“Yeah, but, that’ll cost a lot.” A shadow of reality set in. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve only got thirty dollars.”
“Nothing to worry. I am running over with money.” Seeing my disbelief, he patted the billfold spot in the breast pocket of his jacket, where there did seem to be a bulge.
“Really truly? How much?”
“Puh-lenty,” said he, as if that spelled it out for me. “Cashed in all my settlement, I did, then went to the bank and taked my share from there. Half for her, half for me, right down center. What is the words for that, same-sam?”
“Uhm, even-steven. But I thought from what Aunt Kate said, you guys were about broke.”
“Pah. Woman talk. We will live like kings, Donny. Here, see.” He took out the fat wallet from inside his coat and spread it open for me. Lots and lots of the smaller denominations, of course, but I hadn’t even known fifty and hundred bills existed, as maybe half the wad consisted of. “Outstanding!” I yelped at the prospect of money raining down after my spell of being flat broke.
There was a catch to simply taking off into the yonder, though, isn’t there always? “See, Gram has me write to her every week,” I fretted. “She’ll know right away I’m not back there with you and Hippo—the Kate—like I’m supposed to be, if those are mailed from any old where.”
Even before I finished speaking, Herman had that look that usually produced eye-dea, but this time what came out was scheme. “Mailed from Manitowoc, they can be. Ernie owes me favor.” He spieled it as if it were a sure thing, me writing enough letters ahead to cover the rest of the summer, the batch then sent to the bartender at the Schooner with instructions to mail one each week. “I stick ten dollarses in with, Ernie would jump over moon if I ask,” he impressed upon me. “Your grossmutter hears from you regular, what you are doing,” he finished with infectious confidence. “Postmark says Manitowoc if she looks.”
“You mean,” I asked in a daze, “make up the whole summer?”
“Ja, tell each week the way you like. Make it sound good so she is not to worry.”
And that clinched it. The chance to condense the disastrous season spent with Aunt Kate entirely according to my imagination was too much to resist.
“Woo-hoo, Herman!” I enlisted in his plan so enthusiastically he shushed me and took a quick look around at the other passengers, luckily none close enough to have overheard. Whispering now, I asked eagerly, “But where will we go?”
With a sly grin, he leaned back in his seat as if the dog bus were the latest in luxury. “Anywheres,” he said out the side of his mouth so only I could hear. “Just so it is”—he made the cocked-finger gesture and pointed that pistoleer finger toward the west—“thataway.”
THE PROMISED LAND
June 30–August 16, 1951
15.
LIKE A STUCK compass needle, Herman’s fixation held us to a single arrow-straight direction. To the Karl May territory of Indian knights and pistoleer cowboys, if you were Herman. To anywhere out there short of “the other side of the mountains” and a poorfarm for kids called an orphanage, if you were me. To the west, or rather, the West, capitalized in both our minds as the Promised Land, where we could be rid of the Kate and her bossy brand of life.
Old gray duffel bag on his shoulder, my new companion of the road marched through the crowd in the waiting room of the Milwaukee depot without deviating an inch either way, the wicker suitcase and me trying to keep up, dead-ahead until reaching the long and tall wall map topped with COAST TO COAST—THE FLEET WAY. Over our heads loomed the outline of America, which, I swear, seemed to grow as we stared up at the numerous Greyhound routes extending to the Pacific Ocean.
Our silent gawking finally was broken by a thin voice. Mine.
“So where do we start?”
“Big question,” said Herman, as if he didn’t have any more of a clue than I did. I could see him giving the subject a little think. “Maybe takes some Fingerspitzengefühl, hah?”
Unable to get my ears around that, I started to tell him to talk plain English because we didn’t have time to fool around, but he got there first, more or less. Tilting his head to peer down at me as much with his glass eye as his good one, he uttered—and I still was not sure I was hearing right—“You got Fingerspitzengefühl, I betcha.”
My hands curled as if he had diagnosed some kind of disease. “That doesn’t sound like something I want to got—I mean, have.”