“Sure, I’m kind of interested,” I encouraged Smiley. “What’s that flute business mean?”
This brought about a rare hesitation in the lady-killer choreboy as he studied me there propped on my bunk, rough-clad in a thousand-miler shirt like the rest of the crew but still plainly a youngster, although a husky one. Whatever other changes the summer may have produced in me, I had grown considerably, right past any semblance of eleven going on twelve. Even so, young was still written all over me, from freckles to boyish oversize feet, despite my efforts to camouflage it.
“Come on, everybody, it ain’t nothing but the facts of life,” Smiley defended his position to the bunkhouse in general but Highpockets in particular. “When I was his age, I knew plenty. Ain’t it about time he learned about sailing around the world?” By now I felt like Herman when he’d listened to the hoboes rattling on in their lingo and asked me, “How many languages does English come in?” It was years down the line before I fully understood that Smiley’s lip-smacking phrase meant something like learning the encyclopedia of sex by hand.
“It’s up to One Eye,” Highpockets ruled, sharp again. “None of your concern, so can that kind of mouthing off and—”
“The Pockets is right.” Herman loomed into the room, there is no other word for it, knuckles clenched white on his straight razor as he fixed a snake-killing look on Smiley. “Scotty is good boy. I will take care of his educating.”
“Don’t get your dander up.” Smiley backed down at the sight of Herman and that razor. “I was only funnin’ with the boy, no harm in that, huh?”
“Do your funnying on somebody else.” Herman’s warning hit home on the now wordless Smiley, most of the rest of the crew sitting up and watching, with Highpockets and Harv half onto their feet to head matters off if that razor came into play. But Herman, with a contemptuous “Puh” at Smiley, crossed the room to his duffel bag and tucked the ivory-handled cutter away, snapping me to attention with “Let’s catch air. Come help me with sickles.”
Neither of us said anything as we crossed the yard to the blacksmith shop in the waning daylight, our long shadows mixing together on the ground in our strides. I felt guilty, although not sure why, and sneaking a look at Herman’s set face was no help.
I trailed him into the blacksmith shop past the grindstone, sickles much too plainly not the first thing on his mind. He pulled out a pair of stout boxes from under the workbench and upended them for us to sit on. The sagging old shop, which had been a shambles at first, littered with stray tools and rusting pieces of metal and anything else that collects from breakdowns and repairs on a ranch, he had made tidy as a hardware store between his sessions of sharpening sickles. It has taken me until now to fully realize he had repeated the greenhouse, far, far from Manitowoc—an orderly haven for himself.
“Donny”—he made no pretense at Scotty or Snag—“I am having doubts about this place.”
“W-why?” The Big Hole was showing off in the evening light, the mountaintops still goldenly sunlit while dusk softened the valley of hayfields to buckskin color, with the first town lights of Wisdom sparkling in the distance. To me, the Diamond Buckle ranch right then could not be beat, in any way I could think of.
Herman crouched forward toward me, as if making sure his words penetrated. “Bad company, you are keeping. Not your fault. My own.”
“Aw, come on, Herman, don’t let what happened in there get you down,” I pooh-poohed the bunkhouse episode. “Smiley is as loose as the spool on a shithouse door and you shut him up good and that’s that.”
Herman passed a hand over his face. “There is some of what I mean. You are picking up language like from the garbage dump.”
“So what?” If he was wrought up, so was I. “Goddamn-it-to-hell-anyway, this is what it’s like on a ranch. I know the bunkhouse guys cuss like crazy and carry on like outlaws sometimes and all that. But they’ve been places and done things.” I looked him straight in the eye, the good one. “Like you have.”
“I have been”—his voice rose, then dwindled—“maybe too much places.” He gazed off into the mountain shades of evening, as he must have gazed into many a night since that one in a Munich beer hall. “I am not example to follow. Life plays me big tricks—”
“Not your fault,” I defended him against himself.
“—and I do not want same happening to you.”
That jolted me. “Look at me here,” he went on in the same grim tone, “and you with me, holed up like two Killer Boy Dillingers.”
“But it’s working out okay, isn’t it?” I mustered in response. “We’ve got jobs, we’re making wages, you’re safe from the cops—Herman, what more do you want?”