Chapter 1

The Crawlback Inn wasn’t the snazziest place in Jerkwater Montana, that would have been The Gold Bar & Yellow Room which was not only located more conveniently across from the railroad station but also offered individual paper doilies for every place-setting and had a reputation for having silverware that was clean enough to pass.
Nonetheless, Rudolph Crawlback (Rude, as he had reason to be called) loved to tell the story of how, when he was twelve, he had worked under the July sun with his father, Larry, and Larry’s half-brother Old Uncle Jubilation Crawlback, to salvage the old trading post that had been abandoned in 1867 when the Jerk River had decided to move itself three quarters of a mile southwest, leaving itself open to being renamed the Cloudy Jerk River and causing great consternation to the small community of twenty-three who had settled near its old banks.

In the summer of 1933, when it had been six months since the end of Prohibition, Larry and Jube reckoned that the crumbling structure was in the perfect location for getting dunk; close enough for anyone living in town to walk home and far enough removed so that the option of sleeping it off in a car wouldn’t raise the attention of local law enforcement.

Old Uncle Jube donated some tintypes from the good old days. That had served as his one-and-only rent payment on the shed at the side of the bar where he spent the remaining forty-seven years of his life.

Rude Crawlback had grown up amid the swilling beer and peanut shells, it had been rough in the beginning; for the first ten years or so the bar itself had been an upturned water trough connected end-to-end with a pig-feeder that was also in an unnatural position. Obviously, the dark end of the bar smelled worse than the front, and it wasn’t until Rude Crawlback himself took over as manager and installed his large cast-iron skillet behind the bar to serve as a weapon, that he was able to establish a policy prohibiting the saving of seats. Only then could under-laying hostility leave the premises. Still, even after he had ordered a hardwood bar, sanded and everything, the skillet remained hanging at shoulder level between the wall of pictures at the end of the bar and the red banner with the white capital M (some claimed it was to remind them that they weren’t in Nebraska) to maintain the memory of rougher times and younger days.