“Sure thing, Pop,” I said, as if there really was such a thing.
—
PEOPLE COME AND GO in our lives; that’s as old a story as there is. But some of them the heart cries out to keep forever, and that is a fresh saga every time. So it was with me and the unlooked-for supper partner who quickly became so much more than that. Zoe proved to be something like a pint-size force of nature, thin as a toothpick and as sharp. Her face was always a show, her generous mouth sometimes sly, sometimes pursed, the tip of her tongue indicating when she was really thinking, her eyes going big beyond belief when something pleased her, and when something didn’t, she could curl her lip practically to the tip of her nose. To say that she was not the kind of company I could ever have expected in that summer of my life is a drastic understatement.
Whether or not we were made for each other, the two of us were definitely made for the back room of the Medicine Lodge. From the very start of our exploring of its wonders together, she couldn’t get enough of the assortment of stray and odd items that had been traded in down through time, and I couldn’t get enough of her prodigious imagination. Prowling in some cluttered quarter, she would stumble onto a stray article such as a suitcase made of that old pebbled phony black leather and away she would go. “Ooh, I bet this has been lots of places. Let’s look in it.” We would. Empty, every time. No matter, the lack of content only spurred her speculation. “Just think, all he has is the clothes on his back. I bet there was a fire. In the bunkhouse. He was all played out from punching cows all day and was laying there smoking in bed and went to sleep and the old army blanket caught fire”—for a twelve-year-old, Zoe had a remarkably graphic view of life—“and everything burned up, and he had to run for his life, and the only thing he had time to grab was his suitcase. Everything else, ka-whoosh!”
You always hate to disrupt an artist, so I did not tell her the inspirational piece of luggage actually was owned by some snoose-chewing herder whose belongings were securely in his sheep wagon out in the foothills while he hocked the suitcase when his money ran out before finishing off a big drunk. Besides, Pop’s habit of that last cigarette at bedtime made ka-whoosh! something I didn’t like thinking about.
I had to ask, though. “Does your dad smoke in bed?”
“All the time,” she said, rolling her eyes to fullest effect. “I bet your dad knows better.”
“Oh, sure.”
That was cast into doubt, however, by her next find. The shoe box half full of metal cigarette lighters. Zoe’s eyes went big in amazement. “Who smokes this much?”
“No one guy,” I responded like the back-room veteran I was. “See? They’re engraved. Soldiers trade them in.” And had been doing so for a long time. Rummaging, we found a tarnished lighter with the engraving MONTANEER JUNGLE FIGHTERS, which dated back to the Montana National Guardsmen who served in the tropical hell of New Guinea in World War II. Another one read INCHON SEPT. 1950 THE MARINES HAVE LANDED from the Korean War. Newest and shiniest were some engraved with MINUTEMAN MISSILEMEN—AMERICA’S ACE IN THE HOLE, from Air Force troops, flyboys, as we somewhat inaccurately called them, stationed in missile silos out there under the prairie. “Pop takes one out and uses it until the flint wears out,” I explained the plenitude of lighters. “He says he got tired of running out of matchbooks all the time.”
“Smart,” Zoe commended, but by now her attention had been caught by a collection of shoes ranged along the bottom of one wall: cowboy boots and work shoes but also well-shined oxfords. “That’s wild!” she gasped. “People even trade in their dress shoes?”
“You bet. Like Pop says, they can’t drink with their feet.”
She giggled and went over to the footwear assortment, drawn by one particularly extravagant-looking pair of items. They resembled cowboy boots, but were higher topped and the leather was of an odd texture and funny greenish shade. “What are these fancy things?” she wondered, fingering one.
“Snake boots.”
“Rusty, you’re making that up.” Nonetheless she jerked her hand away.
