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THE CAST OF CHARACTERS Herman and I joined were proof that the Johnson family tree had branches of all kinds. Midnight Frankie was from what he called Lousy Anna, and spoke with a deep southern accent. Shakespeare’s tale was one of youthful indiscretions, when he became adept at what he called dialing the treasury, which amounted to safecracking, and it drew him an education written on jailhouse walls and in prison libraries. Peerless had hit the road during the Depression, starved out of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl farm to the California orchards, where the miserable Okie migrant camps turned him into an agitator and bunkhouse lawyer, and as aggravating as his mouthing off on practically anything could be, he was not often wrong. Skeeter went farther back in the workingman’s struggle against the crapitalists, as he called them, when he fought the cops in the Seattle general strike of 1919 that got beaten down. Fingy never brought his background out except once when Smiley, obnoxious as usual, asked, “How’d you lose them fingers anyway? She close her legs on you too quick?” Fingy gave him a look as if about to squash a bug and only said, “Iwo Jima.”
Then there was Pooch, who seemed to be the sad sack of the crew, his contribution to conversation almost entirely “Damn straight” and “You said it” as he plodded through life. At first I wondered at his lack of teasing by these often rough-mouthed men, because in a schoolyard anyone with a slow mind was in for it. But I overheard Highpockets take Jones aside in the barn and explain that Pooch had been seriously worked over by a notorious sap-wielding railroad bull in the Pocatello yards, and been a little off in the head ever since. Jones, to his credit, said nobody needed to be a mental giant to drive a scatter rake, and he’d make sure Pooch was given the tamest team of horses, after my own.
The one among them who did not share much about what turned him into a hobo was Highpockets himself. He did not need to, so obvious was he as a “profesh” who could make things happen in a collection of men otherwise as stray as cats.
And of course, Harv was Harv.
So, life in the bunkhouse was much like an extended version of that last bus to Wisdom, crowded and crude and somehow companionable almost in spite of itself. But also, with that many of us rubbing elbows in so small a space, an existence in which some friction was bound to occur.
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READING MATERIAL in the bunkhouse never approached the Condensed Books level, and I was propped in my bunk after supper spending time with one of the pink Police Gazettes that were passed around until they fell apart. Ostensibly deep into “Is Marciano a Cheese Contender or a Legit Champ?” and the amazing number of secret lives of Elizabeth Taylor, I was all ears for Smiley’s latest lustful tale of conquest. Herman was in the crapper, as the convenience with the toilet and sink and shower was always called in a bunkhouse, shaving as he did each evening to stay out of the morning crush for the sink, so I was free of frowns warning me not to listen too much. Smiley was a surprise candidate for rodeo Romeo, to call it that, with his moonface and globular belly, but to hear him tell it, he was God’s gift to women.
This particular tale of lust involved a devastating Canadian blond fence-sitter at the Calgary Stampede who couldn’t keep her eyes off Smiley as he went through his clown routine in the arena. To make a really long story short, he got word to her to meet him in back of the chutes while the chuckwagon race was being run, when he’d have a break from clowning. “And we hightailed off to the little trailer I traveled the circuit in back in them days,” he finished, his rubbery face stretched into a triumphant leer. “Probably in record time, we done the deed every which way. Didn’t even have to shed my overalls.”
“Ye never even took off your clown outfit first?” Skeeter registered probably everybody’s shock at the lack of etiquette. “What are ye, some kind of deviated prevert?”
“You’re just jealous,” said Smiley smugly, “of how them rodeo sweethearts liked to play rooty toot toot on my gazoot flute.”
I was working on that rooty toot toot part and and not really getting anywhere when Highpockets raised onto his elbows on his bunk and spoke up sharply. “Watch your mouth around the kid, can’t you?”
“I ain’t burning his ears off, am I, Snag,” Smiley protested. “He has to learn the facts of life sometime.”