by Ivan Doig
Yes, no, and maybe fought over that in me. There it was, imagination more or less come true, Letty embossed into our patchy family as niftily as the name on her blouse. And even better yet, maybe Harv, too, except he was a wanted man there in the jurisdiction of that snotty little sheriff. By and large, Gram’s report was the jackpot of my wishes, but also a king hell dilemma. The best I could manage into the receiver was, “That’s—that’s really some news.”
“You sound like the air has been knocked out of you,” Gram said, perfectly pleased. “I can’t wait to see you again—you’ll have so much to tell me about your adventures back east there, won’t you.” Not if I could help it. “Donny? I think it’d be only fair if I let your Aunt Kate know how peachy the summer is working out, thanks to you being there with her and Dutch, don’t you? Call her to the phone, pretty please.”
“She’s, uh, taking a bath,” panic spoke for me. “She does that every night before bed. Boy, is she ever clean.”
“I guess you’ll have to tell her for me,” Gram resumed. “Anyway, when the doctor turns me loose for good any day now and Letty helps me get established in that apartment and you can come home whenever you want, I’d like the great Kate to know how much your stay there has meant.”
“Oh yeah, she’ll know.”
• • •
I PAID the merc clerk for the phone call and traipsed the darkened street of Wisdom back to the Watering Hole, weighed down with feelings that did not match up. Unspeakably relieved and glad though I was that Gram was herself again, nonetheless that emotion was shot through with remorse, already halfway to longing, for all I would be abandoning at the Diamond Buckle ranch and the Big Hole. The honest-to-goodness genuine job as haystack teamster. The bunkhouse hoboes who, in their coarse generous way, had taken me into the Johnson family right there on the last bus to Wisdom and ever since. The prestige of being a ranch hand for Rags Rasmussen, a source of pride I knew I would carry with me all my life.
Against those hard-won rewards, I now was free almost any time to go and be with Gram and Letty as well, a dream ready to come true. But only if I paid up with either deceit or confession about my time on the loose. Did I dare to simply show up in Glasgow, shiny as the silver greyhound forever fleet on the side of the bus, and start spinning extravagant tales about how terrific my summer in Manitowoc had been? That felt treacherous. The truth had a nasty habit of coming out. At least sometimes.
Before any of that, however, dead ahead through the swinging doors of Wisdom’s sole saloon was the matter of Herman. It was only fair to let him know I’d have to leave him sooner than later, wasn’t it? Hadn’t he brought it up himself, back there in the bunkhouse? So why was part of me wrestling so hard against telling him, at least yet?
• • •
THE ATMOSPHERE in the Watering Hole had turned very beery in my absence, the crew doing its best to drink the place dry in record time. Babs was behind in clearing away empty glasses as she filled fresh ones and scooted them along the bar to the hobo lineup laughing uproariously at some limerick Shakespeare had just composed. I was surprised to see two empties in front of Herman already, plus the one becoming that way in a hurry as he drank with lip-smacking gusto. Elbow to elbow with him there at the quieter end of the bar, Pooch was working on his latest golden schoonerful in his dim, deliberate way.
“Scotty!” Herman let out, as if we hadn’t seen each other for ages. “Welcome back to Watering Hole, such a place. How is the Grossmutter?”
“Up and around,” I hedged.
“Good, good. What a woman she is. Time for Crushed Orange, hah, to celebrate her recupery.”
At his arm-waving signal, Babs worked her way along the bar to us and produced a bottle of Orange Crush for me, along with the announcement:
“Make way, boys, you got company. Here comes the Tumbling T crew.”
Just as rowdy and ready for moonhowling as our bunch, the newcomers swarmed in and established themselves along the other end of the bar, brandishing their paychecks. There was no mistaking who was the Big Ole of this contingent of hoboes turned haymakers. The Tumbling T’s leader was nearly Highpockets’s height, but could not have been built more differently, with what’s called a cracker butt, nothing back there as if that share of the anatomy had gone onto the front in his hanging belly. He turned out to be a boxcar acquaintance of the Jersey Mosquito, who called out to the Tumbling T’s main man, “Deacon! You old sidewinder, c’mon over here and pretend you’re social.”
