The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [152]
18
This was a dry snowfall that would not cling long, but Gros Ventre, which had not tasted paint since the war effort was born, appeared grateful for any fresh coating. Behind him he heard the grind of gears as the bus pulled away in the night to other towns too modestly populated to have a depot, a familiar accompaniment as he walked in so many years of his footsteps toward the newspaper office. The burden handed to him by the bus driver seemed heavier as the war went on, although he knew that was fanciful. Even so, carrying it in the new-fallen snow he took extra care, stomping every so often so his shoe soles would not cake up and grow slick. Shortly he came to the only other lighted enterprise on the whitened main street, two blocks up from where the Gleaner office cast its square of light. He thought to himself he really ought to write a piece about this, how in the ever-changing bargain with time one way-spot of civilization would offer up a cathedral while another would answer human yearning with something as homely as this, a place that could be counted on to be open in the snowy dark, a saloon like a book known by heart. What was the saying? Ancient faith and present courage. He smiled at himself a bit crookedly. Tonight he could stand a glass of courage.
"Haven't seen you in here in a hell of a while," he was greeted as he stepped into the Medicine Lodge. "I'd about given you up for lost."
"A man can't be in two places at once, Tom," Bill Reinking replied, slapping snow off his cap and coat. "I'm supposedly running a newspaper." Or as Cloyce would say, it's running me.
Toweling the dark wood to a trail of gleam as he came, Tom Harry mopped his way down the bar to him. "Liked what you said there in the gizette, back before the election. Franklin D. showed them his rosy red one again, didn't he." Beaming as if in response, Roosevelt presided larger than life on the whiskeyladen breakfront behind the bartender, the campaign poster accurately predicting Four more in '44! Bill Reinking noted with bemusement that right next to it was pasted a faded placard spelling out, in the biggest letters to be found in a printer's jobcase, FORT PECK—DAMN! Momentarily he was taken back to before the war when those unlikely allies of the time, the President and the Senator, blessed into being the huge Fort Peck Dam and put Montana back to work. There was something to ponder there. Was it possible that the depths of the Depression, so daunting at the time, were no kind of a challenge compared to finding an end to this war? He knew the world was more complicated now, but he also knew that every era makes that excuse for tripping over itself.
Pulling himself away from that train of thought, he looked from Roosevelt and the exclamatory placard to Tom Harry as if giving the matter full consideration and said: "Politics is the art of turning ice into ice cream."
"I think maybe I read that in your paper one time," the bartender snorted. In practically that same gallop of breath, he came out with the essential: "What's the word from Ben?"
Bill touched the week's Threshold Press War Project bundle fresh off the bus. "I hope I'm about to find out."
"Then I suppose I ought to be getting you something to go with that," Tom Harry said as if they were both falling down on that duty. "What'll it be—you still drinking