“Hey, want to go to the show?” Our evenings were pretty much second helpings of afternoons, inasmuch as television literally wasn’t in the picture before relay stations began beaming the signal to small western towns like ours; it is strange to think how much distraction the curvature of the earth spared us back then. The new movie at the Odeon once a week was exactly what it sounded like, the only show in town.
“You bet,” said she, ready for anything. Until she thought it over for a second or two. “You think we both should? Together, I mean.” She picked at her elbow uneasily. “That’s kind of . . . you know.”
Yes, it was awfully public. Gros Ventre was a small town where people knew one another’s business almost before it happened. We could be teased to death if the wrong party—Duane Zane came to mind—spotted us sitting together in the movie theater. That was a chance we would have to take, and I had an inkling of how.
“Leave it to me, Bucky”—I did my best radio-serial voice—“we’ll foil those devils yet.”
With enough pleading to her parents and my dogged negotiation with Howie, we managed to get permission to go to the late show rather than the early one on the unique premise that it was a shame to waste a nice summer evening inside. Even so, it still was only dusk when we slipped out the back door of the Medicine Lodge and down the alley until we were across the street from the Odeon. The first show had just let out, and as the crowd dispersed to cars and pickups, we waited until the traffic died down and then hurried across to where the marquee read:
THE ALAMO
STARRING JOHN WAYNE
DIRECTED BY JOHN WAYNE
Charlie Hooper, the Odeon’s owner, was at the ticket window, counting his take, and was surprised to see customers already for the next showing. He was even more surprised when I pushed our price of admission through the little wicket and requested urgently: “Can we please be in the crying room? She has a real bad cough.”
I swear, Zoe immediately took on the look of a consumptive who would cough her head off throughout the show. As Charlie Hooper peered at her through the ticket window glass, she ducked her head and gave a piteous hacking sound. Figuring I was the emissary from her folks or my father, Charlie surmised: “Bashful, is she?”
“Scared of her own shadow.”
“Well, all right, but you’ll have to clear out if there’s a squaller.”
We would cross that high water when we came to it. Meanwhile the crying room, a small soundproof cubicle next to the projector booth where a parent or two could sit with a squalling baby, was all ours. Unseen by the audience below, we could watch the show in royal privacy and make cracks about it out loud to our hearts’ content. Zoe was already nearly giddy with our fortunate spot and I was glad to have my mind somewhat off my absent father.
“Outstanding, Rusty! Hunnerd percent!”
“Almost.” I ran back down to where Charlie Hooper doubled as clerk at the candy counter and bought us each a roll of Necco wafers. This was pure kid instinct. The thin candy discs of a variety of flavors, all of them faint, were kind of like sucking on nickels, but I had a hunch Zoe would be as crazy for them as I was.
“Boy oh boy, Ace”—Zoe grinned a mile as she crackled open her Necco roll—“this hideout is the best idea ever.”
One thing about a movie called The Alamo, there was no doubt about how it was going to come out, so instead of following the plot very closely, we could sit back sucking Neccos and evaluate the actors and the funny way they were dressed. Laurence Harvey played Colonel Travis, in charge of the mission fortress threatened by the Mexican forces of Santa Ana, and whatever anyone in Texas was actually wearing in 1836, this version of the colonel raced around in tight white pants and a really big hat. It was headgear so wide-brimmed it wouldn’t have lasted a minute in Montana wind, and we couldn’t help snorting laughs whenever a camera angle caused it to dwarf the head under it. It seemed like in every scene, Colonel Travis tromped around in the same bad mood. For the whole first part of the movie, he and Jim Bowie, played by Richard Widmark, with the trademark knife—about the size of a dozen X-Actos—strapped to his hip, were so mad at each other that the Mexican foe somewhere out there seemed an afterthought.
As history dragged along at the Alamo, Zoe said impatiently, “Isn’t John Wayne even in this?”
“He must be waiting for something to happen before he shows up.” I rolled what was left of a mint Necco around in my mouth. “Guess what, that’s not even his real name.”
