The Bartender's Tale
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From a great American storyteller, a one-of-a-kind father and his precocious son,Β rocked by a time of change.
Tom Harry has a streak of frost in his black pompadour and a venerable bar called The MedicineΒ Lodge, the chief watering hole and last refuge of theΒ town of Gros Ventre, in northern Montana. Tom alsoΒ has a son named Rusty, an βaccident between theΒ sheetsβ whose mother deserted them both years ago.The pair make an odd kind of family, with the barΒ their true home, but they manage just fine.Β
Until the summer of 1960, that is, when Rusty Β turns twelve. Change arrives with gale force, in theΒ person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom knew back when,Β and her beatnik daughter, Francine. Is Francine, asΒ Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her andΒ Tomβs past? Without a doubt she is an unsettlingΒ gust of the future, upending every certainty inΒ Rustyβs life and generating a mist of passion andΒ pretense that seems to obscure everyoneβs visionΒ but his own. As Rusty struggles to decipher theΒ oddities of adult behavior and the mysteries buildΒ toward a reckoning, Ivan Doig wonderfully capturesΒ how the world becomes bigger and the past becomes more complex in the last moments of childhood.
