, not long after the slide. A couple were parked in a truck on the dam one night. The thing somehow rolled into the water and drowned them both.”
Put that way, it sounded like a pure accident. But if so . . .
“Why is the sheriff still working on it?”
“Kiddo”—Pop wrinkled his brow at me—“I don’t know where you get it from, but sometimes you know more than the situation calls for.”
He pulled out his day’s half pack of cigarettes and found it was empty. “Damn,” he said through his teeth, and opened a fresh pack. I didn’t say anything. The commotion of the reunion picked up as the Melody Mechanics swung into “Pennies from Heaven” and much of the crowd sang along. Over at the van, Del could be seen, absorbed as ever in mudjack gab. The sun shone, the famous dam stood strong as eternity, the Blue Eagle was worshipped in memory, the sheriff was taken care of, everything was clicking just right for Pop on this day of days, except for the bundle of inquisitiveness relentlessly tagging at his side.
“Okay, if it’ll get it out of your system,” he said, as if it had better, “I’ll tell you.” He lit the sinful cigarette, blew a wreath of smoke, and began. “Like I said, the two of them were in the truck in the middle of the night when it rolled. But that was only the half of it. They were—”
I couldn’t wait to tell Zoe about it.
—
“BARE NAKED? Both of them?”
“That’s what Pop said.”
“Watching the submarine races,” Zoe whispered in her knowledgeable way. Practically breathless, we were camped beneath the vent, trying to sort through the happenings at Fort Peck and those since, and at the same time follow along with the voices rising and falling in the barroom, neither one a simple task. For the moment, the tip of her tongue showed her concentration on the mystery couple. “But if they were married, why weren’t they home in their own bedroom instead of making out in a truck?”
“That’s just it, see. Married, but not to each other.”
“Oooh. That’s different.”
So different that it kept me busy filling her in on the story as I had it from Pop. The pair in the truck both belonged to a large family working on the dam, which caused the scandal, but it was the man’s name that meant something. “Had a customer in the old days,” the echo of my father, in a summer snow of seedfall from a giant cottonwood the day of my arrival in Gros Ventre, “Darius Duff, how’s that for a name? He was kind of a political crackpot, but he knew things. He’d start feeling his oats after enough drinks, and one time he got going on Igdrasil, the tree of existence.” I skipped the Igdrasil part to catch Zoe up on the mean little sheriff and how touchy he still was about the unsolved crime, if that’s what the drownings amounted to. “Pop thinks it was an accident. The truck getting knocked out of gear when they were, um . . .”
“Screwing,” Zoe helped out.
“Uh-huh, and it rolled down the dam into the lake, just like that.”
“Wild!”
We paused to listen tensely to the voices out front, the familiar and the new. Nothing was changing there, although at the same time everything was, and I was impelled back to the rest of the story of the Mudjacks Reunion. How Del, exhausted but triumphant, finished the last interview as people were heading for their cars, calling out good-byes and vows to do this again in five years. Meanwhile Pop and I filled trash cans with empty beer bottles—“The Shellackers in Great Falls ought to put up a plaque here, too,” he observed—and carefully stacked the empty beer cases so they wouldn’t blow away. Now that the reunion was all but over, he acted more like his usual self, going about business as if nothing else on the face of the earth mattered, but a couple of times I caught him watching me tensely to gauge my reaction to the day and its revelations. I hardly knew how to measure it myself. This father of mine had proved to be everything Del credited him with, legend and institutional memory and icebreaker. Why not say it all the way? Leadbelly of the mudjacks. Yet he also was shown to have been something like a landlord of women who went with men for money—I may have been only twelve, but I could figure out that taxi dancing might have serious implications after the music stopped—and he and the sheriff poked at each other in a kind of scary way. What was I supposed to think?
