Free The Bartender's Tale by Ivan Doig Page B

Aunt Marge.” It still was very much on the map, though, down there with the sand and sidewinders and cactuses. Ending up back in Aunt Marge’s maniac den with Ronny and Danny seemed to me a one-way ticket to hell. But against that known peril was the great unknown one, my vanished mother. I simply knew virtually nothing about the woman who had borne me. She existed only in my father’s extremely few remarks about her, mainly this one: “We split the blanket when she pulled out on me and you, and that’s that.” It wasn’t, as far as I was concerned.
    I had learned her maiden name the hard way, by innocently asking Pop after I understood enough about marriage to be curious about that. “Joanie Jones if there ever was one,” he let out in one long, exasperated breath. “Why?” My stammered answer must have amounted to, Because. He reminded me yet again she had pulled out on us when I was still in the cradle and it was best for all concerned to have her out of our life. And while that was that one more time, I came out of it finally able to fit “Joanie Jones” onto the hazy outline of the woman who gave me birth. I went to school with a Janie and a Susie, so the girlish first name did not trouble me, although if you had a choice, you’d want your mother to be named something nice like Gwendolyn, wouldn’t you. “Jones” I found harder to deal with; how anything about her could be figured out from that, I hadn’t arrived at. In any case, her name could not tell me why she up and left a husband and a baby, and I harbored my own version of what must have divorced her from Pop and, for that matter, me. The Medicine Lodge, what else? It made sense. If, say, she disapproved of liquor, as there were people in the world who did, would she stay married to a bartender? Plainly not. Admittedly, leaving me—by way of Pop—to the clutches of Aunt Marge’s clan did not win her any high marks as a mother, but parents do whatever suits them, for good reason or not, every kid learns that.
    Yet, gone from almost my entire life though my mother was, what if I was handed over to her if the worst happened to Pop? Would she even want me, reared in saloon circumstances as I was and by a man she couldn’t stand? For that matter, would I want to be with her, a total stranger, a dozen years of separation the only thing we had in common?
    My thoughts kept jittering back and forth: better the demon I knew—Ronny—or the phantom I didn’t—her—if this diabolical trip did my father in, one way or another? Everything churned in my mind, except anything resembling a right answer. I huddled miserably under the covers, ashamed that I was near tears not only for him but for myself.
    I heard Howie get up in the night. The toilet flushed, the slap-slap of slippers stopped at my bedroom doorway.
    “You’re awake, aren’t you.” I could see his bald head in the light from all the snow.
    “Uh-huh.”
    “How about some warm milk to help you sleep?”
    “No, thanks. It would just make me have to get up and take a leak.”
    “There’s a path wore in the floor about that,” Howie readily granted. He shuffled back to bed, but not before saying: “Your old man generally knows what he’s doing. He’ll make it back tomorrow, you’ll see.”
    Grown-ups are full of painless predictions like that. I was in no mood to have reassurance spooned into me. My worries were altogether too big, nobody else could understand the fix I was in with Pop lost and gone, as I was more and more sure he must be, the inside of my head would give me no rest for as long as I lived, I just knew, and more to the immediate point, I wasn’t going to be able to go to sleep ever again.
    —
    “HEY. KIDDO. Rise and shine.”
    It was either bright daylight or a dazzling dream. Pop was shaking me awake, peeling away my cocoon of blankets.
    “Wh-what time is it?”
    “Saturday. Come on, upsy daisy, let’s get over to our place.”
    Groggy, so surprised to see my