The Bartender's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

any time to figure out that when the vent’s louvered slats were open like that, a person could hear everything—and see everything, by peeking—that was happening out front in the barroom. No wonder my father had the reputation of being the lord of all he surveyed, if he could do it secretly whenever he wanted.
    He dropped the stack of bills to pay and his checkbook on the desk and turned around to me. “The deal is, you’re gonna count up the booze for me, right?” His forehead furrowed. “You do know how to count, don’t you?”
    Anything above ten was a challenge, but I didn’t want to appear as shaky at arithmetic as I was at fishing. “Sure! I do it all the time.”
    “Okay, then, see those cases down there?” They were hard to miss, stacked halfway to the ceiling along the sidewall. “Count each kind and call it out to me. Start with the beer.”
    That was the next scene for a while, me scrambling around the boxes of alcoholic beverages and out of his way while he sat there at his lofty desk tackling the financial chores. That image of him with his clattery adding machine and fountain pen and checkbook I suppose sounds as quaintly manual now as a monk with an abacus and quill and scroll, but calculators then were still the human sort cranking out sums up there on the landing and, to a lesser degree, the six-year-old one laboriously enumerating the pyramid of booze down below. Starting with the beer—the vast majority of it Great Falls Select; the beverage of the Selectrics!—I would count the cases twice to make sure I had the number right, call out the total to Pop, he would say “Got it,” and write it down somewhere and go back to his calculating, and I would move on to the next brand of intoxicant. It was educational.
Booze
was a new word to me, and toward the back of the pile, I was thrilled to find included with the bourbon and scotch and all the rest a case of Orange Crush, proof of my father’s discriminating taste. The thrill diminished somewhat when I counted the Coca-Cola, six cases, but I still ended up happy to have been entrusted with the inventory.
    “All done, Pop.”
    “Okay, swell job,” he responded without looking up. “Keep yourself amused awhile, I’m not done writing these damn checks yet.”
    “Can I have some booze?”
    “What? Hell no!” He scowled down from the landing, until he saw me disconsolately tracing a finger along the carton of orange pop. “Oh. Sure, help yourself to a crushed orangutang.” He tossed me an opener.
    Bottle of sweet, sticky soda in hand, I circulated through the maze of things, eager for discoveries. One that puzzled me was tucked behind a stack of spare tires and covered with a tarpaulin, several toolboxes identically new and shiny. Still in my counting mode, I asked: “How come there’s so many of this?”
    Fanning a check in the air to dry the ink, Pop glanced over at what I’d found. “Never mind. Pull that tarp over those like it was.”
    “But there’s”—I had to think hard to remember what the number is when you have ten and two more—“twelve?”
    “The customer must have been a dozen times thirstier than usual,” he said as if that was that, and went back to what he was doing.
    I kept on prowling the wonders of the back room. Propped against the wall where the rain slickers were hanging was a sizable wooden sign standing on end. Pushing aside the curtain of coats and turning my head sideways, I managed to read the big lettering: BLUE EAGLE. Between the words, in fading paint, a fierce-looking sky-colored bird swooped as though it meant business.
    “Pop, how come the eagle is blue instead of eagle color?”
    “Hmmh?” The adding machine was coughing out a long result, which he waited for before answering me. “That’s the name of the joint, is all.”
    “I thought it was the, uh, Medical Lounge.”
    “Not this one,” he replied crossly, setting me straight about the Medicine Lodge and that the other joint was