Mannie was the first to recover and break out a sneer. “What, cap pistols? Little-kid games ain’t for us.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I responded, innocent as the devil filing his fingernails, as a Gram saying best put it. “Remington single-shot .22s. Like I use, at the ranch.”
“Yeah?” Kurt sat up and a little away from me. “Use on what?”
“Magpies.”
“Yeah? What’s those?”
“Birds. Big black-and-white ones that would just as soon peck your eyes out as look at you.” He flinched back as I spread my hands in a sudden gesture. “With tails about yay long. Don’t you have those here?”
“Naw, I don’t think so.” He looked across uncertainly at Gus and Mannie, who were shaking their heads in slack-jawed ignorance of one of the most common birds in Creation. Talk about having a wire down; if any of these three had a brain that worked, it would be lonesome.
“Then how do you make any money?” I pressed my advantage, Kurt still leaning away as if his ass might get shot off from my direction. “See, there’s a bounty on magpies, on account of they eat the eyeballs right out of calves and lambs and things, and”—I had a moment of inspiration—“they really do gobble gopher guts.” At that, my audience was agog, if slightly green around the gills.
“So what you do,” I continued in expert style, “after you shoot them, you cut off their legs with your jackknife and turn those in for the bounty. Fifty cents, just like that.” I snapped my fingers like a shot, if a person imagined a little. “They’re pretty easy to shoot, I got seventeen so far this year,” I concluded, as if dead magpies were notches on my gun belt.
By now I was being looked at as if I was either a gunslinging hero of the eleven-year-old set or the biggest liar on the face of the earth. But it was totally true that Wendell Williamson, tightwad that he was, ponied up for dirty little birdy feet, magpies being the hated nuisance they were on ranches, after Gram vouched that my father had taught me how to shoot the .22 and she swore I was responsible enough to hunt along the creek willows without endangering the cattle.
My listeners stirred uncertainly. Gus’s lips were moving as he worked out fifty cents times seventeen, while Mannie gauged me more warily than before. It was up to Kurt to rally the campers.
“Yeah, well, bows and arrows can kill stuff, too. Like, uh, frogs. We’re goin’ frog huntin’ the first night at camp, ain’t we, guys.”
“We’ll murder the buggers!” and “Frog legs for breakfast!” from across the aisle backed that up as if hunting hopping amphibians in the dark, Indian-style, was a tried-and-true camp activity, which I seriously doubted.
Now even the would-be holy terrors of the frog world fell still as an announcement boomed out from the driver that we were not stopping in Sheboygan as scheduled, because no one was ticketed to there and no more passengers could be taken on. Actually, I suspected he was in a hurry to get rid of the mess of campers. No doubt to put minds at rest, so to speak, about a restroom, he added, “Manitowoc in fifteen short minutes.”
Really? The comprehension began to sink in that I was nearly there at last. Fifteen minutes truly did sound like no time after all my hours on the bus, the never-to-be-forgotten encounters I’d had, close calls especially. In an odd way, I started to miss all that, the bits and pieces of my immense journey coming to mind while my latest companions thought it was a big deal to go up the road a skip and a jump to the same dumb camp year after year. But the mind does funny things, and half listening to their razzing back and forth about which of them was most likely to shoot himself in the foot with an arrow, I had a sudden itch toward the autograph book. After all, here was my last chance on the dog bus for who knew how long, and three candidates right here handy. So what if they behaved like nose pickers, when they knew stuff like that campers’ song. Goofiness had its place in the pages of life, too.
Impulsively I pulled out the album, its cream-colored cover somewhat smudged from so much handling but overall less the worse for the trip than I was, and showed it off to Kurt.
“Yeah?” his answer to almost everything. He fanned through the pages like a speed-reader. “So you want us all to put somethin’ in it.”
I said I sure did, which brought about quite a reaction across the aisle. Gus giggled in Mannie’s face. “Gonna write My name is Manfred Vedder, I’m an old bed wetter, ain’tcha?”
“Sure, dipshit, just like you’re gonna sign yours Augustus Dussel, that’s me, I barely have brains enough to pee,” Mannie jeered back.