“Huh-uh, cross my heart up, down, and sideways. It’s snakeskin of some kind, they’re made in Texas,” I held forth knowledgeably because I had asked Pop the identical question a few days before, when Earl Zane traded them in to drink on. I started to fill her in on the Zane family propensities, but she was so canny she had already caught on to those, including Duane’s. “That kid at the gas station?” She curled her lip dismissively. “What a weenie.”
Snooping past the boots and shoes, she next found the hiding place of the Blue Eagle sign under the rain slickers, just as I had when the back room was a new world to me. Watching a dark-eyed imp of a girl repeat my discovery so exactly was remarkable and somewhat spooky. I’ve said this was starting off as not a usual summer.
Unlike me, however, Zoe saw nothing odd about the eagle being blue. “I bet it’s the only paint they had that day,” she resolved the question, and moved on.
As inevitably as B follows A, she next stumbled onto the latest quantity of items tucked away even farther with the tarp over them. “What are all these tools for?”
My guess was that they were implements used in oil field work, but I only repeated what Pop told me whenever I happened to ask about the stuff that every so often multiplied under the tarpaulin, as if it was a magician’s cloth. “It’s just surplus somebody didn’t know what else to do with.”
“This place is really something, Rusty,” she marveled.
And that was before I even introduced her to the vent.
“It’s that time of day, Tom,” the alimony purr in that voice drifted up to us when we hunched in at the desk on the landing and I grandly levered the vent slats open.
“You’re living proof of that, Velma.” Pop’s reply was punctuated with the sounds of a ginger-ale highball being mixed. “I can quit winding my watch now that you’re back.”
Zoe pressed so close to the metal grille, her ear practically kissed the slats. “Ooh.” She turned to me, instinctively whispering, “It’s just like you said, we can hear every word! This is wild!”
Veteran eavesdropper that I was, I welcomed her to the club with a smug smile.
“How was Mexico?” Pop’s voice kept its distance from Velma’s.
“Same as ever. Fiestas and tortillas.”
Craning her neck, Zoe took a good look at Velma’s tailored outfit and eternally chestnut hair. “She looks pretty swuft,” she murmured over her shoulder to me. “How come your dad doesn’t fall for her?”
“She’s too”—I almost said old before remembering Velma Simms most likely was close to my father’s age, whatever that was—“divorced.” I noiselessly closed the vent so I didn’t have to whisper my way through the long history of the town’s record holder for broken marriages.
“That’s a lot of split blankets,” Zoe said sagely when I was done. “I bet that’s why your dad is such a bachelor. He doesn’t want something like that happening to him again, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Zoe looked at me keenly. “You don’t ever hear from your mom at all?”
“Not really,” I blurted, surprised into dumb honesty. I was not yet used to the fact that the mind of Zoe was like a pinball machine; the flips and bounces came so suddenly you were left blinking, trying to know the score.
“Christmas or anytime?” she pressed the point.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Not even,” she wondered in a hushed voice, “on your birthday?”
I might have answered, Especially on my birthday, since my arrival in the world seemed to have so colossally done in the marriage of my mother and my father. “She, ah, doesn’t believe in that sort of thing. I don’t blame her.” I tried to sound worldly. “When you go through a gate, close it behind you.”
Zoe blinked in
thinking that over, and the vent came to my rescue. “Oh, hey, listen,” I whispered, opening it again to the clocklike happenings of the barroom.
“Ring me up one, Tom.” Bill Reinking had walked in on schedule. “Something to get my mind off the state of the world again this week.”
“Shot of scotch, water on the side,” I stated without looking.
Peeking to check on that, Zoe bobbed her head in fascination. She listened avidly to the trials and tribulations of the Gleaner editor as told to Pop, then when Bill Reinking left, dropped back into her chair with a gleam in her eye. “Know what?” Her whisper turned even more confidential. “Priests do this all the time.”
Pop and I weren’t remotely Catholic or anything else, but I was pretty sure the confessional booth had something more to it than a vent in a saloon wall did.
