“The Kate is in the bath,” he explained, as if we had plotted to meet in this secret fashion. With the same odd glint he’d had at the Greyhound station, he scooted the chair up to my bedside, displaying the book he’d been paging through earlier, thumb marking a place toward the middle. “What I wanted to show you, Deadly Dust, it is called in English.”
This was a case where you could tell a book by its cover, with cowboys riding full-tilt while firing their six-shooters at a band of war-painted Indians chasing them in a cloud of dust. At first glimpse it might have been any of the Max Brand or Luke Short or Zane Grey shoot-’em-ups popular in the Double W bunkhouse, but the name under the title was a new one on me. Recalling my earlier encounter with the kind of person who spelled his perfectly ordinary name with a K, I asked skeptically, “Who’s this Karl May guy?”
“‘My’ is how you say it,” said Herman. “Great writer. All his books, I have. Flaming Frontier. The Desperado Trail. Lots others. Same characters, different stories.” He bobbed his head in approval. “You don’t know Winnetou and Old Shatterhand?” He tut-tutted like a schoolteacher. “Big heroes of The West.” I could hear his capital letters on those last two words.
Maybe so, but when he opened the book in evidence, in his squarehead language as it was and fancy-lettered like in an old Bible, not a single word was recognizable to me. That didn’t matter a hoot to Herman as he proudly showed me the illustration he had hunted down in the middle of the book, translating the wording under it.
“On the bound-less plains of Montana,” he read with great care, adjusting his glasses, “the tepee rings of the Blackfoot, Crow, and Ass-in-i-bone tribes—”
“I think that’s Assiniboine,” I suggested.
He thanked me and read on. “—are the eternal hunting tracks of following the buffaloes, the be-he-moths of the prairie.”
Triumphantly he turned the book so I could not miss the full effect of the picture, which looked awfully familiar, similar to a Charlie Russell painting seen on endless drugstore calendars. It depicted Indian hunters in wolf skins sneaking up on foot to stampede a herd of buffalo over a cliff, the great hairy beasts cascading to the boulders below.
“There you go, hah?” Herman whispered in awe at the spectacle. “Such a place, where you are from.”
It took all the restraint I had, but I didn’t let on that right over there in my pants was a little something from Montana that might have slain many a buffalo. This Herman was wound up enough as it was; the night might never end if we got off on more or less lucky arrowheads and so on. I stuck to the strictly necessary. “Can I tell you something? It’s Mon-TANA, not MONT-ana.”
“Funny things, words. How they look and how they say.” He broke off, glancing toward his feet. Letting out an exclamation I couldn’t decipher, he reached down and picked up one of my moccasins.
“I stepped on it!” he cried out, as if he had committed a crime. “I hope I didn’t break it none.”
I could tell by a quick look that the decorative fancy-dancer still had all his limbs and that the rest of the beadwork had survived, too, so I reassured Herman no harm had been done, while scooping the other moccasin out of range of his big feet.
“Fascinating,” he said under his breath, pronouncing it faskinating, lovingly turning over and over in his hands the deerskin footwear he had tromped on. When he right away had to know what the beaded stick figure cavorting there on the toe and instep was supposed to be, I explained about fancy-dancing contests at big powwows.
Still fondling the moccasin as if he couldn’t let go, he asked in wonder, “You got from Indians?”
“As Indian as they come.” This time I couldn’t resist. Before I could stop myself, I was repeating the tale I’d told the ex-convict about the classy moccasins having been made for a great Blackfoot chief, temperately leaving out the part about my having won them in a roping contest on a dude ranch and instead circling closer to the truth by saying Gram had lucked onto them on the reservation. Herman did not need to know they’d been hocked at a truck stop by a broke Indian.
“How good, you have them. You are some lucky boy.” Maybe so, if the rotten sort was counted along with the better kind, I thought darkly to myself there on the skreeky bed.
He ran his fingers over the beadwork and soft leather one more time and carefully put the moccasin side by side with the other one.
“So, now you know about Winnetou and I know about fancy-dancing. Big night!” He grinned in that horsy way and clapped Deadly Dust shut. Evidently gauging that Aunt Kate’s bath was about done, he rose from his chair. “We palaver some more tomorrow, yah?” he whispered from the stairwell as he sneaked back downstairs.
I sank onto the swayback pillow, wide-awake in the darkness of a summer that was showing every sign of being one for Believe It or Not!
10.