The Bartender's Tale (19 page)

“Pop!” I tore into the house and up the stairs to his bedroom. “You’re in the paper!”

“Hmpf?” He struggled upright in bed, rubbing sleep from his eyes as I waved the newspaper at him. “Let me see that.”

The newspaper picture did him justice, the merciless way a camera does, highlighting the lines in his face, the furrows of his forehead, the stripe in his hair that looked even more startling in black-and-white. He looked more than ever like the etched visage of the Depression generation, the survivor with those past hard times written in his face. The photographer at the Sodbuster Hotel award luncheon had caught him cradling the plaque the awkward way a new father holds a baby. Squinting at his likeness as if it hurt his eyes, Pop tried to yawn himself more fully awake. “It took the Shellackers a week to get a mug shot like that in, hey?”

“No, there’s more!” I flipped the newspaper for him to the story beneath the front-page fold.

Still bleary and hunched in his undershirt, he spread the
Tribune
on the bedcovers, with me reading along with him over his shoulder.

THE MAN BEHIND THE BAR

Beneath that headline was Bill Reinking’s account of the Medicine Lodge and its one-of-a-kind bartender.

If you bottled Tom Harry, bartender of possibly the oldest continuous pleasure dispensary in Montana and surely the most engaging, you would have the hundred-proof pure stuff of legend.

His Medicine Lodge saloon, the comfortable old gathering place on the main street of Gros Ventre, has been in operation since territorial days, and Tom Harry has been in business long enough to qualify as a historic landmark himself. Recently the brewers of Great Falls Select beer honored his beloved joint as the Select Pleasure Establishment of the Year, and all that needs to be said further about that is, what took so long?

His barroom has the look and feel of that vacation lodge you have always dreamed of finding, one small surviving corner of an earlier time but absolutely professionally up-to-the-minute in service. The man behind the bar looks almost too much like a bartender—bow tie, pompadour, lived-in face—to be real, but then he seemingly only glances in your direction and here’s that drink you had in mind. You’d like to talk? He’ll listen hard enough to turn you inside out, if you want. You prefer to sip in silence? Not another word is heard.

Tom Harry makes it all look easy—and does so while finding time to be father to a bright twelve-year-old son, Russell—but presiding over the clientele that unerringly finds its way into this western outpost of civility in a parched land is no small task. Behind the bar on a busy Saturday night, he is Clyde Beatty in the lion cage. Mandrake the Magician doing the pouring. Lamont Cranston using his wizardry judiciously.

“Who the hell is Lamont Cranston?”

“He’s the Shadow, on the radio,” I was an authority on that, all those Phoenix afternoons of cringing on the carpet to listen to serials finally paying off. “He has the power to cloud men’s minds.”

There was more, much more, in the newspaper piece, but I had to force myself to concentrate, my head swelling fast. Bright! I’d been called that right there in the newspaper. Pop was wide awake now. He broke off reading long enough to snatch his cigarette pack off the nightstand and light up with a big puff. “Bill poured it on thick,” he muttered, “whatever got into him.”

“Yeah, wow, Pop, you’re really famous!”

“Don’t go overboard. Famous around here isn’t so famous.”

“No, see what it says?” Beneath Bill Reinking’s byline, in smaller print, was the wording
NORTH AMERICAN PRESS FEATURE SYNDICATE.
“North America is a lot to be famous in, right?”

“Cripes.” I couldn’t tell from Pop’s exhalation whether he was pleased or not to be continentally famous.

We read to the bottom of the newspaper piece.

Tom Harry’s decades as the ideal bartender have carried forward the historical standing of the Medicine Lodge as an institution in its special corner of the world. The cavalcade of customers has gone from homesteaders and cowboys and sheepherders to tourists and businessmen and missile warriors, but the presence behind the bar has stayed steady as the mountains of the Two Medicine country.

On a recent Saturday night, with the joint full and rollicking, this bartender of the ages found time to listen to some fisherman’s lie he had heard so many times before, his towel restless on the polished bar but the rest of him keen and still, until the punch line came and all that was left was for him to cock an eyebrow and chip in his own:

“Sure gonna miss you when I’m gone.”

