Wenzel Gerdts was telling this story to my dad the following Saturday afternoon. I was there too with my dad, standing on Main Street in front of Wandorf’s Hardware Store while my mother went across the street to shop for a hat. There were other groups of men standing all along the four blocks of stores on either side of the street. The men stood with one foot cocked up behind them against the brick storefronts or sat on the fenders of the cars parked at the curb, all of them talking in groups of three or four about the weather and corn and Roosevelt and war. Their wives were inside the stores, buying bits of elastic and brown cloth and a week’s worth of groceries. They were talking too, of course, above the canned beans and the macaroni, beside the yard goods and the cash register, while here and there a little girl tugged at a skirt and a little boy peeked out like a shy country rabbit. The women went on talking in the stores and they were not in any hurry, because they were in town now and it was a Saturday afternoon in Holt in 1940.
But my dad and I were outside on the sidewalk listening to Wenzel Gerdts talk about Lyman Goodnough. Wenzel was a tall, stringy farmer dressed for the trip to town in clean overalls and he had a fresh cheekful of Red Man chewing tobacco at work in his jaw. As a kid of twelve I was almost as fascinated with the way Wenzel worked tobacco as I was with what he was saying about Lyman. It was an art the way Wenzel could shoot that long brown spurt of his from where he stood leaning up against Wandorf’s storefront, shoot it clean too, over across the sidewalk down tidy into the gutter, and shoot it every time into the same brown puddle, like he was not just showing off (like if I was doing it, like even if I could do it) but was actually trying to be kind to the folks who might have reason to step there. He would chew awhile and talk and then quick, shoot a neat brown spurt into the gutter, and afterwards lick a drop off his bottom lip, and then go on talking and chewing and not miss a beat.
And Wenzel was saying, “Why sure, the poor dumb geezer looked scared and interested at the same time. And don’t you know I felt kind of sorry for him? Here’s Lyman Goodnough that’s been out there on that farm all them years with the hot sweat running down into his pants, and now he’s somehow turned up inside the Holt Tavern on a Saturday night and he don’t know what to do with hisself.”
So Wenzel said he waved Lyman over to the booth where he was sitting with Harry Barnes and a couple of other men, playing poker and drinking tap beer from a pitcher. They poured Lyman a beer and he tasted it, but he apparently didn’t like the taste of it much, because he set the glass down and looked around at the faces watching him as if he was a kid at school and they were waiting to see whether he could detect the dog manure they had put in his buttermilk.
“He probably hadn’t never tasted beer before,” my dad said.
“Most likely,” Wenzel said. “It ain’t like drinking orange soda pop.”
But Lyman drank his glass of beer finally, without tasting it any more than necessary, just throwing it down quick like he was taking cod liver oil or prune juice. Wenzel Gerdts poured him another glassful, and Lyman drank it the same way, with both hands on the glass.
“But he ain’t no kid,” Wenzel said. “And I ain’t no nursemaid, neither.”
So Wenzel poured him one more. He threw that one down too, with his Adam’s apple snapping hard above the yellow tie. So by this time Lyman had drunk three of their beers, and about all the profit they had to show for it was that Lyman’s eyes had begun to look like they were glass marbles.
But glass marbles must have been enough for Harry Barnes, a bald-headed man of fifty-some and the best poker player in Holt County. Harry studied Lyman’s eyes for a minute, and then said, “Boys, I believe Lyman’s ready. Deal him in.”
“But he didn’t know how to play poker, did he?” my dad said.
“No,” Wenzel said. “I had to show him.”
“Then he got a good taste of that too,” my dad said. “How much money did you and Harry Barnes take off him?”
“Now wait a minute,” Wenzel said. He shot that quick neat spurt of his over into the gutter and licked the drop off. “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “Sure we was playing for money—a nickel ante with a dime bump—because Harry Barnes ain’t going to play for matchsticks, is he?”
“Not unless they’re gold matchsticks,” my dad said.
“Sure,” Wenzel said. “But it wasn’t like you think it was. I tried to explain it to him—what a ace is and about pairs and full houses and straight flushes. But goddamn it, he just don’t get it.”