“That’s about the size of it,” he said, resuming his inventory stroll again. “Tell me about the rehearsal.”
—
IT WAS AMID this run of luck that I stepped out of the house one morning to the strangest sight: All over town, the cottonwoods were suddenly snowing, the fluffy seed filaments they were named for drifting down like the most tardy flakes of the thirty-year winter, and there, through the heart of this soft storm out of old wrinkled Igdrasil and fellow trees, a rainbow was glowing. I stopped, amazed, as if the mighty seasons of this year were colliding in front of my eyes. Glimmers of rainbows had not been uncommon after all the rains, but this was a true one, a hypnotic arch stretching from somewhere beyond the Medicine Lodge and the other downtown buildings to the far hay fields of the creek valley. I watched, riveted, its full band of colors from red through yellow to violet phenomenally mixed with the snow-white fluff, until it gradually faded, and I think of that signal morning whenever I look back to that time now half a century ago, as if to the pigments of that many-hued year.
Still under the spell of that spectacle, I went on my way across the alley to the Medicine Lodge to await Zoe as usual, for our next session of being Ernest and Algernon and Cecily and so on. The beer truck with GREAT FALLS SELECT blazoned on its side in big red letters—and below, that immortal slogan When you Select, it’s a pleasure!—was backed up to the rear door, as it was every week. The beer man Joe greeted me like an old comrade as he rattled a last case of empty bottles into the truck, while Pop was occupied in reading something that must have come with the usual invoice. I noticed that the more he read, the more his eyebrows climbed. Finally he could not contain himself: “No bee ess? This on the level, Joe? They chose this joint?”
The beer man laughed and thumped him on the back. “Says so right there in the letter, don’t it? You’ve been an A-one customer all these years, Tom, it’s only fair. Have a helluva good time in the Falls.” Climbing into the truck, he gave us a beep of salute and pulled out, leaving Pop standing there reading over the piece of paper, looking as pleased as I’d ever seen him. I almost didn’t want to interrupt the moment.
“Who’s it from, Pop?”
“Some bigwig at the brewery, no less. Guess what, kiddo. The Medicine Lodge is the Select”—he drew it out into Seee-lect—“Pleasure Establishment of the Year. It beat out every other joint in the entire state. How about that, hey?”
“Wow! Is there a big prize?”
“Let me see here.” He ran his thumb down the letter. “A twenty-five-percent discount on next week’s beer order—that’s better than a kick in the pants, anyway—plus a tour of the brewery, an award luncheon, and guest seats in the company box at the Selectrics game this Sunday.”
“Outstanding, Pop! Can I—”
“Don’t sweat it, you’re along. It says right here ‘honoree and family.’”
“Can Zoe come with us?”
“What am I, an adoption agency?” That did not sound promising, but if I played my cards right, it might not be the last word, I sensed. Seeing my face fall and stay that way, he reconsidered. “Just the two of us”—he rubbed his jaw as if taking count—“I guess we are a little short on family. If her folks say it’s okay, I don’t see any overpowering reason why she can’t come.”
—
THE DAY DAWNED BRIGHT and clear, like stage lights turned high. Dressed to the teeth as Pop and I also were, Zoe sat in the middle in the car, because that’s what females did in those days of front seats that held three people. The drive to Great Falls felt like a storybook journey, the polar crags of the Rockies beyond, the nearer fields so unbelievably green the color needed a new name, the creeks and rivers running high, wide, and handsome in a countryside usually starting to gasp for moisture this time of year. Pop declared he could not remember a summer quite like this, and Zoe and I could readily believe it. He was in an expansive mood as our route stepped us down from the altitude of the Two Medicine country, pointing out for my benefit a landmark square butte that Charlie Russell had painted any number of times, and for Zoe’s, the sky-high smelter smokestack, visible from thirty miles away, where copper mined in Butte ended up. Never mind the Pyramids, the Alps, the topless towers of cities of legend, we had sufficient marvels to behold as the Buick gunboat sailed us along.
