The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [9]
Taking all this in, for the narrowest of moments Ben could almost feel he had never been away from it. Illusions had to be watched out for. He got down to business, which meant Tom Harry. "Do you still sell beverages in this joint or just stand around insulting the customers?"
The sole proprietor and entire staff of the Medicine Lodge glanced to the far end where the raggedy sheepherders were gaping hopefully in Ben's direction. "Hard to do, on some of them. What can I get you?"
"Whatever's on tap," Ben said before it registered on him that he was home now, he didn't need to nurse away the evening on beer. "No, wait, something with a nip to it—an old-fashioned, how about." Still in the mood, Cass. The other night in the road-house when they were priming themselves by playing coma cola roulette—each buying the other some unlikely concoction off the mixed drinks list before adjourning to the cabin for the night—she'd wickedly ordered him up one of these, saying it might put him in the mood for an old-fashioned pilot like her. Now he dug into his wallet. "Give the choirboys a round. Catch yourself, too."
"Thanks, I'll take mine in the register. Save you the tip." Schooners of beer flew down the bar, the whiskey and paradoxical bitters and sugar were magically mixed, Ben watching fascinated as ever at the skill in those hands. Tom Harry could never be cast as a bartender, he decided. He overfilled the part. The slicked-back black hair, the blinding white shirt, the constant towel that swabbed the bar to a gleam. The peerless saloonkeeper scowled now in the direction of the sheepherders, which seemed to make them remember their manners. In one voice they quavered a toast to Ben: "Here's at you."
With that tended to, the man behind the bar put his towel to work on the trail of the glass after he slid it to Ben. "Just get in?"
"Hour ago."
"Been places, I hear."
"They ship me around, some."
"Gonna be anybody left on the face of the earth when this war gets done?"
During this the sheepherders conferred in mumbles. Celebrating their largesse of beer, the two were counting out their pooled small change, pushing the coins together with shaky forefingers. "Barkeep?" Canada Dan cleared his throat importantly. "You got any of them jellied eggs?"
"Jesus, gourmets," Tom Harry muttered, carrying the briny crock of preserved boiled eggs down the length of the bar along with his disgust. While the egg transaction dragged on, Ben quietly sipped and gazed past the reflections in the plate glass window to downtown Gros Ventre at night. The civil old trees. His father's newspaper office, still alight down the street, another timeless pillar of the town. On the next block beyond the Gleaner, the Odeon theater where teenaged Ben Reinking every Saturday night of his life stayed on through the second show—the "owl show" at nine that repeated the feature movie for a tardy gathering of drunks, late-arriving lovers, and insomniacs—to dissect how the makers of movies made them. Centralities of his growing up here, those, along with the one where he sat now. He knew there was no denying the influence of bloodline, but by quite a number of the readings he could take on his life so far, Gros Ventre and the Two Medicine country, out there in the dark, served as a kind of parentage too. Whatever he amounted to, this was where it came from.
The keeper of the bar returned, still wagging his head over the jellied egg binge. Ben twirled his glass indicatively on the dark wood. "Any more of this in the well?"
"The war must be teaching you bad habits," Tom Harry grumbled as he mixed the refill.
"Speaking of those." Ben watched for a reaction, but could see none. Standing there swishing the towel, the saloonman showed no sign he had ever been acquainted with practices such as providing working quarters for prostitutes, bootlegging, and, now with the war, operating in at least gray margins of the black market. "Here's