“Still pestering the world same as ever, are you, Skeeter.” Deacon barked a laugh as he joined him. Quick as anything, he spotted the Diamond Buckle hatband on Skeeter’s battered headgear. “But what’s this?” His laugh became nastier. “You let the rancher slap his brand on you these days? What’s next, holding hands and sing-alongs on the old rancheria?”
Overhearing, Highpockets said with cold control, “Rasmussen just likes to show off that world championship he won the hard way. I’d say he’s entitled.”
“If it don’t bother you to have the boss’s loop around your brain,” Deacon responded with a slick smile, “it’s no nevermind to me. Where’s your hospitality, Skeeter, I could use a drink.”
While that touchy reunion of sorts was going on, I sipped at my pop, pretty much matching Herman’s and Pooch’s downings of beer, while conscience worked me over from one direction and then another. I felt I couldn’t hold Gram’s news to myself, even though I hated to let it out, either. But driven to it at a more or less decisive moment, I mustered myself as much as I was able. “Herm—I mean, Gramps—I need to talk to you about something.”
“Has to wait, please,” he said, somewhere in another world as he hoisted his glass for an appreciative sip. “Pooch and me, we got big thoughts to think. Don’t we, podner.”
“Damn straight,” Pooch said mechanically.
“Yeah, but I really need to tell you—”
“Saturday night is to howl,” Herman formulated as if it had come from Longfellow. “And lucky us, here we are, south of the moon, hah?”
He shut me down with such a fond grin—for me, for the decorated saloon so much like the Schooner, for the company of our hobo pals—that I did not have the heart to tear him away. There are times when mercy cancels anything else.
• • •
AS HE AND POOCH lapsed back into their mute pleasure of imbibing, I tried to clear my head by seeing what else Saturday night in the Watering Hole had to offer, and it was then that I began to catch the drift of the Jersey Mosquito’s earnest jawboning of the Tumbling T boss hobo.
“Haven’t seen you since we was in that boxcar on the Ma and Pa”—the Maryland and Pennsylvania Railroad in hobo nomenclature—“and that Baltimore yard bull came callin’ with a billy club in one hand and handcuffs in the other. I swear, Deac, never saw a man bail out the other side of a boxcar as fast as you. Left me to deal with that railroad dick by my lonesome, you sonofagun.”
“Survival of the fastest,” Deacon stated his philosophy smugly. The two of them batted boasts and put-downs back and forth like that until Skeeter sprung the trap I realized he had been baiting all along.
“I’m telling ye, Deacon, I know you think you’re a helluva drinkin’ man. But we got a fella who puts you to shame when it comes to lickin’ a glass. Our man here can take the least leetle sip of anythin’ captured in a bottle and tell you just exactly what it is.”
“Skeets, you’re so full of it your eyes are turning brown,” Deacon dismissed that boast with a laugh.
“By the grace of whatever ain’t unholy, I swear it’s true, Deac,” Skeeter persisted. “Seen him do it with my own two eyes.” Sensing a chance to hold forth, Peerless had moved in and backed that with “I’m a witness to that my own self. Damnedest stunt since Jesus turned ditchwater into muscatel.”
His interest piqued now in spite of himself, the Tumbling T haymaker peered
along the bar at our crew carrying on in Saturday night fashion. “Where’s this miracle of nature you’re bragging up?”
“Sittin’ right there, answerin’ to the name of One Eye.” Skeeter pointed a skeletal finger toward Herman.
Deacon followed that up with a dubious look, then the even more skeptical inquiry to Herman. “So you’re this hipper-dipper sipper who can identify every beer this side of horse piss, huh?”
Herman drew himself up with pride. “Is true.”
“Tell ye what we’re gonna do, Deac,” Skeeter followed right on the heels of that, “if you got any guts left in that stewpot belly of yours. We’ll bet that our fella here can have a swig of any of these”—the sweep of his arm indicated the line of beer spigots half the length of the bar—“let’s say, oh, half a dozen just to make it sporting, and tell you like that”—a snap of his fingers like a starter’s gun going off—“whatevery by God one is, without him knowing aforehand.”