“You’re making that up.”
“Not either,” I said, confident of what I’d read somewhere. “Bet you anything it’s really Marion Morrison.”
We both snickered at the sissy sound of that, or as it would have been in the schoolyard, the thithy thound.
“You suppose back then,” Zoe giggled her way into a lisp, “when someone asked what his name was, he didn’t like to have to thay ‘Morrithon’?”
“‘Marion’ ithn’t tho hot, either, ith it.”
Finally the supposed star of the show showed up on-screen. However he came to be John Wayne, he sure was a-talkin’ slow when he came on the scene as Davy Crockett, coonskin cap and all in the blazing Texas sun. A ragtag bunch with him were his Tennesseeans, and promptly enough they were in a big drunken fight scene in a cantina, the most action yet in the movie. Then appeared a busty señorita, whose main role seemed to be to stand sideways so John Wayne could get a good look.
“Wooh, how about the front porch on her,” said Zoe, which freed me to grin appreciatively.
The movie slowed down drastically after that—after all, it was a siege—and we spent more of our time peeking down at the audience to see what was going on. Attendance at the late show ran heavily to couples on dates, so there was sometimes interesting behavior in the dark. It must have been some of the more evident necking that brought the question to mind in Zoe.
“Rusty? What if”—it was eerie to hear her say my most haunting two words there in the dark—“what if your dad met somebody he liked on one of these trips? A Canadian lady, maybe? Would you want a new mother?”
Zoe had an incredible knack for zeroing in when a person least expected it. Blinking in the dark, I answered thinly: “Are you kidding? You said it yourself, remember? One parent is plenty.”
“I know.”
“Then why’d you bring it up?”
She rattled out a Necco before answering. “That was real dumb of me, wasn’t it,” she said in a small voice. “Excuse me all over the place.” She did her best to erase all doubt. “Besides, your dad is too swuft to do that to you.”
He’d better be, I thought but didn’t say. Instead, I resorted to: “Boy, if this movie doesn’t end sometime, we’ll be eating Neccos for breakfast.” Relieved to change the subject, Zoe piped up: “Maybe they lost track of the ending, you think, Ace?”
In the course of time, with a lot of preachy dialogue along the way, things actually were building to a climax at the Alamo, and the arrival of Mexican soldiers on-screen by the apparent thousands for the attack was really something, we had to admit.
“This is kind of like Custer, isn’t it,” Zoe observed, both of us back in movie-critic mode.
“Reckon so, ma’am,” I responded, John Wayne–like. “It don’t look good for the Texicans.”
The Alamo battle scenes were serious blood and guts; heaven help the human race if war ever ceases to be sobering, even at its most make-believe. And yet, right there amid the explosions and bodies falling everywhere, the scriptwriter and the director included a scene where two mortally wounded Tennesseeans are pinned against a wall and one of them asks, “Does this mean what I think it do?” The other one answers, “It do,” and they both expire.
And we had something new for our vocabulary of the summer.
—
THE NEXT NIGHT was another story
. I went to bed at Howie and Lucille’s in hopes of a call of “Hey, kiddo” rousing me. It didn’t happen. The third day came, and Pop didn’t show up and didn’t show up. Zoe did her best to cheer me up—“Maybe he has to look real hard to find anybody to buy the snake boots, is all”—but by nightfall, I knew I was in for another spell in that tomb of a bedroom.
Breakfast the next morning with Howie and Lucille had me downcast about as far as I could go. As they ate their stewed prunes and took their pills, I fed on toast and jam and watched the clock. Theoretically, I was free to come and go now that it was broad daylight, but I didn’t want to miss Pop when he came for me, if that ever managed to happen. From the concern on Lucille’s kindly face and Howie’s crabby expression—awfully early in the day for that—I was not the only one wondering why he hadn’t shown up long since. I had some more toast and jam and stayed sitting there, waiting.
At last came what we had all been straining to hear, the Packard’s heavy crush of gravel in the driveway.
