I was perpetually being told I was big for my age. Wasn’t it logical for that number to grow to catch up with the rest of me, in this instance? “Thirteen,” I said. He looked skeptical. “My next birthday.” The next after that, at least. An approximation.
He waited for me to say more, but when I didn’t, he let it go. Now he scanned Herman from his city shoes to his eyeglasses. “How about the mister here, who you seem to do the talking for? I don’t hear him owning up to advanced years like some.”
“He’s my grandfather, but he married young.” I hoped that would help in my fudging away from whatever Herman’s age was. “See, we’re all each other has,” I laid that on thick while Herman instinctively stayed mute, “and we’re sort of on hard times. We really, really need jobs.”
The foreman still hesitated. “Nothing against you, but you’re still just a kid, and you can’t have been around workhorses any too many years, whatever you say.”
“Make you a deal,” I scrambled to come up with. “If I can’t harness a team the way you like, as fast as anybody else on the place, and show you I can handle the reins, you can fire me right away and we’ll walk back to town.”
The man called Jones settled his hat and perhaps his mind. “Now you’re talking about something. I could stand that kind of guarantee on this whole damn crew—these hoboes are sometimes the teamsters they say they are and sometimes not. You’re on. Toss your stuff in the pickup and I’ll test you out soon as we’re at the ranch.”
He started toward the pickup cab for his daybook as Highpockets and Harv and the others emerged from the kip in the brush, swinging their bindles and bedrolls at their sides. “One more thing,” I said quick, stopping him in mid-reach for the door handle. “My grandfather has to come with me. Watch out for me and so on. I’m a, you know, minor.”
“Damn it, you’re going to have me hiring the whole hobo jungle before you’re done.” He thought for a second. “All there’d be is grinding sickles and mending broke-down stuff, sort of second fiddle to the choreboy. Not much of a job, general handyman is what it amounts to.”
It was going to take some serious stretching, but I was about to try to make the case that Herman, who never in his life had been on a ranch outside the Germanic pages of Karl May, could somehow be generally handy, when he startled us both with the exclamation “Sickles!” and gave the hiring foreman the thumb and finger OK sign. “Ho ho, handled hundreds sickles in the old country.”
Both the foreman and I drew back our heads to look at Herman in a new way, Jones eyeing him now with curiosity or suspicion or both. “I thought your grandkid here did the talking for you. That sounded like you found your tongue all of a sudden.”
“I talk broken, but apprehend some, the English,” Herman said blandly.
I pitched in, “He means he pretty much savvies what you’re saying.”
“That’s welcome news.” He looked hard at me and then at Herman. “You can talk American, but he can’t? How’s that come to be?”
“My granddad hasn’t been here that long from the old country,” I made up offhandedly. I still was worried about Herman at large on a ranch. “There’s a little something maybe you better know.” I dropped my voice. “He needs to keep out of the way of the livestock. See, he doesn’t speak enough of our language for the horses to understand him, just for instance.”
“What old country is that, anyway?” Jones demanded. “I’d have thought ‘Giddyup’ and ‘Whoa’ were pretty much the same anywhere.”
“Switzerland,” I chose willy-nilly out of Herman’s world of toast maps.
“No hooey? A yodeleer, is he?” The foreman seemed entertained by the idea, insofar as I could tell past his mustache. “All right, you’re both hired, long enough to prove yourselves, anyhow. Let’s get you down in the daybook.” He reached into the seat of the pickup for a big ledger. “Start with you, teamster whiz. You’re—?”
“Snag.” I bared the sharp stump at him in what I hoped was a grin.
His mouth twitched. “When you’re not being a knight of the road.”
“Scotty.” He waited for more and I produced, “Scotty Schneider.”
With a sense of wonder or something very much like it, I saw that instant new name go into ink as he wrote it down. “And what’s his?”
“Uh, Gramps.”
“You got to do better than that.”
“Fritz Schneider, I am,” Herman spoke up, and if I kept a straight face, I don’t know how.
“There, you’re both on the payroll.” The foreman jotted down Herman’s alias or whatever it was to join mine. Done with us at last, he turned to do the same for the rest of the crew waiting in curiosity at the rear of the pickup, first sorting out me and Herman. “Youth and beauty up front with me. The rest of you, dump your plunder in back and jump in.”
? ? ?
“THAT WAS A GOOD think by you,” Herman murmured as we settled into the pickup seat to wait for our new employer. “Some Swiss speak German.”
“They do? I figured they talked Switzer or something. Whoo, that was lucky.”