“How’s it any different?” Zoe insisted. “People come and tell their troubles, and they get to feel better because somebody is listening to them.”
“Yeah, but it’s my dad they know is listening, not us up—”
“Same thing, him or us,” she breezed past that. “People just want somebody to spill to.” Her eyes sparkling, she provided final proof of her expertise. “In Butte, they have a confessional on every corner, like a phone booth.”
I gave my new best friend a look and a knowing laugh. “I bet they need to.”
—
THAT WAS THE START. Zoe quickly became as regular in the back room as some of Pop’s customers out front. In no time, we were thicker than thieves, as that accurate enough saying goes. When we were together, almost anything tickled our funny bones, particularly overheard snatches from the barroom that arrived to us through the vent. In no time we adopted old sheepherders’ “Hunnerd percent” and “Wouldn’t that fry your gizzard” equally with young flyboys’ “Listen up, troop” and “Outstanding!” and any number of other gleeful bits we made our own, lingo overlapping in us as though we were time travelers. Inevitably added to that was every particle of radio serial and comic strip and movie dialogue we’d ever encountered that was silly enough to remember, piled up and waiting in two active twelve-year-old brains like ingredients filling a flour sifter. All it took for that powder of imagination to sieve through in good measure was for one or the other of us to turn the crank.
“Ace, what do you think this doohickey is?” Zoe might take on a persuasive growl—she could be a deadly mimic, and I wasn’t bad myself—as we prowled the holdings of the back room.
“Get a brain in your head, Muscles.” Gangsters who talked sideways out of their mouths were one of our favorites. “Any dumb cluck can plainly see it’s a whatchamacallit, a bootjack.”
“Now that you give me the skinny, boss, I can see you hit the nail on the noggin.”
Zoe had yet another surprising side to her. With boyish trepidation—she was first and foremost a girl, after all—I had given her a hasty tour of my aspiring air force of Hellcats and Spitfires and Airacobras and the like hovering on their fish lines from the rafters, figuring she would have about as much interest in model-plane building as I would in learning to sew. How wrong I was, luckily. Whether it was the pugnacious aircraft names or what, she took to my balsa wood kits as though they were magic sets. “Neat! Show me how it all fits together.” I did more than that, finding the courage from somewhere to show her my most precious possession, the X-Acto knife Pop had given me for Christmas. “Ooh,” she breathed, just that, exactly the right response to the beautiful little instrument that was a cross between a pen and a scalpel.
“You suppose”—for once she was almost shy in asking—“I could try it out sometime?”
I didn’t have to think twice. “Right now, if you want,” I said, with my heart thumping as I pulled out the model kit I had been saving for after the Fourth of July rodeo, when summer started to stretch on. “I’m going to build my biggest one yet. A Flying Fortress.”
There were more oohs from her as I laid out the balsa wood sheets of the framework of the B-17 bomber. With the care of a surgeon I cut out the first wing to show her how it was done, and then handed her the X-Acto knife to do the other one herself. She handled it like a treasure, I was gratified to see, tracing the wing outline with the sharp point as slowly and precisely as I could do it myself.
That settled it. From then on, so many of those afternoons and early evenings, Zoe and I were to be found together at the desk on the stair landing, alternately tuning in on the barroom doings and giggling at each other’s tomfoolery and holding our breath as surgical cuts on balsa wood were made. Somewhere in the back of our minds lurked the disturbing knowledge that when school started in the fall, I would have to turn into a boy among other boys again and she would have to find a best friend among girls. But that fact of life lay whole months away yet, and in the meantime, all we had to live up to was for each of us to do half the laughing.
Early in all this, Pop came in from the bar side to wrestle a keg of beer out to the taps and glanced up at us, innocent as angels there on the stair landing. He paused for a long moment, his eyebrows working on the matter. “Your folks know you’re in here as much as you are, princess?”
Zoe swore, cross her heart and hope to go to heaven in a flash of fire, that they did.
