“Wait, don’t tell him,” I jumped in barely in time. “He’ll tell you.”
Herman received the sacked bottle from the surprised Skeeter, nodded his thanks, tipped it up like sounding the bugle charge, and chugged enough of a drink to swirl in his mouth good and plenty. He swallowed as if the contents were tough going down, but when he got his voice, he announced without a shade of a doubt:
“Fruit wine, plenty fermented. Wild Irish Rose, I betcha.”
“Damned if he ain’t right,” Skeeter said, pop-eyed with awe. “How’d ye do that? Boys, we got a miracle worker here. At the hooch store I asked for Rosie in a skirt”—he displayed the bagged bottle Herman had without hesitation handed back to him—“I was gonna have some fun with you fellas whose tongues has been worked to leather by too much Thunderbird. But One Eye nailed it first taste. Beat that!”
Highpockets, who didn’t seem to miss anything, shifted in his seat and pinned a penetrating look on me. “What’s more, his English improves around a bottle, eh? Usually that operates the other way.”
“Yeah, well”—I didn’t have time to think up any other explanation for Herman’s tasting talent as displayed in the Schooner and now in these circumstances, so a sample of the actual story had to serve—“in the old country he worked in one of those places where they make beer, see, and that was part of his job, guzzling all the other beers to see how those stacked up against theirs. It tuned up his taster, you might say.”
“That’s the job I want in the next life,” Fingy was heard from, clasping his hand and a half in prayer.
? ? ?
GENERAL ACCLAMATION FOLLOWED that, along with the bottle passing to ready volunteers turning bugler until it ran dry. I sat back to collect myself, the already more than full day, which was winding to somewhere along a tightrope-wide back road pressing in on me, filling me with that feeling of being transported in more ways than one. This back-road trip was not the longest of my life, yet was taking me farther than I had ever dreamed. Letty’s inscription in the autograph book promised Life is a zigzag journey, and as she said, truer words were never. By now Manitowoc, the Crow rodeo grounds, the marooned time at Old Faithful, scary Butte, each and every one was in the memory book in my head as well as the one in my pocket, while an unforeseen chapter waited ahead. On the one hand, what was happening now tingled in me as a kind of off-kilter excitement, similar to that dreamy daze between sleep and waking in the morning, when what is real and what the mind has manufactured in the night are not clearly divided. At this point, Gram would have told me not to get red in the head and over-imagine things, but this last bus carrying Herman and me and our rough-and-ready gang of new companions inevitably made my mind fly around. Here we were, on a journey my imagination couldn’t resist playing with, like being on a stagecoach—if the dog bus didn’t qualify sufficiently as the modern version, the Rocky Mountain Stage Line and Postal Courier surely did—packed with the equivalent of owl hoots, the roamers and ramblers, taking new names for themselves as they pleased, out to experience everything of the West.
? ? ?
MY REVERIE was broken when Peerless Peterson, whose nickname became self-evident as he stuffed a chaw in his cheek from a packet of Peerless tobacco, leaned toward me and asked confidentially:
“Hey there, Snag, what was it that happened to your grampop’s peeper?”
“Knife fight.”
That impressed all those listening in as much as I’d hoped. Herman, as surprised as anyone, thought fast and joined the spirit of things. He took me by the ear one more time but only to tug me close so he could go on at whispered length. I almost could not believe what he was coming up with. It was perfect! Herman at his absolute little-think best beat Karl May by a mile, and when he was finished now, I gave my brightest snaggy smile and reported:
“Gramps says to tell you our last name is Schneider, not that it counts for anything in the here and now, we savvy. But he wants you to know Schneider means tailor in the old country, so all he did was cut the other guy some new buttonholes. In his hide.”