Deacon took another look at Herman, who gave him back a vague horsy grin and drained his glass as if in challenge, and it all of a sudden occurred to me just how many glasses he’d emptied. “Hey, though, he’s already had—” I tried to warn Skeeter, but Deacon overrode me with the shrewd conclusion, “Beer gets to be plain old beer the more you drink of it. What do you think, boys? Shall we call this windjammer’s bluff?”
That brought cries of “Hell, yeah!” and “I’m in!” from the Tumbling T crew.
“This suit you okay?” Highpockets shouldered in to make sure with Herman.
“Ja, betsa bootsies,” said Herman with a wink at me, which I found alarmingly woozy. “Suits me to a T Tumbler!” he ambitiously tried a joke.
“Babs, set him up six of the Montana brews, shot glasses only,” Deacon directed. “We don’t want him swilling the stuff long enough to get familiar with it. The Muskeeter here claims he only needs a first swig anyway.”
“STOP WITH EVERYTHING!”
Herman had resoundingly slapped a hand on the bar in a manner that indeed did slam the proceedings to a halt. Gesturing in rather grand fashion at the long line of beer spigots as everyone watched wide-eyed, he elucidated, “Not all of these wild woolly brewings am I acquainted with. Samples first, please, bar maiden.”
Immediately Deacon was suspiciously accusing Skeeter and Highpockets of trying to pull a fast one by having our man wet his whistle too familiarly before the real taste test, while they hotly argued back that the man was new to Montana and it was essential to the bet for him to learn Babs’s stock first so he’d have comparisons to go on. I could not deny the logic—even Pooch delivered “Damn straight” in recognition of it—but was leery of how much more beer Herman was taking aboard before the drinks that counted. I did not even know enough then to have the bigger worry, that in the era when almost every Montana city had its own brewery, the brewers almost to a man were of German origin, leading to a certain sameness of product. It had been nearly thirty years since Herman was testing steins of beer in Munich; did his sense of taste have that much memory of the Germanic tricks of the trade, such as they were?
We were about to find out, because Deacon and his side grudgingly gave in, and Babs, smiling to herself at all the fresh commerce, set up half a dozen shot glasses. As she named off each beer, I as our chosen representative in this—Highpockets was firm that Herman savvied me better than anyone else and we wanted no monkey business in making the individual beers known to him—wrote each on a cash register slip and put it facedown under the respective brew. Highlander, out of Missoula. Kessler from Helena. Great Falls Select. The beer from Butte, baldly named Butte Beer. Billings Yellowstone Brew. Anaconda Avalanche Ale.
Unsteady but unconcerned, Herman winked at me with his glass eye, wrapped a hand around the first shot glass, unleashed the toast “The Devil’s eyedrops cure sorrow!” and lifted the Great Fall Select to his lips.
Eyes half-shut in concentration as I called out the name of each one, he sipped his way through the preliminary beers. When he was done and jovially declared that Montana beer at least was better than the product of any horse, as quick as the laughter died down Skeeter flapped some money under Deacon’s nose and flopped it down on the bar as the start of the pot. “Now, about them bets, if ye haven’t lost your nerve.”
• • •
EXPERIENCE SOMETIMES lives up to its reputation as a teacher. From my time of hanging around the Double W bunkhouse and its card sharks, I was keeping an eye on Midnight Frankie. When he stayed perfectly poker-faced but flipped a nice fresh twenty-dollar bill into the pot—a lot of money, on our wages—saying, “Let’s get some skin in the game,” I tremblingly stroked the arrowhead pouch for luck and dug out twenty dollars from the front of my pants and secured the same from Herman’s change lying on the bar without him noticing. Nor was I the only one following Midnight Frankie’s lead. Highpockets thumbed out the sum with the declaration “I’m in for a double sawbuck, too,” and Harv, thinking it over for a moment, silently did the same, followed in quick succession by Peerless, Shakespeare, Fingy, and Pooch.
“There’s our chunk of the jackpot, Deacon,” Skeeter crowed in challenge. “Decorate the mahogany or say uncle.”
Faced with our crew’s total backing of Herman, the Tumbling T outfit looked uneasily at one another, but when Deacon demanded, “C’mon, don’t let this gang of broken-down blanket stiffs buffalo us,” they all matched our bets. Just like that, nearly three hundred dollars lay in a green pile on the bar.