I was outside before Pop had time to climb out of the car. “Hey, where’s the fire?” He sounded like always, but didn’t look it. His shiner had finally gone away, but there were dark pouches under his eyes, and the deepened lines in his face told how tired he was. He had been driving with the window rolled down, I saw, something a person does to stay awake at the wheel.
I babbled a greeting of some kind, cut off by the slam of the screen door behind me. Unexpectedly, Howie had followed me out.
“You’re stretching it some, Tom. The boy was getting awful worried.”
“I’d just as soon that didn’t happen,” Pop said levelly, looking from one of us to the other. “Anyhow, here I am, right? Climb in, kiddo.”
He drove home as if the huge old car knew the way by itself, his mind elsewhere, and for the first few blocks I didn’t say anything. The streets that had been whited out with snow the last time were now a tunnel of leafy trees, the dappled green that happens when a breeze stirs a column of cottonwoods. Every house lazing in the shade possessed a carpet of lawn or at least grass outdoing itself to be green, from the moist spring and summer. Lilacs were blooming like big purple bouquets left at porches. If there ever was a market for momentary Americana, a day like this was the time to sell off the town of Gros Ventre, complete and entire. My mood didn’t match the pleasant scene, however, emotions going every which way in me. I was dizzily relieved Pop was home in one piece, and at the same time I was so mad at him, I could taste it. Something needed saying, even if I wasn’t sure what.
“Did you get a lot of money from the loot?” I asked sullenly.
He looked at me from the corner of his eye and then back to the road. “I made enough. Don’t sweat it.”
“What, did you have trouble selling the things this time?”
“I got it done.”
“Did you have to drive through the flood?”
“It wasn’t where I was.”
The next logical question was whether he’d been too busy with some floozy to come home on time, but I managed not to ask it, quite. “Then how come it takes longer every time?”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“It’s longer. Every time.”
“If you say so.”
“Even Howie thinks so.”
He let out a sigh of ages. “This is one of those days. Right away Howie takes an ornery fit, and you don’t seem to be in the absolute best frame of mind, either.” One hand on the steering wheel, he knuckled the bags under his eyes with the other. “How about letting me catch a couple of hours of sleep, and then we’ll tackle the joint, would that suit you?”
I looked at him blankly.
“It’s Saturday, remember?
That had skipped my mind entirely—this summer every day was Zoe day, I wasn’t keeping track of much else—but I stiffly maintained: “Howie and I were going to do the setting up and the swamping by ourselves if you didn’t get back.”
“Saint Peter will put you both in the book,” he said wearily, and aimed the car into our driveway, where Igdrasil waited with its top reaching to heaven and its roots watered by seasons of fate.
—
“IMAGINE THAT,” Pop stepped into the saloon, still yawning after the few hours of sleep he’d snatched but with his bow tie in place and his apron on, “the place didn’t fall down without me.” While that was true enough, the barroom definitely had missed his presence, glasses mouth down in the breakfront slightly out of line from usual, stools not quite squared up to the bar, ashtrays emptied but not washed clean, and so on—Howie had his own way of doing or not doing things. Somehow the long old room welcomed its proprietor back, as an empty theater changes when a leading actor strolls onstage. Even the familiar gallery of taxidermied heads up on the walls appeared more hospitable with my father and his black-and-white mane on the premises. And he looked miraculously recuperated, now that he was back where he belonged. Why couldn’t he just stay here forever and tend to the business of bartending instead of vanishing off when I least expected and maybe getting himself in some love situation I didn’t even want to think about?
Still burning inside, I’d trailed him into the barroom with broom and mop and bucket, ready to get at my swamping job, but he circled the floor a couple of times, looking around at things, lost in thought, having a leisurely cigarette.
“You’re getting as bad as Howie,” I complained for the sake of complaint, “I wish you didn’t smoke so much.”
“That’s funny, I wish that sometimes, too,” he said, taking a deep drag. “Usually between cigarettes.” Taking philosophy further, he mused, “If you’re in the habit, you might as well stay there. Saves confusion.”