Customers of the Medicine Lodge hope that will not happen for a long, long time.

“Cripes” again, from pop as we read that ending. I was open-mouthed.

“Did you really say that to somebody?”

“I must have. Bill Reinking is an honest ess of a bee in what he writes.”

“What did you mean about being gone?” The phrase brought a chill around my heart.

“Hey, don’t get constipated about it.” He mashed out his cigarette in the ashtray next to the bed, trying to think. “It’s a what do you call it,” he mumbled, “figure of speech. Somebody I used to know said it all the time. She was always saying something.” He caught himself. “I don’t know why it popped into my head.”

She?

Pop returned to the newspaper photo, wishing he’d gotten a haircut before the awards luncheon so he didn’t look like a beatnik. I scarcely heard, my mind so taken up with “miss you when I’m gone” and the phantom who said it all the time. Who else could she be but my mother? A dozen years ago when they were splitting the blanket—and me into half orphanhood—how had she spoken it then to him? With the snap of drama, fit for Shakespeare’s ear if the Bard were still around? Or did it come out plain and bitter, good riddance to him and his booze business and everything that came with it, including an accidental kid? And
gone
, the question that hung off that. Did it admit a longing that she knew she could not entirely escape by pulling out on us, as Pop put it? Or did it mean the opposite, we’d never be missed as long as she lived? And if she saw the newspaper story, wherever she was, what would she think now? A Jones among the world full of names, how must she have felt at seeing our distinctive ones reappear like ghosts from another life?

During my daze, Pop had absently lit another cigarette while he frowned down at the newsprint, the bartender for the ages smoking in bed. Still shaking his head, he sighed acceptance.

“What the hell, maybe it’ll be good for business. How about we celebrate being famous by going fishing?”

—

IN NO TIME,
the article was not just good for business, it was wildly so. There was such a flood of tourists stopping in to experience the historic saloon and its fabled bartender, besides the Two Medicine country proudly paying its respects by ordering up round after round, that Howie had to be summoned to help Pop behind the bar for hours on end. One particular brand of beer sold at a fantastic rate, as customer after customer—“even the Schlitz yayhoos,” Pop had marveled to me in one of our bedtime conversations—ordered up a Shellac in tribute to the towering bottle on the plaque. Earl Zane got so carried away, he hocked his Calgary Stampede belt buckle for a week’s worth of beer credit.

During all this, Zoe could not get enough of the vent’s events, nor could I, once I somewhat got over the mystery of that utterance of Pop’s that now existed in every newspaper under the sun. It was as intoxicating a time for the pair of us as for anyone bellied up to the bar, what with mornings of Cloyce Reinking steadily perfecting Lady Bracknell bit by bit and then the dialogues of the Medicine Lodge awaiting us the minute we climbed to the familiar comforts of the landing. Grinning widely at each other, we silently cheered Bill Reinking to the skies the first time he came in after the momentous newspaper story, although Pop folded his arms instead of producing a shot of scotch, water on the side.

“How come you couldn’t have warned me I was gonna be plastered on front pages everydamnwhere?”

Old friend looked at old friend across the expanse of that question.

“Alas, Tom, I didn’t find out in time the story for the
Trib
was being picked up by the syndicate. I haven’t had that happen for a while. You make good copy, as we knights of the press say.”

“Yeah, well, maybe. But did you have to make that last line sound like something at a funeral?”

“A story can have more than one ending, you hear enough of them in here to know that,” the newspaperman said mildly. “It’s a question of what fits best with the rest of the tale, isn’t it.”

Through the vent slats, Zoe and I memorized their expressions, the hopeful smile lifting the gray mustache of the old customer and the deep frown creasing the face behind the bar, like the two masks of drama. We could hear the tick of the clock behind Pop. Then a shot glass and water on the side appeared like magic. “It’s on the house today.”

“Swuft,” Zoe breathed, and my heart danced in agreement.

That set of days passed like a parade, and before Pop’s fame showed any sign of wearing off, Saturday dawned and it was time for me to swamp out the barroom as usual.

