The Bartender's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

so that it covered the shine of the hook.
    Trying it, I was nervous and stuck myself. I yelped, and tears started.
    “Cripes, don’t bawl,” he soothed, getting me to wash the spot of blood off my finger in the frigid lake. “Stick it in your mouth and it’ll stop bleeding. Here, I’ll bait up for you, this once.”
    I sucked on the finger and sniffled myself dry, watching as he took up his pole, fussed with the line and reel, drew back, and sent the hook and sinker sailing to where the fish were dreaming of chicken guts. “Now you try.”
    Awkwardly I whipped my pole and the line plooped into the water about six feet from the bank. “That’s a start,” he commended my effort to the extent he could. “You want to go a little more easy when you cast, okay? It’s not like you’re chopping wood.”
    Another swish, another ploop, maybe seven feet out from the bank this time. And, again, no interested response from any fish. I was beginning to get the feeling that progress came slowly in fishing. Not only that, but my hands and feet were cold, and the rest of me in between was not much better. Beautiful as the crisp scenic morning was, it would have been even more attractive from inside the car with the heater on.
    “Don’t sweat it”—Pop at least was undiscouraged—“you’ll get the hang of it.”
    Not, as it proved out, before losing my bait every few casts and having to deal with the hook and chicken guts a number of times more.
    Something else troubled me. I could accept that the sign was right about this being a reservoir, but the other part I had my doubts about. Any rainbow I had ever seen—Arizona at least had those—needed its distance, an expanse of sky to stretch its band of colors from end to end. Here, though, the way the lake was pressed against the mountains, you would sprain your neck looking overhead for any sign of one. I asked Pop about it, and he just laughed. “It’s on the fish. Rainbow trout. The rezavoy is stocked with them.”
    “Really?” I was more interested now, if chicken guts were going to lead to amphibians with red, yellow, green, blue, and purple stripes. Time passed, however, and cast after cast, with me growing more and more numb and no tug at my line—or, for that matter, at Pop’s—from any trout, rainbow-colored or otherwise.
    Ultimately I was saved by the wind, which kicked up a strong riffle on the water and made his casts hard to control and mine hopeless. “Well, hell, they aren’t biting anyway,” he conceded at last, securing his hook into the cork handle of his pole and doing mine for me. “It just leaves that many more for you to catch in the derby.” I shivered from more than the cold as we climbed back to the car.
    —
    BACK IN TOWN, it began to dawn on both of us that my father did not quite know what to do with me once the fishing poles were put away. So there I was again, tagging after him as he went to tend to business at the saloon. Howie, smoking a cigarette as if he couldn’t breathe without it, was doing the same things behind the bar he’d been doing twenty-four hours before, but with a fresh gripe.
    “Tom, you’re gonna have to do something about Earl Zane. Teach him to read, if nothing else.” He jerked his head toward the sign prominent above the cash register: MOSES FORGOT THE ONE ABOUT CREDIT: THOU SHALT NOT ASK. “The no-good son of a bitch wanted to keep on drinking after his money ran out, but I told the prick to—”
    “Hey, not in front of the kid,” Pop cut him off, just when I was getting interested. At least in my vicinity, my father brought his own rules to the etiquette of bad language.
Damn
and
hell
salted and peppered his remarks to me as well as to everyone else, but he made an effort to swear off, so to speak, the worse words when I was around.
Cripes
stood in for what Bill Reinking, the newspaper editor and the town’s acknowledged wise man on matters of language, would have called invoking the Nazarene.