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DISAPPOINTED BUT EXPRESSING my sympathy, I moved on from what would have been that terrific name on the page to someone I figured would have no such trouble wielding a pen, the plain-looking hobo called Shakespeare. By appearance, he might have been anything from a bank teller to an actual whey-faced minister but for his hat stained dark from sweat and the faded gray Texas tux work shirt. Accepting the album as if by natural right, he scanned the verse Highpockets had written and sniffed, “Pockets sticks to the tried and true.” Not him, according to the way he waved the pen over the waiting page while he thought, his lips moving, straining his brain from the looks of it. Then when he had the rhyme or rhythm or something, he wrote lines like a man possessed.
The king called for his fiddlers three.
He bade them, “Play for me your fiddle-diddle-dee.”
The fiddlers cried, “Oh no, sire, not we!”
The queen giggled and said, “They only fiddle that with me.”
—an original rime by Shakespeare
Sort of dirty though that seemed to me, I minded my manners and thanked its author—you don’t get the name Shakespeare in an autograph book just any old day—and let the sway of the bus carry me to the next candidate along the row, Overland Pete. Seeing me coming with the Kwik-Klik and the open album, he shook a hand as pitiful looking as Bughouse Louie’s. “I’ll pass. Arthritis is acting up something fierce.”
Huh. I had never heard of an epidemic of that, but it seemed to be hitting half the people on the bus. Before I could choose my next candidate, I heard an urgent “Psst.” The Jersey Mosquito several seats back crooked a finger at me.
When I went and knelt by him, he brought his face of crinkles and wrinkles down almost to mine to confide, “Ye want to be a leetle keerful with that book of yours, Snag. The learnin’ of some of the boys didn’t happen to have readin’ and writin’ in it.”
“I’m sorry.” My face flamed. “I should have thought of that. B-but I really want to get anybody I can.”
“Then all’s you need to do is wait till payday and keep an eye out then,” the man known as Skeeter counseled. “Them that takes their wages in hard money prob’ly can’t write their names to endorse a check. The rest of us is regular scholars enough to cash our skookum paper right there in the Watering Hole, that’s the bar in town. More eefficient that way.”
I thanked him for that vital lesson and scooted back to my seat. Goddamn-it-to-hell-anyway, I hunched there stewing to myself, was there no limit to what I had to learn by hand, this summer like no other? Feeling sorry for myself and the autograph book, I was fanning through the empty pages that would never know Overland Pete and Bughouse Louie and maybe too many others to make the pursuit worthwhile, when Herman came to the rescue.
“Donny, nothing to worry. Other people will write in your book up to the full, I betcha.” I hadn’t even known he was awake—it was twice as hard to tell, after all, with only one eye to judge by—but now, same as ever, he took in the passing landscape as if the West still was the Promised Land, rough road to get there or not. “Tell you what,” he eased my disappointment, whispering low to not attract further attention from the hoboes in their rounds of bottle and gab, “I will say to you by heart an old German verse and we will make it into English, or something like.” That sounded like it was worth a try, and I perked up as he and I went back and forth over how words looked and what they meant, until we were both satisfied.
When you take a look in your memory book
Here you will find the lasting kind,
Old rhymes and new, life in review,
Roses in the snow of long ago.
“Wow, that’s pretty nice,” I said when the final version stood out on the album page in Herman’s scrawly handwriting, “although I’m not sure if I get it all.”
“Nothing to worry, you will someday.” He stretched from the exertions of this day, but grinning as he did so. “Last bus is gitting somewheres at last. See, looking more like Promised Land.” He drew my attention to a broad gap ahead that the river and the road both relaxed into, so to speak, the landscape turning into the best ranching country I had ever seen. In life along the Rocky Mountain Front, I was used to unbroken cliffs and crags always towering to the clouds in the west, but here the mountains circled the entire skyline, an unforgettable surround of peaks painted beautiful with streaks of snow and the blue of distance. My heart dancing, I gazed around and around at the ring of natural wonders, always coming back to the long valley of ranches and their patterns on the land, where the first hayfields lay tawny in the sun.
23.