“Big Tiny Little Junior,” replied Herta, although I wasn’t sure I had heard right. She took pity on my mystified expression. “Oh my, don’t you know? Big Tiny Little Junior is the most divine piano player with the Lawrence Welk orchestra. They make ‘champagne music’ and play here every year for the Fourth of July observance in the park and at the county fair and everything of the sort. And the name Big Tiny Little Junior just seemed so right for a parakeet. The little dear is a budgerigar, you know.” I didn’t have a clue that was what a shrunken parrot was called, and my face must have given me away because Herta gave a little giggle of compassion and spelled out, “So there you have it, don’t you see? Biggie the budgie. He even knows his name.” To prove it, she twittered across the room, “Pretty bird, who’s my pretty bird?” The wild-eyed parakeet cocked its head and squeaked, “Big-ee, Big-ee” over and over.
During this, Gerda was dealing out cards with mere flicks of her fingers, faster than I could pick them up. We had barely started and already I was scared half sick at the way this so-called game was shaping up. Characters such as Old Shatterhand in Herman’s shoot-’em-ups faced situations all the time where a person’s fate could be decided on the turn of a card. But in real life, my future with Aunt Kate rested just as precariously on my gameness, to call it that in all possible senses, to cope with great big handfuls of canasta cards.
For it had dawned on me during the hen party chitchat before we sat up to the card table why she was so determined—savagely so, I thought at the time—to drill canasta into me. From the evidence of framed family photographs lined up over on the glistenng sideboard, Herta was the matriarch of a whole slew of sharp-looking Schepkes, and Gerda ever so casually kept working into the conversation remarks about the latest achievement of a grandson here, a granddaughter there, the cream of her crop no doubt rising in the world. And Aunt Kate was stuck with me, her lone such twinkling star of the younger generation, supposedly bright enough to read by at night, to be shown off at last. If I didn’t prove to be too dim to grasp a card game old ladies played like riverboat gamblers. By now I knew Aunt Kate well enough that if that were to happen, any attempt at shining me up to match Herta’s and Gerda’s golden offspring would be doused at once and she would devote her efforts to conveying to the others what a complete moron she was nobly putting up with. She could go either way. I was in big trouble if I did not play my cards right.
? ? ?
NO SOONER had Gerda finished dealing than she reached down for the purse beside her chair and took out a roll of coins, plunking it down beside her. Aunt Kate simultaneously did the same, each woman thumbing open the bank wrap to spill a stock of quarters in front of them.
“Time to feed the kitty,” Aunt Kate said musically, evidently a usual joke.
“We’ll see about that, Kittycat,” Gerda declared.
“Here’s my half, Gerd,” Herta thrust a five-dollar bill across the table, which vanished into Gerda’s purse. I blinked at that transaction, which indicated each roll of quarters was ten dollars’ worth, plopped down here casually as if this were a game of marbles.
“Are we playing for blood?”
My shrilled question, straight from bunkhouse poker lingo, made all three women recoil. It was up to Aunt Kate to set me straight, the pointed looks at her from Gerda and Herta made plain.
“If you mean are we gambling, dearie, you most certainly are not,” she set in on me with a warning frown. “I am standing your share, aren’t I,” underscoring the point by picking up a wealth of quarters and letting them trickle from her hand. “The Minnie share, we can call it.”
The other two tittered appreciatively at that. “As to our teensy wagers,” Aunt Kate spoke, as if this might be hard for me to follow but I had better try hard, “we are simply making the game more interesting, aren’t we, girls. To liven things up a little, mm?”
So saying, she shoved a quarter each for herself and me, the would-be Minnie Zettel, out next to the deck to form the kitty, Gerda did the same for her and Herta, and that was supposed to be that.
? ? ?
WITH MONEY RIDING on the game, added to all else circling in my head as I stuffed cards into my hand fifteen deep, I sneaked looks right and left, sizing up our opponents. Both women were cut from the same cloth as Aunt Kate, which was to say spacious. Gerda was squat and broad, Herta was tall and broad. The halfway similar names and wide builds aside, they were not sisters, merely cousins, and old acquaintances of Aunt Kate from some ladies’ club way back when, I gathered. Both were widows, Herman holding the firm belief that they had talked their husbands to death. Widders, in the bunkhouse pronunciation I had picked up. Melody Roundup on the Great Falls radio station sometimes played a country-and-western song that backed Herman’s theory to a considerable extent: “Widder women and white lightning, what they do to a man is frightening.” That tune crazily invaded through my head, too, as I tried to force myself to remember the countless rules of canasta.
Almost as if peeking into my mind, Herta right then chose to ask with a certain slyness, “Are you musical, like your auntie who even talks like there’s a song in her voice?”
“Oh, now, Hertie, don’t get carried away,” Aunt Kate responded, as if she were being teased with that as well as me.
I answered up to Herta’s dig or whatever it was. “Naw, I’m the kind who can only play one instrument. The radio.” I fell back on the old joke, which did not go over as big as I’d hoped.
“Are we playing cards or musical chairs?” Gerda asked pointedly.