As the name implies, Great Falls has a river at its heart, the renowned Missouri, and the broad, powerful current was brimming almost into the bank-side brewery, as though the water could hardly wait to become beer, when we pulled up to the front of the big brick building. The brewery looked disappointingly like a factory, one from long ago at that. There could not have been anything more up to date, however, than the gigantic electrical sign up on the roof spelling out GREAT FALLS SELECT, with that vital last word blinking bright red every few seconds.
“This seems to be the place,” Pop said with a straight face as we got out. While he bent down to adjust his bow tie in the reflection of the car window, Zoe and I gawked around. Both of us had trouble keeping our eyes off the hypnotic sign. Suddenly the thought hit Zoe: “Mr. Harry, is this the beer they call Shellac?”
“The exact same one, princess,” he replied, straightening up to his full height, “although none of us are going to say that word again today from this minute on.” He looked at her forcefully, then the same at me. “Got that?”
We bobbed our heads like monks in a vow of silence, but you know how difficult it is when you deliberately try to put something out of your mind. Shellac, Shellac, Shellac, the huge sign seemed to register in its every blink.
Checking his watch, Pop hustled us into the brewery. Waiting for us was a well-dressed man of large girth, who introduced himself as the vice president in charge of brewing operations. “I see to it the barley comes in and the beer goes out.” He gave an encompassing sweep of his hand as if that explained everything.
Talking every step of the way, he led us off on the tour of the brewery. There was a bewildering variety of vats and boilers and other equipment strung throughout the building, with an army of workers reading gauges and adjusting dials and opening and closing valves and so on. The manufacture of beer, it turned out, was full of words that Zoe and I thought we knew but took on evidently far different meanings when spoken by the vice president, such as malt and mash and hops. It might not be everyone’s idea of a prize outing, but trooping through the Select production maze behind our indefatigable tour guide was decidedly educational, I suspect even for Pop, although he kept nodding wisely and murmuring mm hmm, as if he knew all about how beer was made.
Naturally the brewery had an intoxicating aroma, a heady odor that seemed to go farther up the nostrils than other smells. While the vice president gabbed to Pop, with us trailing behind, Zoe could not resist crossing her eyes as if she was drunk, and I had to make myself not dissolve in giggles. I got back at her by whispering, “Don’t look so shellacked.” She puckered up at the forbidden word, and now we couldn’t help it, both of us laughed through our noses as if sneezing.
Pausing in his discourse to Pop, the vice president turned and smiled indulgently at the sunny pair of us. “Cute children you have, Mr. Harry. What are they, twins but not the identical kind?”
Pop shook his head and gave the kind of wink that passes between men of sophistication. “Different mothers, if you know what I mean.”
“Oho,” said the vice president, not entirely as if he knew what that meant.
When at last we had been shown everything there was about beer making, our host leaned toward Pop as if confiding a business secret.
“Of course, we can brew our product until it runs out our ears, but we can’t sell one drop without superb skill such as yours be-hind the bar. That’s why we here at Select were so pleased to”—he chuckled—“select your establishment for this year’s award.”
Pop took this as imperturbably as a captain of i
ndustry. Nodding gravely to the activity in every precinct of the brewery, he responded: “I’m glad to see I’ve got your crew working Sundays to keep up.”
“That’s saying a mouthful!” the vice president acclaimed that. He thumped Pop on the back as Joe the beer man had done with the delivery of the award letter; I mentally tucked away the bit of behavior as the Great Falls Shellac—whoops, Select—salute. “Well, onward to the luncheon,” our host exclaimed. “I’ll meet you at the Buster.” He smiled tolerantly at Zoe and me again. “I hope you brought your appetites with you.”
—
LIKE THE BREWERY, the Sodbuster Hotel—so named in tribute to the grain-growing region that Great Falls was at the heart of—was a place Pop and I, and for that matter Zoe, might never have encountered in the ordinary course of our lives. Classy enough to invert itself into the Hotel Sodbuster in the terra-cotta name on its facade, it also made sure to boast GREAT FALLS’ FINEST! in a banner over the front entrance. The marble lobby and overstuffed furnishings and potted greenery showed that it was not merely claiming that honor by default, and in those surroundings I’m afraid our threesome looked like just what we were, Sunday visitors who were in over our heads in a fancy hostelry. Not a thing in the brewery excursion had seemed to faze Pop, but he looked nervous about this.