“All right, One Eye, hoist ’em and name ’em off,” Skeeter led the roof-raising chorus of encouragement from our side. But before Babs could move to the taps to repeat the beers, Deacon stopped her and everything else with a shrill two-fingered whistle, evidently a hobo signal for something like stop, look, and listen.
In the immediate silence, the Tumbling T chieftain swelled up with the full attention he had drawn and sprang his demand. “Nothing against PeeWee here”—that again! I could have been put on trial for the murderous look I gave him—“but I want to handle them shot glasses and slips of paper myself, starting behind there at the taps. Just so there’s no wrong impression of anything funny taking place along the way. You mind, Babs?”
The bartender backed away to lean against her cash register. “Since whichever bunch of you wins that jackpot is going to pay full price for shot glasses of beer, you can keep on all night for all I care.”
Highpockets checked with Herman, who replied that as far as he was concerned, any fool who wanted to could pour the beer. Establishing himself at the taps, Deacon made a big deal of drawing the six small glasses of beer, as I hung over the bar watching to make sure he assigned the right slip of paper to each one. Then he arranged the setup on the bar, five glasses in a row in front of Herman with one held back, the hole card, so to speak, so Herman could not figure out the final sample by process of elimination. “We’ll let him off with five out of six, if I have the option of switching this one in”—Deacon peeked secretively at the slip under it—“so he don’t pull some memorization trick on us. Fair enough?”
Skeeter and Highpockets mulled over the proposition but could see nothing wrong with it, while Herman pitty-patted the bar impatiently to start the tasting. It was agreed that as Herman named off the brand of beer, I would read out its slip of paper to verify he had it right, or heaven and earth forbid, he didn’t. With a flourish, Deacon mixed around the shot glasses, along with their accompanying slips, to his contentment and the great drink contest got underway.
Reciting “Ready on right, ready on left, ready on firing line!” in soldierly fashion, Herman reached for the first slug of beer, swilled it briefly before swallowing, and declared, “Bee-yoot!” which I verified as the Butte brew. “Attaway, One Eye!” and “Show ’em what the Diamond Buckle stands for!” came the shouts of encouragement from our crew, while the Tumbling T outfit groaned in disbelief.
So it went, down
the line, each beer identified correctly at the first sip, until there stood the last two shot glasses, the one Deacon was holding back and the other resting in front of Herman.
Grinning tipsily but still in command of himself, he threw the challenge to Deacon. “Which one is to tickle my tonsils?”
“You’re lucky so far,” Deacon said sourly, “but let’s see if that luck ain’t due to run out about now.” So saying, he switched the hole-card shot glass in for the other one.
This beer I couldn’t even guess at. A darker, foamy brew than the others, it had to be either Yellowstone Brew or Avalanche Ale, but with everything riding on Herman’s final feat of swilling a mouthful and identifying it, fifty-fifty odds all of a sudden didn’t seem anything like a cinch. But quite nonchalantly, he raised the shot glass, said, “Bottoms upside,” and in one motion swigged the mystery beer.
To my alarm, he chugged it too much, more of it going down him than the other beers had. Not for long, because what was left in his mouth he spewed onto the bar, his face contorted. Gagging and trying to speak, he was making a k-k-k sound like a car trying to start on a cold morning, as our crew watched in horror, me most of all. Whatever was wrong with him was calamity enough, but I could also see a major portion of our wages about to vanish in front of our eyes.
“Told you,” Deacon crowed as he moved along the bar toward the pot. “Wore out his gullet after so many beers. Let’s have that money and we’ll even buy you a consolation round, Pockets.” He couldn’t hide his smirk.
“Herman, what is it?” I quavered as he kept trying to work his throat. “What’s wrong?” Not knowing what else to do, I slammed him across the top of his back with my open hand as hard as I could.
The blow must have loosened up something somehow. “C-c-c-cough drop,” he spluttered, pointing shakily at the offending shot glass.
“Deacon, you cheating bastard.” Highpockets caught on to the dodge ahead of the rest of us, but not by much. “Grab him.” Harv already had accomplished that, locking the protesting Deacon to his chest from behind as casually as gathering an armful of hay. “Frisk him good,” Highpockets ordered, with Midnight Frankie and Shakespeare quick on the job.