This particular morning, I didn’t mind even the snottiest of chores quite as much. After proudly dusting the plaque on the wall, first thing, I emptied spittoons and swept and mopped and all else, while Pop seemed wrapped up in his own thoughts, doing little things behind the bar. A couple of times I noticed him checking the cash register, as though making sure the money piling up in the till wasn’t a mirage.

Busy dreaming up the next bit to do with Zoe, I wasn’t paying any special attention when he picked up a towel and began polishing the bar as always, but this time in a single long, slow lick from one end to the other. When he reached the end nearest to where I was doing swift justice to the floor with my mop, he called over to me.

“Got something to tell you.”

He took a longer look than usual around the saloon, from corner to corner, and I expected to be told I’d missed a spot in my mopping. Instead, he said, “I’ve made up my mind I might as well sell the joint.”

The barroom floor seemed to give way under me. I stared at him as if he had declared he might as well drown himself in the creek.

Like wrong pieces of a puzzle, the words refused to fit together sensibly in my mind. Sell? The joint?
You can’t!
Out loud, the best I could do amounted to, “But, but . . . why?”

“All kinds of reasons.” He had that shrugging look, and I was afraid he was going to be as impenetrable on this as about those trips of his. I was wrong.

He started to say something, then didn’t. The lines in his face deepened as he searched for where to start.

“Seeing you in here like this set me to thinking,” he began in a strained voice.

Me? Now I was horrified as well as shocked. By taking on the job of swamper, I caused us to lose the Medicine Lodge? I was the pebble that started this avalanche?

He was fumbling out something about how damn hard a decision like this was, which barely registered through my daze. Finally he simply shook his head. “Rusty, I don’t want you to end up running the joint.”

“I’m gonna be an actor, remember?”

“Kiddo, listen.” His blue eyes softened as he looked into mine. “Things don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to.”

He saw that didn’t help at all, and tried again.

“I mean, sure, let’s say you’re gonna be an actor and set the world on fire. But first you’ve got to grow up, right? And that’s years down the line from now, isn’t it. I . . . I don’t want it on my conscience that you might have to shoulder more than you already do around here.” He employed the towel on an already spotless corner of the bar so as not to look at me. “You know as well as I do what it takes to operate the joint. You have to be a working fool, your time is never your own, it adds up on a person after a while.”

Now he did shrug, as if what he was going to say next was merely the tag end of that, although it was anything but. “I’m getting middle aged, you know. In the middle of getting too damn aged.” Seeing my doubting expression, he sighed. “Hey, maybe you don’t notice it, but I do. The body doesn’t lie.” He patted his stomach regretfully. “My belly’s coming over my belt more all the time. When you can’t see down to your business end, you know you’re starting to hit trouble.”

Ordinarily I would have appreciated such man-to-man talk. This was no ordinary time. I absolutely did not want to have to think of him as too damn aged. So what if his middle was sagging, and his widow’s peak was more pronounced than it used to be, and his forehead had a ladder of wrinkles now when he lifted his eyebrows? And that he hadn’t been able to dodge a sheepherder’s stupid elbow, something I continually told myself couldn’t happen again in a hundred years? The sky color of his eyes hadn’t dimmed any and his pouring hand was as steady as ever and his hearing was still keen as could be. Yes, he worked himself practically to the bone in the saloon and there were always so many bills to be paid and there had been those spooky Canada trips to help out on the money end, but none of that counted as much as my alarm at the thought of him as old, too old, to be the best bartender who ever lived, too old to possess the Medicine Lodge and its back room, too old to be the father who was half my life.

He leaned back against the breakfront, his arms firmly crossed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt at his shoulder as if backing him up about the vicissitudes of life. “Listen, Rusty, the hours, day and night in here”—he glanced almost apologetically to the gleaming bar as he spoke of this—“are starting to get to me. Been that way since the start of the year.”

I argued with all my might that he could hire help behind the bar. Good help was devilishly hard to find, he argued back. Besides, he threw at me, what better time to sell than when the Medicine Lodge had been chosen the select joint in all of Montana? The Medicine Lodge, I came right back at him, was always that, anyway, whether or not there was a plaque on the wall, so why be in a rush to sell it? We went around and around like that, getting nowhere, until another awful disturbance caught up with me.