It took me a moment for that to fully penetrate, but when it did—
“You sold the suitcase? Gram will skin me alive!”
“Don’t be horrorfied,” he begged. “It was that or the moccasins. No choice did I have. Had to get bedrolls, can’t sleep bare on something like this.” He knocked a knuckle against the corrugated metal culvert, making it ring hollowly. “Take it from an old soldier who has slept on everything but bed of nails, ja?”
“I guess so,” I muttered, taking it a different thing from having to like it. “But my moccasins and the rest—what’d you do with my things?”
“In duffel.” He messed around with the bedroll a bit more without looking up. “I selled my Karl May books, too, to make room.”
So we both had sacrificed mightily, for the privilege of living like hoboes.
24.
WE REACHED THE campfire circle in time for mulligan, served in tin billies from a stash somewhere in the kip, along with spoons that no doubt were missing from many a cheap cafe. Both of us feeling starved—candy bars had been a long time ago—we dug into the stew nearly thick as gravy and featuring chunks of potato and lumps of some meat everyone knew better than to ask about. Amid the concentrated eating and mild conversing, Highpockets suddenly lifted his head, Skeeter doing the same. Clicks of someone walking on gravel could be heard, and across the campfire from where we sat, a rangy man stepped out of the night into the fireshine. He had something about him that made the circle of hoboes stir nervously.
“Got room for one more?” he drawled in a spare way I’d heard before.
I blinked, but he didn’t change. It was Harv the jailbreaker. Who was supposed to be in that stony lonesome at the far end of the state.
Highpockets responded by unfolding to his full height, hitching up his pants, and maybe even standing on this tiptoes a little, the Big Ole to the life, but he still didn’t match the height and breadth of Harv Kinnick.
But doing what he had to, he challenged: “You smell the grub and figured you’d mooch? Or you got something more permanent in mind?”
“Might have,” said the newcomer, still as a statue.
“Sort of a nightbird, aren’t you,” Highpockets spoke the guarded curiosity of the hobo contingent.
“Takes a while to get here by boxcar and thumb,” Harv mentioned.
Highpockets gazed across the leaping flames of the campfire at the taller man for some moments, sensed the unspoken vote of the group, and said, “If you’re bunking rough like the rest of us, there’s enough of the great outdoors to go around. Come on in and plant yourself. Any scrapings in that pot for him, Midnight?”
As the man who looked like Gregory Peck if you closed an eye a little strode in with that purposeful amble of a town tamer and took a seat on a community log when the resident hoboes shifted over for him, the Jersey Mosquito recited the who-be-ye. The newcomer considered the question with that distant look of a soldier or, as Herman’s nudge and whisper conveyed to me, a knight, and came up with:
“Harv will have to do, I guess.”
All eyes except his shifted to Highpockets again, who could be seen weighing whether an actual given name was up to hobo code.
“Whatever a man wants to go by is his own business, I reckon,” he decided.
Peerless Peterson couldn’t stop from meddling a little. “You don’t have any too much to say for yourself, do you.”
“Still waters can bust dams,” Harv drawled, spooning into the billy of stew remnants Midnight Frankie had handed him. After an unsure moment, general laughter broke out. “Stick that in your rear aperture and smoke it,” the Jersey Mosquito joshed Peerless, who grinned painfully and retreated into silence while conversation built back up to normal among everyone else. Harv in the meantime silently kept at his mulligan.
“Come on,” I tugged at Herman, “let’s scooch around there to him.”
He was as intrigued as I was. “Ja, he is some man, you can see from here.”
I circled around, Herman on my heels, and edged down on the log next to the newest hobo on earth, making us into old-timers. “Hi again.”
He chewed a bit before saying, “You’re the kid with the autograph book.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Kinnick,” I swiftly used his name to emphasize I full well remembered who he was, back there in handcuffs, too.
“Harv,” he corrected quietly but in a way that told me not to forget it.
Herman cleared his throat, a signal that prompted me to introduce him as One Eye, my grandfather from the old country and so on, and on a hunch that we would be wise to have on our side someone with a knack for evading lawmen, I leaned close as I could to Harv, considerably above my head as he was, and confided, “Gramps is sort of staying out of the way of the, uhm, authorities, too.”