Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A • FA L L 2 0 1 6 44 Nothing embodies our delight in Doig's prose more than the way people talk, each in their own style. In fact, in e Bartender's Tale a language researcher, named Delano to honor Franklin Delano Roos- evelt, with a radio lab arrives, wanting to record everything about the bar and Tom. Rusty has to interpret these snatches of dialogue for him. "at honyocker (backwards farmer) was supposed to help out on this fencing deal, but he called up sick. Allergic to postholes, I imagine. So I guess I got to go at it bald-headed." "Didn't you hear? She left him, for some scissorbill (cocky type) at their high school reunion." "Poached deer." "Toasting to faith in the future." "I'm calling it a night. I got to go out in the morning and do the round dance." (plow a field round and round) "Tom, when you get a chance, how about a couple more glasses of vitamin B for us down at this end." Tom is secretive about his past and jaunts to Canada but has the most interesting things to say. "Don't put beans up your nose" — a warn- ing to Rusty "Hey, close your mouth unless you want to catch flies." "Don't stretch the facts to fit the situation." "Get it out of your system. Get that out of your head. Your head is too busy." To Tom, Rusty's "mind goes like an eggbeater." "Don't come unglued…do mankind a service." "You better take it a little bit easy" (to a rowdy customer) "Don't be a plague of locusts" "Live dangerously" "at's not such a sharp idea." "No crap/ no bee ess" "at ess of a b" "Décor" – pronounced dee-cor "Cripes. Ye gods. Blaze" "Just don't push it. What's the story?" "Forget it, kid." "Run that by me again?" "Don't wrinkle your brain about it." "Don't get in an uproar. Don't get hydrophobia. Don't get in a fluster." "How about some crushed orangutan (orange crush)?" "You aren't just woofing." "Don't be a hammerhead. Don't be a dumb cough." (dummkopf ) "A taxi dancer," Tom explains to the naïve Rusty means renting someone to dance with you. A divorce is "splitting the blanket" e story involves a trip to Fort Peck because Delano persuades Tom to go to a reunion of the folks who built the dam and frequented a 24/7 bar called the Blue Eagle that Tom owned then. Del and Rusty ask him how the dam was made and what "mudjacks" were. Tom says, "Say you wanted to take one of those buttes" — he was squinting in the distance toward the only landmarks anywhere around, the Sweetgrass Hills, rising like three Treasure Islands on the horizon — "and use it to dam up the Missouri River. What's the slickest way to move that much fill?" "Uhm, lots and lots of trucks?" Wrong his expression told me, not even close. "You'd be trucking for a hundred years. Naw, what you want to do is add water," he said, as though mixing up the simplest drink. "Dredge up the soil, turn it into mud, a kind of slurry anyhow, and then pipe the stuff to where you want it. Dump enough of it and guess what, you've got a dam." And a little later, Doig explains even more about the dam via Tom. "ose things [pieces of machinery] took a real bite out of the riverbank at a time. A whole hillside would be gone before you could give it a second look, and you'd wonder where the hell it went to. en way down at the end of the pipeline" — he flourished his cigarette toward the horizon until the ash was about to drop — you'd see this brown geyser shooting out, and mudjack crews all over the dam like an anthill that had been stirred up. (He paused). It was quite the sight." Was this great or what? (Rusty thinks.) It sure is and that's the way Ivan Doig gave us Montana and its people in his books. Listen to Ivan Doig talk about libraries www.distinctlymontana.com/doig164 DISTINCTLY MONTANA | DIGITAL Even in copyedits, Doig protects his lingo.

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