“—alley cats at table scraps. Not at first,” he tempered that, his look at me a plea for understanding. “But you think about it, the Kate was used to Fritz away most of time, on boat. I was not away, ever, and it got on nerves. Me on hers, her on mine, fair to say.” He spread his hands, as if balancing choices. “Not good way to live together, but both too stubborn to give in to situation. Until—”
He did not have to say the rest. Until I showed up, a stranger off the dog bus, bringing with me old baggage in more ways than one for Gram’s sister and a jolt of imagination for the man going through life not being Dutch, not being an actual husband, not really grounded in much of anything but dreams of adventure in the Promised Land, out west.
Feeling I was to blame, while trying strenuously to deny it to myself, I started to throw a fit. “Goddamn-it-all-to-hell-anyway, why didn’t you and her get married in the first place like you were supposed to and we wouldn’t any of us be in this fix and, and—”
My tantrum dwindled as the answer caught up with me. “The alien thinger?”
“Ja,” he acknowledged wearily. “Marriage license could not be got without notcheralization paper. Not worth the risk to go and say, after all the years, here I am, how do I make myself American?” With a last blink at the WANTED poster, he creased it to put in his pocket, still speaking softly. “The Kate believed same as I did, more so, even. As much her eye-dea as mine, pretend we’re married. Worth it to have a man around, she telled me, somebody she can boss like she is used to with Fritz. Joke at the time,” he sighed, “but she meant it, you maybe noticed.”
I was listening for all I was worth, but Aunt Kate’s bossy tendency that had driven both of us batty shrank to nothing compared to picking up the phone and turning in her imitation husband to the FBI. That truth rattled through me—the clank of a jail door closing behind Herman—shaking me to the core. The hard knocks of history were not done with him yet. Or for that matter, with me. Eleven going on twelve abruptly seemed way too young to be the seasoned accomplice of a fugitive, or when you came right down to it, a criminal whom the FBI put up there with the bank robbers and murderers as some breed of desperado. But what else was I?
The one thing clear was that the face of Herman the German, enemy alien, was plastered here, there, and everywhere on bulletin boards throughout Yellowstone National Park, as public as the sun. “Now we really need to get out of here,” my voice broke, Herman chiming, “Ja, ja, ja,” as I scrambled to my suitcase and he to his duffel. That was as far ahead as either of us could think. That and the FLEET WAY map back at the bulletin board.
? ? ?
SKIRTING THE TOUR bus lines and trying not to notice the bare spot among the MOST WANTED posters, seeming to gape with guilt pointing our direction, we edged up to the Greyhound map in search of inspiration as much as destination. We needed a fortunate break in some direction, north, south, east, west, it didn’t matter. Somewhere to hole up, until people’s possible memories of a horse-faced man with a German accent waned. But where? Make a run for the coast, to Portland or Seattle or Frisco? Hide out in some Palookaville? Hightail it to Canada, on the chance that up there they wouldn’t know an enemy alien when they saw one?
Still putting his faith in Fingerspitzengefühl—not that we had much else to draw on—Herman began waggling his fingers again to encourage mine. “Ready, Donny? Find us somewheres to git to?”
“Nothing doing.” I tucked my hands in my armpits. “You choose this time. My finger-spitting got us into this.”
“Then must git us out, hah?” Herman said a little testily.
Hard to argue with that. But Fingerspitzengefühl and its outcomes unnerved me and I determinedly kept shaking my head—Nothing doing, absolutely not, you do it for a change—when a certain dot of all those on the map caught my attention. Before I quite knew what I was doing, my finger flew to it.
“Here,” I said, decisive as Napoleon or any of those, “this is what we want.”
? ? ?
STARTLED BY my abrupt choice, Herman peered at the map as if my finger were pulling the wrong kind of trick. Making sure of the small lettering beside the tiny red dot of a bus stop, he turned huffy. “Funny as a stitch, Donny. No time for piddling around, please.”
“I’m not!” My exasperation at his shortsightedness, both kinds, boiled over. “You’re the one who’s piddling!”
He retorted to that, and I retorted to his retort, and in no time we were in a slam-bang argument, the kind where tempers go at one another with all they have until someone’s hits its limit and backs off. In this case, Herman’s.