He glanced my way. “Hey, didn’t I tell you to go down to Shorty’s and get your ears lowered while I was away? You look like a beatnik.” We wouldn’t have known a beatnik if one thumped his bongo drum at us, but it was what he customarily said when I needed a haircut.
“I forgot.”
“That’s what I do about quitting smoking.” He squinted at me critically. “Cripes, Rusty, don’t tell me you just sat around being down in the mouth to your eyeteeth all the time I was gone.”
“No-o-o.” I dragged it out to the fullest extent of indignation. “Zoe and I went to the show.”
“Yeah? Good for you, I guess. Get all the training you can in dealing with females.” Next came one of those grown-up pronouncements as hazy as the blue nicotine cloud following him around this morning. “You’ll need it.”
Now that we had thoroughly gotten on each other’s nerves, he turned back to contemplating the barroom. I couldn’t sweep with him there stargazing like that, so I hinted heavily: “Aren’t you going in the back and pay bills?”
“Right away,” he said, showing no sign of going. Finishing his cigarette, he tossed it in a spittoon, then cocked a look at me different from any yet. “Tell you what. We need to do something else first. I’ll help you at it. Get out the stepladder.”
“What for?”
“It’s time to shine the eyes.”
Time to what? I goggled at him, then around at the ever-staring eyeballs of the stuffed heads. “Theirs?”
“Hell yes. We don’t want the deecor going dim, do we?” He gazed up at the one-eyed buffalo over the front door as if it might nod in agreement. “Better get at it. I’ll hold the ladder for you.”
Feeling vaguely foolish, I fetched the stepladder. “Start with him.” Pop still was in communion with the cyclopean bison. “Break you in easy.”
“I’ve never, uh, shined eyes before that I know of. What do I use?”
“Tickle your brain a little,” he advised. “Didn’t some fancy writer say eyes are the windows of the soul?”
I went and got the Windex bottle and a rag.
While I climbed up and positioned myself beside t
he huge bearded head, Pop steadied the ladder and watched the procedure critically. The buffalo’s single eye, like a sizable black marble, could use some help, I had to admit. However lifelike it may have looked when the taxidermist inserted it, over the years it had gone dull and cloudy from cigarette smoke and other tolls of midair life in a very active saloon. Rather tenderly I spritzed the bulge of glass and wiped with the tip of my finger wrapped in the rag until a gleam came up. It was uncanny, the feeling that grew in me as that dark eye brightened almost to life. In such a situation you know perfectly well the shaggy old beast has been dead for an eon, not to mention decapitated, yet there is the odd illusion that its gaze matches yours. The buffalo in fact had the advantage with that staring eye, and the other socket squinted closed in a shrewd, piratical way.
Curious about that, I wondered out loud: “What happened to the other eyeball?”
“It’s somewhere in the back room.”
“Really? It fell out, you mean?”
“Hell no,” Pop answered offhandedly, “I had it taken out, long time ago. You’d be surprised how hard it is to find a taxidermist who’ll do that. Professional ethics or something. I had to pack that head all over Great Falls before I found one who would agree to it.”
I felt a little dizzy, not just from the altitude of the ladder. Wild! Wait until Zoe heard this!
“Okay, Pop, I’ll bite. Why’d you have poor old bruiser here operated on like that?”
“Think about it,” he said, as if telling me I had missed a speck of dust. “Isn’t a customer gonna be more interested in a one-eyed buffalo than one with twenty-twenty vision? Maybe he’ll get to speculating about where that eye went, like you just were, and order another drink while he’s at it.” He shrugged. “If the guy doesn’t care how many eyes a buffalo has, we don’t want the ess of a bee for a customer anyway.”
I couldn’t argue with any of that. Pop and I moved on from the twinkling buffalo to the elk, with the coyote and deer and bobcat and the others beadily waiting their turn, every eye in the joint starting to shine, mine included. Every little while I looked down at the lord and master of the Medicine Lodge, this father of mine with his bag of secrets, like chicken guts and one-eyed animal heads and who knew what else. Damn, he was difficult to ever stay mad at.