Before Herman could go on, Jones glanced back at the pair of us. “Just to scratch my curiosity itch, where do the pair of you fetch up after haying? Where’s home?”
“Oh, where we live when we’re not with the Johnson family, you mean,” I had to do my best to field that because Herman’s face went as lifeless as a MOST WANTED poster. “About the time school starts we’ll have to go back east to—” Herman went even more rigid. “Pleasantville. It’s around New York, you know. Gramps has a job there, he’s the handyman at the Reader’s Digest place.”
Jones chewed his mustache as he contemplated us. “So he’s got a job there and a job here, does he. Lucky, lucky him.” Reciting straight out of the put-upon ranch foreman’s book of rules on dealing with the odder elements of a crew, he let us know, “Out here, we’re not big on previous, wherever or whatever a person comes from, understand? Just so’s you can do this job.”
“Ja, we savvy,” Herman forced out more loudly than needed. I gave him a look, wondering what could be spooking him when everything was going so slick.
Before I could nudge him aside and ask that question, Jones halted us, saying, “Hold on a sec, here’s somebody you might as well meet and get it out of the way.” He called across the yard to a man limping along toward the chickenhouse carrying a pan of feed. “New hands, Smiley, come get acquainted.”
The choreboy, as I recognized him to be and Herman was destined to find out, swerved toward us swinging a leg held out stiff. Holy wow, I thought to myself, first Louie Slewfoot and then the gimpy bus driver Hoppy, and now this lame specimen, all in one summer. Yeeps. Maybe they came in threes, like when famous people died, according to Gram.
? ? ?
NOW CAME OUR INTRODUCTION to Smiley, former rodeo clown, whose name outside the costume might as well have been Cranky as Hell. Clowns as I have known them, essential performers at rodeos in drawing bulls and mean horses away from bucked-off riders at the risk of their own lives, those entertainers in baggy overalls and whiteface makeup stayed physically fit from all the running and ducking and dodging in the soft dirt of the arena. This one had gone to flab and deeper ruin from the look of him, with a beer gut that might have looked comical in a costume but in ranch jeans hung precipitously over his belt. Facially he seemed to be sucking on something sour all the time, lips twisted and eyes narrowed. An encounter with a Brahma bull, we discovered soon enough from bunkhouse gossip, left him with what is called a cowboy leg, crooked and off at an angle, causing that stiff-limbed gait. He seemed to resent the world of the able-bodied with every step he took. Certainly he acknowledged Herman and me with minimum enthusiasm, muttering, “How ya doin’” without interest and immediately turning to Jones to demand, “When you gonna let me shoot that cow?”
“How many times do I have to tell you,” the foreman gritted out, “no one is shooting any livestock on a ranch owned by Rags Rasmussen. He’ll can you so fast your head will swim. Waltzing Matilda is the best milker on the place, so don’t you touch her except pulling those tits,” Jones went on, as if this had been said too many times before, too.
“A bitch from hell, is what she is,” Smiley whined. “Shat on me again.” The evidence was fresh and green all over the bottom half of his pant leg. “Did her best to kick me, too. I tell you, she’s a killer.”
“It is your job to milk the cows, no matter what. Waltzing Matilda included. Enough said,” Jones declared.
Unsatisfied, Smiley scowled—a severe contradiction in terms, but that was Smiley for you—toward a pasture next to the barn where three cattle were grazing as peacefully as a Wisconsin dairy picture, or rather two of them were. The other was a bony brown-and-white Guernsey with jutting hip bones and a sort of outlaw longhorn look about her, even though she had been dehorned to stubs. Merely from the way she swished her tail, as if spoiling for a target to use it on, I would have bet solid money that was Waltzing Matilda. Herman, maybe from his own alien notoriety, studied the scandalous cow with interest.
“I have some actual good news for you, if you’ll simmer down a minute and listen,” Jones informed the would-be cow shooter, who dubiously clammed up and waited. “You’re off of grinding sickles. One Eye here will be handling that chore.”
“Ja,” Herman put in, as if sickles were his ordinary diet. “Like in the old country.”
“He’s welcome to all those sonofabitching things in the whole god-blasted world as far as I’m concerned,” Smiley accepted that with a fresh twist of the lips and lumbered crookedly off to the chickenhouse, bawling in a voice that had not lost any of its arena volume, “Chick, chick, chick, come and get it, you damn featherdusters.”
Well, evidently not everyone thought the Diamond Buckle ranch was perfect.