He went back to grappling the keg, but not before reciting the warning about beans and nose with an oddly pensive look at the so youthful pair of us.
—
IT WAS RAINING CATS and dogs again, another weather parade the Two Medicine country wasn’t used to, the day not much farther into summer, when she came in the back door shaking her wet hair and caroling up to me on the landing, “What’s the story, morning glory?”
“Hi.”
She gave me a little look, but then bounded up the stairs as usual and started to settle in next to where I’d been dithering over our half-built Flying Fortress. I had the louver slats of the vent open to try to improve my mood, and right away we heard the bar phone being answered. Nothing got past Zoe in the sieving of voices from the barroom—at times like this, I wished it would—and at the first guttural word, she went alert as a sentry.
“That’s not your dad,” she whispered.
Trying to sound offhand—it’s hard when you’re whispering—I told her it was only Howie, filling in.
“Is he sick?”
“Who, Howie? He always talks that way.”
“No, silly, your dad.”
I was badly out of sorts, even with her. “No, nosy, he’s not sick.”
“Then why isn’t he tending bar like always?”
“He’s . . . away on a trip.”
“He is? For how long?”
“Couple of days.”
“Oh, good, that’s not much.” She read my face. “Although it’s kind of a lot, too. Why didn’t he take you along?”
“I didn’t want to go,” I said, hoping the opposite of the truth would end this. “All he’s doing is selling some of this old stuff.”
“Really? Ooh, I see what you mean, the snake boots are gone. Too bad.” Those and a whole lot else I crossly had watched Pop pile up for loading in the Packard early that morning, before he shooed me to the house and told me not to put any you-know-what up my nose while he was away. By now Zoe knew the holdings of the back room as well as I did, and she could tell from the crumpled look of the tarpaulin back by the Blue Eagle sign that the tool collection had vanished, along with a lot else. Her curiosity wasn’t quenched about the comings and goings of the hocked merchandise. “Where does your dad go to sell all these kinds of things?”
When I told her, her eyes reflected dark mystery. “Canada! Why there?”
“Uhm, he makes more money.”
“Just by going across the border? How does that work?”
“They’re short of American stuff up there, I guess.”
 
; Zoe gazed around at the motley accumulation that was left. “They won’t be, if he makes enough trips.”
—
SAME PICKLED BEDROOM. Same slap of Howie’s slippers on the way to the toilet. Same sleepless mood, that first night, fretting myself to a frazzle about my father. I couldn’t get over it. One minute we were in our usual comfortable routines in the house and the joint, and the next thing I knew, he was gone in another puff of smoke. True, this time he had not driven off into the jaws of a thirty-year winter, but it had been the rainiest spring and start of summer anyone could remember, and there was flooding up north on the Milk River. I had a really bad feeling about this sudden trip of his, even more so than that New Year’s excursion into the blizzard, maybe because Zoe had taken my mind off the matter and I was caught utterly unprepared when he told me he was about to load up and go. I wasn’t even sure why, weather aside, this time scared me so. What was it about life that kept tiptoeing back and forth so unpredictably across the back of my mind this odd year? Or was it just the age I was at, still a kid with a kid’s nightmares (Phoenix!) but growing older if not wiser at what seemed an accelerating rate? In any case, here the situation was again, him gone and me stewing in the dark.
Yet when I look back, this is possibly what it took to encourage me into what I did that next day. Desperation can serve as a kind of encouragement, after all.
Zoe and I were back at the B-17, the X-Acto knife doing most of the talking as we traded back and forth at cutting out delicate small parts and gluing them into the complicated bomber fuselage. Worried sick and not able in the least to keep it from showing, I knew she deserved better company than I was managing to be. She was all sympathy, I could tell, but she had that carefully pursed expression a person has around someone something is wrong with. Mustering myself, I cast around for some way to make up for my mood. Fortunately I was not without resources, Pop having given me a couple of dollars of conscience money before he left.