A desk clerk a lot better dressed than we were coolly directed us to the banquet room. Pop halted outside the big oaken doors, though, and jerked his head for Zoe and me to follow him down the hallway. “Anybody who has to take a leak, now’s the time.” Zoe did not yet have the skill of blushing on cue, but she otherwise acted ladylike enough as she minced into the properly labeled restroom while we went to the one marked GENTLEMEN.
The Hotel Sodbuster had restrooms deluxe. More of that marble on the floor, and sinks that nearly snowblinded a person. Even the places to pee gleamed, and, thinking of my dreaded latrine duty at the Medicine Lodge, I wished out loud its facilities were as nice as these.
“Sure,” Pop muttered as we lined up side by side to do our business, “just what the joint needs, a Taj Mahal toilet.”
“Pop? Are you worried about something?”
“What do you think? It’s an award ceremony, isn’t it, so they’re going to expect me to get up and say something, aren’t they. And I’m no public speaker, am I.”
“Can’t you just say, ‘Gee, thanks,’ and sit right back down?”
“What kind of an ess of a bee wouldn’t have any more manners than that?” He zipped up, and checked me over to make sure I had done the same. “Okay, let’s collect Zoe and go get this over with.”
Stepping into the gathering in the banquet room of the Buster was like entering a forest of business suits, with a few of the dignitaries’ wives sprinkled in to coo down at Zoe and me. The vice president from the brewery greeted Pop and ourselves like old friends and led the trio of us around to be introduced. The roomful was quite an assortment—the slickly dressed mayor of Great Falls and sunburnt farmers from the barley growers’ association and up-and-comers of the local Chamber of Commerce and burly beer distributors from all over the state; names flew by us in bunches as Pop shook hands endlessly. With his height and the silver streak in his hair, he stood out in the crowd like a cockatoo, and I could tell he was uncomfortable with the marathon of one-sided conversations people were making with him. This was one of those occasions where much was spoken, but very little was actually being said. Zoe and I were asked over and over how old we were. It was a relief when the vice president clattered a spoon against his beer glass and announced it was time to take our seats.
Thanks to Pop’s eminence, ours were at the head table, and with a roomful of people in front of us to be spied on just by looking, Zoe and I now were in our glory. We sat watching, keen as magpies, as the grown-ups socialized variously. I was storing away the tongue-tied expression on the barley farmer who had ended up next to the mayor’s wife when I heard a finger snap under the table, a signal either from the ghost of Shakespeare or Zoe.
Leaning toward her in response, I whispered, “How now?”
She giggled, but whispered back with concern: “Your dad looks awful serious. Isn’t he having a good time?”
“He has to get up and make a speech of some kind.”
“So? He doesn’t have stage fright, does he?”
“He doesn’t have a speech.”
“Ooh, that’s not good.” She thought for a moment. “Maybe he can tell them it fell out of his pocket back at the brewery and went into one of those big vats, and so the next time they have a beer, they’ll have a taste of what he meant to say.”
“I don’t think he’d go for that.”
As if by radar, Pop turned from valiantly keeping up a conversation with the vice president and said under his breath, “Don’t get carried away, you two.” We obediently straightened up, mute as puppets.
Waiters in white jackets flocked into the room, and the food came. I studied my plate to learn what a banquet consisted of. Mashed potatoes, no surprise there. String beans, harmless enough. Roast beef, pink in the middle. Very pink. In Gros Ventre, someone would have been sure to joke that they had seen critters worse off than this get well.
I had never met anything yet I couldn’t eat, so I went right at my meat. Zoe, though, only tweaked hers with her fork.
Observing this, Pop told her out the side of his mouth, “Dig in, princess.”
