Free The Bartender's Tale by Ivan Doig Page A

around because, he said, you couldn’t leave the damn old fools in the lurch; the lurch always sounded like the worst kind of place to be left in.
    “Hi, Eskimo.” Howie’s croaky greeting past the cigarette nursed in the corner of his mouth did not tell me what I wanted to know.
    “Isn’t . . . isn’t he back yet?”
    A shake of the old bald head.
    Despair gripped me to the bone. This was my worst fear coming true. What might have been a sympathetic guttural sound came from Canada Dan at the far end of the bar. “It’s sure too bad Tom’s not on hand, ain’t it?” he observed, as if to the world at large. “Depressing weather like this, he’d stand loyal customers a drink now and then to cheer things up.”
    Snoose Syvertsen backed that up with vigorous nods. “That’s hunnerd percent gospel truth.”
    “You’re so keen on the weather, just keep watching until it hits forty below in hell,” Howie advised them acidly. “That’s about when you’ll get a free drink from me in this joint.” He turned his attention back to me. “You better scoot on over to my place again, you’re still dressed for it. Lucille is gonna be looking for you.”
    All I felt like doing was collapsing in a heap, but I put it differently: “I could just stay on here until Pop gets home.”
    “No, you aren’t. That father of yours would skin me alive if I let you do that. Besides, I’m pretty quick gonna kick these two out and close the joint early. This weather’s a bugger.” He made a sour face, more than usual. “I’m getting too old for this.”
    “Why isn’t he back by now?”
    “He’s delayed, is why,” Howie said crabbily. He parted with his cigarette long enough to pluck a shred of tobacco off his tongue. “The road’s closed, up there.” Apology was not in Howie’s vocabulary, but his tone softened a trifle as he said, “He’ll show up. Now scoot.”
    Head down, I traipsed the length of the barroom to go out the back of the saloon. “Your old man’s away for quite a while, eh?” Canada Dan remarked as I glumly went past. “He’s sure missed around here.”
    Snoose Syvertsen wagged his head sadly. “Hunnerd percent.”
    —
    LIKE NANOOK RETURNING to the ice floe, I trudged through snowdrifts to the bungalow across town, where Lucille greeted me in her nice, quiet way. She was as aged and sparrowlike as Howie, and while both of them treated me like a best guest, theirs was a house that had not known a child for many years. Prominent on the living room wall was the photograph of their Marine son who had been killed in the invasion of Tarawa in 1943.
    This night was the darkest of my life in every way. I lay under strange old heavy blankets in that musty bedroom, listening to the wind, knowing it was whipping up the snow into a ground blizzard, the absolute worst thing for Pop if he was out there somewhere trying to drive home. My thoughts swirled and whirled as well. I blamed him for going by himself in this terrible weather, I blamed myself for not throwing such a fit he’d have taken me with him, for if I had gone along he would not have dared to let anything disastrous happen, right? In theory, anyway. This night I resented the existence of thirty-year winters, this night I could not get rid of the fear under the covers with me, fear that this time Pop’s trip was going to lead to unimaginable disaster, except I was imagining it.
    There in the bone-chilling dark, the two dangers of his trips merged treacherously in my mind. If he had a love interest that kept drawing him north, there was an insidious side to such an affair. Namely, what if he stumbled into “maddermoany,” as he’d done once already, and this woman didn’t want a kid around? Wouldn’t he be forced to abandon me, in one unwelcome direction or the other? Then which was worse, Arizona or somewhere unknown? In my years with him, Phoenix had gradually diminished to Christmas cards and birthday cards curtly signed, “Ever,