num_pages: 387
description: From a great American storyteller a one-of-a-kind father and his precocious son rocked by a time of change. Tom Harry has a streak of frost in his black pompadour and a venerable bar called The Medicine Lodge the chief watering hole and last refuge of the town of Gros Ventre in northern Montana. Tom also has a son named Rusty an accident between the sheets whose mother deserted them both years ago.The pair make an odd kind of family with the bar their true home but they manage just fine. Until the summer of 1960 that is when Rusty turns twelve. Change arrives with gale force in the person of Proxy a taxi dancer Tom knew back when and her beatnik daughter Francine. Is Francine as Proxy claims the unsuspected legacy of her and Toms past? Without a doubt she is an unsettling gust of the future upending every certainty in Rustys life and generating a mist of passion and pretense that seems to obscure everyones vision but his own. As Rusty struggles to decipher the oddities of adult behavior and the mysteries build toward a reckoning Ivan Doig wonderfully captures how the world becomes bigger and the past becomes more complex in the last moments of childhood.
language: English
title: The Bartender's Tale
publisher: Riverhead Books