Jones pulled in right at the swinging doors of the Watering Hole. As the crew filed into the joint, joshing and laughing, I held back, uncertain. Herman had no such hesitation.
“Wages, remember, Mr. Scotty Schneider?” he said firmly, guiding me with his hand on my back to the entrance to I didn’t know what.
? ? ?
THE WATERING HOLE inside stopped the two of us in our tracks, maybe even thrust us back a step and much farther than that in remembering. Festooned with lariat ropes and leather reins draped in graceful arcs from the ceiling and the side wall hung end to end with bridles and harness and tacked-up ten-gallon hats beyond their days and even angora chaps remniscent of the leggings I had worn in the fancy-dancing exhibition, the ageless old saloon was like a western dryland cousin of the Schooner, back in Manitowoc. Herman made it official with the exclamation, “Is like home!”
As the crew trooped to the long bar, Skeeter by seniority took the lead, comically doffing his hat and holding it over his heart as he addressed the woman of about Gram’s age standing ready at the cash register. “If it ain’t Babs, my favoritist bartender in all of Creation.”
“My, my, if it don’t look like they let the rogues’ gallery loose,” she bantered back. “How’s tricks, Skeets?” Spotting the Diamond Buckle hatband on him and the rest of us, she let out a teasing hoot. “Oh ho ho, fellas, you’ve come up in the world.”
“We like to think so.” The Jersey Mosquito dropped his hat on the bar to claim his drinking spot as the rest of the crew settled onto bar stools like a flock of birds alighting. “And just to prove it, tune up your cash register, Babs honey, we have got checks galore to cash.”
“Again this year,” the bespectacled bartender sighed, “fancy that.” She fussed with her cash register, lifting out the coin drawer entirely for the fat stash of cash underneath. “Okeydoke, high rollers, the First National Bank of Babs is now open.”
Herman still was gazing affectionately around at the saloon trappings, but I watched furtively as Pooch slipped his paycheck to Highpockets to endorse for him, recalling Skeeter’s admonition on the last bus that certain people’s education did not necessarily include reading and writing. Well, hell, that told me, if forgery was in the works we weren’t the only ones, and I got on line with Herman close behind me.
Only to have the bartender pin my check to the bar with an unyielding hand before I could endorse it. “Uh-uh, not so fast.” She peered at me through her wire-rim glasses. “What’s the story here, Pockets, you taken on a mascot these days?”
“Our stacker driver,” Highpockets right away spoke up for me, with Skeeter pitching in, “I’s his age when I hit the road, so that just goes to show you he’s a functionin’ employee.”
She was unmoved. “By rights, I’m not supposed to allow kids in here, let alone be shoveling money to them.”
“Hey,” I tried indignantly, “I’m thirteen.” Herman nodded maybe too vigorously in backing that up.
“And I’m the Queen of Romania. Sorry, sonny, but I can’t accommodate you.”
“Aw, cut him a break, Babs, he’s with us,” Highpockets stuck up for me in the good name of the Johnson family insofar as that existed.
“Pockets, I can only cash checks for paying customers or I’d be bankering for the whole town right down to the dogs and cats.”
“Nothing to worry,” Herman asserted with the smack of a hand on the bar so loud everyone jumped a little. “Bar maiden, enough business for us both and then some, I will give you.”
The bar maiden, gray-haired as could be, smirked with pleasure at the compliment, intended or otherwise. “You sound like you mean business, sure enough, buster,” she allowed, looking him over from the mermaid tie to his strong eyeglasses that pretty much matched hers. “All right, everybody saw the miracle, the flower of youth here grew up while we were watching.” She lifted her hand off my paycheck with the freeing instruction: “Dab your name on it and hand it over.”
Fingers mentally crossed, I wrote Scotty Schneider on the back of the check. The bartender did not even look at the signature, simply stashed it in the cash register with the others and counted out my wages in nice green bills. “Here you go, angel.”
Angel. That was a new one.