“It’s not cooked,” she whispered to him.
“It’s rare, is all. Give it a try.”
“I can’t. The color turns my stomach.”
“Better chew with your eyes closed, then. Come on, people are watching. Saw some off the edge and eat it.”
“Do I have to?”
“Hell yes,” he said, giving her a look. “It’s good manners.”
I knew that look, and braced for trouble. The last thing we needed in a roomful of important people was a contest of wills between my father and Zoe over a chunk of meat. But miracles do happen. Swallowing hard before the really hard swallowing, she cut a bite and ate it. Then another. I was amazed; in our suppers together in the cafe, I had seen her throw a fit over an undercooked pea.
Thus the banquet proceeded without warfare, and after sufficient beer had been served to the grown-ups, the vice president rapped his glass with a spoon again to draw everyone’s attention.
He introduced the mayor, who said a few pleasantries and doubtless won some votes by promptly sitting down. The vice president got to his feet again and talked on for a while about the long and warm relationship between the brewery and establishments such as Pop’s; I noticed the word saloon never crossed his lips, let alone joint. In conclusion, he said it gave him the greatest pleasure to present this year’s award to “an owner and bartender known as one of a kind, Tom Harry, for an establishment which also has no equal, legendarily the first place of business in the town of Gros Ventre and still its leading one, the Medicine Lodge!”
At that, Pop had to stand up and receive a copper plaque that surprised him with its size and heft. As he wrestled it into security in his arms, Zoe and I craned for a look at the thing. Besides the fancy inscription, it was a representation of that scenery around Great Falls we’d seen on the drive in—the river valley, the Charlie Russell square butte, the mountain background—but where the smelter stack would have been, a gigantic Select beer bottle loomed over everything.
Pop studied the engraved scene for a few moments, then said as if thinking out loud: “I have a customer this bottle is about the right size for.” That drew a laugh—Earl Zane would never know he had been his own best joke—and I felt relieved for Pop.
However, he looked not too sure about what he was going to say after that as he ever so gingerly deposited the award onto the table and faced the waiting audience. He ran a hand through his hair, as if trying to comb his thoughts into plac
e. “Something like this comes as quite a surprise, although I guess it’s a long time in the happening. Down through the years, I’ve sold oceans of Shel—”
“Ooh!” Zoe squealed in the nick of time, as if I had goosed her.
“Kids these days.” Pop recovered hastily, giving her what amounted to a grateful frown. He cleared his throat and started again. “Like I was saying, I have sold oceans of Seelect”—he all but buttered the word and handed it on a plate to the brewery vice president be-side him—“down through the years. Years of beers, hey?” he said, as if just noticing the rhyme. Now he squinted as he followed one thought to the next. “My, ah, establishment, the Medicine Lodge, does go way back. I’m kind of getting like that myself.” He shook his head as if thinking about the passage of time. “According to this nice piece of metal”—he tapped the plaque, making it ring—“all the days and nights behind the bar maybe do add up to something.”
There, that did it up perfectly fine, I silently congratulated him. Proudly I waited for him to say “Thanks” and sit down.
Instead he said, “It reminds me of a story.”
What? Since when? My father who would not tell the least tale about anything? The man who made an art of listening, not shooting the breeze? I wanted to disappear under the tablecloth. I just knew the banquet room would become a tomb as people grew bored. Zoe caught my stricken look.
I will say, he did the familiar man-walks-into-a-bar cadence as if it was second nature when he began: “A bartender whose time is up goes to heaven.
“Saint Peter is sitting there on a cloud with his gold-leaf book.” Pop pantomimed the celestial gatekeeper. “‘Hmm, hmm, remind me . . . what did you do in life that brings you to heaven?’ The visitor scratches his head over that, he’s a little embarrassed.” Deliberately or not, Pop acted this out sufficiently. “‘I’m a bartender,’ the visitor finally comes right out with it, ‘and I have to tell you, I’m surprised to be here.’ ‘You’re right about that,’ says Saint Peter, ‘we haven’t had one of your kind in quite some time.’”