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IN NO PARTICULAR HURRY, Herman drove in that sea captain fashion, his big knuckly hands wide apart on the steering wheel while he plied me with questions about Montana and the Double W ranch and as many other topics wild, woolly, and western as he and Karl May could come up with. All of it was really on his mind, to the point where he asked how long my folks and Gram and hers had been out west. Oh, practically forever as far as I knew, I told him, Gram’s grandfather having been a Wegian—Herman gave me a hard look until I explained that was bunkhouse talk for Norwegian—who packed up and came from the old country to homestead, which explained the wicker suitcase. And my father’s side of the family, the Campbells, I guessed had similarly been in Montana for as long as Montana had been around.
“Must have been like Canaan for them, maybe,” he thought out loud. “Like in Bible—the Promised Land, I betcha.”
“How do you know all this stuff?” I had reached the point of popping questions like that, since he never hesitated to bring up things out of nowhere. “The Bible and Longfellow and Karl May and so on?”
“Plenty of time to read on the ore boats,” he answered soberly. “Badger Voyager and the others gived me my learning, in manner of speaking.”
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I DIDN’T DOUBT THAT, and let the matter go as I tried for some learning of my own, trying to figure out Manitowoc if I was going to be stuck there for the whole long summer. It appeared to be an even more watery place than I’d thought, the river with the same name as the town taking its time winding here and there—Gitche Manitou really got around on his spirit walks—before finding Lake Michigan. When we reached downtown, street after street of stores occupied brick buildings grimy with age—if this was the pearl of Lake Michigan, it needed some polishing. An exception was the movie theater with a marquee full of colored lightbulbs brightly spelling out the current show—TOMAHAWK—with Van Heflin and Yvonne De Carlo, which I immediately set my heart on seeing until I remembered I was broke.
As Herman puttered us through the downtown traffic, I passed the time noting more of those stores with the same caliber of names that I’d spotted from the dog bus, as if anyone going into business had to line up way down the alphabet. Schliesleder Tailoring. Schr?eter Bakery. The schushy sound of the town sounded awful German to me, and I tried to savvy at least a little of it.
“Hey, Herman? What’s schnitzel?”
He worked on that as we pressed on past the main-street buildings toward the more grubby waterfront ones. “What are little cattles in English?”
“Calves? You mean the schnitz stuff is a way of saying calf meat? Veal, that’s all it is?”
“Yah. Fixed fancy with stuff on, you got schnitzel. Old German recipe.”
“What’s schnapps, then?”
“Firewater, Red Chief. Old German drink.”
“Boy oh boy, those dumb old Germans really went for some funny stuff, didn’t they.”
“Story of mankind,” he gave a blanket answer to that.
That was not nearly as many definitions as I’d wanted, but another matter quickly had me wondering as the DeSoto pottered across the drawbridge of the weedy river and on past the coal sheds and boiler works. This doctor’s office was in an odd part of town and I tried to think what kind of ailment Herman needed to be treated for in a run-down neighborhood. Firmly built right up to the gray summit of his head, he looked healthy enough to me. “Uhm, this medicine of yours, what exactly is it?”
“Neck oil.”
Now he had me. I didn’t see anything stiff about the way he swung his head to give me a big bucktoothed smile—not the usual attitude that preceded a visit to the doctor, anyway.