“No choice do you have. It comes notcheral, once in great while,” he said, as if it were perfectly normal to be singled out by some crazy-sounding thing. “Generals who think with their fingers, like Napoleon, born with it. Clark and Lewis maybe, explorers like us, ja?” The more he spoke, the more serious he seemed to grow, and I could feel my goose bumps coming back. Passengers overhearing him while they checked out their routes on the map were giving us funny looks and stepping away fast.
“Captain Cook, how about, sailing the world around and around.” He still was cranking it out. “Must of had Fingerspitzengefühl, or pthht, shipwreck.”
? ? ?
I SINCE HAVE LEARNED that what he was trying to describe with that jawbreaker word might best be called intuition in the fingertips, something like instinct or born genius or plain inspired guesswork tracing the best possible course up from map paper there at the end of the hand. A special talent of touch and decision that comes from who knows where.
? ? ?
HE COCKED that glass-eyed look at me as if I were something special. “You are some lucky boy, Donny, to got it.”
Unconvinced and uncertain, I rubbed my thumbs against my fingertips, which felt the same as ever. “And wh-what if I do?”
“Easy. You find us where to go.” In demonstration, he waggled his fingers as if warming up to play the piano and shifted his gaze to the map over our heads.
I did not want any part of this. “Herman, huh-uh. Even if I stand on a bench I can’t reach anything but Florida, and that’s way to hell and gone in the wrong direction.”
“Tell you what,” he breezed past my objection, “I get down, you get up.” Then and there, he squatted low as he could go.
I realized he wanted me to straddle his shoulders. Skittish, I couldn’t help glancing at people pouring past in as public a place as there was, a good many of them staring as if we already were a spectacle. “Hey, no, really, I don’t think I’d better,” I balked. “Won’t we get arrested?”
“Pah,” he dismissed that. “America don’t know hill of beans about arresting people. You should see Germany. Come on, up the daisy,” he finished impatiently, still down there on his heels. “Pony ride.”
Feeling like a fool, I swung my legs onto his shoulders and he grunted and lifted me high.
Up there eight feet tall, the West was mapped out to me as close as anyone could want, for sure. Finger-spitty-thinger or not, I had to go through the motions. Pressing my hand against the map surface, I tried to draw out inspiration from one spot or another, any spot. Certain the eyes of the entire depot were on me, I felt around like that blind man exploring the elephant. Easy, this absolutely wasn’t. If Herman’s Apache knight was anywhere around Tucson or Albuquerque, he didn’t answer the call. Nor did any Navajo cousin of Winnetou, around the four corners where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado all met. Automatically my hand kept following the bus routes traced in bright red, drifting up, on past Denver, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne. Whatever the right sensation of this silly Hermanic stunt was supposed to be, it was not making itself felt.
By now I was stretching as far as I could reach, the Continental Divide at my elbow, with Herman swaying some as he clutched me around the legs.
“Donny, hurry. Getting heavy, you are.”
“I’m trying, I’m trying.” At least my hand was, moving as if of its own accord. I could tell myself I didn’t believe in the finger-guh-fool stuff all I wanted, but all of a sudden my index finger went as if magnetized to the telltale spot over the top of Wyoming.
“I got it!”
“Whereabouts?”
“Montana!”
“Good! Where in Montana?”
“Down from Billings a little.”
“What is there?”
“Crow Fair.”
“Hah? Go see birds? Donny, try again.”
“No! Let me down, I’ll tell you about it.”
16.
“THESE CROWS ARE INDIANS, see, and Crow Fair is their big powwow.” Back to earth, or at least the depot floor, I talked fast while Herman listened for all he was worth. “They always hold it between the strawberry moon and the buck moon, something to do with when berries are done growing but buck deer grow new antlers.” I could tell I had lost Herman more than a little there. “That’s this time of year, get it? We learned a bunch of Indian stuff like that in social studies class at Heart Butte. Anyhow,” I rushed on, absolute grade-school expert that I was on such matters, “Crow Fair is really something, it lasts until they’re powwowed out after about a week, and I bet we can get there while it’s still going on.”
Fingerspitzengefühl notwithstanding, he squinted dubiously up at the little red artery of Greyhound route to the Crow Reservation, way out west from Milwaukee certainly, but also in the apparent middle of nowhere, until I kicked in, “And all kinds of Indians show up for Crow Fair, honest.”
Herman’s thick glasses caught a gleam. “All kinds Indians? You are sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. Hundreds of them. Thousands.”
“Even Apaches like Winnetou?”
“There’s gotta be,” I professed. “They wouldn’t stay home from a powwow like that, the other Indians would think they’re sissies.”
That settled it. Declaring there could be no such thing as sissy Apaches, Herman nodded decisively. “Crow Fair is where we go. Pick up your suitcase, Donny.”