“Huh? Why not?”
Rollng her eyes, she put a hand to the peanut brickle plate. Finding it empty, she bit off instead: “Because it’s a rule. How many times have I gone over those with you? Mmm? Can’t you put your mind to the game at all?”
At that, our eyes locked, her blue-eyed stare and my ungiving one right back. If she was exasperated enough to blow her stack, so was I.
“There are too many rules! This canasta stuff goes through me like green shit through a goose!”
? ? ?
I KNOW IT is the mischief of memory that my outburst echoed on and on in the room. But it seemed to. At first Aunt Kate went perfectly still, except for blinking a mile a minute. Then her face turned stonier than any of those on Mount Rushmore. For some seconds, she looked like she couldn’t find what to say. But when she did, it blew my hair back.
“You ungrateful snot! Is this the thanks I get? That sort of talk, in my own house when I’ve, I’ve taken you in practically off the street? I never heard such—” Words failed her, but not for long. “Did you learn that filth from him?” She flung an arm in the direction of the greenhouse and Herman.
“No!” I was as shrill as she was. “It’s what they say in the bunkhouse when something doesn’t make a lick of sense.”
“Look around you, mister fellow,” she blazed away some more. “This is not some uncivilized bunkhouse on some piddling ranch in the middle of nowhere. Dorie must be out of her mind, letting you hang around with a pack of dirty-mouthed bums. If she or somebody doesn’t put a stop to that kind of behavior, you’ll end up as nothing more than—”
She didn’t finish that, simply stared across the table at me, breathing so heavily her jowls jiggled.
“All right.” She swallowed hard. Then again, “All righty right. Let’s settle down.”
If sitting there letting her tongue-lash the hide off me without so much as a whimper wasn’t what might be called settled down, I didn’t know what was. My tight lips must have told her so, because her tone of voice lessened from ranting to merely warning: “That is enough of those words out of you, understand?”
My face still closed as a fist, I nodded about a quarter of an inch, a response she plainly did not like but took without tearing into me again. “That’s that,” she said through her teeth, and to my surprise, threw in her hand and began gathering in all the other cards on the table.
“I need to go and have my hair done, so we won’t try any more cardsie-wardsie today. Now then”—she shoved the cards together until they built into the fat deck ready for my next day of reckoning—“while I’m out, find something to do that you don’t have to swear a blue streak about.”
? ? ?
NATURALLY I RESORTED to Herman. He was sitting there, book in hand, in the greenhouse, comfortable as a person can be on a fruit box, smoking a cigar while he read. As soon as I called out “Knock, knock” and sidled in, he saw I was so down in the mouth I might trip over my lower lip. Squinting over his stogie, he asked as if he could guess the answer. “How is the canasta?”
“Not so hot.” Leaving out the part about what went through the goose, I vented my frustration about endless crazy rules. “I try to savvy them, really I do, but the cards don’t mean what they’re supposed to in the dumb game. Aunt Kate is half pee oh’d at me all the time for not doing better, but I don’t know how.” I ended up dumping everything into the open. “See, she’s scared spitless her card party is gonna be a mess on account of me. So am I. But she’s got it into her head that she can teach me this canasta stuff by then.”
“The Kate. Sometimes her imagination runs off with her,” said the man paging through Winnetou the Apache Knight.
Herman nursed the cigar with little puffs while he thought. “Cannot be terrible hard,” he reasoned out canasta with a logic that had eluded me, “if the Kate and the hens can play it. Betcha we can fix.” Telling me, cowboy-style, by way of Karl May, to pull up a stump while he searched for something, he dragged out the duffel bag from the corner of the greenhouse.
Dutiful but still dubious, I sat on a fruit box as ordered and watched him dig around in the duffel until he came up with a deck of cards that had seen better days and a well-thumbed book of Hoyle. “We reconnoiter the rules, hah?” A phrase that surprised me, even though I pretty much knew what it meant. But we needed more than a rulebook, I told him with a shake of my head.
“We’re still sunk. Aunt Kate and them play partners, so it takes two decks.”