The bartender slapped the copper top of the bar with his towel in mock fury. “Goddamn it, Herm, how do you do it? I had that brought in all the way from Buffalo to fool you.”
“Takes more than Buffalo,” Herman said with the simple calm of a winner and still champion, and set the shotglass aside like a trophy while the bartender trooped back to the hitherto mystery tap and drew a genuine glass of the beer, which is to say a schooner. “What about Cowboy Joe here?” he asked as he presented Herman the free beer. “I might as well stand him one, too, while I’m giving away the joint.”
“Name your poison, podner,” Herman prompted me, as if we were in a saloon with Old Shatterhand, and so I nursed a bottle of Orange Crush while the two men gabbed about old times of the Great Lakes ore fleet and its sailors, Herman soon buying a beer to even things up a bit in the tasting game and a second Orange Crush for me, adding to the general contentment. I was drifting along with the pair of them to the Straits of Mackinac and Duluth and Thunder Bay and other ports of call, when I heard Ernie utter:
“So how’s Tugboat Annie?”
I went so alert my ears probably stood straight out from my head. Somehow you just know a thing like that out of the blue, or in this case, the fishnets. Aunt Kate, he meant.
Herman took a long slug of beer before answering. “Same same. Thinks she is boss of whole everything.”
Ernie laughed, jowls shaking like jelly. “She was that way even when she was slinging hash down here on the dock, remember? Order scrambled eggs and they’d just as apt to come fried and she’d say, ‘Eat ’em, they came from the same bird that cackles, didn’t they?’” He let out a low whistle and propellored his towel somehow sympathetically. “You got yourself a handful in her, Herm.”
“Armloads, sometimes,” said Herman, not joking at all.
Wait a minute. I was trying to catch up. The Tugboat Annie part I got right away, that rough-and-tough, hefty waterfront character in stories in the Saturday Evening Post. But was Aunt Kate ever a waitress? Snooty as she was now, with her Kate Smith wardrobe and insistence on good manners and all? It almost was beyond my ability to imagine her, twice the size of shapely Letty, with her name sewn in big sampler letters on the mound of her chest, bawling meat orders from behind a cafe counter to someone like Gram in the kitchen. And strangely enough, in their breakfast battles over slices of toast, Herman never threw that chapter of the past in her face.
? ? ?
EVENTUALLY WE DEPARTED the Schooner, Ernie vowing he would stump Herman the next time and Herman telling him he could try until the breweries ran dry, with me still wowed by that beer-tasting stunt. Before we reached the car, I asked, “How’d you learn to do that?”
Herman was maybe somewhat tanked up on Olde Rhine Lager, but his answer was as sober as it comes. “Job I had in old country. Story for another time, when you want your hairs raised. Get in, Donny. We must go home and face the Kate.”
13.
NERVOUS AS A cross-eyed cat, I took my place across the card table from Aunt Kate. It was the fateful turn of Herta Schepke, seated to my left, to host the weekly canasta party and she had really put herself into it, the heavy old dark living room furniture burnished with polish, the rose-and-thistle-patterned rug vacuumed until every tuft stood and saluted, the “nibbles” plate impressively stacked with Ritz crackers spread with pimento cheese. Even the parakeet in a cage by the window shone dazzlingly, preening its green and gold feathers in the sunlight as it squawked and whistled for attention.
“That’s some bird,” I thought I’d make polite, safe conversation while Gerda shuffled and reshuffled the fat deck of cards in expert fashion and Aunt Kate inaugurated the nibbles plate with an Mmm mm and two bites that did in a cheese-topped cracker. “What’s its name?”