When Pop wasn’t busy glancing at me as we loaded up to leave, I eyed him, trying to decide. “Tom, you were fantastic! You too, Rusty.” Del by now was practically floating against the ceiling of the Gab Lab as he stowed the precious reels of tape, recounting to us one mudjack’s tale or another in giddy fashion. Gradually I made up my mind. When Del at last showed signs of running down, I butted in sharply.
“I have a question.”
I looked right at Pop as I said it, and my tone sent Del silent. I could see Pop, his expression frozen, bracing himself against five Ws and an H and whatever else of the alphabet of inquiry possible about his doings in his Fort Peck years. I let that hang in the air just long enough before I asked, “Why was the eagle blue?”
I realize it was an imaginary whoosh of relief from him, and for that matter from Del, who sensed that this was one of those family matters where the stakes were dangerously high, but it cleared the air, nonetheless. With a look of replenished confidence, Pop enlightened me that the blue eagle was something from the New Deal, a symbol businesses showed off to say they were complying with wage standards and other codes of the National Recovery Administration, and he’d figured it made a good name to slap onto a saloon at the grandest New Deal construction project of all. “Anything to do with Roosevelt, Fort Peckers were hog wild about”—he got talkative now that my question had proved easy as a breeze—“so they thought it was patriotic to drink in the joint. Not bad, hey?”
Head cocked, Del had been crouched in the Gab Lab, happily listening. “Great story! History making itself felt in the thirst glands,” he enthused, joking or not, I couldn’t tell. “Tom, you absolutely must let me capture that on tape when we get back.”
“We’ll see” sounded more positive than it usually did from him.
Hesitantly, Del put forth, “I, ah, hope you’re glad you came?”
Pop paused. He gave that a rueful wrinkled smile, sharing some of it to me, before answering.
“‘Glad’ maybe isn’t quite the real best word. But it’s been interesting.”
His gaze went distant as he cast a look at the dam and then at the vacant hillside, where the Blue Eagle once stood, and around at the reunion site, where he had walked like a king. I silently watched while he loosened his bow tie and folded it away, the same as I had seen him do so many times after his nights of bartending. Standing there as if catching his breath, he looked like he did after bouncing someone from the saloon, shirt crumpled and the gray in his pompadour mussed in with the black hair, brow furrowed but no wounds showing. I was the o
ne hurting, with our life scheduled to change unimaginably as soon as we got home and the Medicine Lodge passed from our hands, and this father whom I loved, in spite of anything today’s evidence said about him, would turn into an old man waiting for the marble farm. It didn’t seem right.
After his breather, if that’s what it was, Pop snapped to. “Delano, you don’t have to kiss every tape,” he called into the van, where Del could be heard still squirreling away things, “we need to get a move on or we’ll be at the tail end of the traffic out of here.” Already, departing cars were jammed at the approach to the road up the bluff, except for one coming off the dam and heading in our direction at a surprising speed, from the looks of it someone who couldn’t wait to use the boat ramp now that the crowd was clearing away. Del hopped out, and while I made myself useful folding up chairs, he and Pop began taking down the van awning. Busy with that, they weren’t paying any attention to the rapid arrival, but, naturally curious, I watched the car zoom right past the boat ramp and keep coming in a storm of dust.
Zoe had been following my whispered telling of this, as if she didn’t dare miss a word. I stopped, seeing it all again.
“Then what?” she breathed.
“This big red Cadillac pulled up.” The voices coming through the vent rose at this point, the woman’s above the others. “And she got out.”
6
BACK IN BUSINESS in the old neighborhood, Tom?” The voice was husky, the smile a bit tilted, the appearance startling, to say the least. “Mudjacks haven’t forgotten how to drink, I betcha. How was the take?”
Pop watched, wide-eyed—Del and I did, too—as this late-arriving surprise left the car to join us. The woman was, according to the saying I had never fully appreciated until then, an eyeful. In lavender slacks that had no slack between the fabric and her and a creamy blouse also snugly filled, the vision of womanhood providing us that slinky smile was not what is standardly thought of as beautiful, yet here were three males of various ages who could not stop staring at her.