I fully expected her, and if I was lucky, me, to establish in the backseat, the way rich people did. But while Herman was putting my suitcase in the trunk, she drew herself up by the front passenger door and stood there as if impatient for it to open itself, until I realized I was supposed to be the one to do it.
When I leaped and did it, she enunciated, “That’s a little gentleman,” but still didn’t budge until I caught on further and scrambled in to the middle of the seat. She followed, the car going down on its springs on that side under her weight, until Herman evened things up somewhat by settling himself behind the steering wheel.
Doing so, he slipped me a sly grin and I heard him say what sounded like “Welcome to Manito Woc,” as if the town were two words.
I was about to ask if that was actually how to pronounce it when the Kate Smith voice hit a note of warning. “Brinker, don’t fool around. Look at the time—we have to go to the station.”
“Yah, Your Highness,” he answered as if used to being ordered around, and the DeSoto came to life after he pulled out the throttle a little and the choke farther than that and stepped hard on the starter and did another thing or two.
Meanwhile it was all I could do not to bounce up and down with delight at her pronouncement. The station! The dog bus, that loping mode of transportation full of starts and stops and disruptions and tense connections, somehow had delivered me right in time for her radio show. Kate Smith Sings, all anyone needed to know about it.
I glanced at her hopefully. Maybe she even could slip into the program some hint that I had arrived, and Gram would hear it in her hospital room and know I had come through my harrowing journey safe and sound, mostly. I didn’t want to ask that yet, shy about bothering someone getting ready to perform for a national audience. I would not have been surprised if she exercised her vocal cords right there in the car, but the only sign she gave of impending performance was humming to herself while she tapped a hand on the round rise of one thigh as steadily as a telegraph operator in a shoot-’em-up western.
I figured she was entitled to a few jitters. What had that first seatmate of mine, the stout woman on the Chevy bus, said? I’d be such a bundle of nerves. And that was merely about my supposed journey to Pleasantville, nothing like facing a radio microphone and a live audience and singing for the thousandth time “God Bless America” the way everyone coast-to-coast was waiting to hear again. If I was a trouper like Joe Schneider had said, the famous entertainer sitting right here at my elbow was the biggest example imaginable. It must run in the family.
“How is Montana?”
Herman’s question out of nowhere jostled me out of that line of thought, and somewhat nervously—maybe it was catching—I responded, “In pretty good shape for the shape it’s in, I guess.”
“Yah, I betcha. Like Old Shatterhand would say, up on its hind legs and still going, hah?”
His laugh came from the bottom of his throat, like his words. His lingo threw me a little at first, but I knew I’d get used to it, accustomed as I was to hired hands in the bunkhouse or the barracks at a construction camp who were called Swede or Ole or Finnigan if from Finland, and spoke “that broken stuff,” as it was called. Squarehead was the catch-all term for such types. Herman’s accent and name I guessed must have come straight from Holland with its tale of Hans Brinker and the silver skates and all that, and it only added to the surprise of my sensational arrival. His choppy voice now reached a wistful register as he declared, “Out in cowboy land, you are in luck.”
“Pretty please”—from the other direction came a prompt response with not the usual sweet intonation on that phrase—“don’t be filling the boy’s mind with nonsense.”
“No, it’s fine,” I spoke up, trying to sit tall enough to be a factor between them. “I’m around those all the time, see. On the ranch. Cowboys, I mean. I’d be there in the bunkhouse with them right now if Sparrowhead—Wendell Williamson, I mean—had let me be stacker driver on the haying crew like I asked to.”
It took them each a few moments to put that together, and I’m not sure he ever did get there. She, though, said as if thinking the matter over, “But instead you’re very much here, dumpling.”
“Yeah!” Only minutes before, I would have had to fake this kind of answer, but landing in the spacious lap of Kate Smith, in a manner of speaking, I had no trouble whatsoever being enthusiastic. “This is so much better than there, it knocks my socks off.”