At least I had no trouble figuring this out, although I had a pang at forsaking Red Chief.
“I’m Snag.” My jack-o’-lantern smile showed off the jagged reason. “And him here,” I indicated Herman, “is One Eye,” no explanation needed there, either.
“Good enough for me.” Highpockets credited us both and flashed that OK sign again. “Welcome to the Johnson family,” he left us with, and worked his way seatback by seatback up front to where he sat, the aisle a lot like the deck of a rolling ship as the bus galloped along on the unpaved road.
To my relief and no doubt Herman’s, the other hoboes took his lead, everyone settling in for the ride, which may have looked short on the map but wound along the twisty river, which would head one direction and then another, with timbered mountains hemming it in so close it was hard to see the sky. I began to wonder about this route that hardly seemed to rate being marked in red on a map. Why were there no towns? Or ranches? A forest ranger station, even. Out there in back-road nowhere, I grew more jittery as every riverbend curve threatened the Greyhound’s groaning springs and Hoppy’s straining grapple with the steering wheel, the water always right down there waiting for a bus to capsize upside down.
Soon enough, I had something else to worry about. When a swerve around a pothole the size of a washtub swayed Herman halfway into my seat, he glanced around to make sure no one was watching, then took me by the ear again, this time with a harder pinch. His whisper was all that much sharper, too. “Why am I Grossvater all the sudden?”
Uh oh. I didn’t have to understand German to know he was put out about being designated grandfather.
“It’s to cover our tracks,” I sped into rapid-fire explanation as low as I could whisper. “See, this way, if anybody ever picks up our trail and starts nosing around, you’re not on the spot for being my great-uncle, like they’re looking for, you’re just my grandpa in the natural order of things.” Herman’s deep frown did not move a muscle. Casting around for anything that might thaw him, I invoked the Apache method or what I hoped might be. “I bet Winnetou did this all the time, scrubbing out his trail with a batch of sagebrush or something, so his enemy couldn’t run him down. That’s all we’re doing, you being the grossfather is just our, uh, scrub brush, sort of.”
Herman did not buy my interpretation entirely, his grip on my ear not letting up. “Your eye-dea, this Wisdom bus is.” He cast a dubious look around at our fellow passengers. “Now look who we are with, one step from bums.”
“Two,” I said, wincing from his hold on me. “Tramps are in between, remember.”
He still didn’t relent. “What is this Johnsons family?”
I took a guess. “Maybe it means all the hoboes, sort of like a tribe?” This time I harked back to Crow Fair. “Like the Indians we saw in the camp there, but without tepees or braids or moccasins—”
“No fancy-dancing, I betcha, either,” he said, pretty sarcastic for him.
“Herman, listen,” I persevered, ear pinch or no ear pinch, “like it or not, we have to stick with these guys. Think about it, okay?” I managed to flash the hobo sign for that. “You can tell by looking they aren’t ever going to turn you in, are they. They’ve got their own reasons to avoid the cops.”
Wrinkled in concentration, Herman followed my logic around all the corners he could, finally shaking his head. “If you say so, Donny. I don’t got a better eye-dea.” He pressed against his seatback as if bracing himself. “Let’s go be hoboes, Gramps will live and learn.”
? ? ?
NO SOONER had our whispered conversation ended than a shout from down the aisle roused the Jersey Mosquito, sitting across from us. “Hey, Skeeter, you old skinflint, pass the bugle,” the Johnson family member known as Peerless Peterson, if I remembered the roll call right, piped up, spitting a tobacco plug onto the floor, evidently to clear his mouth.
Not for the purpose it sounded like, though. “I’m the man what can, ye damn moocher,” Skeeter yipped back, but instead of a musical instrument he fumbled out from somewhere something long and slim wrapped in a paper bag. Seeing me onlooking in confusion, Skeeter paused to explain, “Hoppy ain’t supposed to see any bottles on the bus. This way, he don’t. Right, Hop?”
“You have got the only Greyhound driver with blinders on,” Hoppy agreed to that, perilously close to the truth according to the way he hunched over the wheel to peer fixedly through the windshield as the bus shimmied on the washboard road.
Skeeter, proper host, was screwing the top off the hidden bottle when he noticed Herman craning over in curiosity along with me. “Hey there, One Eye, you want a swig? This is giggle juice you don’t get just any old where, it’s—”