Free The Bartender's Tale by Ivan Doig

athlete could come up with. Sometimes we were totally silly in shooting it, sometimes we were cutthroat serious.
    With Duane Zane, you couldn’t always tell which was which. “Free throw,” he declared when it came his turn to start the round. His version, however, proved to be an exaggerated underhand heave from down around his ankles.
    Wouldn’t you know, the damn ball went in. Just then a blast of wind rattled the high windows at the end of the gym. Most of us let out
brr
s and yearnings for spring, but not Duane.
    “I hope it storms for a month, so my dad keeps on making money pulling people out of ditches with his wrecker,” he proclaimed, his voice strutting with the rest of him after that basket.
    Oh, how I wanted to bounce the ball off his fat head. Instead I managed to take revenge by swishing my shot through the net to match his dumb free throw. “Way to go, guy!” cried my adherents, while Duane made a gagging sound.
    Noon hour was nearly over after that round, but we always believed if we hurried, we could squeeze in one more before the bell rang. I especially wanted to. With the lucky day I’d been having, all I needed for horse was
e
. Even better, it was my turn to start, and my choice of shot was as unpopular as I’d hoped.
    “Aw, not that!”
    “Be a guy, give us a break!”
    “You and your pukey hook shot.”
    Even Jimmy and Hal moaned with the others. A hook shot may not have seemed a likely accomplishment for me—I wasn’t a bad athlete, though I definitely was not a really good one—but at the start of the school year, Pop had put up a basketball hoop for me in a back-room corner that must have been a horse stall originally, and I endlessly practiced over-the-head shots there, pretending I was Wilt Chamberlain or some other hook shooter two or three times my height. Those solo hours paid off now as I catapulted the ball one-handed over the top of my head and it ricocheted off the backboard hard enough to rattle the rim, then toppled through the hoop, to everyone else’s groans and my cry of joy.
    The basketball hadn’t hit the floor yet when it was intercepted by the school principal, Mr. Naylor.
    “Whoa, boys. We’re sending bus students home early”—he singled out Hal and Jimmy—“on account of the roads. Grab your coats and books and be ready to go.”
    “Lucky guys,” Duane mouthed off, while they went to be bussed home through treacherous weather.
    I forged my own way from school at the regular time, the slow afternoon hours like enormous shadows dragging behind me. What was the saying, something about the driven snow? This snow was doing its unerring best to drive down my neck, the wind flinging the fat flakes right at me no matter how I turned my head. If this wasn’t the recipe for a thirty-year winter, I didn’t know what was. Beneath the bare cottonwood trees, English Creek was frozen over, an icy pond that went on for miles. The entire town of Gros Ventre looked like something that had been left in the freezer too long.
    Anxious, I did not take time to go around to the back of the Medicine Lodge as usual but stumbled in, overshoes, mackinaw, cap, scarf, and mittens coated with snow, through the front entrance. I couldn’t wait to see Pop, safe, sound, big as life, bartending incomparably as usual.
    But Howie was behind the bar. The saloon’s only other sign of life was a pair of the red-eyed sheepherders who were fixtures in the Two Medicine country, Canada Dan in from the Withrow ranch on one of his frequent spells of unemployment, and Snoose Syvertsen, likewise in from any number of places he had been hired and fired from down through the years, sitting out the winter in town and hoping for some charitable soul to attend to their thirst. They especially pinned their hopes on “tursters,” as they called tourists, who could be trapped into conversation and free drinks. Pop ritually grumbled about this scruffy pair leaning a hole into the bar but let them hang